Precarious Mobilities: Brazil’s ‘Previously Poor’ in Times of Growth and Crisis
Co-chaired by Benjamin Junge, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, SUNY at New Paltz and by Sean T. Mitchell Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Rutgers University – Newark
Economists variously characterize our era as one of perilously deepening inequalities or, conversely, one of burgeoning Global-South middle classes. How can anthropology and related disciplines contribute to our understanding of the significance of these seemingly divergent global tendencies, illuminating the changing nature of class in the 21st century and how it is shaping politics and everyday life?
September 24 – 26, 2019
A Bio-Cultural Investigation of Intergenerational Epigenetic Mechanisms
Chaired by Bilinda Straight, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University
Understanding how humans adapt through experience to extreme environments is an increasingly urgent problem that demands innovative approaches. The goal of the seminar was to create a bio-ethnographic model of vulnerable resilience (resilience in contexts of environmental extremes and chronic scarcity) focused on the intersection between environmental disaster, culturally-shaped emotion, and epigenetic processes.