2023
Amelia Simone Herbert received the Council on Anthropology & Education (CAE) Frederick Erickson Outstanding Dissertation Award. The CAE has established an annual award to recognize the author of an outstanding dissertation recently completed in the field of anthropology and education. It is named after esteemed educational anthropologist, Frederick Erickson, Professor Emeritus, UCLA GSEIS. Herbert's dissertation is an ethnography that examines how youth, families, and educators navigate the racial and spatial politics of aspiration in the increasingly marketized schooling landscape of Cape Town, South Africa.
Corinne Kentor was named a 2023 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Leading Edge Fellow. The ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship Program supports outstanding early-career PhDs in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they work with social justice organizations in communities across the United States. This community-engaged humanities initiative demonstrates the capacity of humanistic knowledge and methods to help advance justice and equity in society. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Kentor will take up a two-year position with the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education & Immigration to implement public policy campaigns that advance equitable, forward-thinking practices at the federal, state, and campus levels. She will use her expertise to translate complex policy issues into accessible public messaging that uplifts the contributions of undocumented, refugee, and international students in U.S. communities and on college campuses.
2021
Andrew Wortham accepted a visiting scholar position at the University of Nottingham Ningbo. More information about the position can be found here.
2020
Luis Rodrigo Mayorga Camus was named a finalist of the Outstanding Dissertation Award given every year by the Council on Anthropology and Education to recognize the author of an outstanding dissertation recently completed in the field of anthropology and education. Mayorga was acknowledged for his dissertation project "Between hope and hopelessness. Citizenship education and student mobilization in a Chilean public high school."
Serah Shani received a grant for $230,304 from the John Templeton Foundation for research project entitled, "The Cultural Evolution of the Conscience, Virtues, Character Development, and Human Progress." The summary of the project is as follows:
Although all human societies have beliefs about what is right and wrong, the study of the conscience and moral development across cultures is understudied. The proposed research combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to answer the following questions about the conscience and character development among the Maasai: (1) What moral values and virtues are parents teaching their children to help them succeed in a competitive market economy? (2) In what ways do religions influence the moral values of children? (3) In what ways does moral enculturation differ between groups of different socioeconomic status, geographic locations, and levels of exposure to global religions and market influences? (4) What are the moral values held in common by traditional Maasai thought and the global cultural influences that it has confronted? (5) To what extent do the traditional moral values of the Maasai overlap with those introduced by the market, formal education, missionary work, and other globalizing forces? (6) Does that overlap provide a basis for negotiating the development of the conscience in this time of rapid change? Findings from this research will be presented at six conferences and published in six peer reviewed journals. Findings will help reveal how human values evolve and are accepted, challenged, transformed or take new forms in situations of cultural change. This will be the first research of the conscience studied from both qualitative and quantitative methods and from interdisciplinary perspectives including the intersections of religions, cultural practices, socioeconomic status, geographic location and exposure to market economies. These findings will contribute to an understanding of the nature and evolution of the conscience cross-culturally.