Dr. Jeffrey Mantz will go through the basics of NSF applications, talk about specific programs, and give some general grant writing advice. Mantz is Program Director in Cultural Anthropology and Human Subjects Research Officer at the National Science Foundation, where he has served since 2012. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and has previously taught at George Mason University, Cornell University, California State University at Stanislaus, and Vassar College. His own research takes him to the Caribbean and Central Africa, where he explores issues related to inequality, resource extraction, and commodity supply chains.

This SWAP (Sharing Work on Appalachia in Progress) event will feature talks by two recipients of 2016 UK Appalachian Center Eller and Billings Student Research Awards.  Kathryn Engle presents Stinking Creek Stories: Life, Agriculture, and Community in Rural Southeastern Kentucky; Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth presents "You can make a tree sing: that's the magic": Musical Instrument Makers and the Re-enchantment of Livelihood and Material in West Virginia.  Both awardees are UK Graduate Students.  This is a free event for UK Students, Faculty, and Staff!

Please, join us at the UK Appalachian Center as we welcome Henry Bundy for a SWAP (Sharing Work on Appalachia in Progress) Talk on Wednesday, September 14, 2016 from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.  This talk is entitled Mental Distress and Surplus Populations In Upstate South Carolina.  Henry was one of our 2015 recipients of the Eller & Billings Student Research Awards, and this talk is about his current research project which has been funded, in part, by the award. This is a free event for students, faculty, and staff; we welcome you!

Comparing ethnographic and agricultural data collected from two neighboring Biangai villages (Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea), one engaged in a small-scale conservation effort and the other stakeholders in a large industrial gold mine, this paper analyzes the linkages between alternative development regimes, agricultural transformation and human-environmental relations. Working the land is not simply about production, but also about knowing the landscape and its products as nodes in human social relations. Mining regimes disentangle the multi-species networks experienced in the garden, and reassemble them into other spaces. Thus, in the mining inspired transformations of agricultural practices, Biangai are also transforming how they experience their own multi-species community – its past, present and future.

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series.

The works of African descendant women describing our own experiences has always been the most reliable source for my developing a coherent theoretical dialogue about women in captivity and beyond. Black Feminist Archaeology, therefore, demonstrates through an analysis of the material past a method to positively enhance the texture and depth of how we understand the experiences of captive African peoples and further creates an archaeology that can be directly linked to the larger quest for social and political justice.

This talk demonstrates how plant remains can be used to trace food pathways in the modern day. The plant is peaches and the talk will examine pits recovered from a Mission period archaeological site located on Sapelo Island, one of the Georgia Sea Islands, where UK Dept of Anthropology archaeologist Dr. R. Jefferies is conducting excavations and research.