News
The Department of Anthropology would like to congratulate our 2012 Graduating Class, and especially those who graduated with honours! Our hats are off to:
Dean's Honour Roll Recipients:
Niloufar Amin
Jessica Breiter
Jennifer Blair Edwards
David Avraham Levine
Simon John Luffman
Michelle Lee MacMillan
Robert Nall
Karina Edith Pylypczuk
Larisa Ariella Weissberger
Graduating Summa Cum Laude:
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Jennifer Blair Edwards |
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Simon John Luffman |
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Michelle Lee MacMillan |
Congratulations to the 5 Public Anthropology Award Winners at York University in Prof. MacDonald’s ANTH 2210 (Public Anthropology) class who participated in a North American competition involving over 4,000 students from 25 schools. To see the names of the award winners and their award winning opinion pieces click here. The awards are given by the Center for a Public Anthropology through their Community Action Website Project. Each semester the Project involves thousands of students from a range of schools across North America. Participating in the Community Action Project helps students improve both their critical thinking and writing skills. By actively addressing important ethical concerns, it provides students with a sense of engagement involving the broader world. It also offers practice in active citizenship. The Project encourages interested students to send their views to elected officials and members of the media.
Doctoral student Michael Jackman is featured on the cover of this week's edition of "Xtra" (Toronto LGBT newspaper). He has written an article based on his dissertation fieldwork focusing on the social history of "The Body Politic", one of the leading gay activist periodicals in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s.
Doctoral student Joanne Lebert was profiled in Globe article on attempts to create a regulatory framework for "conflict minerals" in Africa. Joanne works for Partnership Africa Canada, "an Ottawa-based group that won a $1.6-million grant from the Department of Foreign Affairs to help create a system of mineral tracking and certification in Congo and neighbouring states." The labelling system would be similar to the Kimberley Process, which certifies that gems are not “blood diamonds” from war zones.
"Policing production: Corporate governmentality and the Cultivation System" by Albert Schrauwers Focaal 61: 75-90. This article re-examines the Cultivation System in early nineteenth- century Java as part of an assemblage of Crown strategies, programs, and technologies to manage the economy — and more particularly, “police” the paupers — of the “greater Netherlands.” This article looks at the integrated global commodity chains within which the System was embedded, and the common governmental strategies adopted by the Dutch Crown to manage these flows in both metropole and colony. It focuses on the role of an early corporation, the Netherlands Trading Company, that also served as the administrator of poverty-relief efforts in the Eastern Netherlands where cotton cloth was produced. The article argues that corporate governmentality arose as a purposive strategy of avoiding liberal parliamentary scrutiny and bolstering the “enlightened absolutism” of the Crown. By withdrawing responsibility for the policing of paupers from the state, and vesting it in corporations, the Crown commercialized the delivery of pauper relief and reduced state expenditure, while still generating large profits.
Congratulations to Daniel Banoub who has successfully defended his Master's Major Research Paper entitled "Fogo Island Arriving: An Anti-Essentialist Reading of the Production of Place."
Congratulations to Courtney Nickerson who has successfully defended her Master's thesis entitled "Connections, Practices, and Particulars: A Multispecies Ethnography of the South Western Shore of Nova Scotia."
Congratulations to Jessica Caporusso who has successfully defended her Master's thesis entitled "Tuning In: Sonic Atmospheres and Affective Labour in Recording Studio Life."
Congratulations to Elysée Nouvet who just successfully defended her PhD dissertation entitled "Poverty and Pain: Materializing Forces of Distress in Contemporary Nicauragua."
7 Students in Public Anthropology course win International Award from the Center for a Public Anthropology
Congratulations to Fatima Khan, Vanessa Fallone, Amanda Mountford, Nicole Collver, Sardar Saadi, Kate McFeeters, and Colin Savoie for their award winning essays in the Center for a Public Anthropology's annual North American competition involving over 4,000 students from 21 schools. These students wrote on the topic "Who Should be the Beneficiaries of Anthropological Research?"
The students also produced Youtube videos on public issues such as:
Magic Squares: The Patterned Imagination of Muslim Africa in Contemporary Culture
July 1: This entrancing new exhibit, curated by Prof. Zulfikar Hirji (Anthropology) and Patricia Bentley, opened at the Textile Museum of Canada. The exhibit brings together magic and mysticism, numerology, Middle Eastern/West African culture, fabrics (wearable and decorative), plus contemporary responses to archival art. See the Globe & Mail review.
Borderless Higher Education for Refugees receives Mastercard Foundation grant
15 June: Prof. Wenona Giles (Anthropology) is the director of the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BEHR) Project which seeks to provide post-secondary education to the 8.1 million people of the Global South caught in refugee-like situations as a result of war, human rights violations and persecution. BEHR is currently involved in two pilot projects: one in the Dadaab Refugee Camps in Kenya, and a second on the Burma/Thai border. The BEHR Project has just received $250,000 grant support from the Mastercard Foundation.
6 Honours Majors Graduate Summa Cum Laude
15 June: The Department of Anthropology congratulates the six Honours Majors in Anthropology, and the one B.A. Anthropology who graduated Summa Cum Laude in the 2011 Summer Convocation. These seven outstanding students were among only 99 for the entire faculty. The Honours Majors are: Marta Bak, Yasmin Esfanipour, Krystal Ghisyawan, Nadine Jamal, Anton Kujansuu, Mohammed Sohail. Summa Cum Laude in the B.A. Program is Nicole Mihajlovic. Our collective best wishes for your futures!
Marta Bak
Nadine Jamal
Yasmin Esfanipour
Nicole Mihajlovic
Department of Anthropology honours retiring professor, David Lumsden
