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From the President

2017: A Year of Challenges and Accomplishments

At the heels of the 2016 US presidential election, the new year brought to the Association a deep sense of uncertainty. Nevertheless, AAA moved forward on several fronts. The key AAA activities this year were centered on: 1) public engagement and public presence; 2) publishing; 3) external relations; 4) internal relations: members, programs, meetings and sections; 5) governance and programming structures; and 6) AAA’s financial state.

Public engagement and presence

In 2017, AAA engaged over 40 advocacy efforts in keeping with the discipline’s core values and the Association’s established processes. These actions included developing Understanding Race After Charlottesville, affirming AAA’s commitment to UNESCO, demanding US Congress swiftly enact DACA legislation to protect undocumented youth, joining forces for the April 2017 March for Science, reiterating the Association’s condemnation of the Executive Order banning immigrants in multiple statements, and taking steps to protect science funding and academic freedom, including establishing the Rapid Response Network on Academic Freedom. Members participated in AAA’s Time to Take Action effort, and kept up with AAA’s activities via the AAA website, @AmericanAnthro (Twitter), the AAA Facebook page, and the AAA blog.”World on the Move: 100,000 Years of Human Migration,” AAA’s timely Public Education Initiative, made good progress despite slow-goings in securing needed financial support. In May, AAA hosted a policy workshop organized by anthropologist Eben Kirksey with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, bringing together over a dozen scholars to work on relevant policy issues. AAA’s ongoing efforts on Israel-Palestine included naming Rami Salameh of Birzeit University and the Graduate Institute in Geneva as AAA’s first Palestine-Israel Fellowship Fund for Travel recipient.

Publishing

The thoughtful 18-month process of securing a new publishing contract was brought to successful conclusion in 2017, with AAA signing a five-year agreement with Wiley. Through December 2022, the terms of the contract enable the Association to support the “portfolio principle,” which means that all 20+ publications will be maintained regardless of the ability of any individual journal to be self-supporting. AAA’s publishing program, governed by the four values of quality, breadth, accessibility, and sustainability, provides opportunities for anthropologists to disseminate scholarly knowledge, receive valuable credit for their professional work by publishing in credible outlets, and participate in supporting this important community resource. Open Anthropology’s editors Jason Antrosio and Sallie Han agreed to remain for another three-year term, ensuring that this journal provides a way to open up anthropology in multiple ways, including bringing anthropology into the public conversation on critical issues. The Executive Board voted in May 2017 to authorize a review process of the AAA author agreement to ensure it meets the needs of the field, authors, and the publishing program/portfolio as a whole. The Executive Board also authorized the creation of a discipline-specific repository, a project under development by the Publishing Futures Committee (PFC, formerly CFPEP).

Services to members, the discipline, and the world

Trish Redeker-Hepner, Ramona Perez, and Keri Brondo helped launch AAA’s new Members’ Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee (MPAAC), which officially began immediately after the Annual Meeting. AAA also began a process of evaluating the dues structure with help from a professional consultant whose findings will inform any new policy in membership dues.

A president’s working group developed the AAA Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion Review: Communicating Public Scholarship in Anthropology; a working group on Anthropology Non-Tenure Track Faculty Employment launched AAA’s online community; a platform was developed for contingent faculty; and the Association issued cutting-edge reports on the labor market for anthropologists.

AAA worked with Cultural Heritage Partners to monitor and advocate for cultural heritage safeguards and, with three other scholarly societies, formed the Coalition for American Heritage to protect funding for research and historic preservation. AAA strengthened relationships with sister associations, participating in 15 conferences or other events in the US and internationally.

Agustin Fuentes, 2017’s Executive Program Chair, organized the successful 116th AAA Annual Meeting. “Anthropology Matters” featured over 1,000 events, including AAA’s annual Native Welcome Ceremony, Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim in conversation, over 20 Executive Sessions, a series of late-breaking panels, and the presidential lecture.

Last but certainly not least, Treasurer Ted Hamann reported that AAA continues on solid financial footing, ensuring the successful provision of the wide array of member programs and projects, detailed in the Strategic Implementation Plan.

From the Executive Director

Our Commitments – Making A Difference

Ed Liebow, Executive Director

At its core, our Association is a scholarly and professional society that brings anthropologists together to advance our collective understanding of the human condition and to apply this understanding in tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems. A good deal of professional satisfaction can be derived from the way in which our Association has drawn on its power to convene scholars and practitioners through our publications and meetings; amplify our members’ voices through outreach, engagement, and public education activities; and set standards for intellectual integrity, professional responsibility and ethical conduct through our extensive volunteer governance network.

In the past year, our Association has demonstrated its dedication to making a difference by:

  • Reaffirming our commitment to academic freedom
  • Affirming our commitment to shaping policy outcomes rooted in core values of mutual respect and equal rights
  • Offering specific contributions to policy solutions concerning
    • Humanity and climate change
    • Cultural heritage preservation
    • Reducing health disparities globally
    • Eliminating race-based and other forms of social injustice
    • Protecting the human rights of immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and displaced persons

Of course, we do a number of other important things at the Association. We support professional development, highlight the remarkable professional accomplishments of our versatile and talented members, assemble materials that support teaching and learning, and monitor trends in enrollments, post-graduate employment, research funding, as well as legal and regulatory developments that affect research and teaching.

Our convening power has proven especially important in 2017. This power, which we use to bring people together, enables our members to share ideas on collective action that

  • people can organize through their home institutions and communities
  • the Association can undertake with the repertory of tools it has available
  • the Association can take by joining our voices with those of other sister societies equally concerned about whether the current direction in policies and practices is moving us towards a more just and sustainable society

In this last category of collective action, our collaborative partnerships, 2017 has been particularly relevant. AAA remains a governing member and active participant with the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), which is diligently working to advocate for research support provided by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. COSSA is also working hard to increase public awareness about the importance of fully funding the Federal Statistical Agencies, on which we depend for high-quality data about American society and the world. We are also active participants in the National Humanities Alliance, which is advocating for public support of the humanities. The Alliance was instrumental in mobilizing Congressional support to protect funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. And this past year we joined with the Society for American Archaeology, the Society for Historical Archaeology, the American Cultural Resources Association, and Cultural Heritage Partners to support a collaborative effort to strengthen protections for important historical and archaeological features as well as traditional cultural landscapes.

As the year draws to an end, our Association remains financially strong, the impact of our publication portfolio is growing, our Annual Meeting and section conferences are robust, and our public education and outreach initiatives are helping to increase general public awareness of the remarkable contributions made by our members. All of these activities are carried out by a talented professional staff in the AAA office, under the wise guidance of our Executive Board and governance network. The year 2017 marked the end of Alisse Waterston’s term as Board president, and we extend our heartfelt thanks for her tireless service to the Association.

 

116th Annual Meeting in DC

Annual Meeting by the Numbers

 

The 2017 Annual Meeting Mattered!

More than 6,500 attendees gathered in November/December for the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. They participated in 844 sessions, panels, and roundtables; in 31 workshops; multiple gallery spaces; and events on Capitol Hill and across Washington DC. We discussed the contemporary political landscape and its aggressive attacks on human rights, the planet, and our communities. We planned actions, developing strategies for sustainable and engaged resistance. This was the highest concentration of anthropologists in one area in a long time. It is worth reflecting internally for a moment and asking “Did the Annual Meeting matter for us?”

I think it did.

It mattered for all the students participating in their first sessions: meeting their peers, future colleagues, authors of so many of their favorite books/articles, and then finding out that some of them are amazing and others not so much, but that all are part of the anthropological dynamic.

It mattered for the students and faculty from smaller schools and community colleges, rural areas, and underserved urban spaces, who seldom have the support and access that so many in the elite and research universities take for granted. The meeting offered opportunities to network, to hear and learn, to be heard, and to participate in shaping the discipline.

It mattered for the anthropologists outside of the academy as they reminded their academic peers of their important contributions and the critical and central roles that collaboration inside and out plays for all of anthropology.

It mattered for the anthropologists of color who in most departments are immersed in a sea of whiteness, but at the Annual Meeting can see a bit more color in the landscape. The meeting offered expanded prospects to find a wider complex of connectivity, unity, and action, and the opportunity to continue to collaborate and to continue to push against the profoundly racialized biases of the academy.

It mattered for the job seekers, the friends who see each other only once a year, the non-anthropologists invited to immerse in our milieu, the now established professors who organized fêtes for their mentors, the accidental collaborators, the first-time author seeing her book on display, and so many more.

It mattered for our professional organization, the AAA, as the staff work tirelessly across the year to produce, develop, and implement the infrastructure for our gathering, enabling it to matter for all of us.

In my call for the Annual Meeting, I asked us to continue to move beyond divisive debates about ownership, terminology, and classification and into fruitful dialogues across and throughout our practices. I hoped we’d gather in opposition to strict boundaries, spill across academic divides, and blur the synthetic lines that isolate good questions from generously intellectual and fearlessly anthropological investigation. I challenged us to demonstrate why anthropology matters in the academy, in the larger world, across time, and to us.

For many attendees, some of these goals were experienced, and they took heart, leaving the meetings excited about their work, their discipline, and their contributions. But for others, this was not the case. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we need to work on the registration process, assuring reasonable accommodations for attendees who need them, increase our media coverage, and reduce our carbon footprint by greening the meetings even more. Anthropology does matter, but it needs to matter more.

The 2018 meeting theme “Change in the Anthropological Imagination: Resistance, Resilience, and Adaptation” offers us another chance to gather and a renewed inspiration. Imagining how we can matter more, and figuring out ways to make that a reality, is at the heart of what anthropology is all about. See you in San José.

Anthropology Day 2017

CELEBRATE. ENGAGE. INSPIRE.

Each year hundreds of anthropology students, professors, and enthusiasts come together to celebrate their love of the discipline on Anthropology Day. Started in 2015 as a way to encourage anthropologists to share and celebrate the discipline with the world around them, Anthropology Day has grown into an anthropological celebration with a global reach. In 2017 registrants joined us from more than a dozen countries including Belize, Guatemala, Lebanon, Kenya, India, and Turkey. Posts on social media reached millions of users across six continents.

Anthropology Day allows each participating group to celebrate the day in the way they choose, making the activities as diverse as the field. Each year groups plan activities ranging from department open houses to trivia nights to workshops in K–12 classrooms.

In 2017, AAA staff joined in and partnered with Archaeology in the Community (AITC) to visit schools in Washington, DC. AAA staffers, along with volunteers from AITC, National Geographic, the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists, George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the Society for American Archaeology made seven presentations about anthropology to more than 200 elementary and middle school students.

More than 180 campus anthropology groups, departments of anthropology, museums, high schools, and other organizations planned Anthropology Day events. Members of the Anthropological Society of the Los Angeles Valley College celebrated their third Anthropology Day with a “diversity wall,” which asked members of their community to share representations of their various cultures. Randolph-Macon College held a screening of The Anthropologist, featuring a Skype session with one of the film’s creators. Dozens of colleges hosted film screenings, held special community lectures, or organized games. You can find a complete list of activity suggestions on the AAA website at americananthro.org/anthrodayactivities.

Join in the fun and register your group using the registration form at americananthro.org/anthroday and be sure to share photos from your events on social media using #AnthroDay.

Education icon

AAA staff teamed up with representatives from Archaeology in the Community, the Society for American Archaeology, National Geographic, George Washington University, and the National Museum of Natural History to visit local schools and conduct virtual presentations to a total of 355 elementary/middle school students.

AAA joins Cultural Heritage Advocacy Coalition

AAA is committed to seeing that anthropological and archaeological research help protect, preserve, and interpret historical properties and cultural resources in the face of anticipated threats to change cultural heritage policies in the US and worldwide.

These are crucial issues for AAA and its members. Cultural heritage resources may be adversely affected by changes in existing antiquities protections and also by changes in energy, environmental protection, and tribal consultation policies. Concerted advocacy efforts are needed to fend off anticipated threats in these and related areas.

In 2017, AAA joined forces with the Society for Historical Archaeology, the American Cultural Resources Association, and the Society for American Archaeology to form the Coalition for American Heritage.

To protect and advance historic preservation, the Coalition is dedicated to safeguarding and ensuring the opportunity for local communities, state and tribal governments, and members of the general public to have a meaningful say in federal government undertakings that affect their heritage. The Coalition is also dedicated to helping protect and advance federal funding for archaeology, anthropology, architecture, and social sciences that supports rigorous scientific research about the past and programs that bring history and science alive for younger generations. The US funds basic research on new technologies, cutting-edge research in the humanities and social science, and collaborative cross-discipline innovations.

Visit the Coalition’s website today to learn more about the bills we are following in Congress and to take action.

AAA Members Outside The Academy

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Non-academic respondents are much more likely to be self-employed than respondents who work in higher education. Sixty-one of the 262 non-academic respondents, or 23.8%, are self-employed or freelance, compared to 11 of 1081, or 1.0%, of academics. Rates of part-time and multiple employment are similar across academic and non-academic respondents.

AAA’s new Department of Research and Professional Services collects and disseminates information about the discipline and profession of anthropology in order to inform AAA planning, policy formation and decision making, and also to increase awareness of the value of anthropology and its contributions to society.

Summer Interns

AAA Summer Interns

In the summer of 2017, AAA had the honor of welcoming two new interns to Washington, DC.

Karina Nogueras is a member of the class of 2018 at the University of Central Florida. Her interests in underwater archaeology and forensic anthropology (and SCUBA certification) made her a natural fit to complete her internship with the Naval History and Heritage Command’s Underwater Archaeology Branch. Prior to serving as an intern with the AAA, Karina was a volunteer with the Florida Public Archaeology Network and treasurer of the UCF chapter of the Lambda Alpha Anthropology Honors Society.

Palmyra Jackson graduated from Seattle University in June, 2017 with a degree in anthropology. Prior to her time as a AAA intern, Palmyra was an intern and researcher with Vanastree, working with a women-run seed-saving collective in Karnataka, India. Palmyra also interned with Black Dot, a community and resource center for black entrepreneurs. Palmyra completed her AAA internship with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art.


This program, funded entirely from member donations, will host two new interns in the summer of 2018.

Annual Meeting

2018 Calendar

February 15
 Anthropology Day
Executive Session
Proposal Submission Deadline
March 16
 Minority Dissertation
Fellowship Applications Due
AAA Internship
Program Applications Due
March 26
 Founding Day for AAA
April 6
 AAA Leadership
Fellows Application Due
April 16
 Proposal Deadline for all 2018 Annual Meeting Abstract Submissions
August 31
 AAA Photo Contest Submission Deadline
September 14
 Call for Late-Breaking Sessions for Annual Meeting Closes
November 14-18
 117th AAA Annual Meeting
Join Us!americananthro.org/membership

Annual Meetings

2018

2019

2020

2017 Award Winners

2017 Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology Awarded to Donald Brenneis

Donald Brenneis is the winner of this year’s Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology. Over a 40-year career, Brenneis has distinguished himself for his pioneering research on the nexus of communication, performance, and power. Brenneis’s earliest scholarship focused on small-scale communities in Fiji and Nepal as they negotiate conflict and interpersonal relations through speech acts. His more recent research focuses on evaluation standards, bureaucratic forms, and interactional dynamics in American academic institutions, including human subjects review panels, review panels at the National Science Foundation, and editorial boards. Brenneis is known for a remarkable ability to speak to broad issues through close attention to the details of social life.

Throughout his career, Brenneis has also devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to the broader community of scholars. Brenneis is a Past President of the AAA and in his second term as director of the American Council of Learned Societies. He has edited Annual Review of Anthropology, reviewed numerous departments, and served on countless advisory boards. In the midst of all this, Brenneis chaired his department and his campus’s Academic Senate as well as taught and mentored generations of undergraduates and graduate students. Brenneis has fulfilled all these responsibilities deftly and with great warmth.

It is hard to imagine another anthropologist whose contributions to the discipline have been more extensive or influential than Brenneis’s.  Through his scholarship and his service, he has helped anthropologists develop a deeper understanding of what our discipline is and could be.

Sameena Mulla Named 2017 Recipient of the Margaret Mead Award

Congratulations to Sameena Mulla, the 2017 recipient of the Margaret Mead Award for her scholarship, including the book The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention. The Margaret Mead Award, offered jointly by the AAA and the Society for Applied Anthropology, is presented to a younger scholar for a particular accomplishment, such as a book, film, monograph, or service, which interprets anthropological data and principles in ways that make them meaningful to a broadly concerned public. 

The following quote from a reviewer speaks to the intellectual quality, clarity and understandability, and breadth of impact of Mulla’s work: 

“The Violence of Care is not only a brilliant academic study of sexual assault interventions as these unfold in a hospital emergency room but one that completely changes our vision on how to understand sexual violence at the intersection of race and gender in one of the most violent and racially divided cities (Baltimore) in the USA … [The book has been] featured in discussions on public radio and has had an impact on law and society networks within and outside the US. [Mulla’s] work showcases a fundamental conviction … that anthropology must assume a unity of theory and praxis and that philosophy and social theory are enriched by the worldly character of anthropology.” 

Diana Burnett Named 2017 AAA Minority Dissertation Fellow

Diana Burnett is the recipient of the 2017 AAA Minority Dissertation Fellowship, awarded by the AAA and the Committee on Minority Affairs in Anthropology. Burnett is an advanced doctorate candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and approaching her final year of dissertation writing.

As a scholar and researcher situated at the intersection of medical anthropology, anthropology of religion, and the anthropology of race and ethnicity, Burnett’s broad interests have been structured around an examination of the relationship between race and identity, belief systems (often religion and spirituality), and health. Subsequently, she has developed and pursued an aligning interest that focuses on health inequities and community-based solutions to these issues. Specifically, she is interested in groups whose migrant identity and migration histories have been unexplored and/or underexplored in the anthropological literature.

Burnett states, “My research contributes to the growing body of anthropological scholarship, which seeks to understand the relationship between diaspora, globalization, and migration in the construction of cultural frameworks as it pertains to an anthropological inquiry to the effects of the urgent global health epidemics especially in ‘high-risk’ populations.”

Rami Salameh Receives First Palestine Israel Fellowship Fund for Travel

Rami Salameh received the first Palestine-Israel Fellowship Fund for Travel, which provides funding for a Palestinian or Israeli anthropologist to attend the AAA Annual Meeting.

“We are thrilled and I feel personally honored to welcome Rami Salameh of Bizreit University in the West Bank to attend the Annual Meeting with support from the PIFFT Fellowship, designed to bring voices we as an Association might otherwise not hear,” said AAA President Alisse Waterston who added, “As the very first PIFFT awardee, Rami will present his powerful and compelling work on political death and dying in Palestine in a session on Palestinian ethnographies. I can’t wait to meet him, and to see the PIFFT Fellowship blossom in the coming years.”

Salameh graduated in 2004 from Bethlehem University with a degree in sociology and received his master’s degree in Cultural and Critical Studies at Westminster University in 2011. Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate at the department of anthropology and sociology at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and he is expected to defend his thesis in January 2018. His thesis is about the bodily lived experiences of the colonized Palestinians, in which he attempts to understand their living, loving,3 and dying. He is also currently a lecturer at Birzeit University.

Richard Moore Receives 2017-18 Anthropology in Public Policy Award

Richard Moore is the recipient of the 2017-18 Anthropology in Public Policy Award. The AAA Committee on Public Policy was particularly impressed with Moore’s cross-disciplinary research, outreach to high school and college students through a new curriculum, and influence on water quality programs and overall environmental policy. Indeed, the committee felt that his work on these issues truly represents the types of policy contributions that deserves recognition through this award.

Moore, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and The School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University, conducted theoretical and applied work on grassroots participatory groups that resulted in a water quality trading project that has been a pioneering model program both in Ohio and nationally. It was cited as the “poster child of water quality trading” at the 2014 Congressional hearing of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Water Resources and the Environment where Moore was asked to testify.

Before retiring in 2015 Moore was Executive Director of the OSU Environmental Sciences Network and former director of the OSU Environmental Science Graduate Program.

Joyce V. Millen Honored for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology

Joyce V. Millen is the winner of this year’s AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. When Millen first began teaching at Willamette in fall 2006, it was obvious she was a gifted teacher and research fellow, whose capacity to inspire leadership is truly remarkable.

Millen is an initiator and a catalyst for ideas and actions. At Harvard, she conceived of and helped design and initiate the Global Health Leadership Program to prepare future physicians for work in resource-poor environments and to create a cadre of advocates for social change.

While shouldering her heavy research and administrative tasks within the Institute, Millen’s first focus is almost always on her students, for many of whom she is not only an intellectual authority but a trusted friend and source of ethical inspiration and guidance.

2017 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology Goes to Sarah Horton

The recipient of the 2017 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology is Sarah Horton for her book They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and “Illegality” among U.S. Farmworkers. Within the book, she draws upon a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in California’s Central Valley to examine the causes of the high rate of heat-related deaths among immigrant farmworkers. Horton shows that even as growers, the media, and state occupational safety officials tend to naturalize farmworkers’ deaths from heat stroke, U.S. labor, immigration, health care, and food safety policies all play a role in this tragedy.

This book challenges official accounts of the causes and prevalence of heatstroke and outlines concrete policy solutions to remedy the problem. Horton has written reports for California’s occupational health and safety agency, Cal-OSHA, on how company food safety policies compromise workers’ health in the fields and is working with several California labor advocacy organizations and nonprofits to encourage companies to change their policies.

Maria Vesperi Receives 2017 Anthropology in Media Award

AAA is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2017 Anthropology in Media Award is Maria Vesperi. Throughout her career, Vesperi has been deeply involved in communicating anthropology to the general public through media. In 1980 she wrote a collaborative 12-part series for the Tampa Bay Times (formerly St. Petersburg Times), “Growing Old in a New Downtown.” 

In 1986 Vesperi wrote an investigative series, “Welfare: Does It Help or Harm the Poor?” which was nominated by the Times for a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Making use of her contacts as a full-time journalist and later as a 20-year member of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies Board of Trustees, she has also organized a range of academic paper sessions, special events and workshops related to journalism. While Vesperi was General Editor of Anthropology Now, she contributed to the successful communication of anthropology to the general public and raised public awareness of anthropology through a broad and sustained public impact at many levels, including the international level.  

Vesperi has demonstrated courageous leadership, engaged ethnography, and rare editorial talent. She has the sensibility and passion of a first-rate journalist combined with the insight and charisma of a superb teacher. In sum, because of the range and depth of Vesperi’s contributions to communicating anthropology to the general public through a variety of media, she is an extremely worthy recipient of the Anthropology in Media Award.  

Carol Mukhopadhyay Receives AAA’s Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology (CoGEA) Award

Carol Mukhopadhyay received the AAA’s Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology (CoGEA) Award for 2017. The committee was particularly impressed by her unflagging commitment to gender equity that permeates her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship.

Mukhopadhyay’s commitment to gender equity and combating all kinds of discrimination has been influential over the decades. As one former student put it, “both as ideology and as lived practice.” Another former student notes how her dedication to standing up to gender inequity “is not [just] something she does, it is who she is.” Former students and colleagues were particularly inspired by her courage, tenacity, generosity, and willingness to stand up for others.

Mukhopadhyay is professor emerita at San Jose State University. Her feminist research addresses gender divisions in families, politics, and science and engineering, in the US and India.

2017 AAA Leadership Fellows Offer Diverse Perspectives Across Anthropology

Katie Kirakosian, Lesley Jo Weaver, and Diana Marsh have been named the 2017 AAA Leadership Fellows. The Leadership Fellows program is designed to provide a unique opportunity for anthropologists beginning their careers to learn about leadership opportunities and to encourage future leadership in the Association. The wide variety of educational and professional backgrounds shared by this year’s Fellows promise to bring exciting new perspectives to Association leadership.   

Trained archaeologist Katie Kirakosian is drawn to service opportunities that allow her to have a clear and lasting impact on the future of anthropology. Kirakosian is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she completed her Ph.D. in 2014. Kirakosian sits on the board of the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island, co-founded the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) Teaching Archaeology Interest Group, and is a coordinating team member for the SAA video project “Archiving the Archaeologists.” Her background in administration and project management will make her a valuable addition to the Leadership Fellows team. 

Lesley Jo Weaver is a third-year faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. As a medical and biocultural anthropologist who graduated with a Ph.D. and MPH from Emory University in 2014, Weaver is particularly interested in engaging with AAA leadership who are working to bring biological and applied anthropologists into the fold. Weaver is currently serving on the Society for Medical Anthropology’s membership committee as well as working on an NSF-funded three-year collaborative project comparing the relationships between food security and mental health in Brazil, Ethiopia, and Haiti. 

Diana Marsh is a museum anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia who hopes to apply her four-field training to AAA leadership opportunities. Marsh recently completed a fellowship with the American Philosophical Society Museum and begins a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the National Anthropological Archives this summer. Her position as a Leadership Fellow will build on her service to the Association as a Council for Museum Anthropology board member. 

AAA President’s Awards

Elizabeth ChiltonElizabeth Chilton (University of Binghamton), for her work as a member of the Executive Board and chair of the Audit Committee, and leadership of the Working Group on Culture Heritage.
Agustin FuentesAgustín Fuentes (University of Notre Dame), for his service as executive program chair for the 116th AAA Annual Meeting on “Anthropology Matters!”
Jeff MartinJeff Martin (AAA), for his dedication and hard work as director of communications and public affairs.
Ramona PerezRamona Pérez (San Diego State University), for her leadership of the Members’ Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee (MPAAC), and service on the Executive Board, as a member of the Working Group on Israel-Palestine, and as chair of the MPAAC subcommittee.
Tricia RedekerTricia Redeker-Hepner (University of Tennessee), for her leadership of the Committee for Human Rights and of the Members’ Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee.

 

Executive Director’s Awards

Leslie AielloLeslie Aiello (American Association of Physical Anthropologists), for her visionary leadership of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, her role in helping to build international bridges among anthropological communities, and her enduring commitment to maintaining strong collaborative ties with the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
ValorieValorie Aquino (University of New Mexico), for her courageous, risk-taking, and tireless work as co-organizer of the April 2017 March for Science, which catalyzed hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets in a non-partisan demonstration of support for scientific research, education, and evidence-based policy.