MSU Forensic Anthropology continues to bring answers and closure for the families of tragedies. When unidentified human remains were found on private property in northern Kent County, Wyoming Department of Public Safety called in MSU forensic anthropologist, Dr. Joe Hefner to identify the remains. They were the remains of Charles Oppenneer, a victim of the ‘Craigslist killer’. Dr. Hefner and the MSU forensic anthropology team determined the cause of death and positively ID’d the man, offering closure for the family of Mr. Oppenneer, who had been missing since 2014. Hefner and the MSU team also provided invaluable evidence for the police department. You can read the full story here. Our sympathies go out to Mr. Oppenneer’s family and friends.
Dr. Joe Hefner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, was also quoted in a recent Washington Post article where he discussed the Easter terrorist bombing in Sri Lanka. Hefner, a board-certified forensic anthropologist who assisted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, provided The Washington Post with his expert perspective on the incredible challenges in identifying victims in a disaster of this magnitude.
On February 14-15, 2019, the MSU’s Department of Anthropology, co-hosted an international and interdisciplinary conference entitled Cities of the Arab World: Theory, Investigation, Critique. In partnership with MSU’s Global Urban Studies Program (GUSP) and Muslim Studies Program (MSP), and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS) at the University of Michigan, the event brought together scholars from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East to explore urban life in the geographic Arab world, and the political, economic, and cultural presence of Arab communities in cities around the globe.
Six panels were formed for the two-day conference, on topics
ranging from urban mega-projects and questions of sustainability, to the
political economy of post-conflict reconstruction. The program included two
very well received keynotes by Dr. Harvey Molotch (Professor Emeritus of Social
and Cultural Analysis and Sociology, New York University), and Dr. Mona Fawaz
(Faculty of Engineering and Design, American University of Beirut), and a
screening of El-Said’s In the Last Days
of the City (2016), in conjunction with the MSU Library Film Series,
organized by Anthropology and Area Studies Librarian Deborah Margolis.
The conference was designed with multiple goals in mind.
Among the most important was to explore not only cities of the geographical
Arab world, but to ask questions of its global extensions to urban communities
around the world. The second goal was to expand and deepen engagement between
Urban Studies and scholars of the Arab World.
“The major theoretical debates in Urban Studies continue to
be rooted in the US and European experiences. Theorizations from the South,
including the Arab world, are very exciting and intellectually productive, yet
they remain outside of the mainstream,” Hourani said. Given the large Arab and
Arab-American communities in Michigan, it is only natural that our public
universities would help to overcome this challenge.
“We were very pleased with the collaboration with CMENAS,
and the large turnout for the event demonstrates that there is a strong
constituency for the global orientation of research that GUSP, MSP and
Anthropology produce, both within the university and across the state.”
Miss Avdoulos in front of Cambridge’s famous Red Door after submitting her PhD dissertation.
Eve Avdoulos graduated from Michigan State University in 2012 with her degree in anthropology, going on to graduate from the University of Cambridge with a Master of Philosophy in 2013. In July of 2019, she will receive her Doctor of Philosophy from Cambridge where she was a researcher at the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research located within the Department of Architecture. Currently, she is applying to various postdoctoral and public sector positions.
Ms. Avdoulos’ PhD, submitted in September 2018, investigated the complexities and contradictions of the phenomenon of urban decline. Through the study of Detroit and a close reading of two residential urban neighborhoods, she examined the development of urban decline over time, as well as how this phenomenon has differentially affected social patterns and practices within the city. By highlighting a methodological approach focused on the everyday lived experience of the city, she illustrated how decline should be regarded as a process that actively transforms the urban environment by dismantling and disassembling existing spatial and social networks and infrastructures, while, creating new ones.
Eve is particularly interested in the socio-political and cultural aspects of urban environments and the ways built environments influence the human condition. At the root of her work is a desire to better understand the human condition to strengthen equity, inclusion, and diversity in our ever-growing urban areas. She enjoys teaching because it allows her an opportunity to engage students in critical thinking and discussion, to help students discover their passions and motivations and to instill the skills and confidence to pursue their personal and professional goals. She feels fortunate for her incredible teachers at MSU who taught her these things as well as instilling a love of fieldwork. Ms. Avdoulos believes fieldwork offers members of the community a chance to share their own stories and experiences in ways they were previously unable to do so.
Eve presents her research at Centre for Urban Conflicts Research at Cambridge
During her time at MSU, she was actively involved with the Department of Anthropology through volunteering in the archaeology lab, attending an archaeological field school in Greece as part of a study abroad program, working at the MSU Archives & Historical Collections and participating in the Campus Archaeology Field School. Each of these experiences provided her with the foundational skills needed to achieve success in graduate school and prepared her for a career in academia and research. Eve first got interested in anthropology through her fascination with ancient cultures and the material remains of their societies. Upon a family trip to Rome, Florence, and Pompeii, she became spellbound by the incredible feats of human ingenuity and knew upon being accepted to Michigan State that she wanted to pursue an Anthropology degree to further study her interest in the human condition.
Her current department, The Centre for Urban Conflicts Research within the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge is dedicated to investigating cities experiencing conflict, including those caused by ethnicity, nationalism, religion, class, or race. The Centre maintains an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach and is comprised of individuals from a variety of backgrounds including anthropology, architecture, geography, and history. The diversity of research undertaken by those working at the Centre exposed Eve to a wide range of global urban issues.
There is a new space in McDonel Hall for digital
applications in archaeology. The Digital Heritage Imaging and Innovation Lab,
or DHI Lab, held its grand opening on Thursday, May 2nd, 2019. This
lab, housed in E36 of McDonel Hall, offers three main types of imaging
techniques: 3D scanning, RTI (reflective transformance imaging), augmented and
virtual reality, as well as 3D printing stations, a photogrammetry station and
other digitization methods. This new space also houses equipment and services
for digital documentation, digital preservation, and digitally enabled public
engagement. In addition to the technologies housed within, its primary work
space is set up for classes, workshops, individual research, or group projects.
The idea for this new learning space was fostered through a collaboration among
LEADR staff and Anthropology faculty with two main motivations for creating the
space. The Department of Anthropology wanted to embrace our growing strength in
digital cultural heritage. This idea, coupled with the success of LEADR,
created a unique opportunity to develop a space supporting a lab for faculty and
graduate/undergraduate students interested in applying digital methods and
computational approaches to material culture.
While this lab has been operating under its soft opening throughout
Fall Semester 2018 to work out the kinks, the Open House to demonstrate its
full capabilities to the public, occurred during the late morning of May 2nd
with refreshments being offered and students and faculty on hand to display the
new technologies. This new learning space will help support digital components
in archaeological field schools, provide experiential learning, hands on
learning, and applied learning. The experiences obtained from this lab will
serve students choosing to go on to any digital field and will offer them very
marketable skills in digital methods. It is geared primarily towards 3D
capture, virtual reality, and 3D printing of material culture and collections.
The new DHI Lab is run by the Department of Anthropology and is part of the LEADR family of facilities. Funds for this digital learning space came from a combination of Anthropology and TLE funds from the Provost’s office (technology, learning, environments). Some of the current projects already in the works here include the Campus Archaeology Program utilizing 3D capture, 3D capture of archaeology collections from the MSU Museum, a collaborative project with the Michigan History Center digitizing Michigan relics, and a Masters thesis by anthropology student Taylor Panczak.
MSU researcher Monir Moniruzzaman visits a slum of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
As previously reported here, Dr. Monir Moniruzzaman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University has been appointed as a member of the inaugural Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues at the World Health Organization (WHO). This Task Force was established by the Member States at the 70th World Health Assembly in 2017 to advise and assist the WHO and other Member States, in disseminating and implementing the WHO Guiding Principles. These guiding principles address the ethical aspects of organ transplantation such as the voluntary and unpaid donation of human tissues and organs, issues of universal access to transplant services, and the availability, safety and quality of these procedures worldwide.
The Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues also assists Member States in establishing and/or strengthening their systems in organ-tissue donation and transplantation at a national level or through regional cooperation. This Task Force, the first of its kind, is comprised of 31 selected experts, who have extensive knowledge on this issue across various fields such as medicine, surgery, ethics, law, patients’ rights, public administration and health systems and who come from regions across the world. We are grateful to Dr. Monir for his dedication and work on such an important topic.
Dr. Amanda Tickner at Keukenhof Gardens, Netherlands
Dr. Amanda Tickner is a librarian specializing in GIS in the Maps Library and an Adjunct lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. Amanda helps people find data, use GIS in research, teach GIS to beginners, and troubleshoot GIS problems, she also sits on several PhD committees in Anthropology. The interdisciplinary quality of her GIS work allows her to help people from all disciplines, which dovetails well with her anthropological background. Dr. Tickner received her PhD in archaeological paleobotany from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2009 and began at MSU in 2015.
Currently, Dr. Tickner is transitioning from using her
anthropology background as a paleobotanist to working with more cultural
subjects. She is very interested in using ethnographic methods in usability
studies via contextual analysis, which she can do as a part of her job as a GIS
librarian. Amanda is also interested in landscapes more generally – especially
people’s perceptions of virtual spaces in relation to physical spaces. Regrettably,
she has not been able to do much of her own research since switching career
paths because her library work takes up most of her time.
Dr. Tickner enjoys her current positions because librarians
are helpers and her adjunct position with anthropology allows her the ability
to share cultural references with people who speak her own language. It also
allows her to help students in a variety of ways. Amanda finds it satisfying to
help people succeed in their projects and to gain job skills because she can
teach interested people new skills without the pressure of giving grades,
something she feels is a wonderful change. Dr. Tickner’s current work builds
upon her previous experiences because her background in both ecology and social
science allows her to work with a wide variety of disciplinary problems in a
coherent and helpful way. This is important because it allows her to help
people with GIS research from all departments, from English to Forestry.
Dr. Amanda Tickner at Uxeau France
Her first interest in anthropology came from a fascinating
World Archeology course from Prof. Peter Wells at University of Minnesota,
where she studied for her undergraduate. While this course was initially
selected to fulfill a requirement, Dr. Tickner soon realized she really enjoyed
this subject the most. Grinning while studying for World Archaeology became a
norm. This enjoyment led her to value a holistic approach in her thinking and
understanding which anthropology also values. Amanda’s interest in both the
sciences and the humanities kept her firmly in archeology, since it is a
wonderful hybrid of these things.
When Dr. Tickner was starting out, and in her past
anthropology teaching (historical ecology, food and culture, and four fields
anthropology), she was very interested in getting students to break down their
ideas of a nature/culture dichotomy and recognize that humans are as natural as
anything else in the world, while at the same time acknowledging our role in
shaping our natural world. This is a value she hopes she has imparted in her
students. Now, Dr. Tickner enjoys hearing from students that her assistance
helped them finish their master’s thesis or that skills she taught them in a
workshop helped get them a job. Currently, she is excited about the new digital
scholarship lab in the library as she has had a lot of fun working with the 360
immersive display space and looks forward to helping more classes use it.
We are extremely happy to have Dr. Tickner here at MSU and are glad that she decided to move across the country even though Michigan winters are not her favorite thing. Having grown up in Minnesota, Amanda thought maybe she would be able to handle winter better now that she is older, but so far, she reports this is not the case.
Dr. Heather Howard, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Affiliated Faculty of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program and the Native American Institute here at MSU, was awarded a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada as co-Principal Investigator with Principal Investigator Heidi Bohaker (History, University of Toronto) and co-Principal Investigator Margaret Bruchac (Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania).
Their project, “Widening the Circle: Building a Community Knowledge Sharing Digital Platform with Great Lakes Indigenous Cultural Heritage Research Data,” will provide just over $40,000.00 to create and test a new public website for the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC). GRASAC is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural alliance of researchers from Indigenous communities, universities, museums, and archives who share the common goal of creating deeper understandings of Great Lakes Indigenous arts, languages, identities, territoriality, and governance. GRASAC houses over five thousand detailed records of Great Lakes material culture and documentary art, thirty thousand high resolution digital photographs, audio and video recordings, as well as language resources including glossaries of Cayuga and Anishinaabemowin.
This project will ensure responsible data sharing grounded in respectful and meaningful Nation-to-Nation conversations helping to develop long-term data governance policies for GRASAC. Using Mukurtu, an open source software developed specifically for Indigenous cultural heritage, we will work with community partners to develop appropriate cultural protocols to protect data and to test the usability of the platform by Indigenous community members, including contemporary makers, teachers, and students. This project builds on work Dr. Howard has been undertaking with Michigan Indigenous makers and the collections of the MSU Museum over the last three years.
