Cast your vote by logging in to AnthroGateway, click on the “My Information” page, and then click on the “Vote Now!” button.
This month we’ll take a look at the candidates.
Today’s feature are the candidates for undesignated seat #1 of the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology (CMIA). Committee member objectives are to: promote participation of underrepresented populations in anthropology by creating a climate where ideas from all individuals are equally considered, rather than viewed through a racialized frame; foster professional advancement by minorities in anthropology; promote intellectual awareness within the discipline and Association of issues that face minority anthropologists; and help define anthropology’s role in national discourse on cultural diversity.
Click here to learn more about the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology.
Flordeliz Bugarin
As a cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, I specialize in Africa and the African Diaspora. I focus on the heritage and culture of African Americans, Gambians, South African Xhosa, and Filipino Americans. I also bridge historical archaeology, heritage management, and international development. Throughout my work, I support community-driven initiatives, focus on minority concerns, and participate in activities geared towards increasing diversity in our profession. As a faculty member at Howard University, an HBCU, I have made concerted efforts to actively recruit Africans, African Americans and other minority students into anthropology. I have organized conferences and workshops, raised funds for scholarships and assistantships, and developed field schools and student internships. I have also built a consistent service record devoted to diversity issues. As Chair of the Gender and Minority Affairs Committee for the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), I have attended workshops on diversity and anti-racism to generate new programmatic strategies. I have also supported a successful mentorship program. A seat on the AAA Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology (CMIA) will allow me to continue similar work and make significant contributions in minority affairs. My experiences and goals mirror the agenda of the CMIA: to encourage more minorities to join the AAA, inspire all AAA members to actively strive towards a diverse community, and define anthropology’s role in the discourse of cultural diversity.
Satish Kedia
Over 15 years of professional experience in academia blended with a practitioner role as the director of research and evaluation centers have provided me with a unique perspective on challenges facing minority scholars, not only within the discipline but also in other practitioner roles. It continues to be a daunting task for the discipline to attract minorities, both locally and globally. Equally, we still find ourselves bewildered as to how to actively include minorities at all levels of training, research, and teaching and to create space for their voices as part of the sustained intellectual discourse. Needless to reiterate, it is a moral responsibility for us to recognize and amend the situation by constructively engaging and acting on these issues. By its very nature of the discipline, we must embrace diversity, not only rhetorically but in all our actions. If elected, I will actively promote engagement with international scholars and students through focused outreach efforts, facilitate minority student mentoring and shadowing, and advocate for exchange programs among national and international minority scholars. Given my lived experiences as an Asian American, I will bring additional insights and commitment to these issues and help devise innovative ways to engage ourselves with all segments of the population.
Log-in to AnthroGateway to vote today!
Filed under: Association Business | Tagged: 2013 AAA Elections, AAA Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology, CMIA, Flordeliz Bugarin, Satish Kedia, undesignated seat for the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology | Leave a Comment »
As a linguistic anthropologist interested in connections between language usage, social policy, and language-centered social change/movements, I am drawn to serve on the committee for human rights because I believe this committee to be a vital forum for establishing a model for language rights both within the organization, and the field as a whole. Conducting research with signed language users in the United States and southern Vietnam, I am particularly interested in the ways that the latter are marked according to body (not linguistic) statuses, as well as how body practices are disciplined and regulated according to normative social, political, and economic hierarchies produced within specific locales, national contexts, and transnational arrangements. Social “inclusion” of deaf persons is among the “hot” terrains now garnering global human rights attention. Yet the perspectives of signed language users is rarely represented; rarer still are they used to problematize disability inclusion policies, among other human rights-related concerns. As a member of this committee I believe I would contribute a perspective on language that promotes not only critical parsing of relevant issues, including how we talk about rights and the impacts of assumptions grounded in those forms of talk, but ways of addressing material concerns through everyday communication.
I will work to bring the voice of the American Anthropological Association to the forefront of contemporary and heritage human rights issues at national and international levels. I believe that I can contribute to the committee because of my volunteer and professional experiences with human rights and other non-governmental organizations in the U.S. and Latin America. I also have experience working with congressional offices that resulted in successful legislation on human rights in Sub-Saharan Africa. My research and field experience includes working for indigenous organizations in Mexico.
I am interested in serving on this committee because I have an academic interest in the relationship between heritage and human rights and would like to encourage more of my peers with an interest in heritage to move from postcolonial critique to political activism. As a student of research ethics, economic development and cultural property I am aware of the potential for good intentions to inspire neocolonialism and familiar with the often spectacular failures of top-down development programs. But it seems to me that the remedy for these errors as well as the impetus toward activism lies in anthropology and that it is unfortunate that our professional reticence has allowed programs and policies to be set without the benefit of anthropology. As a member of this committee I would work to raise awareness of human rights issues, which is the committee charge, but would emphasize reasoned consideration of strategies that have been or might be successful in addressing human rights violations. I would also promote discussion and debate through forums and workshops about the meaning of activism within the several subfields of anthropology and the responsibility entailed in the privilege of being an anthropologist.
Working for human rights means working for the rights of all: women, men and communities in the broadest sense. Civil rights, economic and environmental justice, rights to land and life are all part of this package. There is little about anthropology, and of all of its subdiscipines that doesn’t touch on, provide evidence for, or help unravel the puzzle of human existence, contributing to the application of anthropological perspectives in active support of human rights issues. As an applied cultural anthropologist, I have worked with this directly, in Chiapas, Mexico with the Zapatistas, where human rights violations are identifiable and vivid. Closer to home, work in Canyon de Chelly has emphasized the right of the Dine (Navajo) to land and culture. More recently, I am involved with the battle for ‘civil fracking rights,’ as New Yorkers and others fight for home rule and the ability to maintain their lives and environment. As a member of the AAA Human Rights committee, I will work to make sure anthropological knowledge informs and influences policy surrounding all dimensions of the struggle for human rights.
As a member of the committee for Human Rights, I feel I have a specific knowledge set that traditional Anthropology often ignores (that of US-based human right’s issues) as well as the skills to render this knowledge productive through modalities of education, community collaboration and communication across the discipline.
I have been an AAA member since 2006 and am seeking a seat on the CfHR to promote critical dialogue and research on human rights within the AAA. Specifically, I am interested in facilitating conversations on the future of the human rights movement and the role anthropologists can play in the promotion of human rights. Recently, I organized two AAA panels on transitional justice, seeking to increase anthropological engagement with the legacies of human rights abuses. Over the past decade, I have worked to fight poverty, hunger, and racism in the U.S., both as a grassroots organizer at Washington Citizen Action, and as a research associate at the Poverty & Race Research Council and the African American Policy Forum. Previously, I worked with Amnesty International’s Medical Examination Group in the Netherlands to assist asylum seekers gain refuge there. My current research focuses on the Argentine human rights movement and former political prisoners. If nominated, I will focus on raising the visibility of anthropology as a discipline that engages with human rights challenges around the world.
Rebecca Galemba
Christina Beard Moose
Cathy Costin
Laura Miller
