Keynote Speaker: Dr. Daena Funahashi

Graduate Student Presenters 

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Malorie Albee

Malorie Albee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. She studies the bioarchaeology of the human foot skeleton.

 

Lydia Barrett

Lydia Barrett is a 2nd year PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studies cross-cultural musicology. She’s originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina. After finishing her studies in Vocal Performance and Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she spent two years as a public school English teacher in Guinagourou, Benin as a Peace Corps Volunteer, where she coordinated a national girls’ scholarship with the Batonga Foundation and sang lots of songs with her beloved students. Today, Lydia’s work focuses on the musical experiences of women and girls in the postcolony.

 

Heather Frigiola

Heather Frigiola is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

 

Gerpha Gerlin

I am a second-year anthropology PhD/MPH student & Science in Human Culture Cluster Fellow at Northwestern University, working on issues related to recovery from severe and persistent mental illness. I am crafting a multi-sited dissertation project that critically engages aspects and consequences of custodial care for psychiatric consumers, survivors, and ex-patients who have lost (or “forfeited”), and are trying to recover, the ability to participate fully and freely in the world.

 

Susan Haris

Susan Haris is a doctoral candidate in literature and philosophy at IIT Delhi and a Fulbright fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

 

Kenzell Huggins

Kenzell Huggins is a PhD Candidate in the University of Chicago Anthropology Department. His interests center on the production of other-than-human entities through the semiotic activity and labor of humans. His dissertation work occurs in and around media industries in Singapore.

 

Janelle Levy

Janelle Levy is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at UC, Irvine. Her research focuses on anti-Blackness, Creolization, and the politics of identity and aspiration among elite Jamaican youth.

 

Nicole Mabry

Nicole Mabry’s project focuses on rapid environmental shifts happening in what is known as Louisiana, and follows a number of scholars in considering these shifts as an extension and intensification of colonial efforts to transform landscapes. I consider how environmental transformations happening in the Mississippi Delta region tell us something important about the “groundwork” required and constantly shored up by settler and extractive formations, and therefore also about what happens when that ground begins to shift, unsteady, and submerge.

 

Brianna Meyer

Bri Meyer is a fifth year PhD dissertator at UW-Madison. She does multispecies ethnography working with the American Saddlebred show horse community—of which she has been a lifelong member. Her specific research interests in this area include the creation and cultivation of caring bonds across species that are collaborative, embodied, and gendered. She is also invested in discussions on the accessibility of anthropology and ethnographic writing, and how the “genre” of ethnography relates to and differs from other genres of literature. Bri holds a BA in anthropology and English literature from Augustana College and is affiliated with the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment (CHE) at UW Madison.

 

Shahana Munazir

Shahana Munazir is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her anthropological scholarship is situated at the intersection of education, gender studies, theology, history, and medicine.

 

Hanna Pickwell

Hanna Pickwell, PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago, researches the social efficacies and regimes of value of used commodities in China.

 

April Reber

April Reber has researched politics in Germany for three years. Her initial work problematized notions of normativity and extremism and her current work investigates conspiracy.

 

Rain Ramirez

Rain Cardiel Ramirez was born and raised in southern California. She is the daughter of a Salvadorean immigrant and a first-generation grad student.  Her mother raised her in indigenous customs, which sparked her interest in studying western ideologies and doing comparative studies that put different ideologies of gender coming from colonialism with contemporary Latinx and Indigenous culture in the United States. Furthermore, she wants to explore female disability and toxic masculinity in different cultures and works of literature. As a transfer student from East Los Angeles College to the University of California, Santa Cruz, Rain worked collaboratively through personal tutoring, workshops, and first-year student programs. She is passionate about supporting first-generation and underrepresented students. When she is not reading or writing, she usually trails in nature or plays with her two cats.

 

Kassandra Sparks

Kassandra Sparks is a Sociocultural Anthropology PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores ritual, labor, and rights among sex workers in NYC.

 

Gustav Steinhardt

Gustav Steinhardt is a PhD candidate in biological anthropology at UC Berkeley, focusing on the ecology and social behavior of emperor tamarins and saddleback tamarins in Amazonia.

 

Lachlan Summers

Lachlan is three children in a graduate student-shaped trench coat.

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Discussants

 

Cindy Carcamo

Cindy Carcamo is an award-winning journalist who covers immigration issues for the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was Arizona bureau chief and a national correspondent for The Times, focusing on border and immigration issues in the Southwest.

 

S. Chava Contreras

Dr. Contreras received his B.A. from UC Berkeley in Native American Studies with a minor in Cultural Anthropology. After working as a high school educator and musician, he went on to earn a M.A. at UC Merced for his work on migration and health of Yucatec Maya to San Francisco, California. His recent research looks at Wixarika conceptions of sickness and healing in the context of indigenous land struggles in Western Mexico. He earned a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz in Cultural Anthropology in 2022 and is currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

 

Katharine Creagh​​

Katharine Creagh is the writer, producer and host of the ANIMALISTIC podcast (https://animalisticpodcast.com/). Her work explores the interconnectedness between social justice, environmental issues, animal rights and global health. She has a Bachelors degree in Psychology from University College Dublin and a Masters degree in Human-Animal Interactions from the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. She currently works for a major UK canine charity, managing a project that aims to help employers and workplaces become more dog-friendly. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with her soul mate, a 1 year old Brussels Griffon named Afina.

 

Brian Walter

Brian Walter is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research and teaching interests bring together environmental anthropology, critical heritage studies, political ecology, and environmental justice. Brian’s current project explores how the impacts of climate-change-driven sea-level rise are compounded and racialized by infrastructure and heritage preservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He conducts this research in collaboration with community groups advocating for equitable flood mitigation with whom he is still actively engaged.

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Conference Planning Committee 

 

Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht

Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht is a PhD candidate in the Biological track in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research mainly focuses on the genomics of ancient human pathogens.

 

Shruti Gokhale

Shruti Gokhale is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology, and holds a master's degree in social work with a specialization in livelihoods and social entrepreneurship. Her research project focuses on navigations between tradition and modernity in the lived legal experiences of different performers in India – a nomadic hereditary entertainer community of tightrope walkers, and performers in the film industry – to analyze how subjective interpretations and implementation of specific laws are informed by social conditioning and cultural biases, working differently for different communities and constructing precarious legitimate citizenship in the process.

 

David Ingleman

David Ingleman is an anthropology doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a holistic anthropologist whose research and teaching interests include archaeology, cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, and linguistics. He has toiled in Cultural Resource Management archaeology, served in the US Peace Corps in Jamaica, video documented oral histories that connect Jamaica to Sierra Leone, and worked at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. His dissertation combines historical and archaeological research, including morphological and stable isotope analyses of animal remains, to understand multispecies sociality in the 19th-century Hawaiialn kingdom.

 

kalina kassadjikova

Kalina is a doctoral student of biological anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Kalina is interested in how cultural differences manifest biologically in human populations.

 

Katie Nuss

Katie Nuss is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Department of Anthropology. Their current research focuses on the experience of Japanese Americans incarcerated in American concentration camps during World War II. This research combines a wide variety of sources to explore the interconnections of landscape and memory in relation to difficult histories.

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