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News and Announcements
Safety in the Field Session
Calling all those who will be doing field research this summer! Whether you are a graduate student heading off to do field research for the first time, or a faculty member who is or will be supervising graduate students in this situation, please consider joining us for a discussion of “Safety in the Field” on Friday, April 12, from 10:30-12:30 in SSC 2257. We will have a light lunch (pizza & drinks) to follow. Please register by Apr. 10th at the following site to attend: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DZBGHDH.
Significant Publications of Doctoral Student
A paper by Anthropology PhD candidate Paul Szpak (Fish bone chemistry and ultrastructure: implications for taphonomy and stable isotope analysis), published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, generally regarded as the top journal in the world for natural science studies related to archaeology, and certainly amongst the top five for archaeology in general, has been rated the hottest or most downloaded/read article in that journal for 2012 by SciVerse ScienceDirect. This paper has already been cited a number of times and often in fields much beyond archaeology per se. Another paper by Paul written with three colleagues (T. J. Orchard, I. McKechnie, and D. R. Grocke), and for which Paul was senior author (Historical ecology of late Holocene sea otters (Enhydra lutris) from northern British Columbia: isotopic and zooarchaeological perspectives), was ranked the 19th hottest article for 2012.
CASCA 2013
The 2013 Annual Conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société Canadienne Anthropologie will be held from May 8-11, 2013, on the beautiful campus of the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C. Full information and conference details can be found HERE.
"Angry Old Men and Women: Argentina’s Activist Pensioners"
The 2013 John Gehman lecture features, Dr. Lindsay Dubois, of Dalhousie University. Her talk draws on her oral history project with radical activist pensioners in Buenos Aires which investigates how the current activism of these elders fits into their longer biographies, asking questions about where activism comes from and what sustains it over time. The talk will be held in SSC 5220 on Thursday January 17th, at 2.30pm. Details are available HERE.
Doctoral Student Wins Award
Please join us in congratulating Anthro PhD student Ian Puppe who has just been awarded The Helen Hornbeck Tanner Student Conference Paper Award for the Best Student Paper at this year's Ethnohistory Conference. His winning paper is entitled "No Home on the Range: Ruin, Reclamation, and Revitalization in Algonquin Provincial Park." This is a huge achievement and well deserved!
Anthropology Graduate Program Open House
Prospective applicants to our graduate programs are invited to attend an Open House on Friday, November 23, 2012 at 2:00 pm. Please join us for coffee, a tour of the department and an information and Q&A session about our graduate programs. For directions and information on visiting our campus click HERE. Registration is now closed.
Apply to Anthropology Graduate Programs
The 2013-14 online application system will be open for applications starting October 4th. Please click the button below to apply. Application deadline is Feb. 1, 2013.
Graduate Scholarship Applications for 2013-2014
If you are planning on going into a Graduate program, it is important to watch for department deadlines for each scholarship application. For information, instructions, and deadlines, please click HERE.
Dr. Spence Honoured
The latest issue of the Cambridge University Press Journal Ancient Mesoamerica (July 2012; Volume 23, pages 1-7) provides an autobiographical sketch of Professor Emeritus Michael W. Spence entitled “Finding a Balance”. The sketch details his career and many contributions to Mesoamerican (and Ontario!) archaeology. Mike is only the fourth Mesoamerican archaeologist to be honoured for their career contributions in this way in that journal.
Recent Faculty Book Publications
Anthropology department members have been very busy on the research front. In addition to journals, book chapters and other shorter works, over half the full-time faculty have been involved in producing books and monographs that have recently appeared or are forthcoming this fall. The books run the gamut of all areas of anthropology from sociocultural to archaeology to linguistics to bioarchaeology and include some reissues of classic works. Information about them, including weblinks, can be found by clicking [HERE].
New Special Topics Courses
This course provides a basic understanding of the application of methods of statistical inference in bioarchaeological analysis. Examples and assignments will be based on bioarchaeological data.It will discuss unique problems with this data and provide an overview of spatial statistics. Tuesday 7:00-10:00 pm
Taking the idea of the “Ethnographic Film” as a starting point this course will explore how film and video is both practiced and theorised within anthropology. The long history of anthropological filmmaking has been accompanied by contentious debates from both within and outside the discipline. Now more than ever the world encounters diversity through visual media and the ethnographic is being redefined by cultural producers whose platforms for their work are as likely to be social media sites as documentary film festivals or television. What are the dynamics of an engaged anthropologically-informed film/video practice sensitive to the transformative power of visual representations? We will explore this question using examples of films/videos that exemplify different ideas of the ethnographic. We will watch the work of visual media makers who use innovation and experimentation to contest the power relations, ethics and genre of cinematic realism many argue are inherent whenever a video camera is used to represent the lives of real people living real lives. This course will raise questions about how our understandings are mediated through film and video media; media that can present everyday realities as everything and anything, from the excruciatingly mundane to the extraordinarily exotic and spectacular. Such inquiries are inevitably reflexive and will require us to consider our own habits of desire, fascinations and situated knowledges. Thursday 7:00-10.00 pm
Research Assistant Opportunity for Current and Prospective Students
Dr. Karen Pennesi will be hiring a graduate research assistant to conduct interviews in the UWO community during summer and fall 2012 as part of her newest project: "Negotiating Personal Names and Social Identities at the University of Western Ontario". Students interested in working on this project or on conducting their own M.A. or Ph.D. research on this topic under Dr. Pennesi's supervision should contact her or click [HERE] for more information.
Thinking of Applying to Our Graduate Program?
Prospective students can find answers to their questions about our program HERE. Tips on putting together a good graduate school application are available HERE. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us HERE.
Madagascar Field Course
Archaeological Field School in Peru
Also from this web page:
Anthropology @ Western
Thinking about Graduate School
Follow the link above to explore the exciting and innovative learning opportunities available in our graduate program.
You can direct enquiries to the department staff by clicking the link above.
You can direct enquiries about the Graduate Program by clicking the link above.
