Brian J. Burke
Peter K. New Award Winner, 2012
Brian J. Burke received his PhD in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, where he participated in a variety of applied research including projects to study: grassroots environmentalism on the US-Mexico border (with Dr. Diane E. Austin), the strategies of Latin American rural cooperatives in the context of economic globalization (with Drs. Timothy J. Finan and Marcela Vasquez-Leon), ecovillages and fair trade coffee production in Colombia, and his dissertation work on activism for barter systems and alternative currencies in Medellin, Colombia (with Dr. James B. Greenberg). His Peter K New paper on the social and economic impacts of alternative economies grows out of this dissertation work. Since graduating, Brian has been working as a post-doc with the Coweeta Listening Project, a collective of anthropologists and geographers who are studying and promoting the democratization of ecological science in Southern Appalachia.
Amanda Overgaard
Peter K. New Award Second Place Winner, 2012
Amanda Overgaard completed her Bachelor of Science in Sociology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a minor in Psychology in May 2012. Her academic interest is in medical anthropology, particularly maternal child health. Her winning paper, “Breast or Bottle: Perceptions of Breastfeeding and their Influence on Breastfeeding Rates in the United States” is a product of her senior thesis. She hopes to attend graduate school in the fall of 2013.
Susan W. Woolley
Peter K. New Award Honorable Mention, 2012
Susan W. Woolley received her B.A. in Anthropology from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Education from U.C. Berkeley. She is completing her Ph.D. in Education with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at U.C. Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests intersect in the following areas: anthropology of education; language, discourse, and power; gender and sexuality studies; and ethnographic and qualitative research methodology. Susan’s training in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis informs her study of the ways heteronormative discourses are reproduced and re-signified through everyday social interactions in school. In her research, she focuses on student-led peer education and teachers’ curricular and pedagogical interventions targeting gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ issues in their school. Examining everyday linguistic and social practices, Susan questions what happens to social constructions of “safe space” when students and teachers both contest and reproduce notions of binary gender and heteronormativity. Her paper “Speech that Silences, Silences that Speak: ‘That’s so Gay,’ ‘That’s so Ghetto,’ and ‘Safe Space’ in High School” focuses on the ways such linguistic expressions interpellate subjects’ identities and social positions and serve as conduits for power and the reproduction of ideology through their injury.
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