Faculty Research Projects
A brief synopsis of current faculty research projects are described here. Additional information may be found on each faculty member by clicking their name.
Mary Anglin
Current activities include:
- ethnographic research on popular forms of activism in women’s health, with long-term interest (1992-present) in activists’ redefinition of risk and treatment for breast cancer, and more recent work on differential access to care for poor women and women of color diagnosed with breast cancer (urban U.S.);
- analysis of ethnographic research on female adolescents of color in public housing, one of the foci for an HIV prevention study (urban U.S.).
Future research will look at small-scale farming—or community-supported agriculture—in Southern Appalachia, with emphases on the gendered relations of livelihood, health, and local/regional economies.
Lisa Cliggett
My research incorporates socio-cultural change and economic frameworks by exploring the political economy of resource access, population mobility, and ecological dynamics, with ethnographic research in Southern Central Africa. With this analytical approach I examine the inter-relations of individuals, families and communities, with the environment, and the role that larger scale structures (such as regional and national politics, and international aid organizations) play in these local level relationships. Currently my research program centers on an investigation of land cover change in a national park buffer zone in Central Zambia, and how host-migrant relations influence land tenure security, ecological sustainability and social dynamics in the region. A simultaneous project takes the intersection of livelihoods and food / nutritional security as the lens for examining the migrant experience in this frontier zone. Other primary research projects have included a study of the effects of migration / mobility on agricultural labor availability and household economics and intergenerational relations. I supervise a variety of PhD students with a broad range of research interests. Among these student projects are (or have been): Sustainable Consumerism in Sweden; “Peasants” and Livelihood Change in Costa Rica; Markets and Rural Livelihood Integration in the Ecuadorian Andes; Gender, Youth and Resource Use in Zambia; and Agro-Pastoral Livelihood Diversification in Morocco.
Deborah Crooks
I am a biocultural and nutritional anthropologist with research interests in livelihoods, nutrition, health and child growth. My current research project in Zambia seeks to elucidate the ways in which migrants engage their environment to produce well-being. This multi-method and collaborative project (with Lisa Cliggett) combines theory and method from biological and cultural anthropology, and data that are both quantitative and qualitative. My current PhD advisees are developing projects that will ask how and why children make the food choices they do with repercussions for nutritional status; and how migrants to the U.S. negotiate a new and unfamiliar food environment, and the possible consequences for nutrition security.
George Crothers
I am an anthropological archaeologist with research interests in the transition of hunting and gathering populations to the first horticultural societies. Currently, I have two long-term field projects in Kentucky: 1) Mammoth Cave Archaeological Project and 2) Green River Human Paleoecology Project. These two regions have a spectacular record of human activity from the Archaic to Early Woodland periods, spanning the critical period of economic and social transition from foraging to farming. My colleagues and I are investigating several cave and Green River sites to obtain archaeobotanical and faunal samples for comparative purposes. Both of these projects are multidisciplinary efforts that involve specialists in paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and geoarchaeology.
My students have conducted thesis research on aspects of Mammoth Cave archaeology, site preservation issues in rockshelter sites in eastern Kentucky, and Fort Ancient site occupation sequences in northern Kentucky.
Scott Hutson
In the summer of 2008, I initiated the first field season of a long-term research project investigating the causes and impact of a regional-scale historical transformation in Yucatan, Mexico. This transformation is marked by the construction of an 18km stone causeway linking two large Maya sites: Ucí and Cansahcab. Research in 2008 focused on settlement patterns around Ucí. Future field seasons will continue settlement patterns research in the direction of Cansahcab and excavate ancient households to determine the extent of economic, social, and ritual changes associated with the integration of this micro-region. I am also analyzing the results of two recent field seasons focused on an additional set of causeways in the vicinity of Yaxuna, Yucatan. Finally, I continue to work with data from several seasons of now completed fieldwork at the major urban center of Chunchucmil, Yucatan.
Richard Jefferies
My primary research interest centers on the social and economic organization of hunter-gatherer societies of the North American midcontinent. I am currently investigating the formation of local- and regional-scale social networks within and between these groups, as reflected by artifact morphology and style. I continue to study Late Prehistoric Mississippian chiefdoms along the northern periphery of the Southeastern U. S., with particular emphasis on their interactions with contemporary societies that inhabited adjacent regions. I have recently initiated a new research program that is studying Mission period Native American (Guale)-Spanish interaction in the coastal Southeast. This project is focusing on several sites located on Sapelo Island, one of the Georgia Sea Islands.
Current graduate student dissertation research includes:
- Late Pleistocene adaptation in the western Tennessee Valley
- Hunter-Gatherer exchange and interaction in west central Kentucky
- Middle to Late Holocene adaptive strategies in the Lower Ohio Valley
- Late Archaic-Early Woodland mortuary ritual in the North American midcontinent
- Late Prehistoric agricultural intensification in the Appalachian Plateau
- Mississippian chiefdom formation in the middle Savannah River valley
- Mississippian chiefdoms in the southern Appalachian Highlands
- Identity and landscape in a nineteenth century river town neighborhood
Diane King
My current research interests include kin groups (specifically patrilineages), tribes, religious identities and other social categories. Postcolonial migration to the West and the ongoing cultural encounter between the "Middle East" and the "West," as well as internal displacement and regional migration are important themes in my work. I am interested in gender roles and patriliny and how they shape each other. I am very interested in the state. What, exactly, is a state, and what can ethnography offer to the definition? What role does and can collective memory play in conflict, past, present and future? Iraqi Kurdistan is my main field site, and a very rich place to investigate these issues.
Erin Koch
My interests are in critical medical anthropology, infectious diseases and ethnographic studies of science and technology. These topics are intimately connected to matters of social justice, citizenship and governance, all of which inspire my research and teaching. My new project concerns globalization and post-Soviet science in Georgia, focusing on bacteriophage research. I am interested in cultural meanings of microbes and controversies about developing phage therapies as antibiotic alternatives. I am also designing a project about incarceration and health disparities among minorities in Kentucky. I am interested in how detention exposes individuals to new health risks and exacerbates existing ones.
Sarah Lyon
I am currently investigating the gendered dimensions of fair trade market participation through in-depth research among North American female consumers and case studies of producer groups in Latin America. Fair trade has prioritized gender equality. However, in practice this mandate is underdeveloped. While fair trade publicity materials highlight the steps producer groups have taken in order to foster gender equality, women’s projects are largely focused on non-productive activities outside the export agricultural sector. At the same time, the Northern fair trade consumer market is dominated by middle to upper class women. My work explores the convergences (and contradictions) between the female producers and female consumers constituting fair trade commodity networks.
I currently am supervising four graduate student research projects which focus on the challenges facing female street vendors in Tegucigalpa; food consumption habits in a rapidly industrializing Honduran community; the economic, ecological and cultural impacts of the cruise based tourism industry in a small Alaskan community; and the complex relationships linking a Ecuadorian NGO to both its Northern donor agency and the indigenous communities in which it works.
Christopher Pool
My archaeological research focuses on the evolution of complex societies in the tropical lowlands of southern Veracruz, Mexico, including the Olmecs and their Epi-Olmec and Classic-period successors. Specifically, I study the interactions among environment, economy, ideology, and political practice at scales ranging from the household to supraregional political economies. I also draw on interdisciplinary training in anthropology, geology, and geochemical characterization to understand patterns of resource exploitation and exchange within their social and cultural context. My students study various aspects of craft production-exchange systems, political economies, imperial strategies, and settlement patterns, mostly in Mesoamerica, ranging from Olmec to Aztec periods.
Monica Udvardy
- With two colleagues, my current advocacy anthropology research project is called, “Tracking the Changing Meanings of Kenyan Mijikenda Memorial Statues (vigango, pl.).” Erected to commemorate and incarnate the spirits of deceased men, their on-going theft to supply the Western art market has disrupted Mijikenda families, their religious beliefs, and intergenerational relations. I am analyzing the political, economic, and ethical issues surrounding the traffic in cultural property that the involuntary global voyages of vigango illustrate.
- I continue to research and write about Mijikenda gendered social organization, especially about the intersection of both indigenous and contemporary women's organizations and descent ideology.
In Western and non-Western contexts, my graduate students have or are studying aspects of gendered identities (religious, sexuality, impacts of return migration); and museums, cultural property and the formation of national identity.