Department of Anthropology

Conference on Community-Engaged and Public-Facing PhD Research

woman standing at a table at a conference, talkingFriday, April 12, 2024

Time: 9:00 am - 4:30 pm
Location: Mandel Reading Room (303)

Please join us for a one-day conference on community-engaged and/or public-facing PhD research. Organized by Professor Jonathan Anjaria, the conference will feature ten Boston-area PhD students--including Brandeis Anthropology's Moriah King (pictured), Gowthaman Ranganathan, and Kalie Jamieson--who will share their ongoing work that is collaborative, innovative and experimental in both content and form.

In addition to our Brandeis Anthropology students, other participants will come from Tufts, Northeastern, Harvard and other Brandeis departments.

This conference is funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and is intended to complement the recently published Preparing Publicly Engaged Scholars, in which Moriah King and Prof. Jonathan Anjaria co-wrote an essay

Conference Schedule

9:00 - 9:30 am -- Breakfast

9:30 - 10:30 am -- Book talk and Q&A: Stacy Hartman and Yevgenya Strakovsky, authors of the book, Graduate Education for a Thriving Humanities Ecosystem

10:45 am - 12:00 pm -- Panel 1

  • Tieanna Graphenreed (English, Northeastern): An interactive digital map of overlooked Boston Black intellectual life for K-12 and university instructors and local Boston communities
  • Savita Maharaj (English, Brandeis): Creating curricular resources on early Black Boston in partnership with Boston Public Schools
  • Anca Wilkening (Religion, Harvard): Historical research with Indigenous nations in service of cultural revitalization efforts
  • Discussant: Elizabeth Son, Associate Professor, Theatre, Northwestern University

12:00 - 1:00 pm -- Lunch

1:00 - 2:15 pm -- Panel 2

  • Mac Irvine (Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Tufts): Producing, performing and participating in Austin’s queer nightlife
  • Moriah King (Anthropology, Brandeis): Collaborating with Black farmers in Georgia to tell visual stories of land stewardship through family archives
  • Gowthaman Ranganathan (Anthropology, Brandeis): Collaborative programming with a trans-led organization working for gender and sexuality rights in Sri Lanka
  • Discussant: Noe Montez, Associate Professor, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Tufts University

2:15 - 2:45 pm -- Coffee break

2:45 - 3:15 pm -- Kalie Jamieson (Anthropology, Brandeis) and Megan Moran (COMPACT, Brandeis): Curating resources for community-engaged PhD research

3:15 - 4:30 pm -- Panel 3

  • Jessi Brewer (English, Brandeis): Co-creating stories that transform public ideas of women’s incarceration
  • Jo Rezes (Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Tufts): Creating a social media cooking show with AIDS activists, chefs and historians to highlight the intersections of chronic illness, taste and humor
  • Claire Lavarreda (History, Northeastern): Indigenous oral history and archiving using Omeka-S
  • Discussant: Roopika Risam, Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College