Professors in the Anthropology Department attended the annual American Anthropological Association Meeting in San Jose, California on November 14 – 18, 2018. Professor Mary Moran ran into Georgia Butcher ‘17 who was presenting at a poster session titled “Miner Community, Major Challenge: Identity in the West Virginia coal mining industry”
Georgia informs us she “is currently at the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) which supports the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as well as other federal agencies. I was presenting this poster as a case study from a project we conducted at the office. I found it fascinating that there was so much identity formation playing into the coal mining communities in West Virginia. “
“AAA was a great experience to really reconnect with my academic roots. I’ve been able to use some techniques learned at Colgate, such as interview skills, theme analysis, interview analysis, and more. On top of that, having a strong anthropology base lets me be flexible on the projects I’m put on and I’ve been exposed to a large variety of ways of working because of that. Plus being an anthropologist in the federal government makes for great people watching and culture exploring. There are a lot of calls for culture shifts in departments and the other anthropologist and I get a kick out of such huge organizations with deep seeded histories they do not want to let go of talk about the need for culture change. “
The American Anthropological Association is the world’s largest association for professional anthropologists, with more than 10,000 members. Based in Washington, D.C., the Association was founded in 1902, and covers all four main fields of anthropology (cultural anthropology, biological/physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology). This year’s’ Annual Meeting was titled Change in the Anthropological Imagination. It was a timely call to action for papers, posters, workshops, round-tables, and other formats that address the themes of resistance, resilience, and adaptation from a wide range of perspectives.