Hale Herald - Spring 2024

Lauren Hosek (Biological Anthropolgy, Professor)

Professor Lauren Hosoek is a historical bioarchaeologist and her research integrates osteological data from human skeletal remains with archaeological and historical evidence.  She utilizes these intersecting sources to examine how large-scale social phenomena such as religious ideology and institutional practices become embodied through ritual and activity across the life course. Her research projects span from early medieval Central Europe to the 19^th-century American West. Most recently, She has been working on a community-based project in the Denver area exploring the health and ritual practice of the 19^th-century Catholic Sisters of Loretto in collaboration with the living Loretto Community.

Chu May Paing (Cultural Anthropology, PhD Candidate)

Chu's dissertation titled "Intense Engagements: Social Media Activism in the Aftermath of the 2021 Military Coup in Myanmar" looks at how ordinary Myanmar people's political engagement is fueled by circulation of certain public feelings on social media spaces in the aftermath of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar. Her dissertation explores how the intense circulation of images and speech online creates an atmosphere in which social and political ideals for a new Myanmar are constantly written and rewritten.

Skylar Davidson (Minor in Anthropology in Progress)

Skylar is a 4th-year student at CU Boulder, pursuing an Anthropology minor. After taking Primate Life History with Dr. Michelle Sauther, she developed a passion for Primatology and excitedly added an ANTH minor. In the summer of 2023, Skylar traveled abroad to Vietnam with Dr. Covert and Dr. O’Brien to study its diverse ecosystem and native primates. Being in Vietnam developed Skylar’s deep love for the endangered Pygmy Loris and she plans to pursue a Master’s and PhD in Biological Anthropology. She intends to lead conservation research for this species and find her way back to Vietnam.

Jamie Forde (PhD Anthropology 2015)

Dr. Forde is a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Trained as an anthropological archaeologist at CU, he employs both art historical and archaeological methods in studying Indigenous Mesoamerican material and visual culture during the periods surrounding colonial encounter with Europeans. His work has been focused in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, particularly the site of Achiutla, where he has directed an interdisciplinary field project. His research has been published in journals including Ancient Mesoamerica, Colonial Latin American Review, and Ethnohistory.

Upstream, Downstream, Offshore: Constancy Amidst the Flux of Supply Chains
4pm, April 12, British Studies Room

Dr. Julie Chu
Associate Professor -Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago

Fluvial landscapes have long undergirded logistical projects for building out and maintaining the infrastructural channels of commerce and travel. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic engagements with original “development deltas” of Post-Mao China linking coastal Special Economic Zones to global exchange, this talk offers an estuarial take on what scholars of modernity and supply chain capitalism have described as a “liquid” world full of uncertainty and volatility. This talk focuses on the temporal politics of constancy that make fluvial landscapes thinkable in terms of supply chains and in turn, actionable as valued lifeways.

Co-sponsored by the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Anthropology and the Center for Asian Studies. Free and open to the public.

Digital Aestheticization of the Environment
4PM, April 19, Hale Science RM 230

Veronika Zavratnik
Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

By becoming increasingly digitalized, the aestheticization of the environment permeates our daily lives. Simply by looking around or listening attentively in any naturalsetting, it can easily be observed that people's engagements with their surroundings are different from a decade ago.
Today, ti is hard to find someone in the mountains, by the sea or in the forest who is not tapping on their smartphone, flying drones, using wearable cameras or other devices to digitally 'capture' and augment their experience of the environment. Images, blogs, vlogs and newly added (tourist/walking) maps are then circulated through digital technologies and media, uprooting and disseminating places and environments through time and space.

This talk draws on the ongoing collaborative research project (2022-2025) that aims to study the transformative moment of environmental perceptions by focusing on digital aestheticization as it unfolds in everyday contexts of outdoor leisure in selected European countries - Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Sweden and Finland. The emphasis will be put on how, through digital aestheticization, sustainability and environmental change become perceptible and meaningful in the local and/or regional context.