1st Place Winner
Amanda McMillan Lequieu
University of Wisconsin – Madison
“We made the choice to stick it out”: Negotiating a stable home in the rural, American Rust Belt
Amanda is scholar of home, place, and economic change. She is a PhD candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s joint departments of Sociology and Community and Environmental Sociology, advised by Michael Bell. Her research interrogates the relationship between structural, environmental, and economic change and lived experiences of home and community. Specifically, she is interested in how low-income communities adapt to globalizing economies and changing environments over time, through the lens of land tenure, environmental history, and economic development/post-development. Her qualitative field work has taken her from homesteads in Swaziland, to kitchen tables in dairyland Wisconsin, to red-dirt roads post-war northern Uganda, and most recently, to urban and rural Rust Belt communities. Amanda’s research situates the stories people tell about their places and their people within patterns of macroeconomic transformation.
2nd Place Winner
Amy Kennemore
University of California – San Diego
In Search of Indigenous Justice in the Bolivian Highlands: Legal Pluralism and Critically Engaged Collaborative Research from below the “Thresholds of Visibility”
Amy Kennemore is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation research considers emerging forms of governance and politics in Bolivia through examination of the practices of knowledge production around legal pluralism, understood as both a legal mechanism to strengthen indigenous autonomy and a platform for critically engaged collaborative research. She has been an affiliated researcher of the La Paz Departmental Association of Anthropologists since August of 2015, conducting collaborative research with social science researchers, non-governmental workers, activists, and indigenous community members in the highland region of Bolivia to implement new forms of legal pluralism that are advanced in the 2009 constitution, which officially “re-founded” the country as a “plurinational, communitarian” state. In addition to conducting collaborative research in Bolivia, she currently serves as Editorial Assistant for the journal Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.
3rd Place Winner
Adrienne Strong
Washington University in St. Louis and Universteit van Amsterdam
“We Swim In Blood:” Exposure to risk and forms of care on the maternity ward of a Tanzanian hospital
Adrienne Strong is a joint Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of Anthropology and the Universiteit van Amsterdam’s Health, Care, and the Body group in the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Her Ph.D. dissertation is entitled The Maternity Ward as Mirror: Maternal Death, Biobureaucracy, and Institutional Care in the Tanzanian Health Sector. She conducted approximately two years of fieldwork in the Rukwa region of Tanzania, predominantly based at the regional government referral hospital’s maternity ward. In this setting, Adrienne studied the ways in which biomedical healthcare facilities as both institutions and social environments influence forms of caring and, ultimately, whether a pregnant mother lives or dies during an obstetric emergency. She also explored the ways in which regional history and political economics have shaped biomedicine in contemporary Tanzania. Adrienne has a recently published article in Social Science & Medicine entitled “Working in Scarcity: Effects on social interactions and biomedical care in a Tanzanian hospital.” Her research has been funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant, NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant, and a Scholar Award from the international P.E.O. Sisterhood. Adrienne will graduate in May 2017 and plans to accept a postdoctoral research fellowship at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in the School’s Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) group.
