Sharon Gillard

Sharon Gillard is a dual master’s student in Public Health and Anthropology programs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte). She holds a bachelor’s degree from UNC Charlotte and majored in anthropology with a minor in linguistics. Her concentration in the Public Health program is community health practice. She has collaborated with UNC Charlotte faculty members, the Women’s Health Equity Institute, and community partners. She has researched and advocated for the health disparities Black women experience in Charlotte Mecklenburg County, NC. Her interests include understanding inequities in holistic healthcare concerning marginalized cultural groups, the connection between mental health, and how it can often be overlooked. Cultural values and cultural identities can play a significant role in health care decisions that are made. Her research includes solutions for mental healthcare disparities and ways that public health can incorporate approaches by working with communities to identify healthcare barriers that are experienced.

Leyla Jafarova

Leyla Jafarova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her dissertation project offers a critical exploration of the emergence and development of humanitarian ethics of care for unidentified dead bodies in a post-war setting of Azerbaijan, with a central focus on the complex interplay between morality, politics, and regimes of care. Her work draws attention to the multiplicity of ways that the living adopt to forge relations with their missing and/or departed kin after the acts of mass violence and to construct their truths in the absence of certainty.

Oswaldo Medina Ramirez

Medina-Ramirez is a sixth-year Anthropology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida studying communities of practice within environmental governance networks. I am passionate about social and environmental justice. This passion drives the decisions I make around the academic and professional projects with which I engage. My goal is to become an interdisciplinary scholar of natural resource governance. I am committed to demonstrating the utility of interdisciplinary and evidence-based practices to foster improvements in community, social, and environmental well-being. In my future career, I aim to span the roles of researcher and practitioner by working at the intersection of academia, policy, and practice to contribute to more equitable and environmentally responsive natural resource governance. My research with frontline natural resource managers in Costa Rica and Florida seeks to advance the theory and practice of participatory and collaborative environmental governance by better understanding how environmental bureaucracies experience and navigate human conflicts that emerge in participatory initiatives.

Indiana Reid-Shaw

Indy is a PhD Candidate in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is interested in how natural resource management and climate adaptation initiatives can be community-led and equitable. Her current research is abut small-scale fishers perspective’s of a new Community-Based Fisheries Management program in the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati. Here, she works closely with co-researcher, Josephine Katovai of the University of South Pacific, Fiji (they are pictured here together conducting fieldwork). Indy’s past research investigated livestock herder knowledge and adaptation to Climate Change in Mongolia along with co-researcher, Azjargal Jargalsaihan.

Danlu Yang

Danlu Yang is a second-year master’s student majoring in applied anthropology at Oregon State University. Her research interests focus on Science and Technology Studies, Sociology of knowledge, World Anthropologies, and Decolonizing Anthropology. Danlu’s graduate research explores the challenges and opportunities posed in front of non-native English-speaking scholars from China, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain. Employing interviews, textual analysis, and participant observation, her study on a multinational Sino-Portuguese anthropological translation project explores the impact of English on multilingualism through scholarly communication and publication, highlighting academic power dynamics and the influence of English cultural hegemony in the post-colonial world. Her proficiency in Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European Portuguese), Mandarin, and English made her competent to conduct cultural and linguistic research unraveling the nuances of academic exchange among scholars from semi-peripheral and peripheral nations, all within a dynamic, multifaceted transnational research landscape.