The Engaged Anthropology award honors individual anthropologists (or multi-disciplinary groups or organizations with at least one anthropologist) or projects which have demonstrated a deep commitment to social justice and community engagement by applying anthropology to effectively address a pressing issue facing people and the planet.
This year, the nominations committee is thrilled to honor two projects whose work demonstrated the best of what engaged anthropological practice has to offer. Dr. Irma McClaurin and the project team are honored for their work on the exhibit, The Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World. The exhibit, formally located In the Rochester Museum & Science Center, allowed visitors to “discover more than 200 inspiring stories of past and present diverse Rochester, Indigenous, and Haudenosaunee women visionaries, trailblazers, inventors, activists, and entrepreneurs who changed Rochester and the world.”
The project, The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship and Advocacy by Ruth M. Van Dyke and Carrie C. Heitman, “presents visual and textual material in an open-access format to examine an ancient landscape threatened by oil and gas development in the American Southwest.” The project also features “video chapters presented by Acoma, Diné, Zuni, and Hopi cultural experts filmed on location in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.”