Faculty Research Projects

Rosalind Shaw

Professor Shaw is currently writing up a book project titled Demobilizing Memory: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of War in Sierra Leone, based on field research on local and transnational processes of memory, redress, and social repair in post-war Sierra Leone. Shaw examines why, after eleven years of civil war that became internationally notorious for its violence, that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not have widespread popular support among survivors, and how it was ultimately reshaped according to local memory practices.Her policy briefing for the United States Institute of Peace is on line here.

Deborah Pacini Hernandez

In collaboration with her Urban Borderlands students, Deborah Pacini Hernandez has been conducting research on local Latino communities since 2000. An article based on this research entitled "Quiet crisis: a community history of Latinos in Cambridge, MA" is included in Latinos in New England, ed. by Andres Torres, Temple University Press 2006.

Cathy Stanton

Professor Stanton is currently producing an Ethnographic Overview and Assessment of Hopewell Furnace National Historical Site in southeastern Pennsylvania for the Northeast Ethnography program of the National Park Service. Cathy is focusing primarily on the cadre of volunteer charcoal-makers who help to perpetuate the knowledge of how charcoal was made for use as fuel at early iron-making sites like Hopewell Furnace. She is exploring how national parks can understand and work with "neo-traditional" groups that, like this one, draw on historical knowledge in order to create avocational communities in the present.

Astier M. Almedom

The May/June 2005 issue of the American Journal of Human Biology featured the photograph of one of Almedom's study participants, an Eritrean (Saho) mother with her baby daughter. The study set out to investigate physiological correlates of maternal sense of coherence (SOC)—a measure of mothers’ resilience—in the immediate pre- and postnatal period. For more information on Prof. Almedom, click here.

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