Current ANTH major, Gordana Rasic, Stars in New York’s “Fashion Week”!

UIUC’s own ANTH major, Gordana Rasic, debuted her fashion line at a major fashion event in New York City yesterday.  Gordana brings her anthropological training to bear on the clothes she designs.  The theme of her current collection is “Duality within Society;” in a nod to her academic focus at the U of I on biological anthropology, her previous collection explored the theme of “Vital Organs.”  Gordana says the woman she imagines designing for is “very self-empowered and unafraid to speak her mind.”

Gordana Rasic Enjoying the Limelight (with co-designer Omar Villalobos & a Model) after Their Line Has Debuted on the Runway of EMERGE! at Fashion Week, Feb. 14, 2012 (photo by Hannah Gottlieb-Graham)

Gordana is already making a splash in the New York fashion world.  On Feb. 14, she was one of six “emerging” designers–and by far, the youngest–from around the world whose work was showcased at the third semi-annual “EMERGE!” event held as part of New York’s famed “Fashion Week.”   The event was held at the Broad Street Ballroom in lower Manhattan.

The by-invitation-only event was hosted by actress Tracee Ellis Ross and model Chavis Aaron.  At the event, canonical fashion designer, Dianne von Furstenburg, bestowed Fashion Innovator Award on Vogue magazine’s designer, André Leon Talley.  Other featured designers included  Terri Stevens, who was featured on Season 4 of “Project Runway.”  In the audience, “celebrity sightings” included Angela Simmons, Toccara, Derek J, B Smith,  Ashanti, New York Housewives Jill Zarin, and Alex and Simon McCord.

You can look at Gordana’s designs and read more about her fashion line on her homepage: http://gocadesigns.4ormat.com/home.  We can’t wait to see more from our anthropologist-fashion designer!  We’re proud of your successes, Gordana!

Gordana Rasic (with her company vice-president, Omar Villalobos) Taking Bows on the Runway after Their New Line has Debuted at the EMERGE Show of Fashion Week, 2/14/12 (photo by Hannah Gottlieb-Graham)

Gordana Relaxing on the Balcony of a NYC Bldg before Her Debut at the EMERGE Fashion Show in NYC

New Film on Industry and African-American Heritage in Edgefield, SC

Thanks to the South Carolina Humanities Council and National Endowment for the Humanities for grant support for two projects on Edgefield ceramics and archaeology. Congratulations to the Edgefield County Historical Society, as the sponsoring organization for these projects, and to George Calfas as Project Director and author of the grant proposals.

The first project consisted of a five-part speaker series convened in South Carolina in the Summer of 2011, entitled “Pottersville: 200 Years of Pottery Production in the Edgefield District.”

The second project is entitled “Pottersville: Home of Alkaline Glazed Stoneware,” and has the following description on the S.C. Humanities Council web site: “create a short documentary film of 8 to 10 minutes showcasing the alkaline-glazed stoneware tradition that is so important in Edgefield County. This film will be presented at the Joanne T. Rainsford Discovery Center in Edgefield, the McKissick Museum in Columbia, at regional historical society meetings, as well as on several websites, including SCETV’s KnowItAll.org, which reaches K-12 classrooms across the state” (http://schumanities.org/home).

Over the past few months Mr. Calfas and his colleagues have been working with Storyline Media to edit film footage with the goal of sharing the rich history of the pottery communities of Edgefield, the accomplishments of African-American and European-American artisans in those industries, and to document the 2011 Archaeological Fieldschool at Pottersville. The final product is a concise, 15 minute documentary now available online. In the coming month a DVD version will be added to the Anthropology department video library. If you would like a copy please let Mr. Calfas know, and please pass along this information to others who may be interested. Additional information about this multi-year, collaborative research and education project is also available online.

Alison Goebel and Chris Tan Recognized in Anthroworks Best 40 Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology 2011

Our PhD alumni Alison Goebel and Kok (Chris) Tan have been praised for authoring dissertations in the top 40 ranking by the Anthroworks web site. Congratulations to Alison and Chris!

Here are their dissertation titles and abstracts –

Small City Neighbors: Race, Space, and Class in Mansfield, Ohio, by Alison Goebel. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Advisors: Alejandro Lugo, Brenda Farnell, Ellen Moodie, David R. Roediger. This dissertation investigates social relations in a small deindustrializing city in the United States to analyze the specificities of class, “race relations,” and small city “cityness.” I conducted ethnographic research in Mansfield, Ohio, a multiracial, class-stratified city of about 50,000 residents. My work contributes to studies of whiteness and U.S. race relations by examining how whiteness hierarchically structures social relationships among neighbors. In analyzing how middle class white dominance responds to pressures that seek to undermine its privileges, my dissertation offers a small city view of U.S. race relations. My findings capture particularities of the field site as well as the consequences of global neoliberal capitalism and white racial privilege common throughout the United States.

Stand up for Singapore? Gay Men and the Cultural Politics of National Belonging in the Lion City, by Kok Tan. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Advisors: Martin Manalansan IV, F. K. Lehman, Janet D. Keller, Alejandro Lugo. This dissertation examines how Chinese-Singaporean gay men articulate their aspirations for national belonging within a recalcitrant state and its nation-building programs. These men expose the artificiality of the nation and its categories of belonging. Even as the state compels them to submit to its call for economic and biological (re)productivity, it also chastises them for their allegedly excessive individualism. In everyday life, they navigate a social landscape structured by the very real practices of an authoritarian state that criminalizes their sexuality. I argue that the illiberal state achieves its political legitimacy by convincing citizens that only it can secure Singapore’s continuous economic growth.

ANTH Major, Gordana Rasic, Will Show Her Fashion Line of Women’s Clothes at Fashion Week in New York on Feb. 14!

Yes, you read correctly.

Our own Gordana Rasic–who is a a pre-med student double-majoring in anthropology and molecular and cell biology, has a secret life as a fashion designer . . . She’s only been designing clothes for a year-and-a-half, but she already has her own business, called Goca — and her current collection has been chosen to be featured at “EMERGE!,” an event held as part of Fashion Week that features five emerging fashion designers from around the world.  Gordana is one of the five!  If you’d like to see the sorts of clothes she designs, check out the website of her business: http://gocadesigns.4ormat.com/.

The organizers of EMERGE! are already featuring publicity about the upcoming runway show, and they’ve interviewed Gordana, along with her collaborator (Omar Villalobos), on their website.  You can see the 3-minute video interview here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBxaL4Zpebg&feature=related

Good luck in New York, Gordana!

ANTH Major Caroline Brown Has a Blog while She’s in Japan for the Year!

She’s promised us a post for our blog, but meanwhile, you can check out her own blog!  It’s here: http://loonyjigs.tumblr.com/

‘Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall’

“Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall,” By James Gorman, New York Times, January 2, 2012

Once, animals at the university were the province of science. Rats ran through mazes in the psychology lab, cows mooed in the veterinary barns, the monkeys of neuroscience chattered in their cages. And on the dissecting tables of undergraduates, preserved frogs kept a deathly silence.

On the other side of campus, in the seminar rooms and lecture halls of the liberal arts and social sciences, where monkey chow is never served and all the mazes are made of words, the attention of scholars was firmly fixed on humans.

No longer. . . .

Jane Desmond of the University of Illinois, a cultural anthropologist who organized a series of talks there about animals, says that what goes on in the public arena, beyond the university, has had a role in prompting new attention to animals. There are worries about the safety of the food chain, along with popular books about refusing to kill and eat animals.

Read full article here.

ScienceShot: Standing Tall to Beat the Heat?

by Traci Watson on 12 December 2011

Science Now: Up to the Minute News from Science

Stand upright, cool off. That’s long been touted as one of the benefits of our ancestors becoming bipedal in a hot and sunny world. But now researchers have poured cold water on the idea. A team examined how our ancient relatives, who were most likely covered with a thick pelt of hair, would fare while walking briskly in a sizzling place like the African savanna. The body dimensions used in the model—30 kg for females, 55 kg for males—were based on a group of early human ancestors, or hominins, such as Australopithicus afarensis, the species that includes the famous Ethiopian fossil “Lucy.” The models showed that a 30-minute trek put hairy hominins at risk of heat stroke whether they were four-legged or erect , according paper published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more here: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/scienceshot-standing-tall-to-beat.html

Cultural Anthropologist Paul Stoller Decries the “Culture of Expediency”

From: The Huffington Post

Paul Stoller

Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University; Author, ‘The Power of the Between’

Mitt Romney and the Culture of Expediency

Posted: 11/30/11

Mitt Romney’s duplicity is yet again in the news. This time the GOP Presidential hopeful’s flip-flopping is the subject of a new Democratic National Committee (DNC) web video, called “Mitt vs. Mitt.” The web video recounts Mitt’s “fight against himself”… “the story of two men trapped in one body.”

How can someone who has flip-flopped on so many issues still manage to garner political support in a political climate that seems to reward the aura of unshakable conviction?

Here’s my take on this contradiction.

We live today in a culture of expediency. On one side of the culture of expediency we are overwhelmed by the complexities and stressors of contemporary social life, we yearn for simple solutions to a complex set of personal, social and economic problems that barrage us with too much information, too many due dates, and too many obligations. People who present “easy-to-understand” solutions attract our attention and perhaps our political support. On the other side of the culture of expediency, the same set of contemporary stressors compels us to take short cuts.

Read the rest here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-stoller/mitt-vs-mitt_b_1118879.html

 

In Defense of Difference

SCIENTISTS OFFER NEW INSIGHT INTO WHAT TO PROTECT OF THE WORLD’S RAPIDLY VANISHING LANGUAGES, CULTURES, AND SPECIES.

FEATURE / BY MAYWA MONTENEGRO & TERRY GLAVIN /

 

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

DECEMBER 2, 2011

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Experts have long recognized the perils of biological and cultural extinctions. But they’ve only just begun to see them as different facets of the same phenomenon, and to tease out the myriad ways in which social and natural systems interact.

Read more here: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/in_defense_of_difference/P1/

 

 

 

 

 

[This article was originally published in the October 2008 print issue of Seed magazine.]

What Scientists Can Be Grateful for on Thanksgiving

By Adam Ruben

November 25, 2011

AAAS

 

Thanksgiving is a time when we’re forced to verbalize what we’re thankful for. Not that we’re ungrateful in general, but we usually don’t sit around the dinner table taking turns expressing gratitude while our food gets cold.

At Thanksgiving, we identify the usual culprits. We’re thankful for family, we’re thankful for friends, we’re thankful for the food itself. We’re thankful that Farting Cousin Barry’s flight was delayed. But do we ever stop and express our appreciation for science?

let’s do it now.

• We are thankful to the funding agencies that support our research. Without them, we’d be at home experimenting on our cats.

• We are thankful for coffee. So, so thankful.

• We are thankful for that one colleague who knows statistics. There’s always one.

Read more things that scientists can be thankful for here:

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2011_11_25/caredit.a1100131

Credit: Hal Mayforth