Social Sciences | University Categories | CAS in the Media

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Three CAS grad students earn top AFW awards

April 9, 2014

Amanda Vander Woude, right, with Sheila Converse, AFW president and music faculty member

Graduate and doctoral students in the College of Arts and Sciences won three of six annual awards presented last week by the WSU Association for Faculty Women. AFW’s top honors recognize students whose work benefits the community.

Ellen Preece, a doctoral student in the School of the Environment, won a Harriett B. Rigas Award. Elected president of the Washington State Lake Protection Association, at WSU Preece researches food and water safety issues.

Amanda Vander Woude, a graduate student in vocal performance, won an AFW Founders Award. Vander Woude studies the vocal injuries of professional singers, gives voice lessons to WSU undergraduates, and performs in various ensembles.

Amber Morczek, a doctoral candidate in criminal justice and criminology, received the Karen Depaul Leadership Award. Morczek has participated in violence-prevention programs, including the Prisoner Debate Project, which took WSU undergraduates to the Coyote Ridge Correctional Facility to collaborate with inmates during public debates in the facility about topics in criminal justice.

More about the 2014 AFW awards

How anthropologists help control Ebola outbreaks

April 3, 2014

When disease strikes in the developing world, like the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, doctors, nurses and epidemiologists from international organizations fly in to help.

So do anthropologists.

Understanding local customs—and fears—can go a long way in getting communities to cooperate with international health care workers, says Barry Hewlett, a medical anthropologist at WSU Vancouver.

Otherwise medical efforts can prove fruitless, says Hewlett, who was invited to join the Doctors Without Borders Ebola team during a 2000 outbreak in Uganda. There are anthropologists on the current team in Guinea as well.

Before the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders started bringing in anthropologists, medical staff often had a difficult time convincing families to bring their sick loved ones to clinics and isolation wards. In Uganda, Hewlett remembers, people were afraid of the international health care workers.

“The local people thought that the Europeans in control of the isolation units were in a body parts business,” he says. “Their loved ones would go into the isolation units and they would never see them come out.”

Learn more about anthropology’s role in disease control

Spite Is Good. Spite Works.

March 31, 2014

Research recently published by David K. Marcus, WSU professor of psychology, was featured in a New York Times article about the role of spite in social order.

Reporting in February in the journal Psychological Assessment, Dr. Marcus and his colleagues presented the preliminary results from their new “spitefulness scale,” a 17-item survey they created to assess individual differences in spitefulness, just as existing personality tests measure traits like agreeableness and extroversion.

While psychologists are exploring spitefulness in its customary role as a negative trait—a lapse that should be embarrassing but is often sublimated as righteousness (as when you take your own sour time pulling out of a parking space because you notice another car is waiting for it and you’ll show that vulture who’s boss here, even though you’re wasting your own time, too)—evolutionary theorists, by contrast, are studying what might be viewed as the brighter side of spite and the role it may have played in the origin of admirable traits like a cooperative spirit and a sense of fair play.

The new research on spite transcends older notions that we are savage, selfish brutes at heart, as well as more recent suggestions that humans are inherently affiliative creatures yearning to love and connect. Instead, it concludes that vice and virtue, like the two sides of a V, may be inextricably linked.

Read more about spite studies in the New York Times (subscription required)

Ozette: 18th Century Mud Slide Catastrophe

March 28, 2014

Mudslide calamities like the recent one near Seattle are uncommon but not unique. About 1750, several Pacific coastal houses in Ozette, a Native American fishing village on the Olympic Peninsula, were buried by a sudden mudslide.

From ~400 AD through the early 1900s, Ozette was the base of whaling operations by people known as the Makah. It wasn’t until coastal erosion in the 1970s exposed the ruins that the village became visible again.

When the Makah people found the ruins of Ozette eroding out on their beaches, they asked archaeologists at WSU to help out. The project was one of the first joint Native American and academic projects ever conducted in American archaeology.

More about the Ozette Archaeological District

‘Clicktivism’ moves civil rights forward in a new generation

March 27, 2014

Experts say Black activism today takes place in digital spaces where young African Americans share stories and invoke conversation about their struggles with friends and strangers. According to David J. Leonard, associate professor and chair of the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, social media has its place in activism just as traditional forms of activism commonly associated with the Civil Rights movement.

“Activism and organizing are the basis of change; change comes through what [W.E.B.] DuBois described as ceaseless agitation. There are many different tools that are used to engage in this work,” Leonard said. He points to the information shared in social media about Trayvon Martin, the “online mobilization” to Jena 6, and the execution of Troy Davis, as examples of when Black youth use social media to create conversation.