As students and I have been creating more zines (both through classes and research projects), we have started to build a critical mass of them. You can now find several in the Collaboratorium (Smith Lab 4180) here at OSU. Best of all, they are free!
Last week, the OSU Undergraduate Anthropology Club invited Lee Hoffer, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, to give a guest lecture on the opioid epidemic. Lee has been studying opioid use and markets ethnographically for over two decades and had lots of great insights to share. You can hear more about his work in this interview conducted by two of our undergraduate anthropology majors.
One of the projects I’ve been really happy to collaborate on here at Ohio State is the “Pop Garden” outside of Smith Laboratory, where my office is located. A new club on campus named GrOSU designed the garden and planted it with amaranth, popcorn, millet, and sorghum–all crops that can be
“popped” and eaten. We were also very lucky to receive a donation of Com-Til – a nutrient-rich compost made from yard and sanitation wastes – from the City of Columbus. So who fertilized the pop garden? If you live in Columbus, it just may have been you.
We hope to develop other garden projects throughout our Columbus campus (including Waterman Farm) as part of the Initiative for Food and Agricultural Transformation (InFACT) Discovery Theme at OSU. If you have ideas of projects you want to initiate, please feel free to contact me.
I just published a short blog post for Ohio State’s Initiative for Food and Agricultural Transformation (InFACT), which discusses my new research on the use of biosolids (i.e. treated sanitation sludge) in Midwestern agricultural landscapes.
This year I am starting a new position in the Department of Anthropology at (THE!) Ohio State University. My hire is part of OSU’s Initiative for Food and Agricultural Transformation (InFACT), one of the many new Discovery Themes on campus. This initiative is recruiting dozens of new faculty who approach the study of food and agriculture from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, architecture, nutrition, political science, and public health, among others. I will continue to be working in the Amazon region (both in Peru and Brazil) and the American Midwest, focusing on farmer’s conservation management practices and adaptation to climate variability. I am also developing a new project that investigates the use of human waste (“biosolids” or “night soil”) in contemporary agriculture.
