2019 Organizing Committee
Event Co-Creators
Christina Crespo is a PhD student in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology and is completing the Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. Her broader academic aim is to address how alternative approaches to science and collaboration can generate knowledge—in more inclusive and equitable ways— to confront the challenges of a changing world. She has done research in Florida, Cuba, and Australia.
Samm Holder is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Department of Anthropology and is working toward an Interdisciplinary Certificate in University Teaching. Her research explores how human agency and social structures shaped human biology in the past. She has conducted bioarchaeological fieldwork in Peru, Lithuania, Egypt, and here in Athens, Georgia.
Session Co-Organizers
Kaylee Arnold is a third-year PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Disease Ecology Across Scales program through the Odum School of Ecology. Her research focuses on analyzing the gut bacteria of disease vectors, such as kissing bugs, to better understand how deforestation affects the transmission of infectious diseases. She has conducted field work in Panama, Italy, and throughout southern California.
Rebecca Atkins is a 4th year PhD student in the Odum School of Ecology. She currently investigates patterns in snail-plant interactions within salt marshes spanning a latitudinal gradient from Florida to Maryland. In addition to her research, Rebecca also mentors undergraduate and high school students and engages in science outreach through writing and the visual arts. Rebecca is passionate about the intersection of art and science and hopes to cultivate this practice as she pursues a career in coastal conservation.
Jennifer DeMoss is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology and Integrative Conservation Ph.D. programs. Her research focuses on the roles of bodily practice and nonhuman agency in socio-environmental relationships. She conducted fieldwork with a nonprofit environmental education organization in Traverse City, Michigan, studying this organization’s efforts to foster emotional, social relationships with local landscapes through body and movement-centered curriculum. Throughout the course of her fieldwork, she has questioned how landscapes shape these educational opportunities, as well as the implications of pedagogy centered around concepts of settler indigeneity. Her work reflects an interest in sensory ethnography, and she uses video as a tool to illuminate moments of sensuous contact in more-than-human landscapes. Other interests include alternative educational models, environmental literacy, ethnoecology, and wild foraging. Her B.A. is from the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan, and she has field experience in botany and forest ecology.
Alden DiCamillo is an MFA student in the Lamar Dodd School of Art whose research stems from a queer artist lens that asks questions about (re)imagining the un-historied and how visual/sensory media practices fit with anthropology at the intersection of policy-making. Having garnered their BA in studio art and business management from Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio in 2015, they have continuously pursued courses of study that will allow their studio practice to become increasingly cross-disciplinary. Personally, their work manifests in a multi-media studio practice that seeks to develop an understanding of (third)spaces that enter between and outside of binary notions of narrative, history, philosophy, and identity-building.
Kristen Lear is a PhD Candidate in Integrative Conservation and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. In her work as a bat conservationist, she seeks to develop effective and equitable solutions to bat conservation challenges through collaborative research, partnership with local communities, and public engagement and outreach. Her fieldwork has taken her to Texas, Australia, and now Mexico.
Jeff Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology Ph.D. program. His research, more broadly, explores how different professions in the health care field interact and how these interactions shape education, job satisfaction, practice laws, and patient access to care. His most recent research utilizes interviews and observations to explore how nurse practitioners operate under restrictions to their practice and the ways in which they create both legitimacy and professional boundaries. This research problematizes the traditional view of field expansion as centered on conflict and offers a nuanced perspective that highlights the creation and maintenance of an ethos of care in lieu of an effort to dominate the field. This research highlights the importance of professional culture on formal and informal rules that can underlie the processes of the legitimization of a profession.
Volunteer Coordinator
Megan Anne Conger is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her research is rooted in postcolonial and world-systems intellectual frameworks, and seeks to explore the varied experience of settler colonialism in North America. She has conducted field and museum-based research throughout the US (Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, New York), Canada (southern Ontario), and Mongolia (Khovsgol Province).
Communications Coordinator
Emily Y. Horton is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology and Integrative Conservation Ph.D. program. Trained in cultural and ecological anthropology, she specializes in the human dimensions of environmental governance and conservation. Her current research draws from the social sciences, natural sciences, and visual arts to explore the socio-ecological dimensions of small-scale fisheries governance in a Brazilian co-managed marine reserve. She gives special attention to well-being, sustainability, and gender concerns in her work.
Finance Coordinator
Emily Ramsey is a third-year Ph.D. student in Anthropology and is completing a Graduate Certificate in Organic Agricultural Production. Her research focuses on the experiences and contribution of immigrant farmers from throughout Latin America to U.S. food systems, and the transnational ties they maintain here and abroad through agriculture. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in New York, Oregon, and through the Southeast (including Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana).
Catering Coordinator
Olivia Ferrari is a first-year Ph.D. student in Anthropology and Integrative Conservation. Her background involves research on human impacts on wildlife populations in the UK and Latin America. Her current work aims to combine wildlife research with human dimensions of conservation, with the goal of making community-based conservation more effective and inclusive considering cultural and political contexts. She has conducted fieldwork in Peru, Costa Rica, and Panama.
Videographer
Alec Nelson is a second-year PhD student in Integrative Conservation and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. His research consists of unpacking landscape-scale spatial prioritization in a conservation context, with a focus on cross-scale communication and decision-making practices. He has conducted field work in Colorado, Vermont, and New York, and is an avid audio-visual enthusiast.
