Students in Professor Susan Trencher’s and Professor Justin Lowry’s ANTH 114, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, classes can now brag about expressing their ideas to an international audience. Along with students from the U.S. and Canada, they took part in a program where they wrote about real-world anthropological research questions and received feedback from their international peers.
The Center for a Public Anthropology presented this opportunity. The center, which focuses on the discipline of anthropology as a means of addressing public problems, promotes student activism, assists non-academic audiences in understanding public issues, and emphasizes the public outreach of doctoral anthropology departments.
Each year, the center holds a North American competition among colleges and universities in the United States and Canada; through its Community Action Website, students research and write about an ethical question that touches on the anthropology field. The students write op-ed style pieces that are published online, and the participants may share this link with local, state, or national legislators, newspapers, or other public news outlets. The students gain the experience of writing for a broad public audience, and their pieces are reviewed and anonymously evaluated by students from the other participating colleges and universities.
This year, 3,500 students from 24 colleges and universities reviewed five case studies and addressed the question of how Institutional Review Boards (in the U.S.) and/or Review Ethics Boards (in Canada) should enforce a set of common rules regarding research. They took into account the freedom researchers enjoy in conducting their research, and regulations that prevent the abuse of research subjects and ensure that the research works to promote a positive societal benefit.
The center recognized twenty-five George Mason students for their work. The links to the right contain the students' essays and their names.
Congratulations on a job well done!
December 17, 2013
