HEAT Ethnographic Field School

Through a grant to Brandeis University and the University of Florida, the National Science Foundation supports an ethnographic field school for Ph.D. students in cultural anthropology from universities in the United States. In 2013, the field school will take place July 7 – August 10 in Tallahassee, FL. The field school involves a collaboration between researchers and community partners affiliated with the Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee (HEAT).

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Images from today's decision by the Governor and Cabinet to allow USF anthropologists to exhume unmarked graves at the Dozier School for Boys. It was the last item on the agenda, which meant that many people had already left. But for those who stayed -- and especially for those who had been fighting for this moment -- it was a great ending. An all-too-rare moment of reconciliation and relief.

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The Tallahassee field school was invited to the Meeting of the Governor and Cabinet to listen in on the decision-making process for access to the unmarked graves at the Dozier School in Marianna, Florida.

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Field school students working with the Tallahassee Urban League's Reverend Ferrell to make lunch plates for the Dream Defenders at the Capitol!

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The Dream Defenders waiting for Rick Scott at the Capitol. Working on repealing Stand Your Ground.

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Home remedies from the field!

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Just after midnight, hours after the news of the unjust verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, a peaceful demonstration in protest on the steps of the state capital here in Tallahassee, Florida. The gathering began with a song: "we who believe in justice can not rest, we who believe in trayvon can not rest, we who believe in freedom can not rest, until its won." .

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The 'Poor' Reality; An Extended Haiku

The recent bus tour of Frenchtown and subsequent resident reactions to and recollections of neighborhood changes reminded me of a creative, semi-autobiographical piece I wrote nearly 3 years ago for an urban anthropology class. --Tariana

Gentrification.

Wait- are you tryna fool me?

Where is my old 'hood?

THIS section is not, NOT for

your re-creation.

Cement blocks, double locks, this

land holds our childhoods.

YOU IN, WE OUT. Market rent

condominiums,

high-priced studios, town homes.

Well-lit walkways, to

guide our poor asses OUT! Ghe

Tthos-made-premium.

Small percent allocated

to include have-nots.

PROMISES FABRICATED.

Our homes? Private lots.

Who did you build that park for?

Nice trees you planted,

whose growth you worried 'bout, huh?

Color-coded dreams

of grass, swings, peace, and clean streets.

Shit- we humans, too.

But green's the GO sign;

GO A-WAY, for we have none.

[jjeancasler]

Collards and Cornbread meeting at Dunn st. Farm in Frenchtown. I could only stay for part of it but there seemed to be a lot of energy and some really powerful ideas today.

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I totally scored some extra pot likker during the monthly Collards and Cornbread meeting of the Tallahassee Food Network! This participant observation sure is delicious...

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Lance and I with the Ethnographic Field School Students, during our student-faculty-host family-community member-academic partner dinner in the Goodbread Neighborhood.   

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Mapping our bus tour

View Bus tour in a larger map

Yesterday we took a wonderful three-hour bus tour of historic African American sites in Tallahassee. Our guide was Mrs. Althemese Barnes of the Riley House Museum, who literally wrote the book on the history of  African American communities in Tallahassee. Even long-time Tallahassee residents said they learned a lot.

Aside from learning about Tallahassee, the tour was also an opportunity to test out some digital tools for data collection in ethnographic research. 

This Google map shows a track of our tour, as logged with the built-in GPS on my iPhone and the GPS Tracks app. When we started the tour, I launched the app and clicked "start." When we finished, I clicked "stop." Then I exported the map as a KML file to Dropbox and imported it to a custom map on Google Maps.

You can begin to imagine other possibilities for linking a range of ethnographic data to spatial context using these tools. I look forward to exploring some of these possibilities in the next few weeks.

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We had a wonderful workshop on participatory photography this morning with our guest instructor Dr. Krista Harper from UMass-Amherst. She designed the workshop with an emphasis on hands-on learning, so one of our first tasks was to engage the whole group—students, community members, faculty—in a conversation about what would be the focus of our photovoice project.

The energy and enthusiasm that grew from that conversation was tremendous. We began to arrive at a set of ideas that was more compelling than what any one of us could have proposed alone. And along the way, the folks from Tallahassee taught us a lot about what was going on in this community and what was important to them. Dr. Harper had to stop us and remind the student anthropologists that we “need to document this conversation as part of the research." The process we began today isn't something that leads to a research project; it is the research. “A lot is already going on here," she said.

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Off to Tallahassee with a car full of gear for field school. Students arrive on Sunday for our five-week program, supported by the National Science Foundation.