Sabbatical Report
Anastasia Panagakos
10th Annual Los Rios Anthropology Expo
Spring 2011 Type B Sabbatical
Submitted: October 20, 2011
Abstract
My type B sabbatical was spent in completing the long-range planning for the 10th Annual Los Rios Anthropology Expo which is being held at CRC on October 28, 2011. The objective of the sabbatical was to help facilitate and consolidate the long term planning of this event to just one faculty member within the Anthropology Program. The Los Rios Anthropology Expo is a district-wide event showcasing various aspects of anthropology for our students, staff, faculty, and broader community.The event, heldon a rotating basis at one of the four Los Rios campuses each fall, includes panel discussions, paper presentations, and information booths staffed by faculty, student organizations, and community members. The goal of the expo is to bring anthropology to a broad student audience, to foster collaboration among faculty at the four campuses, promote networking, and to provide a forum for critical thinking and learning. My work on this project included contacting and networking with various anthropologists in the area to both promote Anthro Expo and to solicit their participation. I worked with our graphics, IT, and culinary arts colleagues on campus to help craft the vision of Anthro Expo and to plan the logistics. In addition, I wrote grants and solicited for funds to help pay for Anthro Expo. I wrote the promotional materials, letters of invitation, and conceptualized the Anthro Expo logo. I maintained an active public relations profile through Facebook and email.
Sabbatical Report
Anastasia Panagakos
10th Annual Los Rios Anthropology Expo
Spring 2011 Type B Sabbatical
Submitted: October 20, 2011
I spent my type B sabbatical completing the long-range planning for the 10th Annual Los Rios Anthropology Expo which is being held at CRC on October 28, 2011. The objective of the sabbatical was to help facilitate and consolidate the long term planning of this event to just one faculty member within the Anthropology Program. In past experiences with hosting Anthro Expo, we have found that dividing the work up between the faculty members was inefficient and caused much repetition of work (particularly in terms of creating contacts with other anthropologists in the area). I feel the 0.2 course release was sufficient to allow me the extra time to devote to the planning process and I thank the committee for supporting me.
The Los Rios Anthropology Expo is a district-wide event showcasing various aspects of anthropology for our students, staff, faculty, and broader community.The event, heldon a rotating basis at one of the four Los Rios campuses each fall, includes panel discussions, paper presentations, and information booths staffed by faculty, student organizations, and community members. This year’s expo is much larger in scale than previous years and includes several presentations by prominent anthropologists coming from as far away as Los Angeles, a catered lunch for participants, and student projects created by all students enrolled in an anthropology class here at CRC this fall.
The goal of the expo is to bring anthropology to a broad student audience, to foster collaboration among faculty at the four campuses, promote networking, and to provide a forum for critical thinking and learning.There are several events at Anthropology Expo that will help promote our CRC values of cultural competence (Strategy Area 3). Diversity, on our campus and how it relates to human culture, is highlighted throughout the expo by the various cultural and ethnographic examples presented. These include presentations on Native American cultures, museum displays, the technology and culture posters and the key note addresses. Our anthropology students will be teaching other attendees about diversity through these presentations which affords them an interactive learning experience outside the classroom setting (and in turn supports Strategy Area 2 to enhance student success).
Anthropology Expo also promotes an awareness of cross-cultural interactions through its focus on culture change through technology, food culture, social justice, and diverse perspectives on marriage, sexuality, and gender. The presentations will challenge attendees to think more broadly about how their own lives are influenced by a world that is rapidly globalizing and how this changes culture. Anthro Expo enhances the campus climate for college employees (Student Equity Plan Goal 2.2) by allowing colleagues from various disciplines to come together and share their common interests (through their information tables). The expo also meets Student Equity Plan Goal 5.1 in that it grants transfer students access to faculty here at CRC and other Los Rios campuses, in addition to faculty from UC Davis, Sac State, and other 4 year institutions. These interactions will be useful for future mentoring and networking.
Anthropology Expo also addresses Student Equity Plan Goal 2.1 in that it promotes a culturally proficient teaching methodology. A core belief in anthropology is cultural relativism – or the idea that all cultures are of equal value and that we should not judge other cultures based on our own standards and values. Cultural relativism is stressed throughout the anthropology curriculum and the professors model this concept for students throughout the term. Like the concept of cultural proficiency, cultural relativism highlights the idea that people should be able to get along and learn from one another even when they disagree. Anthropology Expo allows both the professors and students an opportunity to practice cultural relativism by teaching others about diverse cultural practices that fall outside of the American norm (such as food culture, use of technology, marriage practices, etc).
The Planning Process
The most challenging aspect of planning for Anthro Expo was in getting anthropologists to commit to participating. I began early in January sending out invitation letters to prominent anthropologists in Northern California. Our goal was to have three key note speakers representing the main branches of anthropology: physical, cultural, and archaeology. Over the course of several months I contacted sixteen different people at Stanford, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Sonoma State University, Chico State University, Cal Academy of Sciences, and San Jose State University. After many attempts I was able to confirm Laura Nader from UC Berkeley, an influential and highly respected cultural anthropologist who agreed to screen her film “Losing Knowledge” and do a question and answer period. Her film highlights the loss of indigenous farming methods in a small Mexican village in the wake of NAFTA and globalization. Andrew Marshall, a primatologist from UC Davis, will lecture on rainforest conservation and orangutan habitat destruction in Indonesia while Adrian Praetzellis, an archaeologist from Sonoma State, will lecture on historic archaeology in Old Sacramento. In addition, we have a special invited speaker, Roberto Gonzalez from San Jose State, who is on the American Anthropological Association’s Ethics Committee and will be discussing the role of anthropology in the military.
Securing funding for Anthro Expo was also a top priority in January and February 2011. I wrote a grant to the Cultural Competence and Equity Committee and was awarded funding for the project in March in the amount of $1,689.30. The CCE grant allowed us to pay for promotional materials such as color flyers, posters, and banners; to provide lunch to participants catered by our Culinary Arts Program; and to offer a small honorarium to our four main speakers. I also spent time outlining the needs of Anthro Expo with President Travis who was then able to provide additional funding of $1,500.00. This support allowed us to provide complete packets to our participants including a commemorative tote bag and pen, paper, CRC folder, and printed campus information. This funding also allowed us to increase the honorarium for Prof. Nader in particular who usually commands a large speaking fee (and wasn’t afraid to tell us that!). Dean Ginny McReynolds has also provided administrative support and financial support for incidentals such as name tags.
Critique of the Leave
Overall I feel that my leave was well spent and did fulfill the objectives I had set out for myself. The results of the leave are now apparent as Anthro Expo is one week away. All the long range planning meant that we had ample time over the summer and into the fall to deal with the smaller details of the event. Since we had our main speakers and participants confirmed since May this allowed us to focus on promotion at the four Los Rios campuses, to other colleges and universities, businesses, non-profit organizations, and to the broader general public. Consolidating the planning of Anthro Expo to one faculty member allowed my anthropology colleagues to focus on their classes and provided me with enough time to write and conceptualize the event.
Although Anthro Expo has yet to take place we are already seeing benefits to our students, the college, and community. For CRC students in general it will provide a crash-course on anthropology (a discipline many of them know little about) and allow them to meet and network with a variety of anthropologists from academics to working professionals. CRC students currently enrolled in anthropology classes play an integral part to the success of Anthro Expo as they are all required to create a project to be displayed in the expo’s “Museum of Anthropology.” The students have been collaborating with each other and their professors since early in the semester and these projects have allowed them to learn about anthropology in ways that go beyond the classroom experience. In addition, we have CRC anthropology majors who are presenting their independent study projects at Anthro Expo and this has given them a first opportunity to create and execute a presentation or paper. Anthro Expo provides our college with an opportunity to showcase cultural diversity, increase the visibility of our anthropology program, and provide a free intellectual event for the local community to enjoy. Anthro Expo, like the OneBook Project and Ethics Bowl, is an even that helps elevate our community college beyond the commuter mentality often found in our students and provides a venue for real interaction with professors, staff, and students alike.
Sharing Results
My experiences with planning and executing Anthropology Expo will be presented in several ways. I will share the results (and lessons I learned) with my anthropology colleagues across the four Los Rios campuses in order to help them better plan for future expos. In January 2012 I will present a paper about Anthropology Expo at the California Community Colleges Anthropology Teachers meetings in Paso Robles to hopefully inspire other campuses around the state to adopt the expo idea and how to make it work. After Anthro Expo I will provide a write-up or presentation (perhaps through CASSL) to give our campus a report on how the event went. I will use our Anthropology Program website and Facebook page to report on the event and post video and pictures. The main product of my leave is, of course, Anthropology Expo 2011 itself. We are anticipating upwards of 700 people at this year’s event. This includes hundreds of CRC students and over 70 participating anthropologists from around the state. Our participants will be polled after the event in order to gain further perspective on its success.
10th Annual Los Rios Anthropology Expo Schedule of Events
Recital Hall Events:
11:00 a.mFilm Screening of "Losing Knowledge: 50 Years of Change" withDr. Laura Nader(Recital Hall)
3:30 p.m. "Field Primatology and Conservation in the Bornean Rainforest" withDr. Andrew Marshall(Recital Hall)
5:00 p.m. "The Archaeology of Historic Sacramento and How I Got To Dig It" withDr. Adrian Praetzellis(Recital Hall)
LRC EVENTS:
TIME / EVENT / LOCATION12:30pm-1:30pm / Featured DiscussionwithRoberto Gonzalez(SJSU and AAA Committee on Ethics) on Ethics in Anthropology / LRC 104
12:30pm-3:00pm / Anthropology Museum of current anthropology students’ projects / LRC 102
12:30pm-3:00pm / CRC Anthropology Department Lab Open House / LRC 103
12:30pm-1:30pm / Presentation: CRC Student Independent Research Projects (indigenous boat making and impact of Harry Potter on first generation Potter fans) / LRC 106
12:30pm-3pm / Informational tables and networking. Participants include local schools, businesses, government agencies, anthropology clubs, etc. / LRC Hallway
1pm-2pm / Career Panel: John Foster (State Parks), Dr. Adie Whitaker (Far Western Anthropological Group) and Helen Wolcott (CSU, LA Criminalistics Department) / LRC 105
1:30pm-3pm / Workshop: Theater of the Oppressed with SFSU Anthropology and Kairos Theater / LRC 106
2pm-3pm / Lecture: Forensic Anthropology with Dr. Kanya Godde (UC Merced) / LRC 104
2pm-3:00pm / Workshop: Getting a job in anthropology with Jenna Farrell (Tetra Tech) / LRC 105
List of Anthropology Expo Participants
American River CollegeAmerican River College Anthropology Club
Anthropology Club at UC Davis
California State Parks Sacramento Archaeological Research and Collections Facility
Center for Archaeological Research at Davis (CARD)
College of Marin
Cosumnes River College - Anthropology
Cosumnes River College- Art History
Cosumnes River College- Biology Department
Cosumnes River College- Sociology
Cosumnes River College- Photography
Cosumnes River College- Psychology Department
Cosumnes River College – Anthropology Club
CSU, Los Angeles (Criminalistics Dept) and Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center
CSU, Sacramento
Far Western Anthropological Research Group
ICF International
Millennia Archaeological Consulting
Sacramento Archaeological Society
Sacramento City College-Anthropology
San Francisco State University and Kairos Theater Ensemble
San Jose State University/ AAA Committee on Ethics
Sierra College-Anthropology
Society of California Archaeology/ Far Western Anthropological Research Group
Sonoma State University
Tetra Tech EC, INC
UC Berkeley
UC Davis
UC Merced
Traveling Door Exhibit
CRC OneBook
UC Davis Field School