News

February 11, 2013

UMass Delegation Participates in International Workshop at University of Barcelona

Two anthropology faculty and five graduate students took part in an international workshop on the theme of “Space, Placemaking, and the Politics of the Local” at the University of Barcelona in early February. The international workshops were part of the Anthropology Department's European Field Studies program’s three-year NSF research and training grant, "Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS)” (OISE-0986575), led by co-PIs Krista Harper and Jacqueline Urla. 

For this round of the program, Harper is serving as field supervisor, guiding students through a three-semester course series on ethnographic research design, field research in Europe, and analyzing and writing up and writing up field research data. Harper and Urla co-organized the workshop with colleagues at the University of Barcelona, where graduate students from the two universities presented their research projects and discussed the interplay of theory, method, and ethics in field research. 

The UMass graduate students—Gina Agostino, Rebecca Broedel Bartusewich, Johanna Mitterhoffer, Lillian Muir (all anthropology) and Jenny Folsom (sociology)—are preparing to conduct NSF-sponsored field research in Belgium, Italy, Spain, Cyprus, and Portugal. Harper presented her work on "Participatory Visual and Digital Research Methods" to the Visual Anthropology colloquium of the Department of Anthropological Sciences. The UMass delegation also visited Barcelona's Mercat El Born, an urban archaeological site, for a presentation by the head archaeologist.