Current Center for Public Anthropology Research Projects
Fordham University has outstanding faculty across the social sciences and the humanities dedicated to public scholarship and social justice, and is committed to building relationships across institutions with faculty and programs with shared investments. As a result, the Center, serves as a hub for the talents and energies of our anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and educators in partnership with other academic and non-academic institutions and activists.
Currently, the Center hosts two different programs, which share a commitment to public scholarship in New York and beyond.
The Demystifying Language Project (DLP)
The Demystifying Language Project (DLP) is a multi-pronged initiative, launched in 2018 by Ayala Fader, that aims to create long-term relationships between linguistic anthropologists/sociolinguists, undergraduates, and local public high schools. The DLP uses linguistic anthropology and ethnography to facilitate teachers and students’ explorations of how relationships of power shape language use. Topics such as multilingualism or varieties of English are often part of high school students’ everyday lives, but are rarely woven into public high school curricula, which treats language more prescriptively. By demystifying students’ own experiences with language— reading linguistic anthropology and applying those ideas to students’ ethnographic study of language use in their own school, homes, and communities—the DLP strives to create a grounded, hands-on, and potentially life-changing set of tools for high school students and teachers, along with the faculty and undergraduates who collaborate with them.
The long-term vision of the DLP includes teacher training summer seminars and high school summer institutes held regularly on the Fordham campuses. However, our current priority comes directly out of a pilot study in 2019, which found that there are no easily accessible linguistic anthropology readings for high school students and teachers. To remedy this, the DLP hosted a writing workshop in June 2023 funded by the Spencer Foundation for Educational Research, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, and a Fordham Challenge Grant. During the workshop twelve high school students and twelve undergraduate interns, as well as an interdisciplinary team of Fordham and University of Massachusetts-Amherst faculty, are accompanying twelve prominent linguistic anthropologist authors as they “transpose” previously published articles for a high school audience. Deliverables include an open educational resource hosted on the Center’s website, collaborative scholarly and popular publications, a scholarly roundtable including authors, organizing faculty, and two Fordham undergraduate interns.
The DLP showcases the power of the liberal arts to make social change, imperative at this polarizing time in our nation’s history. The DLP directly furthers Fordham’s mission of “Educating for Justice” and “Combatting Systemic Racism,” by erasing the boundaries between academic research and social justice activism. The DLP aims to make a difference for Fordham as an institution, for our undergraduates, for our faculty, and for our NYC high-students and teachers.
The Annual Margaret Mead Annual Lecture
The Annual Margaret Mead Annual Lecture Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead was professor and the chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970. She ended her long career at the American Museum of Natural History. Mead was a controversial anthropologist in her own time and remains so to this day. Nevertheless, she was an early public scholar who was committed to writing for a wide readership in order to have anthropology speak to ethical dilemmas and politics of her day. This orientation to the field resonates with Fordham’s current department, even as it engages with political issues differently than Mead.