May 10, 2024 Congratulations to University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Department of Anthropology 2024 Student Award winners Jackson Plemmons, Rosemary Gay, Julio Villa-Palomino, Anusha Hariharan, and Ann Suk!
The Honigmann Undergraduate Honors Thesis Award – Jackson Plemmons
The committee was impressed by your work with Samburu pastoralist children and their daily lives in northern Kenya. Your nominators described your thesis as remarkably well-written and sophisticated in its analysis. We appreciated the dedication and resilience with which you conducted complex quantitative data, have presented aspects of your work at national and international meetings, and refined your previous analyses in your honors thesis.
The Honigmann Graduate Prize in Sociocultural Anthropology – Rosemary Gay
The committee was impressed by your innovative research on genetic, mechanical, and technological innovations for peanut production across US-Brazil collaborations and we are excited for the contributions this will offer to sociocultural anthropology more broadly. Your nominators, Caela and Angela, also spoke of your vital efforts toward building community for fellow graduate students, faculty, and community collaborators within and beyond the department, including as SAS Co-Chair and as Coordinator for the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research. We commend you for your continuing contributions to the discipline, the department, the university, and well beyond.
The Manning Dissertation Award – (joint award) Julio Villa-Palomino and Anusha Hariharan
Julio – The committee was impressed by your well-crafted dissertation and its resounding theoretical and methodological contributions within and well beyond anthropology. Your work on the de-institutionalization of psychiatric care in Carabayllo, Peru is both ethnographically innovative and theoretically sophisticated, offering new ways to track and understand the shape-shifting nature of psychiatric power at a time of “community mental health.” The committee recognizes your work’s broader implications for productively informing mental health care reform about local dimensions of de-institutionalization that are typically invisibilized in global advocacy. We applaud you for this tremendous work and look forward to seeing its many manifestations in the world as you move forward.
Anusha – The committee was impressed by your well-crafted dissertation and its resounding theoretical and methodological contributions within and well beyond anthropology. The ethnographic care with which you engage feminist activism in Tamil Nadu and your innovative study of the vital role of friendship and intimacy to political horizons offer significant interventions at a time when the anthropological study of social movements remains ever critical. We applaud you for this tremendous work and look forward to seeing its many manifestations in the world as you move forward.
The Polgar Award for Applied Anthropology – Ann Suk
The committee was impressed by your collaborations with the Refugee Community Partnership and your efforts to work closely with RCP to determine how research can contribute meaningfully to the organization’s work. We applaud you for your deep commitment to working alongside communities to identify their health and resource needs in North Carolina, as well as your dedicated efforts on UNC’s campus to help identify health and resource needs impacting student well-being during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope that this award emphasizes the salience of your research beyond academia and spurs you to continue to conduct engaged, participatory and applied research in the future.