Bumper year for social anthropology

As 2004 draws to a close, the Department of Social Anthropology can look back with glee on a year that can best be described as a bumper one.

Here Monday Paper bruits about the department's achievements.

• Dr Susan Levine has been nominated an adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University for three months where she will be participating in the development of a course on film and sexuality. The nomination follows her groundbreaking work on STEPS, a project that used film screenings and facilitated audience discussions to promote HIV prevention throughout southern Africa. Levine has also been allocated land by the Clanwilliam Municipality for a permaculture project that promotes sustainable development through participatory research with members of impoverished local communities in organic farming methods.
• Associate Professor Fiona Ross's book, Bearing Witness, was awarded the UCT Meritorious Book Award. Ross was also a plenary speaker at the biennial conference of the Association of European Social Anthropologists in Vienna in September. Together with Associate Professor Mugsy Spiegel, Ross is taking a leading role in reframing the code of research ethics for anthropologists and ethnographic researchers in southern Africa. Spiegel has been invited by the president of the Wenner Gren Foundation to present a paper in research ethics at a special session of the forthcoming American Anthropological Association.
• In June 2004 Dr Lesley Fordred-Green was chosen as one of seven (out of 300 applicants) for a Rockefeller Fellowship in retheorising cultural heritage. She will spend five months at the Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC after which she will head for the W E B du Bois Institute at Harvard as one of the recipients of the 2005 UCT-Harvard Mandela Fellowship. During 2004, Fordred-Green also edited the forthcoming issue of the journal of Anthropology Southern Africa which published, among others, five papers from the department that emanated from a UCT Stimulation of Research Grant on social mapping and new media.
• Dr Owen Sichone and a multidisciplinary team of researchers, put together by engineering and the built environment's Dr Neil Armitage, were awarded a research grant by the Water Research Commission to conduct a study on the strategic management of greywater in non-sewered areas of South Africa. Together with Dr Sally Frankental, Sichone is co-authoring a book on ethnicity in contemporary South Africa. Frankental was also one of 10 invitees to an International Round Table discussion on Jewish intermarriage and she continues to publish on the subject of identity.
• Earlier this year former honours student Kerryn Greenberg won a prestigious fellowship to Bard College in the United States to study museum curatorship, and honours graduate Beth Mills won the Harry Crossley prize for the best honours essay in the humanities faculty.