December 2009 • Anthropology News

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Navigating NSFDeborah Winslow National Science Foundation

On May 10, 1950, President Truman signed NSF into existence. That bill (PL 507), employed the ambiguous rubric of “other sciences” to allow, without actively encouraging, the support of social science research. This reflected evident Congressional hesitancy:

If the impression becomes prevalent in the Congress that this legislation is to establish some sort of an organiza-tion in which there would be a lot of short-haired women and long-haired men messing into everybody’s personal affairs and lives, inquiring whether they love their wives or do not love them and so forth, you [the scientists] are not going to get your legislation. —Rep Clarence Brown (Ohio), 1946

Nevertheless, by 1957, NSF had estab-lished a Social Science Research Program. It supported four disciplinary areas: anthropology, economics, sociology, and history and philos-ophy of science. Now, half a century later, anthropologists have far wider opportunities at NSF, so much so that keeping up with the changing list can be daunting.

Standing ProgramsIt is useful to think of NSF funding oppor-tunities as being of two sorts: (1) ongoing or “standing” programs and (2) initiatives with shorter shelf lives, such as special programs and Dear Colleague Letters. For anthropolo-gists, the obviously relevant funding sources are the standing programs in cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, docu-menting endangered languages, and linguistics. However, I encourage you to look further, and here I offer some suggestions.

The Arctic Social Sciences Program (whose director, Anna Kerttula, is herself an anthropol-

ogist) and the Law and Social Sciences Program both regularly fund anthropologists and include anthropologists on their review panels. Here are other programs to investigate, with topical areas of recently successful proposals in paren-theses: Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences (environmental risk, hazard response, and commons management); Political Science (civic engagement, women electoral candidates); Sociology (immigration and the family); Science, Technology, and Society (medical migration,

reproductive technologies); Geography and Spatial Sciences (pastoralism, commons manage-ment); Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (teaching evolution); and the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.

Each standing program has its own website, which you access by putting the program name into the search box at www.nsf.gov. The sites describe the programs and provide links to program officers who can answer your questions as well as links to abstracts of recent awards.

Remember, you can submit a single proposal to multiple programs. When you select (from a drop-down menu) the program you wish to consider your proposal, you can return to select multiple programs. The first program chosen will manage the proposal and you should follow their target dates, deadlines and other special requirements, if any; the other programs will consider your proposal for their panels and reviewers. The outcome may be that two or more programs co-fund your research, or that only one (or none) will. However it turns out, co-review gives you more opportunities and feedback.

Special ProgramsIn addition to standing programs, there always are a variety of more evanescent funding oppor-tunities through such mechanisms as special programs and Dear Colleague Letters (DCLs). If the standing programs tend to reflect standard disciplinary divisions, these other opportunities usually emphasize interdisciplinary research.

For example, in October 2009 a new special program of potential interest to some anthro-pologists was announced: Disaster Resilience for Rural Communities (DRRC). It is a joint initiative of two NSF programs: Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences and Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events, in collabo-

ration with the US Department of Agriculture. DRRC has its own deadline (January 20, 2010) and review process. In contrast, a new DCL was published the month before to encourage proposals in Environment, Society and the Economy (ESE). This undertaking seeks to increase collaboration between geosciences and the social and behavioral sciences, not by establishing a new funding program, but by augmenting funding for a particular sort of interdisciplinary research within the standing

programs. If those programs recommend proposals for funding, the proposals may then be considered for co-funding from special set-aside funds.

Special programs and DCLs help NSF stay responsive to new research areas and national needs. Sometimes, they morph into standing programs, but more often they are discontinued after a few years. How can you stay up-to-date about what funding opportunities are available? Dear Colleague Letters are listed on the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences homepage (type SBE into the search box at www.nsf.gov). If you go to the “Active Funding Opportunities” page, you will find a link to subscribe to “E-mail Updates,” which will notify you when website content changes. As always, I am very happy to help.

Do you have a question about NSF? Feel free to contact NSF column editor Deborah Winslow at dwinslow@nsf.gov or 703/292-7315.

G A T E W AY T O N S F

To be included in a future Kudos column, submit your information and photo to Jona Pounds at jpounds@aaanet.org.

K U D O S

Lenore Manderson (Monash U) will begin her term as the new editor for the journal Medical Anthropology in January 2010. Manderson is a medical anthropologist, also known for her work in social history, sociology and public health.

Five anthropologists are among the new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: Jane I Guyer (Johns Hopkins U), Kristen Hawkes (U Utah), Maxine L Margolis (U Florida and Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia U), Karen B Strier (U Wisconsin-Madison), and James V Wertsch (McDonnell International Scholars Academy at Washington U).

To be included in a future Award Recipients column, submit your information and photo to Jona Pounds at jpounds@aaanet.org.

A W A R D R E C I P I E N T S

Kaori O’Connor  (U College  London) has received the 2009 Sophie Coe Prize in Food History. Named in memory of  the pioneering culinary anthropologist and food historian, this international prize is awarded annually for an original work of outstanding scholarship and is presented at the annual Oxford Symposium on Food. O’Connor’s winning paper is “The Hawai’ian Luau: Food as Tradition, Transgression, Transformation and Travel,” published in Food, Culture & Society. She is also the author of The English Breakfast: The Biography of a National Meal (2006).

Anthropology News • December 2009

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G R A N T R E C I P I E N T S

To be included in a future Grant Recipients column, submit your grant information and photo to Jona Pounds at jpounds@aaanet.org.

2009–10 SAR Resident ScholarsThe School for Advanced Research (SAR) welcomed five resident scholars to the campus in September to begin their nine-month tenures.

Sherry Farrell Racette (U Manitoba), recipient of the Anne Ray Fellowship, will spend her time at SAR mentoring First Nations museum interns at the Indian Arts Research Center and working on her study of a specific form of hide garment, the long painted coat. Racette divides her work on the long painted coats into three phases: visual analysis of the iconography of the painting and porcupine quillwork; examination of construc-tive elements such as pattern, media and sewing techniques; and reconstruction of histor-ical contexts and examination of the theoretical questions emerging from the evidence.

Christopher Teuton (U Denver) is SAR’s Katrin H Lamon Fellow. His research project, “Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club,” is both a collec-tion of Cherokee stories and a critical introduc-tion to Cherokee oral traditional discourse. The collaboration between Teuton and members of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club is a unique one. They will divide their collection of stories to reflect a commitment to both historic traditions of Cherokee storytelling and the lived contem-porary reality of Cherokee storytelling.

Charles L Briggs (UC Berkeley) has received a Weatherhead Fellowship. His book project is a documentation of an outbreak of bat-borne rabies that became an epidemic in a Venezuelan rainforest. Briggs and his wife, public health physician Clara Mantini-Briggs, stumbled upon the fatal disease in 2008. When they presented the state with their findings, in collaboration with indigenous leaders, they were discredited and criminalized, generating an international media spectacle.

Lynn M Morgan (Mount Holyoke C), a Weatherhead Fellow, will work on “Reproductive Governance in Latin America,” which analyzes the dramatic transformations affecting repro-ductive health and biopolitics across the hemi-sphere. The term “reproductive governance” refers to the mechanisms through which states, donors and NGOs use legislative controls and moral injunctions to produce, monitor and control reproductive practices. Morgan argues

BGC-AMNH Research Fellowship in Museum AnthropologyThe Bard Graduate Center and American Museum of Natural History offer a research fellowship in museum anthropology that provides support to a postdoctoral investigator to carry out a specific project over two years. Candidates with a research interest in the history of collecting for anthropology museums are especially encouraged to apply for the 2010–12 fellowship. The program wishes to promote scholarly investigation of how objects move from the sacred and particular to the market, and of the collecting process and the role of collectors. See http://anthro.amnh.org/anthropology/collections/InternshipGuide.shtml. Deadline: December 15, 2009.

Smithsonian Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology SIMA is offered by the department of anthro-pology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History with major funding from the Cultural Anthropology Program of NSF. The program seeks to promote broader and more effective use of museum collections in anthropological research by providing a supple-ment to university training for graduate students preparing for research careers in cultural anthro-pology who are interested in using museum collections as a data source. Students in related interdisciplinary programs will be considered. The curriculum includes both seminars and hands-on workshops. See http://anthropology.si.edu/summerinstitute in January for applica-tion requirements. Deadline: March 1, 2010.

NEH/CCHA Summer Institute on Alaska and Pacific Northwest Native CulturesThe NEH summer institute “Native Cultures of Western Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast” will be held in Alaska and British Columbia, June 13–July 12, 2010, for 24 faculty from community and four-year colleges and universities, spon-sored by the Community College Humanities Association. The program includes seminars with distinguished scholars and local Native guest speakers, and study visits to Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), Vancouver and Alert Bay. Participants will receive all lodging, internal travel and site-visit costs for scheduled activities. See http://ccha-assoc.org/nwcoastcultures10/index.html. Deadline: March 2, 2010.

You can still apply to some programs featured in previous columns, including the SSRC Eurasia Dissertation Support Fellowship (Dec 10), Wiener Laboratory Fellowships in Greece (Jan 14) and Landes Interdisciplinary Research Grants (ongoing). See www.aaanet.org/bulletinboard for details.

Funding Highlights

This column features a brief selection of support opportuni-ties from the AAA website. For a complete searchable list-ing, visit www.aaanet.org/bulletinboard. For students, addi-tional information is available at www.aaanet.org/profdev/fellowships and www.aaanet.org/profdev/fieldschools.

that reproductive health policies across Latin America have become the site of intense social and political mobilization and are increas-ingly framed as a moral contestation over the meaning of “human rights.”

James Trostle (Trinity C), another Weatherhead Fellow, plans to complete a book-length manu-script that builds on his prior writing about the history and content of “cultural epidemiology,” a set of methods and theoretical rationales for linking culture to human health at population scale. The book will analyze how infectious diseases are transmitted in a region undergoing rapid sociocultural and environmental change. It will examine the relevance of anthropology in discussions of population health and explore new approaches to describing how pathogens and people move across changing landscapes.

National Academy of Education Angela Reyes (CUNY Hunter C) received an NAEd/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral

Fellowship for her project, “Asian American Cram Schools: Linguistic and Ethnic Boundaries in Immigrant Educational Sites.” Focusing on the analysis of classroom interaction, this study explores how the educational experi-ences of students at an Asian

American cram school in New York City are informed by the identities and relationships produced through a particular cross-racial class-room dynamic. It examines how Asian American students and non-Asian teachers establish, sustain or dismantle various types of linguistic and ethnic boundaries between one another.

SAR Participants (l to r): Charles L Briggs, Lynn M Morgan, James Trostle, Sherry Farrell Racette, Christopher Teuton. Photo courtesy Jason S Ordaz