Anthropology Archives - Page 3 of 3

Prof. Ricca Slone has been teaching graduate public policy courses in Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies for the past 12 years. Most recently, she taught an online course on Congressional procedure in Fall 2023. Before teaching at Northwestern University, Prof. Slone worked on water-supply issues for three years at the Environmental Law & Policy Center, a research and advocacy organization based in Chicago which works in several U.S. Midwestern states. From 1997 to 2005, Prof. Slone served four terms as a state representative in the Illinois House of Representatives, representing the 92nd district in central Illinois. She also chaired the Higher Education Appropriations Committee and was the vice chair of the Energy & Environment Committee.

As a senior scholar near the end of her working years, Prof. Slone hopes to rejuvenate the Sun Oven project by relaunching the assembling and marketing of solar ovens from a new location in Karnataka so that they can help women in South India who cook over wood fires.

Prof. Slone’s Fulbright-Nehru project is identifying strategies to overcome Indian cultural challenges to adopting renewable technologies. The framework for analysis is Nordgren and Schonthal’s friction theory (The Human Element, 2022). The project’s focus is on adoption of clean solar cooking by rural Indian women who otherwise cook over smoky fires, which is time consuming and causes respiratory diseases and deforestation. The research is a case study comparing the relative ease of adoption of the following technologies: wind turbines for energy; electric tuk-tuks for mobility; and solar ovens for cooking. Prof. Slone’s hypothesis is that cooking will encounter the most cultural resistance.

Dr. Urmila Mohan is a public anthropologist of material culture and studies how sociocultural values are circulated through cloth, bodily practices, and belief. She earned a PhD in anthropology from University College London, an MFA in studio arts from Pennsylvania State University, a BA (hons) in anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington, and a BFA in communication design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

Dr. Mohan’s research includes an ethnography of devotees who make garments for their deities and also wear specific clothing; this was published as Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism. She also undertook a curatorial study of Balinese ritual textiles at the American Museum of Natural History, resulting in an exhibition and catalogue, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles. Besides, she is the author of the monograph, Masking in Pandemic U.S..

Dr. Mohan has written extensively on material practices and theorizes them in her edited volume, The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices. Earlier, she had co-edited The Material Subject: Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion and a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture titled “The Bodily and Material Cultures of Religious Subjectivation”.

As part of her commitment to interdisciplinarity, Dr. Mohan founded the digital, open-access publication, The Jugaad Project. She is also a member of several global working groups, including the Matière à Penser network for embodiment studies.

Dr. Mohan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an ethnographic study of weavers of silk ikat (resist-dyed) textiles in Gujarat, India. She is contextualizing ikat handloom innovation as a process of socio-technical ‘enchantment’ that engages weavers, traders, and consumers. She is also connecting woven cloths’ agency with changing socioeconomic and spiritual practices via weavers’ technical, bodily, and material adaptations. Her research adds to studies of how artisanal communities and heritage are shaped in India; it is doing so by analyzing shifts in practices/meanings due to migration, the influence of kinship on technology adoption and craft expansion, changing roles of women in weaving families, and the effects of the geographical indications patenting system.