The Journal
We are a journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and are an editor reviewed publication. We publish work that is based on the mission of highlighting the contributions of applied anthropologists, and exploring how and where anthropology is useful in the world. We are currently focused on highlighting global social justice and publishing work that centers authors from historically oppressed and underrepresented groups.
Our journal is different than many other academic journals because it is geared toward publishing and reaching a wide audience within and beyond academia. We publish shorter articles with fewer citations from authors with different backgrounds. We also just started a creative section which will include creative work form anthropologists and our collaborators that relate to our work in the field.
See below and visit the SfAA web site for more information on what we publish. We would like to hear from you!
Send inquiries, comments, and submissions to practicinganthropology@gmail.com
Editor-in-Chief
Lisa J. Hardy
Dr. Hardy is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Social Science Community Engagement Lab, and Founder and Lead of Octopus Ethnographic, LLC. Dr. Hardy served as PI of research Health Resilience among American Indians in Arizona funded by the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities and is Co-PI of a Home Health Assessment grant with Red Feather Development Group under the umbrella of the Center for American Indian Resilience (CAIR) P20 Exploratory Center for Excellence at Northern Arizona University. She holds a certificate in Media & Medicine from the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University Medical School, PhD from Temple University, and MA degrees from Temple and Northern Arizona University.
Dr. Hardy has trained community researchers and participants in graduate courses and in community settings at Native Americans for Community Action (NACA), the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association, Hopi Health and Human Services, and at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Hardy’s work includes wellness and health for oppressed and historically underrepresented groups. She has conducted research and made policy recommendations for the Center for Disease Control, the Kresge Foundation’s Safety Net Enhancement Initiative and other large and small funding agencies.
In addition to training community partners on research and assessment Dr. Hardy’s work focuses on the practical applicability and policy implications of the outcomes of community-engaged practice. She has published her work on community mapping strategies, best practices for community-engaged research, medical anthropologists working in partnership with healthcare professionals, and ethical guidelines for the protection of data in large center grants involving tribes.
Recently she has been shifting her focus to poetry and creative writing.
Read the announcement here. Read more about Dr. Hardy’s work here.
Editorial Assistant
Caroline Mende
Caroline Mende is completing her first year as a master’s student with Northern Arizona University’s Anthropology Department. She has a BA in Anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Caroline developed an interest in public health while working with the Chef Ann Foundation and is interested in medical anthropology, food access, and women’s reproductive health.
Editorial team
Sandhya Ganapathy
Dr. Ganapathy is a member of the Global Studies department at St. Lawrence University, where she teaches about a range of topics including environmental movements, health justice and fashion. Her first body of scholarship examines contestations over oil development and conservation on iconic Alaskan landscapes. She considers both the ways Indigenous communities contend with an ever expanding global thirst for oil and the nature of their alliances with environmental NGOs. More recently, she has begun work on a new project exploring the relationship between settler colonialism and the medicalization of birth in Indigenous North American communities, and the consequences this has on health, sovereignty and social reproduction. She is also particularly interested in pedagogy, and exploring the challenges and possibilities of teaching anthropology in inter-disciplinary and non-anthropological environments.
Sharon Moses
Dr. Moses is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and received her Ph.D. in Anthropology/Archaeology emphasis, from Cornell University where she was a National Science Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow as well as the recipient of the Cornell SAGE Full Ride Fellowship. Her dissertation work was based upon Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey’s beneath floor child and adult burials, associated rituals, and use of children in the creation of sacred spaces. Her work was conducted under the direction of Prof. Nerissa Russell (Cornell University) and Prof. Ian Hodder (Stanford University), Director of the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Project.
Dr. Moses is the creator and Coordinator of the interdisciplinary Social Science Forensic minor in the Department of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, incorporating studies in Criminology and Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Women and Gender Studies to name a few. Dr. Moses has assisted law enforcement as a consultant and as a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist in criminal cases and in missing-persons body recovery cases. She is a member of FAR (Forensic Archaeology Recovery), a non-profit organization that seeks to address humanitarian concerns and body recoveries of mass fatality, missing persons, criminal and civil rights cases in the United States and around the globe. Dr. Moses is also a certified composite sketch/forensic artist and teaches forensic art courses at NAU. She offers her services in forensic facial reconstructions for missing or unidentified persons to law enforcement agencies in Arizona. Most recently, Dr. Moses has worked on facial reconstructions for the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and Rutgers-Camden for an historical archaeological project involving recovered human remains dating from 18th-19th century epidemics that swept through early Philadelphia.
Dr. Moses is a registered professional archaeologist; her current historical archaeology research project is based at the former rice plantation located in South Carolina. She is excavating the site’s enslaved quarter and documenting evidence for African and Native American practices of folk magic, ritual, and sacred objects buried among the cabin sites. Moses is interested in the intersection of these activities with childhood, gender, and identity formation.
Gwen Saul
Dr. Saul holding “Cactus Basket” (2017) by Ann Mitchell, Akwesasne Kanien’kehaka
Dr. Gwen Saul is Curator of Ethnography at the New York State Museum (NYSM). She oversees the care and representation of the Ethnology Collection which includes material culture representative of the histories of Indigenous peoples in what is now New York State and the collecting initiatives of the Parker family (Tonawanda Seneca) and Lewis Henry Morgan in the mid-1800s. She works with Haudenosaunee and Algonquian artists and community members to expand the NYSM Contemporary Native American Art Collection, and is currently focusing her efforts on the renewal of the NYSM Contemporary Native Art gallery to include new acquisitions of contemporary Native American art.
Link to: http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/research-collections/ethnography/dr-gwendolyn-saul
Heather Fernandez
Heather Fernandez is a socio-cultural anthropologist currently living and working in Denver, CO. She is a graduate of the master’s program at Northern Arizona University. In the past she has researched the use of sustainable transportation in urban settings. Her current research interests focus on decision making, perception, formation of daily life patterns, and customer/user experience.
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos is a medical anthropologist and public scholar. She writes about undocumented health access, health and racial justice, trauma, and the everyday politics of survival & resistance. Learn more about her work on her website at: elizafarfansantos.com.
Bonnie Marquez
Bonnie Marquez is a medical anthropologist. She is currently the project coordinator for the Rapid Assessment of Immediate and Potential Long-term Implications of Changing Telehealth Regulations for Substance Use Treatment in the Context of COVID-19 with the Center for Health Equity Research. Her research interests include health equity, substance use disorder, and women’s reproductive health.
Clara Beccaro
Clara Beccaro is PhD student in anthropology at the New School for Social Research, originally from France but currently a white settler in Manahata, Lenapehoking. Clara’s research focuses on bodily integrity and risk-taking in contemporary France, examined through the lived reality of becoming disabled and becoming transgender. Drawing from disability and transness as embodiments, Clara’s research explores the material practices and performances used to articulate individual bodily experiences at the level of the collective. Clara’s ethnographic practice is grounded in visual anthropology, multimodal engagement, and creative pedagogies. On the side, Clara is a ceramicist and a film-maker.
Joyce Rivera-Gonzalez
I am an Anthropology doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame and incoming Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Wellesley College. I am interested in questions of youth, crisis, disaster, precarity, sovereignty, and wellbeing. My dissertation work explores the ways in which Puerto Rican youth imagine individual and collective futures as they navigate an elusive and ever-present “Puerto Rican crisis,” especially after Hurricanes Irma and María. I am interested in how young adults conceptualize disaster and crisis in a continuously uncertain and precarious socio-political and economic landscape. Additionally, I am a Contributing Editor of the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s AnthroPod. I am also the co-chair of the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Risk and Disaster Topical Interest Group (TIG), as well as a member of the Culture and Disaster Action Network (CADAN).
Practicing Anthropology 