Four displaced ethnic groups populate Kyakitanga village in central Uganda. The community collaborates with small NGOs and local ministries to address conditions of “underdevelopment” and at a August 2012 workshop, participants expressed a priority of increasing community wisdom concerning “modern” food production. In a place-based subsistence community, such wisdom may be framed as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). This research explores Kyakitangan TEK as it already exists, aims to identify the local food sovereignty development model, and the implications of that model for social equity and environmental sustainability. These questions were explored through a participatory action research study involving local-led grand tours, object-and-walking probe interviews, alternative talking circles, and pile sorts. Findings indicate Kyakitangans possess tremendous TEK concerning foraging, agriculture, and pastoralism. This TEK is tied to ethnicity, as different foodways function as survival strategies specific to each group’s ancestral history and environment. Contrary to the 2012 workshop’s “modernist” atmosphere, Kyakitangans actually advocate a development model utilizing knowledge and resources already existent within the community. Implications pose questions about how ethnic groups collaborate moving forward since different foodways entail different land-shaping impacts and the livelihoods of each group are linked to each other. These dynamics are contextualized in the region’s political economic and cultural history, because the question of food insecurity is a by-product of peoples’ physical separation from native lands. This is exacerbated by structural violence and historical trauma of post-independence regimes and neoliberal globalization. Open-endedness in methodology allowed for the surfacing of important issues surrounding gender and reproductive control. Overall, the Kyakitangan context presents alternative models of development which privilege local knowledge. This type of model in broader development discourse is currently marginal, co-opted, or nonexistent.

Humans and other primates have been in contact for the entirety of our evolution and our relationships have been complex and ever changing. Many cultures hold a position of dominance, exploitation, or power over other primates. This often results in turning them into the "Other," which allows humans to use them as they see fit. This research examines the ways in which humans relate to and perceive other primates to understand how these relationships are associated with varied human uses of them. Expanding upon the current research in ethnoprimatology, which examines the human-other primate interface, my work studies the relationships and perceptions that develop in the context of captivity. I investigate these relationships in a biomedical research facility, a zoo, and an animal sanctuary. I use observation, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and discourse and artifact analysis to determine the human perception(s) of other primates. Qualitative data analysis will be used to discern and interpret similarities, differences, and patterns. What I expect to find from this study is that humans treat other primates as "Others" and assign them a lower status in order to justify their varied uses. This study will help us to understand our hierarchical relationships with other primates, how they allow for exploitation, entertainment, or conservation values, and what this teaches us about the construction of "human nature".

This is an ethnographical account about a topic of little exploration, indigenous martial arts of the Philippines. Filipino cultures are a plurality of multi-stratum genealogies that merge and occasionally, disrupt one another. Filipino martial arts (or Eskrima) are a collection of Indigenous martial arts that has existed in the Philippines since pre-contact to today. Over the centuries, these arts have distilled into various systems, each with their own styles and codes. Through the methods of ethnographic data collection such as direct participant observation, shadowing, interviewing, literature review, journaling and self-analysis, I will document the shared phenomenological experiences and present a grounded theory based on the sorted material. My qualitative focus will be on one particular Filipino martial art system, Balintawak Cuentada. My presentation will convey the significance of heritage practices along with analytical insight into embodied anti-colonial perspectives while asking; how do practitioners, while living our everyday lives as Americans of Filipino decent maintain this embodied perspective? My study population is a group of practitioners dedicated to the Balintawak Cuentada system. Nearly all of the participants of this research, including myself, began our training because we wanted to connect to our ancestry in a way that could pragmatically fit into our modern lives. In our quest to reconnect with our heritage we have connected with each other. The preliminary results of this ethnography will have implications of significance to other social sciences concerned with place-making, identity, postcolonialism, embodiment, cultural memory, health and politics of the body including gender norms and performances as well as asking the philosophical questions of what are movements of the body without meaning, and what is a community without traditions. My expectation for this research is to document an example of deepening an understanding of the self through the physical engagement of ancestral habitus and ceremony.