The SfAA is an organization of anthropologists dedicated to the application of anthropological research to solving human problems. Within the SfAA, there are seven standing committees, one of which is the Nominations and Elections Committee. The Nominations and Elections Committee reviews potential candidates for elective offices within the SfAA, informs them about the duties and obligations required by the offices, and distributes information about the potential candidates to society members during the election process.

Every year, two new members are elected by the members of the SfAA to serve on the Nominations and Elections Committee for a two-year term. There are only four members of the Nominations and Elections Committee at one time. Garcia joined the three other anthropologists—Sherylyn Briller, Kathleen DeWalt, and Kerry Feldman—who currently make up the Nominations and Elections Committee at the 73rd annual meeting in Denver, which took place Thursday, March 21, 2013.

Papakie, a 1993 alumna of IUP and a lieutenant colonel in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, will use her experience in the military to assist in developing and assessing family-based interventions for veterans’ readjustment to civilian life. The development of these interventions is part of MARTI’s Veterans Research Initiative, spearheaded by MARTI research associate Christian Vacarro.

Papakie is also very active in veteran issues on campus and serves on the Veterans Outreach Group and co-advises the Veterans Organization.

Vaccaro and Belakova’s article is based on recent studies which document the increased role of friendship between marijuana users and retailers in areas with strict drug policies. In the article, Vaccaro and Belakova explore the idea of friendship in this specific drug culture using data from semi-structured interviews with 44 marijuana users and retailers.

According to the data, many participants defined friendship in this drug culture by expressing the expectation that marijuana would be shared among friends and that, at some point, this would be reciprocated. The definitions also included introductions to marijuana dealers, and these marijuana dealers were referred to as “friends” as well. Vaccaro and Belakova point out in the article that the expectations of these friendships serve to sustain the distribution chain as well as provide protection for marijuana users.

The article was published February 11, 2013, and can be found at “A Friend with Weed is a Friend Indeed.”

The Prevention Research Center is a center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. It advances Prevention Science, or “the study of the mechanisms by which adverse health outcomes may be prevented by early intervention, education, environmental change, and policy change.”

Garcia’s talk, “Enfermos y Terapia: Substance Abuse Treatments among Transnational Mexican Migrants,” centered on the migrants’ use of traditional Alcoholics Anonymous groups and other AA-based groups, such as 24-hour groups—or anexos, as they are known in Mexico—to treat their alcohol and drug abuse. The lack of local and affordable treatments at the migrants’ U.S. worksites and Mexican homeland communities are the major reasons for using AA treatments over others. These treatments, he argues, are ideal for transnational populations. They are affordable, draw on core cultural and religious beliefs, and can easily be initiated in one country and continued in another.

From September 2012 until September 2013, Ünlü will serve as a visiting scholar at IUP, developing his dissertation with the assistance of Alex Heckert, the associate director of MARTI and a renowned international expert on the concept of positive deviance. Ünlü will be examining Heckert’s published journal articles and other literature on positive deviance and will be meeting with him throughout the year to discuss his dissertation progress.

Ünlü has previously published research on a variety of subjects, including strategic planning, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, and the impact of human resources practices. This published research has appeared in a variety of Turkish academic journals and has been presented at various international conferences, including the 2012 International Academy of Management and Business Conference.

Learn more about Onur Ünlü.

Garcia was the chair of the session “Studying Farmworkers and their Persistence: Long-Term Ethnography, New and Old Communities, and New Insights.” In this session, Garcia presented his paper, “The Origins and Transformation of Drug Use among Transnational Mexican Farmworkers in Pennsylvania and Guanajuato, Mexico.”

The paper addressed the factors that lead to drug use among transnational migrants both in Guanajuato, Mexico, and in the United States. Some of the factors included family history of drug use, the witnessing of drug use, and traumatic experiences crossing the United States-Mexico Border. The paper focused on how these influences were similar and different and how they affected each other. It also featured information on how transnational farmworkers’ drug use transforms according to their location.

Information for Garcia’s presentation was gathered through his five-year transnational ethnographic study on migrant farmworkers in parts of Guanajuato, Mexico, and southeastern Pennsylvania.

For the past two years, Brannon has been a speaker at the MARTI Summer School on subjects involving social media, like protecting youth online, cyber addiction, and online bullying. In his new position, he will work with Crystal Deemer, John Anderson, Victor Garcia, Alex Heckert, and Christian Vaccaro to sustain existing MARTI programs. He, along with his colleagues, will also establish new outreach and training initiatives.

Brannon continues to teach both at IUP and Westmoreland County Community College and to work on his doctoral studies in Administration and Leadership.

For more information on Ray Brannon, please see his MARTI personnel webpage.

The book was written by Edward Gondolf, ex-associate director of Research for MARTI and retired IUP faculty member. In April 2012, Gondolf’s work on batterer programs was published by Northeastern University Press. Gondolf is one of the leading experts in the world on batterers and batterer intervention programs.

In his book, he discusses the flaws of experimental program evaluations, “evidence-based practice,” and “new psychology,” while promoting a broader approach for batterer intervention and advocating better implementation of the basic principles established in the criminal justice field. Gondolf concludes from his research that many batterer programs need more documentation of their efficiency and effectiveness. The lack of evaluation prevents these programs from being modified to improve and expand them in order to reach more individuals.

The panel at the 2012 American Society of Criminology (ASC) was an “Author Meets Critics” session, at which Heckert served as chair. Heckert, Larry Bennett (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Joanne Belknap (University of Colorado–Boulder), served as critics to Gondolf’s work.

Belknap is president-elect of the ASC. The conference was held in Chicago, Illinois, from November 14–17, 2013.

The book is based on a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education U.S. Department of Education project, “An Ethnographic/Social Science/Community-Based Model to Recruit and Retain Hispanics.” Garcia participated in this project for five years (1999–2004) and was on staff at UT Dallas as a research scientist during this time. The project was one of the first of its kind in the country and, over the years, has generated much interest.

Barriers Faced by Hispanic Students Transferring from Community Colleges to University: An Ethnographic Approach is a case study, and some of the results and observations are generalizable to other community college systems outside of the Dallas County Community College District, a major project site in conjunction with UT Dallas.

Garcia and Alexander reviewed the extant literature on the barriers to transfer for Latino community college students and took pains to frame their observations within the literature. Among the identified and studied barriers were the lack of financial resources, gendered cultural views of education in the Latino community, and institutional obstacles. Garcia and Alexander have compelling field observations on an understudied but critically important topic for young Latinos. They provide a much better understanding of the thorny problem of Hispanic transfer from community colleges to the university.

Findings related to this project were also published in the Journal of Hispanic Education, Teaching Anthropology: Publication of the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges, and the Community College Enterprise: A Journal of Research and Practice.

Garcia presented “Enumerating Hispanic Immigrants: Observations from Census Studies and Recommendations for an Accurate Count” at the H2R 2012: International Conference on Methods for Surveying and Enumerating Hard-to-Reach Populations. The conference was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from October 31 to November 3, 2012.

The paper addressed the many challenges in accurately counting Latino immigrants who are a hard-to-reach and a hard-to-study population. Latino immigrants make up nearly 40 percent of the total Latino population, and all indicators are that this population will continue to increase over the next two decades. The enumeration challenges were identified through his participation in four U.S. Census Bureau sponsored ethnographic studies conducted over the last 20 years. He focuses on the findings from his last census study, “the Nonresponse Follow up Census 2010 Observations of Hispanics and Others in the Greater Dallas Area”, conducted in May 2010. Among the many barriers identified in this study were a distrust of the U.S. federal government, the lack of bilingual and bicultural enumerators, unfamiliarity with the decennial census process, and issues of language, including illiteracy. If future censuses are to be successful with this immigrant population, Garcia argues, they must include enumeration strategies aimed at mitigating these and other barriers. He concludes his paper with a number of recommendations.

Garcia also presented “The Drug Trade and Transnational Migration: The Emergence of a New Drug Culture and Economy” in a rural development open session at the 13th World Congress of Rural Sociology, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in August 2012.

He was also the organizer and chair of the above session, comprised of researchers from different countries of Latin America.

The paper is based on his recently completed five-year National Institute on Drug Abuse research project, conducted in both southeastern Pennsylvania and southern Guanajuato, Mexico.

He will add to MARTI’s research program his nationally-recognized expertise in the areas of hazards and responses to natural catastrophes.

Their objectives at the conference were to give IUP additional visibility in southeastern Pennsylvania, an area with a rapidly growing minority population, mainly Latinos, and to recruit students to IUP. They accomplished this ambitious task by staffing an IUP information/recruitment table, offering a workshop on Latinos and education, and giving a dance performance at the conference’s talent show.

The workshop, titled “The Dream Act: What You Should Know,” was delivered by Garcia and two Caring about Latino Student Achievement (CALSA) students, Diana Gomez-Franco (Business) and Alyssa Ortega (Anthropology). The dance group Ritmo Latino, under the leadership of La Doña Sharlyne Rios, delivered an impressive 10-minute dance routine organized around a fusion of tango (Argentina), bachata (Caribbean), salsa (Caribbean-Colombian), and hip-hop (East Coast-South Florida). The Ritmo Latino dancers were Sharlyne Rios (International Business), Alaya Scott (Fashion Merchandise), Rebecca Canales (English Education), Jose Aponte (Criminology), Daniel Cerritos (Hospitality Management), and Ivan Nuñez (Spanish for International Trade and Economics). The IUP students came in at second place in the contest, being edged out by Esperanza Academy Charter School, located in Philadelphia.

For the last 11 years, the annual Kennett High School Multicultural and Diversity Awareness Conference has attracted hundreds of students—minorities and non-minorities—from nearby school districts, among them York, Allentown, Philadelphia, Norristown, and Coatesville. This year, IUP was the only university to participate. In the past, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, and West Chester University have been present with faculty presenters and recruiters. The mission of this increasingly popular conference is to bring many high school and college students, parents, school personnel, and other professionals together to discuss important issues and topics related to the cultural and diversity differences and similarities that exist in our society today. The conference is organized around guest speakers, a number of workshops, and a talent show at the end of the day. Funding for these activities is from the Kennett Consolidated School District and community donations.

Garcia is well familiar with the region and, together with CALSA students and (in the past) LaSO students, has previously participated in the conference. Since 1993, he has conducted a number of research projects in local communities that address the concerns and needs of the growing Mexican immigrant and migrant populations. Garcia, in close coordination with Shawn Jones and other staff at the IUP Admissions Office, also helps to recruit Latino and other students from the local high schools to IUP, including from Kennett High School.

IUP student participation at the conference was made possible with funds and resources from the Dean’s Office in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Office of Admissions, the Office of Vice President for Enrollment and Management, and the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute.The support from these offices is greatly appreciated.

Garcia's paper, based on research and consultant work conducted for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Bureau of the Census, examined the many contributions that Latino farmers, many of whom are immigrants, make to food security and the U.S. economy.

The conference, titled "Siglo XXI: Forging the Future of Latinos in a Time of Crisis," convened scholars and researchers from around the country to discuss current research on Latino education, health, politics, civic engagement, labor and economics, immigration, the arts, culture, and society.

Garcia is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute.

The paper addresses an innovative ethnographic field school, Casa Ángel Palerm, established in one of the largest Latino communities in the country in Dallas, Texas, to recruit and retain Latino students at the university. Casa Ángel Palerm was funded from 1999–2004 by the U.S. Department of Education’s FIPSE Program and made a significant contribution to transferring successfully Latino students in the Dallas County Community College District to universities in and around the Dallas area. Specifically, the paper describes the field school and the pedagogy employed in teaching ethnography to Latino students and in familiarizing them with educational issues in their community. It also discusses the intellectual tradition behind the field school, the Ángel Palerm School of Anthropology in Mexico, which emphasizes in situ research using a field school rooted in community to train students and solve community problems.

The use of ethnographic field schools, ethnography, and cultural studies to increase the number of Latino students at the university has been published in articles by Garcia and his colleagues, as listed on the MARTI website. A related book manuscript, New Challenges for Community Colleges: Retention and the Transfer of Latino Students to the University, by Garcia and Bobby C. Alexander, a colleague at the University of Texas at Dallas, is under publication consideration by the Edwin Mellen Press and in its final phase of external review.

Dr. Vaccaro, the lead researcher, with the assistance of Drs. Alex Heckert (MARTI/Sociology), Jay Mills (Psychology), and Victor Garcia (MARTI/Anthropology), has developed a major MARTI research initiative, “Developing and Assessing Family Based Interventions for Young Veterans’ Readjustment to Civilian Life.”

Watch the MARTI website for updates as they become available.

The regular registration fee of $325 will run from May 28 through June 24, 2011.

Watch the MARTI website for updates as they become available.

Watch the MARTI website for updates as they become available.

If you want to know more about helping children of all ages and especially high-risk youth, MARTI’s annual Summer School is for you. This year’s school is designed to meet the ever-changing needs of today’s youth and families. Presentations will include the latest information on treatment for young children, improving school-based programs, working with adolescents, sexual abuse intervention, improving cultural competency, adult recovery strategies, anger and violence, building resiliency in children, and many other exciting topics. Year after year, MARTI has provided the latest techniques for working with children, excellent presenters, and special sections for educators and clinicians, all at a low cost.

Visit the MARTI Summer School website for more details.