Truman’s Sociology Majors came in first out of 13 teams competing at the Trivia Night Competition held at the Annual Midwest Sociological Society Meeting this past weekend in Minneapolis, MN. (3/29th to 4/1st).  Pictured front row from the left to right is Danielle Clemons, Zachary Palmer,  and Tasheka Graves.  The second row is two sociology graduate students from Illinois and Florida, Professor Elaine McDuff (Truman) and Professor Ann Eisenbers (SUNY-Geneseo).  Congratulations!

This past Saturday,
March 17th SOAN265 Structured Inequalities
students Shelby Hewerdine, Aaron Albrecht, Tasheka Graves, Nanda
Christanto, and Morgan Simpson help cook a meal at Hope’s Kitchen as part of their required service learning for the class.  Hope’s Kitchen is a non-profit organization that prepares  free meals for over 200 Kirksville residents.

Emily Love, Sociology, has been inducted into the 2011–2012 edition
of the Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges.  She is pictured receiving her certicate from Interim Provost, Richard Coughlin.   The  award is based on  academics, character, leadership, and service to the campus and community.  Congratulations Emily for your contributions!

Interviews start in late January – the Student Interview Project provides hands on research oppor-tunities for students each year and helps the University learn about issues affecting our students.

Dr. Elaine McDuff, Associate Professor of Sociology, has been awarded a sabbatical for the 2012-13 academic year in order to initiate a new research project exploring emerging patterns associated with the feminization of migration in southern Africa. The project is expected to provide some student research opportunities and to enrich many of the courses Dr. McDuff teaches.

Truman Sociology/Anthropology and History major, Rudy Cesaretti, presented a poster at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Montreal, Canada last week. The poster focuses on visual interpretation of yearbook photos from the decades surrounding school consolidation in Schuyler and Putnam counties. This research supplements significant qualitative field work (TruScholars project summer 2011) and quantitative analysis Rudy is doing to learn more about the changing role of schools in community identity formation in rural northeast Missouri. He travelled to the AAA meeting with Dr. Amber Johnson, who also presented a paper on “Using Binford’s Frames of Reference to Model Mobility” in a session focused on both ethnographic and archaeological studies of mobility at multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Students for Social Change is concentrating our annual Social Justice week on disability awareness this week (October 31-November 3rd). We will be holding various events to facilitate a greater understanding of disabilities in America as well as abroad. Our aim is to bring together individuals and issues to allow students and faculty to explore disability with the hopes of normalizing disabilities. We will provide a chance for students to interact with disabilities through seeing the issue through a global and local lens with the goal of offering the chance for all of us to gain a fraction of insight into issues that surround it with the intention of being able to better understand disability as well as ourselves.

SOAN Majors Angela Page and Kiera Hulsey were sworn in this morning by Judge Steele to volunteer as Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) interns this year

A group of six Sociology/Anthropology majors and one Communications major created a documentary in the Fall of 2008 of the logic of the career of Lewis Binford for their capstone project.  Dr. Binford has had a global impact in anthropological archeology.  “The Binford Project: Logic of a Life’s Work”  DVD  is 80 minutes long and available. Proceeds from the fundraiser will be used to support student initiated projects in the Department of Society and Environment.