Transcript

[00:00] [AnthroPod theme music, All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

Sharon Jacobs [SJ] [00:10]: Tampa Bay, Florida. You might know it as a site of business conferences, rowdy spring breaks, or baseball training grounds. But it’s also facing statewide rising fascism and oppressive laws targeting historically marginalized minorities, especially members of Florida’s Black and trans communities.

[00:30] That last point has weighed heavy on the minds of many anthropologists, as we near the start of the 2024 American Anthropological Association (or AAA) annual meeting, which is set for November 20–23 at the Tampa Convention Center. At last year’s meeting, in Toronto, members of the AnthroBoycott collective called for the AAA to cancel the planned conference in Tampa. They were responding to laws touted by Florida governor Ron de Santis with nicknames like “Don’t say gay” and “Stop WOKE” that have increased censorship in Florida schools and universities—as well as racially motivated restrictions on voting rights in the state, and bans on gender affirming care and drag. In fact, travel warnings for the state of Florida have been issued by the NAACP [the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], Equality Florida, Human Rights Campaign, Florida Immigrant Coalition, League of United Latin American Citizens, and Florida National Organization for Women. And de Santis has issued his own kind of warnings for academics:

[01:33] 'If Marxist Professors Are Leaving The State Of Florida, That Is Not A Bad Thing!': DeSantis by Forbes Breaking News

Ron de Santis [01:33]: If Marxist professors are leaving the state of Florida, that is not a bad thing for the state of Florida, that is a good thing for the state of Florida.

SJ [01:41]: So, what do we do about the Tampa annual meeting? In a December 2023 article for PoLAR (the Journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology), SJ Dillon—a PhD candidate at Emory University in the neighboring state of Georgia—argued that, given the AAA’s decision to go ahead with the meeting in Florida despite the calls to cancel it, anthropologists ought to find ways to reimagine the academic conference and act in solidarity with locals—standing together in opposition to Florida’s leading politicians. They write: “This would not address the utter ethical and political failure it is to hold the conference in Tampa Bay (a failure that is not the fault of the current Executive Board at all), but could mitigate some of the harm, or at least materially support communities being impacted by that legislation.”

Among their suggestions, Dillon pointed to the need to partner with on-the-ground activists and artists in the Tampa area, especially those from communities most impacted by Florida’s oppressive politics.

[02:45] That’s something Tampa Bay anthropologists have been tackling for a long time. The University of South Florida’s anthropology department is broadly committed to practical societal applications and community-based research. Its faculty, students, and alumni have been involved in a number of local initiatives—like the Tampa Soulwalk, a project by the City of Tampa. The Soulwalk is an arts and heritage trail that focuses on the city’s Black history. Here’s one USF alum speaking from along the route of the Soulwalk:

Fred Hearns [03:18]: Hello, my name is Fred Hearns, Black history curator at the Tampa Bay History Center. And I’m here at the corner of Columbus Drive and Central Avenue, in Tampa Heights, at the former campground for the Buffalo soldiers. The Buffalo soldiers were here in the spring of…

SJ [03:36]: In this episode of AnthroPod, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the work that Tampa Bay anthropologists have been doing alongside marginalized local communities. First, we’ll visit the African American Burial Grounds Project, where Professor Antoinette Jackson supports the Black Tampa Bay communities who are reckoning today with the legacy of their ancestors’ cemeteries being erased and built over by municipal and private developers. Secondly, with Professor Rebecca Zarger, we’ll hear what trees mean for residents of a racially and economically unequal city on the front lines of climate change and facing rising temperatures, sea levels, and hurricanes—like the recent storms Helene and Milton. Thirdly, anthropologist and Executive Director Alayne Unterberger will tell us about the Florida Institute for Community Studies, which supports the low English proficiency communities targeted by anti-immigration laws and government restrictions tightening their ability to provide services.

I’m Sharon Jacobs, one of the Contributing Editors of AnthroPod, and you’re listening to “Eyes on Florida: Community-centered Anthropology in Tampa Bay.”

[04:46] [Space Age Hustle by Squadda B]

King Soul [KS] [04:58]: What happens when you break ground and three coffins are found?
Is it still disturbing the peace if their bodies don’t make a sound?
Is it still a fair fight when their lights have been gone many moons ago?
2 ½ acres were secured for a cemetery but disappeared when Tampa needed to grow.
Over 700 burials were laid in Zion Cemetery.
It’s scary to think they all haven’t been accounted for.
They’re still finding more remains.
Bodies with no names because progress erased them from history.

SJ [05:38]: You’ve just been listening to an excerpt from “Price of Progress,” by poet and Tampa native Kelvin Dupree Jr. or “King Soul.” King Soul is one of seven artists who form part of the team of the African American Burial Grounds Project, which was spearheaded by Dr. Antoinette Jackson, chair of the anthropology department at the University of South Florida.

Antoinette Jackson [AJ] [06:01]: It never ceases to amaze me that this happened in the first place—again, that we’re just finding out about, you know, a lot of these burial sites.

But the other thing that really surprised me is the amount of, throughout the community, focus on these types of issues, the, really, ways that the community has come together and people who are actively involved or want to be involved. It continues to grow.

SJ [06:28]: In 2020, Dr. Jackson responded to a call put out by the University of South Florida in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Demonstrators around the country were pushing institutions to question their histories and relationships with white supremacy in America. In this environment the university asked for proposals for projects of relevance to its local community.

In the years leading up to 2020, like many in the Tampa Bay area, Dr. Jackson had been hearing about discoveries of Black burial sites underneath housing complexes, parking lots, and other urban development projects. These human graves had been dug at cemeteries that were later erased from the map as white developers and local governments pursued urban development projects in the mid-twentieth century. Only now was material evidence surfacing of the bodies underfoot. Dr. Jackson’s team submitted a proposal to the university to look closer at the buried history of Tampa’s Black burial grounds.

AJ [07:28]: The key issue, though, for us, and for me, was the present. You know, who are the people, the living people and communities that are impacted, what does that look like today, and how can we get in conversations. Because many of these sites are being redeveloped, or the areas are being redeveloped. And, how do we get in these conversations about what should happen to these burial grounds, and include the communities and peoples that are impacted in these conversations?

So that, that was the impetus of our initial involvement in launching of the African American Burial Ground Project, to respond to that, for four cemeteries: Zion in Tampa, Oaklawn, Evergreen, and Moffitt Cemeteries in St. Pete, which are under the new Tropicana Field parking lot.

SJ [08:14]: The cemeteries that the African American Burial Grounds Project focuses on are all located in the Tampa Bay-St. Petersburg metropolitan area. Dr. Jackson and her team interviewed people in the area with histories, connections, and associations with some of these erased cemeteries and recorded their oral histories. The USF AABG [African American Burial Grounds] Oral History collection and research database is housed on the USF Library website—you’ll find a link to that in the show notes for this episode.

[08:45] The excerpt you’re about to hear comes from an interview Dr. Jackson conducted on September 19, 2021, with Dominique Cobb, whose family has lived in Tampa for generations and who currently serves as the chair of Tampa’s Historic Preservation Commission.

Dominique Cobb [DC] [09:00]: Oh, yes. Robles Park was the, the Robles Park pond was the area that we actually on Sundays had kickball games. When I graduated high school, I would go there on Sundays to take my dog for a walk while other people were having parties. Just the festive community-ness in Robles Park has always been there for the last, as far as I can remember.

SJ [09:25]: Robles Park, where Dominique Cobb grew up, is the area around Zion Cemetery, one of the sites of the African American Burial Grounds Project. Believed to be the first Black cemetery in Tampa, Zion was founded in 1901 by and for the Black community around Robles Pond. By the 1920s, this area had been incorporated into the city of Tampa, and newspapers reported that white developers were pushing out its Black residents. In the 1950s, the Tampa Housing Authority started building a public housing project on part of the old Zion Cemetery site. Although three caskets were unearthed during construction in 1951, the city insisted that all other bodies from Zion had been re-located decades before, and it continued to build the Robles Park housing complex. It was only recently that local journalists and historians started to publicize evidence of graves underneath the Robles Park housing complex, prompting a larger investigation of the site.

AJ [10:29]: So in 2018, 2019, those news reports became not only local but national, because they also involved, in this round, they also involved archaeologists and ground-penetrating radar, where they actually were able to materially confirm and affirm that, yes, this was a cemetery. The archaeological ground-penetrating radar records pointed to that, and they also dug trenches in order to reach the level where the coffins were. For me, also, there were already oral histories, and community members had been saying, yes, there is a, you know, there’s a cemetery there.

SJ [11:09]: Suddenly, something community members had long known—the Robles Park housing complex had been built over Black bodies—had an archaeological record behind it. By 2020, ground-penetrating radar had located more than three hundred caskets under the ground that was once Zion Cemetery. Faced with this evidence, the city stopped its redevelopment of Robles Park housing complex, relocated twenty-nine families who had been living there, and called for an advisory committee to help determine what kind of permanent memorialization to build at the cemetery site.

AJ [11:43]: So right now, on the fence area, the area where the cemetery is, there is a banner with the names of the over seven hundred people that are buried there, listed on the banner. So it gives you a material marker right now saying that this is the site, this is the area where the cemetery is.

SJ [12:05]: As part of their oral history interviews, Dr. Jackson and her team have spoken with community members about what memorialization means to them, and what kind of structures they would ultimately like to see at the Zion Cemetery site. Here’s more from her interview with Dominique Cobb.

AJ [12:21]: When you hear the words “African American Burial Grounds and Remembering Project,” what comes to mind, and what kinds of things would you want to come out of a project such as this? First of all, what comes to mind when you hear that?

DC [12:39]: What comes to mind is, “Don’t let them forget me.” Oh, I get chills saying that because, like I say, when I walked out that door and saw the manifest of names, I saw baby names, I saw twins, I saw mothers, and one thing that I believe our culture, that tends to happen, is we forget our ancestors. And we have a complete site, a whole cemetery of people that may be connected to me, may be connected to you, and they are not, I feel as, I don’t want to say I feel, I need them not to be forgotten. I think it’s so important to make sure that we don’t forget those who may have contributed to our society, who have contributed to our course of living. Those same people that are, you know, in those burial grounds, they may have laid these same bricks for, you know, and I feel as though they need to be, not just their name read, but remembered: Hey, this is sacred ground. You know?

SJ [13:44]: It’s this idea of remembering, of connection, and of the past living on in the present, that made it crucial for Dr. Jackson to have cultural anthropologists involved in this kind of project.

AJ [13:55]: So cultural anthropologists really bring in the living people and communities. Who is living at the site today, what do they think about what’s going on? How is that impacting their lives? How do we make people aware of what is going on in that, with that cemetery and the surrounding community? How do we get people engaged and educated and enthused and informed enough that they would want to do something to help?

SJ [14:25]: In addition to the oral histories and the work of artists and poets like King Soul, who we heard at the top of this segment, the African American Burial Grounds Project has presented programs in communities, including at the site of Zion Cemetery itself. These programs serve to both educate people about the issue of Black cemetery erasure and to learn more from people with knowledge of these cemeteries and surrounding communities.

AJ [14:51]: That makes our site and the work we’ve done pretty dynamic. And it has brought a lot of interest to bear on the projects, such as Zion, because of the ways that the art is able to interpret, present things, get other communities and people involved that would maybe not typically be listening or, you know, focused on something like this.

SJ [15:14]: In 2021, just one year after the launch of the African American Burial Grounds Project, Dr. Jackson founded the nationwide Black Cemetery Network (which you can find online at blackcemeterynetwork.org). The network provides a place for people and communities working to preserve historic Black cemeteries to tell their stories and be in community with others who are actively involved in doing the work of addressing Black Cemetery erasure. Dr. Jackson refers to the Black Cemetery Network as a living archive.

AJ [15:45]: The Black Cemetery Network was created and launched as a way to bring Florida into the national conversation. It really shows that there are, we are not alone in this. Unfortunately. It’s not like it’s a glorious thing. But the fact is that this is a national problem, and we need to take it with that level of seriousness.

SJ [16:09]: The Black Cemetery Network has expanded from an initial eleven sites to over one hundred and sixty at the time of this recording. The under-resourced or erased burial grounds that have become part of the network extend as far north as Maine and as far west as Texas. And while the sites differ in terms of institutional structure and maintenance—as well as in terms of the ways that racism and white supremacy have affected them in different parts of the country—Dr. Jackson emphasizes the similar challenges all these Black cemeteries face.

AJ [16:43]: In the end of the day, many of the sites have the same issue: They’ve been built over top of, they’ve been ignored, they have been underfunded, marginalized, under resourced. And that their history has intentionally been not made part of the central core of public knowledge.

The exciting thing for me is that people are asking, starting to ask the appropriate questions, starting to look at their histories more critically, and that’s, I think, what Tampa has, you know, brought to the fore.

SJ [17:14]: For more information about these projects, please go to the Black Cemetery Network website and visit the USF African American Burial Grounds Digital Collection—you’ll find links for both in the show notes for this episode.

KS [17:30]: The funny thing is, it was never reported as a robbery
When they took the land over our dead bodies.
Thank you.

[17:40] [applause]

[17:45] [music transition] [Space Age Hustle by Squadda B]

SJ [18:06]: Florida is a state on the forefront of climate change—a fact that was driven home by the double disaster of hurricanes Helene and Milton earlier this month. While Florida’s government makes a point of downplaying the threat posed to communities by climate change, the next community-centered anthropology project we’re going to visit is investigating Tampa locals’ complex relationship with the environment around them, as it changes due to both human-driven and other factors.

Rebecca Zarger [RZ] [18:35]: “Ghost trees” often refer to trees that are being impacted by saltwater incursion from sea level rise—large numbers of trees die off and, you know, the sort of skeletons are left as a remnant of what was once a forest.

One of the things that was really striking about a lot of the interviews we did—on their streets, as they walk through the neighborhood, people would narrate all the trees that had been taken out, they would tell us, you know, what the tree looked like and what it meant to them. Each place had a different story of a different, very large tree that had been taken out.

[19:11] And that really resonated with me personally, because I’ve experienced that on my own street, on my city block. We’ve lost probably six or seven really large trees that used to create this kind of tunnel effect over the sidewalk, over the street. I can see that we’re slowly starting to lose that. And it’s not only because of trees being intentionally cut down to create new housing, but it’s also because, in particular, some of the species of oaks that were planted in the mid-twentieth century are species that really age out after fifty to sixty years. They start to drop limbs, they start to become weak and fall much more easily. So they’re coming down for a variety of reasons, both kind of ecological and also human.

SJ [19:58]: People in Tampa Bay have a love-hate relationship with trees. That was one of Rebecca Zarger’s main findings when she worked on the City of Tampa Tree Canopy Survey in 2021. Dr. Zarger, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, was invited to bring a “social equity component” to this assessment, which the municipal government does once every five years.

In a southern city like Tampa, the shade provided by a rich tree canopy is of obvious importance. Increasing heat and hurricanes that can knock down trees, as well as the question of who pays for the trees’ maintenance, lie at the root of Tampa’s fraught relationship with its greenery. Initially, Dr. Zarger’s team was tasked with administering a survey, in English and Spanish, to give the city an idea of how people felt about trees.

RZ [20:51]: We had close to thirteen hundred people complete this, sort of, online survey. We also went to public spaces where we knew there would be kind of a wide range of demographics as far as people experiencing the city and in particular, spaces where marginalized and underrepresented members of the city would be spending time—public parks and community centers. We were primarily focused on what here in Tampa is called the “urban core,” which are neighborhoods right around the center city of Tampa.

SJ [21:25]: But her team decided to go further with its ethnography. In addition to the survey, they compiled interviews with Tampa residents who wanted to talk more about what their city’s trees mean to them. Throughout the project, Dr. Zarger’s team kept its focus on marginalized and underrepresented communities in Tampa. And what they found was more complicated than a stereotypical story of a city planting trees in wealthy white neighborhoods while leaving working-class, Black, and Latinx neighborhoods in a heat desert.

RZ [21:56]: And I think that also speaks to this idea of historical structural racism, and/or racialization of neighborhoods and city residents.

SJ [22:07]: For example, here’s how Dr. Zarger describes a historically Black neighborhood of East Tampa:

RZ [22:13]: Like, a lot of massive live oak trees, you know, dripping with Spanish moss, that create these canopies over the roads and the sidewalks. And some residents really value those trees for those reasons. Maybe also because of spiritual or multigenerational connections with the trees that we live with—you know, that we see every day, that shade our houses, that are located next to your child’s school, or your church.

But those trees have also represented a lot of risk for families in East Tampa, because there’s been less consistent investment in maintaining the trees. So if landlords, for example, don’t maintain the trees that are in their property, then, you know, they’re more likely to drop a branch, either during a storm or just anytime, and you know, create a hole in someone’s roof, and then they’re stuck with a blue tarp on their roof for months and months, because no one’s coming and repairing.

[23:09] I think, not only in East Tampa, but also in other areas of the city, one of the things that people expressed to us is that, even if they really love trees and appreciate the shade, and the benefits they provide, there are a lot of drawbacks as well. You know, trees break up sidewalks and roads and pipes, they drop branches and leaves at different times of the year. There’s a ton of pollen as a result of having so many oak trees in the city. And a lot of people, you know, suffer from that.

SJ [23:38]: Although most of Tampa’s shade comes from oak and cypress tree leaves, the city historically has been home to a broad diversity of tree varieties, in keeping with the diversity of its human population.

RZ [23:50]: Tampa has a really vibrant, rich history of immigrant families moving here, in particular associated with the cigar industry, which was the biggest in the United States at one time.

SJ [24:02]: Ybor City was at the heart of the cigar industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This central Tampa neighborhood was home to large numbers of Italian, Cuban, Spanish, and Jewish workers. Each community brought to Tampa its own language and culture, and also its own trees—in particular, fruit trees.

RZ [24:24]: You had, you know, fruit trees from the Caribbean, from Italy, from, you know, other parts of Europe or, you know, from somewhere in the United States all kind of being planted in that part of the city. At the time that those neighborhoods were sort of being constructed and expanding, there was a sort of prioritization of trees as a real benefit in an in an urban space.

SJ [24:49]: Many of Ybor City’s fruit trees are no longer there, which Dr. Zarger chalks up to the shorter life span fruit trees generally have, relative to oaks.

Overall, her team found that Tampa residents did value their trees, and wanted to see more of them planted—in spite of concerns with maintenance, cost, and social equity. But working with the city government and making policy recommendations, as an anthropologist, is a tricky balancing act.

RZ [25:17]: One of the challenges that came up was this, I think, very kind of typical problem of translation—as far as being clear and relatable about the stories and the voices, while at the same time, not diminishing the complexity and the variation of views and experiences.

You know, I think we as anthropologists are trained to be critical. Critical of everything. Right? Oftentimes, the stories that anthropologists tell are somewhat inconvenient, messy—we like to use the word “problematic” a lot. And yes, all those things, I think can can be conveyed. But I think the challenge is to be kind of simultaneously comfortable with boiling things down to an essence, while also conveying the complexity behind that. Figuring out ways to convey that in a way that is true to the ethnographic data, but also doesn’t jeopardize the collaborative relationship with the city. That’s another challenge, I think, of the work.

[26:30] [music transition] [Space Age Hustle by Squadda B]

[26:35] [This was posted on FICSCREATES… by Florida Institute for Community Studies, Inc. (FICS)]

Yadimar Garcia [YG] [26:35]: El lobo abrió la puerta y corrió hacia la abuelita y SOS! Se la tragó de un solo trago. Después, se vistió con el camisón de la abuelita!

SJ [26:57]: That was Yadimar García reading Caperucita Roja—or, Little Red Riding Hood—at an event held by the Florida Institute for Community Studies, which goes by the acronym FICS, in summer 2023.

Alayne Unterberger [AU] [27:11]: I like to tell people that FICS is the reluctant nonprofit. I’m a co-founder of FICS, the Florida Institute for Community Studies Incorporated.

SJ [27:23]: Alayne Unterberger is a medical anthropologist whose work takes her outside the academy. As executive director of the Florida Institute for Community Studies, she works with migrant youth and families in the Tampa Bay area.

Today, about 18% of the population of Hillsborough County (home to the city of Tampa) was born outside the U.S.—a factor significantly higher than the U.S. average—with one in five people primarily speaking Spanish at home. FICS primarily serves low English proficiency communities around Tampa Bay, providing education, training, and community-centered research—all guided by an anthropological perspective that values contextualization and cross-cultural translation.

[28:07] The value of building cross-cultural understanding and having cultural brokers has been clear to FICS since they were founded, about twenty-five years ago. In the late 1990s, the Florida state government found itself in the midst of a so-called “tuberculosis problem” for migrant children.

AU [28:23]: The long and the short of this was that, in countries like Peru, Russia, Mexico, Guatemala, when children are very small, they receive a pre-vaccine against TB. So what was happening were false positives. They would be reactive to the tuberculosis—the tine test.

SJ [28:46]: Seeing these positive test results, the state was administering medication to children who didn’t actually have tuberculosis.

AU [28:54]: This was overzealous, basically on the part of the Department of Ed and the Department of Health, although they were very well intentioned.

SJ [29:03]: Dr. Unterberger, then a student of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, got together with a group of academics and activists to explain the situation to state representatives. Thanks to their efforts, the tuberculosis policy was discontinued. That collaboration soon led to the establishment of FICS.

AU [29:22]: And we were started originally to do needs assessments and teach people community participatory research, so that they could do their own needs assessments instead of waiting for government to tell them what the problems were in their community, that they could design their own programs. That’s how we started, as a research institute.

SJ [29:42]: From needs assessments, FICS quickly expanded to work on issues in family planning and equity in education, and eventually added service provision to its roster of activities. Now, FICS runs before and after school programs, youth summer programs, literacy, HIV testing, and other activities relating to education and community building. This kind of work was hardly new to Dr. Unterberger, who came to anthropology from a background in Hispanic culture and language and social work.

AU [30:13]: Over time, I took all these courses in social work, became a bilingual social worker, and started working in community health centers or clinics. I was feeling extremely burnt out, putting band-aids on people every single day, right? It’s a situation that leads to a lot of burnout, because the core problems that people have, such as poverty, lack of health literacy, or just lack of education in general, those things, when they’re not addressed, they present themselves in other things—for example, high blood pressure, constant problems with diabetes, because the diets that we were giving people were not tailored to their culture. I would sit there and spend hours translating diets.

SJ [31:07]: As she was studying at the University of Florida, Dr. Unterberger’s feelings of burnout, her sense that the work she was doing in clinics was insufficient to challenge the structural problems facing migrants, naturally led her to the anthropology department.

AU [31:22]: As I was telling them, you know what I was doing what I was interested in and how I was feeling really burnt out from putting band-aids on people all day—and not, you know, not, not covering the wound, not even touching the wound, right. They’re like, “That’s an anthropologist, you’re thinking like an anthropologist.” And so—well, maybe I’ll take a class!

SJ [31:41]: Sometimes FICS’s brand of anthropology comes down to the smallest details of cultural translation—like explaining the diversity of Tampa Bay’s Latinx population to institutions that are often built to cater only to part of that population.

AU [31:56]: We have a large influx of Brazilians in Tampa. From what I can tell—I mean, at one point fifty percent of our youth were Brazilian.

The ESL programs in Florida are mainly staffed by people who speak Spanish. But if you’ve ever studied Portuguese, you know that they sound alike in some ways, but they mean very different things.

SJ [32:19]: In addition to coaching Portuguese-speaking youth in English, FICS worked to make parents aware of their rights to communicate with their children’s school in their language, and they worked with teachers and school administrators to make a Portuguese option available on the online application the schools were using to talk with parents.

AU [32:36]: So, these are just little things but they mean a lot to the community, that, you know, someone can advocate with them, not for them.

We definitely see that the parents will advocate, it’s not that they won’t, we don’t need to advocate, we just need to create the conditions so that they can advocate. Right? So that if it’s just a simple thing, like changing the language on an app, because the school system has coded Portuguese speakers as Spanish speakers, that’s just something that, because we have relationships with the schools, we can talk to the teachers, you know, in English and let them know, hey, this student's parents would like to talk to you, but in Portuguese, not in Spanish.

SJ [33:19]: These days, FICS faces a challenge of space. Where the organization previously ran five multicultural family centers, Hillsborough County took back their lease after eight years. Without its own space in which to gather their community and provide services, FICS is trying to counter barriers to access their services by working directly in schools and libraries and partnering with churches.

[33:42] [No cierren FICS by Florida Institute for Community Studies, Inc. (FICS)]

[33:52] [music transition] [Space Age Hustle by Squadda B]

SJ [34:06]: That was Dr. Alayne Unterberger talking about FICS, the Florida Institute for Community Studies. Before her, you heard Dr. Rebecca Zarger on the Tampa Tree Canopy Survey and Dr. Antoinette Jackson on the African American Burial Grounds Project.

[34:22] All three anthropologists live and work in the Tampa Bay area. And their engaged anthropology is an example of what the discipline can do, on the ground, in solidarity with marginalized communities in a threatening political climate. This larger question of how anthropology responds to injustice, not just in Florida but nationally and globally, will be at the forefront of November’s annual meeting in Tampa.

[34:48] You’ve been listening to AnthroPod, from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. AnthroPod is the work of a collaborative and nonhierarchical collective of Contributing Editors. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Sharon Jacobs, with review by Deborah Philip.

[35:00] [AnthroPod theme music, All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

[35:06] You can find a full transcript of this episode, as well as references and links to all the projects we’ve discussed, in the show notes at culanth.org—that’s c-u-l-a-n-t-h-dot-org. Thanks for listening.