Anthropology is a science of humanity that addresses human issues both from a cultural and from a biological point of view. The narrowest concern of anthropology is the survival of humanity; its broadest is the conditions of continuity and change for all human life. While broadly educated, individual anthropologists generally specialize in a particular approach to this whole view of humanity.

Kathy Buddle-Crowe 

Kathleen Buddle is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Manitoba.  She has published extensively on the cultural history of media activism in Canadian “Indian Country,” and on cultural performance and politics in the production of urban indigenous localities.  She is currently engaged in collaborative research with a Winnipeg-based Native grandmother’s council, documenting the women’s efforts to intervene in the lives of sexually exploited street youth, and to curb violence against children.

Buddle also works intensively with Native street gang members in three prairie cities, inquiring into the cultural production of prairie lawlessness and into the disciplining of the bodies of criminal others.  The gang project is concerned with the performative aspects of gang sociality and with the situating of “disorder” at the confluence of race, gender, geography and generation.

Susan Frohlick 

Dr. Susan Frohlick is an associate professor of anthropology and co-ordinator of women's and gender studies at the University of Manitoba. She received her PhD from York University and her MA and BA from Simon Fraser University. 

Most of Frohlick's current research relates to sexual rights – human rights issues related to the expression of sexuality (i.e. orientation, practices and reproductive rights).

She is involved in a multi-year study on local youth and the sexual economies of global tourism in Costa Rica. By taking a youth-centred approach, Frohlick and her research team hope to gain insights into the meanings of sexual tourism involvement for local young men and women from marginalized ethnic and racial backgrounds, to move beyond a victimization framework. In highlighting the youths' strategies and the benefits of their involvement in local sexual economies, the research will foster youth empowerment as well as new understandings of commodification in global sexual tourism. Frohlick recently published Sexuality, Women, and Tourism, a book based on her field work in Costa Rica. 

Frohlick is also collaborating with Winnipeg's Sexuality Education Resource Centre on a project that uses community-based and youth-oriented methodologies to engage African immigrant and refugee youth in talking about sexual health issues. The project, which is CIHR-funded, aims to understand the cultural dimensions of sexual practices for newcomer youth living in Winnipeg and Calgary. Ultimately, the project will implement messaging for HIV/AIDS prevention for this target group of newcomers facing vulnerabilities to sexually transmitted infections due to poverty, racism, disenfranchisement, gender and sexuality norms, and stigma associated with HIV.  

Anna Fournier

Anna Fournier’s research deals with youth perspectives on human rights in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states.  She conducted fieldwork in Ukraine, inquiring into the way high school students understand and claim human rights in the educational setting as well as on the “streets” as a site for participation in social movements.  She links young people’s articulations of rights and justice to changing configurations of morality under conditions of capitalist transformation.

Her current project examines recent democratic revolutions and popular uprisings in post-Soviet countries and the Middle East, asking in what ways the global discourse of human rights is reproduced or challenged by new forms of claims making and an emergent language of political and economic justice.  She asks what it means to claim rights through the “popular uprising” as a form that is modular in some respects yet also rooted in local histories and political cultures. 

Ellen Judd

Ellen Judd's early work explored China's distinctive path to socialism and human rights by examining cultural construction and social mobilization in pre-Liberation and Cultural Revolution China. She also examined the gendered implications of China's post-socialist rural economic reforms in north China in the 1980s and 1990s, and the official and unofficial responses of women's movements in the 1990s. This work involved study of Canadian and international women's movements.

Judd's recent work focuses on the implications of China's market-driven development and the implications of massive rural-urban migration for disadvantaged rural communities in upland west China. This has extended the study of disparities of gender and rural status to those of region, age, (dis)ability and health. Her current SSHRC project explores how west China migrants, who are excluded from urban social programs and marginal to rural social programs, care for their health and that of their trans-local families through long-standing cultural resources and new health programs. She has written two books on these experiences: Gender and Power in Rural North China and The Chinese Women's Movement between State and Market.

Since 2006, Judd has been part of a Sichuan University-University of Manitoba team that is training Chinese people to respond to HIV/AIDS in their country, especially within high-risk and vulnerable populations. Judd has also applied anthropological research to questions of human rights at the University of Manitoba through a diversity audit in the department of anthropology. She has supported work in the anthropology of violence and peace and in gender critique in development through her editorial work withAnthropologica and with Zed Press. 

Fabiana Li

Fabiana Li’s research on conflicts over resource extraction in Latin America engages with issues of social and environmental justice. Her work in Peru examines how economic reforms and new technologies of mineral extraction enabled the rapid expansion of mining activity into areas used for agriculture and farming. Focusing on one of the world’s largest gold mines, her ethnographic fieldwork paid particular attention to struggles over water, controversies over pollution, and the emergence of grassroots movements in response to extractive activity.

Greg Monks

Greg Monks is an archaeologist and has had a long standing interest in Canadian archaeological heritage legislation, which is currently non-existent at the federal level. As heritage has been identified by the United Nations as a human right, Monks' research in both the archaeological culture heritage of Canada's Aboriginal peoples and his applied interest in promoting the enactment of federal heritage legislation both tie into issues of broader social justice and human rights.

He has offered a graduate seminar on international heritage legislation, and some of this material is also covered in the Cultural Resource Management courses offered at the undergraduate and graduate levels (ANTH 3960 and ANTH 7410).