This page contains a summary of news and announcements prior to July 2019.


Recent CHD Graduate Student/Alum Placements 

PUBLISHED ON APR 8, 2019  

Michael Chladek (PhD 2017) has taken a position as a Senior Research Associate at Clinical Outcomes Solutions. 

Keshia Harris (PhD 2018) was hired by American Institutes for Research as a researcher. 

Gabriel Velez will start in the autumn as an Assistant Professor of Education at Marquette University. 

Talia Weiner (PhD 2017) has accepted the position of Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of West Georgia. 

Nadxieli Toledo Bustamente (PhD 2018) has accepted the position of Assistant Professor in the Child Development Proram of the  College of Education at California State University-Sacramento. 


More Graduate Student/Alum Awards and Honors for 2018-19 

Amanda Brown was awarded $20,000 by the Hymen Milgram Supporting Organization (HMSO) Successful Pathways from School to Work Program for work on her dissertation. 

Rebecca Rose Frausel, Tasneem Mandviwala, and Gabriel Velez won a $10,000 grant from the Hymen-Milgram Supporting Organization's Successful Pathways from School to Work research initiative. (see: https://voices.uchicago.edu/successfulpathways/grantees/successful-pathways-research-grantees/gabriel-velez/

Sharon Seegers Marie was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in Cultural Anthropology for her research on, “The Everyday Ethics of Voice in Sign Language Interpreting in Hà Nội, Việt Nam.” (Sharon also won a Wenner Gren that was announced last fall). 

Séamus Power had a lead article published in Current Anthropology titled "The Deprivation - Protest Paradox: How the perception of unfair economic inequality leads to civic unrest." The article can be accessed  at https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/68a3e3_630a0966184d4b6fa8668ddc504ac857.pdf


Professor Goldin-Meadow to give 2019 McGovern Lecture at AAAS Annual Meeting 

PUBLISHED ON FEB 13, 2019

Professor Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, will deliver the annual John McGovern Lecture at theAnnual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Goldin-Meadow, who joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1976, is a member of the Department of Psychology, the Department of Comparative Human Development, and the Committee on Education in the Division of the Social Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975.

Her address, The Gestural Origins of Language and Thought, will be given on Friday, February 15, at 12 Noon. As described in the program, her talk will explore:

Gesture is versatile in form and function.  Under certain circumstances, gesture can substitute for speech, and when it does, it embodies the properties of language that children themselves bring to language learning, and underscores the resilience of language itself. Under other circumstances, gesture can form a fully integrated system with speech.  When it does, it both predicts and promotes learning, and underscores the resilience of gesture in thinking.

Goldin-Meadow was part of the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development sponsored by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine and leading to the book Neurons to Neighborhoods. She is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, APA (Divisions 3 and 7), LSA, Cognitive Science Society, Society for Experimental Psychologists, and the Psychonomic Society, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship, which led to her two books, Resilience of Language and Hearing Gesture.

She co-edited Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought and founded the journal Language Learning and Development. She has served as Chair of the Section on Psychology and the Section on Linguistics and Language Science at AAAS, President of the Cognitive Development Society, President of the International Society for Gesture Studies, and Chair of the Cognitive Science Society.

Goldin-Meadow was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, received the Mentor Award in Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association in 2011, and the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement in Basic Research from the Association for Psychological Science in 2015.

First delivered in 1990, the John McGovern Lecture honors prominent behavioral scientists from around the world. This lecture has been endowed by the John P. McGovern Foundation, to enable all scholars to learn and explore the accomplishments and challenges of the behavioral sciences. Dr. McGovern was an internationally recognized practicing physician, scientist, scholar, educator, and humanitarian.


Congratulations to our 2018-19 Franklin Research Fellows 

PUBLISHED ON JUL 10, 2018

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2018-19 Earl R. Franklin grant for undergraduate research! The students below were awarded this grant to support summer research for their B.A. honors theses.

Shruthi Basireddy

Temisan Blagogee

Ishani Kejriwal

Nora Sullivan

Emily Tcheng


Congratulations to our graduate students on their awards! 

PUBLISHED ON JUL 10, 2018   Comparative Human Development students continue to win awards! Below is a list of our most recent winners. Congratulations to all!

Ansari, David

  • University of Chicago Social Sciences Division Teaching Fellowship

Berman, Zoe

  • Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship
  • African Studies Small Research Grant 2018-19

Cook, Mary

  • Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship

Gugwor, Resney

  • Comparative Human Development Preceptorship

Hadlock, Lorna

  • Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship Summer 2018 (Quechua)

Horton, Laura

  • University of Chicago Social Sciences Division Teaching Fellowship

Howard, Alexis

  • Predoctoral Fellowship in the NIA T32 Specialized Training Program in the Demography and Economics of Aging

Lee, Helen

  • Hymen Milgrom Supporting Organization Successful Pathways from School to Work Grant

Loomis, Miles

  • Neugarten Lectureship

Lyons, Emily

  • NAed/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship
  • Neugarten Lectureship – Autumn 2018

McFee, Erin

  • Gianinno Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship

Miklin, Sanja

  • SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship for 2018-2019

Nickels, Nora

  • MA Computational Social Science Preceptorship
  • Neugarten Award
  • Neugarten Lectureship – Spring 2019

Offidani-Bertrand, Carly

  • NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
  • Mellon Foundation/Social Sciences Dissertation-Year Fellowship
  • Neugarten Award

Scrivner, Coltan

  • Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Collaborative Research Project
  • Graduate Student Council Advanced Travel Fund
  • Institute for Mind and Biology Travel Fund
  • Rynerson Research Fund

Seegers, Sharon

  • Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Taylor-Seymour, Raffaella

  • Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph Field Research Award, Center for International Social Science Research
  • Small Grant, Committee on African Studies
  • Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship
  • Joseph H. Fichter Research Grant Association for the Sociology of Religion

Vaidya, Shruti

  • Pozen Human Rights Research Grant

Velez, Gabriel

  • Chicago Center for Teaching Fellowship
  • APA Division 48 Travel Award
  • Neugarten Lectureship – Winter 2019

Wilson, Emily

  • Nicholson Graduate Student Fellowship

Ye, Lily

  • Gianinno Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship

2018-2019 Departmental Awards 

Congratulations to our students whose applications were selected for the 2018-2019 department fellowships and awards!

Neugarten Lectureship

  • Miles Loomis
  • Emily Lyons
  • Nora Nickels
  • Gabriel Velez

Neugarten Award

  • Nora Nickels
  • Carly Offidani-Bertrand

Rynerson Research Fund

  • Coltan Scrivner

Gianinno Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship

  • Erin McFee
  • Lily Ye

Undergraduate Preceptor

  • Resney Gugwor

Chair Margaret Beale Spencer has received a Diversity Leadership Award 

PUBLISHED ON JAN 10, 2017  

Professor Margaret Beale Spencer has received a Diversity Leadership Award from  the University of Chicago. A brief excerpt from the University's site is below:

" 'All humans, no matter who you are, possess both risk factors and protective factors,' she said. 'I want to understand how we get resiliency for everyone. It might look different for different groups. I want to understand how we get good outcomes independent of risk factors.'

To account for how these factors affect human development over the lifespan across a variety of environments, Spencer developed the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory, or PVEST. 'People who share the same context make very different meaning of it,' she said, depending on the complex interplay of the stressors and protective factors in their lives, the coping strategies they develop and internalize, and how experienced stressors and coping strategies change.

By contrast, much of the research on low-income youth of color approaches them from a deficit perspective. Bringing a more complex and nuanced understanding of human development to the psychology and education of young people hasn’t been easy. 'We do not implement our science with that understanding,' Spencer said. 'People lack interest in unpacking the complexity. They use simple analogies to construct very complicated lives. PVEST helps us de-complicate some of those dynamic human experiences.' "

To read the full article please follow this link.

To read more about Professor Spencer and her Research, please visit her webpage here.


Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic by Professor Eugene Raikhel 

PUBLISHED ON DEC 7, 2016

Professor Eugene Raikhel has recently published a book titled Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic through Cornell University Press. A breif description from the publisher can be found below. If you would like to purchase the text please follow the link here


CHD Post-Doc Stacy Rosenbaum receives media coverage for a recent paper 

PUBLISHED ON NOV 29, 2016

CHD Post-Doc Stacy Rosenbaum has received a lot of media coverage about a recent paper she wrote! For one of the sites buzzing please follow the link below:

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161128-groups-of-gorillas-have-turned-violent


Professor Micere Keels has recently contribuited an Op-Ed piece to Inside Higher Ed 

Professor Keels has recently had an Op-Ed piece published to the website Inside Higher Ed. The article is titled "Righting the Enrollment and Graduation Ship" and a brief excerpt is provided below:

"As the costs and benefits of getting a college degree continue to rise, so do the stakes associated with making the decision to enroll in college and the decision about which college to attend. These two decisions are intimately intertwined -- students can no longer be encouraged to enroll at any college and at any cost just for the sake of being counted among the college-going population. And colleges, for the long term, can little afford not to help them succeed -- and graduate -- once they get there."

To read more about Professor Keels's work, please visit her webpage here.


Erin Moore has won the Sylvia Forman Prize 

PUBLISHED ON OCT 17, 2016

The Association for Feminist Anthropology has selected Erin Moore the as the recipient of this year’s Sylvia Forman Prize for a graduate student paper paper. The paper titled, “Detoothing Kampala: ‘Idling’ and the Politics of Evasion in Kampala’s NGO Economy,” will be announced in the printed program for the American Anthropology Association meetings. The prize will be awarded at the AFA business meeting during AAA. The prize committee unanimously agreed that her paper beautifully mixed ethnography and feminist theory to expand the scholarship on gender and temporality. 


Amir Hampel has been Awarded the Condon Prize 

PUBLISHED ON OCT 17, 2016

Amir Hampel has been awarded the Society for Psychological Anthropology's Condon Prize for best student paper in 2016-17. The SPA will recognize him at its business meeting at the American Anthropology Association meeting, and his paper will be published in the journal Ethos.


Affective Circuits: African Migration to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration, edited by Jennifer Cole & Christian Groes 

Professor Jennifer Cole has co-editied a recently published book titled Affective Circuits: African Migration to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration. This is a brief summary of the book from the University of Chicago Press:

The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration.
          
The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.

Pick up a copy today, or order it online by clicking here!


Professor Mueller's recent study has received a Press Release from University of Chicago 

Professor Anna Mueller's recent article "A New Durkheimian Framework for Understanding Adolescent Suicide in a Cohesive Community" has been published in the journal American Sociological Review and has just recived a Press Relsease from the University.

The abstract for the article is below:

Despite the profound impact Durkheim’s Suicide has had on the social sciences, several enduring issues limit the utility of his insights. With this study, we offer a new Durkheimian framework for understanding suicide that addresses these problems. We seek to understand how high levels of integration and regulation may shape suicide in modern societies. We draw on an in-depth, qualitative case study (N = 110) of a cohesive community with a serious adolescent suicide problem to demonstrate the utility of our approach. Our case study illustrates how the lives of adolescents in this highly integrated community are intensely regulated by the local culture, which emphasizes academic achievement. Additionally, the town’s cohesive social networks facilitate the spread of information, amplify the visibility of actions and attitudes, and increase the potential for swift sanctions. This combination of cultural and structural factors generates intense emotional reactions to the prospect of failure among adolescents and an unwillingness to seek psychological help for adolescents’ mental health problems among both parents and youth. Ultimately, this case illustrates (1) how high levels of integration and regulation within a social group can render individuals vulnerable to suicide and (2) how sociological research can provide meaningful and unique insights into suicide prevention.

To read the press release from the University, please follow this link.


Rick Shweder wins Society for Psychological Anthropology's Lifetime Achievement Award 

We are proud to announce that Professor Richard Shweder has been awarded "The Society for Psychological Anthropology Lifetime Achievement Award" for 2016!

"The Society for Psychological Anthropology Lifetime Achievement Award" honors career-long contributions to psychological anthropology that have substantially influenced the field and its development. The award seeks to recognize the work of individuals whose sustained involvement in psychological anthropology has had a major impact on research directions, on the wider visibility and relevance of the field, and on the growth of a community of scholarship addressing issues of culture and psychology.

This is an incredible  and well-deserved honor. Please join us in congratulating Rick for this award.

Find a link to past awardees here.

And click here to find out more about Professor Shweder's work.


Professor Guanglei Hong’s research monograph, Causality in a Social World: Moderation, Mediation and Spill-over was published 

CHD faculty member Guanglei Hong’s research monograph, Causality in a Social World: Moderation, Mediation and Spill-over, was published by Wiley in July 2015. 

"Without disciplined reasoning," Prof. Hong writes, "a causal inference would slip into the rut of a ‘casual inference’ as easily as making a typographical error.” Aimed at applied researchers, the book clarifies the theoretical concepts of moderated effects, mediated effects, and spill-over effects. It systematically introduces innovative statistical strategies for investigating these causal effects and aims to make them readily accessible to a broad audience. A major emphasis is placed on explicating and evaluating, in the context of real applications drawn from social sciences, education, and health research, the assumptions required for relating causal parameters of interest to empirical data given a specific research design.

Prof. Hong’s interview with Statistics Views about the publication of this book can be accessed here:

http://www.statisticsviews.com/details/feature/8214181/Causality-in-a-Social-World-An-interview-with-author-Guanglei-Hong.html


Professor Lindsey Richland Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

Professor Richland was recently awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation, entitled: An Instructional Complexity Approach to the Science of Learning by Analogy.  The proposal is collaborative with Bryan Matlan, at WestEd.

The project has the potential for broad impact on mathematics teaching as well as on research in the science of learning. The project takes an innovative approach to shifting the focus of theory driven research to incorporate complexity without losing rigor, making learning theory better able to explain and inform teaching practice within the complexity of everyday classrooms. A broad dissemination plan for best practices of analogy instruction is in place.

For more information regarding this award and the project please Click Here.


Former CHD Professor David Orlinsky Scheduled to Receive the Sigmund Freud Prize for Psychotherapy 

Professor Orlinsky has been will be awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize for Psychotherapy of the City of Vienna this September. This award sponsored by the World Congress of Psychotherapy is given anually by the City of Vienna.

For more information about this award please follow the link below:

http://www.worldpsyche.org/cms-tag/122/sigmund-freud-award


New CHD Professor Anna Mueller Receives 4 Awards for Recent Articles 

This summer, three papers co-authored by Professor Anna Mueller and Professor Seth Abrutyn, were awarded four best paper awards from the American Sociological Association. The awards have been announced publicly and the ceremonies to confer these awards will take place in August.  

Below are the paper’s citations and the name of the award(s) each has won. For more information about Professor Mueller please visit her faculty page here.


23rd Annual Trial Research Student Conference 

Friday, May 13th, 2016 - 10:30AM-3:30PM Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th Penthouse Level 901

Comparative Human Development will be presenting the twenty-third annual Trial Research Student Conference! Several CHD graduate students will be presenting the research they have been conducting over the course of their studies in the department. 

 


Margaret Beale Spencer to be conferred with an honorary degree by Northwestern University 

PUBLISHED ON FEB 5, 2015

Margaret Beale Spencer will be awarded with an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Northwestern University on June 19th, 2015. Honorary degrees are awarded to a small number of persons who are judged to have made exceptional contributions to fields valued by the university.

Professor Spencer, who is the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education, says she feels "truly honored" by the degree. "Because of my high regard and respect for Northwestern University, I responded to the notification from [Northwestern University] President Shapiro with sincere appreciation and pride".


Comparative Human Development Relocation 

PUBLISHED ON DEC 29, 2014

The Department of Comparative Human Development has moved to the 3rd floor of Rosenwald, 1101 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.  The office location change was effective Monday, January 5, 2015. Our telephone numbers and email addresses remain the same. 

All mail can be sent to the following address: Department of Comparative Human Development Social Sciences Research Building Office 103 1126 E. 59th St. Chicago, IL 60637


New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development honoring Bert Cohler 

PUBLISHED ON NOV 21, 2014 

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development has just published a special edition honoring Bert Cohler, edited by Brian Schiff, and entitled “Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course.” This special edition consists of an introduction by Schiff and six articles, the abstracts of which are below, along with a link to the article.

Introduction: Development's Story in Time and Place

    Brian Schiff

In this introductory chapter, I place Bertram J. Cohler's (1982) seminal essay Personal Narrative and Life Course in the context of the history of narrative psychology and developmental theory. I describe four theses from Personal Narrative and Life Course, which impacted developmental theory and research: (a) the self is a narrative project, (b) developmental periods have a distinct narrative character, (c) narratives are always told in (personal and historical) time, and (d) persons strive for coherence. I briefly describe the chapters to follow. However, my main goal is to argue for the implications of narrative for developmental science. Following Cohler, I argue that narrative has a central role to play in understanding human lives and can provide substantial benefit to developmental theory and research. A narrative perspective allows for a complex and nuanced description of developmental phenomena that accounts for the subjective and unpredictable nature of human lives. The narrative interpretation of experience is a primary human activity that alters the meaning of experience and potentially sets development on a new course, rendering the prediction of developmental outcomes a difficult venture. The narrative perspective provides detailed insights into how development unfolds, how persons actually interpret and reinterpret life in time and place, and can help psychologists to engage fundamental questions about the meaning of experience.

Narrative Making and Remaking in the Early Years: Prelude to the Personal Narrative

    Peggy J. Miller, Eva Chian-Hui Chen, and Megan Olivarez

Although very young children are unable to formulate a personal narrative of the life course, their everyday lives are steeped in narratives. Drawing on ethnographic studies in diverse sociocultural worlds, we argue that the early years of life form a vital preamble to the personal narrative. In this phase of life, the universal predisposition to narrative takes root and burgeons as young children step into whichever narrative practices are at hand, practices that are culturally differentiated from the beginning. As children narrate their experiences, they orient themselves in time and establish the interpretive grounds for intelligibility. This process is highly dynamic. Stories recur, stories are repeated, stories are revamped, and stories disappear. These dynamics constitute, for many children, an intense narrative initiation that defines early childhood as a developmental context. By the end of early childhood, they are well versed in making and remaking narratives and show an incipient ability to open a wider temporal window on their own experience.

Contextualizing the Self: The Emergence of a Biographical Understanding in Adolescence

    Tilmann Habermas and Neşe Hatiboğlu

In adolescence, remembering the personal past and understanding what kind of person one is intertwine to form a story of one's life as the most extant, informative, and flexible form of self-representation. In adolescence, the striving for self-coherence translates into a quest for global coherence of the life story. We suggest that contextualizing is a fifth means for creating global coherence in life narratives besides the cultural concept of biography, temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence. We present three kinds of contextualizing in life narratives, the temporal macrostructure, sociohistorical contextualizing of one's life, and hierarchical and linear segmenting of the text and life. These three forms of contextualizing in life narratives by their authors are complemented by three forms of contextual influences on life narratives analyzed by researchers, namely the historical, personal, and communicative situation in which they are recounted. Contextualizing is exemplified by the life narrative of a young migrant.

Narrative and the Social Construction of Adulthood

    Phillip L. Hammack and Erin Toolis

This chapter develops three points of elaboration and theoretical expansion upon Cohler's (1982) treatise on personal narrative and life course. First, we highlight Cohler's emphasis on an interpretive, idiographic approach to the study of lives and reveal the radicalism of this approach, particularly in its ability to interrogate the lived experience of social categorization. Second, we link Cohler's position directly to cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and consider the link between inner and social speech through the idea of narrative engagement. Finally, following Cohler's life course perspective on human development, we suggest that adulthood is best conceived as a cultural discourse to which individuals orient their personal narratives through a dynamic process of narrative engagement rather than a clearly demarcated life stage. Emerging adulthood is linked to cultural and economic processes of globalization in the 21st century and challenges static notions of social roles traditionally associated with compulsory heterosexuality (e.g., marriage and parenthood). Narrative processes in emerging adulthood occur through both situated storytelling and the formation of a life story that provides coherence and social meaning, both of which have key implications for social stasis and change.

The Life Narrative at Midlife

Dan P. McAdams

In a remarkably prescient chapter, Bertram Cohler (1982) reimagined the problems and the potentialities of psychological development across the life course as a distinctively human challenge in life narration. This chapter situates Cohler's original vision within the intellectual and scientific matrix of the late 1970s, wherein psychologists expressed grave doubts about the extent to which human lives may demonstrate consistency and coherence. By focusing attention on human beings as autobiographical authors rather than as mere social actors or motivated agents, Cohler moved the conversation away from dispositional personality traits and developmental stages and toward the emerging concept of narrative identity. Over the past 30 years, research on narrative identity has shown how people use stories to integrate the reconstructed past and imagined future, providing their lives with some semblance of unity, purpose, and meaning. At midlife, many adults struggle to solve the problem of generativity, aiming to leave a positive legacy for the next generation. Inspired by Cohler's original chapter, contemporary research reveals that the most generative adults in American society tend to construe their lives as narratives of personal redemption. As such, life stories may serve as valuable psychological resources for midlife adults, even as they reflect and refract prevailing cultural themes.

Narrating Your Life After 65 (or: To Tell or Not to Tell, That Is the Question)

    Amia Lieblich

This chapter examines differential circumstances whereby aging individuals construct their selves as a narrative or, alternatively, seem to prefer other routes to manifest their identity. The preliminary exploration of questions about the characteristics of those aged who prefer to tell and those who do not, as well as the salutary role of telling, is based on two studies of 65–80-year-old well-functioning Israeli-Jewish seniors. While approximately half of them were willing to conduct a life review, the other half constructed their robust identity through activities and a here-and-now focus. Historical circumstances that involve seeing one's life story as heroic or having an important historical message, as opposed to a series of haphazard events, are considered a major factor in the preference to tell or not to tell. The chapter concludes that there are different strategies for identity management, with an emphasis on either past events or present activities. Neither of these preferences can simply indicate success or failure in aging well.

“Personal Narrative and Life Course” Revisited: Bert Cohler's Legacy for Developmental Psychology

    Mark Freeman

The primary aims of this concluding chapter are to identify common themes across the preceding chapters, to provide an integrative synthesis of these themes, and to draw out the implications of Bertram Cohler's work for narrative psychology and for the field of developmental psychology more generally. As with the previous chapters, the central ideas explored in Personal Narrative and Life Course remain focal to the discussion. So too is the concept of development, in childhood, adolescence, and beyond. By drawing together the retrospective dimension frequently associated with the idea of narrative with the prospective dimension frequently associated with the idea of development, this chapter also seeks to underscore Cohler's seminal contribution to our understanding of the dynamic movement of human lives in and through time.


Comparative Human Development at the AAA

PUBLISHED ON NOV 17, 2014

For those of you who are planning to attend this year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (taking place December 3 -7 in Washington DC at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel) we’d like to let you know about several events and presentations by Comparative Human Development faculty and students.  (Follow the links for information about the date and time of each talk or session).

Faculty

There will be two roundtable sessions honoring the work of Prof. Rick Shweder on Thursday Dec 4 and Friday Dec 5.  The sessions, titled “Universalism without uniformity” have been organized by two alumni of CHD’s PhD program, Julia Cassaniti and Usha Menon.  The first roundtable, “Best Practices?? Morality and Cultural Pluralism,” will take place from 11:00 AM to 12:14 PM on Thursday Dec 4 and will feature commentaries from CHD Prof. John Lucy, as well as Robert LeVine, Fuambai Sia Ahmadu, Pinky Hota, Thomas S Weisner, Jacob Hickman, and Stanton Wortham.  The second roundtable, “One Mind, Many Mentalities: Self, Health and Emotion ,” will take place on Friday December 5 from 2:30 to 4:15 PM and will include presentations from Jon Haidt, Paul Rozin, Tanya Luhrmann, Byron Good, Janis Jenkins, Charles Nuckolls, and Lene Jensen The second session will be followed by a "toast, roast and boast" dinner in Rick's honor hosted by Tanya Luhrmann and Hazel Markus.

Prof. John Lucy will be presenting a paper entitled “Language Structure and the Emergence of Self in Childhood,” He will also be participating in a roundtable session on the “Dilemmas and Complexities of Multilingual Fieldwork” and serving as a discussant for the session “Beyond perfection: Co-variation in language and communicative efficacy.”

Prof. Eugene Raikhel and Stephanie Lloyd will be presenting a co-authored paper titled “Trading Zones and Styles of Reasoning in Environmental Epigenetics,” as part of a panel which the two of them organized: “Assembling the biosocial: Embodied environments, health and modes of interdisciplinarity in the life sciences and anthropology.

CHD faculty affiliate Prof. Judith Farquhar will be presenting a paper on “The magic of the clinical” and taking part in a roundtable called “Why can't linguistic and medical anthropologists just get along?”

CHD faculty affiliate Prof. Summerson Carr will be presenting a talk titled “The Perils of Therapeutic Poetics,” and also will serve as a discussant on a panel “States of agency: On the creativity, conscience, and subjectivity of civil servants.”

Students and Alumni

A number of current and recently graduated CHD students will also be presenting their work at the conference. Here’s a list of presenters and the titles of their talks.

Les Beldo (PhD 2014): [the Struggle for] Whaling [Rights] Is Who We Are: Whaling and Makah Identity

Lindsay Conklin: Love Memes & Relationship Themes: Youth, Gender, and Courtship in Amman

Amir Hampel: Personality As a Locus of Anxious Cultural Critique in Contemporary Beijing

Laura Horton: Linguistic Innovation in Family Homesign Systems

Julia Kowalski (PhD 2014): Competing Cares: Promoting a Politics of Dependence in Jaipur, India

Zhiying Ma: Constructing Risks, Distributing Responsibilities: Negotiating Involuntary Hospitalization of Mentally Ill Patients in China

Erin McFee: The Contributions of Ex-Combatants from Illegal Armed Groups to the “Truth” of the Colombian Conflict: An Analysis of Laws 975 and 1424 and the Selective Use of Quoted Ex-Combatant Testimonies

Erin Moore: The Miniskirt Bill and the Scandal of Young Women in Urban Uganda

Aaron Seaman: Giving Care?: Exploring the Analytic of Care through an Examination of the “Caregiver”

Aaron Seaman: serving as discussant for Reflections on mind and body in the era of the 'cerebral subject'

Kimberly Walters: Humanitarian Truths: The Shifting Sands of Transnational Sympathy and the Knowing of Commercial Sex

 


Susan Goldin-Meadow wins APS 2015 William James Fellow Award 

PUBLISHED ON MAR 12, 2014

Susan Goldin-Meadow has been awarded the APS 2015 William James Fellow Award. The James Award is the highest honor conferred by the Association for Psychological Science. It honors distinguished APS Members for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology.

To Find out more about the William James Award please click here!


Yihua Hong awarded Spencer Foundation grant

Congratulations to Yihua Hong, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Comparative Human Development, for receiving a one-year research grant from the Spencer Foundation in the amount of $50,000 in support of her research project entitled "Making Sense of the 'Zero' Effect of the Comprehensive Teacher Induction Programs". The project seeks to understand the puzzling findings from a randomized experiment by investigating possible mediation mechanisms that may explain why some prominent teacher induction programs failed to produce an impact on beginning teachers’ instructional practices.


Talia Weiner awarded Stirling Prize 

PUBLISHED ON SEP 9, 2013

Congratulations to doctoral student Talia Weiner, who has been awarded the Stirling Prize from the Society of Psychological Anthropology for her paper, "The (Un)managed Self:  Paradoxical Forms of Agency in  Self-Management of Bipolar Disorder."


2013-14 Social Sciences Divisional Awards 

PUBLISHED ON JUN 18, 2013

Congratulations to Aaron Seaman and David Kern, our PhD students who were selected from among many applicants from the entire Social Sciences Division to receive the Harper and Mellon Awards, respectively. These fellowships provide a year's funding for the recipients to devote their full energies to writing their doctoral dissertations.

Sean Coyne has also won a SSD Summer Grant this year, to complete his field research on Cayo Santiago.


2013-14 Departmental Awards 

PUBLISHED ON JUN 18, 2013

Congratulations to our students whose applications were selected for the 2013-14 department fellowships and awards!

Neugarten Lectureship

  • Les Beldo
  • Tara Mandalaywala
  • Erin Moore

Neugarten Award

  • Nadxieli Toledo Bustamente
  • Marianna Staroselsky

Rynerson Fellowship

  • Lindsey Conklin
  • Ashley Drake
  • Christine Fleener

Undergraduate Preceptors

  • Les Beldo
  • Julia Kowalski

Amy Cooper and Elizabeth Fein's dissertations reviewed 

PUBLISHED ON JUN 5, 2013

Our recent PhDs Amy Cooper (2012) and Elizabeth Fein (2012) have had their dissertations reviewed.


Eugene Raikhel, Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring 

PUBLISHED ON JUN 5, 2013

Congratulations to Eugene Raikhel, recipient of the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring, an award initiated and supported by our students. Read an award profile and interview with him here.


Jennifer Cole, Guggenheim Fellow 

PUBLISHED ON APR 12, 2013

Comparative Human Development continues to dominate the Guggenheim Foundation awards at the University of Chicago in recent years. Today the New York Times announced that Professor Jennifer Cole has been named a Guggenheim Fellow in African Studies/Humanities by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is one of only three in the State of Illinois.