MA graduate Adreanna Rodriguez received the AAA's Jean Rouch Award

     MA graduate Adreanna Rodriguez (2018) received the AAA's Jean Rouch Award, one of the Association's highest honors in Visual Anthropology.  Adreanna's MA film, Document the Impact, explores the crisis of climate change as seen through photographs taken by female pastoralists in Northern Tanzania.  It is an intimate portrait of four women who open their lives to viewers by presenting and describing their images of drought and its consequences in their communities.

     Jean Rouch, whose work the award commemorates, is among the great figures in Visual Anthropology.  He is best known for his dedication to self-reflexivity and anthropologie partagée, a vision of our discipline committed to self-critique and social-engagement.  Adreanna's film exemplifies these commitments with great skill.  Her work and the photographs in it have already been screened and displayed several times in Tanzania.  There they are being used to facilitate conversations between local people and international NGOs committed to ameliorating climate change.

     Adreanna's film was also recognized earlier this year when it received the Anthropology Department's Jay P. Young Award for Anthropological Excellence.