Postdoctoral Fellowships Awarded to Two UW Anthropology Professors

Allison Caine and Lauren Hayes, both assistant professors in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Anthropology, are recipients of Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2024.

The fellowships, which provide funds for full-time writing, are awarded to just 20 people nationally each year. The Wenner-Gren Hunt website notes that the program “supports emerging scholars whose work has the potential to transform our understanding of what it means to be human.”

Caine’s project, “Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Multispecies Survival in the Peruvian Andes,” explores how Peruvian alpaca herders evaluate climate change through their specialized knowledge of animal behavior and grassland ecology.

Herders pay attention to subtle shifts in human-animal communication and landscape change to detect broader socioecological stress, and they respond through a range of adaptive strategies to maintain long-term resilience.

Caine’s project shows how Andean herders are forging pathways in shifting landscapes, and she argues that the Quechua language provides compelling frameworks for understanding and responding to socioecological change. She will begin her project in January 2025.

Hayes’ project, titled “Walking the Line: Gender, Communication and the New Manufacturing Workplace in Appalachia,” will begin in January 2024.

She studies the way people talk and communicate at work and how that affects the roles and tasks assigned to men and women. In current professional environments, “soft skills,” such as communicating in teams or problem-solving, are considered important in the workplace.

Hayes notes that these styles of interacting often are associated with women, whether they use them more than men. Her research explores if valuing these “feminized soft skills” could change how men and women are treated at work, especially in jobs such as manufacturing, where women are underrepresented and receive lower wages than men overall.

To learn more about Caine’s and Hayes’ projects, email them at acaine@uwyo.edu and lhayes9@uwyo.edu.

For more information about the UW Department of Anthropology, visit www.uwyo.edu/anthropology.