CSTMS is thrilled to announce three of our graduating STS Designated Emphasis students have accepted new positions!

Rachel Carmen Ceasar, PhD in Medical Anthropology, is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work examines the intersection of forensic archaeology, the dead body, and hierarchies of heritage and knowledge created in conflict and peace. Trained as a medical anthropologist, Rachel’s research and teaching are shaped by feminist science studies and body studies. She is currently writing a book manuscript, Heritage of War, Exhumation of Peace: Death, Disparity, and the Right to Proper Burial in Postwar Spain, which analyzes the politics of exhuming mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship in Spain today. Her ongoing research shifts from inequalities created in human rights work in Spain to the racial and postcolonial contexts of forensic science practices in post-apartheid South Africa.

Shannon Cram, PhD in Geography, has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the University of Washington, Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.  Shannon’s research examines the complex relationships between nature, culture, and power.  These interests are rooted in a deep commitment to interdisciplinary study and engaged scholarship, as well as extensive fieldwork within environmental and health justice communities.  As both teacher and scholar, her work depends upon thoughtful integration of the social and natural sciences—drawing from fields as diverse as hydrology, cultural studies, and environmental policy.  She believes that academic scholarship must take seriously both the utility of scientific knowledge as well as the historically and politically situated nature of its content, understanding networks of power and politics as defining features of social and scientific change.  For the Fall 2015 Quarter, she will be teaching an undergraduate course called The Politics of Science.

Michael Mendez, PhD in City and Regional Planning, will be the inaugural University of San Francisco’s Provost Postdoctoral Scholar. Michael will be affiliated with the USF’s Environmental Studies Program and will teach a course each semester on environmental policy, sustainability, equity,  and governance. Within these courses, he will focus on commuting-engaged learning with state and local policymakers. Michael is an engaged scholar with a focus on theory and practice. He investigates through the fields of urban planning, public health and Science & Technology Studies (STS) how the built environment, policymaking process and social movements influence sustainability and population health in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. In his dissertation, he explores existing forms of inequality in urban communities and methods in which climate change policies serve to either exacerbate or redress underlying structural issues.