Since 1996, Dr. Hutson has been doing archaeology in the Maya area, working briefly in Belize and Guatemala before settling down in Yucatan, Mexico, in 1998.  Dr. Hutson will speak about his current research.

Mexican social scientist, Josefina Aranda Beauzry (from ISS-UABJO), will teach a one credit course on gender, development, and food in Latin America at UK in F15.  She joins us from Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicas-Universidad Autonoma "Benito Juarez" de Oaxaca, Mexico, and will give a public lecture in conjunction with her visit. 

Women farmers are less likely to own land and have limited access to credit, extension services, producer organizations and market information.  In this talk, Sarah Lyon explores current innovations in the speciality, high-quality, coffee market aimed at supporting women farmers, including new financial products and training programs, micro-batching of women's coffee, identifying and supporting "hidden influences" and developing gender "scorecards."  She will discuss the impact of some of these innovations in Oaxaca, Mexico, where 42 % of registered organic coffee farmers are now women.

Most studies of language and confessional minorities focus on the self-identity, singular, of members of a minority community. Some minority populations, however, have two or more concurrent language, cultural, and ethnic self-identities (although usually only one confessional self-identity). This talk examines the self-perceptions of an understudied minority population, the Lutheran Russian Germans living in the western part of the Russian Empire known as Congress Poland or “Russian Poland” (now eastern Poland and southern Lithuania) during the 19th and early 20th centuries, before they were forcibly resettled by the Russian government into interior Russia during World War One.

The Russian Germans, also known as “German Russians,” were Russian citizens, the descendants of German artisans who had migrated to Russia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by invitation of Catherine the Great and Paul I. Those in Russian Poland lived mostly in integrated communities together with Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Belarusians, and Russians. Most were trilingual in Polish, Russian, and Low German, with some knowing Lithuanian as well. Based on documents in Lithuanian and Polish archives and a private collection in the U.S., the talk focuses on the Lutheran Russian German populations in the adjoining provinces of Suwałczyzna and Łomża (now Suvalkija in Lithuania and Mazowsze in Poland, respectively) and their adoption of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian cultural features, as reflected in their naming and signature practices, language choices, cuisine, and self-identity as a group during a period when the concept of ethnicity had not yet been developed in Russia.