Bridging the gap: our experience with outreach educational activities as a way to expand social perspective

In the current worldwide political scenario, the perceptions individuals have of human diversity and cultural variation play an important role in shaping events on local, regional, national and international scales. Intolerance in particular plagues communities around the world, including our own. Much of this intolerance is ultimately the result of people not being able to properly contextualize human diversity, and therefore not being able to accept and incorporate the perspectives of others. The value in diversity is lost. This presentation tackles issues surrounding intolerance by discussing the role that outreach programs can play in broadening people’s perspectives and thereby, reducing different types of biases. Through a series of activities we created at the Department of Anthropology, with the participation of undergraduate, graduate and faculty volunteers, we are engaging in the development of interactive educational opportunities that explore the larger human biocultural context. Please join us for this talk so we can share our experience and discuss our initiatives with educators, students, and researchers from different backgrounds. Presenter Mark Hubbe is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at OSU. He received his PhD from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and has been living in the US since 2012. His research focuses primarily on the study of past populations from South America, and has contributed to our understanding of the settlement of the Americas as well as to the origins of social inequality among prehistoric Andean communities from the Atacama Desert. Since 2017, he has been coordinating APOP (the Anthropology Public Outreach Program), composed of undergraduate, graduate, and faculty volunteers dedicated to bridging the gap between the academic work and the broader public by promoting interactive educational activities about modern human diversity and the evolution of our species within and outside OSU. You can follow APOP’s activities at u.osu.edu/apop, and know more about Mark’s research at u.osu.edu/heads. You can learn more about this event, and register to attend, here: https://library.osu.edu/researchcommons/event/apop See Less