The Department of Sociology and Anthropology has separated and become their own departments beginning this month.
The anthropology department wanted to be more visible to students.
Margaret Graham, interim chair of the Anthropology Department, said, “We’ve been the secondary, if you will, program within two departments. We were with psychology for a long time at UTPA and then we moved to sociology.”
The department will offer new majors and minor concentrations in Archeology and Global Health & Migration and will take effect this semester.
Graham said coming out of the Anthropology Department will help students when applying to graduate schools.
“For students, I think, it gives them a better touchstone, this is who you are, this is what the anthropology department is,” she said. “And being our own entity allows us to respond quicker to student needs and demands. So, I think that’s always a benefit for students.”
The stand-alone department will have access to information it did not have before, giving it the autonomy to do more that might not have been possible being part of a department.
“I will be participating in meetings at different levels, that as a program coordinator I wasn’t able to go to,” Graham said. “So, I will have access to more information. From my angle, it’s more administrative and developmental programs, and so forth, of course, but I think it’s more information and more ability to make decisions that we want to make.”
She said the biggest need for the department is to hire more faculty.
“I’d say that’s the primary thing, to roll out new programs and see how students are responding to them or if they’re having any difficulty, we want to take care of those and fix those,” Graham said. “But we want to get people in line and get going on these, and as we go, if we can get more hires then we can develop further concentrations or minors that might be applicable to strengthen the ones that we have, given that we’re a smaller department and having two concentrations like that is pretty great.”
Guy Duke, assistant professor of anthropology and archeology, said they are excited about becoming their own department and be able to run things their own way without having to see if it works with sociology.
“We had a certain amount of independence as a joint department running our own programs, but we still had a chair, who was a chair of the entire department, and it would alternate between a sociologist and an anthropologist but it was still, you know, things still had to be done together,”Duke said. “There [was] funding that would come from the college, or the university, [that] would have to be split up amongst the two programs within the department.”
He said the department is always looking to improve to make things run smoothly, add more majors and minors and grow in a way that allows them to bring more undergraduate and graduate students.
“We would like to develop a more anthropology specific graduate program at some point,” Duke said. “So, these are things that are all down the road but are working towards trying to make
these happen.”
