College of Social & Behavioral Sciences UMass Amherst

At UMass Amherst Anthropology's summer Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology Field School, students learn how to excavate human skeletal remains (practicing with plastic skeletons) at the campus's unique taphonomy lab. 🪏⛏️ Check out this recent Western Mass News feature on the program!

‘Almost impossible in a classroom’: students seek hands-on forensic experience at UMass Amherst A dozen college students from across the country took part in a field school program to get hands-on training in bioarcheology and forensic anthropology.

We’re so excited to share that the ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentoring Award for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences goes to Dr. Sancha Medwinter, Associate Professor of Sociology! 🎉

Professor Medwinter’s approach to individual mentorship is described as humble, gentle, honest, and inextricably linked to her steadfast work to build community
amongst colleagues and within the classroom. Specifically, Professor Medwinter’s mentorship is credited with demystifying success for colleagues from
underrepresented groups. Prof. Medwinter’s candor about both her mistakes and her successes reveals the structural nature of the challenges of academic life and has inspired her colleagues to persist through their own challenges. Professor Medwinter’s expertise in decolonial pedagogy, shared widely in campus workshops, has informed course design and departmental DEI practices towards building
equitable and caring communities.

Congratulations to Boone Shear, Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and facilitator of the Building Solidarity Economies program, for being recognized with the Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching! Shear's efforts have created numerous ways for students to build meaningful connections with local and regional communities and organizations. "This class (Anthro 341) is just one part of a larger project to build a different type of world that’s based on care and reciprocity,” says UMass economics PhD student Annie McGrew.

“A big part of this is not just about meeting people and hearing presentations about the transformative, world building work that they’re doing, but forming deep, ongoing relationships with people in those organizations, by participating in work that they’re doing,” Shear explains. “It provides a sort of hopeful realism, that ‘Oh, this is something that more and more people are trying to do in different ways.’ It becomes more solid and sobering and concrete.”

Learn more:

“Not just a class”: Students Find Connection Through Building Solidarity Economies : College of Social & Behavioral Sciences : UMass Amherst BSE coordinator and facilitator Boone Shear has received the 2026 University Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching.

Heads up, Class of ‘27: may want to save these for inspiration🎓👀
Nice work, Class of ‘26! 🙌

Congratulations, SBS Class of 2026! Your hard work, creativity and commitment to understanding the world have prepared you for meaningful impact. Enjoy your accomplishments and carry your spirit forward. We can’t wait to see what you do next!

In television, a crossover episode brings two audiences together. For shows like “Abbott Elementary” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” or “Rugrats” and the “The Wild Thornberrys,” a crossover allows characters from separate worlds interact in unexpected ways, often toward a common goal.

SBS faculty members Sadiyah Malcolm-Wallace, sociology, and Bridgette Davis, public policy, realized they taught their quite-related courses at the same time, in the same building, on the same days. Jokingly, they asked: “What if we did a joint event with our classes? Like a crossover episode?”

Their recent joint venture, “Youth Programs, Policy, and Praxis: ‘Crossover Episode,’” was a collaboratively-designed event merging two distinct courses for a single shared learning experience. Malcolm-Wallace’s course, Sociology of Childhood, examines how childhoods are socially constructed across race, class, gender, and geography. Davis’ course, Policy in an Age of Precarity, explores how public policy shapes the life trajectories of young adults navigating instability in education, housing, and labor. The faculty and their respective courses are housed in different disciplines, but in essence, they both look at deeply interconnected questions about young people’s lives.

Read more about this unique teaching innovation: https://www.umass.edu/social-sciences/news/crossover-episode