Exit Zero refers to the highway exit ramp number for the former steel mill neighborhoods of Southeast Chicago in the Calumet region, once one of the largest steel-producing areas in the world. Exit Zero is also the name of a book written by anthropologist Christine Walley, who grew up in the region as a fourth generation member of a steelworking family, as well as a documentary film made by Chris Boebel and Chris Walley.

Professors Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson are spending the Spring 2012 semester traveling and teaching with Semester at Sea, a global education program sponsored by the University of Virginia that offers undergraduates the opportunity to explore different regions and cultures all over the world.

Deborah K. Fitzgerald, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, has announced that Erica Caple James, associate professor of anthropology, has received the James A. ('45) and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities. The $25,000 prize is awarded annually as a research fund to support innovative and creative scholarship in the humanities.

MIT's Spectrum Magazine profiles the year-long Sensing the Unseen seminar, sponsored by MIT Anthropology and organized by Professors Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson.

Heather Paxson discusses the history of milk and artisanal cheesemaking on the June 28th edition of WBUR's On Point radio program.

Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti by Erica James received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Cultural Anthropology Gregory Bateson Prize.

Invited by the MIT Anthropology program, David Harvey, author of The Condition of Postmodernity and professor in the Program in Anthropology at the City University of New York, examines the latest financial crisis and the complexities of global capital flow from a Marxist perspective.

Stefan Helmreich's Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas has received the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society for 2010.

Heather Paxson's article, "Cheese Cultures: Transforming American Tastes and Traditions," published in the Fall 2010 issue of Gastronomica, won an 'honorable mention' in the 2010 Sophie Coe Prize competition in Food History, awarded by the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

Stefan Helmreich's book, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, has won the second annual Gregory Bateson Prize.

Erica James spends the year as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study, writing an ethnographic account of the relationship between state governance and faith-based charitable organizations in Haiti.

Students in James Howe's course, Monitoring the Rights of Native Peoples, submit a five-page report on the Kuna people of Panama for the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the United Nations' process for reviewing human rights practices around the world.

Harvard Magazine profiles the latest research project from Heather Paxson on American artisanal cheesemaking.

Christine Walley and Chris Boebel have released a trailer for their new Spring 2010 course "21A.339J DV Lab: Documenting Science through Video and New Media" - see it here.

Heather Paxson has received the 2009 Belasco Prize for Scholarly Excellence from the Association for the Study of Food and Society for "Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States," which was published in Cultural Anthropology 23(1):15-47. She is the very first recipient of this award.

Stefan Helmreich has won MIT's 2009 Levitan Teaching Prize in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Susan Silbey has been honored with the 2009 Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize by the Law and Society Association.

Susan Silbey has been awarded the 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Heather Paxson is the 2008 recipient of Levitan Prize in the Humanities, for "Economies of Sentiment, Ecologies of Production: Crafting American Artisanal Cheese" as well as one of 2 recipients of the 2008 Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Cultural Anthropology is a social science that explores how people understand - and act in - the world. But what, exactly, is it that Cultural Anthropologists do? How do they approach their research? In this short film, three members of MIT's Anthropology Department, Stefan Helmreich, Erica James, and Heather Paxson, talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork. View the video on Youtube.