Gideon Singer

2016 Fulbright Scholar

Hometown

Reisterstown, MD

Major

Master's in Anthropology

College

The Graduate School

 

Gideon Singer’s goal is to become “a global advocate for societal, economic, and ecological sustainability.” His focus? E-waste, or electronic waste, is generated by growing demands for technology and growing concern for the health of people and the environment. Dr. Riall Nolan, Professor of Anthropology at Purdue, describes Gideon as “a remarkably poised, self-directed individual” and “one of the newer generations of anthropology students whose desire to come to grips with global problems represents a major departure from business as usual in our discipline.”

 

Currently, an NSF IGERT Fellow in Sustainable Electronics at Purdue will conduct research on e-waste in Adelaide, Australia as a Fulbright Student. Partnering with the Appleton Institute at CQUniversity, he will integrate ethnography and GIS to investigate local responses to the rapid increase of e-waste and design community-based resources to unmake that waste. He also plans to create educational resources and teach students there how to use an online Story Mapping Template to visualize their own consumption and discard practices.

 

Singer says, “As an anthropological archaeologist, I investigate the dynamic relations between society and the artifacts – the physical remains of material culture which have been designed, manufactured, used, and discarded by us.” He has served on numerous archeological digs around the U.S. and was a delegate at the Unmaking Waste last summer. In 2011, he was a member of the Tropical Archeology Research Lab at James Cook University in Australia, where he conducted laboratory research on Indigenous diet and helped teach archaeology to primary school children.