 to UVM live at five. My name is Ryan Hargraves and I am the director of admissions here at the University of Vermont. The UVM live at five series is designed so that you can learn a little bit more about what the University of Vermont has to offer through the eyes of some of our most distinguished community members. Today, we are fortunate to be joined by anthropology professor, Luis Vavanco. Professor Vavanco, we're so excited that you're here today. I know you're very busy, so appreciate your time. But why don't you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself and your path to the University of Vermont. Well, thanks, Ryan. I really appreciate this opportunity. I'm really excited to be speaking to all of you. So I am a cultural anthropologist. I focus on environmental issues. I'm really interested in the conditions for environmental sustainability. I've been studying social movements in Latin America that are trying to protect nature at the community level for probably about 25 years, worked in Costa Rica, Southern Mexico. And I'm a social movement scholar. I'm trying to figure out what kinds of claims are being made about protecting nature. How do these land and communities that have different ways of interacting with the natural landscape? That research was, at times, got me into studying ecotourism. And so I've written a fair amount about this phenomenon of ecotourism. And I remember hanging around, we anthropologists, we sort of hang around. That's our mode of research. We listen and we ask questions. And I remember doing a lot of field work in Costa Rica where I would ask the question, why did you come here? What are you looking for when you're coming to the tropical rainforest? And people would often tell me something about a nature film they'd seen. And so I eventually, I had shelved that at the time, and I eventually came back to it. So a whole nother research area for me is nature films. I'm very interested in how nature films communicate about the natural world, but also about how people relate to the natural world. Written recently about penguins. I asked myself, why are we so interested in penguins right now? Why are they all over the place in film? So I wrote a whole history of why penguins are interesting to people on film. And then lately, last six, seven years, I've been working on questions of urban sustainability and green urbanism movements, specifically around the bicycle. I use the bicycle as a lens to study social change and social movement politics in cities. I'm out there, of course, riding a bicycle as a form of field work and getting involved with activists and others who view the bicycle as a possibility for changing the way people get around their cities. So those are my main areas of research. I also write textbooks. I have a few popular anthropology textbooks. And my most recent project was, I just submitted the Oxford Dictionary of Cultural Anthropology. That was a big project that took me a few years to write. So I have a pretty broad array of interests beyond just my environmental research. Well, thank you. And speaking of bicycles, according to your colleagues, you've really been putting the pedal to the metal, so to speak, in the academic setting here at UVM. But I wanted to back up, and I know you're from the San Diego area for our conversation, which is a great ecosystem in of itself. But tell us about your path to UVM and how you ended up here. Why did you end up choosing the University of Vermont as a place to do your teaching and your research? Well, I feel very fortunate that I ended up here. This is a great institution. And so I left San Diego to go to college just down the road here at Dartmouth. And when I graduated, I remember thinking to myself, wow, I really love this part of the country. I would love to return here. Went off, did graduate school at Princeton. That was coming to an end when I won a pretty selective fellowship to come here. It's called a Henderson Fellowship for graduate students of color who are finishing their dissertations. And so I had that. One thing led to another. I guess I was a pretty good house guest and they offered me a tenure-track job. And so this was a really fortunate landing place for me. This institution is very hospitable to my image of what I want to do. And that's to be a teacher-scholar. I think we pride ourselves on our teacher-scholar model here. I love teaching. I love engaging undergraduates. And at the same time, we take scholarship very, very seriously. We're a powerful research institution as well. And that really fits my idea of the kind of institution I want to be at. Awesome. So in your work with students, if you can recollect on your career, perhaps tell us about a couple of particularly interesting students with whom you've worked and how they've maximized the educational opportunities here at Vermont. So I can think of two students that jump out immediately and they reflect different aspects of my teaching and my career here. So one student came with me to Oaxaca, Mexico. Now, some of you may know, we have a semester program in Oaxaca, Mexico. And I helped create that about 10 years ago. And so we would spend our first week in Oaxaca in a small Zapotec village. It was kind of a shock therapy for American students to be in this indigenous village. And we showed up one evening to this village that a couple of days into just being in Mexico, there was a young man named Keith who had never been outside the US. And here he is three days, two days after he lands in Mexico in this little village, literally no lights on. It's very dark. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere. He could be in Timbuktu as far as he's concerned. And we started sending the students off to their home stays for the evening. And boy, the look of panic in his eyes were really great. And I said, Keith, you gotta trust me. This is your pop quiz, buddy. You're gonna go and you're gonna have a really mind-blowing experience, but you gotta trust me on this. And I'll see you in the morning. And I just sort of pushed him on to the darkness. Now in the morning he comes and he's got an incredible sense of confidence and incredible sense of discovery. And he even said, I don't believe him, but he said, I had squirrel for breakfast. And I was like, Keith, this is such a difference. What happened? He said, Luis, I know I'm here because I need to learn. I need to open my worldview. I need to open my perspective. And man, that evening really did. This family opened their house to me and they were really hospitable. And I learned all kinds of things using my basic Spanish. And so that was the first week of the semester-long program. That really set him up to be open to radically different ways of being a whole different culture. And that to me was the power of learning in the field. And I love taking students out of the classroom. I do it all the time. I do a lot of service learning in the community. I do a lot of field-based ethnographic research with my students. And this was one extreme version of study abroad program that I did for a while. And I can see when students engage the world, we're not just learning about the world, we're learning in the world. And that to me is really powerful. Another student that comes to mind is a high flyer who just graduated a few years ago, came from Arkansas. She claims she was the first UVM student from Arkansas. No one's ever followed up, I wonder. But anyways, she comes from Arkansas, which is not a well-trodden path to here to UVM. But we got to know her very well. I got, she took a special program that I'm in called, it's of great interest to a lot of students in arts and sciences. We have these liberal arts learning community programs that are based in the dorms, but they have a strong academic piece. So Sammy was her name, she took that with me, got close to me and other faculty in that program. We knew she was a high flyer. And over the course of the next three and a half years after her first semester, she systematically got involved with faculty as a research assistant. She was very heavily relied on by some faculty members who could see her talent and smarts. She won a boring scholarship, which is a foreign language scholarship nationally competitive. And then when she graduated, she got a Fulbright to go to Kazakhstan. And she's been there now, I think she's just wrapping it up. But here's a student who really thrived in the environment we have, who had lots of opportunities to get these nationally competitive grants and to in her own way develop a real global view on the world. Awesome. Yeah, thank you for telling us about Keith and Sammy. I think those stories definitely help illustrate some of the pretty amazing students that we have here at the University of Vermont. But why don't you end by telling us, what are some of the benefits if you have folks out there considering University of Vermont among many other choices? What are some of the benefits in your opinion of a UVM education? Well, I think first of all, we have to say we've got world-class faculty here. I am impressed constantly by my colleagues and their curiosity, their creativity, their impact. But I also think it's the location is really important. And I don't mean that just because we're in this beautiful place on the sandwich between these mountains and this beautiful lake. That plays a role, but it's more the Vermont. Vermont is a scale that allows you as a student and me as a faculty member to engage in the big issues of our time and really get involved. We have access to our politicians. We have access to leaders in our community in ways that you don't necessarily get in other larger scale locations. And so what it means for me is I can create those high impact learning opportunities for my students. Where sometimes our work really counts. And so I teach a class every summer. It's kind of a fun and curious and exciting class. It's called Bicycles, Globalization and Sustainability. We study sort of bicycle politics and culture and transportation around the world. But here we do service learning. And my students have gotten very involved in the transportation system in Burlington through their research, through their service projects. And they've had a real impact on the city. And so the scale I think is a really critical element here. We have the strength of a research university. And we have the intimacy of the small scale liberal arts college. I think it's the best of both worlds. Awesome. And I always try to stress how incredible our faculty are but how accessible they are as well. So with that, I'm gonna ask you a final question. It's sort of a pop quiz question. What is your favorite film? My favorite film is, oh boy, you got me. Okay, it's called Te Rua. And it's a Maori Heist film. It's a film created by Maori activists and it's sort of about cultural appropriation. It's a very layered film told from the perspective of Maori storytellers. I'm an anthropologist. I'm very interested in these kinds of things. So yeah, it's called Te Rua. Awesome. I'll have to put that one on the list for sure. Well, we have run out of time but Professor Vanco, I wanna thank you again for just spending a few minutes with us and helping us discover more about what the University of Vermont has to offer. So with that, thank you guys for joining us for another episode of UVM Live at Five. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much.