LaTroya A. Hester
Social Impact Communicator | Trainer | Founder
Virginia Nazarea
Biography for UGA's Public Service Awards
Virginia Nazarea, professor and Director of the Ethnoecology and Biodiversity Lab, has made unique contributions to UGA’s Department of Anthropology since 1994. She demonstrates her commitment to service-learning by developing classrooms without walls for students, the community, and the world.
Her scholarship of engagement centers on the place-based pedagogy of “memory banking.” This approach, inspired by her own connection to the Philippines, was developed in response to a need to systematically collect indigenous crop varieties, their genetic material, and the cultural knowledge that they hold.
Nazarea develops her courses at UGA as an opportunity to involve her undergraduate and graduate students in research on documentation, recovery, and application of knowledge for cultural resilience. She and her students established The Southern Seed Legacy (SSL) in order to help communities preserve southern crop heirlooms; aided the indigenous peoples of Cotacachi, Ecuador to prevent the loss of their ancestor’s practices; helped to document the lives of those who attended an African-American log schoolhouse in Taliaferro County, Ga. during segregation; and organized Rabun County’s oral archive of Appalachian culture.
For the past 14 years, she has dedicated her passion and expertise to responding to the needs of diverse peoples and to finding innovative ways to preserve their heritages. Nazarea is both a Praxis Award and William A. Owens Creative Research Award winner. She has brought almost one million dollars to the University through her research, and she is frequently called upon nationally as keynote speaker and internationally as a program advisor. She has authored several books on cultural memory and continues to offer courses such as Landscapes and Memories (ANTH 4015/6015) at UGA.