Carrie Dennett

Instructor

Biography

Dr. Carrie Dennett is an anthropologist whose teaching portfolio focuses on – from an interdisciplinary perspective – the relationship between social institutions and social justice, particularly topics of intersectionality, discrimination, and inequality as they relate to issues of gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, language, and race. As an instructor, she seeks to model enthusiasm for learning, promote the power of knowledge, and distill the importance of developing understanding and compassion for others. In the local community, she serves on the Board of Directors for the Rural Red Deer Restorative Justice Society.

Beyond the walls of Red Deer Polytechnic, Carrie is actively involved in archaeological research. She has contributed to projects in Canada, Honduras, and Nicaragua, with a current focus on northwestern Costa Rica. In the lab, she specializes in the compositional analysis of pottery from Central America utilizing complementary petrographic and geochemical (NAA) analyses as part of an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Ronald Bishop of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, exploring pre-Columbian communities of practice. Alone and in collaboration with various colleagues, Carrie has presented and published nationally and internationally on diverse topics related to this and other research.

A strong focus on the development of interdisciplinary research design has led to engagement in a range of other collaborative scholarly experiences over the years. These include two years (2012-2014) as the Resident Mayer Fellow at Colorado’s Denver Art Museum working with the Jan and Frederick Mayer Costa Rican collection, and a postdoctoral scholarship (2015-2016) at the Artic Institute of North America focused on a publication examining Iñupiaq-speaking Nunamiut communities of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. For many years (2007–2015) Carrie also served as Managing Editor for the peer-reviewed journal Ancient Mesoamerica (Cambridge University Press).

Education

Ph.D. (Archaeology), University of Calgary, 2016
M.A. (Anthropology), Trent University, 2007
B.Sc. hons. (Anthropology), Trent University, 2004
Post Baccalaureate (Criminology), Simon Fraser University, 2001
B.A. hons. (Psychology/Sociology), Trent University, 1999