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Dr. Bill Roberts,
Interview with CITL Fall 2021
Dr. Bill Roberts at the Lycee Malick Sy in Thies, Senegal. Photo by Maribeth Boeke Ganzell.
Bill Roberts, Professor of Anthropology, is in his 31st year of teaching at St. Mary’s. Professor Roberts has created and led numerous study abroad trips for St. Mary’s students and in previous sabbaticals he spent time conducting research in The Gambia, in particular. He’s also a foundational faculty member of the new Public Health Inquiry, now in its second year. When we met with him in the fall of 2021 he’d recently returned from a sabbatical which he’d spent focusing on local public health crises during the backdrop of the global pandemic. Dr. Roberts teaches Anthropology, Public Health, African Diaspora Studies, as well as Environmental Studies.
CITL: Could you share what you were working on during your recent sabbatical?
Bill Roberts: Well, there's a couple of projects. Throughout the sabbatical and starting even before the sabbatical became official, I was part of a COVID-19 science group that met regularly with a number of faculty across campus and medical and public health personnel in St. Mary’s county. Of the Covid-19 topics I looked at, domestic violence was one, and another was the mental health impacts that were reported, and I started to get into some of the misinformation around vaccines. I learned a lot with this group; we would meet on a regular basis and talk. We were all looking at different different topics and different issues in terms of the impact of COVID and trying to understand the pandemic. Part of my sabbatical proposal was that I was really interested in domestic violence and looking at that as a public health issue. I learned a lot, but one of the things the pandemic affected was my approach as an anthropologist, which draws heavily on ethnography. The way that I usually do ethnography involves me being on site in person. A lot of that just went out the window with the pandemic.
In researching domestic violence, I looked at data reported from other countries and from locales and states across the nation, so I had two sets of feeds. Femicide, for example, increased during the pandemic. Alcohol consumption increased a lot during the pandemic. So, looking at domestic violence, one of the problems was the lockdowns meant that people were locked at home with their potential abuser. I read a lot of reports – sometimes with notable increases – associated with the lockdowns. And there was an increase in violence, in general, and in terms of homicide, too. I think domestic violence is a big public health issue that many people don’t want to talk about. I think it's one of those issues that, like food insecurity, is stigmatized; there's a lot of stigma and shame associated with it. Those are among the thorniest public health issues that any society faces, made more challenging because of the stigma.
Around January last year, I was introduced to the chairperson for the Feed St. Mary's local food bank, Dr. Linda Lymas. The Feed St. Mary’s Food Bank just got underway a few months before the pandemic broke out, so they hadn't even really had a public launching yet. It turns out what they were really interested in and thought that I might be able to help them with is what I would have called in an earlier period in my life – when I used to do a lot of consulting work internationally – monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and what the SMCM faculty knows as assessment. The basic question asks, “what difference is this making?” So, I started working on that. And that got me actually into the pantries and into the St. Mary’s Caring soup kitchen during the pandemic, from about January 2021 on through the summer. That was really satisfying. And it turned out that I continued to follow the domestic violence question but that the issue of food insecurity is probably what I'm more focused on now. And it fits really nicely with the public and environmental health inquiry. As it turns out, the Healthy St. Mary's Partnership, which is coordinated through the St. Mary's County Health Department, periodically - about every five years - pulls all of these agencies and concerned citizens together and comes up with a five year plan: What are the major health situations that we want to do something about? And one of the priorities for the Environmental Health Action Team is addressing food insecurity in St. Mary’s county and reducing it by 10% over the next five years.
The other thing I did was look at what impact the PEACE (Promoting Educational And Cultural Exchange) program that I directed in West Africa had been. I sent out a survey to hundreds of people. I asked Gambian and American participants that had been to The Gambia, all these years later, about what that experience meant to them.
CITL: And you’re still working with the Feed St. Mary’s since returning from sabbatical?
Bill Roberts: Actually, they elected me to the board! So, yes. I'm focusing on monitoring and evaluation and trying to connect them with Healthy St. Mary's partnerships. I also sit on the Transportation Advisory Committee for the county, so I brought up food insecurity there. One of the things I've always enjoyed is, you know, making connections and bringing people and their ideas together. I'm also trying to get some students involved in that effort. I had a couple of students who were interested in working with me on the pantries. I think this is going to be a long-term project. It actually went back to the pre-pandemic period, when I was working with a couple of students on their capstone projects in anthropology, and topics related to food and food insecurity on campus came up through the ethnographic research they were doing. There's a lot of nuance in terms of what the experience of food insecurity is. And we need to figure out, what does that mean? What does that experience look like – in St. Mary's County and on the St. Mary's College campus? So, those are some of the things I do in my spare time.
CITL: Do you have any memorable teaching moments that you wouldn't mind sharing?
Bill Roberts: What I think is some of the most profound learning is when anybody, faculty, students, whoever are open and put themselves in new experiences, new places, new discussions, that maybe takes them out of their comfort zone. When you’re made to think a little bit more and figure some things out. That was one of the things that I loved about the Gambia. There were many times in the Gambia where I had great experiences with students, connecting them with Gambians. Gambians sharing their Gambian knowledge and their Gambian experience with the students was really great. That was a particular contribution I was able to make here at the college because of my background and my connections. We have had, I think, over all of those years, some really good experiences. And sometimes I think I learned just as much from the students. I have to reflect on my interactions with them and what I think is valuable for them. I have to try to create those experiences in which they'll not only understand something but be able to grab hold of some benefits as opposed to just “kind of understanding” but find it's just a matter of time before they forget it, and move on to the next thing.
Dr. Bill Roberts on Goree Island
CITL: What's your favorite topic to teach? And why?
Bill Roberts: I really enjoy my language and culture class, but increasingly I really enjoy teaching Introduction to Anthropology; I've got such a good group of students there. They're so nice; many of them thank me on the way out of the classroom. And I think, more than anything, it's not so much about trying to identify the introductory elements that students need to know – I mean, there is some of that because you have to do some scaffolding – but it’s about what I can do to increase their curiosity in Anthropology and Anthropology’s approach to understanding the human experience. Because when students are, or when anybody is, curious about something, then they'll put the effort in to learn more about it. So, trying to develop an anthropological imagination, to imagine their approach to something. To make people more curious about this amazing world we live in. That's what I’ve tried to do.
CITL: Tell us about your favorite teacher.
Bill Roberts: My first year as an undergraduate, I took a course, Introduction to Geology. It was a full year that you committed to; the courses were taught one semester at a time. I had this Geology faculty member, Dr. Gerald (Jerry) Johnson. That guy at eight o'clock in the morning, was so energetic, and so positive – and his enthusiasm! This was a big lecture class, so it wasn't through discussion or anything like that. I just admired his way; it was just so evident in his passion for what he was doing. When I arrived here at St. Mary's College, in the fall of 1991, Jerry Johnson was involved with the lead coffin project. After all of these years– I had graduated from William and Mary in 1977– so 24 years later, he was still there, still involved and still active.
I had some really good teachers! I had one, my academic advisor Carol Ballingall, who was supportive of me. Between my junior and senior year as an undergraduate she enabled me to go to Central and South America, to basically do my own version of SMP research. That experience was really what inspired the whole Gambia and Guatemala study abroad programs at St. Mary’s. I remembered how important that was for me, and how transformative that was for me, as an undergraduate, and what that did for my confidence. But mostly I just had this self-questioning as an undergraduate, like, “Am I really just learning this stuff, just to pass these classes, just to get these grades? That doesn't seem sufficient. It doesn't seem like that's enough reason to be putting all this effort into this. There's got to be something more.” And so I found a project and I had to figure out how to do it. I had to work out all of the problems and I did it and learned a lot, and learned a lot about myself ,and grew a lot. So, that was what inspired me to make the effort and to take the steps that I did to try to create something similar for St. Mary’s students.
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