Lena Strumos wins Anthropology Gold Medal Award

Meet Anthropology’s Gold Medal Award Winner, Lena Strumos

Every year Anthropology’s Gold Medal Award is given to the fourth-year anthropology student with the highest GPA in anthropology courses at the end of fall term. This year’s winner is Lena Strumos. Congratulations Lena!

Lena Strumos has recently completed her requirements for a Combined Honours Degree in Anthropology and Sociology. Her interest in anthropology surfaced during high school when she discovered anthropology courses. She was intrigued to learn about a discipline that would allow her to explore humans from a cultural perspective, their behaviours, and societies both past and present.

Lena’s research project for AN400 Doing Fieldwork explored the topic of complementary and alternative medicine. Certain practices in this field are governed by limiting laws, statutory provisions, and defamation from governing apparatuses. Lena examined how people in the natural medicine community respond to and mitigate these limitations to achieve legitimization.

Lena’s studies in anthropology were complemented and enriched by her courses in sociology and she found a point of connection between the two disciplines in law. Dr. Philips’ course AN243 Law Culture Society made her particularly interested in how laws differ among cultures. This fall she will apply to law school (Osgoode Hall and Ryerson) with the goal of becoming an international lawyer. She hopes to use her anthropological knowledge to advocate for human rights while also refraining from ethnocentrism.

May 06, 2020