Office Hours

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi everybody, my name is Giselle Kowalski and I'm the digital content producer here at Texas State University. You're listening to Office Hours, and today I'm here with Tyson. Tyson, what's up?

Tyson Taylor:
What's going on?

Giselle Kowalski:
How are you doing?

Tyson Taylor:
I'm doing very well. How are you?

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm great. So you got to speak with Dr. Kate Spradley from the Forensic Anthropology Department. What was that like?

Tyson Taylor:
It was super cool. Dr. Spradley is super personable and she was talking to me about her journey and the obstacles and challenges that she had to overcome. And I feel like the challenges she faced, like self-doubt and confidence issues, are really prevalent in students within my age. She went to discuss about the work she's doing right now and she's helping families along the border identify their lost loved ones. And to just hear about her journey and where she started from to what she's doing today was super inspiring and I hope to aspire to be someone like her one day.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, no, she's amazing. So we hope you guys enjoy this conversation between Tyson and Dr. Kate Spradley.

Tyson Taylor:
Hello and welcome to the Office Hours podcast. I'm your host, Tyson Taylor, and as always, we have a very special guest. With that being said, to begin, can you please tell us your name and what you teach here at Texas State University?

Kate Spradley:
My name is Kate Spradley, I'm a professor of biological anthropology. I teach forensic anthropology oriented class, skeletal methods, human variation, research design.

Tyson Taylor:
How long have you been teaching here at Texas State?

Kate Spradley:
I started here in 2008.

Tyson Taylor:
All right. Well, to get things flowing, we like to start off the Office Hours podcast with an icebreaker. So today's question is, if you could have one superpower for a whole day, what would it be and what would you do with it?

Kate Spradley:
I would probably be invisible.

Tyson Taylor:
What would you do with your superpower?

Kate Spradley:
In my line of work, I have a lot of questions that go unanswered and I often wish that I could just be in a room when discussions are going on, which would help me figure out all of the problems so we could propose better solutions.

Tyson Taylor:
All right. Well, we're going to take it kind of back to the beginning of just your journey in your life. Where did you grow up and what was it like growing up there?

Kate Spradley:
I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is not far from here, but also very different than Texas. Little Rock is a small town, but I didn't know that it was small, so it wasn't until I moved actually to Texas and I'm surrounded by San Antonio and Austin and I finally realized what it's like to be in a big city. But it was nice. There's lots of outdoorsy things to do, lots of hiking, lots of rivers. I enjoyed it.

Tyson Taylor:
Did you have any first couple of jobs growing up in Arkansas?

Kate Spradley:
Yes, my first job was working at a daycare center and then I worked at the zoo. It was the ZooperMarket and we sold a lot of Zooper foods as they called it. Then I got a job at a place called US Pizza. It was just a local place and I worked there through high school and partly through college as well.

Tyson Taylor:
You work in these jobs and are super responsible and you have to start thinking about your career in academics. And you ultimately picked a career in biological anthropology. What inspired you to pick a career in that?

Kate Spradley:
Well, I went to college and there was nothing that really resonated with me. I started off at LSU. That was too big for me, so I went back to Arkansas and I went to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I was taking classes just working towards the degree and back then you could just take classes that interested you, you didn't have to declare a major right away. So I took an anthropology class, and it was the first class that really resonated with me.
And during the class, a teacher held up, it was a cast of a Neanderthal bone. It was someone who had lived maybe 40,000 years ago and she started talking about, "Look, there's a healed fracture here. 40,000 years ago, this meant that someone actually cared for this man because someone wouldn't be able to survive with a broken leg that long ago unless someone was caring for them." She told us that the individual's about 40 years old, and I just thought to myself, "Wow, that is amazing that you can learn so much about one person and even part of a society just from looking at one bone." And that prompted me to take all the anthropology classes at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. And then I transferred up to the flagship university and got a degree, bachelor's of arts in anthropology, and then my master's, and then I just decided that I had not stopped learning, so I went and got my PhD.

Tyson Taylor:
So a lot of students nowadays struggle with feeling kind of lost when they first get to college, not knowing what kind of field or path they want to go down. So you kind of touched on already, can you just tell me a little bit more about how your experiences at the University of Arkansas shaped your interest?

Kate Spradley:
I went to the University of Arkansas, the flagship campus, to finish my degree and to get a master's. It was then a possibility of an internship. There was internship programs and the master's program, and I thought I would really love an internship and you could create your own. So I interned at the Arkansas State Medical Examiner's office with the medical examiner and the morgue techs and I just really thought, "This is for me. This is where I want to be." That experience, that internship really shaped me.

Tyson Taylor:
Can you tell me about some of the biggest challenges you faced during that time and how you overcame them?

Kate Spradley:
So I grew up in an environment where my parents didn't think I was very smart and nobody around me really thought I was very smart. I remember my high school guidance counselor told me and my parents, they did not think that I was going to be able to graduate from high school. I still don't remember why, because pretty sure I had passing grades. I mean, I graduated from high school.
So that was the first challenge, just not really believing in myself or thinking that I wasn't as good as other people. That was huge. And looking back, they were all wrong. I grew up in a house that was, we had enough money to eat, we had enough money to pay the bills, but there just wasn't a lot of encouragement in the house. That really impacted me a lot. So at first I thought, "I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I'm good enough to do this. I don't know if I'll get into graduate school." So they knew me at the University of Arkansas. They let me into the master's program there.
And then when it was time for the next step to apply for the Ph.D., I was really nervous because that was still in the back of my mind, "You're not good enough." But I think what I learned during my master's and my undergraduate as well, I really worked hard once I found something I wanted to do. That was what did it for me, and I thought, "OK, I am smart. And I think I've always been smart. I just haven't had the opportunity to be smart before." So that was something that was really challenging for me.
And because of that, I was also very shy, painfully shy. The first time I was given the opportunity to teach an introduction to Biological Anthropology Laboratory, which graduate students often taught, I remember one of the students looked at me and said, "Don't worry, Kate, we're just as nervous as you are." So it was very nice of him to say, and it made me feel a lot better.

Tyson Taylor:
I want to say thank you for opening up and telling us that it was a really inspiring story and I bet a lot of students can relate to that as well.
So now getting more into your work, correct me if I'm wrong, but biological anthropology kind of serves as a foundational aspect of your research. Could you fill me in with some of your more specific research interests and how they contribute to the broader field of biological anthropology?

Kate Spradley:
Sure. So biological anthropology is a subfield of anthropology in general, and anthropology is really the study of human variation over time and space, how all humans vary over time and space, culturally, biologically through material culture that's archaeology, linguistically. And so I specialize in biological anthropology. Again, I was interested in the skeleton that's in the biological realm.
So with that, I study what's called population affinity estimation. So when forensic anthropologists, when usually many times this is how it happens, a deer hunter finds somebody in the woods and the question is, "Who is this person and how long have they been here?" One of the estimates is, "Where in the world does this person come from?" Are they socially considered white? Are they socially considered Black or Hispanic? Or are they from somewhere else in the world? And all of the standards in forensic anthropology were only applicable to people that are considered Black and white. And I thought that really doesn't fit the population surrounding us. So I think we need to do a better job. So I started working with a forensic anthropologist in Arizona and collecting a lot of data on migrants who were coming from Mexico and Central America trying to improve methods of identification for individuals considered Hispanic.

Tyson Taylor:
And your research involves using data from human skeletons for many different purposes. Can you explain how you collect and analyze this data and what challenges you face in the process?

Kate Spradley:
That's a great question. So when I was a Ph.D. student, my advisor sent me to this medical examiner's office in Arizona and I collected data on these migrants that were dying. And I went there to measure skeletons. But when I left, I left with a lot more understanding of it's not just data, they're people. You always think that, but it's not until you really experience it. And I asked a lot of questions when I was in Arizona, "Why are so many people dying here? Why are they coming across? Why are they so hard to identify? What are the policies that are surrounding all of these migrant deaths?" And you realize that this is a really big issue. It's a really serious issue. We're no longer just trying to collect data to improve methods of identification or to improve my research so I can get tenure and promotion, but it really inspired me in a way to, "OK, we've got to do something to help this situation."
And that's really what brought me to where I am today. I do a lot of humanitarian and human rights forensic anthropology. I had no idea I would be doing any of those things, but it's just where I wound up and it's what I do now.

Tyson Taylor:
You kind of touched on it a little bit, but your involvement in this big research project, OpID. Can you tell me about that project, what it entails, your experience working on it?

Kate Spradley:
Yes. So I direct something called Operation Identification. It's the humanitarian arm of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State. So Operation ID or OpID started in really 2012 when you have the surge of Central Americans coming in to Texas. It used to be that most migrants died in Arizona, but Texas surpassed in 2012. And individuals are being found and buried without taking DNA samples, without any fingerprints, without any investigation into the identification of these individuals. So they were found buried and administratively disappeared to never be found again. And so some of my colleagues and I thought, "This can't be what the counties are doing, what law enforcement is doing." So we decided to go and see if we could help. And that started with exhuming these remains and taking DNA samples, working towards identification.
And then I met a person who recently died. His name is Eduardo Canales, he was an organizer and an activist, and he put water stations out to prevent death. We immediately started working together to try to change policies as well. And that's something I also thought I would never be doing, changing policies, working with individuals in the legislature to change laws we've changed. We've changed some laws that helped to better account for how many people are dying in Texas because we didn't have any accurate counts and we can't possibly provide any solutions unless we have an accurate accounting of what the problem is. So there's been a lot of challenges along the way too numerous to even list them all on this podcast here. But I describe it mostly like you're walking down a trail and then all of a sudden someone puts a boulder in front of you, so you find a way to go around the boulder and then someone throws out a bunch of marbles so you can't walk, and then you find a way to sweep away the marbles.
So there's a lot of obstacles and there's a lot to overcome around every corner. For example, DNA is the most effective way of identifying somebody. I think if you've turned on a television, you've seen a forensic show that will tell you that. And the people, the families of the missing living in Mexico and Central America were not able to submit DNA to our federal DNA system, which meant that no one was going to be identified, and that was just FBI policy. They weren't going to change it. And so Eddie Canales and I and our partners in the Forensic Border Coalition, we requested a thematic hearing at the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights and a Civil Society. We requested, begged, and pleaded with the federal government and the FBI if they would change their policy.
And several years... Well, it actually took about seven years later, seven years, but the FBI actually did working with a local laboratory here in Texas, they created a standalone humanitarian database that allows DNA from families to be compared against our federal database. So now we're starting to get a lot of identifications, and that takes a long time. And it was a lot of work, a lot of meetings, but we did it. And now there's so many more families that can have an answer to what happened to their loved one. They can get those remains back. So there's challenges around every corner, but what I've learned is when you work with a group of people and you all have the same goal, you can get there. It might take a long time, but you can get there.

Tyson Taylor:
I mean, can you just talk to me like, what does it mean to you just personally knowing you're making this big of an impact on the world?

Kate Spradley:
That's a great question. It feels good. I'm often so busy writing grants to keep this project going, to keep my staff afloat, to just keep it moving forward, that I don't step back enough and look at this. And when I do step back and I see what we're doing, it is really impressive to me, that one day some people thought, "Hey, how can we help?" And now we're here. We are educating counties in best practices of managing the dead. We're helping so many families get answers and getting their loved ones back so they can bury them and have a place to visit.
It feels really good to do something that is so helpful because sometimes I think in a university we can get really wrapped up in our research and really wrapped up in publications and presentations. But being able to take what you do inside the university and apply it to something that's so helpful, it's really the most fulfilling thing I've ever done in my life. And I do it with many, many people. It is not me alone. It is working with people inside the university and outside the university and globally.

Tyson Taylor:
You're also currently focusing on migration, sex, and ancestry estimation within forensic anthropology. Why is that so important to you and how do you see this work influencing the field in the coming years?

Kate Spradley:
So I really started out my research with sex and affinity estimation because they're really important. If you don't estimate the sex of a skeleton properly, and because sex is on a continuum, we're not going to estimate everyone properly, but if you can't do it appropriately, then that's maybe 50% of the population you're not looking at when you're trying to identify an individual. And if you can narrow that down further by estimating, "OK, this person is African American, or this person is Asian American, or actually this person is probably from somewhere in Europe or somewhere in Africa," that really narrows it down even further. So those are two major components of what we call the biological profile. And if you don't get those right, you're really going to get everything else wrong.

Tyson Taylor:
So what has studying the dead taught you about the living?

Kate Spradley:
That's a great question, and I think it's complicated and multifaceted. I have learned a lot. So studying the dead is very, in my experience, it's easier, first of all, than studying the living because I know I can't hurt the person in front of me. I can only help them. But especially in the context of how I'm working now with all of these migrant deaths, with families searching for everybody, it has really taught me to appreciate the time that I have with my family right now because so many of the families of the missing in Mexico, Central America, all over the world, they see their loved one one day or hear from them on the phone and then they're just disappeared the next day and they never hear from them again. I can't imagine what that would be like.
Sometimes people ask me, "Oh, you must work all the time because you're really dedicated to what you do." Yes, I work and I think about work a lot, but I try to put in just a regular work week, and evenings and weekends are for my family because I know the families of the missing would give everything to just have one more day with their loved ones. So it's made me just appreciate life a lot more.

Tyson Taylor:
I mean, just looking back at what you've done, your journey to where you are today, if you could go back to your 18, 20-year-old self, is there any advice you would give yourself?

Kate Spradley:
I probably would've told my 18-year-old self to believe in yourself more. Just to believe in yourself more, you're not stupid, you can do whatever you set your mind to. And don't be afraid. If something seems like too big of a problem, don't shy away from it. Just face it head-on and celebrate the small victories along the way. You can't have a huge victory overnight, but you can have a lot of small victories until you get to that big one.

Tyson Taylor:
You've inspired me. I mean, when I came into college, I was undecided. I always kind of had a lot of self-doubt. And you're really inspiring me because you're kind of in that similar boat and here you are today changing the world and making a huge impact on society and everything else. So I want to thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a great episode, and hope to see you around this semester.

Kate Spradley:
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here today.

Tyson Taylor:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Make sure you tune in next time to learn more about the experiences of our amazing Texas State faculty. Also remember to follow us on our social media, TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the host and guests, not of Texas State University. Once again, I'm Tyson and I'll see you next time.