Digital Commons Network^™

Every Screen Is A Window And A Mirror: How Social Media Strengthens Ties Within The Lgbtq+ Community, Jourdan Sadir Pérez

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Forming The Kyrgyz Community Of Chicago: Identity, Organizations, And Institutions, Jonah Victor Sorby Roth

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project is an anthropological examination of the Kyrgyz community living in Chicago. It involves a deep examination of who the Kyrgyz are as an ethnic group, how they have developed a shared identity, and how this identity forms the basis of their community in Chicago. It also includes an ethnographic examination of two formal organizations—a nonprofit and a restaurant—that are run by Kyrgyz people and serve the Kyrgyz population, and a similar examination of Kyrgyz-Chicagoans’ relationships to institutions. After analyzing the complex web of relations between community, organizations, and institutions, I argue that informal organizations and institutions are especially …

Thrift : A Respelling Of Home, Penelope B. Bernal

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The first commercial thrift stores were established in the late 19th and early 20th century. Labeled as ‘charity stores’, the first thrift stores were tied to philanthropic missions, creating a bond between charity and capitalism. However, thrift stores have expanded beyond philanthropy and have evolved into community spaces. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s A Respelling of my Name, the goal of this project is to provide the reader with an intimate view of thrifting through the conversation of three main topics : As Is, One-of-a-Kind, and Community.

The Rome Of The West: An Ethnographic Play With Music, Clayton Roma Bragg Webb

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

Dreaming Of Nuclear Futures: History, Toxicity, Panic, And Motherhood In Contemporary Pro-Nuclear Advocacy, Mikel Rand Inchausti

Senior Projects Spring 2023

What is the future of nuclear energy? What futures do we imagine in living alongside nuclear energy and nuclear waste? Who is advocating for those worlds? Read to find out. Enjoy!

Nothing Happens Here, Kai Diego Parcher-Charles

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Ontological Security And Environmental Hegemony In American Suburbs, Finlay Dunn Mackenzie

Senior Projects Fall 2023

This project briefly examines the history of suburbanization in the United States and proposes a theory for its durability as a form of housing its roles as an idealized source of ontological security and its nature as an expression of the hegemony of capital.

Daughters Of The Commandment And Their Mothers: An Ethnographic Exploration Of Bat Mitzvahs In Metro Atlanta, Maya E. Lavender

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

“A Certain Brauch:” German-Georgian Palatine And Rhenish Immigrant Houses In Columbia County, New York And Their Vernacular Architectural Roots, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this archaeological and architectural survey of 18th Century Palatine and Rhenish immigrant houses in New York's Hudson Valley, specifically in Columbia County, I track the development of three houses from their earliest vernacular forms to those touched by the Georgian influence. The Georgian worldview, stemming from European Enlightenment ideals, began permeating colonial American society in the 18th Century. It's influence first began to touch the wealthy and elite most connected with mother Europe, and then trickled into more common society. I chronicle and analyze Germantown, NY's Reformed Sanctity Church Parsonage, Germantown, NY's Simeon Rockefeller House, and Clermont, NY's "Stone …

Zoom As A Virtual Conduit: The Possibilities And Limits Of Intimacy In Remote Instruction, Ruby Rachel Harte

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

“Nappy Hair, Don’T Care”: Storytelling Through Strands, Sasha D. Onyango

Senior Projects Spring 2022

There is a Kiswahili phrase that goes “intelligence/the mind is like hair, everyone has their own’. Following that logic, how Kenyan women relate to their hair is unique to the individual yet there remains collective and shared experiences. The questions that I raise throughout the paper explore: 1) how images and narratives of hair throughout Kenyan history have influenced the way women today understand how they interact with their hair, 2) the ways Kenyan women are taught about hair grooming and the journey of learning to care for their hair, and 3) Kenyan women’s understanding of their hair and how …

Accommodation And Coping In Medieval Catholic England: A Historical Dramaturgy Casebook For The Chester Mystery Cycle’S Play 14: Christ At The House Of Simon The Leper, Christ And The Moneylenders, And Judas’ Plot, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this historically focused dramaturgy casebook for the medieval Catholic Chester Mystery Cycle's Play 14, Christ at the House of Simon the Leper, Christ and the Moneylenders, and Judas’ Plot, I offer suggestions for Play 14's production as it might have appeared in the cycle's final year of performance, 1575. I contextualize and grapple with the play's antisemitisms, and also offer a brief history of antisemitism in medieval Europe. I also analyze Play 14 and the Chester Mystery Cycle for their rhetorical appeals to the medieval vernacular language, contexts, and events, as well as their anachronistic temporal and geographic …

Of Archives And Ghosts, Zara Ruth Franke

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This project, is about Bard's history of ghosts, subcultural lore and what makes something "home" to you. In a place and time, in students life, when things seem dispossessed and temporal. As the subtitle of my written sproj suggests:Temporal spaces of home for Bard students now and then, their connections with each other and how we process memories, ghosts and subcultural lore.

My installation is about these moments in life, when everything seems to freeze for a second, hold still, and you feel like this moment is forever but also not at all. "Ephemerality", in academic, theory terms but also …

Pouring The Tea At Yum Cha: Redefining Chinatown’S Boundaries During Covid-19, Lance Sum

Senior Projects Fall 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Perimeters And Pods: Crisis, Collective Action, And Small Towns, Ruth F. Kohl

Senior Projects Spring 2021

This project examines the communities of small towns and the ways that these social dynamics between friends, neighbors, and coworkers shift in times of conflict. Through the explorations of a historic labor strike in a small town quarry, a prohibitionist raid on that same town's supply of alcohol, and the social relationships between Bard students in Tivoli amidst COVID, this project investigates how these connections between people operate.

"Useful Wooden Toys": Skateboarding As A Tool For Nyc Youth Advocacy, Simon Len Nichoson

Senior Projects Fall 2021

My senior thesis explores the role of skateboarding in youth development, and its further implications within the realm of youth advocacy and activism. A large part of my project involves ethnographic fieldwork in which I participate in a skate clinic for the Harold Hunter Foundation (HHF), a non-profit organization that primarily serves at-risk youth in New York City through skateboarding-related programming. Founded in memory of professional skateboarder Harold Hunter, the foundation also seeks to provide support and advocacy for the skateboarding community. While practicing self-reflexivity, I draw from the field of halfie anthropology, given that I am an avid skateboarder …

Moving By Al-Meekrobas: Interrogating The Binary Of Informal And Formal Transport, Alejandra Eliana Guzman

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Entangled Roots: Knowledge Systems And Conservation In The Tongass National Forest, Lily Geneva Lustig

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is the world’s largest remaining temperate rainforest, sequestering up to eight percent of all the carbon stored in the lower forty-eight states’ national forests combined. Home to the Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida peoples for over ten-thousand years, the Tongass's protection is central for knowledge production and livelihood. Despite the Tongass's importance for local communities and for mitigating climate change, the policies that restrict extractive industries like logging in the forest are constantly contested by United States politicians, putting the forest and the people who rely on it in jeopardy. With a re-centering of Indigenous scientific knowledge …

Mountains To Main Streets: Negotiating Authenticity In Appalachia’S 21st Century Moonshine Distilleries, Ty Jonathan Holtzman

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Cock: Essays And Illustrations On Attention, Accessibility, And Deep Play, Buck Holbrook Buettner

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Clifford Geertz's theory of "deep play"--most thoroughly explored in his 1973 essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"--states that acts of recreation and sport carry within them the greater values, traumas, and taboos of the individual cultures which practice them.

An illustrated anthology, Cock: Essays and Illustrations on Attention, Accessibility, and Deep Play elaborates upon Geertz's pre-established definition of deep play by applying its terminology to cultural practices beyond the Balinese cockfight, analyzing brief parentheticals and asides in Geertz's text, and exploring methods of making the greater anthropological field more accessible via multimodal anthropological publication. Also, it is filled …

Opening The Fridge: An Exploration Of Mutual Aid And Community Care In Queens, New York, Caitlin Hamilton

Senior Projects Spring 2021

This project embarks on an exploration of Queens Mutual Aid Network, which was started in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 crisis. This group has provided food assistance, unemployment support, help procuring prescription medicine, and a digital space for community networking to the people of the extended Queens community. I also analyze the Corona community fridge and its implications for community care networks in the wake of overwhelming need. As part of my research, I spent time conversing with community activists about these efforts, and made food deliveries to the community fridges in my area. I then contextualize these …

Rewriting The Haggadah: Judaism For Those Who Hold Food Close, Rose Noël Wax

Senior Projects Spring 2020

American Jews, specifically those who do not observe, often turn towards food as a performance of Jewish identity, both publicly and privately. Longing for roots, these Jews reach for a piece of Jewish culture that can make them not only feel Jewish, but also grounded in a longstanding tradition that explicitly ties Judaism to a dynamic food culture. In doing so they invent traditions, creating habits sometimes loosely based in prescribed or familial tradition, sometimes not at all. In this way, food, through invented traditions, allows modern non- observant American Jews to make their Jewish identity tangible.

The Veilmakers, Emily Nicole Giangiulio

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Joint Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature and The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Rezistance: Diné Grassroots Organization And Modes Of Activism, Eric Robert Dougherty

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This ethnography looks at themes of Indigeneity and activism as it exists in the everyday realities of young people living in or around the Navajo reservation in the southwest United States. Through work-related projects of hogan construction, land reclamation, watershed management, and language restoration Navajo youth are given opportunities to take control of their present circumstances and imagine a different future for themselves and their families. Besides work, youth and activism are constituted through other mediums and spaces that allow people to express who they are, what they care about, and why these things are important to them. The consistent …

This Has To Meme Something: Social Polarization And Internet Memes, Adrianna Lyn Candor

Senior Projects Fall 2020

I am analyzing the ways in which memes function on social media, as a reflection of culture. Do memes fulfill a role of expression for people's identities and cultures in society? If so, how do they fulfill that role for various groups of peoples, and what are the implications?

Affects Of Elimination: Foundations Of Collectivity, Oskar Coltrane Dye-Furstenberg

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This paper examines specific indigenous social movements in the United States. Two examples are considered: the occupation of the decommissioned Fort-Lawton, Seattle military base in 1970 and the contemporary movement for missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW). Both are examples of resistance to assimilation and ‘elimination’ in the form of collective action by indigenous persons. The paper explores the relation between coming together as a group and responding to the experience of violence, injury, or suffering. This dynamic between collective formation and shared affective experience constructs the foundation upon which these movements imagine and work to enact a social and …

Ward Manor: Care For The Elderly And Digital Memory, Anne Tilghman Comer

Senior Projects Spring 2019

The Bard College campus dormitory known as Ward Manor has a rich and fascinating history. Using ethnographic research and multimodal methodology, this study has revealed a heretofore unknown story of the residents who lived out their lives in a collective residential community and are buried in the Ward Manor Cemetery. The story of this facility is explored as part of a more significant social and philanthropic endeavor within the United States in the early twentieth century. No longer forgotten, this critical aspect of Bard College is brought to life through this research.

Vibrations, Memory, And Identity: The Embodiment Of Tambú And The Afro-Curacaoan Identity In Curacao, Jazondré Kaniela Renee Gibbs

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Reproducing Culture Through Terroir: Following Raclette Du Valais From The Alps To The Consumer, Sophia Rose

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Sustainable Paths, Cailin Flores Drew-Morin

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.