Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"So Long As I Can Read": Farm Women's Reading Experiences In Depression-Era South Dakota, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

During the Great Depression, with conditions grim, entertainment scarce, and educational opportunities limited, many South Dakota farm women relied on reading to fill emotional, social, and informational needs. To read to any degree, these rural women had to overcome multiple obstacles. Extensive reading (whether books, farm journals, or newspapers) was limited to those who had access to publications and could make time to read. The South Dakota Free Library Commission was valuable in circulating reading materials to the state's rural population. In the 1930s the commission collaborated with the USDA's Extension Service in a popular reading project geared toward South …

Boost Or Blight?’ Graffiti Writing And Street Art In The ‘New’ New Orleans, Doreen Piano

Doreen M Piano

Before the storm, responses to graffiti writing and street art in New Orleans were typical of other urban environments where it was viewed as being “out of place” (Keith, 1999), “a spectacle of filth” (Conquergood, 2004), involving what Ferrell (1993, p. 37) describes as a “war of the walls.” David (2005) describes the political aspects of street art in New Orleans as “visual resistance” (p. 233), a term that captures relations of power among graffiti producers, their products, and the effects of their actions (p. 233). However, attempts to eliminate graffiti and street art by enforcing stricter penalties, encouraging neighborhood …

Fighting Over The Founders: How We Remember The American Revolution, Andrew Schocket

Andrew M Schocket

The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in U.S. history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also …

Kokkyo Wo Koete Omoi Wo Tsutaeru: Seikatsu Tsudurikatata Kyoiku To Mekishiko Kei Imin No Kodomotachi / Sending A Message Across The Border: Life Experience Writing And Children Of Mexican Immigrants, Kaoru Miyazawa

Kaoru Miyazawa

This article focuses on how the principles of Seikatsu Tsuzurikata Kyoiku, Life Experience Writing Education, can assist understanding literacy practices of migrant children in Pennsylvania.

Framing Farming: Communication Strategies For Animal Rights, Carrie P. Freeman

Carrie P. Freeman

Journalism In A Pr World, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.

Michael I Niman Ph.D.

Mike Niman discusses the future of journalism in a PR-dominated communication environment. In particular, he examines the migration of talent from journalism to the PR industry, the collapse of mainstream journalism and the role of an emergent alternative media as American journalism goes through metamorphosis from what it was to what it could become. Journalism is a social good that should equip people to understand and resist spin. Niman argues that mainstream American journalism, rather than rising to this challenge, has transparently succumbed to serving as an arm of the corporate PR industry, thus laying the groundwork for its own …

The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh

Michael D Sharbaugh

Water sources in the United States' New England region are laden with arsenic. Particularly during North America's colonial period--prior to modern filtration processes--arsenic would make it into the colonists' drinking water. In this article, which evokes the biocultural evolution paradigm, it is argued that colonists offset health risks from the contaminant (arsenic poisoning) by ingesting copious amounts of seven spices--cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, vanilla, and ginger. The inclusion of these spices in fall and winter recipes that hail from New England would therefore explain why many Americans associate them not only with the region, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, …

Tax The Rich, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.

Michael I Niman Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

The Epistemology Of Ethnography: Method In Queer Anthropology, Margot D. Weiss

Margot Weiss

This essay explores methodological dilemmas in queer anthropology by reviewing three recent queer ethnographies: Mary Gray's Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America; Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic; and Gloria Wekker's The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. The essay aims to illuminate the epistemology of queer studies more broadly by focusing on a key paradox of ethnographic method: the binary of theory and data that is simultaneously made and unmade in ethnographic research and writing. In a newly transnational queer studies, ethnography …

Our March Toward Intolerance, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.

Michael I Niman Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

Politics And Language, Max Skidmore, Andrew Cline

Max J. Skidmore

A collection of essays dealing from various points of view with the political effects of language usage

“‘The City I Used To...Visit’: Tourist New Orleans And The Racialized Response To Hurricane Katrina”, Lynnell Thomas

Lynnell Thomas

This article explores the connections between New Orleans’s late 20th-century tourism representations and the mainstream media coverage and national images of the city immediately following Hurricane Katrina. It pays particular attention to the ways that race and class are employed in both instances to create and perpetuate a distorted sense of place that ignore the historical and contemporary realities of the city’s African American population.