Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Queer Rural Youth Online: A Digital Ethnography, Joseph Robert Burns

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis is based on digital ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 within Queer subcommunities on the social media sites Reddit and Twitter (now known as X) and data collected from interviews with Queer rural youth members of these communities. The data reveal that social media use directly influences the lives and actions of Queer rural youth, who use the space to build social connections, shape their personal identities, and seek advice pertaining to their in-person lives and decisions. By using these spaces, Queer rural youth build both bonding and bridging social capital, learn to subvert restrictions to their Internet access, …

Confronting Web3 Technology: Opportunities, Challenges And Community Formation, Christopher-John Rogers

Dissertations and Theses

The emergence of blockchain technology created an entire industry of innovative new digital assets--or tokens--and diverse new fields of expertise founded on ideological aspirations of a new World Wide Web that reimagines digital value transfer through decentralization and disintermediation. Experimentation in the so-called "Web3" industry produces rich new fields of ethnographic study revealing the experiences of diverse individuals navigating novel technological capabilities which give way to new avenues of identity formation, community building, and ecosystem creation. These exciting new endeavors come with difficult challenges threatening the realization of ambitious visions for digital futures. Ethnographic research conducted through discourse analysis, participant …

"Where Is Your Accent From?": The Voice Of My Identity, Robert Northman

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

This essay probes the role of language in how it contributes to the construct of one's identity. The author discusses lived experiences centered on the the perceptions of accented English that is actually African American Vernacular English. The essay explores how these experiences were formed and how they developed over the course of the author's lifetime. The author also discusses ways in which language has caused both comfort and conflict, and provides a glimpse into a unique perspective that can contribute to a greater understanding of the power and importance of language.

People And Power: Person-First Language Usage And The Criminal Justice System, Casey E. Orr

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

Language is power. Word choice and terminology, especially those referring to people, are expressions of societal norms and institutional power. Dehumanizing crime-first terms and labels are abundant and common in criminal justice contexts despite being protested by system-involved individuals and activists. Instead, many advocate for person-first terms wherein identifying language emphasizes an individual’s humanity. With a peace-focused anthropological framework, this paper presents the case for person-first language in criminal justice contexts. It is evident that adopting first-person language usage regarding the criminal justice system is necessary after analyzing and considering the multiple sources, such as the voices of those who …

Dancers Of The Book: Yemenite, Persian, And Kurdish Jewish Dance, Quinn Bicer

Anthós

Despite the cultural significance of dance in Jewish communities around the world, research into Middle Eastern Jewish dance outside of the modern nation-state of Israel is sorely under-researched. This article aims to help rectify this by focusing on Yemenite, Persian/Iranian, and Kurdish Jewish dance and explores how these dancers have functioned and been received within the societies they have been a part of. The methods that have gone into this article are a combination of analyzing primary source recorded dances and existing secondary source research into the dance of these communities. Through these methods, this article reveals how Yemenite, Iranian, …

Doings With Land: Process And Participation Through Indigenous-Led, Experiential Education In Saqáanpa (The Snake River In Hells Canyon), Clark Shimeall

University Honors Theses

In our rapidly unraveling world, the re-centering of Indigenous ways of being and knowing is more important than ever. This re-centering is based in cultural revitalization and transmission within Indigenous communities, and these processes are intimately tied to relationship with Land. This writing describes the "doing" of an Indigenous-led experiential educational program for Nez Perce and Cayuse descended youth -- the Saqáanma School -- which was conducted via whitewater raft on pik'uunin (the Snake River) through saqáanpa (Hells Canyon) in July 2021. The complex exchanges between people, culture, and Land embodied in this project are examined through Barker and Pickerill's …

Kurdish Filmmaking In Turkey: History And Narratives, Omar Sadik

Dissertations and Theses

This research investigates the history and politics of cultural production by examining Kurdish filmmaking in Turkey. Sadik provide an analysis of contemporary films and filmmakers to explore how Kurdish cinema in Turkey is situated in broader, global political-economic structures. By examining this important case through the lens of history and memory, Sadik clarify how production and aesthetics in Kurdish cinema point to important systemic processes. Sadik uses three main research strategies in this study: a historical survey of Kurds in Turkey, an analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with contemporary Kurdish directors and an analysis of films directed by Kurdish filmmakers …

Mobility Interrupted: A New Framework For Understanding Anti-Left Sentiment Among Brazil’S “Once-Rising Poor”, Benjamin Junge, Sean T. Mitchell, Charles H. Klein, Matthew Spearly

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

How do sequences of upward and downward socioeconomic mobility influence political views among those who have “risen” or “fallen” during periods of leftist governance? While existing studies identify a range of factors, long-term mobility trajectories have been largely unexplored. The question has particular salience in contemporary Brazil, where, after a decade of extraordinary poverty reduction on the watch of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT), a subsequent period of economic and political crises intensified anti-PT sentiment. This article uses original data from the 2016 Brazil’s Once-Rising Poor (BORP) Survey, using a 3-city sample of 822 poor and working-class Brazilians to analyze …

The Cultural Dilemma Of The American Education System: An Observation Of How It Lives In Montessori, Amaya Varma

University Honors Theses

This thesis acts as a case study examining the culture of a Montessori school by highlighting major themes from a selection of interviews. The intention is not to measure the amount of diversity in this school, but rather to provide an observation of people's understanding of the concept. It intends to show the limits and contradictions of any schooling project which concerns the structural constraints of the American education system. It reveals an internal "culture of kindness" which is constructed in this school and argues that Montessori education could be amenable to instilling certain values which allow for students to …

Coming To Know The Local Environment: Children's Experiences In Rautamai Gaunpalika, Nepal, Elsie Nicole Love

Dissertations and Theses

This qualitative research, conducted over three months from late monsoon season into early fall of 2018 with twenty-six children and thirteen adults, explores how children in the hills of Rautamai Gaunpalika, Province 1, Nepal come to know their local environment. Semi-structured interviews with children, their family members, and teachers, and participant observation with children as they worked and played in forests, fields, and streams, suggest that outside of school, children come to know their local environment in the following ways: through participation in and application of knowledge to subsistence practices; through collaborative learning and teaching in mixed-age groups; through relationships …

More Than Words: Articulating The Multisensory Experiences Of Protected Area Visitors In Southern Nevada, Sara Nicole Temme

Dissertations and Theses

The complex sensory experiences of visitors to U.S. protected areas are not well understood. Previous research investigates visitor activities, motivations, and the ways place attachment cultivates support for conservation activities and other pro-environmental behavior. However, it is unclear how protected area visitor sensory experiences contribute to these behaviors. This study aims to articulate the multisensory experiences of visitors to the Desert National Wildlife Refuge Complex and the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area in southern Nevada, U.S.A. Specifically, it demonstrates the complexity of these experiences as present, intertwined, and embodied in all visit phases: before, during, and after. Utilizing a mixed-method …

Linking Conservation And Environmental Justice: Exploring Relationship-Building Between A Land Trust And Four Pacific Northwest Tribes, C. Noel Plemmons

Dissertations and Theses

Conservation organizations around the world are addressing exclusionary policies and implicit biases that have alienated segments of society from both the conservation movement and natural places. Native American tribes make up one segment of society with a particular interest in and deep ties to land and resources. Vancouver, Washington-based Columbia Land Trust recognizes tribes' special relationships with their ancestral lands and resources thereon, but has struggled to develop policies that involve tribes in conserved areas and conservation plans. The conception among mainstream scientists that western conservation science is better equipped than Indigenous ecological knowledge (IEK) to determine best practices is …

Recovering Salmon: Zooarchaeology And Oral Tradition In The Documentation Of Extirpated Cultural Keystone Species In The Upper Klamath Basin, Douglas Deur, Perry Chocktoot Jr.

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

As this special issue attests, Dr. Virginia Butler and her students have made significant and lasting contributions to the study of human-environment relationships over deep time in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond this, their contributions suggest the potential of archaeological research to engage the public and to address pressing natural resource issues of our time. Their investigations of Pacific salmon harvests in the Klamath River Basin are an important case in point. Applying the methods of zooarchaeology to the study of anadromous fish in the Upper Klamath Basin, Butler and her students provide clear corroboration of Tribal oral tradition. In turn, …

Racializing Discourses: An Exploration Of Moreno Subject Formation In Oaxaca, Mexico, Juan Salvador Sepulveda-Figuereo

Dissertations and Theses

Processes of Black racialization in Mestizo Latin America open a space to expose how subjectivities emerge and change while in tension with broader national ideas and transnational discourses. Morenos, typically dark skin individuals of African descent, inhabit the boundaries of mestizaje, Mexico's national racial ideology which emphasizes indigenous and Spanish ancestry. As a result, regional narratives subject morenos to racialization processes that align with the historical erasure of people of African descent, effectively excluding morenos from the nation. Nevertheless, morenos incorporate themselves into the regional and national narratives through various mechanisms and (re)formulations of established discourses.

I propose a …

Cultural And Spiritual Significance Of Nature: Guidance For Protected And Conserved Area Governance And Management, Bas Verschuuren, Josep-Maria Mallarach, Edwin Bernbaum, Jeremy Spoon, Steve Brown, Radhika Borde, Jessica Brown, Mark Calamia

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The cultural and spiritual significance of nature has been defined as the spiritual, cultural, inspirational, aesthetic, historic and social meanings, values, feelings, ideas and associations that natural features and nature in general have for past, present and future generations of people – both individuals and groups. These guidelines respond to a growing need to make conservation more inclusive, effective and socially just by accommodating multiple worldviews; by treating natural and cultural heritage as interlinked; and by suggesting ways for engaging and empowering all relevant groups and stakeholders in protected area design, governance and management. The guidelines also assist with creating …

"Through A Forest Wilderness:” Native American Environmental Management At Yosemite And Contested Conservation Values In America’S National Parks, Rochelle Bloom, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Chapter 9. The philosophies and views of nature prevalent in the 19th century West shaped the early National Park Service, and continue to influence park policy today. Park-builders incorrectly viewed early parks as untouched “wilderness,” even as Native peoples continued to occupy, revere, and actively manage lands and resources on these lands. This misapprehension fostered the creation and enforcement of park regulations meant to protect wild spaces, resulting in the displacement of both Native peoples and the culturally significant habitats that they had helped sustain for millennia. Among these regulations, federally imposed restrictions on burning and other traditional plant community …

Anatomy Of Disaster Recoveries: Tangible And Intangible Short-Term Recovery Dynamics Following The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes, Jeremy Spoon, Chelsea E. Hunter, Drew Gerkey, Ram Bahadur Chhetri, Alisa Rai, Umesh Basnet, Anudeep Dewan

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The April/May 2015 Nepal earthquakes and aftershocks had catastrophic impacts on rural households living in biophysical extremes. Recoveries from natural hazards that become disasters have tangible and intangible short- and long-term dynamics, which require linked quantitative and qualitative methods to understand. With these premises in mind, we randomly selected 400 households in two accessible and two inaccessible settlements across two of the highest impacted districts to assess variation in household and settlement recoveries through tangible impacts to infrastructure and livelihood and intangible impacts to place attachment and mental well-being. We conducted household surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus groups over two …

Balance On Every Ledger: Kwakwaka’Wakw Resource Values And Traditional Ecological Management, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, Chief Adam Dick

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter illustrates the core environmental values of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) people on the Pacific coast of Canada to explore how they manifest in the traditional management of coastal natural resources. The authors’ survey of environmental values is based on the authentic knowledge of Chief Adam Dick, a co-author of the chapter. The chapter argues that talking about Indigenous Knowledge without the broader context of environmental values can lead to serious scholarly misunderstandings and insists that long-term collaborations between academic researchers and specialized knowledge holders from Indigenous communities is necessary in order to represent Indigenous Knowledge accurately.

This chapter illustrates …

Fire, Native Ecological Knowledge, And The Enduring Anthropogenic Landscapes Of Yosemite Valley, Douglas Deur, Rochelle Bloom

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Yosemite Valley is a place with rich and enduring traditions of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, manifesting in specific management practices that, in turn, leave discernible imprints upon the natural landscape. Historically, the Native American inhabitants of Yosemite Valley have employed a variety of techniques that materially enhance the availability of culturally preferred plant communities. This chapter identifies specific techniques that appear consistently in the oral traditions and written historical accounts of the valley. These methods included anthropogenic burning, pruning and coppicing, clearing underbrush beneath trees, hand eradication (“weeding”) of certain competing species, selective harvesting, smoking, “knocking” of dead wood from the …

Navigating Multidimensional Household Recoveries Following The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes, Jeremy Spoon, Drew Gerkey, Ram Bahadur Chhetri, Alisa Rai, Umesh Basnet

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Natural disaster recovery is multidimensional and takes time depending on vulnerabilities. Changeo ccurs as households embedded within integrated social and environmental systems adapt or transform.We focus on the April/May 2015 Nepal earthquakes to understand rural natural disaster recovery. We conducted household surveys on critical earthquake impacts and recovery trajectories with 400 ran-domly selected households in four clusters of settlements in two districts with catastrophic impacts to all houses and infrastructure. To track rapid change in the short-term, we completed surveys at two intervals—approximately 9 months and 1.5 years. Using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination, our analysis explores relationships among critical …

History And Memory In The Intersectionality Of Heritage Sites And Cultural Centers In The Pacific Northwest And Hawai'i, Leah Marie Rosenkranz

Dissertations and Theses

While working to maintain contemporary and future relationships with stakeholders, heritage sites and cultural centers across the United States attempt to tell the history and experiences of the land and people who were once there, are there in the present, and will be there in the future. Fort Vancouver National Historic Site is one of these heritage places. This study is a response to current management needs identified for the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Through an internship with the ongoing Fort Vancouver National Historic Site Traditional Use Study, my research examines how heritage sites and cultural centers fulfill the …

"The People's Commune Is Good": Precarious Labor, Migrant Masculinity, And Post-Socialist Nostalgia In Contemporary China, Xia Zhang

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male …

Reframing Native Knowledge, Co-Managing Native Landscapes: Ethnographic Data And Tribal Engagement At Yosemite National Park, Rochelle Bloom, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Several Native American communities assert traditional ties to Yosemite Valley, and special connections to the exceptional landmarks and natural resources of Yosemite National Park. However, tribal claims relating to this highly visible park with its many competing constituencies—such as tribal assertions of traditional ties to particular landscapes or requests for access to certain plant gathering areas—often require supporting documentation from the written record. Addressing this need, academic researchers, the National Park Service and park-associated tribes collaborated in a multi-year effort to assemble a comprehensive ethnographic database containing most available written accounts of Native American land and resource use in Yosemite …

Benediction: The Teachings Of Chief Kwaxsistalla Adam Dick And The Atla’Gimma (“Spirits Of The Forest”) Dance, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, William White

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Like the symposium that inspired this book, its contents are preceded by the words of Chief Kwaxsistalla wath-thla Adam Dick. His name, Kwaxsistalla – bequeathed to him by his father and grandfather, who had inherited the name from generations going back to the beginning of remembered time – is a chiefly title that means “smoke from his fire reaches around the world.” He was chief of the Qawadiliqalla (Wolf) Clan of the Dzawada7enuxw (Tsawataineuk) Kwakwa’kawakw from Kingcome Village on the mainland coast of British Columbia.

Migrant Emplacement: Gendered Subjects, State Regulations, And The Discursive Erasure Of Elders In Sri Lanka, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Discriminatory assumptions about family structure and care work underlie a 2013 Sri Lankan state regulation, referred to as the “Family Background Report” (FBR), which restricts the transnational labor migration of women with children under the age of five. Since the early 1980s, women from Sri Lanka have worked as domestic servants in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. A culture of migration has developed, and labourers’ remittances sustain family financial strategies. The FBR regulations narrow people’s employment options and destabilize long-standing practices of intergenerational reciprocity. Using ethnographic data gathered in 2015, the chapter considers the potential and actual …

Proper Conjugation Of Bodies: Chastity, Age, And Care Work In Sri Lankan Migrants’ Families, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Physical and symbolic aspects of bodies limit the migration trajectories of female domestic workers from a Buddhist community in coastal Sri Lanka. Government regulations and family decisions regarding women’s overseas labour draw upon and in turn influence discourses about gender, sexuality, age, health, and class. This ethnographic analysis illustrates that local norms task women with nurturing the brains of babies, preserving the chastity of teenage daughters, caring for frail elders, and preventing their working-class husbands from overindulging in liquor or having sex with other women. Successful social reproduction depends on the proper conjunctions of bodies in the extended family. Corporeal …

Between “Us” And “Them”: Political Subjectivities In The Shadows Of The 2018 Brazilian Election, Charles H. Klein, Milena Mateuzi Carmo, Alessandra Tavares

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines political subjectivities, community engagements and voting practices among residents of São Paulo’s Zona Sul peripheries in the three years preceding Brazil’s 2018 presidential election. Building on a 398-person household survey, 46 in-depth interviews, and extensive participation observation over the course of a fouryear study, we argue that although most residents of our study communities across the political spectrum are disenchanted with institutional politics, many maintain political engagement through their everyday lives, including activism centered on intersectional identities and state-sponsored violence/genocide. Our discussion combines statistical analysis and auto-ethnographic inflected vignettes and is in dialogue with two common themes …

When God Put Daylight On Earth We Had One Voice': Kwakwaka'wakw Perspectives On Sustainability And The Rights Of Nature, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, Adam Dick

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this chapter the authors ask: How are the 'Rights of Nature' truly manifested in an indigenous context? We contend that one especially illuminating example can be found in the teaching of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of coastal British Columbia. The Kwakwaka'wakw are among the most studied indigenous people in Americas, and are thus a key reference point, providing a rich tradition that is widely known and accessible through accounts of past anthropologists and a handful of living experts.

The authors of this article all speak from deep groundings in Kwakwaka'wakw tradition.

Deriving Lane-Level Insight From Gps Data: Innovations For Traffic & Autonomous Driving, James Fowe

PSU Transportation Seminars

With the on-going disruption of the transportation industry and rapid advancement in ITS technologies; emerging smart cities, navigation systems and autonomous transportation, the need for highly accurate geospatial localization has never been more crucial. These technologies demand that we have more granular location information of vehicles not just on a road, but to a specific lane on the road.

This presentation will give a pedagogical style summary and overview of some of the on-going research work at HERE Technologies and how we have pushed the state-of-the-art in lane-localization of noisy GPS probe data using novel Machine Learning Algorithms and how …

A Data Collection Program For Reducing Ipv In Lgbtq+ Communities, Alexandra Michel, Nicholas Cheke, Lourdes Gonzalez, Rachel Greim

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Annual Conference

Sexual and gender minority populations are not currently being accurately tracked or counted in most domestic violence (DV) and intimate partner violence (IPV) surveillance programs in Oregon. However, research indicates that LGBTQ+ populations experience IPV at rates comparable or even higher than heterosexual populations. Additionally, distrust of law enforcement and services designed around heterosexual experiences of IPV further reduce the ability of LGBTQ+ populations, particularly transgender women, to access IPV services. We propose that through the use of a PRECEED-PROCEED model, a program could be developed to more accurately collect sexual orientation and gender identity data by IPV service providers …