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Articles 1 - 30 of 44
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Abolition Of Care: An Engaged Ethnography Of The Progressive Jail Assemblage, Justin Helepololei
The Abolition Of Care: An Engaged Ethnography Of The Progressive Jail Assemblage, Justin Helepololei
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted with prison abolitionists and criminal justice reform activists in Western Massachusetts - a context in which the sheriffs who operate county jails see themselves as reformers. I use the concept of a “progressive jail assemblage” to analyze the varied actors and logics that sustain incarceration locally, focusing especially on the use of care discourses and practices. I consider how progressive jailing puts prison abolitionists in the position of being against some forms of care. At the same time, abolitionists have put forth competing notions of care, ones they see as building a world …
Making The Old City: Life Projects And State Heritage In Rhodes And Acre, Evan Taylor
Making The Old City: Life Projects And State Heritage In Rhodes And Acre, Evan Taylor
Doctoral Dissertations
The “old city,” a widely recognizable category of urban space, has long been a locus of development projects, state monitoring, and mass tourism, while also being home to resident communities. This dissertation explores the intersections of community life and state-driven heritage projects in the Old Town of Rhodes, in the Greek Dodecanese, and the Old City of Acre (‘Akka), a Palestinian community in northern Israel/Palestine. Both old cities are UNESCO World Heritage sites and subjects of intense state-supported tourism development. However, their resident populations and their built environments, which coalesced mainly under Crusader and Ottoman rule, challenge the authorized heritage …
Rules Of Recognition: Indigenous Encounters With Society And The State, Erica Kowsz
Rules Of Recognition: Indigenous Encounters With Society And The State, Erica Kowsz
Doctoral Dissertations
For Indigenous peoples, being recognized has come to mean not simply being known and acknowledged by one’s own relations but also being seen in the right way by the eye of authority. For decades, to gain access to the resources, rights, and legitimacy that state recognition confers, Indigenous political actors globally have navigated bureaucratic processes, from court proceedings to paperwork petitions. While the notion of Indigenous rights emerged at a global scale, they are specified in national jurisdictions. Indigenous people confront problems of their recognizability at all scales in their everyday lives and where they engage with state processes determining …
Beyond Revolutionaries, Victims, And Heroic Mothers. Reproductive Politics In War And Peace In Colombia, Vanesa Giraldo Gartner
Beyond Revolutionaries, Victims, And Heroic Mothers. Reproductive Politics In War And Peace In Colombia, Vanesa Giraldo Gartner
Doctoral Dissertations
During the 2016 peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), reproductive policies in this guerrilla group became a site of contestation in producing new discourses about peace, gender, and nation. This dissertation addresses this controversy and explores the implications of reproductive politics in war and peace among ex-combatant women. The data for this project was collected through archival research and a multi-sited ethnography in Caquetá-Colombia. It discusses the role of contraception in the transformation of the FARC from a grassroots guerrilla movement to a revolutionary army and analyzes the multiple discourses produced about …
Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin
Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation seeks to examine the types of digital media being produced in the Northeastern United States, its content, the goals and motivations of its creators, the processes underlying Indigenous digital media creation, and the desired and projected audiences of Indigenous digital artists and content creators. Resulting findings from this study illuminate long histories of Indigenous use of digital media tied to digital media's development in Indigenous lands. I argue that Native people have been producers and influencers in film and later, digital media, and have underwritten digital production due to its development on Indigenous lands. Through interviews and media …
The Boundaries Of Safety: The Sanctuary Movement In The Inland Empire, Cecilia I. Vasquez
The Boundaries Of Safety: The Sanctuary Movement In The Inland Empire, Cecilia I. Vasquez
Doctoral Dissertations
The Trump administration for many represented drastic ideological shift in American values, and for others he embodied a social threat to their lives. In response, many cities, counties, states, and schools proclaimed themselves Sanctuaries to protect their undocumented immigrant community members. The term evokes images of churches operating as a place of refuge with impenetrable walls. The declaration of Sanctuary provided an illusion of boundaries and a sense of safety. This dissertation interrogates the meanings of sanctuary and how the Inland Empire in Southern California, implemented and created sanctuary. By analyzing the California Values Act and working alongside organizers in …
Platforms And Power: Transnational Guatemala, Eric Sippert
Platforms And Power: Transnational Guatemala, Eric Sippert
Doctoral Dissertations
Moving beyond studies of social movements and NGOs, this dissertation examines how grassroots groups in Guatemala use transnational flows of goods, ideas, and people to create new organizational forms and types of political action. This case study of an organization of returned migrants, former combatants, and indigenous youth demonstrates how marginalized groups create platforms that facilitate connections between disparate actors across nation-state and identity borders. Drawing on field research in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, I explore how these platforms emerged, threats to them, their effects, and what they can teach us about political organizing in crisis. I begin by tracing the …
Above The Oxbow: The Construction Of Place On Mount Holyoke, Danielle R. Raad
Above The Oxbow: The Construction Of Place On Mount Holyoke, Danielle R. Raad
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is a study of the orogenesis of Mount Holyoke, or the making of place on a mountain. It is an orogenic ethnography and a contemporary archaeological ethnography of place. Mount Holyoke is a mountain in Western Massachusetts that rises above the Connecticut River Valley. It is a prominent destination for tourists and locals alike to recreate outdoors in a state park, to observe the view of the valley below, and to visit the historic, nineteenth-century Summit House. I explore the nature and nuances of attachment to Mount Holyoke through time, by examining conceptions of place over two centuries. …
Real Fake Fighting: The Aesthetic Of Qualified Realism In Japanese Professional Wrestling, Clara Marino
Real Fake Fighting: The Aesthetic Of Qualified Realism In Japanese Professional Wrestling, Clara Marino
Masters Theses
Professional wrestling is a performance art in which the line between fact and fiction is often obscured. Much of the existing scholarship on the medium that examines its dynamics regard reality and artifice focuses on the role of the artificial, analyzing pro-wrestling as primarily a form of heightened spectacle akin to passion plays or soap opera. However, professional wrestling in Japan, particularly that found in the country's largest promotion, New Japan Pro-Wrestling, features many elements that resemble real sports much more closely than many American promotions. These elements include fighting styles, wrestler injury, characters that do not fit easily into …
Cyclones, Spectacles, And Citizenship: The Politicization Of Natural Disasters In The Us And Oman, Tyler Schuenemann
Cyclones, Spectacles, And Citizenship: The Politicization Of Natural Disasters In The Us And Oman, Tyler Schuenemann
Doctoral Dissertations
In the face of such complex, urgent threats of fires, floods, and increasingly powerful storms, many scholars warn that climate change puts us on the path to a technocratic, “rule of experts” for the sake of survival. Others warn that climate change will actually undermine the authority of governments, as they become increasingly unable to meet the basic needs of their citizens. In this dissertation, I draw from interviews, archival research, and ethnographic observations in the US and Oman to examine how power and historical context shape the way that these societies politicize natural disasters. These two countries have fundamental …
Liberation And Gravy: An Engaged Ethnography Of Queer And Trans Power In Georgia, Elias Capello
Liberation And Gravy: An Engaged Ethnography Of Queer And Trans Power In Georgia, Elias Capello
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation aims to better understand how self-identified trans activists in Atlanta, Georgia find and build community, by using queer and Black feminist community based methodologies such as participant observation, ethnographic interviews, participatory mapping, and auto-ethnography. In particular, I ask 1) How do trans people find and build community, safety, and understanding? 2) How do transgender activists create and enact place making that does not rely on policing and privatization? To create and maintain safety for wealthy communities in Atlanta, Georgia, systems of policing and privatization are increasing. Although developers, city council members, and legislators promote Atlanta, Georgia as a …
The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein
The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein
Doctoral Dissertations
The main intellectual problem I address in this study is how everyday communication activates the relationship between creativity, conflict, and change. More specifically, I look at how the communication of creativity becomes a process of transformation, innovation, and change and how people are propelled to create through everyday communication practices in the face of conflict and opposition. To approach this problem, I use the case of communication in modern-day Belarus to show how creativity becomes a vehicle for and a source of new social and cultural routines among the independent grassroots communities and initiatives in Minsk. On one level, I …
Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows
Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows
Masters Theses
This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.
What Will You Do Here? Dignified Work And The Politics Of Mobility In Serbia, Dana N. Johnson
What Will You Do Here? Dignified Work And The Politics Of Mobility In Serbia, Dana N. Johnson
Doctoral Dissertations
Serbia is said to have one of the highest rates of brain drain in the world. For the generation glossed as the “children of the 1990s,” stances toward mobility and migration have shifted along with geopolitics. Following nearly two decades of wartime entrapment, in 2009 the conditions of possibility for mobility fundamentally changed for Serbian citizens. Of both symbolic and material consequence, the country’s return to respectable geopolitical standing also marked a shift toward more nuanced stancetaking in relation to mobility and migration. Namely, by the time of my research, the expectations of youth—not only of “normal mobility” but of …
When Healing And High-Stakes Meet: Restorative Justice In An Era Of Racial Neoliberalism, Dani O'Brien
When Healing And High-Stakes Meet: Restorative Justice In An Era Of Racial Neoliberalism, Dani O'Brien
Doctoral Dissertations
Based on a 3-year ethnography, this dissertation documents the story of Presente, an explicitly critical youth-led restorative justice group attempting to dismantle the school-prison nexus and create a more youth-centered culture at their high-reform high school. This dissertation addresses the questions: How does serving as a restorative justice peer leader impact students? What challenges and opportunities arise as the school tries to transition to more restorative practices? And how do the values central to restorative justice come up against, challenge, and get challenged by neoliberal education reform?
Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden
Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the advocacy work and political activism of Latin American social movement organizations based in the United Kingdom. I examine how activists working in Britain as it prepares to exit the European Union, make sense of their collective agendas, strategize to achieve their goals, and evaluate the outcomes of their advocacy efforts. In doing so, this project provides insights into the ways that identity movements are negotiated and performed during periods of increased political and public hostility toward their constituents and agendas. I illuminate the relationship between identity movements, immigration discourses, politics, and policy implementation and explore how …
Embodied Heritage: Obesity, Cultural Identity, And Food Distribution Programs In The Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma, Kasey Aliene Jernigan
Embodied Heritage: Obesity, Cultural Identity, And Food Distribution Programs In The Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma, Kasey Aliene Jernigan
Doctoral Dissertations
This research examines obesity among Oklahoma Choctaws at the intersections of issues related to historical trauma; structural, symbolic, and everyday violence; and the social processes of heritage, identity, and meaning-making. Unique to Native Americans is an historical reliance on food assistance, from rations in the 1800s to the more recent Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Participation in FDPIR is linked with increased risk of obesity, with foods historically high in fat and sugar, and is the primary food source for more than 60% of Native Americans. Spanning more than six months of ethnographic research, this dissertation explores the …
The Moral Economy Of The Networked Financial Subject: Cultures Of “Wealth-Tech” (Financial Self-Help) And Moneymaking In South Korea, Bohyeong Kim
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography on the culture of wealth-tech in South Korea. Wealth-tech (chaet'ek'ŭ) refers to techniques of personal finance and moneymaking, including investments in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, and other financial products. It entered the everyday lexicon in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, when South Korea witnessed radical economic restructuring and neoliberal social governing. Situating the wealth-tech boom within the restructuring of the economy and subjectivity after the 1997 crisis, this dissertation explores a new mode of subject formation under the financialization of the South Korean economy. Based on 15 …
Labor Migration And Intangible Cultural Heritage In Postsocialist Rural Romania, Alin Rus
Labor Migration And Intangible Cultural Heritage In Postsocialist Rural Romania, Alin Rus
Doctoral Dissertations
The processes of industrialization and modernization, as well as those emerging from them, have produced radical changes in the lifestyle of the peasantry. These transformations went hand in hand with the degradation of community lifestyle and of the customs it contained. Among the many rituals performed by rural communities, this dissertation focuses on mummers' plays. The present paper is an attempt to outline a brief history of mummers' plays beginning with an age when they were simple community rituals and going to the recent decades when they entered a rapid decline, and when state institutions together with international organizations such …
The Process To Political Mobilization In Five College Capitalism: Forms Of Antiracism, Personal Reflection And Community-Building, Caitlin B. Homrich
The Process To Political Mobilization In Five College Capitalism: Forms Of Antiracism, Personal Reflection And Community-Building, Caitlin B. Homrich
Masters Theses
The town of Amherst, Massachusetts is home to the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, and Hampshire College, institutions that have greatly influenced the town’s prolific history of political activism as well as the high educational attainment and economic status of the majority of its residents. Often hailed as a liberal utopia, research on the political mobilization occurring in this town provides insight into the process and limitations of ally politics: when most of the residents of Amherst are White, how do they engage in racial justice activism? When most of the residents are wealthy and/or highly …
Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott
Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott
Doctoral Dissertations
Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …
Seguimos Luchando: Women Educators’ Trajectories In Social Movement Based Popular Education Projects In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jennifer Lee O'Donnell
Seguimos Luchando: Women Educators’ Trajectories In Social Movement Based Popular Education Projects In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jennifer Lee O'Donnell
Doctoral Dissertations
Through a multisite ethnographic investigation, I provide a look at the vision and practices of women teaching in the popular education sector, particularly those who impact social, economic, and political public spaces in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As an alternative to Freirean based education theory, which may overshadow the collective work of women in popular projects, this work highlights women’s commitments to education that contests neoliberal reform, transforming not only curriculum and pedagogies, social practices, and discourses inside classrooms, but the communities where they live as well.
Ideological Conflict Embedded In Anthropology And The Road To Restructuring The Discipline, Donna L. Moody
Ideological Conflict Embedded In Anthropology And The Road To Restructuring The Discipline, Donna L. Moody
Doctoral Dissertations
Indigenous people have long-held perceptions of the existence of ideological conflicts between indigenous worldview and Western worldview. Western worldview is understood by indigenous people to be embodied in American Anthropology as a discipline and, by extension, in American anthropologists. These conflicts may be considered the genesis of a divide that began with the colonization of the indigenous world and one which continues to sustain the on-going marginalization and oppression of Native populations by a colonizing society; a society which considers indigenous worldview to be an unsubstantiated belief system, while not recognizing that the science upon which anthropological thought is built …
“Race Talk” In Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study Of Two Texas Chambers Of Commerce, Natasha Shrikant
“Race Talk” In Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study Of Two Texas Chambers Of Commerce, Natasha Shrikant
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation takes an interpretive, discursive approach to understanding how organizational members create meanings about race, and other identities, through their everyday communication practices in the workplace. This dissertation also explores how these everyday discourses about race might reproduce, negotiate, or challenge ideologies that maintain the dominant position of Whiteness in United States racial hierarchies. I draw from data collected during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork (from Jan-Aug 2014) with two chambers of commerce in a large Texas city: an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) and what I call the “North City” Chamber of Commerce (NCC). The AACC explicitly …
Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep: An Ethnographic Analysis Of The Development, Implementation, And Sustainability Of A Safe Infant Sleep Education Campaign In Springfield, Ma, Julie Skogsbergh
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation was a collaborative, community-engaged research project with a local community based organization, Project Baby Springfield, specifically addressing a two-year period from 2012-2013 when the organization designed, developed, and implemented a bilingual safe infant sleep education campaign in the City of Springfield, MA. This dissertation draws upon two theoretical perspectives: Critical Medical Anthropology and Critical Race Theory. It also employs a mixed methods approach drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data including: state and citywide statistics provided by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, anonymous safe infant sleep surveys and focus groups among parents and grandparents, individual interviews, and participant …
A Conflict Of Interest? Negotiating Agendas, Ethics, And Consequences Regarding The Heritage Value Of Human Remains, Heidi J. Bauer-Clapp
A Conflict Of Interest? Negotiating Agendas, Ethics, And Consequences Regarding The Heritage Value Of Human Remains, Heidi J. Bauer-Clapp
Doctoral Dissertations
Since the mid-twentieth century growing public fascination with a heritage of violence has spurred an increase in sites of conscience and dark tourism. While scholars have demonstrated how this heritage can draw attention to events that may have been marginalized or ignored, little attention has been paid to complex ethical dilemmas involved in the commodification of violence through tourism. Even less attention has been paid to ethical treatment of the remains of victims whose suffering is central to dark tourism. This dissertation demonstrates how heritage policies and codes of ethics can be strengthened to promote ethical treatment of the dead …
Vietnam Without Guarantees: Consumer Attitudes In An Emergent Market Economy, Kylie R. Lanthorn
Vietnam Without Guarantees: Consumer Attitudes In An Emergent Market Economy, Kylie R. Lanthorn
Masters Theses
This research explores how Vietnam’s embrace of capitalism and global markets has impacted consumer culture. Through ethnographic research conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam in June-August 2015, this study seeks to interrogate how the political atmosphere in Vietnam coexists with market freedoms in a country which opened its economy to the world during the 1986 Doi Moi (renovation) reforms. Vietnam now conducts a considerable amount of foreign trade with major foreign investment from countries including Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. This study emphasizes the role international relations have played in these developments as Vietnam has embraced partnerships with countries with which it …
Change Of Sight, Sites Of Creativity: The Visual Arts In Albania After Socialism, Sofia Kalo
Change Of Sight, Sites Of Creativity: The Visual Arts In Albania After Socialism, Sofia Kalo
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines Albania’s fine art world after the end of state socialism in 1991. Drawing on two years of anthropological fieldwork (January –August 2006 and January 2010-August 2011) in Tirana, Albania’s capital city, this study investigates how the withdrawal of state support and oversight on the arts, the introduction of a market economy and efforts toward European belonging have been reflected, responded to and challenged in the discourses and practices of aesthetic production. Viewing art as a productive site of social meaning, where people perform and struggle over their identities, their pasts and futures, this dissertation explores the social …
Ts'msyen Revolution: The Poetics And Politics Of Reclaiming, Robin R. R. Gray
Ts'msyen Revolution: The Poetics And Politics Of Reclaiming, Robin R. R. Gray
Doctoral Dissertations
As a result of the settler colonial project in North America, Ts’msyen have been thrust into a state of reclamation. The purpose of this study was to examine the distinctiveness of what it means for Ts’msyen to reclaim given our particular history and experiences with settler colonialism. Utilizing the poetics and politics as a theoretical, methodological and practical framework, this dissertation synthesizes the motivations, possibilities and obstacles associated with Ts’msyen reclamation in the contemporary era. Further, as a contribution to the literature on decolonization, Indigenous nationhood, Indigenous subjectivity, Indigenous methodologies and repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, I report on two …
Producing The Dead Sea Scrolls: (Trans)National Heritage And The Politics Of Popular Representation, Evan P. Taylor
Producing The Dead Sea Scrolls: (Trans)National Heritage And The Politics Of Popular Representation, Evan P. Taylor
Masters Theses
This thesis explores the politics of representing the assemblage of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls to popular audiences in Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the United States. I demonstrate that these objects of national heritage are circulated along transnational routes to maintain the legitimacy of nationalist discourse abroad. Three sites—the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Qumran National Park in the West Bank, and a travelling exhibit presented at the Boston Museum of Science—are examined for textual narrative, spatial arrangement, and visitor behavior. Analysis of these observations illuminates two recurring motifs common …