Other Anthropology Commons^™

Putting It Gently: The Other Side Of A Peace Corps Volunteer Experience, Nicole Jacobson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Peace Corps is a transformative experience for many young Americans. The majority of volunteers have worthwhile services they remember fondly; however, these experiences are not always positive. The Peace Corps is a Cold War initiative that uses soft power techniques to further American exceptionalism, capitalism, and the modernization theory of development. The goal of this project was to understand what factors led to the negative experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers. I conducted an ethnography that focused on online communities, semi-structured interviews, Peace Corps memoirs, and news articles to understand Peace Corps Volunteers’ experiences and the organizational culture where they …

The Impact Of Patient Shadowing On Service Design: Insights From A Family Medicine Clinic, Andrew S. Gallan, Bruce Perlow, Riddhi Shah, Judith Gravdal

Patient Experience Journal

A central tenet of patient-centered care is to truly and deeply understand how patients experience health care. One particular qualitative method, patient shadowing, holds the promise of seeing things through the patient’s eyes in real time. The purpose of this research is to utilize patient shadowing to capture the realities of patient experiences in an outpatient family medicine clinic and to report opportunities for improvement to clinic leadership. A total of twenty (20) patients were shadowed at a family medicine outpatient clinic over the course of eight (8) different days, providing a variety of circumstances including staffing levels, shift changes, …

"Urban" Dengue? An Examination Of Perceived Dengue Risk And Notions Of The Urban In Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador, Charlotte Robbins

Senior Theses and Projects

Is dengue fever an urban disease as public health literature suggests? And what does this literature mean by urban? To answer these questions, I compare perceptions of the urban and dengue risk from residents who I interviewed across different sites in Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador. I ground my analysis in four urban frameworks: the bounded city theory, postcolonial theory, assemblage urbanism, and urban political ecology. I find that residents in Esmeraldas Province think about urban spaces very differently from how the Ecuadorian government defines what is urban. In particular, residents discuss government investment in infrastructure and services as an important dimension …

God, I Hope This Part Of My Life Is Over: A Focused Ethnography Of A Correctional Youth Facility’S Therapeutic Climate, Eric Meyer

Theses & Dissertations

Although all prisons have the same goal of isolating offenders from society, the precise strategies used vary from one jurisdiction to the next. Some prisons use means of punishment to gain inmate compliance. Other prisons concentrate their limited resources on rehabilitation. Contained within the following pages are details of a focused ethnography that was completed in a state correctional youth facility that housed males between the ages of 15 and 21 years, all of whom were convicted of violent crimes. This study had the objective of exploring the climate of therapy in this correctional youth facility where rehabilitative programs were …

Identity Shifts Among Cis- And Trans- Females Who Sell Sex On The Streets Of New York City, Amalia S. Paladino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Deviant Identity Shift (DIS) Model that is introduced in this dissertation provides a framework for making sense of how sex workers come to understand their own place in the world, including the experiences of violence that often accompany their lives, and it shifts our attention away from static models that focus on unidimensional or even multidimensional factors that impact the lives of sex workers, to a far more dynamic view of the evolution of their distinctive forms of cultural identity. A series of themes emerge from the life histories of 18 cis- and 15- trans women between the ages …

Authors' Introduction, Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, Magdalena Lubanska

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Charting Constellations Of Power: Texas Public Education Policy, Hollie Wright

MSU Graduate Theses

For decades, public education in Texas has been entrenched in neoliberalism-inspired policies that research shows largely fail to produce promised results and have a tendency to perpetuate the very problems advocates claim the policies will solve. This raises questions about the decision-makers and what is happening in the public education policy process. In line with Laura Nader’s directive for more anthropologists to make those in power the subject of their research, I used both ethnographic and social network analysis methods to ‘study up’ in Texas public education. This study describes some relationships of members of the Texas State Board of …

How To Conduct A Mini-Ethnographic Case Study: A Guide For Novice Researchers, Patricia I. Fusch Ph.D., Gene E. Fusch, Lawrence R. Ness

The Qualitative Report

The authors present how to construct a mini-ethnographic case study design with the benefit of an ethnographic approach bounded within a case study protocol that is more feasible for a student researcher with limited time and finances. The novice researcher should choose a design that enables one to best answer the research question. Secondly, one should choose the design that assists the researcher in reaching data saturation. Finally, the novice researcher must choose the design in which one can complete the study within a reasonable time frame with minimal cost. This is particularly important for student researchers. One can blend …

Cause For Question: Risk And Postmodern Panic In The Vaccine Safety Debate, Marygrace Trifilio

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thoughts and feelings of non-vaccinating parents in America and argues that contemporary vaccine refusal results from overwhelming information saturation in the Internet age. Non-vaccinating parents express distrust of competing scientific research and call for a return to a more natural, toxin-free lifestyle.

Writing About Aj Pop B'Atz': Bruce Grindal And The Transformation Of Ethnographic Writing, Sarah Ashley Kistler

Faculty Publications

The works of Bruce Grindal teach us many things about anthropology’s humanistic tradition. With examples such as Redneck Girl and “Postmodernism as Seen by the Boys at Downhome Auto Repair,” Bruce Grindal demonstrated how we can creatively engage our ethnographic writing to reflect lived experiences. In this article, I examine Bruce’s influence on my ethnographic writing and collaborative research in the Maya community of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. Since 2006, I have worked collectively with a group of Chamelqueños to investigate the story of their local hero, Aj Pop B’atz’. In the sixteenth century, Aj Pop B’atz’ welcomed Spanish invaders …

What Is Writing In Undergraduate Anthropology? An Activity Theory Analysis, Boba M. Samuels

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

How students learn to write in the disciplines is a question of ongoing concern in writing studies, with practical implications for academia. This case study used ethnographic methods to explore undergraduate writing in two upper year anthropology courses at a Canadian university over one term (four months). Student and professor interviews, classroom field notes, surveys, and students’ final papers were analysed using a framework drawn from activity theory and informed by genre theory. Four themes emerged from the data: anthropology as school; the familiar vs. unfamiliar; reading; and hidden rhetoric. Findings suggest students approach disciplinary work primarily as students rather …

Labour Migrants And Access To Justice In Contemporary Qatar, Andrew M. Gardner, Silvia Pessoa, Laura M. Harkness

All Faculty Scholarship

In 2012, the Open Society Institute’s International Migration Initiative launched a study to examine migrants‘ access to justice in Qatar. This study was led by researchers Andrew Gardner (University of Puget Sound), Silvia Pessoa (Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar), and Laura Harkness. The study was built on the foundation of a the research team’s large, three-year research project funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). That project administered Qatar’s first large-scale survey devoted solely to exploring the migration experience. Of the 1189 migrants surveyed for that project, the research team was able to identify those individuals who had reported …

Reclaiming “Anthropology: The Forgotten Behavioral Science In Management History” – Commentaries, Fred Luthans, Ivana Milosevic, Beth A. Bechky, Edgar H. Schein, Susan Wright, Davydd J. Greenwood

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

Purpose – This collection of commentaries on the reprinted 1987 article by Nancy C. Morey and Fred Luthans, “Anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history”, aims to reflect on the treatment of the history of anthropological work in organizational studies presented in the original article.

Design/methodology/approach – The essays are invited and peer-reviewed contributions from scholars in organizational studies and anthropology.

Findings – The scholars invited to comment on the original article have seen its value, and their contributions ground its content in contemporary issues and debates.

Originality/value – The original article was deemed “original” for its time (1987), …