Ethnic Studies Commons^™

Implementing Ethnic Studies In California Public Schools, Tania Uruchima , '16

#CritEdPol: Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies at Swarthmore College

This paper explores the fight for ethnic studies in California public schools from two angles: the legislative push for the state to take action, and grassroots organizing by community organizers, students, teachers, parents, and others. Considering the success of grassroots organizing in implementing ethnic studies programming on a district-by-district basis, in contrast with the stalling of legislative action, I propose a policy move that mobilizes the state to actively support local organizing within individual districts. California educational law mandates the deliberate engagement of targeted stakeholders in local school decision-making. Therefore, the state should fund and facilitate the regular convening of …

Understanding School And Interethnic Relations Of Mexican Immigrant Youth In A Post-Industrial Community, Roberto Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a dearth of literature on how immigrant groups understand minority groups in the United States, in particular, African-Americans. Increased technology and more rapid global movement in the 21st Century challenges 20th explanations of assimilation (Chicago School) and necessitates more research focused on how immigrant groups and racialized minorities interact to negotiate new worlds. This ethnographic research was conducted over thirteen months during 2012 and 2013 in a post-industrial neighborhood in the northeast that had been the site of 11 purported anti-bias attacks against Mexican immigrants during the summer of 2010. Research questions focused on: 1) Mexican immigrant youth …

In The Land Of The Mountain Gods: Ethnotrauma And Exile Among The Apaches Of The American Southwest, M. Grace Hunt Watkinson

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In the mid to late nineteenth century, two Indigenous groups of New Mexico territory, the Mescalero and the Chiricahua Apaches, faced violence, imprisonment, and exile. During a century of settler influx, territorial changeovers, vigilante violence, and Indian removal, these two cousin tribes withstood an experience beyond individual pain best described as ethnotrauma. Rooted in racial persecution and mass violence, this ethnotrauma possessed layers of traumatic reaction that not only revolved around their ethnicity, but around their relationship with their home lands as well. Disconnected from the ritual resources and sacred geographies that made up every day Apache living, both groups …

Francisco Pedro Do Amaral (C. 1780-1830), Amy J. Buono

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

A biographical essay on Francisco Pedro do Amaral (c. 1780–1830), Afro- Brazilian painter, stage designer, and decorative artist.

Reconsidering Citizenship Models And The Case For Cultural Citizenship: Implications For A Social Psychology Of Social Justice, Regina Day Langhout, Jesica S. Fernández

Ethnic Studies

This chapter reviews citizenship constructions in the United States and examines how historic, legal, economic, schooling, and multicultural “melting pot” ideology landscapes shape citizenship and its performance. It introduces cultural citizenship as an alternative starting point for citizenship and its performance, providing a theoretical foundation and empirical evidence for cultural citizenship, and argues in support of incorporating this framework into social psychology when working toward collective social justice. It also discusses the implications of adopting a cultural citizenship perspective for social psychology and how this perspective can extend our understanding of citizenship practices to enact social justice. We conclude with …

Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, And The Humanities, Frances H. Tran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation works from and through the field of Asian American studies, drawing on Asian Americanist cultural critique and minority discourse, to investigate the relationship among race, the politics of knowledge, and the epistemic function of the humanities. Proliferating discourses on “post-race” and “colorblindness” characterizing the present moment posit a progressive movement beyond racial division, towards recognizing and incorporating minority difference into the academy. However, even as issues like “diversity” have gained visibility as institutional objectives, I contend that this heightened visibility occludes the structural conditions that allow racialization to persist. In this project, I follow the work of thinkers …

Dislocating Camps: On State Power, Queer Aesthetics & Asian/Americanist Critique, Christopher Alan Eng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that the history of Asian racialization in the United States requires us to grapple with the seemingly counterintuitive entanglement between “the camp” as exceptional space of biopolitical management and “camp” as a performative practice of queer excess. While each practice of camp has been theorized as exemplary of modernity, these considerations have been largely separated into studies of political economy on the one hand, and queer aesthetics on the other. Taken up predominantly in political philosophy and the social sciences, the former centers the death camps in Europe during World War II as epitomizing state violence within …

A Means To An End: Articulations Of Diasporic Blackness, Class And Survival Among Female Afro-Caribbean Service Workers In New York City, Christine A. Pinnock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the oral histories and personal narratives of Afro-Caribbean women who migrated to New York from 1961-2008 and explores how they articulate and negotiate multiple identities surrounding diasporic Blackness, class, and gender. This dissertation studies Afro-Caribbean women in the spaces they live namely, the Northeast Bronx, New York City, and Westchester and takes an interdisciplinary approach to theorize Afro-Caribbean women's experiences. Based on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, this study explores the challenges of Afro-Caribbean women working in the service sector who perform as: domestics, healthcare workers, retail workers, and food service workers and …

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?: Food Inequlaity And Black Americans, Christina Foster

Capstone Collection

Food insecurity is an issue that plagues many people throughout the world. It only requires a brief search on the United Nation’s (U.N.) World Hunger Map to determine that this is indeed a worldwide crisis. Conversely, within the United States, the issue of hunger is often treated as “minimal” in comparison to other countries. A deeper inquiry into hunger within the U.S. reveals an even more disturbing connection: the role of white supremacy and systemic racism in regard to hunger. Academic research pertaining to food access is quite recent. Be that as it may, it is of no surprise that …

Colonization To Construction: Bridging The Gap Between Ancient Chamorro, Spanish Colonial & Modern Architecture On Guam, Dominic J. Lizama

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Guam is an island in the Marianas that, over time, has experienced a rich cultural history brought about by its exposure to colonization, natural disasters, warfare and the continual influx of people and culture. Therefore, the architecture that exists on the island is one that divides itself into four distinct styles with each as a response to external forces that affected the island. By researching each of these styles, one is able to fully understand the holistic view of Guam’s history in order to design architecture that reflects the past with anticipation for the future. This thesis works to explore …

Picturing The Cajun Revival: Swallow Records, Album Art, And Marketing An Identity Of South Louisiana, 1960s-1970s, Jessica A. Dauterive

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In South Louisiana in the late 1950s, Ville Platte native Floyd Soileau joined a network of independent recording companies across the United States that provided an opportunity for local entrepreneurs and artists to profit from the global music industry. This paper analyzes the album covers of Floyd Soileau’s Cajun recording label, Swallow Records, during the 1960s-1970s. This period overlaps with a movement to subvert a negative regional identity among Louisiana Cajuns that is often referred to as the Cajun revival. Through a consideration of album covers as objects of business strategy and creative expression, as well as oral histories with …

Immune Function In Amazonian Horticulturalists, Aaron D. Blackwell, Benjamin C. Trumble, Ivan Maldonado Suarez, Jonathan Stieglitz, Bret Beheim, J. Josh Snodgrass, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Background—Amazonian populations are exposed to diverse parasites and pathogens, including protozoal, bacterial, fungal, and helminthic infections. Yet much of our understanding of the immune system is based on industrialised populations where these infections are relatively rare.

Aim—We examine distributions and age-related differences in 22 measures of immune function for Bolivian forager-horticulturalists and US and European populations.

Subjects and Methods—Subjects were 6,338 Tsimane aged 0–90 years. Blood samples collected between 2004–2014 were analysed for 5-part blood differentials, C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and total immunoglobulins E, G, A, and M. Flow cytometry was used to quantify naive …

A Prison Of Education: The School-To-Prison Pipeline In Low-Income Schools, Adam Le

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

This paper examines the relationship between prisons and education in American culture, comparing public schools in California cities to wealthier private schools. The essay critiques the American dream’s notions of social stratification and success of the individual in racialized areas. The first section compares funding disparities between education and prison and argues that while funding is an integral part of the inner-city’s problem, the curriculum itself is ineffective. The second section takes a closer look at differences in the curricula and educational settings of an inner-city school and a private school. It offers ethnic studies in secondary education as a …

Beyond Metropolises: Hybridity In A Transnational Context, Raihan Sharif

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Beyond metropolises and within transnational contexts, investigating hybridity discourses is long overdue. This article argues that the epistemic violence embedded in such discourse has grave implications for the very impoverished nations and peoples with whom it claims solidarity and that, because this discourse is trendy in academia, its service to neoliberal capitalism is both easy to miss and important to expose. Interstices of postcolonial hybridity discourses, development discourses, and environmental justice discourses—dominant versions of which are segregated from contextual issues—as produced in Western academia and exported to third world countries for appropriation as developmental efforts—reveal epistemic violence, the manipulation of …

Comparative Organizational Assessments And Partenship Potential For Sekou Pou Nanm-Yo And Asirans Community Counseling Center, Lauren M. Mawe

Sustainability and Social Justice

This paper assesses the organizational capacity of two small Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Port-Au-Prince Haiti. Each NGO has a staff of under 15 members. At the time of the assessment, they were both in early stages of their development, with one in its first year of operations, and the other in its fifth year. Both embody grassroots, community organizations because of their connections to the communities in which they work, their willingness to travel to those communities, and their predominantly Haitian staff. The fieldwork included interviews, focus groups, and three months of participant observation and work with these organizations. In …

Young, Urban, Professional, And Kenyan?: Conversations Surrounding Tribal Identity And Nationhood, Charlotte Achieng-Evensen

Educational Studies Dissertations

By asking the question “How do young, urban, professional Kenyans make connections between tribal identity, colonialism, and the lived experience of nationhood?,” the researcher engages with eight participants in exploring their relationships with their tribal groups. From this juncture the researcher, through a co-constructed process with participants, interrogates the idea of nationhood by querying their interpretations of the concepts of power and resistance within their multi-ethnic societies. The utility of KuPiga Hadithi as a cultural responsive methodology for data collection along with poetic analysis as part of the qualitative tools of examination allowed the researcher to identify five emergent and …

Fragmentality, Elena Volkova

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary art is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental; it becomes more and more trans-border, as life itself. Nowadays, people live in the world, where their beliefs, ideas, politics, and religion are constantly colliding. The more people expand boundaries and develop connections, the more complex and tangled our society becomes as a system.

FRAGmentality presents a set of mixed media pieces incorporating painting, weaving, embroidery and three-dimensional elements dedicated to these contradictions in the modern society. It deals with structures within Social relations and human nature.

Being a representative of a …

Race, Rebellion, And Arab Muslim Slavery : The Zanj Rebellion In Iraq, 869 - 883 C.E., Nicholas C. Mcleod

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the ninth century, enslaved Africans from the east coast of Africa, called the Zanj, revolted for nearly fifteen years in southern Iraq against their Arab slave masters and challenged the social order of the Abbasid Empire. This thesis is a socio-historical investigation on the role that race played in starting the Zanj Rebellion of 869 C.E. It examines the Arab Islamic slave trade and the racial stratification experienced by blacks in the early centuries of Islamic history in conjunction with the Zanj Rebellion. The thesis applies a structural framework for analyzing race, to demonstrate the racialization process, prevalent racial …

Choral Theatre, Albert Joseph Wolfe Jr.

Dissertations

Jamaica gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962, after some 300 years of colonization. Prior to Independence, the standard arts education curriculum was decidedly British and Western European. That which was labeled Caribbean or Jamaican “folk” by the British was deemed inferior and was not taught, demonstrated, or performed in formal settings. Thus, generations of Jamaicans never observed or imagined a Caribbean aesthetic in the visual and performing arts. Instead, pre-Independence Jamaicans were taught British and Western European music and performed it the “British” way.

Today, Jamaicans boast a number of artistic developments that are instantly recognized across the …

Bosnia: Doomed To Failure Or A Rising Hope?, Caitlin V. Moore

Politics Honors Papers

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country that suffers from a lack of a national identity as it has three main ethnic groups, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, who are all fighting for power. After the Bosnian war, which lasted from 1992-1995 and involved genocide that was committed against the Bosniaks, the ethnic divisions were further entrenched. These divisions were not helped by the provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords, which was the peace settlement that brought an end to the war. Dayton created an ethnocracy within Bosnia that places more importance on ethnic groups than national identity. In order to see …