Digital Commons Network^™

Pillage As The Political Economy Of The Kurdish Anfal Genocide, Kaziwa Salih

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Scholars are critical of how economists overlook “the questions of genocide,” and of how legislatures have not paid adequate attention to the subject of looting, except in the case of the Armenian genocide. This article, informed by interdisciplinary perspectives, uses government documents, data, and semi-structured interviews to discuss the overlooked triangle of looting, economics, and the Anfal genocide of the Kurds in Iraq. The study refuses to limit itself only to the eight stages of the Anfal genocide that started in 1988, and instead offers data on its preliminary phases which occurred earlier in the 1980s. It then discusses the …

Brazilian Camming: The Monetization Of Intimacy In Online Sex Work, Fernanda Veiverberg

Master's Theses

This thesis addresses a form of online feminized labor in Brazil, which employs digital technology to relieve the urges for intimacy and monetary insecurity. Camming is a genre of online sex work, in which cam models sell their body image and attention online through computer-mediated interactions. It constitutes a profitable activity that employs body performance without physical contact between model and client, typical in most categories of sex work such as prostitution, and where the clients are not mere spectators as within the pornography industry because camming requires authenticity and communication. For that, I explored three conceptual spheres that combined …

Grabbing The Paycheck: A Glimpse Into The Modern Economic Livelihoods Of Xe Máy Grab Drivers In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Maddie Davis

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Woven into the very fabric of urban life in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam is commuting via motorcycle (Vietnamese: xe máy). The versatility of xe máy can be witnessed in the surge of rush hour traffic, the shipment of a great variety and quantity of goods, and the crunch of people in order to get the whole family atop a single bike. Due to xe máy as the primary way much of the population gets around, Ho Chi Minh City’s transportation infrastructure and traffic patterns are highly conducive to this method of transit. Resulting from these favorable conditions, a multitude …

From Coffee Houses To Internet Speech: Civility And Moderation Within The Contemporary Public Sphere, Leslie Brown , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis explores the ways in which discourse occurring in online discussion forums can become toxic and fail as spaces that create public opinion within the contemporary public sphere. After a literature review of Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere and other scholars who connect the bourgeois sphere to our current iteration of the public sphere on the internet, an ideal type of a contemporary public sphere is constructed. Using this ideal type, the ways in which multiple online discussion spaces fall short of realizing the potential of the public sphere and the culture of discussion that has been cultivated within them …

Biocultural Diversity Of Medicine In Tsum Valley, Ashira Weinreich

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Health is intrinsically connected to biodiversity in the Himalayan mountains of Tsum Valley. Medicinal plants have historically been integral to primary health care in this region. The main objectives of this paper are to explore the role of biocultural diversity on perceptions of health and to demonstrate that medicinal plant knowledge contributes to health sovereignty in times of cultural and environmental change. The nutritional and medicinal significance of plants were examined in the daily lives of villagers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted from April to May 2023. Preliminary results are analyzed ethnographically. Interviews and participant observation will provide a rich understanding …

The Headbangers Of The Himalaya: An Investigation Of Nepal’S Rock And Metal Scene, Samuel White

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The goal of this research endeavor was to generate findings which unveil information about the culture, the bands, and the lives of the musicians and fans who make up the Nepali rock and metal scene. The community is rather esoteric and information regarding certain bands and their musicians’ background is limited to broad, outdated articles published online. Thus, most of the information regarding the scene can only be obtained if one truly immerses themselves within it. I was fortunate enough to make friends which granted me a firsthand look into the Nepali rock and metal scene. The general questions which …

Sanak Value In Women’S Land Inheritance Rights: Case Study On Women Inheritance Land Rights In Karangpakuan, Sumedang, West Java, Patricia Beata Kurnia

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

Karangpakuan Village is one of the villages in Sumedang, West Java, which territory was broken up into multiple parts by the government, as part of its land was submerged in the framework of the creation of the Jatigede Reservoir. Karangpakuan Village is one of the traditional Sunda Priangan villages, in which traditional customary inheritance norms based on bilateral kinship values are still practiced – despite the Islamic background of the community. These bilateral kinship values influence inheritance practices as these are not based on gender, but divided equally while considering other criteria, such as the number of children in the …

Transformative Psychedelic Experiences At Music Events: Using Subjective Experience To Explore Chemosocial Assemblages Of Culture, Gabrielle R. Lehigh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clinical interest in psychedelic treatments in the United States started in the 1950s, but anti-drug policy and anti-social sentiments quickly thwarted future research. The last decade has renewed clinical interest in using psychedelics to treat a diversity of mental health ailments. While these studies provide essential protocols, treatments, and therapy models for patients, they are limited in understanding the role of the contextual elements that influence psychedelic experiences and outcomes. This project examines how people use psychedelic substances outside medical settings by studying transformative psychedelic experiences at music events. This inquiry into psychedelic use utilizes an integrated framework of chemoethnography …

Environmental Justice From The Ground(Water) Up: Coping With Contamination In Tallevast, Florida, Grey W. Caballero

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How do communities living with chronic environmental contamination cope with the social, political, and economic impacts of the contamination? This research employs a community-engaged oral history approach with participant observation and archival research to address this question. We focus on the case of Tallevast, Florida, where the local groundwater has been contaminated with chlorinated solvents for over 60 years and where cleanup is estimated to take another 100 years. In addition to concerns about health and wellness, we find that residents are also concerned about household displacement and the disruption of social networks, failed governance at the local and state …

Peace Studies And The Limits To Growth, Selina Gallo-Cruz

The Journal of Social Encounters

150 Peace Studies and the Limits to Growth Selina Gallo-Cruz Scientists have issued increasingly dire warnings about the present and future danger posed by ecological overshoot. Peace scholars’ entrée into this discourse is often through a concern over extractive politics, a central locus for how conflicts are bound up in environmental destruction at the hands of the same industries responsible for ecological decline. Policy and practical responses to the urgent need to scale down production lag behind reality, however, and a global growth-based economy continues to prevail. Here, I explore the dilemmas faced by peace studies scholars who may want …

Working Across Organizational Lines: Grassroots And Grasstops Tensions And Possibilities, Corrie Grosse

The Journal of Social Encounters

The climate justice movement is increasingly stressing the importance of building broad-based coalitions for addressing climate change. Two important elements in these coalitions are grassroots and grasstops organizations. The former bring creativity and flexibility to coalitions whereas the latter bring resources, staff, and specialized expertise. Drawing on 106 in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Idaho and California, this chapter from the book Working Across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction (University of California Press, 2022) analyzes how grassroots and grasstops organizations work to build effective coalitions. Contributing to emergent theory on social movement coalitions, I argue that organizational form, particularly nonprofit’s …

Fixing Prior Consultation For Indigenous Empowerment, Marcela Torres-Wong, Elia Méndez-García

The Journal of Social Encounters

Over the last three decades, extractive conflicts in Latin America have become increasingly violent. Hundreds of Indigenous activists have been murdered for defending their land against extractive interests. The international formula for addressing this type of conflict is for governments to conduct prior consultation procedures with Indigenous communities before affecting indigenous territories. However, the misuse of consultations by governments and companies to legitimize ecologically destructive projects has led a sector of Indigenous organizations to reject prior consultation, while others continue advocating for free, prior, and informed consent. We compare two cases of Indigenous communities from Oaxaca and Yucatán in Mexico …

Introduction - Volume 7, Issue 1, Selina Gallo-Cruz

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Engagement In Water Governance Action Situations In The Lake Champlain Basin, Patrick Bitterman, Christopher Koliba

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

Water quality governance encompasses multiple “wicked” interacting problems that manifest within social-ecological systems. Concerned governments, institutions, and actors concerned with addressing these issues must wrestle with complex systems that span time, space, and scale. This complexity of connected systems requires the participation of multiple actors across political boundaries, problem areas, and hydrologic domains. In Lake Champlain (US), frequent cyanobacteria blooms negatively affect property values, recreational activities, and public infrastructure, in addition to their impacts on the aquatic ecosystem. Through a survey of actors working on water quality in the Lake Champlain Basin, we analyze how actor participation in structured issue …

“Born For A Storm”: Hard-Right Social Media And Civil Unrest, Daniel Karell, Andrew Linke, Edward Holland, Edward Hendrickson

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Does activity on hard-right social media lead to hard-right civil unrest? If so, why? We created a spatial panel dataset comprising hard-right social media use and incidents of unrest across the United States from January 2020 through January 2021. Using spatial regression analyses with core-based statistical area (CBSA) and month fixed effects, we find that greater CBSA-level hard-right social media activity in a given month is associated with an increase in subsequent unrest. The results of robustness checks, placebo tests, alternative analytical approaches, and sensitivity analyses support this finding. To examine why hard-right social media activity predicts unrest, we draw …

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 …

Doing Urban History In The Global South, Anwesha Ghosh

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Testing The Affect Of Modified Sense Of Place, Conservation Ethic, And Good Farmer Identity Measures On Predicting The Adoption Of Cover Crops In Working Landscapes In Iowa, Elizabeth A. Bennett, Morey Burnham, Jessica D. Ulrich-Schad, J. Gordon Arbuckle, Weston M. Eaton, Sarah P. Church, Francis R. Eanes, Jennifer Eileen Cross, Matthew A. Williamson

Sociology and Anthropology Student Research

While sense of place (SOP) has been used in amenity landscapes to understand pro-environmental behavior, in working landscapes, SOP has not been a valid or reliable predictor for explaining conservation behavior. In this paper, we advance theory on SOP in working landscapes by assessing the relationship between several new and modified sense of place measures and farmer adoption of cover crops in Iowa. We used data from a 2018 survey of Iowa farmers and a Bayesian logistic regression, finding that physical dependence and economic dependence are distinct dimensions of SOP in working landscapes and the addition of a measure beyond …

During The Pandemic: A Perspective From A First-Year Teacher, Caleb T. Johnson

Journal of Graduate Education Research

This feature article aims to blend oral impressions with concrete "best" practices in secondary education. Through the most basic methods used throughout history--listening, interpreting, and translating stories shared among groups of people--this singular perspective questions whether the conversations among teachers positively impact the narrative of educating students as COVID-19 continues to have effects that are more difficult to perceive. Without bringing the two parties into conversation, the article offers its readers the observation and reflection of one who is invested in students' learning in the context of the classroom as much as the context of a world still dealing with …

Design Power And Potential Future Of Global Organization Of Life, A. Fuat Fırat

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

In this essay I propose a definition of design to address its potential role in largely determining power relations in the future. Some foundational discussion of wealth, culturally constructed differently in different historical times, trends of corporatization in the contemporary world, and the birth of control society is presented to help understand the possibilities and difficulties of building future organizations of life. I invite discussions and dialogues to widen and deepen the concept of design power.

An Institutional Perspective On Climate Change, Markets, And Consumption Across Three Countries, Delphine Godefroit-Winkel

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This manuscript enriches knowledge about consumers’ responses to climate change actions. Through the lens of institutional theory, it examines the findings of three studies run in France, Morocco and the United States. In Morocco, consumers are more responsive to climate change actions when they are managed at the level of their country, and company. Moroccan consumers express ambivalent emotions when their supermarket engages in actions to combat climate change. In France, consumers are less responsive when their country engage in climate change actions, but they display positive responses towards their supermarkets’ climate change actions. In the United States, the responses …

Marketing, Development, And The Question Of Meaning, Dominique Bouchet

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Originally developed as a sales technique, marketing ended up playing an economic and political role globally. With the advent of globalization and sustainability issues, the importance given to the techniques of marketing in both analyses and in communication limits the possibility of mutual understanding and of social creativity. A profound understanding of what is at stake for society and culture is not what matters when the focus is on the ways to maintain the superficial link to the instrument of power.

The market plays a central role within the fields of marketing, economics and politics. Yet, questions of what the …

Privileging Localism And Visualizing Nationhood In Anti-Consumption, Rohit Varman, Russell Belk

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

The main aim of this research is to understand the genesis and nature of an anti-consumption movement in India and its emphasis on nationalism through localism. This research adopted a case study design, including in-depth interviews and discursive analysis. Through a historical analysis this research shows the influence of anarchist political philosophy in a contemporary anti-consumption movement. It demonstrates that anti-consumption is inflected with discourses of freedom, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-statism, which are central to the anarchist conception of localism. This research shows that anti-consumption movements in India use consumption objects to privilege local over both national and international. This helps …

Establishing Meaning And Values In Marketing And Broadening Perspectives In Understanding Nationhood And Climate Change, Deniz Atik, Nikhilesh Dholakia

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

Modest Aspirations: Day Dreams, Frivolity, And Digital Lives Of Public College Girls In Lahore, Pakistan, Anam Khan

Theses and Dissertations

This project was conceived out of a policy announcement in 2016 where the Higher Education Commission Pakistan announced that the two-year colleges were to be phased out and eventually eliminated. In doing so, the notice suggested that they will be replaced by programs modeled around the United States community college and called Associate Degrees. This ongoing development formed the basis of my research as for many gender and class minorities, these programs are the only option for post-secondary education in a country where many do not have the privilege to go to college. I aimed to analyze the kind of …

On The Balcony, Beyond “Balconearing”; Perception Of Cairene Women, Behind The Curtains., Rowida Magdy Al-Gebeily

Theses and Dissertations

This study sheds light on the significance and role of threshold spaces as means of accomplishing sociocultural needs, restoration and wellbeing in the residential environment. Understanding the function and uses of these spaces allows us to appreciate their benefits that are often neglected. The research particularly focuses on the social dimension of one fundamental threshold space; the Cairene balcony. It is an integral space that provides a valuable connection to the outside, and its importance in the development of urban living is widely recognized. If carefully designed to meet the residents’ needs and demands, they can promote a better quality …

Factors Affecting Knowledge, Attitude, And Practice Of Covid-19: A Study Among Undergraduate University Students In Bangladesh, Mufti Nadimul Quamar Ahmed, Shamim Al Aziz Lalin, Saeed Ahmad

Sociology and Anthropology Student Research

The global expansion of the COVID-19 outbreak is one of the worst disasters the world has faced in recent decades. This study explored various factors of knowledge, attitude, and practice regarding COVID-19 among Bangladeshi undergraduate university students. In addition, we also look at how COVID-19 based knowledge, attitude, and practice influence each other. Using a random sampling technique and a self-administered structured questionnaire survey, this study collected data from 167 private university students in Bangladesh from 1st October to 30th October 2020. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (including frequencies, percentages, and means), binary logistic regression, bivariate regression analysis, and …

A Race-Police Regime: Nypd Technology And Urban Governance In New York City, Elliott Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation draws on three years of ethnographic and archival research to explore the relationship between technology, policing and race at the NYPD. In focusing on the ways problems are constructed and police power enacted, I explore the more-than-human entanglements in the production of race and the governance of cities under racial capitalism. My overarching claim is that urban governance works through contentious techno-political arrangements I call race-police regimes, which sanction and elicit race by enacting forms of exclusion and belonging. Racial capitalism in New York City, I argue, is governed through a technocratic mode of policing which leverages …

Naming Venus: An Exploration Of Goddesses, Heroines, And Famous Women, Kavya Beheraj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have been observing and romanticizing Venus for more than 5,000 years. However, mapping its surface has nearly always been impossible, since the planet is shrouded in thick clouds. A breakthrough came just fifty years ago with the invention of radar imaging, leading to the discovery (and naming) of hundreds of new features in a relatively short length of time.

The rapid naming of Venus is a case study on the impact of planetary nomenclature — the process of naming features on other worlds. While the act of naming streamlines communication and humanizes alien landscapes, it is subject to bias, …

“Investment In Inertia”: Language Ideologies Of Instructors And Students Of Spanish As A Heritage Language, Michael E. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When the Spanish-language skills of heritage Spanish learners are disparaged in an academic environment, these learners are at high risk of abandoning further study of Spanish and shifting entirely to English. This dissertation uses mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods, including thematic and discourse analysis, to investigate the language ideologies of instructors and students of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) and the effects of those ideologies on students’ experiences in SHL college courses. It builds on earlier research on language ideologies in the post-secondary heritage language context (e.g., Carreira, 2011; Loza, 2017; Valdés et al., 2003). I find that …