Digital Commons Network^™

Police Officers’ Perspectives On The Death Of George Floyd By Minneapolis Police Officers: A Descriptive Study, Janet Henderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers reported to the location where an African American man had been accused of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill in a convenience store. After being taken outside of the store, the man, George Floyd, was eventually placed in the back of a police patrol car, after he was handcuffed. Saying he was claustrophobic and resisting arrest, Mr. Floyd was removed from the patrol car, and placed on the ground on his stomach. One of the patrol officers, the most senior officer present, and a field training officer, placed his knee on …

Anth201: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Fall 2023), James Tolleson

Open Educational Resources

Cultural anthropology emerged to study the differences among human beings (and between human and non-human beings). This course will cover the foundations of the discipline, including a critical perspective on anthropology’s ties to European colonialism and the rise of global capitalism. Students will come away with an understanding of how cultural anthropologists study culture, defined as “a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways” (Brown, McIlwraith & Tubelle de González 2020, 6). We will also pay close attention to …

Metapopulation Dynamics Of Sars-Cov-2 Transmission In A Small-Scale Amazonian Society, Thomas Kraft, Edmond Seabright, Sarah Alami, Samuel M. Jenness, Paul L. Hooper, Bret Beheim, Helen Davis, Daniel K. Cummings, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Maguin Gutierrez Cayuba, Emily J. Miner, Xavier De Lamballerie, Lucia Inchauste, Stéphane Priet, Benjamin Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

The severity of infectious disease outbreaks is governed by patterns of human contact, which vary by geography, social organization, mobility, access to technology and healthcare, economic development, and culture. Whereas globalized societies and urban centers exhibit characteristics that can heighten vulnerability to pandemics, small-scale subsistence societies occupying remote, rural areas may be buffered. Accordingly, voluntary collective isolation has been proposed as one strategy to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 and other pandemics on small-scale Indigenous populations with minimal access to healthcare infrastructure. To assess the vulnerability of such populations and the viability of interventions such as voluntary collective isolation, we …

Fantasy Escapism: Using Role-Playing Games To Explore Mental Health And Gender Identity, Aidan Cipolla

English and Creative Writing Summer Fellows

This project analyzes how escapism through the use of role-playing games can be used as a coping mechanism for those struggling with a variety of topics, including gender dysphoria and mental health issues. The project takes an ethnographic approach to data gathering, consisting of interviews with a small group of Dungeons and Dragons / video game players, and personal anecdotes regarding the author’s experience with escapism.

Integrated Healthcare In The U.S. Safety-Net System: Meeting The Needs Of Patients Through Comprehensive Medical And Social Care, Jacqueline Devaney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This thesis examines how a Patient-Centered Medical Home addresses, implements, and provides medical and social resources and services within the Florida U.S. safety-net system, and how patients and providers perceive health care interactions between each other. The safety-net clinics seek to fill the care gap for millions of uninsured low-income U.S. residents who cannot afford private insurance, are unemployed, self-employed, undocumented, or their low income exceeds the qualification threshold, and they face barriers in accessing expensive medical care in the U.S. I have conducted ethnographic research at Grace Medical Home, a safety-net clinic in Central Florida, which included five months …

Puerto Rico's Cultural Industry (Re)Construction: A Study On Vulnerable Systems, Post-Disaster U.S. Philanthropy, And Autogestión Through Puerto Rican Artists And Cultural Managers' Perspectives, Andrea Ocasio Cruz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, and its aftermath significantly changed the local cultural industry's funding infrastructure. Philanthropic foundations in the United States (US) have provided financial support to local artists, educators, cultural managers, and institutions after the storm for over four years. Based on semi-structured interviews with eight participants and fieldwork, this study provides insight into the colonial and neoliberal policies that progressively stripped the cultural industry's public funding infrastructure and ushered in a US-led "impromptu Institute of Culture." This study proposes that Puerto Rico's cultural industry was founded on a vulnerable system shaped by colonialism, resulting in …

"They Dare To Continue:" Identity Politics And Coloniality Of Distance At Universidad De Oriente, Yucatan, Mexico, Rachael Root

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In the last few decades, narratives of diversity and international declarations have directed higher education to become more inclusive. In Mexico, new intercultural universities incorporate indigenous knowledges, skills, languages, and values into Western-style curriculum or create new curriculum that centers local elders and community needs in degree completion requirements. As a public university located in Valladolid, Yucatan, Mexico, Universidad de Oriente's objective is to stimulate regional development, yet their mission is to protect and preserve Yucatec Maya language and culture. These opposing priorities generate tensions: is Universidad de Oriente really a school "for the Mayas" or is it yet another …

Common-Pool Resource Management And Conflict Resolution: A Case Study Of Two Self-Governed Irrigation Schemes In Ntcheu, Malawi, George Kasch

Capstone Collection

Contrary to conventional common-pool resource (CPR) theory – where it is presumed that strong central states must be the primary actors in regulating the commons – self-governed CPR theory is a method that enables the appropriators themselves to be the primary actors in designing and managing a given CPR. Irrigation systems are one on the most common examples of CPR sharing. Using Elinor Ostrom’s theory on self-governed CPR management and her Eight Design Principles, I examine the mechanisms by which two neighboring small-scale irrigation schemes in rural Malawi manage and govern common-pool water resources to contrast intra-scheme functions and the …

Introduction To The Special Issue On Secrecy And Technologies, Clare Stevens, Sam Forsythe

Secrecy and Society

Many scholars have treated the inscrutability of technologies, secrecy, and other unknowns as moral and ethical challenges that can be resolved through transparency and openness. This paper, and the special issue it introduces, instead wants to explore how we can understand the productive, strategic but also emancipatory potential of secrecy and ignorance in the development of security and technologies. This paper argues that rather than just being mediums or passive substrates, technologies are making a difference to how secrecy, disclosure, and transparency work. This special issue will show how technologies and time mediate secrecy and disclosure, and vice versa. This …

Evolution Of Women’S Consciousness: Toward Integral Consciousness, Katherine T. Ziemke

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This article presents research materials which demonstrate historical consciousness for women of ancient European descent, the cultural heritage of the author. Awareness is examined from various historical angles in a transdisciplinary approach to the work. I explore the possibility that women’s historical and continued oppression may be a sign of the disintegration of the mental and a re-emergence of the integral structure of consciousness. A broad examination of women’s historical roles and corresponding thought shows how ancient consciousness may be used to accelerate a path toward integral consciousness today. Finally, this essay proposes that women’s historical consciousness and primordial memories …

Holocaust Education In Arkansas: An Exploration Of Policy Process And Implementation, Toby Klein

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Holocaust was the attempted extermination of the Jewish people--a fact previously considered to be common knowledge. However, recent national surveys find that Arkansas students have the lowest levels of knowledge of the Holocaust in the United States. A recent law mandated the teaching of the Holocaust for 5-12th grade public school students in Arkansas, however, little is known about the policy process and implementation of such a mandate. Given the magnitude of the gaps in the literature on this topic, this dissertation uses a three article format to address specific gaps and make specific contributions to the literature by …

Selective Framing And Narrative As Anthropocentric Agents In Yellowstone: America’S Eden, Breanna Lee Hansen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Yellowstone: America’s Eden is but one example of nature documentaries tackling the complexities of nature-culture relationships during the age of the Anthropocene. Yellowstone National Park, the first to be named, is a primary example of how our relationship to the natural world developed through conservation and commodification. Yellowstone: America’s Eden demonstrates how film techniques conceal nature as a human construct through selective framing and narrative. By analyzing editing techniques made in the representation of Yellowstone National Park, this thesis bridges anthropocentrism to nature documentaries. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from media studies, environmental humanities, and anthropology, this thesis analyzes the ways …

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 …

Current Developmental Challenges In Nepal: How Can The Diaspora Help?, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Nepal now enjoys a unique opportunity to positively transform the country’s economy and society. The economic activities fueled by remittance, supported by foreign aid, and aided by domestic economic activities such as tourism, trade, and services, including start-ups, are helping increase individual incomes. However, the earnings from remittances, which measure to about 25% of Nepal’s GDP, are spent on consumer goods and not on investments that can generate employment and raise the standards of living. The foreign aid is often donor driven and also not always well managed and wisely spent on national priorities. Further, it is frequently marred by …

Locating A Shadowy State In Queer, Feminist Politics, Atreyee Majumder

Articles

In this commentary, part of a book forum on Srila Roy’s (2022) book ”Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India”, I argue that the feminist and queer movement, in response to the neoliberal turn in India, is not totally separate from the Indian state formations. In fact, a shadowy state emerges in the affective life of citizens as an expression of what Timothy Mitchell would have called “state effect”.

The Bearing Earth: Colonization, Conservation, And Political Ecology In Costa Rica (Coto Brus 1948 - Present), Pablo Alonso Arias-Benavides

Latin American Studies ETDs

This thesis presents two questions: How are relationships between people in Coto Brus and the land – specifically, forest – mediated by social, political, and economic forces? How are personal and collective identities expressed through relationship with the landscape? I chose Coto Brus because it is a forested region of Costa Rica which was populated with state support in the 1950s, and because it is my father’s hometown. In order to understand the subjective experiences of Costa Ricans involved in deforestation and reforestation, I performed interviews in the canton, visited conservation sites, and analyzed historical sources. This study combines multiscale …

Book Review Of The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables For A Planet In Crisis By Amitav Ghosh, Cynthia Twyford Fowler

Faculty Scholarship

Amitav Ghosh, a celebrated author of fiction and nonfiction, earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford. In this iteration of his nonfiction oeuvre, Ghosh’s mapping of the historical entanglement of human rights abuses and environmental exploitation is framed upon the pillars of postcolonialism and posthumanism. Many of the processes he writes about in his acclaimed book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis overlap with the interests of Human Ecology readers. Chapters 4 “Terraforming,” 5 “We Shall be Gone Shortly,” and 6 “Bonds of Earth” may feel familiar to students of environmental histories and aficionados of Alfred …

The Reluctant Feminist: Angela Merkel’S Cautious Leadership, Ls Gaiek, Marlyn Garcia

The Scholarship Without Borders Journal

Abstract: What does it mean to be a modern feminist global leader today? Global leadership research is growing, but less research focuses on female leaders, even though the 21st century thus far contains a significant rise of female leaders. Angela Merkel’s infamously historic reticence and aversion, concerning speaking about feminism, irrevocably dissolves in an interview in January of 2019. This interview offers a glimpse into Angela Merkel’s cageyness, and provides an intimate insight into her circumspect perspective concerning feminism. This article aims to explore barriers and challenges to Angela Merkel’s rise as a global leader, how crisis forged and …

Pregnancy In United States Immigration Detention: Listening To Migrant Women's Stories, Amanda Heffernan

Nursing ETDs

Over the last five years, dramatic shifts in immigration policy across three presidential administrations have impacted migrants arriving at the U.S.’ southern border, with unique impacts on pregnant migrants. The purpose of this study was to document, analyze and contextualize the experience of pregnancy in United States immigration detention. Specifically, the study aimed to: 1) understand the situation of pregnant migrants detained in United States immigration detention facilities between 2017-2022; 2) situate the experience of detained pregnant migrants within multiple contexts, including their own individual and family migration stories and the larger context of United States immigration policy; and 3) …

Wisata Jalan Kaki Sebagai Alternatif Aktivitas Wisata Di Masa Dan Pasca Pandemi Covid-19 Di Dki Jakarta, Budiman Mahmud Musthofa

Jurnal Sosial Humaniora Terapan

Walking tourism has presented great opportunities for tourism industry stakeholders. Walking tourism can be developed anywhere according to the uniqueness of an area by creating specific travel routes to provide a unique experience for tourists. This type of tour has been around for a long time in Jakarta, but it has grown significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Organizing walking tour packages in DKI Jakarta began with community activities, which have now become government programs through collaboration with various tourism industry stakeholders. Through qualitative methods, this research explores the process of developing and managing the Jakarta Walking Tour program. The results …

Archivo Y Memoria: Una Mirada A Tres Historias De Mujeres Esclavizadas En El Virreinato De La Nueva Granada De Finales Del Siglo Xviii, Luisa Carolina Julio Gomez

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Colonial documents preserve information that allows us to know the local Andean history of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. These manuscripts reveal forms of violence that shaped the subjectivities of the time and the resistance of oppressed women. This dissertation examines the effects of slavery and the response of three enslaved women to that colonial violence. This analysis seeks to better understand and make visible how the intersection between racism and patriarchy impacted the lives of three racialized women in the colonial context.

This dissertation focuses on the experiences, struggles, and resistance of three women present in the manuscripts consigned …

“I’M Still Suffering”: Mental Health Care Among Central African Refugee Populations In The Tampa Bay Area, C. Danee Ruszczyk

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An estimated 500 Central African refugee families have been resettled in the Tampa Bay Area since 2002 (RPC, 2022). The cycles of trauma that they have endured place them in vulnerable positions regarding their mental health. Struggling to exist within underfunded social programs that are rigid in their expectations and with the current system of reactive care vs preventative care, the refugees in Tampa are put in a difficult situation of navigating their own health and wellbeing in lieu of having the full support of the United States government and their community. I will discuss how these refugees experience and …

Narrating & Living With Loss: Towards An Ethnography Of Grief, Fayrouz Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

Through this paper, I seek to approach grief through how it is lived, the nexus between loss, and the sought-for physical abstractions through memory, objects, and materials to live with/despite such a loss. This paper is a phenomenological and ethnographic research project on the curatory rituals and practices that individuals employ in keeping lost loved ones alive in their everyday. I explore grief through a multidisciplinary and multimodal conceptualization rather than simply through cultural and social practices such as burial and mortuary rituals. The research follows the grief narratives of different individuals in Egypt in inquiring about the objects, memories, …

The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …

Privacy Perceptions Transformation In Cairo’S Home Designs - A Case Study: Gated Communities, Yasmine Esmat

Theses and Dissertations

The infrastructure of gated communities in Egypt’s New Cairo and 6th of October cities have become the new normal. The streets bordered by fences, walls, and the occasional gate, formed when two or more gated communities face each other, dominate the urban landscape today (Kostenwein, 2021). Nowadays, it is highly common to see billboards advertising new gated communities everywhere on the roads and bridges. Gated communities offer various privileges, and one of them is privacy. Taking Cairo city with its several gated communities as a case study, the research focuses on the transformation of privacy perception for Cairo’s home designs …

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, …

Self-Reported Water Competency Skills At A Historically Black College & University And The Potential Impact Of Additional Hbcu-Based Aquatic Programming, Knolan C. Rawlins Ph.D., Shaun M. Anderson Ed.D, Tiffany Monique Quash Ph.D.

International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education

This article provides an analysis of self-reported water competency skills at a Historically Black University (HBCU). A survey was administered to undergraduate students who lived on campus at one HBCU. Of the 254 respondents that reported the ability to swim, only 187 respondents self-reported the ability to swim and the ability to perform water competency skills. The biggest discrepancy occurred within individuals that identified as Black or African American. In this group, 142 out of 250 participants proclaimed the ability to swim. However, the number of Black or African Americans that could swim dropped to 84 when researchers operationally defined …

The Impacts Of Disability Policy And Its Implementation On Deaf University Students: An Applied Anthropological Approach, Tailyn Marie Osorio

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) has provided legal requirement for universities to provide accommodations for all disabled students, including deaf students. The ADA is intentionally vague to allow flexibility for how institutions implement accommodations provisions. This leads to high variability across universities. Using ethnographic data from policy analysis, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with accommodations coordinators and deaf students from a large-public university, this applied anthropological study aims to investigate the impacts of policy and policy practices on the experiences of deaf students while proposing interventions informed by the coordinators and deaf students themselves.

This study is …