Digital Commons Network^™

The Production Of Cultural Heritage Discourses: Political Economy And The Intersections Of Public And Private Heritage In Yap State, Federated States Of Micronesia, Stefan M. Krause

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heritage is a concept that has received abundant critical attention within the academy. This study seeks to extend this critique by demonstrating the value of long-term ethnographic research and analysis of heritage processes on the Main Islands of Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). As the FSM staff cultural anthropologist for 23 months, the author utilizes interview and participant observation data collected during a total of over 2 years in the field to uncover and analyze the production of cultural heritage discourses on Yap’s Main Islands. With a central goal to understand locally produced views and values of stakeholders …

Grant-Writing, Spike Gildea, Margaret Florey

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

This course provides an overview of the key national and international funding agencies. The essential information that is commonly required by funding agencies is reviewed and explored section-by- section. Students will practise writing sections of a mock proposal and will receive feedback about what works and what doesn’t in grant applications. Ethical and intellectual property issues are discussed and we examine the requirements for carrying out effective projects consistent with community protocols.

Project Planning, Margaret Florey

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

This workshop provides a sound foundation in project planning and development. It is aimed primarily at those people who are relatively new to planning language projects. Over four sessions, participants will identify the project goals and objectives, proposed outcomes, the target audience, and the project team members and their skills and roles. They will map out the activities and projected timeline together with a preliminary implementation plan. We will explore strategic plans and look at how each step of a project fits strategically into wider goals for the language. We consider ethical issues, community protocols and regulations that need to …

Ethnography In Language Documentation And Revitalization, Sarah Shulist, Faun Rice

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

This workshop will focus on training participants to use ethnographic methodologies in the development and implementation of projects for both language documentation and revitalization. The target audience includes community linguists and academic linguists with an intermediate to advanced level of knowledge about language programs, but without any extensive training in anthropology and ethnography. The goal is to provide this group of language activists with an additional set of tools for use in enhancing the efficacy and comprehensiveness of their documentary and revitalization work.

Documentation Of Orature, Imelda Udoh, Uwemedimo Iwoketok

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

Orature is an amalgamation of two words: oral and literature. It depicts the creative impulse of the society it evolves from. This artistic expression includes proverbs, riddles, extemporized poems/songs, folktales, childlore, etc. The general observation is that attention has been given to aspects of Orature by adults almost to the exclusion of children’s artistic expression. There is no doubt that some aspects of our collective Orature has been put in print. However, much more is yet to be documented. It is also often not considered that both adults and children draw their experiences from the same setting, they employ the …

Life In Communities, Spike Gildea, Jorge Emilio Labrada

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

Given the widely recognized danger the world’s languages face at the present time, there has been a major expansion of language documentation and linguistic description, which requires what has been traditionally referred to as linguistic fieldwork. We generally prepare our students to undertake this work through field methods courses but “[w]hile we generally do a very thorough job of teaching how to elicit and analyze data, we often forget to tell them that there is a personal and practical side to fieldwork that can very well derail their research if they are not prepared for it.” (Macauley, 2004:194). The overall …

Teaching And Leaerning An Indigenous Language, Hishinlai' Peter

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

Students will be able to (1) listen and participate in the discussin of an Indigenous language learner as he speaks about his experiences in learning his ancestral language from the language classroom; (2) understand the basis of the language classroom, and expectations of the students from the teaching perspective; (3) understand and participate in the revieiw of the curriculum of the class; (4) understand the basis of lesson plans ad be able to create them to support language learning goals; (5) understand how to engage students in the process of acquiring the language; and (6) understand the role of grammar …

Spatial Visualization And Language Documentation, Kristine Hildebrandt

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

Maps and atlases (collections of maps) can be an important and extremely useful part of the toolkit for examining and interpreting variation and change in language documentation and in projects aimed at maintenance, promotion or revitalization. They allow for orderly and illuminating generalizations to be drawn from often unruly distributions of patterns. They also allow for a birds-eye view of patterns across large populations or large geographic and temporal spaces. Although maps cannot tell the whole story behind languages and varieties, they are one way in which we can provide context or approach explanation for interesting or unexpected patterns or …

Integrating Experimental Methods, Language Documentation, And (Linguistic) Theory, Seunghun Lee, Michal Temkin Martínez

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

Language documentation and linguistic theories mutually benefit from cooperation - data from documentation propels linguistic theories, and different theories can inform the collection of language materials. A wide array of rich, naturally occurring data collected in language documentation settings has long informed and been used for the basis for typological assertions and to further linguistic inquiry (Palosaari and Campbell 2011, Himmelmann 2012). On the other hand, O’Grady et al. (2009) use psycholinguistic theory and methods to aid in the documentation and assessment of language fluency that can be used for revitalization efforts. Additionally, the integration of experimental methods in language …

Transcription, Eno-Abasi Urua

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

Transcription, the written representation of spoken human language, is vital to any language documentation and revitalization project. This hands-on workshop introduces participants to a variety of different transcription methodologies for various purposes. The workshop primarily focuses two types of transcription: (i) phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet and (ii) discourse transcription where elements of well-known transcription systems are introduced (Conversation Analysis – developed at UC Santa Barbara). The workshop emphasizes the nuts and bolts of these transcription systems and how to apply transcription practices to documentation and revitalization projects.

Unangam Tunuu, Anna Berge, Moses Dirks

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

This workshop prepares the student for the 3-week practicum focusing on fieldwork on a sleeping or less accessible language using archival materials; the language we focus on (for both the workshop and practicum) is Unangam Tunuu (Eastern Aleut, ISO 6390ale). The workshop class will cover the language and cultural history, linguistic structure, the history of language documentation and description in Unangam Tunuu, and the main resources and foci of previous linguistic research. Students will be required to do the readings and to familiarize themselves with leading articles or reference books in the field, in particular with the Aleut Dictionary and …

Talk It Up! — Integrating And Prioritizing Conversational Data In Documentation, Nicholas Williams, Kristine Stenzel, Barbara Fox

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

This course will introduce participants to some of the basic methodological and theoretical issues related to recording and analyzing everyday conversations. We will discuss specific contributions of naturalistic interactions to understanding aspects of linguistic structure, social interaction, and culture and explore how interactional data can be better integrated into language documentation projects.

Working With Archival Materials, Susan Gehr, Megan Lukaniec

CoLang 2016 Workshop Syllabuses

As more languages become dormant each year, there is a growing need to develop and disseminate research methods for working with archival documents. This workshop is aimed primarily toward beginning and intermediate participants who either are currently working with or intend to work with archival materials. The workshop will focus primarily on providing and developing skills to accomplish research and revitalization goals through the use of archival documents. Therefore, there will be hands on practice in class as well as regular assignments for participants. These assignments will allow students to begin working with these materials during the workshop itself, to …

Collaborative Imaging. The Communicative Practice Of Hand Sketching In Experimental Physics, Judith Marlen Dobler

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents on-going ethnographic fieldwork in design research conducted in an x-ray laboratory. The study investigates physicists’ hand sketching as a collaborative imaging practice and depicts collaborative drawing as a distinct form of knowledge in between the spaces of notation and verbal articulation. Physicists’ collaborative sketching is captured through methods taken from design research and STS, including participant observation, videography and drawings by the design researcher. In order to analyse the functions of the collaborative sketching, three key aspects of the research are discussed in this paper. First, the spaces and materiality of the laboratory are observed. Second, the …

New Studies Of Children’S Work, Acquisition Of Critical Skills, And Contribution To The Domestic Economy, David F. Lancy

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

In spite of the fact that the very earliest ethnographers who paid any attention to children took note of the “precocity” displayed by children in both learning the household (e.g., caring for a younger sibling) and subsistence (harvesting and processing grain), tasks characteristic of the societies under investigation, the first synthesis and cross-cultural compilation of this large body of descriptive material is quite recent. This first, introductory, article in this collection reviews those efforts to systematize the study of children’s work and leads the reader through a catalog of the major conclusions or generalizations that have emerged from this analysis. …

A Divided Community: The Ethics And Politics Of Activist Research, Christopher Anthony Loperena

Publications and Research

In this article, I draw upon over two years of fieldwork in a Garifuna community in Tela Bay, Honduras, to explore the ethical and political contradictions bound up with activist-oriented ethnographic research. The rise of tourism as a means of national development and a driver of local economic desires has fractured communal politics in Triunfo de la Cruz, particularly around questions pertaining to land tenure and territorial belonging. I analyze the challenges of doing politically engaged anthropology in such a context. My open collaboration with land rights activists and ongoing support for the struggle to defend Garifuna collective property rights …

Science, Symptoms, And Support Groups:Adhd In The American Cultural Context, Kealy D. Fallon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a cultural analysis of the behaviorally- and psychiatrically-defined disorder ADHD, socio-historically contextualizing it in the United States and exploring ethnographically how people affected by it talk about and organize their experience of its symptoms.

Embodiment In Traditional Chinese Medicine (Tcm) Discourse: Healing, Silence And The Miracle Cure, Kaicheng Zhan

Dissertations - ALL

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a thousand-year old medical practice originated in China, has stepped into the western world with globalization for years. TCM has entered the West with its foreign, distant and “unscientific” concepts despite the fact that medicine globalization is still a contested concept. My thesis aims to understand the embodied concepts of TCM through practitioner-patient interaction as culturally specific constructs. Among many TCM medical and philosophical concepts, I specifically focus on the healing, the silence and the miracle cure and how they are embodied and co-constructed by the practitioner and the patient during acupuncture, herb prescription and tuina …

Totality And Infinity—Nationalism And The Face: An Ethnographic Exploration In The Republic Of Turkey And State Of Israel, Charles Phifer Nicholson Jr.

Student Scholarship

This paper argues that the historical roots and current manifestations of secular and religious nationalism in the Republic of Turkey and the State of Israel are well understood in light of Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of totality. Furthermore, as discovered through ethnographic research collected concerning the lived experiences of ethnic and religious minorities in these nations, it posits that the best response to these all-encompassing, exclusive worldviews is found in the reality of the human face, as conceptualized by Levinas in connection with his notion of infinity.

The foundation and primary source of this project is ethnographic research collected in the …

Sharing The Sacred: A Tradition Of Mormon Public Education In Kirtland, Ohio, James Stuart Bielo, Kimberly Blake, Daniel Mcclurkin, Seth Boda

Southern Anthropological Society - Annual Conference

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) has a strong tradition of promoting formal education. This includes several initiatives detailing, preserving, and sharing church history at sites of significance, setting these sites apart as sacred space. In summer 2015 I conducted eight weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at the Kirtland Historic Village, a recreated 19th century town in northeast Ohio. Historic Kirtland’s status as a sacred LDS space, coupled with its high operating costs and low non-LDS visitor attendance, raises the question of why the site stays open to the general public and free of admission. The use of …

Having A Say: Democracy, Access To Justice And Self-Represented Litigants, Jennifer Ann Leitch

PhD Dissertations

Access to Justice is one of the most contested issues on the law-and-society agenda. There is a long-standing exchange over its meaning, objectives, and success. Beneath that engagement, there is a deeper and more basic debate about the overall ambitions for access to justice: is the goal to improve peoples access to the legal process and generate more positive outcomes (the practical thesis), or to enhance peoples participation and ultimately their ability to affect justice as an end in itself (the democratic thesis)? This thesis adopts the latter approach.

The plight of self-represented litigants (SRLs) offers a revealing glimpse into …

“This Is Our Life. We Can’T Drive Home.” An Analysis Of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy As Perceived By Elementary Teachers, Students And Families In An Urban Charter School, Elaine Azalia Mcneil-Girmai

LMU Theses and Dissertations

As schools have become more diverse ethnically and linguistically, the likelihood of cultural mismatches among students, families, and teachers has increased (Frank, 1999). Culturally relevant pedagogy has at its core the understanding that incorporating students‘ culture into the practices of the school and the classroom through culturally relevant curriculum is likely to improve student cooperation, inspire a greater understanding of the educational program, and increase academic outcomes (Brown, 2004). These pedagogies have the potential to be a vital tool toward closing the achievement gap, yet the practices associated with them are in danger of meeting the same fate as multicultural …

Modeling Food Security, Energy, And Climate And Cultural Impacts Of A Process: The Case Study Of Shea Butter In Sub-Saharan Africa, Colleen Claire Naughton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Millions of people in the world, particularly women and people in sub-Saharan Africa, suffer from hunger and poverty. Three of the major 2015-2030 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to eliminate hunger through food security and sustainable agriculture, eradicate poverty, and achieve gender equality through women’s empowerment. Shea trees and their associated fruit and butter can play a major role in each of these three SDGs for women and their families throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Shea trees are located over a wide expanse stretching more than 5,000 kilometers across over eighteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These trees produce fruit that …

Where The Yak Became One With The Soil: Reflections On Life And Research In A Himalayan Village, Geoff Childs, Alyssa A. Kaelin

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

This article explores the role that Briddim, a small village in northern Rasuwa District, Nepal, played in the intellectual development of two students who visited nearly three decades apart. After a brief historical survey focusing on the village’s position on a trans-Himalayan trade route connecting Kathmandu with Kyirong, the authors use a personal and reflective lens to explore Briddim’s changing fortunes in relation to international exchange networks and geopolitical forces. In many ways Briddim encapsulates the socioeconomic and cultural changes sweeping contemporary highland Nepal as a result of rising educational opportunities, tourism, and migration. By comparing notes from 1984 and …

Ethnography Of Parkland Students: How Do Students Judge Others Based On Their Apparel?, Lori Armstrong

Independent Honors Projects

In this brief ethnographic study, the student sets out to reinvestigate the findings of a previous student project focusing on Parkland student’s tendency to judge others based on their attire. Data collection for the two studies were similar: photos representing styles of dress, and participant interviews. However, this study included examples of styles of dress for men in addition to styles of dress for women. Where the first project concluded that students did not tend to judge, this student’s survey showed contradictory results, with more negative judgement being placed on the photos presenting women than those presenting men. The author …

"Treat Everybody Right:" Multidimensional Foodways In Detroit, Alex B. Hill

Wayne State University Theses

Detroit is assumed to be a “food desert” even with contradicting evidence. With fruits and vegetables available at each of Detroit’s 70+ independent grocery stores, there remains a lack of understanding in consumer preference and perception of nutritional access. It was reported in 2010 that upwards of $200 million in grocery spending leaves the City of Detroit. Throughout the months of July to September 2014, 73 Detroit residents participated in focus groups and group interviews to discuss food purchasing habits and perceptions of food access. Of the 73 participants, 51 completed a Food Purchasing and Eating Patterns (FPEP) survey which …

Communication Patterns And Strategies In Software Development Communities Of Practice, Shreya Kumar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Some of the greatest challenges in the relatively new field of software development lie in the decidedly old technology of communication between humans. Software projects require sophisticated and varied communication skills because software developers work in a world of incomplete, imperfect information where teams evolve rapidly in response to evolving requirements and changing collaborators. While prescriptive models for software process such as Agile suggest ways of doing, in reality these codified practices must adapt to the complexities of a real workplace. Patterns, rather than rules of behavior within software process are more suitable to the varied and mutable nature of …

Necessary Medicine: Rethinking Health Communication At Burning Man, Raquel Irene Polanco

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study turns to the annual Burning Man Festival held in Black Rock City, Nevada as a site of cultural performance where participants negotiate health meanings. I adopt a culture-centered approach to health communication and utilize critical performance ethnography and narrative performativity as methodological and theoretical frameworks to investigate the specific communication practices that bring about health meanings at the festival. Analysis revealed the significance of everyday life practices performed through narrative for understanding how Burning Man participants understand, reinforce, and counter various health meanings with implications for the field of health communication and performance studies.

Crossing Borders And Building Bridges: A Video Ethnography Of Special Education In Nuevo Progresso, Mexico, John Lowdermilk, Julie Pecina, Cheryl Fielding, Lisa Beccera

Human Development and School Services Faculty Publications

This paper presents an overview of a video ethnographic study of a special education school on the Texas/Mexico Border. The public school is located in Nuevo Progreso, which is a town in the Río Bravo Municipality in the state of Tamaulipas in Mexico. The town is located on the United States-Mexico border. The Progreso-Nuevo Progreso International Bridge connects the town with Progreso Lakes, Texas. The 2010 census showed a population of 10,178 inhabitants. Both the school and town have very little resources making the creation of the special education school a very special event. For a public school to start …

Defining Biodiversity: A Local Assessment Of The Tahuayo River, Peru Using Self-Directed Photography, Rozsika D. Steele

All Master's Theses

The Área de Conservación Regional Comunal Tamshiyacu Tahuayo (ACRCTT), located in Loreto, Peru, protects 420,000 hectares of the Amazon basin. In 2009, the ACRCTT received formal government recognition after three decades of advocacy and conservation work by resident communities. Local resource users who live a subsistence lifestyle possess sophisticated Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) that can be used to identify which constituents of biodiversity are culturally relevant. This information can help resource managers develop an operational definition of biodiversity. Self-directed photography is a research method that allows participants the opportunity to direct data collection and empowers them to visually communicate their …