Digital Commons Network^™

Tensions In A Nepali Telecenter: An Ethnographic Look At Progress Using Activity Theory, Jeffrey Chih-Yih Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Developing countries such as Nepal struggle to keep up technologically. While advances make it possible for average Nepalis to access mobile phones, computers, and digital cameras, barriers impede access. As with other governments (Huerta & Rodrigo, 2007; Mokhtarian & Meenakshisun, 2002), Nepal responded in 2004 with telecenters to push sustainable technology. Most telecenters still struggle to accomplish their purpose (M. K. Bhattarai, personal communication, June 29, 2009). Developing countries struggle to meet communities' technological demands (Colle & Raul, 2003). Issues other than technology limit telecenters from fully providing services and meeting the needs of the local community. These issues, which …

Heal Project Process Report: Arrival At A Charrette To Effect Change At Sjsu, Marina L. Corrales

Master's Projects

This report documents the process the evaluation team, student evaluators from the Department of Anthropology at San Jose State University (SJSU), led by Professor Charles Darrah, went through to develop a modified charrette to link research with ideation. The team‘s work was funded through a Healthy Eating Active Living Local Partnership Grant ("HEAL Grant") made to SJSU by Kaiser Permanente Northern California Region in the fall of 2007 and included a series of research projects with the goal of changing policies and the built environment at SJSU in ways that support health and wellness. Work was collaborative in that the …

Mujeres Haciendo Frente Al Desplazamiento Forzado / Women Confronting Forced Displacement, Rocio Clarisa Lemus

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The main question of this research whether or not a relationship exists between gender and forced displacement. More specifically, my interest is to document the experiences that women undergo when they are forced to leave their places of origin due to the Colombian War. The present research looks both to study the current condition of women who live in displaced condition in Bogotá and to contribute to the discussion regarding the concept of ambivalent empowerment. The analysis of the information is enriched by the Intersectionality Theory of Patricia Hill Collins . The research method and design used in this research …

The Literary Fictioning Of John Gregory Bourke's Imperial Nostalgia, Toni K. Mcnair

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Nineteenth-century Army Captain and American ethnographer John Gregory Bourke (b. 1846 - d. 1896) meticulously described and documented a vast amount of information on military life, geography, ecology, and people on both sides of the Mexican-American border, offering observations and opinions of American, Mexican, Mexican-American, Apache, Pueblo, Zuni and Plains Indian cultures. Because of his ethnographic studies of Mexican-Americans along the Rio Grande, cultural studies scholars, José E. Limón and José David Saldí­var have identified John Gregory Bourke as complicit in the U.S. government's imperialist project. Referring to Renato Rosaldo's anthropological theory of imperialist nostalgia, These authors declare Bourke's work …

Threads In A Tapestry: An Ethnographic Evaluation Of Milken Community High School’S Tiferet Fellowship Program, Roger Jason Fuller

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study explored an essential question, "What does the lived experience of students in the Tiferet program mean for them and others?" By exploring the background, implementation, and lived-experiences of two academic-year sophomore cohorts from Milken Community High School in Los Angeles as they lived and participated in a semester study abroad program at the Alexander Muss Institute of Israel Education in Hod HaSharon, Israel, the study shows the impact-of that experience on the students in the program and the school culture at large. The study engaged in a description of the program’s development and evaluation of the lived-experiences as …

Humanities And Communities: A Dialogue In Pacific Studies, Teresia K. Teaiwa, April K. Henderson

Pacific Studies

This article presents a reflective dialogue between Teresia K. Teaiwa and April K. Henderson, two scholars in Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. On the occasion of their program’s tenth anniversary, they explore the intersections and tensions between humanities-based academic traditions and their responsibilities to Pacific communities. Drawing on their diverse academic backgrounds and experiences, they discuss the challenges of defining a “humanities approach,” the pressures of neoliberal university structures, and the need for “reflective delay” in knowledge production. They also examine the role of language, narrative, and community engagement in their teaching and research, emphasizing the importance of …

Approaches To Qualitative Research: Theory And Its Practical Application (A Guide For Dissertation Students), John Hogan, Paddy Dolan, Paul Donnelly

Books/Book Chapters

Qualitative research is a multifaceted approach that investigates culture, society and behaviour through an analysis and synthesis of people’s words and actions. Qualitative methods produce compelling knowledge of how and why people behave as they do, whether in organisational, family, personal, or other social roles.

The primary objective of this book is to introduce students to the concepts underlying qualitative research and how this kind of research can be conducted in a practical manner. To this end, it discusses various approaches to qualitative research and provides examples of these approaches being carried out in practice. In doing so, the book …

Ethnographic Literary Journalism, Christel Lane Swasey

Theses and Dissertations

Leon Dash and Ted Conover have modeled an ethnographic approach to literary journalism. This approach combines literary journalism's compelling narrative techniques with ethnographic “naturalist-like” (Brewer, 2000) thoroughness and trustworthiness. Rosa Lee: A Mother in Urban America, by Leon Dash, and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, by Ted Conover, exemplify this painstaking method that skillfully uses the narrative craft, generates trustworthy data, and contributes to an academic body of knowledge as well as exposing findings to the general public. Dash, Conover, and others have demonstrated the synergy and problem-solving potential of merging anthropology with literary journalism, yet there is no …

Ethnographers At Microsoft: A Review Of Human-Computer Interaction: Development Process, Ronald J. Chenail

The Qualitative Report

Qualitative researchers and those with qualitative inquiry skills are finding tremendous employment opportunities in the world of technology design and development. Because of their abilities to observe and understand the experiences of end users in human-computer interactions, these researchers are helping companies using Contextual Design to create the next generation of products with the users clearly in mind. In Human-Computer Interaction: Development Process, the new edited book by Andrew Sears and Julie Jacko, the authors describe an array of models and methods incorporating qualitative research concepts and procedures that are being used in technology today and can have great potential …

Vol. 32 No. 2-3 (2009): Pacific Island Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 32, No 2-3-Jun/Sept 2009 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Working The System: The Role Of Islam In Student Negotiations Of A Midwestern Charter School, Elizabeth J. Baer

Religious Studies Honors Projects

“What should the role of Islam be in American public life?” Rather than answer this question through broad, theoretical discourse, I turn to a case study of Somali Muslims in a Midwestern charter school. Through this case study, I analyze how individual Muslims, tied to communities and Allah in diverse ways, actively negotiate how to incorporate their religious practices into public space. I argue that by examining specific strategies used by individuals in an actual school setting, as opposed to making generalizing assumptions, one can better understand that Islam already plays a variety of constantly changing roles in American public …

Indigenous Informants Or Samoan Savants? German Translations Of Samoan Texts In Die Samoa-Inseln, Mary Elisabeth Cox

Pacific Studies

Most studies of Samoan culture and language published since 1900 rely on Augustin Krämer’s seminal ethnography Die Samoa-Inseln. It is unusual for a scholarly work to become so accepted and beloved by an indigenous people, but Samoans hand down copies of Die Samoa-Inseln from generation to generation. They particularly prize the extensive Samoan language texts that appear side by side with their German translations. However, an analysis of Krämer’s personal diaries reveals that his grasp of the Samoan language was at best rudimentary. I suggest that the German translation instead reflect the efforts of highly sophisticated Samoan informants who …

Books Noted: Recent Pacific Islands Publications: Selected Acquisitions, January 2008-June 2008, Riley Mofatt

Pacific Studies

THIS LIST of significant publications relating to the Pacific Islands was selected from new acquisitions lists received from Brigham Young University Hawai'i, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, University of Auckland, East-West Center, University of South Pacific, National Library of Australia, Melanesian Studies Resource Center, Center for Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Nijmegen, University of California San Diego, Secretariat of the Pacific Community Library, Center for South Pacific Studies, University of New South Wales, Macmillan Brown Library at University of Canterbury, and the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau's Center for the Pacific Development Training. Other libraries …

Vol. 32 No. 2-3 (2009): Pacific Island Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US $26.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, …

Anthropology And Ethnography: Contributions To Integrated Marketing Communications, Claudia M. Wright

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Student Research

This paper explores the ways in which anthropological research, specifically ethnography, can be useful in an Integrated Marketing Communication approach. Starting from a brief description of the different ways in which the discipline of anthropology has studied consumption, the paper turns to review how it can serve effectively to understand both the corporate as well as the consumer culture. Furthermore, the role that the anthropological discipline plays for Integrated Marketing Communication strategies is presented along with some examples of how different firms have used it. This paper is an approach to understanding ethnography not only as a market research methodology, …

Mas' Making And Pedagogy: Imagined Possibilities, Janice B. Fournillier

The Qualitative Report

In this article I draw on an ethnographic case study that examined mas makers perceptions of the learning/teaching practices at work in the production of costumes for Trinidad and Tobagos annual Carnival celebrations. During the 2005 Carnival season I spent four months in the field, my country of birth, and collected data through participant observation, still photographs, and informal and semi-formal autobiographical interviews. I used Spradleys (1979, 1980) domain and componential analysis and Goodenoughs (1971) propriospect in my description, analysis, and interpretation of the data resources. In this article, I apply the notion of performance art pedagogy to these findings. …

(Review) After Life: An Ethnographic Novel, Robert Gay

Sociology Faculty Publications

The article reviews the book "After Life: An Ethnographic Novel," by Tobias Hecht.

Everyday Encounters Between The Piaroa Of Alto Carinagua And The Venezuelan State, Christian Espanol

Digitized Theses

This thesis examines the everyday life of the Piaroa people of Alto Carinagua, an Amerindian village in Venezuelan Amazonia, and their interactions with Venezuelan state officials and institutions. It provides ethnographic information about the Piaroa and explores the processes of state formation of the Venezuelan modern state as well as the integration of the Venezuelan Amazonian region to the national territory, and analyzes the everyday interactions between the Piaroa and the state which on occasions can fuse these two entities in complex ways. I argue that the Piaroa of Alto Carinagua are involved in processes of social and cosmological transformations …

Difficult Hope: An Ethnography Of The Bread And Puppet Theater, Austin Mccann

Theses & ETDs

This is an ethnography of Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater, based in Glover, Vermont. Bread and Puppet is anomalous: this anti-capitalist "Cheap Art" organization has maintained its distinctive aesthetic and its radical independence for more than four decades. The theater is based on the charismatic authority of Peter Schumann, a German artist concerned with cultural revival in the face of political horror. Schumann's promulgation of the synergy of art and politics has serious implications for the reception and canonization of his work. My thesis interrogates Bread and Puppet's aesthetic, then turns inward to questions of structure. The ways in …

Does Universal Access Mean Equitable Access? What An Information Infrastructure Study Of A Rural Romanian Community Can Tell Us, Cheryl Klimaszewski

Library Staff Research and Scholarship

Researchers interviewed villagers to investigate the current state of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) development in the village. Ethnographic methods were used to collect data and to assess villagers’ information needs. The information landscape in Viscri is presented and analyzed in local and national contexts. The national policies shaping Romania’s emerging Information Society are discussed and literature on the impact of ICT development at the community level is also reviewed.

Bounded Rationality In The Emergency Department, Markus Alexander Feufel

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This research aimed at understanding bounded rationality - that is, how simple heuristics result in satisfactory outcomes - in a naturalistic setting where agents have to meet environmental demands with limited resources. To do so, two methodological approaches were taken, an observational and an experimental study of U.S. emergency physicians who have to provide a satisfactory level of care while simultaneously coping with uncertainty, time and resources constraints. There are three major findings. First, based on observations of 12 resident and 6 attending physicians at two Midwestern emergency departments (ED), ED physicians use at least two general heuristics. One heuristic …

Mental Health Care At The Margins: A Critical Ethnography Of Psychological Practice In An Inner City Mental Health Setting, Katy Sampson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the past several decades, the field of psychology has attempted to improve psychological services for a greater diversity of people. However, despite these attempts, research continues to document a "gap" when it comes to mental health care services for marginalized populations. Various studies have addressed the issue of this "gap" in mental health care; however, most adhere to positivist assumptions regarding sociocultural aspects of experience, understanding culture and identity as immutable qualities existing within individuals, rather than as an interpersonal phenomenon that is negotiated between and among people and institutions. As a result of these assumptions, many past studies …

Why The Old Traditions Will Not Fail: Landscape, Legends, And The Construction Of Place At Dartmouth College, Charles H. Wade

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, is one of the nine Colonial Colleges and a member of the exclusive Ivy League. Congregationalist minister Eleazar Wheelock founded Dartmouth in 1769 on the premise of training missionaries to Christianize the Indians of the region and, over the years, Dartmouth developed into a premier college. Dartmouth is famous for its traditions, its ardently loyal alumni, and as a classic New England liberal arts college. But this image does not correspond with a closer, more critical look at the College. Through both archival and ethnographic research, this dissertation examines the cultural landscape, folklore, …

Strutting It Up Through Histories: A Performance Genealogy Of The Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Corey Elizabeth Leighton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the cultural performances of the parade community in one of the oldest and largest parades in the country: the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. The modern parade celebration consists of groups of mostly working-class white men from South Philadelphia who dress up in extravagant sequined and feathered costumes and, beginning in South Philadelphia, march toward City Hall on one of the largest streets in the city on New Year’s Day. The parade is competitive and marked by performance competitions at the end of each parade. The parade’s history in the city of Philadelphia is extensive but contested. Many locals …

Governing In The Vernacular: Eugen Ehrlich And Late Habsburg Ethnography, Monica E. Eppinger

All Faculty Scholarship

Eugen Ehrlich's vision for a "dynamic conception of law" in 1903 challenges prior focus on doctrine and logic with a demand that legal science direct attention to the "facts of daily life." Ehrlich's program -- his innovative conception of law and calls for a new sociology of law -- has been claimed as inspiration by those intent on modernizing law and state administration and by critics launching attacks on state fetishism. Between these extremes, Ehrlich's understudied ideas about implementing "living law" as a program for governance deserve re-examination.

This Article, situating Ehrlich's work in the social, intellectual, and political milieu …

Aesthetic Journeys, Johanna Brewer, Scott Mainwaring, Paul Dourish

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Researchers and designers are increasingly creating technologies intended to support urban mobility. However, the question of what mobility is remains largely under-examined. In this paper we will use the notion of aesthetic journeys to reconsider the relationship between urban spaces, people and technologies. Fieldwork on the Orange County bus system and in the London Underground leads to a discussion of how we might begin to design for multiple mobilities.

Transformative Education For Culturally Diverse Learners Through Narrative And Ethnography, Aileen Hale, Jennifer Snow-Gerono, Fernanda Morales

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents a study of the effects of creating a bridge between the narrative and ethnographic methods and writing processes as a means to more effectively educate teachers of culturally diverse learners. Ten teacher-participants from a Masters of Education (M.Ed.) degree programme in Bilingual Education at a university in the northwestern United States took a sequence of courses in which instructor-researchers taught them narrative and ethnographic pedagogy, theory, and methodology. Through qualitative methods, instructor-researchers analyzed teacher-participants’ personal narratives and ethnographic case studies for generative themes. In discovering the commonalities of themes between these two methods of inquiry, the research …

First Love: A Case Study In Quantitative Appropriation Of Social Concepts, Diederik F. Janssen

The Qualitative Report

Peer love is a highly invested autobiographical marker, and its scientific ascent can be studied in terms of its literature’s motives, stated objectives, exclusions, and delimitations. In this article an overview of numeric and selected ethnographic data on the timing of “first love” is presented, to inform an assessment of the ontological underpinnings of milestone research common to quantitative sociology and developmental psychology. Complicating scientific normalization of love’s initiatory connotation, selected ethnographic observations on the timing and notion of early/first love in non-Western societies are presented. These observations facilitate a critique of love as a heterosocial, propaedeutic event, and hence, …

Introduction: The Practice And Prospects Of Grandparenting In The Pacific, Dorothy Ayers Counts

Pacific Studies

The contributors to this special issue represent the orientations and approaches of several social science disciplines and are variously involved in interdisci­ plina1y endeavors. However, anthropology is the primary discipline and ethno­ graphy a shared methodology. It is a main task of any ethnography to make the exotic familiar and to treat the familiar as though it were exotic. The papers in this special issue achieve this for grandparenthood in the Pacific. The familiar concept of grandparenthood is shown to have multiple meanings in close examinations of how the status is achieved, for example, what it means for a person's …

An Ethnography Study Of Hiv Positive Midlife Black Women, Charlotte Stoudmire Phd

Dissertations

Black women, ages 45 and older, are disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 2001, Black women comprised 11% of all older women in the United States; however, they accounted for more than 50% of AIDS cases and more than 65% of HIV cases (Winningham et al., 2004). The literature review reflected little research specifically looking at the reason(s) for the increase in HIV in Black women, ages 45 to 60. Furthermore, few research studies focused on HIV patient health beliefs and their experiences in living with HIV. This study was conducted with an ethnography research method coupled with the …