Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

La Casita Center: An Accompaniment Based Approach To Social Justice And Social Service., Ben Harlan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

La Casita Center is a Louisville based nonprofit organization that accompanies Latinx immigrants in the Louisville Metro area. and that is led and staffed by Latina immigrants. In this thesis, I investigate how employees of this Latinx-immigrant led nonprofit organization, navigate challenges to both administer service and build community using the model of accompaniment. Organizations like La Casita are critically important for Latinx newcomer communities in the United States and as neoliberal and nativist-inspired policiescontinue to oppress and marginalize, La Casita provides a model for what it means to center inclusion, belonging, community, and solidarity. In a global landscape of …

Building On Ruins: Impacts Of Mass Violence And State-Led Repression In Indonesia, Geraldine Santoso

International Affairs Senior Theses

How does mass violence affect perceptions of citizenship? What are the impacts of mass violence and state-led repression on post-colonial political economies? This thesis focuses on the impact of mass violence on the perceptions of citizenship and the political economy of Indonesia. After the Indonesian 1965-1966 mass murders and subsequent state-led repression under General Suharto, perceptions of political and civic identity and political participation were fundamentally changed– where Chinese Indonesians, despite their economic power, are politically disenfranchised and PKI/PKI affiliated pribumi (native) Indonesians are neither politically nor economically empowered.

Capitalist expansion also serves as a critical motive for mass atrocity …

Poetry And Possibilities In Contemporary Egypt, Reem Badr

Theses and Dissertations

Egyptian colloquial poetry has historically been conceived of, by practitioners and onlookers alike, as a politically committed, subversive, resistant practice. In this thesis I explore how this poetry, with its complex inheritance, inhabits the realities of post-revolutionary Egypt. Throughout the chapters of this work I trace colloquial poetry in its more traditional forms, as well as in its more novel ones like Egyptian rap/trap, as it grapples with the reduced possibilities in the present. As it reflects and spawns a wider disillusionment with and refusal of politics and claims a reinvention of itself as a private practice, the poetry cannot …

Dance And Know You Are A Part: The Instrumentality Of Performative Politics And Dance In The Configuration Of Local Social Memory And Afro-Brazilian Identity And Agency In Pelotas, Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil, Triston R. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The arts have been a refuge from perpetual repression and omission, and, a platform for social activism for Afro-descendants in the Americas. In Brazil this is very much the case. With performance serving as a social barometer or a looking glass, dance becomes a source of cultural knowledge, acts as preservative, and negotiates individual mobility within a given context. The Afro-Brazilian dance company, Cia de Dança Daniel Amaro in Pelotas, Brazil grants its members a means of activism and agency to challenge entrenched national narratives and reinterpret local social memory.

Most academic writings about dance or performance in Brazil, focus …

Islam & Interfaith Dialogue: Innovative Diplomacy Between The United States And Islamic Republic Of Iran, Kristyn Rohrer

Honors Student Research

This meta-communicative study provides an analysis of global interfaith dialogue as it pertains to peace and conflict, with a primary focus on Islam. The Islamic Republic of Iran and United States have a complicated history. Their diplomatic relationship is rife with manipulation, radicalism, and a disregard for human dignity. Currently, the US is imposing hundreds of sanctions and restrictions on Iran, from nuclear energy to medicine, as a result of President Trump’s decision to back out of the Iran Deal. However, other forms of dialogue are affecting positive relations between the two countries. Interfaith dialogue between North American Mennonites and …

Ground Truthing: The Politics And Culture Of Soil And Water Conservation In Iowa Agriculture, Brianna Farber

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the complex relationships between people, technologies, and ecologies involved in natural resource conservation and industrial agriculture in Iowa. Specifically I focus on the various efforts to address water pollution affected primarily by agriculture in the state. Using a theoretical framework informed by political ecology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and posthumanist theory, I draw on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork to discuss what makes conservation culturally salient and practically difficult to achieve. This difficulty around conservation arises in part from the tensions between what I describe as the corn assemblage and the prairie assemblage. I identify these …

Rules Of The House: Strategy, Tactic, And Violence In One World By Night, World Of Darkness, Live-Action Role-Play Games, Laya Liebeseller

Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis focuses on governance of institutionalized play in three World of Darkness live-action role-play (larp) games (ethnographic field work conducted between May and August of 2016), whose players have willingly allowed the international organization of One World by Night – an organization made up of their peers – to unify them in such a way as to create connection, community, and shared story across the world. I analyze four locii within these games (the book, the organization, the storyteller, and the player) using Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, specifically focusing on …

The Antipolitics Of Food In Middle-Class America, Neri De Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of the food and parenting practices of a diverse group of middle-class families in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. It starts from the basic premise that the economic pressures on the American middle classes find expression in family life around the socially reproductive work of choosing food and parenting.

The current economic climate marked with extreme and rising income inequality, low growth, high unemployment and stagnating wages has complicated the reproduction process for all parents in this study, regardless of income. Scholars have described how this concern for the future of the next …

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

The Transformation Of Tibetan Identity, Mang Jia

Senior Theses

After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1951, Tibetan identity began to secularize, shifting from a more traditional religious to a more explicitly political identity. The few studies that focus on the secularization of Tibetan identity, even if only secondarily, claim that it is either a compulsory product imposed by the reinforcement of modernization by the Chinese authority or a voluntary product through younger generations of Tibetans’ internalization, primarily through schooling, of the Chinese colonization ideology. Either way, those scholars of Tibetan studies treat the secularization of Tibetan identity as a form of cultural assimilation or deterioration of Tibetan identity. …

Bridging The Blue-Green Divide: The Role Of Environmental Ngos In Tackling Environmental Problems In Taiwan, Yttrium Sua

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis attempts to provide a brief historical outline of the environmental movement in Taiwan and the unique political situation that has directly affected how the movement has progressed. Thereafter, it looks at some examples of environmental disputes that have occurred in recent years, paying special attention to the ways the environmental movement has interacted with the government. This provides the background to frame the analysis, which will shed light on the reasons for the current state of distrust and antagonistic interactions between the environmental movement and the government. Finally, the thesis evaluates whether such interactions with the government is …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Saudi Aramco And The Politics Of Cultural Heritage, Anahid Hanounik Huth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Culture Heritage in recent decades has become a catch word within world discourse. It is increasingly receiving generous attention in both money and time form private and public sectors on preservation policy. The application of so-called preservation and restoration projects, the alleged care for Cultural Heritage, has become a motive and battle cry of UNESCO, World Bank, private companies, banks, NGOs, European Council, and Western governments' foreign policy. This leads us to ask what is behind this increasing attention, and whether we should see it as Christina Luke 2013 suggested in her article--is Heritage increasingly being seen as a soft …

"A New Way Of Doing Politics": The Movement Against Cafta In Costa Rica, Jeremy Rayner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In October of 2007, Costa Ricans voted in a referendum to ratify a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA, or CAFTA). The first referendum in their nation's history--and the first referendum ever held on a Free Trade Agreement--marked the culmination of a cycle of contention over liberalization that transformed practices and expectations of politics in a country often considered an exemplar of representative democracy. In this dissertation I provide an account of the opposition to CAFTA (the NO), based on two years of ethnographic research with the Patriotic Committees (Comites Patrioticos), the decentralized, grassroots network at the heart …

Corruption In The Indian Political System, Khusboo J. Desai

Honors Theses

Currently, India and China are both competing to be the hegemonic power in Asia as well as a superpower internationally. Both are growing at double-digit rates, while other nations are dealing with the current recession. However, while China is reducing corruption which ultimately translates into money lost by the government, corruption in India is increasing at a rapid pace. According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index 2010, India ranked 87 out of 180 nations. Though, India ranked better than half the other nations, India fell from 72nd (2007) to 84th in two years. In my thesis, I explore the relationship …

Making Modernity: Ideological Pluralism And Political Process In Zinacantán, Kristen Adler

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation examines political process and ideology in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, focusing on the Tsotsil-speaking community of Zinacantán. The complex interplay between constructions of tradition and modernity clearly indicates that Zinacantán is not the isolated, "closed corporate community" often portrayed in the anthropological literature. Rather, complexities that emerge from local narratives suggest profound ideological pluralism, e.g., liberal individualism alongside hierarchical complementarity. Through a focus on narrative and event, this work challenges received notions of tradition and modernity and demonstrates the diverse ways in which Zinacantecos are traditionalizing the modern and modernizing the traditional through reflexive communicative means. Although …

From Herds Of Goats To Herds Of Tourists: Negotiating Bedouin Identity Under Petra's Romantic Gaze, Cynthia Allison Wooten

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.