Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Beyond The Plaza: Barcelona’S Okupa Squatters At Work In The Wake Of La Crisis, Justin Helepololei

Justin AK Helepololei

As ongoing, financial crisis has kept millions in precarity - and over 40% of Spain's youth unemployed - mass mobilizations of the country's indignados have continued to fill the country's streets and plazas. Nearly one year after the original 15M demonstrations, city-wide occupations have triggered a profusion of more localized and issue-based assemblies. Beyond the plazas, squatter-activists of Barcelona's decades-old “okupa movement” have helped to facilitate the continuation of these dialogues by offering space within dozens of pre-existing squats and even opening new sites to host such interactions. Leveraging decades of experience and skill in re-appropriating spaces, squatters create room …

Sustainability 'Wars' In A New England Town, Elizabeth L. Krause, Anurag Sharma

Elizabeth L. Krause

A research project into large group decision-making in a New England Town Meeting surprised us with the degree to which sustainability came to be the axis around which political debate revolved. We identified two very different yet overlapping conceptions of sustainability: one emphasized fiscal responsibility; the other asserted the merits of environmental stewardship. Each of the two conceptions had proponents, with strong views about what constituted good versus bad governing practices, each with a strong sense of what was good for the town. In this paper, we sort out those meanings. We seek to understand and expose the contours of …

Biocultural Perspectives On Gender, Transitions, Stress, And Immune Function, Leo Zachary Dubois

Open Access Dissertations

Health disparities, including higher rates of mental or physical illness, are found among members of minority or marginalized groups including people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. However, there is a paucity of research incorporating both experiential components and measures of physical health, particularly among trans men during their transition from female to male. Trans men transition through the use of testosterone therapy (T) and surgical procedures in order to align their internal male gender identities with their physical presentation. This study combines the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data in order to understand trans men's experience of …

Remaking The Political In Fortress Europe: Political Practice And Cultural Citizenship In Italian Social Centers, Angelina Ione Zontine

Open Access Dissertations

At the current moment, with voter turnout low and mass popular uprisings re-fashioning the political map, questions of political participation and dissent are extremely pressing. In established democracies and newly democratized states alike, an active and potentially dissenting citizenry is often seen as the necessary balance to overreaching state power and unregulated market forces, but scholars struggle to keep abreast of a proliferation of new foci and forms of engagement. This dissertation focuses on the form of collective political engagement enacted at centri sociali occupati autogestiti (occupied, self-managed social centers) or CSOA in Bologna, Italy. As they enact political alternatives …

United In Difficulty: The European Union’S Use Of Shared Problems As A Way To Encourage Unity, Grace Cleary

CHESS Student Research Reports

Since the European Union's inception, it has invested considerable resources into cultural programs aimed at fostering a sense of shared European heritage. However, these efforts have always been balanced alongside the need to leave space for diversity within and across EU nations. In this paper, which highlights the findings of my MA thesis, I examine the European Capital of Culture (ECC), which I studied in Córdoba, Spain during the spring of 2011. I look at how European identity is being defined in a specific context, and in particular how the contest is refocusing on new forms of shared heritage by …

"No Cops, No Journos, No Anthropologists": Fieldwork Challenges In Occupied Barcelona, Justin Ak Helepololei

CHESS Student Research Reports

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Flamenco Between Heritage Tourism And Cultural Identity, Seung Ho Chung

CHESS Student Research Reports

No abstract provided.

Rewriting The Balkans: Memory, Historiography, And The Making Of A European Citizenry, Dana N. Johnson

CHESS Student Research Reports

This research explored the work of historians, history teachers, and NGO employees engaged in regional initiatives to mitigate the influence of enduring ethnocentric national histories in the Balkans. In conducting an ethnography of the development and dissemination of such initiatives in Serbia, I queried how “multiperspectivity” is understood as a pedagogical approach and a tool of reconciliation, how conflict and controversy are negotiated in developing alternative educational materials, and how the interests of civil society intersect with those of the state and supranational actors. My research sought to interrogate the field of power in which such attempts to innovate history …

Mobility And Language In Place: A Linguistic Landscape Of Language Commodification, Christa Burdick

CHESS Student Research Reports

No abstract provided.

From Artifact To Narrative: Viewing The Cypriot Past In The Cypriot Present, Jill Bierly

CHESS Student Research Reports

No abstract provided.

Multiculturalism, Identities And National Uncertainties In Southwest Europe: The Rise Of Xenophobia And Populism In Catalonia (Spain), Montserrat Clua I Fainé

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

The analysis of the discourses about the migratory threat takes a special feature in the Catalan case, where there is an historical strong nationalist movement that seeks to defend its own Catalan national and cultural identity against Spain. A nationalist discourse that has been self-defined as a "civic nationalism" because it claims that has historically receipted and integrated the different peoples that have arrived at its territory. But it has showed in some moments a clear xenophobic discourse against immigration, especially during the 60s and 70s, against the massive arrival of Spanish migrants that was produced at that time in …

French Far-Right Trajectories: Against A Multiculturalism That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Anne Friederike Delouis

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

Clearly, France is a peculiar place as far as multiculturalism is concerned. With its official ideology of egalitarianism, the "indivisible" Republic claims universal validity. As a consequence, the existence of different ethnic or cultural groups on the French territory is hardly recognized in legal terms and official rhetoric.

However, the social reality of poor and mostly ethnic ghettoes in all major French towns became eminently visible when the 2005 riots brought them to international media attention. Living conditions and economic opportunities for suburban ghetto-dwellers have not improved since, nor have majority attitudes towards them changed significantly. On the contrary, the …

When Opportunity Moves Off-Shore: Multiculturalism And The French Banlieue, Beth Epstein

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

Since the turn of this new century, problems of "culture" and "difference," diversity and multiculturalism, have made their way into public discourse in France. Across a dizzying array of polemics that includes social unrest in the country's disadvantaged suburbs, the rise of the National Front, post-colonial recriminations, and more, voices are being raised in favor of a more overt form of multiculturalist discourse as a means to think through contemporary social issues in relation to notions of race, identity, and discrimination. The integrationist French republican project, wherein racial or ethnic classifications are eschewed on the grounds that they enclose people …

The Intercultural Alternative To Multiculturalism And Its Limits, Katharina Bodirsky

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

Intercultural policies have gained salience in integration and regional development strategies in cities such as Berlin and in EU and European policy networks. Critiquing multiculturalism for having produced segregation by recognizing cultural communities, proponents of interculturalism (e.g. Wood and Landry 2008) emphasize the importance of intercultural exchange and an individual right to cultural identity combined with equality of opportunity as well as the political advertising of the value of diversity. This value, it is argued, is also economic, as intercultural exchange sparks creativity, which fosters innovation, which enhances competitiveness. Intercultural cities, it is posited, are moreover attractive to investors and …

Some Notes On Affect And Discourses Of Social Tense In Tense Times, Christopher Sweetapple

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

No abstract provided.

From The Intercultural Model To Its Actual Implementation In A Spanish Neighborhood, Jaime Palomera, Mikel Aramburu

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

The language of “interculturalism” has become part of the current doxa among policy-makers. It informs the ways in which new models of diversity governance are being designed, from supra-national organisms to local councils. In general terms, intercultural models tend to place high value on the question of “living together” or “conviviality”, and also on issues of equality and social justice. However, the evidence in this paper (based on fieldwork in a working-class neighborhood in Spain) suggests that in actual practice local governments do not see local “intercultural/community” projects as a means to promote social justice but as an end in …

Quebec’S Interculturalism Policy And The Contours Of Implicit Institutional Discourse, Samuel Shapiro

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

I approach the question of scales and political imaginaries through an exploration of how the Canadian province of Quebec is situated at the crossroads of several European and North American traditions. I discuss the relationship between the 2012 Quebec student strikes against the policies of then-Quebec premier Jean Charest and a welfare state model based on social protection, which is closer to that that found in France and several Scandinavian countries than in the rest of Canada. I then examine in depth how Quebec’s attempt to develop an alternative approach for the management of ethno-cultual diversity – often called interculturalism …

Not A Backlash, But A Multicultural Implosion From Within: Uncertainty And Crisis In The Case Of South Tyrol's "Multiculturalism", Dorothy Louise Zinn

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

This paper considers a case in which a regime commonly identified as "multicultural", locally entrenched and stringently defended by hegemonic politics, is nonetheless undergoing crisis and uncertainty. In the autonomous province of South Tyrol (Italy), there is a heavy social, economic, legal and discursive investment in "multiculturalism", offering a case that is often celebrated as a model of social co-existence and minority protection, and even serving as a selling point in provincial self-representations. Due to the area's peculiar history—previously belonging to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire but annexed to Italy a century ago—a "separate-but-equal" system developed as a means of defending the …

Visual Interventions And The “Crises In Representation” In Environmental Anthropology: Researching Environmental Justice In A Hungarian Romani Neighborhood, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Participatory visual research, or "visual interventions" (Pink 2007) allow environmental anthropologists to respond to three different “crises of representation”: 1) the critique of ethnographic representation presented by postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist anthropologists, 2) the constructivist critique of nature and the environment, and 3) the “environmental justice” critique demanding representation for the environmental concerns of communities of color. Participatory visual research integrates community members in the process of staking out a research agenda, conducting fieldwork and interpreting data, and communicating and applying research findings. Our project used the Photovoice methodology to generate knowledge and documentation related to environment injustices faced by …

Investigating The Relationship Between Material Property Axes And Strain Orientations In Cebus Apella Crania, Christine M. Dzialo

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Probabilistic finite element analysis was used to determine whether there is a statistically significant relationship between maximum principal strain orientations and orthotropic material stiffness orientations in a primate cranium during mastication. We first sought to validate our cranium finite element model by sampling in-vivo strain and in-vivo muscle activation data during specimen mastication. A comparison of in vivo and finite element predicted (i.e. in silico) strains was performed to establish the realism of the FEM model. To the best of our knowledge, this thesis presents the world’s only complete in-vivo coupled with in-vitro validation data set of a primate cranium …

Rewriting The Balkans: Memory, Historiography, And The Making Of A European Citizenry, Dana N. Johnson

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis explores the work of historians, history teachers, and NGO employees engaged in regional initiatives to mitigate the influence of enduring ethnocentric national histories in the Balkans. In conducting an ethnography of the development and dissemination of such initiatives, I queried how conflict and controversy are negotiated in developing alternative educational materials, how “multiperspectivity” is understood as a pedagogical approach and a tool of reconciliation, and how the interests of civil society intersect with those of the state and supranational actors. My research sought to interrogate the field of power in which such attempts to innovate history education occur, …

Host Longevity And Parasite Species Richness In Mammals, Jason M. Kamilar, Natalie Cooper, Charles L. Nunn

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Hosts and parasites co-evolve, with each lineage exerting selective pressures on the other. Thus, parasites may influence host life-history characteristics, such as longevity, and simultaneously host life-history may influence parasite diversity. If parasite burden causes increased mortality, we expect a negative association between host longevity and parasite species richness. Alternatively, if long-lived species represent a more stable environment for parasite establishment, host longevity and parasite species richness may show a positive association. We tested these two opposing predictions in carnivores, primates and terrestrial ungulates using phylogenetic comparative methods and controlling for the potentially confounding effects of sampling effort and body …

Runx2 Tandem Repeats And The Evolution Of Facial Length In Placental Mammals, Jason M. Kamilar, Marie A. Pointer, Vera Warmuth, Stephen G.B. Chester, Frédéric Delsuc, Nicholas I. Mundy, Robert J. Asher, Brenda J. Bradley

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Background

When simple sequence repeats are integrated into functional genes, they can potentially act as evolutionary ‘tuning knobs’, supplying abundant genetic variation with minimal risk of pleiotropic deleterious effects. The genetic basis of variation in facial shape and length represents a possible example of this phenomenon. Runt-related transcription factor 2 (RUNX2), which is involved in osteoblast differentiation, contains a functionally-important tandem repeat of glutamine and alanine amino acids. The ratio of glutamines to alanines (the QA ratio) in this protein seemingly influences the regulation of bone development. Notably, in domestic breeds of dog, and in carnivorans in general, the ratio …

The Archaeology Of Immateriality, Elizabeth S. Chilton

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Despite changes in archaeological theory and practice over the past 40 years, most archaeologists are still not very good at acknowledging that “significance” is context-dependent and non-material. In this paper I present two cases studies from New England where archaeologists collaborated with Native peoples on sites that had significant preservation concerns. I evaluate to what extent these projects were successful in their goal of decolonizing archaeology. I call for a definition of materiality that acknowledges that tangible objects and their intangible contexts and meanings are inextricable, and that values are continuously created and recreated in the present by a variety …

Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation And Cultural Activism, Jacqueline Urla

Jacqueline L. Urla

Introduction (excerpt)

Discourses Of Development: Narratives Of Cultural Heritage As An Economic Resource, Neil A. Silberman

Neil A. Silberman

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation And Cultural Activism, Jacqueline Urla

Jacqueline L. Urla

Table of Contents

Pottery In The Landscape: Ceramic Analysis At The City-Kingdom Of Idalion, Cyprus, Rebecca M. Bartusewich

Rebecca M Bartusewich

The ancient site of Idalion, Cyprus has a landscape dominated by two acropoleis containing sacred sites. The plain below is the location of domestic occupation. I have petrologically analyzed 45 ceramics from the domestic area and one sacred area and found that while the sacred spaces dominate the landscape, ceramics were not produced/chosen differently for the sacred area over the domestic area. The visual proximity of the sacred and the everyday seems to indicate cohesion in the social and natural landscape. The preliminary petrological analysis of pottery from Idalion has shown, thus far, that the sacred and profane are intertwined.*

Heritage Interpretation And Human Rights: Documenting Diversity, Expressing Identity, Or Establishing Universal Principles?, Neil A. Silberman

Neil A. Silberman

No abstract provided.

Rewriting The Balkans: Memory, Historiography, And The Making Of A European Citizenry, Dana N. Johnson

Dana N. Johnson

This thesis explores the work of historians, history teachers, and NGO employees engaged in regional initiatives to mitigate the influence of enduring ethnocentric national histories in the Balkans. In conducting an ethnography of the development and dissemination of such initiatives, I queried how conflict and controversy are negotiated in developing alternative educational materials, how “multiperspectivity” is understood as a pedagogical approach and a tool of reconciliation, and how the interests of civil society intersect with those of the state and supranational actors. My research sought to interrogate the field of power in which such attempts to innovate history education occur, …