Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

I Was Taught To Yell Fire, Marina Gutierrez

Honors Theses

From a very young age my mother always told me to yell, “Fire,” if I was ever in a situation where I needed help from a potential attacker, but I never understood why I couldn’t just yell, “Help.” Her reasoning was that many people will run towards a fire to help put it out or save potential victims, but when someone yells for help others will shy away because they don’t want to get involved. I would just nod and promise to yell fire not really understanding the underlying meaning she had just explained to me.

It wasn’t until I …

Children Enrichment Programs And Teaching Methods In Two Different Socioeconomic Classes, Chloe Bartlett

Honors Theses

Students from working class families are not given equal attention treatment opportunities or guidance as those of middle class backgrounds. The 'gap' between family and school is the socioeconomic background being catered to in schools. I argue that schools run on a highly Western middle class ideology and thus do not reflect cultural values or systems of students from working class families who perceive authority differently and have been socialized in a community plagued by violence crime and lack of economic resources. Such resources that middle class families can attain to academically assist their children. As a result those students …

Seeking ‘Collective Solitude’ In The Pacific: An Ethnography Of Wave-Riding In Encinitas, California, Laura C. Schaffer

Honors Theses

For centuries, the practice of surfing has mystified the novelist, the missionary, the thrill-seeker, and the proximate spectator, alike. Though it has its roots in Polynesia, this wave-riding eventually globalized – spreading to and adapted by coasts worldwide. Through observation, interviews, and participation, this study examines the co-existence of supposedly competing notions of individuality and community as they manifest in the Encinitas (California) surfer, their community, and their pursuit of the waves. The study finds that while the individual surfer inscribes their own personal meaning on the pursuit, they (in the context of a ‘surf town’) are tied to other …

Identity Development In Korean-American Adoptees: A Content Analysis Of Personal Reflections, Charles Rachor

Honors Theses

This paper examines Korean-American Adoptees and their identity development through a content analysis of online comments concerning four major themes: Parents and Parenting, Siblings, Self-identity, and Current Events. Using two Facebook groups consisting exclusively of adoptees, examinations were made of positive, neutral, and negative replies to posts about the themes. The findings from this analysis lend credence to previous studies about self-identity, some of the influential factors, and the struggles faced in achieving levels of comfort expressing multiple racial and cultural identities.

It’S Not You, It’S— Hookup Culture And Sexual Subjectivity, Anne Vetter

Honors Theses

A semi-fictionalized ethnography that interrogates how students at Colby College use hookup culture as a way to make sense of themselves and others. This thesis is about systems, about social power and norms, and the very real ways that they are experienced in and enacted by the bodies of individual students. In other words, this thesis is a naming of what many students on this campus already know without words, a linking of story to story to story, a marking of patterns that underlie the forms of sexual subjectivity driving participation in hookup culture. Ultimately, by making visible the systems …

Dear Reader, How Do We Go On? Letters Of Reflection On Community Care In Climate Activism In Maine, Ester Topolarova

Honors Theses

Climate activist groups in Maine often see their members become too tired to continue organizing. Thus, I decided to explore how these activists enact community care. I conducted my fieldwork with 350 Maine and its local nodes. I explore community care as a practice and as an aspiration. Community care is practiced through the acts of people taking care of each other. Aspiration, therefore, is a way of living and seeing the self as striving to replicate the world activists are fighting for. I conceptualize care as racialized, gendered, classed, and embedded in neoliberal capitalism. In activist meetings, care is …

As Good As Niu: Food Sovereignty In Samoa, Emily Gove

Honors Theses

Samoa’s history as an island nation, with its cultural heritage of migratory peoples, followed by settler colonialism and missionaries, has resulted in its uniquely amalgamated food system. Cuisine varies from traditional crops and recipes to imported canned goods, although dependence on the latter has led to wide-ranging health problems. A way to confront these problems is through reclaiming local cuisine, renewing its popularity and promoting the concept of food sovereignty. Through fieldwork based on surveys, interviews, and participant observation in Apia, complemented with a study of activist Robert Oliver’s new cookbooks on Pacific cuisine, this project examines current themes …