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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo
Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …
Collective Action As Relationship In Late Modernity: Animal Advocacy In A Repressive Political Climate, Catherine M. Wilson
Collective Action As Relationship In Late Modernity: Animal Advocacy In A Repressive Political Climate, Catherine M. Wilson
Doctoral Dissertations
Since the mid 1990s, in the United States, social regulation and activity with regard to animal care and the nature of acceptable human-animal relationships has changed remarkably rapidly, even as animal rights activism has become less prominent. Utilizing extensive ethnographic, artifactual, and interview data, this dissertation interrogates some of the relational processes that have contributed to these changes. After first sketching a brief history of animal advocacy discourses in the U.S., In Chapter Four, I document a shift from disruptive to productive strategies in animal advocacy. I argue that two important contributing factors to this shift were anti-terrorism legislation that …
Emerging Climate Change Publics: Cultivating Sustainability And Justice In The Pioneer Valley, Vanessa Adel
Emerging Climate Change Publics: Cultivating Sustainability And Justice In The Pioneer Valley, Vanessa Adel
Doctoral Dissertations
Climate change is setting off erratic weather patterns and environmental changes that threaten the livelihood, stability, and survival of the planet. Communities and institutions around the globe are sounding the clarion call about these devastating impacts, advocating for sustainable practices and deep changes to every facet of our lives. This dissertation research consists of an ethnography of a local network of actors and organizations who are responding to climate change, centered on those who define sustainability as integrally connected to justice. I analyze this network of activity through the lens of the concept of an emerging public. I start from …
Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent
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 …
Review Of Reclaiming Basque By Kathryn Woolard, Jacqueline Urla
Review Of Reclaiming Basque By Kathryn Woolard, Jacqueline Urla
Jacqueline L. Urla
Book Review of Reclaiming Basque by Kathryn Woolard. American Ethnologist February 2014.
The Search For Self-Fulfillment: How Individualism Undermines Community Organizing, Rachel Rybaczuk
The Search For Self-Fulfillment: How Individualism Undermines Community Organizing, Rachel Rybaczuk
Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014
This paper focuses on the role of individualism in community organizing. My case study follows the organizing efforts of the Coalition for Affordable Northampton Neighborhoods (CANN) and residents’ attempts to save an affordable neighborhood from Smith College’s campus expansion. As a resident and co-founder of CANN I was particularly interested in identifying the reasons for our difficulty in organizing residents whose homes would be torn down. While attending community and city meetings, interviewing core activists and activists who left the organizing efforts, I observed individualism undermining community organizing and political involvement. People’s search for self-fulfillment was in conflict with the …
Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activism And Postsocialist Political Ecology In Hungary, Krista Harper
Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activism And Postsocialist Political Ecology In Hungary, Krista Harper
Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series
"Wild Capitalism" examines environmental issues in the "New Europe" of the twenty-first century. Specifically, it looks at how the meanings of "civil society" and "environment" have changed as environmentalists encounter the political and ecological realities of life after state socialism. Although environmentalism is a global social movement, environmental politics is a grassroots process in which activists creatively translate environmental issues into cultural idioms and political processes.
Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activism And Postsocialist Political Ecology In Hungary, Krista Harper
Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activism And Postsocialist Political Ecology In Hungary, Krista Harper
Krista M. Harper
"Wild Capitalism" examines environmental issues in the "New Europe" of the twenty-first century. Specifically, it looks at how the meanings of "civil society" and "environment" have changed as environmentalists encounter the political and ecological realities of life after state socialism. Although environmentalism is a global social movement, environmental politics is a grassroots process in which activists creatively translate environmental issues into cultural idioms and political processes.
Environment As Master Narrative: Discourse And Identity In Environmental Conflicts (Special Issue Introduction), Krista Harper
Environment As Master Narrative: Discourse And Identity In Environmental Conflicts (Special Issue Introduction), Krista Harper
Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series
Although postmodern philosophers proclaimed the death of the master narrative of enlightenment (Lyotard 1984), the environment has become a quintessentially global narrative. Throughout the world, people are imagining the environment as an object threatened by human action. Environmentalism proposes to organize and mobilize human action in order to protect the endangered environment (Milton 1995). Sociologist Klaus Eder posits that ecology has become a “masterframe,” transforming the field of political debate (Eder 1996). The articles assembled in this special issue investigate the rise of the environment as a master narrative organizing political practices.