Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Young Parents’ Experiences And Perceptions Of ‘Teen Mom’ Reality Shows, Devon Greyson, Cathy Chabot, Jean A. Shoveller Jan 2019

Young Parents’ Experiences And Perceptions Of ‘Teen Mom’ Reality Shows, Devon Greyson, Cathy Chabot, Jean A. Shoveller

Communication Department Faculty Publication Series

MTV’s hit reality shows 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom were produced with an agenda of preventing teen pregnancy. Researchers have examined their effectiveness as behavioral interventions, yet little attention has been paid to experiences of young parents themselves with these shows, nor to their ethical consequences, including the potential for compounding of stigma against young parents. This analysis qualitatively examines the experiences of young parents in British Columbia, Canada, with the media phenomenon referred to as ‘Teen Mom shows.’ Interview and observation data from a large, longitudinal, mixed-methods ethnographic study of young parents was analyzed using hybrid deductive-inductive qualitative …


Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar Jan 2011

Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural …


The Search For Self-Fulfillment: How Individualism Undermines Community Organizing, Rachel Rybaczuk Jan 2009

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 Jan 2006

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.


Environment As Master Narrative: Discourse And Identity In Environmental Conflicts (Special Issue Introduction), Krista Harper Jul 2001

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.