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Notes From The Field - Conference Proceedings, Summer Fellows 2025, Center For Latin American, Caribbean, And Latino Studies (Clacls)

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

CLACLS presents proceedings papers from the third CLACLS Summer Fellows Showcase Conference, held on November 12, 2025.

The daylong event showcased the research endeavors of fourteen Summer Fellows, who offered succinct presentations on their projects funded by the CLACLS Summer fellowship. The included three panels: “Feminist and Queer Critical Perspectives”, “Language, Archive and Power”, “Social Movements and Political Imaginations.”

Illuminating Sanja Matsuri: Lived Religion And Festival Practice In Asakusa, Caleb R. Merckle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Sanja Matsuri, a major Shintō and Buddhist festival in Asakusa, Tokyo, through the lenses of lived religion, participant observation, autoethnography, and anthropology. Departing from institution-centered approaches, it foregrounds the experiential dimensions of festival participation, showing how physical devotion, collective movement, and festive intensity function as expressions of spiritual meaning. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 and 2025 included participant observation, informal interviews with local and foreign participants, and Reflexive Discourse Analysis of fieldnotes and bilingual transcripts. Analysis reveals a dynamic interplay between formal sacralization strategies — such as mitama-ire rituals and structured processions — and spontaneous, informal participant …

Jainism And Catholicism – Dialoguing Spiritually, Bryan Lobo

Journal of Global Catholicism

The inter-spiritual dialogue between Jainism and Catholicism lends itself towards discovering similarities and dissimilarities between the two spiritualities. Recognizing this discovery, this paper, without claiming to be exhaustive as regards the spiritual themes, discusses the chosen themes to facilitate greater reflection and potential to re-discover elements that can help the growth of understanding and practicing the preferred spirituality.

Hindu Poetry And The Project Of An Inter-Spiritual Catholic Theology, Francis X. Clooney

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article engages the work of the Indian south Indian Tamil-language Vaiṣṇava poet saints known as the Alvārs. The article specifically focuses the First HundredHoly Linked verses of Poykai Ālvār to argue for inter-spiritual learning between Catholics and Hindus. The article concludes with personal reflections on this encounter within the context of the global Catholic Church

A Comparison Of Regional Food Systems And Food Security In Rural Mississippi And Italy, Reinhard M. Knerr, Athan M. Gregory, Anne Cafer

Journal of Human Sciences and Extension

In the Mississippi (MS) Delta, more than 40% of residents are food-insecure despite predominantly agricultural land use. We hypothesized that limited social networks and non-navigable food market systems constrain MS producers, limit market viability, and hinder regional food sovereignty. This ethnography compared rural Italian and Mississippian food systems through semi-structured interviews of food producers, processors, and marketers. We described differences in social networks between groups that led to differential capacities to share capital and to overcome producer and labor constraints. We also described key differences in governmental and Extension support of local food systems. Finally, we provided suggestions for addressing …

Fundamental Uncertainties Invalidate The Precision Of Obsidian Hydration Dating: A Rapa Nui Case Study, Robert Dinapoli, Carl P. Lipo

Anthropology Datasets

Obsidian hydration dating (OHD) measures water absorption into volcanic glass to estimate artifact age. Recent studies using infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy (IR-PAS) claim ±30-year precision, comparable to radiocarbon dating. We tested these claims by applying Bayesian hierarchical models to 242 published IR-PAS measurements from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Standard OHD practice treats burial temperature and humidity as known constants; we instead modeled them as uncertain variables and propagated that uncertainty through the rate equation. Realistic dating uncertainties are ±300 years, ten times larger than the claimed value. The 95% credible interval for any individual date (~600 years) exceeds Rapa Nui's entire …

The Sociologists And The Anthropologists: Intellectual Imaginations Of Mennonite Settlements In The Paraguayan Chaco, Samuel Boucher

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

The debates over Indigenous rights and missionary intervention in Paraguay’s Chaco were shaped not only by international declarations and local conditions but by the sociologists and anthropologists who interpreted—and contested—them. North American sociologists such as J. Winfield Fretz, Jacob Loewen, and Calvin Redekop studied the Mennonite colonies as agents of modern development, weighing the achievements and shortcomings of their mission efforts. The Paraguayan anthropologist Miguel Chase-Sardi cast those same colonists as foreign capitalists exploiting their Indigenous neighbors, drawing international scrutiny through his contribution to the 1971 Barbados Declaration and its charge of ethnocide. The ensuing clash with administrators such as …

Surviving And Thriving: The Indigenous Migrant, Danna Guzman-Rodriguez

Honors Theses

This literature and cultural study highlights the generation of children of indigenous immigrants and the relationship with their indigenous identity and culture. This unique experience is complex and encapsulates issues such as indigenous cultural survival, homogeneity, globalization, and lack of cultural identity. Exploring the Totonac community in La Chaca, Veracruz in Mexico, allows for a deeper explanation of this experience. Speakers of Totonac and other indigenous languages often migrate to countries such as the United States and carry such cultural ties with them. What happens to these ties after moving to a Western-dominated country where globalization favors English and Western …

Reframing Kabyle Resistance In Marc Garanger's Femmes Algériennes 1960, Lea Wong

Journal of Amazigh Studies

This article examines the identity photographs taken by Marc Garanger as a site of Kabyle women’s resistance in the Algerian War. Over the course of 1960, Garanger moved between various wartime displacement camps across Kabylia, photographing indigenous people for the production of identity cards––a crucial from of colonial population control. Since its publication, Garanger’s Femmes algériennes has become an ambiguous symbol of resistance in the Algerian War, largely due to the subjects’ perceived antagonistic posture and gaze. This article takes a forensic approach to analyzing Kabyle women’s wartime adornment, uncovering a new framework for conceptualizing Algerian women’s agency grounded in …

Representations Of Women Safeguarding Living Cultural Heritage For The Future In 21st Century Kabyle Cinema, Sheila Petty

Journal of Amazigh Studies

This article examines cinematic representations of how some Kabyle women relate to and shape claims to Amazigh (Kabyle) land, language, tangible and intangible cultural heritage; how they navigate and safeguard cultural memory; and how this is depicted in three Kabyle films: La Langue de Zahra/ Zahra’s Mother Tongue (Fatima Sissani, France/Algeria, 2011); Nnuba (Sonia At Qasi-Kessi, Algeria, 2019; and Azar/Racine/Root (Malik Bourkache Daoud, Algeria, 2023). The article also probes how the filmmakers use tangible cultural heritage (documentary film) to document, transpose, and transmit intangible cultural heritage (memories, poetry, song, stories). Through an analysis of the narrative form and cinematic style …

Listening To Taos Amrouche, A Kabyle Woman’S Singing Voice In A Context Of Exile And Immigration : Between A Search For Intimacy And Independence, Melek Chekili

Journal of Amazigh Studies

This article analyzes the vocal, musical and literary strategies Algerian Kabyle singer and writer Taos Amrouche employs to determine the place voicing holds for her in contexts of colonization, exile and migration. I demonstrate through her singing career and her 1975 autobiographical novel l’Amant Imaginaire, that within the ambivalences stemming from her birth in Tunisia to exiled Kabyle Christian converts and her emigration to France, Taos Amrouche’s singing voice provides a space where those ambivalences can co-exist. By being adamant about keeping her artistic activity close to her body and explicitly referring to sex in her writing, she exerts …

Open Materials For Ant-Psy 210, Sex And Culture, Melissa Zavala

Open Educational Resources

Sex and Culture explores the cultural construction of human sexuality from the framework of the individual in society. Students will examine the social learning of sexual behaviors, beliefs and practices. Analytic focus will include how culturally prescribed gender roles for men and women inform notions of right and wrong. Specific topics may include institutionalized gender inequality, marriage and the family, homophobia and other issues involved in the relationship between sex and culture. All topics will be considered from a historical and cross-cultural perspectives.

Ka Here Tāngata:1 Mātauranga And Te Ao Māori In Biocultural Kākāpō (Strigops Habroptilus) Conservation Approaches, Sophie Perfetto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master's thesis examines conservation as a form of living cultural heritage practice through the co-management of kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus), a critically endangered parrot and taonga species in Aotearoa New Zealand. Situated within ongoing histories of colonial dispossession and Western frameworks of land and species management, contemporary kākāpō conservation is shaped through the partnership between the Department of Conservation’s Kākāpō Recovery Programme and Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on semi-structured interviews collected during fieldwork from July to August 2025, this study examines how institutional partnerships structure decision-making, authority, and responsibility in contemporary conservation governance. Findings demonstrate that Māori knowledge systems …

Reseeding Relations: Comparing Museum And Indigenous Seed Sharing & Rematriation Protocols In The Midwestern United States, Madeline G. Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) paved the way for the repatriation of ancestors and certain cultural objects to Indigenous communities, museums still struggle to address other forms of cultural returns. Heritage seeds, those which hold cultural significance to Indigenous peoples, held within museum collections perpetuates the colonization of Indigenous lifeways. This research examines rematriation as an Indigenous form of cultural return better suited to address these needs than limited repatriation models. I analyze how museums are working to create rematriation processes for their collections which reflect diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies through a three-tiered approach: …

Picturing Africa: Critical Reflections On The Importance Of Imagery In Textbooks, Amber R. Reed, Bailey A. Brown

Essays in Education

While many social studies teachers in the Atlanta metro area are working to combat stereotypical and racist images of Africa, our analysis of three commonly used textbooks demonstrate these are exactly the types of images that tend to get reproduced. This essay draws on an analysis of three commonly used textbooks in Georgia as well as interviews with teachers in the area. We show how stereotypes of Africa as filled with wild animals, primitive, and poverty-stricken are often upheld in publications despite teachers’ fervent desire to dismantle them. Because these images are often decontextualized, it is difficult for teachers and …

Social Innovation In The Peacebuilding Sector, Michelle Helman, Phd, Katherine Ronderos, Mariafernanda Burgos-Ariza

Peace and Conflict Studies

Social innovation is an expanding practice in the peacebuilding sector. In this article, three peace scholar-practitioners reflect on our experiences as peacebuilders and consider the utility, tensions, and possibilities for peace and social innovation in theory and in practice. We draw insights gleaned through a focus group workshop with peacebuilding colleagues and highlight three case study examples from Colombia, the Philippines, and Kenya, each demonstrating the challenges and opportunities of social innovation in the peace sector. In doing so, we offer a reimagining of- and recommended action steps to engage innovation through a collaborative, feminist design approach. This article contributes …

Investigating The Structural Barriers And Opportunities For End-Of-Life Management Of Agricultural Plastic Waste Within California's Strawberry Industry, Rory M. O'Toole

Master's Theses

Agricultural plastic waste (APW) accounts for a significant and growing share of global plastic pollution, yet no study has documented how APW management functions across a specific crop system from production through end-of-life (EOL). This thesis addresses that gap by examining the structures and valuations that shape current EOL management of plastic mulch (PM) and drip tape (DT) in California's strawberry industry, one of the nation's most plastic-dependent crop systems. Drawing on an ethnographic approach that included 27 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, as well as site visits, this study traces how APW is produced, valued, and discarded within a structurally …

Kitchen Table Press: A Case Study Of Regression To The Neoliberal Mean, Alaina Disalvo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the idealistic founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980 and its slow downfall, culminating in the cession of ownership of the Press to a university in 1992. It traces the ideological development of Kitchen Table Press’s key founders, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, and their respective relationships to the ideologies of other renowned feminist figures of the era, specifically June Jordan and Adrienne Rich. It examines the history of the Press through historical, intersectional, affective, and socialist lenses. This thesis argues that neoliberal pressures can bend even the most radical organizations away from their …

Kanak-Ish Misfits: Queer Imaginaries, Racialized Borders, And The Politics Of Care In Berlin, Germany, Faruk Seref

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines queer Muslim experiences of border politics, racialization, and care in Berlin, Germany. By formulating bordering as a domineering and oppressive practice of boundary-making, I study how global bordering mechanisms shape and disrupt structures of care, caring, and being cared for. With an intersectional focus on race, gender, sexuality, and sex, I argue that borders are simultaneously materialized and challenged in varying localities, including the nightclub, the queer scene, the diasporic neighborhoods, and households. Ultimately, viewing collective care as fundamental to survival, healing, resistance, and building non-punitive lifeworlds, I theorize the counter-hegemonic practices of queers of color through …

Who Keeps Us Safe? Youth Resistance And Security Regimes At The Neoliberal University, Arwen Hansell

University Honors Theses

In a political climate shaped by surveillance, labor precarity, policing, and immigration enforcement, questions of (in)security increasingly organize everyday life. Governments justify security measures through the language of public safety, even as many people experience insecurity surrounding housing, healthcare, employment, and the future itself. Although critical security studies have examined policing, militarism, and surveillance extensively, youth are often overlooked as political actors despite their central role in social movements. This study addresses that gap by focusing on student labor organizers and activists navigating (in)security. Using collaborative ethnography, I conducted fieldwork at protests, labor organizing meetings, workshops, and demonstrations connected to …

New Age Spirituality In Post-Secular Turkey: Navigating Secular Sensibilities And Class Privilege, Zeynep Ozbarlas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The conflict between religion and secularism has been one of the major forces shaping Turkey’s socio-political landscape since the late nineteenth century. With the radical secular turn during the founding of the Turkish Republic, secularism remained the dominant force until the rise of political Islam in the 1980s. This dissertation, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, argues that New Age spirituality, adopted by the secular upper-middle class, has become an alternative venue for the reproduction of secular sensibilities and socio-economic privilege in contemporary Turkey, at a time when the two-decade tenure of the Erdoğan regime has undermined secular hegemony.

Although New Age …

Narrative Roots - What We Inherit, What We Tell, What We Become: Intergenerational Storytelling, Meaning-Making, And Mental Health, Adam Sholder

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This capstone synthesis explores how the family stories we inherit and the stories we tell across generations shape who we become, with particular attention to their impact on identity and mental health. Drawing on narrative identity theory, reflective practice, and relational understandings of family life, it introduces the Recursive Narrative Integration Model, which positions intergenerational storytelling as both a method of inquiry and a mechanism of meaning-making. Informed by a recursive process of creative and reflective writing, this synthesis approaches storytelling not only as an object of study, but as a lived and generative practice through which experience and narrative …

On The Brink Of Silence: Ethnographic Perspectives On Hunting And Forest Life Among The Awa Guajá In Eastern Amazonia, Uirá Garcia

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The central theme of this article basically resides in the relationship established by indigenous peoples between their hunting practices and the forest. Indigenous ways of connecting ‘hunting’ and ‘forest’ necessarily pass through other modes of knowing, only marginally – if it all – dependent on vision. On the contrary, sounds, smells and even dreams are, for many South American indigenous collectives, more trustworthy indices than what the eye sees. This article divides into two parts. In the first, I set out the main ideas related to the anthropological study of hunting in Amazonia at a conceptual level. In the second, …

Making Noise Through Law: Indigenous Legal Mobilisation Against A Power Plant In “French” Guiana, Pierre Auzerau

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

In so-called “French” Guiana, or Guyane, the Kali’na village of Atopo Wipi has fought for years against a hydrogen power plant being built on their land. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in Guyane and Western Europe, where I collaborated with various stakeholders to support Atopo Wipi’s resistance to the power plant, my research focuses on the legal dimensions of the Kali’na’s struggle to protect their land. Specifically, this article examines how the Kali’na navigated different normative frameworks, including international human rights standards and French law, to fight the project. Through this analysis, I show how the …

“Ese Dia Que Se Va El Patron An Hecho Fiesta”.* Historicities Of Successful Resistance Against Hacienda Bosses Among The Kukama (Peru, 1933-1945), Arno R. Holl

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This paper analyzes two cases of resistance by Kukama workers within the debt slavery system of habilitación in the Peruvian Amazon during the first half of the twentieth century. It discusses the similarities and differences between the two cases, and positions the workers and their accounts of events and agency within the historical, social and cosmological framework of the time and region. Through the examples studied here, the hierarchies, power dynamics, spirituality, lifestyles, traditions, and cultural changes that shaped Kukama communities at the time become visible from an emic perspective. The paper places special emphasis on how historical events are …

El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Caucho. Pactos Matrimoniales Y Trabajo Coercitivo Entre Awajún Y Patrones En La Amazonía Peruana, Silvia Romio

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Este trabajo presenta un análisis etnohistórico de los cambios en la jefatura awajún del Alto Marañón a inicios del siglo XX, centrándose en sus relaciones de dependencia, poder y trabajo forzoso con los comerciantes mestizos, en su mayoría patrones del caucho establecidos en la zona. El ensayo describe la transformación gradual de las relaciones cotidianas con estos foráneos, quienes pasaron de ser simples aliados comerciales a convertirse en capitanes y, finalmente, en yernos-patrones mediante el matrimonio con una o más hijas del jefe indígena. A través de la figura del yerno-patrón, se produjo una progresiva incorporación del “blanco” a …

A Pedra Da Aldeia: Reativações Waiwai Entre A Antropologia E A Arqueologia De Longa Duração, Carlos Machado Dias Jr., Kanhera Renato Xerew, Alexandre Aniceto Souza, Jaime Xamen Wai Wai, Justino Sarmento Rezende, Claide De Paula Moraes

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

O artigo analisa um episódio ocorrido na comunidade waiwai do Jatapuzinho, na Terra Indígena Trombetas-Mapuera, envolvendo o encontro do professor Renato Kanhera Waiwai com um antigo Pote de Pedra encontrado às margens do rio Jatapuzinho durante um período de estiagem. A partir de uma experiência etnográfica conduzida pelo próprio Kanhera, os autores refletem sobre os efeitos cosmopolíticos, históricos e ontológicos mobilizados pelo artefacto, articulando antropologia, arqueologia e perspectivas indígenas em um exercício de escrita coletiva. O texto argumenta que o Pote de Pedra não constitui apenas um vestígio arqueológico, mas um agente ativo na reativação de memórias, sonhos, narrativas e …

"Nothing Is Simple". An Ethnographic Theory And Its History, Marcio Goldman, Elizabeth Ewart, Patrick O'Hare

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This lecture was given on April 16th, 2026, at St Andrews University, as the 2nd Peter Gow Memorial Lecture. Its aim is not only to pay tribute to a great anthropologist who died prematurely, but also to explore a fundamental aspect of his work. Namely, the fact that Peter Gow developed what we might call an “ethnographic theory of mixture”. This theory is elaborated here through a comparison between Peter Gow’s work and my own, with a particular focus on what I have termed the Afro-indigenous relationship, counter-miscegenation, and counter-syncretism.

La Maquiladora De Sueños Is Where The “American Dream” Ends: The Socio-Cultural Impact Of Hai(T)Ijuanenses In The United States-México Borderlands, Pedro Aleman Perfecto

Master's Theses

Historically, Tijuana has been the destination for migrants who have been left out from the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world. The city is at the epicenter of globalization where many transit, leave, and arrive. Sometimes considered a “third country” due to its binational and bicultural identity with its sister city, San Diego, California. The growing number of Haitian refugees that arrived in Tijuana in the mid 2010s to seek asylum in the United States overwhelmed the city’s infrastructure and left the Haitian community vulnerable, yet it created new opportunities and reshaped new identities in the region. …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …