Anthropology Commons^™

No Going Back: Ground-Breaking Lab Sends Students To Balkan Route To Learn About Refugees--And Themselves, Arne Norris

Colby Magazine

A double major in global studies and anthropology with a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Powers was in Istanbul networking, scouring the city, making contacts with LGBTI refugees and activists, finding people to share their stories as part of a project at Colby, the Insurgent Mobilities Lab. The lab, involving more than a dozen students, is researching the dynamics of migration along the Balkan Route that hundreds of thousands of refugees have traveled in a grave effort to seek a better life in Northern Europe.

Documenting The Undocumented: Experimenting Europe At The Biometric Migrant Archive, Romm Lewkowicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation is a critical ethnography of the biometric governance of asylum seekers and illegal migrants in the European Union, an integral apparatus for the policing of border-free Europe. Interrogating the paradox of how ‘undocumented migrants’ have been—and are—the most documented subjects in Europe today, the research explores how this documentation assumes the form of biometric technology and its relation to the postwar eradication of Europe’s internal frontiers. At the center of these processes and my research object is Eurodac: a pan-European apparatus for the biometric documentation and regulation of Europe’s paperless migrants and asylum seekers. By attending to both …

Contemporary Human Displacement: A Comparative Analysis Of Syria, Yemen, Honduras, And Venezuela, Rav Carlotti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What is causing the surge in human displacement around the world? Large-scale displacement in Syria, Yemen, Honduras, and Venezuela has generated unprecedented humanitarian crises in Latin America and the Middle East as millions of displaced people end up as refugees or immigrants. Humanitarian organizations like the UNHCR and host countries have had their resources overextended by these ongoing crises, and there is no end in sight. This thesis shows that contemporary human displacement is rooted in the increasing inability of governments to manage their societies amid great political demands and socio-economics strains. These causes are difficult to tackle because they …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Flexible Lives On Engineering's 'Bleeding Edge' : Gender, Migration And Belonging In The Semiconductor Industry, Sarah E. Appelhans

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation explores gender, flexibilization, and belonging within professional high tech employment, particularly amongst women and migrant engineers. Prior studies of women in the “integrated circuit” focused on low-skilled factory labor (Nakamura 2014, Grossman 1980); however, women are increasingly choosing careers in the male-dominated engineering workforce, which designs and manufactures semiconductor technology. Fieldwork for this dissertation took place between May 2018 – Aug 2019 in the Northeastern US, a regional hub for semiconductor manufacturing companies. Thirty-eight life history interviews were conducted with participants from several companies in the area, along with frequent follow ups and participant observation with seventeen engineering …

The Inescapable Effects Of Discourse As Knowledge And Power: Refugee Youth’S Resistance To “The System” In Pursuit Of Higher Education, Fallon Puckett

Theses and Dissertations

Employing a Foucauldian inflected analytic framework, I examine how youth resettled in and around Unity, NC, ambivalently managed racializing discourses associated with being ‘refugee’ as they pursued access to higher education (HE). Like many scholars who are drawn to post-structuralist concepts, I understand ‘discourse’ to be a form of knowledge and power, which operates through institutions implicated in advancing forms of self-government. In my video-conferenced interviews with youth they revealed cogent interpretations of the many ways these different U.S. governmental (and some non-governmental) institutions operated in their lives as “the System.” In the particular case of refugee youth, they used …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Migrating Genes: Using Adna And Archaeological Data To Explain Migration In The Casas Grandes Region Of Northern Mexico, Meradeth Snow, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Migration as an archaeological topic has addressed huge distances, such as the colonization of the Americas, as well as smaller regions, such as the peopling of specific sites. The use of genetics as a medium to enhance our understanding of population movement can be an asset. There are potential pitfalls, however, such as the misrepresentation of DNA ranging across the landscape without human vectors or motivations. Genetic data must be interpreted through the lens of all available data from the site and surrounding region in order to understand how it its into the potential for human migration. These ideas will …

What Educators In Mexico And In The United States Need To Know And Acknowledge To Attend To The Educational Needs Of Transnational Students, Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor Zúñiga

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This chapter from the edited volume "The Students We Share" explains to both US and Mexican audiences that a persistent number and proportion of K-12 students continue to circulate between both countries and thus that it is a challenge for both countries' education systems—including teacher preparation, curriculum, assessment, etc.—to see how students' knowledge and experience from the other system is both salient to their new schooling in a new country and valuable for how it will contribute to their future means for negotiating adulthood.

"Roses Remind Me Of Aleppo": Ironic Home, Beckoning States, And Memories Of Syrian Armenian Women In Yerevan, Armenia, Anahid Matossian

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

This project contributes to anthropologies of the state, (diasporic return) migration, belonging, home, and conflict, including genocide and war. It intervenes in the anthropology of home by focusing on both the social and physical aspects of home, its pain, joys, and ironies, and it speaks to the anthropology of genocide by showing how a population a century removed from a genocide uses it to interpret their experience. This dissertation also deals with state constructions of ideal citizen formation--one of obligation and devotion to the socially constructed ancestral homeland, where descendants who share an ethnic identity have a role to play …

Migrant Dreams, Egyptian Workers In The Gulf States, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Migrant Dreams is about the hopes and aspirations on which migrant workers thrive to achieve their goals. The first version of this book was published in 2017 in Arabic with the title Hatta yantahi al-naft (Until the End of Oil). Based on over a decade of fieldwork, observations and conversations, Samuli Schielke gives a detailed overview of the life of low-income Egyptian migrant laborers who relocated to the Arab Gulf States on temporary contracts, returned, then migrated again. The book focuses mostly on the story of Tawfik, an intelligent Egyptian young man from rural backgrounds who is compelled to achieve …

Lgbtqc: Queer Perspectives On The Illinois-Iowa Quad Cities, Robert Burke

Anthropology: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Cities are broadly conceived to be queer utopia when compared with rural spaces. While the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa fit this simplistic model in some ways, the region has several unique characteristics that warrant their own investigation. I argue that the social climate of the Quad Cities is generally perceived as welcoming and inclusive by the LGBTQ+ community. However, despite an assortment of community-building institutions, some find socialization and partner-seeking a bit difficult. Many advocate for investment in a variety of physical LGBTQ+ “third places” (public gathering places), which would yield a variety of benefits for this community. …

What Western Tourism Concepts Obscure: Intersections Of Migration And Tourism In Indonesia, Kathleen M. Adams

Anthropology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Classic Anglo-European definitions of tourism as recreational travel have hindered more nuanced locally-grounded understandings of travel phenomena elsewhere in the world. Moreover, contemporary global labor and educational mobility have produced novel travel forms and behaviors that straddle the Western categories of “tourist” and “migrant.” The purpose of this analysis is to examine Toraja (Indonesia) perspectives on travel which can be instructive for correcting the binary divides between tourism and migration that have long plagued dominant Western models of travel. Drawing from data culled from long-term qualitative fieldwork and online research, I convey three ethnographically-grounded stories of Toraja migrants on return …

Masculinity, Migration, And Forced Conscription In The Syrian War, Kristin V. Monroe

Anthropology Faculty Publications

In this essay, I provide a different perspective on the Syrian conflict by examining how the war’s reach can also be located amid the losses, interruptions, and experiences of those Syrians who have until now largely escaped its incredible violence. By looking closely at how the war has altered the life trajectories of and produced distinct modes of vulnerability for military-age men, I develop an argument about how, although they avoid fighting by going to work in Qatar, the lives of a group of Syrian men remain defined by conscription. Through my investigation of how these men are located in …

Birth Across Borders: Migueleña Maternal Experience In Palm Beach County, Florida, Inbal Mazar

Maya America: Journal of Essays, Commentary, and Analysis

Dangers for pregnant Maya women in San Miguel Acatán, a highland hamlet in Huehuetenango, Guatemala are exceptionally high. Those who migrate to Palm Beach County, Florida also face significant risks during pregnancy. However, conceptualizing migrants as vulnerable and non-agentive dismisses the opportunity to explore other dimensions of migrant women experiences. Interviews with Migueleña mothers and midwives and health professionals and advocates in both regions revealed resilience strategies Migueleña migrants create and employ as they navigate linguistically and culturally foreign medical systems. The support they provide each other results in more positive maternal experiences under arduous circumstances. Over time, Migueleñas are …

The Security Apparatus, Federal Magistrate Courts, And Detention Centers As Simulacra: The Effects Of Trump’S Zero Tolerance Policy On Migrants And Refugees In The Rio Grande Valley, Terence Garrett

Political Science Faculty Publications

Trump’s DHS implemented the Zero Tolerance policy from April 6 to June 24, 2018. Refugees, prevented from crossing the midpoints of bridges by Customs and Border Protection agents, crossed the Rio Grande to ask for asylum, were denied, and forced to cross at places deemed illegal by law. This resulted in misdemeanor violations for unlawful entry and fleeing immigration checkpoints. The policy initiative centered on the separation of children from their migrant parents—refugees fleeing from the northern triangle countries: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Adult migrants were sent to prisons and holding facilities, brought before a magistrate to plead guilty, …

The Effects Of Racialization On Skeletal Manifestations Of Disease Among Migrants In Historic St. Louis, Missouri, Kristina M. Zarenko

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the biological effects of racialization on migrants in late nineteenth and early twentieth century St. Louis, Missouri. Racialization is a form of structural violence in which real or perceived physical differences contribute to the creation of hierarchical racial categories along a continuum of whiteness. German and Irish immigrants and African American migrants from the South came to St. Louis in search of economic prosperity and in an attempt to escape poverty, famine, or conflict in their places of origin. However, racialization affected each migrant group’s access to housing and employment as well as their exposure to violence. …

Chapter 10, Life In Town In Intimacy And Community In A Changing World: Sikaiana Life 1980-1993, William Donner

Sikaiana Ethnography

A description of emigration to towns, mainly Honiara, among the Sikaiana people of the Solomon Islands from 1980 to 1993. The migrants maintained and developed many ways to express their solidarity and community.

A related website can be found here,

Migration And Women’S Relationships To The Land And Food In Myanmar, Allison Joseph

Scripps Senior Theses

Abstract

In the 21st century, Myanmar has become the largest migration source country in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. To achieve its economic and political goals, the government has conducted extensive confiscation and reallocation of communal lands, which has resulted in a growing class of landless and dispossessed citizens. Under the new laws, rural women are disproportionately impacted and more vulnerable to the processes of dispossession, often lacking the rights or resources of their male counterparts to fight for the land of their ancestors. This has resulted in the wide-scale disinheritance of Myanmar’s rural women from their land and food, as …

The Kaiparowits Puebloans: Kayentan Or Virgin Branch Migrants?, Phil R. Geib

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

More than 50 years ago archaeologists identified a high-density of small Puebloan habitations on the Kaiparowits Plateau in southern Utah. Analysis of pottery from these habitations by James Gunnerson and Florence Lister resulted in conflicting interpretations of cultural affiliation. Gunnerson argued for a Virgin affiliation whereas Lister argued for a Kayentan affiliation. Lister’s interpretation triumphed and the Puebloan occupation of the Kaiparowits was attributed to a migration of Kayenta people from the south during the late Pueblo II period. A review of architectural and artifactual evidence fails to support a Kayentan migration. An expansion of Puebloan groups from the west …

Transnational Journeys: Samoan Migration And Remittances Reconsidered, Paul Shankman

Pacific Studies

In her work on Samoan population movement, Sa‘iliemanu Lilomaiava-Doktor criticizes earlier approaches to migration and remittances as “wrongheaded” because they were based on an “economistic” Euro-American model that did not sufficiently include indigenous perspectives. She then offers an approach that focuses on Samoan conceptions of movement, obligation, and connection. This article addresses her critique and examines the role of indigenous concepts in understanding and explaining trends in Samoan migration and remittances over the past several decades. As important as indigenous perspectives are, a number of the trends that Lilomaiava-Doktor derives from her approach are problematic. Furthermore, a review of the …

The Effects Of Forced Migration On The Houma Of Louisiana, Jessica R. Parfait

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis seeks to understand the effects of multiple forced migrations on the Indigenous Houma of southern Louisiana. The causes of these migrations have taken many forms such as the dispossession of land and relocating for access to resources. Through ethnographic interviews and historic research, I seek to critically engage the past to understand how it has molded the present and the lives of tribal citizens. I evaluate the power dynamics enacted upon the Houma who have recorded contact with Europeans dating to 1686 but have never been recognized as a sovereign entity by the United States.

’Being A Tourist In (My Own) Home’: Negotiating Identities And Belonging In Indonesian Heritage Tourism, Kathleen M. Adams

Anthropology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Risking Rescue: The Politics Of Precarity In Mediterranean Crossing, Eleanor Paynter

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Over the course of Europe’s recent refugee crisis, the role of Search and Rescue (SAR) has changed dramatically, first forming a critical part of (inter)national responses to the crisis, and now occupying an antagonistic position, as countries have closed their ports to NGO-operated vessels and the European Commission (EC) has ceased naval Search and Rescue operations. As a result, migrants crossing the Central Mediterranean face different and increased risks, including dying at sea, being held by European authorities, or being apprehended closer to Libya and sent to a Libyan detention camp.

In response to these shifts, groups that continue SAR …

Disability And Migration: How Systems Of Violence Intersect With The Production And Experience Of Disability For Migrants In Morocco, Frances Condon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This project investigates the perspectives and experiences of physically disabled, chronically ill, or bodily-impaired migrants from south of the Sahara living in Rabat, Morocco. Increasing interest in disabled migrants’ rights from international organizations risks erasing those being ‘protected’ if it does not attend to the intersections of race, class, citizenship, and gender as they relate to the production and experience of disability for migrants. Produced by and for the (white) global North, I argue that traditional Euro-American disability studies scholarship is ill-equipped to address the issues faced by disabled migrants in post-colonial contexts. In addition to being ineffective, the uncritical …

Sinning Men, Sinful Places: Spatial Politics Of Moral Transgressions In The Franco-German Borderland, Oguz Alyanak

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Where do Muslim Turkish men who live in Strasbourg go after work? What are the kinds of places they socialize? Is it home? Is it the mosque? Or is it elsewhere, like coffeehouses, or wherever the car takes them in Strasbourg, and beyond, such as nightclubs, drinking alleys, bistro-casinos and brothels in Kehl and other neighboring German cities? And if it is the latter, and it rarely should be, as the imams would warn the pupils attending religious conversation circles, and the Friday sermons, how do these men justify their presence in these spaces? How do they reflect on their …

The Transformational Haze: Crisis, Shadow Economies, And Global Civil War On The Venezuela-Colombia Border, Sam Kirsch

Sustainability and Social Justice

This paper presents a counter-narrative to the current migration ‘crisis’ on the Venezuela-Colombia border. Its purpose is to highlight the geopolitical complexities of this event that are de-emphasized by media and neoliberal discourse. The frameworks of crisis narrative, shadow economies, and “global civil war” grants us the analytical lens that will allow us to peer further into the processes that have led to the Venezuelan migration. Through this lens, I will illuminate intricacies in the relationship between Colombia, Venezuela, and the West in a way that justifies the exploration of alternative interpretations to mainstream claims of socialism, tyranny, and intervention.

Gender East And West: Transnational Gender Theory And Global Marketing Research, Katherine Sredl

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Much of the prior scholarly research on global gender and marketing tends to focus on development. The post-socialist space does not fit neatly into this paradigm, given the diversity of its legacy of ideology, industrialization, feminist thought, and the post-socialist experience of privatization, democratization, European Union expansion, and, in some cases, war. This chapter uses the history of feminist thought in Yugoslavia and Croatia to highlight the contribution the post-socialist space brings to global gender and marketing research: questioning the role of the state in securing rights and questioning assumptions about individualism in a neoliberal era. I argue for an …

A Parade Of Identities: Negotiation Of Ethnic Identities In Three New York City Cultural Parades, Julia M. Herrera-Moreno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Parade of Identities” is a digital project that applies social theories of international migration, psychology and cultural anthropology to ethnographic visual data in order to analyze ethnic identity and urban space appropriation found in three of New York City’s cultural parades. The project traces and analyzes the historical meaning and emerging directions in terms of ethnic identity construction, of NYC immigrant parades through the use of the author’s photography and video collections (2012-2018) of St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day and Chinese New Year parades, in association with a website and blog via digital humanities’ platform. Additionally, by activating the …

Refugees From Syria Caught Between War And Borders: A Journey Towards Protection, Maissaa Almustafa

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines the global crisis of protection through the lens of the Syrian refugee crisis and the particular experiences of refugees’ journeys to Sweden.

In doing so, the dissertation challenges the dominant narratives that represent refugees either as victims who deserve aid in their regions, or as threats when they exert their agency and journey towards the global north. In the same vein, the dissertation problematizes the dominant narrative of the “European crisis of migration” and proposes that the “unauthorized” arrivals of refugees in Europe are reflections of a global crisis of protection, a crisis that develops as a …