Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Refusing Rehabilitation: Outlaw Epistemologies And The Carceral-Therapeutic State In Nyc, Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During an historic re-articulation of incarceration in New York City, Refusing Rehabilitation: Outlaw Epistemologies and the Carceral-Therapeutic State explores how gender, race, and class have been transformed at the intersection of criminal legal system reform and the overdose crisis. I take up how multiracial groups of criminalized women—thrown together by the state, not by choice—refuse forms of state control and violence, and imagine together alternative “outlaw” horizons of justice, healing, drug use, and escape from carceral-therapeutic capture. Countering the individualizing mandate of rehabilitation, women in rehab articulate visions of healing grounded in interdependence, collective safety, and an end to structural …

Consciousness, Culture, And Comradeship: Narratives Of South African Exile And Anti-Apartheid Activism In West Berlin, Claudia R. Crowie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exile is still an emotionally and politically charged topic and experience in South African history. It evokes emotional and contrasting responses in relation to its role in the struggle for liberation of the Black majority, and reveals tensions along organizational lines in relation to the contributions, influences, and outcomes of the ANC, PAC and the BCM. In this dissertation, I focus on a small group of exiles of various political persuasions in the 1980s, who arrived in West Berlin as exiles in the late 1970s and 1980s, most remaining until the ANC came to power in the first democratic election …

El Poder De Las Tierras Estatales: Conflictos De Propiedad, Formaciones Estatales Y La Construcción De Los Llanos En Colombia, Julio Arias Vanegas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work examines different conflicts over the definition, delimitation, and use of state lands in Colombia. It focuses on the conflicts over three places, which have been produced as state properties and “baldíos” (public, untitled lands) from the 1940s to the 2010s in Los Llanos region. This dissertation departs from two premises. First, the making and unmaking of state lands are unique windows to examine how the limits between state and non-state properties, actors, and spaces are defined and disputed. Second, state lands, and especially baldíos, have been a key form of state territorialization and appropriation of marginalized regions. Thus, …

The Cultural Battle Against The Dollar: Struggles Over Hoarding And Democracy In The Twilight Of Argentina's Soy Boom, Charles Dolph

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Argentina’s economy has undergone a profound transformation over recent decades from beef and wheat to soybeans and derivative products as the country’s main export commodity and source of foreign exchange. The dissertation traces this shift against the historical backdrop of the country’s peculiar class, territorial, and state formations as the only Latin American nation where agrarian reform has been altogether absent. This perspective on Argentina’s experience with the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture reveals it as an expansive project in which the U.S. dollar figures as an instrument of pacification and acquiescence to agribusiness hegemony. Amid an early twenty-first century …

Building The Revolution: Ideology, Affect And Gender In Bolivarian Caracas, Andreina I. Torres A.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Building the Revolution: Ideology, Affect and Gender in Bolivarian Caracas,” examines the Bolivarian Revolution (1998-present) as a heterogenous shifting political process, and terrain of struggle in which a multiplicity of actors disputed the meanings and direction of socialism in Venezuela. During three years of ethnographic and archival research in Caracas (between 2014 and 2017) I researched one of the many Campamentos de Pioneros (Pioneer Camps) that was part of the Movimiento de Pobladores y Pobladoras de Venezuela (Venezuela’s Settlers’ Movement). The pioneers sought to “rescue” and occupy centrally located land in the national capital in order to build housing for …

North Of The Grid: The Black Experience Of 17th -19th Century Rural New York City, Stephanie E. Barnes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, transatlantic slavery was a racial project and template for race-making which created a country that relied on institutions that were organized and performed through social stratification. Today, the nation still operates on systemically racist institutions that have benefited whites while disadvantaging ‘others.’ The narratives presented in American history are rooted in whiteness and benefit the white community while marginalizing nonwhites. Over two hundred years of slavery history in this country has been purposely manipulated and left out. My research focuses on using an historical archaeological framework to research and share the lives of free and enslaved …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

Everything To Lose: Extraction, Racism, And Survival On Wet'suwet'en Land, Anne Spice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work critically analyzes the role of extractive industry in the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and occupation of Indigenous lands, and examines how Indigenous resistance to oil and gas projects augments the damaging effects of fossil fuel extraction and create alternative possibilities for life in the face of catastrophic environmental crises. In Wet’suwet’en territory, in Northern British Columbia, Canada, construction has begun on the fracked gas Coastal GasLink pipeline, despite the opposition of local Indigenous leaders and chiefs. Several Indigenous land reoccupation camps have been set up by Wet’suwet’en people to resist the pipeline’s construction, and the resulting conflict …

Sunbelt Schooling: Publics And Politics Of Education Advocacy In Phoenix, Arizona, Matthew Chrisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past forty years, public education in the United States has been the target of both neoliberal and conservative education reforms that have imposed austerity and privatization, set limits on racial, gendered, and sexual citizenship, increased school responsibility for social reproduction, and winnowed visions of public education as both a universal social entitlement and site of participatory democracy. These reforms emerged from, and remain powerfully anchored in, the United States Sunbelt, a crescent of metropolitan suburbs spanning southern California to Florida. This region propelled the conservative revolution in American politics but is also the site of progressive organizing that, …

All Aboard The Abortion Pill Train: Activism, Medicine, And Reproductive Technologies In The Republic Of Ireland, Brenna Mccaffrey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The successful legalization of abortion in the Republic of Ireland in 2018 is one of many recent political changes amidst ongoing global debates about the role of reproductive freedom in modern societies. This dissertation follows these changes through both clandestine and highly public social movement activism, deliberative and legislative political processes, and dynamic shifts in medical service provision over a three-year period from 2017 to 2020. I center the abortion pill as a medical and pharmaceutical technology that has been under-examined by scholars as an agent of change in the story of Ireland’s abortion debates. The emergence of non- profit …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

A “Medieval” Myth For A “Modern” Empire Britain Under The Shadow Of Arthur (1461–1612), Julian Gonzalez De Leon Heiblum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the use of the Arthurian myth from the fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries, as a narrative that connected a set of political principles for the unification of Britain and its imperial expansion. Joining other competing political myths in the British archipelago, the political significance of the Arthurian myth has nevertheless been overlooked. On the one hand, the myth informed the transformations of kingship in England and Wales from the crowning of Edward IV to the early years of James’ English reign. It did so specifically within the process of institutionalizing a British crown which was intertwined with …

Music Pedagogy In Venezuela’S Plains: Making Space In Alma Llanera, Elaine Sandoval

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the process of institutionalizing traditional música llanera (plains region music) education in Venezuela is informed by a hierarchical spatialization of the capital, Caracas, and the historically agricultural- and livestock-producing region known as the llanos, or the plains. Drawing on Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991), I argue that the representations of space that have defined the llanos region and música llanera often obscure the lived space of music-making and dwelling in the llanos. This dissertation is based on fieldwork in Guárico state between 2016-2018, where I observed the state-funded Alma Llanera program, which had been …

Control, Allegiance, And Shame In Male Qing Dynasty Hairstyles, Carolle Pinkerton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is about the politicization of hairstyles in imperial China. They indicated conformity with social norms, or rebellion against them. This was especially true under the country’s last dynasty. The Manchu conquerors imposed their own hairstyle, the queue, on their Han Chinese subjects to make their rule palpable to China’s illiterate millions. “Hair martyrs” who refused to accept this “barbarous” hairstyle were ruthlessly eliminated. The Manchus had feared assimilation into the much larger Han population. But the introduction of one uniform male hair style for both Manchus and Han blurred the lines between the two groups. In this way …

Past-Futures Of Harlem: Black Urban Space At The Limits Of Spatial Justice, Dane C. Ruffin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The racial capitalist development of the U.S. metropolitan landscape has been shaped by the involuntary displacement and dispersal of Black communities. From the dispossession of the Half-Free Negro Lots around the Fresh Collect pond in the seventeenth century to the clearing of Seneca Village to build Central Park in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth-century police-facilitated “race riot” in the Tenderloin district of Manhattan, which fueled the move to Harlem, the four-hundred year history of Black Manhattan alone provides substantial evidence of this and is in no way unique in this regard. Incomplete, yet ongoing, is what …

Property In Pieces: Land, Oil And Uncertainty In A Mexican Ejido, Margaret Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pemex has been a symbol of Mexican nationalism and a steward of the nation’s oil patrimony for more than 75 years, but few scholars have studied the messy ways in which oil extraction has played out in rural communities. This dissertation does that, while also analyzing the way in which various forms of property—national patrimony, private property, and communal property—are articulated in three dimensions (3D) in an ejido (communal agrarian community) in northern Veracruz. Horizontally, land has shifted from being collectively owned and managed to being divided into individually held plots which are not always recognized. Meanwhile, a web of …

Living In Permanent Transience: An Ethnography Of Contemporary Alexandria, Alexandra K. Schindler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of two distinct groups — Syrian refugees fleeing war and heading for Europe and young Egyptian artists and intellectuals living in post-revolution Alexandria, Egypt. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this project shows how the experience of living in permanent transience is a condition of both groups struggling to make Alexandria feel like home. The recent influx of Syrian refugees into Alexandria has had a significant impact on this Mediterranean coastal city, as it has become both the scene of emergent social and economic relations, and a crucial …

Climate Change And The Ancestors: Rain, Gender And Politics In An African Water Catchment, Jessie Fredlund

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Uluguru, a small mountain range in eastern Tanzania and one of the rainiest places in East Africa, serves as the principal water catchment for Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, and for commercial farms along the country’s central coast. Home to smallholder farmers who cultivate a variety of crops on mostly rain-fed farms, the catchment has been a site of struggle over water and nature since the nineteenth century. Today, climate change has rendered rainfall increasingly unpredictable, and a wave of “sustainable development” interventions has pressured farmers to change their practices and to engage in unpaid forms of ecological labor …

Avocado Mania: The Rise And Costs Of Our Obsession With Avocados, Rosa C. Lourentzatos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The past two decades have seen a surge in global demand for avocados, which have become popular among middle- and high-income fractions of society in developed regions of the world. Avocados are predominantly consumed far from their centers of origin and out of their traditional cultural context. The United States imports 87 percent of its avocados from a single region in Mexico, Michoacán. The systems of production and provision that have risen to meet the demand for this fashionable fruit have had devastating social and environmental effects, including deforestation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, pollution, displacement of indigenous populations, food insecurity, …

Reimagining Recovery: Debt, Mutual Aid, And Disaster Governance In Puerto Rico, Sarah Molinari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the politics and lived experiences of debt and climate disaster recovery in Puerto Rico. It examines mutual aid and debt resistance in relation to governance techniques and overlapping crises marked by the U.S. territory’s bankruptcy, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (2017), and culminating with popular mobilizations in the summer of 2019 that propelled the governor’s resignation. Tracing the ways that the post-hurricane social disaster and debt crisis are mutually constitutive, I investigate a case of women-led grassroots mutual aid organizing in the east-central municipality of Caguas, Puerto Rico and a political movement calling for a citizen audit …

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 …

The Objective Function: Science And Society In The Age Of Machine Intelligence, Emanuel D. Moss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Machine intelligence, or the use of complex computational and statistical practices to make predictions and classifications based on data representations of phenomena, has been applied to domains as disparate as criminal justice, commerce, medicine, media and the arts, mechanical engineering, among others. How has machine intelligence become able to glide so freely across, and to make such waves for, these domains? In this dissertation, I take up that question by ethnographically engaging with how the authority of machine learning has been constructed such that it can influence so many domains, and I investigate what the consequences are of it being …

Spectral Urbanism: Modern Ghost Cities, Rare Earths, And Political Time At The Limits Of Materialism, Linsey Ly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary urbanization in China is marked by speed, repetition, and similitude, key features of what I call spectral urbanism that also attends to the presence or absence, to recursivity and deferral. The mass development of empty, outmoded, and seemingly abandoned modern ghost cities in China’s borderlands come to be used as evidence of an interruption or lack in the veneer of Chinese modernity. The contours and quality of stalled development are measured, read in objects of the built environment that have yet to fulfill their anticipated function: vacant buildings, quiet roads that lead no one to empty parks, homes which …

Bodies On The Line: The Politics Of Regulating Pornography In Los Angeles, Christopher J. Baum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the regulation of sexually explicit media in the United States – specifically in Los Angeles – and the site used to understand it is the modern pornography industry at its points of production. I argue that since the industry's formation in the early- 1970s, regulatory efforts have focused on controlling porn worker’s bodies as a way of enacting broader social transformations and reshaping the domains of erotic life. Drawing from eighteen months of ethnographic research, I explore several interlocking forms of regulation. I begin by examining the formation of pornographic production cultures during what I call the …

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 …

The Compressed Modernity Of Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage In Taiwan: Digital Activism, Human Rights Discourse, And Intertwined Sexual, Political And National Identities, Jyun-Jie Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2019, Taiwan became the first Asian country to officially legalize same-sex marriage. Remarkably, the Taiwanese queer movement achieved the goal of marriage equality in only 30 years, with the first tongzhi (同志) activist group organized in 1990. Compared to Euro-American social movements, Taiwanese tongzhi activism has experienced a “compressed modernity” (Chang, 1999, 2010a, 2010b), which accelerates cultural and social transformations. Although Taiwanese academia has been significantly influenced by queer studies as a form of western knowledge production, local scholars and activists created a new interpretation from “queer” to “tongzhi.” Entangled with complex political identifications in post-martial-law Taiwan, …

Framing The Border: Liminality In The Network Narratives Of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Muhammad Muzammal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores liminality conveyed as displacement before death in the network narrative films of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Due to their depiction of existential crises and possibly fatal scenarios of several characters in different countries and regions, these network narrative films are colloquially referred to as the “Death Trilogy.” Therefore, rearranging the many strands of death-related abstractions and notions in these films around liminality becomes a jumping-off point to explore deeper layers of these works. Through interdisciplinary yet markedly film studies excavations, this thesis projects the liminal spaces of Iñárritu’s films onto border spaces. With borders considered as sites of …

“The Gifts Of Enemies”: The Acteal Massacre, Sociedad Civil Las Abejas And Mexico’S Ejército Zapatista De Liberación Nacional And Humanitarian And Development Aid During The Low-Intensity War, 1997–1999, Maria R. Hart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about a faction of the Sociedad Civil Las Abejas who, as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), were housed at the INI IDP camp in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, in 1997-99 after the Acteal massacre on December 22, 1997. This faction is of interest because they protested the remaining members of Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (Civil Society The Bees) social movement at Acteal and the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, often better-known as the Zapatistas), because the movement required them to reject governmental humanitarian aid and development programs or lose their membership in the social …

Many Forms Of Black Death: Coal Extraction, Transnational Activism And The Value Of Life In Colombia, Oscar H. Pedraza Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After the murder of the president and vice president of the coal union by paramilitaries in the department of Cesár, Colombia, the union is left adrift. Its fragility is only heightened when the person who decides to take over, is killed six months later. The union has been vocal on their critique of environmental destruction produced by coal and argues that their criticism is part of the reasons why they were targeted. Not far from there, in the department of Guajira, the conglomerate in charge of Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine of South America, wants to divert a creek …

¿Cómo Traducimos "Ni Una Más" Al Inglés?: Latin American Manifestation Of The Phenomenology Of Femicide, And The United States’ Subsequent Internal Neglect, Suemi Mendez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to tackle two components in analyzing the phenomenological concept of femicide, most simply known as the killing of women because they are women through structural violence and oppression. First, it will develop its deployment within the Latin American framework as it has been adapted to function within the regional lexicon, both socially and legislatively. This assessment will serve to address the successes and failures thus far in tackling femicide as the location with the highest statistics globally. Through this foregrounding, it will lead into how this revised deployment of femicide fits into the context of Global North …