Browsing by Subject "Ethnography"
Now showing 1 - 13 of 13
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Conditions, Contestations, and Pockets of Belonging: Youth Citizenship in Small Town America(2021-06) Fahning, HeidiSmall towns in the American Midwest, undergoing significant demographic, political, and economic shifts, are a microcosm reflecting the broader debate of “who belongs” in popular and academic discourse. This year-long, multi-sited ethnographic research study focuses on the personal narratives of six youth of different racial, ethnic, class, and gender identities to understand how youth negotiate and experience belonging within their daily lives. Drawing on an intersectional subjectification (“self-making” and “being-made”) framework, this dissertation advances three arguments. First, I contend belonging in Riverton for the youth is conditional on their positions in racial, class, and gendered hierarchies of belonging. Secondly, I maintain that conceptions of belonging in a small Midwestern town are continuously being shaped, contrived, and contested by actors whose interactions within the high school mirror broader negotiations within varying structures of power across the United States and the world. Through the everyday contestations of belonging, youth are violently excluded and youth create spaces where they experience belonging. Finally, I claim that youth carve out pockets of belonging, conceptualized as spaces where youth experience a sense of at-homeness and belonging, through their everyday interactions. Ultimately, this dissertation argues it is within the conditions, contestations, and pockets of belonging within formal and non-formal educational spaces that shed light on youths’ experiences and conceptions of belonging.Item “Democratizing” clinical research? efficiency and inclusiveness in an electronic primary care research network(2010-06) Hudson, Brenda L.This dissertation is a critical ethnography and rhetorical study of the development of an electronic network designed to advance medical research and improve health. Specifically, this study focuses on the network's social and technological affordances of efficiency and inclusiveness to connect communities of primary care providers and clinical researchers to both expand participation in and expedite the research process. By examining the network's technical elements aligned with its social context, the assumptions that influence the choice of technologies, and the network's subsequent design, Brenda L. Hudson explores the network's hierarchical structure and potential democratizing capabilities in clinical research. Through field notes, interviews, and textual analysis, Hudson provides a micro-level examination of the electronic network's development and technical affordances during the program's three-year funded contract. An ethnographic narrative describes how the group functions as a "community of practice" to create a network linking primary care practices with clinical research. Further, Hudson provides a macro-level examination that draws on critical theories of technology and explores to what extent the network might serve as a "democratic" technology through its involvement of previously unprivileged populations in clinical research--primary care providers and patients. Results indicate that assumptions of efficiency and inclusiveness in clinical research--and specifically in the network's technical affordances--provide potential benefits to patients' health by widening the pool of researchers and participants and streamlining the recruitment process. However, manifest in this electronic network, these assumptions also pose potential risks and ethical challenges surrounding private health information and "therapeutic misconception," whereby a research participant believes that enrolling in a research study will provide direct therapeutic benefit. Further results indicate that although the development team has done much to assure a "democratic" development of use of technology by operating as a "community of practice," there exist unintentional asymmetrical hierarchies of who controls and uses the network, favoring primary care providers and practices that already exist in clinical research.Item A Desire to be Otherwise: On Eco-survivalism(2018-04) Morehouse, ToddDrawing on two years of ethnographic field research conducted in an eco-survivalist community in central Vermont, this dissertation examines the ideological, philosophical, and political contexts of eco-survivalism and neo-primitivism. In particular, this research focuses on how the practices around which the community coheres––ones commonly relegated to a pre-civilizational past––shape community members’ understandings of past, present, and future human-environment relations. Toward this end, this dissertation explores three primary practices––lithic tool making, animal tracking, and herbcraft––and discusses how such practices are capable of fostering intimacy with, and knowledge of, the world. Through an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and speculative mode of investigation, the findings suggest that while there are many risks––both conceptual and material––associated with eco-survivalist practices, they nevertheless offer insights for addressing present environmental uncertainties and offer a potential set of strategies for navigating future environmental challenges.Item Imperial Medicine: An Ethnography of Immigrant Experiences after the Affordable Care Act(2019-07) Jimenez, AnthonyMy dissertation illustrates affinity between the US health care system and border control. I conducted 11 months of ethnography at Justicia y Paz (JyP), a volunteer-run NGO based in Houston, Texas that provides free food, clothing, basic medical services and temporary shelter to hundreds of undocumented immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia each year. I supplement this data with hundreds of informal interviews and 36 semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrants, volunteers, and city employees affiliated with Houston's medical district. I find that immigrant health care is premised less on legality (i.e., being documented) and more on legibility (i.e. being recognizable to health care practitioners in particular ways). Drawing on Harsha Walia's theory of border imperialism, which draws insights from critical race theory, Marxist analysis, feminist studies, and poststructuralism, I argue that illegality is not simply a determinant of but also determined by health disparities. Today's health care system operates like a border where the racialized terms of illegality are regulated, (re)produced and actively contested. My research illuminates these processes through examining how health care is understood, provided, and received at the medical district, NGO, and migrant levels. In doing so, I make several theoretical contributions to the areas of medical sociology and immigration and develop practical considerations for health practitioners and NGOs with health equity aims. On a theoretical level, I illustrate convergence between the welfare and carceral state, advance theoretical debates around medicalization, and add nation to analyzes between caregiving and masculinity. On a practical level, I implicate health practitioners and equity-oriented NGOs like JyP in different forms of migrant suffering and offer considerations for becoming social justice allies.Item Legal status, education, and Latino youths' transition to adulthood(2013-06) Punti, GemmaThis two-year ethnography explores how six Latino young adults (ages 18 to 21), who arrived as children or teenagers in the US, experience and understand illegality and education. Just one participant qualifies for the `Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Policy'; a common reality since more than half of the undocumented youth under 30 are ineligible (Passel & Lopez, 2012). Through participant observation and conversational interviews, I sought to understand the role that education plays in the life of these young adults; how the meaning they give to illegality evolves, and how they showed agency in their discourses and everyday practices. Past research focused on the few undocumented students who are excelling academically (e.g., Perez, 2009), the marginalized lives of undocumented immigrants (e.g., Gonzales & Chavez, 2012), and the stages that undocumented youth undertake in learning about the meaning of illegality (Gonzales, 2011). Research has omitted the academic experiences of the majority of undocumented youth (who are not excelling academically), the nuanced forms of agency disclosed by this youth, and the experiences of first-generation young adults. These aspects are addressed in this study. Through ethnographic and discourse analysis (Gee, 1990) this study shows how age of arrival becomes more determinant than legal status in explaining high school graduation and their academic experiences. Still all participants believed that by echándole ganas they could graduate from high school. The meaning of illegality becomes fluid and while participants stated not to fear deportation, they acted on that fear by performing invisibility in public and unknown spaces. Finally, these youth learn to live in illegality but not as agentless individuals but as individuals who strategically pursue to improve their lives. **************** Aquest estudi etnogràfic de dos anys de durada examina com sis joves llatinoame-ricans sense documents, d'edats compreses entre els 18 i els 21 anys i que varen arribar abans dels 14 anys (generació 1.5) o després (generació 1), donen sentit a una educació als EEUU i a una vida d'il.legalitat. Només un dels participants qualifica per la llei `Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals'; una realitat molt típica ja que més de la meitat dels joves de menys de 30 anys sense documents són ineligibles (Passel & Lopez, 2012). A través de l'observació dels participants i d'entrevistes informals he investigat el significat que té l'educació per aquests joves; el significat que donen a la seva condició legal, com el significat canvia, i com mostren capacitat d'acció en el seu discurs i en les seves activitats diàries. La investigació prèvia estudiava aquells pocs joves indocumentats que tenien uns resutalts acadèmics excel.lents (e.g.Perez, 2009), les vides marginals dels immigrants indocumentats (e.g., Gonzales & Chavez, 2012), i les etapes que els joves sense documents experimenten al anar descubrint la seva il.legalitat (Gonzales, 2011). Aquesta investigació passada ha oblidat les experiències acadèmiques de la majoria dels joves indocumentats (els quals no tenen resultats acadèmics excepcionals), les formes subtils d'agència (capacitat d'acció), i les experiènces de la generació de joves que varen arribar als EEUU després dels 14 anys. Aquests aspectes si que es tenen en consideració en aquest estudi. A través de l'anàlisis del discurs (Gee, 1990) i de l'anàlisis etnogràfic, aquest estudi mostra com l'edat d'arribada és més determinant que la seva condició legal en l'explicació sobre les seves experiènces acadèmiques i en la possibilitat de graduar-se de l'escola secundària. Malgrat els obstacles que aquests joves viuen, els participants firmament creuen que amb una actitud de echándole ganas, poden acabar l'escola secondària satisfactòriament. El significat d'il.legalitat és fluid i encara que la majoria diuen que no temen ser deportats o discriminats, actuen sobre aquesta por vivint en invisibilitat. Finalment, aquests joves aprenen a viure com a indocumentats però conscients del seu desig de millorar les seves vides, i ho fan estratègicament - a través de l'aprenentage, la creativitat, i la recerca de noves alternatives professionals.Item The Melancholy of Schooling: A Critical Ethnographic Study of Race, Trauma, and Learning in a High School English Classroom(2017-06) Grinage, JustinThis year-long critical ethnographic study discusses the difficulties that arose when a multiracial class of 12th grade high school English students engaged in learning surrounding the reality of racism in the United States amid public displays of police brutality. Most notably, three high-profile cases of racial violence committed against black males, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, took place within five months of each other and coincided with the school year that I conducted my fieldwork for this study. Using the psychoanalytic concept of racial melancholia (Cheng, 2001) as a theoretical framework, I demonstrate how repressed forms of racial trauma and grief are experienced through the process of teaching and learning and how these processes are connected to larger formations of American racialization. My analyses focuses on the psycho-social (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008) construction, production, and transmission of trauma in the context of learning about race in the classroom. I place racial melancholia in conversation with theories of history (Benjamin, 1969), mourning (Freud, 1917), emotion (Ahmed, 2004), haunting (Frosh, 2013), whiteness (Thandeka, 1999) and affect (Massumi, 2015) to document the various ways that both the students and the classroom teacher struggled to learn and teach about racism. I argue that melancholic trauma and racial loss permeates American identities as a result of the nation’s extensive history of denying its racial transgressions. The implications of the study emphasize that we must learn to identify and work through unresolved racial grief if we are to improve our comprehension of race and engender anti-racist agency in the face of persistent systemic and individual acts of racial subjugation. This dissertation makes a distinct contribution to social justice approaches to education by underscoring the generative and productive possibilities for designing curriculum and employing critical pedagogies that center on understanding racial trauma.Item Oral history interview with Susan Dray(Charles Babbage Institute, 2020-01-28) Dray, SusanThis interview is part of a series on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conducted by the Charles Babbage Institute for ACM SIGCHI (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction). HCI Pioneer and one of the founders of SIGCHI recounts her education, early career, and the founding of SIGCHI as an idea/plan in Gaithersburg 1982. She details her work in human factors on government projects and on analyzing secretaries and office processes in using newly acquired IBM computers at Honeywell’s headquarters (the development and writing of DELTA), as well as launching the first industrial users/design lab outside of the IT industry at American Express Financial Services. She also discusses leaving American Express to found Dray and Associates, one of the first HCI consultancies. Among the core topics discussed are the evolution of SIGCHI and the CHI Conference, gender and the HCI field, the relative place of practitioners and academics in HCI, and her method and roles in studying users and advising companies/organizations. She also discusses UXPA (a heavily practitioner organization focused on user experience and design), and her role in mentoring many young students and professionals (especially women) in HCI.Item Performing Masculinities: The Impact of Racialization, Space, and Cultural Practices on Hmong Immigrant Youth(2014-08) Smalkoski, KariAlthough several research studies have been conducted on second generation Hmong youth and families, little is known about the latest wave of Hmong immigrants, the Wat Tham Krabok (WTK) Hmong, who arrived in the U.S. between 2004-2006. In addition, literature on the Hmong still relies heavily on model minority tropes steeped in meritocracy narratives. This research examines the experiences of WTK Hmong youth who live in predominately African American urban neighborhoods and are bussed to predominately white suburban schools. Three years of ethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites was conducted between 2009-2011 and 2012-2013. The research examines ways that WTK Hmong males, in particular, have been racialized in spaces of institutions which has significantly impacted their relationships with families, attitudes about schooling, and perceptions about their futures. Although youth have experienced vast amounts of parent-child conflict, these experiences are not simplified as intergenerational familial conflict; rather, a complex, dynamic, and critical representation of youths' lives is illuminated through their insights and perspectives told from their point of view. In addition, youths' experiences are analyzed within larger structural structures and processes. Emphasis is given to the everyday violence that Hmong males have experienced in schools. The research problematizes the ways school officials use no tolerance "race neutral" policies which allow violence and misunderstandings to fester between Hmong youth and their African American peers. A significant finding in the research is that WTK Hmong male youth are ignored, unprotected, and experience intensive social isolation in schools and in many cases, their families. In response, youth resist by creating protective spaces which involve alternative masculinities and built-in peer support networks through cultural practices. The analysis extends conventional scholarship of masculinities by exploring how racialized masculinities are a site for discipline and disempowerment of WTK Hmong youth while providing spaces for provisionally empowering forms of agency and resistance through cultural practices. Youth must have access to cultural practices through out-of-school programs as they have the potential to create social capital that connect them to academic success and social integration, offering them opportunities to engage with their families and schools in meaningful ways.Item Social class and the written and unwritten rules of competitive college admissions: A comparative study of International Baccalaureate schools in Ecuador(2020-07) Bittencourt, TiagoIn 2006, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education signed an agreement which sought to gradually introduce the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) into as many of the country’s 1400 publicly funded secondary schools as possible. The initiative was premised on the belief that the quality of public education could be significantly improved if public school students had access to the education experiences and credentials which in Ecuador were historically restricted to private schools catering to affluent students. While subject to critique by several civil societies, the initiative generated a significant amount of enthusiasm and was widely perceived as an early indication that the public-private divide which marred the country’s educational system and cemented pervasive forms of inequality was finally being rectified. Undergirding the DP initiative is a crucial assumption; that increasing access to prestigious educational programs is an important and effective way of addressing inequality. However, as numerous scholars have shown, access alone is not enough to ensure equality and generate social mobility (see Apple, 1996; Aronowitz, 2003, 2008; Jack, 2018). Rather, an overt focus on access may ignore and even conceal the forms of advantage that are unevenly distributed within different segments of society (Tan, 2008). Issues ranging from the materiality of teaching and pedagogy (Vavrus & Salema, 2013) to the practices and “informed agency” of affluent parents and students (Brantlinger, 2003) are equally important and, if left unconsidered, can greatly diminish or even negate the promise a policy such as the DP initiative upholds. This dissertation interrogates this standing assumption by examining the social and cultural processes that produce and maintain inequality, and therefore interfere with the DP initiative’s stated intent. Through process-tracing and a multi-sited ethnography of a low-income public school and an affluent private school, I found that although sponsored by Ecuador’s Ministry of Education, the DP was not recognized as a valid credential for admission to local universities. Due to this existing policy disconnect, students from both schools strictly viewed the DP as a means of gaining access to universities abroad. As a result of this shared aspirational goal, it was possible to discern important differences in how students thought through and engaged with the application process for universities abroad. These differences highlighted the formative role of students’ familial backgrounds and institutional membership, suggesting that while access to DP allowed students to share similar desired goals, circumstances outside the confines of the classroom were more likely to determine whether these goals would indeed be accomplished. In sum, while public school students were encouraged to aspire to study abroad, they were not afforded the support or have the means to effectively engage with the required application and admission processes. The gradual realization that their dreams were likely to remain unfulfilled led students to experience to a mash of affects (Berlant, 2011) which included frustration, disengagement and acquiescence. These affective responses not only conflicted with the DP initiative’s intent of equalizing opportunity, but in many ways served to reinforce existing patterns and systems of inequality. The findings of this study are not intended to discredit the DP initiative – admonishing a seemingly well-intentioned policy is a common but often unfruitful endeavor. Moreover, given the study’s design, any assertion of representation would be misleading, and therefore the impulse for generalization should be significantly tempered. Rather it is to showcase the grounded productions and the ensuing shortcomings which limit and even counteract the policy’s intended goal of addressing social inequality and equalizing opportunity. While the study was envisioned as a direct response to a specific initiative, the emerging insights speak to issues of class culture and the “internationalization” (Knight, 2004; 2015) of public education. Specifically, it will address the relationship between social class and conceptions of “responsibility”, and instances of what Bourdieu (2007) terms as “capital conversion”.Item Son Dos Alas: A Multimedia ethnography of hip-hop between Cuba and Puerto Rico.(2011-02-28) Riviere, MelisaFrom New York to Rio, from Nairobi to Tokyo, hip-hop, more than any other musical genre or youth culture, has permeated nations, cultures and languages worldwide. Hip-hop emerged from race and class rebellions during the New York City fiscal crises of the 1970's. It flourished under grim conditions as a vibrant expression of youthful exuberance used to overcome repression, marginality, discrimination and hardship. I concentrated my research on the globalization of hip-hop in Cuba and Puerto Rico because each island showcases a unique and thriving rap scene yet holds contrasting cultural and economic contexts. Although Cuba and Puerto Rico share common colonial histories, today they hold polarized relationships with the United States, the birthplace of hip-hop. In the case of Cuba the U.S. embargo is older than hip-hop, offering a case of complete exclusion from direct influences. In contrast, Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and thereby intimately linked to American art movements, youth genres, production resources, and market interests. This dissertation argues that youth utilize hip-hop to express their individual local struggles to unite with each other between Cuba and Puerto Rico as "world citizens" in order to belong to a global majority when they are considered local minorities. Through multimedia production, local artists globalize their repertoires despite geographic, economic or political restrictions. The innovative fieldwork methodology herein termed Ethnographic Production proposes the use of audiovisual media to create a contemporary technological "place" in which youth transcend boundaries to create virtual dialogues through their repertoires in order to overcome isolation between each other. This methodology proposes that the key site for anthropological inquiry is not necessarily to be "discovered" or "located," as traditional disciplinary expectations may assume, rather it can also be "created." As a result, the dissertation demonstrates how the experiences rappers articulated within the media modified their everyday behavior and insinuated a sense of responsibility to each other. This approach differs from traditional uses of media in anthropology used as a form of documentation or dissemination of fieldwork data. The dissertation assesses how musical repertoires transcend localized contexts between the islands and how access to audiovisual recording and reproductive technology has given youth the tools to (re)produce hip-hop. The research data, consisting of collaborative songs between rappers from each location, reveals that it is through value systems and common civil rights struggles, more so than strictly the four elements of hip-hop (rap, break dance, turntablism and visual art), that youth relate to one another and their global audiences.Item Teach the kids to code switch... which is a very easy thing to say: Heterosystemic pedagogies for racial justice within a field of (im)possibilities(2018-12) Puechner, ShannonThis study employs ethnographic field methods to investigate the ways Eric, a ninth-grade English language arts teacher committed to racial justice, enacted literacy education in his classroom. With a background in critical literacy, I entered the field with preconceived notions of what a justice-oriented classroom would look like. So, I was surprised to observe a teacher-centric, basic-skills-focused classroom that offered few opportunities for student voice. By observing staff development and committee meetings, learning that Eric’s school, Wayside Junior High, also expressed commitments to racial justice, but engaged in behavior management practices (PBIS) that are generally understood be in tension with racial justice. The purpose of this study is to better understand how Eric and the Staff at Wayside came to take up these apparently contradictory practices. To achieve this purpose, I developed a Foucauldian interpretation of Activity Systems Analysis (FASA), which combines elements of Engestrom’s Activity Systems Analysis (objects, rules, tools, subjectivities, and contradictions/tensions), with several Foucauldian concepts (problematization, freedom, and the field of possibilities). The resulting analytical framework can be expressed in the question: How do subjects construct and enact agency within the field of possibilities produced by the problems, rules, tools, and subjectivities in their environment? An analysis of the data had several implications. Justice-oriented teacher educators 1) must engage with the real and practical problem of organizing a group of individuals for a collective learning activity, what many call “behavior management” and 2) must avoid conveying an ethic of moral purity, and instead encourage teachers to cultivate practices of hybridity—to inventory the multiplicity of problems, objects, rules, and tools in their environment and creatively assemble new justice-oriented learning activities that we, as researchers and teacher educators, could not have imagined. Furthermore, justice-oriented teacher educators in the field of literacy and English language arts 1) must devote more resources and more credit hours to preparing educators to teach the craft of writing, and 2) must identify, teach, and conduct research on strategies for teaching so called “basic skills” through a critical and justice-oriented lens in order to provide minoritized students with codes of power (Delpit, 1988).Item Transformational Festivals and the Enchantment Economy: Performance and Race in Neoliberal Times(2019-06) Schmidt, BryanThis dissertation examines the phenomenal global growth of music festival culture over the last two decades, with particular emphasis on “Transformational Festivals,” a genre of participatory, for-profit event influenced by New Age ideology and aesthetics. I use ethnographic examination of these festivals in the United States and Costa Rica as a basis for understanding the role that participatory culture and event economies play in territorialization and racialization. I historicize this analysis as a component of liberal and neoliberal culture by examining the lineage of repertoires and event structures in US temporary outdoor communities, which utilized the natural landscape as a basis for creating a White-dominated participatory culture. These communities were crucial to furthering a settler colonial project by creating deeply affective forms of social connectivity among White liberals, while also iteratively and imaginatively overwriting the landscape’s history of conquest so as to render native claims to colonized land pliable and, ultimately, dismissible. Turning to the aesthetics of contemporary festival culture, I trouble the scholarly tendency to examine the festival event as a social interstice that exists “outside” of quotidian time and space. I build a concept of “enchanting performance” that allows the production of event space, and the performance of idiosyncratic festival repertoires to appear as activities self-consciously connected to political and social commitments. This offers an alternative to structural interpretations of festivals as “counter-spaces,” allowing us to consider the complicated role such events play in ongoing movements for social change—especially those that pertain to race. I then outline how festival aesthetics tie in to a wider “enchantment economy” that operates at local and transnational levels. With an examination of the Harmony Park Music Garden in Minnesota, I articulate how struggles over symbolic and material control of the festival space create a fraught politics of Whiteness that manifest through claims of autochtony vis-à-vis the festival grounds. I then examine Envision Festival in Costa Rica to discuss the phenomenon of “Destination Festivals,” with attentiveness to transnational symbolic and material exchange. I outline how Envision utilizes an erotics of the Other to capitalize on the libidinal economy that attends festivalgoing in order to generate identity capital for White tourists. I also discuss the economic and social consequences of this culture mining, which offer up heritage as an object of mass consumption in the service of White identity formation.Item Underrepresented: The Experiences of Black People Who Pursued Careers in Minnesota Law Enforcement(2018-12) Woodson, WilliamWhile African Americans are overrepresented in Minnesota police shootings and officer-involved fatalities, they are underrepresented in Minnesota law enforcement. The reasons are complex, interconnected, grounded in historical racial barriers and racist practices, and reinforced by current obstacles such as career awareness, concerns about the legitimacy of the law-enforcement function, and academic credentialing. Scholarly literature and law-enforcement leadership agree that a comprehensive effort to bolster public confidence and police legitimacy must include an increase in racial and ethnic diversity in order to better match the populations being served. ROTC and STEM are two examples of partnerships and proactive collaborations between higher education and future employers in response to the society’s continuing need for well-qualified, appropriately prepared talent. This investigation used an ethnographic case study framework to explore the lived experiences of 13 people of color who pursued careers as Minnesota police officers. A review of the literature surfaced seven salient career choice factors, role models and mentorship, social capital, perceptions, interests and skills, financial access, postsecondary credentials, and capacity for self-authorship. These served as a starting point for the development of a semistructured interview framework. A participatory research lens was used to sharpen the insights and enhance the legitimacy of these findings. This study identified specific barriers to black participation in representative numbers—most prominently a culture intolerant of difference. Of the seven career-choice elements, the capacity for self-authorship emerged as the most significant enabler of career access and success for black police officers. Initiatives to improve representation that offer the greatest promise include active promotion, by leadership, of the importance of a more diverse and inclusive work environment to rank-and-file officers; recruitment initiatives tailored to build career awareness among underrepresented identities; and investment in pathway programs like Law Enforcement Training Opportunities (LETO) and Law Enforcement Career Path Academy (LECPA), as well as paid developmental opportunities such as community service officer and cadet positions. These tactics will have the greatest impact if deployed in concert.