Browsing by Subject "ethnography"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    The Changing Face of Wall Space: Graffiti-murals in the context of neighborhood change in Los Angeles
    (2012-05) Bloch, Stefano
    In this historical geography of the changing appearance of wall space in and around the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, I show how the proliferation of graffiti-murals indicates the rise of a new form of practice in the production of urban aesthetics. I rely on data gathered through empirical and qualitative research—specifically, ethnographic methods that include archival image analysis, original photography, personal and participant observation, and extensive formal and open-ended interviews with members of the graffiti and mural communities. Throughout this dissertation I discuss the production and destruction of murals and graffiti-murals in the context of over 70 years of socio-spatial neighborhood change. I rely on the writings of geographers, sociologists, urban theorists, and art theorists who understand the production of alternative urban aesthetics as necessarily political, participatory, and place-based.
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    Critical Community Literacy: Looking With Local Resistance
    (2018-05) Puett, Sarah
    This dissertation considers the relationship between literacy and activism in the public sphere. In the fall of 2016 I participated with a local racial justice organization where I took part in a series of public meetings. Focused on alternative means of public safety, the meetings were planned in response to local state violence—multiple incidents of police shooting and killing Black community members—as well as the broader interlocking systems of oppression which fail to protect people of color. This study exhibits how one decentralized organization helps establish critical literacy in a segregated urban area, better known for its progressive politics than its proclivity for lethal state violence. These meetings warrant a more complex, critical frame than community literacy scholarship currently provides. Drawing on both literacy and rhetorical studies, my analysis reveals the ways in which literacy events represent a type of intervention, and in this case, serve to disrupt mythic timelines. During the events, I contend, local Black organizers occupy and transgress the role of a literacy sponsor by calling on their (kn)own experiences with racial oppression. My analysis nuances the relationship between literacy events and practices, and in turn, I offer a series of dialectics for participant-observation in community literacy studies. I hope to establish precedent for speaking more plainly about racism and whiteness in community literacy scholarship, and to challenge the dominant notion that community literacy projects are categorically just. Looking With Local Resistance signals that if we participate as activists in communities outside the academy, we must do so as reflexively and sustainably as we do critically.
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    I Am a Shaman: A Hmong Life Story with Ethnographic Commentary.
    (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1989) Conquergood, Dwight; Thao, Paja
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    Over-Medicated Boys and Girls Down the Well: The Politically Awkward ‘Imaginaries’ of Education Liaisons in the U.S. and Pakistan
    (2016-03) Miric, Suzanne
    This study explores the lived experiences of education liaisons in Minnesota and Pakistan in the context of cultural myths of modern educational progress, as envisioned in world society theory. Using a multi-sited ethnographic and narrative inquiry approach with 10 core participants over a discontinuous, more than five-year time period, it finds that an important aspect of education liaisons’ work is re-interpreting and re-working dominate social imaginaries of the meaning of mass education, such as those involving urban Black communities in the U.S. and rural, Pashto-speaking communities in Pakistan. This study both supported and challenged aspects of world society theory, resulting in four core analytical themes emerging from the work of liaisons: The social construction of marginality and its imaginations as an institutionalized expertise; the importance of ‘awkward’ political social imaginaries in relation to educational myth-making as everyday liaison work; understanding institutionalized manifestations of power and silence as enduring practices of bewitchment, and the tensions of engaging with particular legacies of racial and gender oppression, while constructing imaginative possibilities and social identities in institutional contexts. This study contains practical recommendations for educational policy and practice.
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    Theorizing Karen Women’S Experiences Of ‘Power’ To Engage
In Self-Help In Resettlement
    (2018-04) Horn, Tonya
    This study describes the experiences of 10 first-generation Karen women to resettle to St. Paul, Minnesota. Since 2005, Karen people from Burma have been one of the largest refugee groups being resettled to Western resettlement countries. Existing literature suggests that refugee-background communities may have a wealth of knowledge and experiences in developing and adapting self-help structures and processes, and that they play a critical role in their own resettlement. However, little attention has been paid to how, why, and for what purpose new communities are able to (re‑)form historical self-help structures in resettlement or the supports or barriers that impact a community’s ability to utilize these structures to promote self-help. The purpose of this study was to examine Karen women’s experiences of power to engage in self-help in resettlement. Semistructured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 10 Karen women who had experience with Karen women’s organizations in Burma, Thailand and/or the United States. Interviews were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory methodology. Guided by principles of qualitative research, grounded theory, and ethnographic methods, what emerged was a preliminary theory of “power,” defined by participants as agency and capacity to help each other in resettlement, and factors that impacted their power to engage in self-help. Four categories emerged that explained women’s experiences of power to help each other in resettlement: (re‑)establishing a self-help structure; personal and premigration relationships or Knowing Each Other; having resources, which included knowledge, time, transportation, and financial resources; and having authority. Findings add knowledge that is situated in cultural context in relation to the experiences of Karen women. This dissertation study addresses several critical gaps in existing literature by revealing the processes through which a first-generation Karen community (re‑)established historical structures of self-help to meet the needs of their community in resettlement, the conditions that affected their agency and capacity to help one another, and by capturing the perspectives and experiences of Karen women. Findings can be used to inform development of interventions and resettlement policies that recognize and support the strengths, strategies, and resources that new refugee-background communities bring with them to resettlement settings.
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    What War Does to a Survivor’s Sense of Time: The Spatiotemporal Self After Violence in Tajikistan
    (2020-08) Lynch, Damon
    War is so forceful it often seems recent to its survivors regardless of when it occurred. The violent past is alive and lies in front. To understand why I develop a new paradigm called the spatiotemporal self. Although my research is about time and war, my intention is that this paradigm will be of general interest to the social sciences. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily in the Badakhshan region of Tajikistan, this interdisciplinary research examines experiences of a civil war that occurred 20 years before and a one-day battle that occurred during the fieldwork. The spatiotemporal self is a theoretically novel alliance of time and self, brought together by visual perspectives intrinsic to both. Time is conceived of using spatial construals of time — temporal span (T-span), sequence time (S-time), and most importantly, the internal and external variants of deictic time (D-time). The self is conceived of as having four levels that emerged in evolution, from oldest to newest: the protoself, core self, minimal self, and narrative self. The first three levels combine to use a pre-reflective mode of self-consciousness that emphasizes a phenomenological, experiential processing of events; these three levels use a first-person visual perspective of the self. The narrative self level uses a reflective mode of self-consciousness that emphasizes the conceptual meaning of events in the context of broader life and society; this level uses a third-person visual perspective of the self. Because the spatiotemporal self is an alliance of cognitive processes, at the cognitive level it is a human universal. Ethnographic respondents were asked which visual perspective of the self they used to recall events important to them from the violent past. A first-person visual perspective of the self predominated in which respondents focused primarily on their experience of an event’s concrete details, with a tight focus on the time of the event. Internal D-time was indicated by the past being alive and in front. Respondents were also asked to switch visual perspectives to use the third-person visual perspective, so they could see themselves in the same event from an external perspective using their mind’s eye. Respondents then discussed the event using external D-time and S-time, focusing on the event’s conceptual meaning for self and society. Respondents’ phenomenological accounts of the past exhibited a complex, multilayered temporal structure. On the one hand, respondents layered time in them conceptually, differentiating past from present. On the other hand, they flattened time in them phenomenologically, almost erasing distinctions between past and present. Both ways of knowing the phenomenological past were equally practical to the respondent, despite appearing analytically incongruous. Moreover, attributions of what happened to respondents in their phenomenological accounts were made under the rubric of the minimal self, despite being articulated by the narrative self. Finally, some phenomenological accounts of the past were symbolic, embedding a generative, conceptual message. A tentative finding is that the presence of temporal layers and generative elements in phenomenological accounts suggests that internal thought might contain generative constructs independent of linguistic expression.