Thesis Archive

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2019-2020

Abstracts

Riskland: Uncertainty and Disaster in Pucayacu, Ecuador
Aubrey Calaway
This thesis explores the ways in which uncertainty is produced and navigated in the times in-between cyclical natural disaster. In the rural, subtropical town of Pucayacu, a seemingly idyllic status quo is recurrently disrupted by seasonal threats from the Quindigua River and the cyclical inundations of El Niño. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over three months of fieldwork, I examine how events like floods and landslides are embedded within this community’s quotidian regularities- both political and climatic. This cyclical framework allows for further investigation of the temporal and infrastructural mechanisms through which uncertainty is reproduced for marginalized populations. I draw on the narratives of a wide range of local residents in order to understand how river walls, hillsides, and bridges- as well as the means of infrastructure required to build and maintain them- intersect with care by the state. By paying careful attention to the affective aspects of risk mitigation, I then analyze the emotion-risk assemblage of tranquilidad (tranquility) constructed by Pucayacans as they navigate various precarious edges. I employ an analytical approach that seeks to complicate dominant narratives of damage, instead looking at the potential for desire-based anthropological study of other disaster-impacted “risklands.”

Cultural Political Threads
Ntxheb (Xe) Chang
Cultural Political Threads considers how the production and consumption of contemporary Hmong textiles and costumes entangles with ethnic identity. Through a series of government reforms in the 1980s, ethnic minority culture in China became heavily commercialized and traditional hand-made textiles were quickly overtaken by machine production. In this backdrop of China's economic reforms and technological changes, Hmong ethnic costume styles blended, creating new styles that transcend locality while preserving old motifs. While the language of these motifs is no longer legible to costume designers, they continue to play an important role in creating a sense of ethnic identity and solidarity. Through interviews with Hmong Chinese costume designers and college students, Cultural Political Threads discusses how costumes reflect the fluidity of cultural identity and the growing sense of pan-ethnicity among younger Hmong Chinese.

Queer Histories of the Khmer Rouge Regime: Surviving Sex/Gender and Genocide
Tabitha Payne
A quarter of Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal state, Democratic Kampuchea (DK, 1975 – 1979). Despite DK’s brutality, queer Cambodians found love and friendship, making the most of the absurd spaces the regime inadvertently opened for queer relationality, like the dormitories, rice fields, and work units. This thesis draws from queer survivors’ oral histories, collected during my ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia with the grassroots group, CamASEAN Youth’s Future. I focus on the stories of three transmasculine friends and testimony of Sou Sotheavy, a transgender woman, at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. I embed their narratives into the long arc of Cambodian history to affirm how they experience DK not as an isolated period of anti-queer violence but rather as an exacerbation of ongoing oppression. I argue that DK enacted trans- and homophobic violence via its system of binaried gender, heteronormative forced marriages, and anti-queer rape culture. But DK’s discipline was uneven. Some queer people met state ambivalence; once, authorities overlooked a transgender man’s relationship. Addressing a yawning gap in Cambodia scholarship, this thesis uniquely presents a pre-1980s queer Cambodia, writing of in-community languages, transmasculine and lesbian polyamory under DK, and pre-DK Khmer terms for queer subjects.

Imaginary Rivers: An Environmental History of the Amu River, 1920-1970
Frishta Qaderi
As the boundary between the USSR and Afghanistan, the Amu River straddled two competing modernization visions championed by the political entities it demarcated: communism and capitalism. These trajectories of modernity and progress, however, were not only articulated through slogans, posters, and speeches, but also expressed through environmental narratives espoused by distant metropoles. Drawing from archival research at the British Library and the Library of Congress, this thesis explores how promises of modernity were articulated through Kabul and Moscow’s respective rhetorical productions of the Amu River over 1920-1970. Both Kabul and Moscow attached imaginary histories and geographies to the Amu River, refashioning the river to serve individual goals. I argue that environmental imaginaries were imbued with ideas on how the Amu should be valued, distributed, and re-arranged, ideas that shaped perceptions of nature and influenced development interventions and public policy. In the 1950s, western and Soviet visions met and mixed in northeastern Afghanistan on a cotton farm along the banks of the Amu River. There, I ultimately argue, the contours of Soviet and western visions of modernity blurred, their similarities in nature management overshadowing ideological differences.

Globalization and Indigeneity: The Socio-economic Impact of the Moroccan Argan Oil Market on Amazigh Communities
Reda Semlaniz
This paper examines the socioeconomic impacts of the Argan market on indigenous North African (Amazigh) communities in the Southwest of Morocco. Specifically, the paper focuses on the impact of the Argan market in three areas: quality of life, the relationship between the Amazigh and the Argan plant, and women’s empowerment. Through performing a difference-in differences analysis using Morocco’s Census data between 1982 and 2004, the research shows that, after the Argan market boom, Argan-producing provinces have witnessed higher levels of literacy and access to sanitation and basic facilities than non-Argan-producing provinces. Nevertheless, using interviews collected during fieldwork in Agadir and Taroudant, the paper argues that although the Argan market has created new economic opportunities for Amazigh women, it did not increase their agency and did not emancipate them from their traditional societal roles. Additionally, the paper also asserts that the increased value of the Argan oil forced a process of dispossession upon the Amazigh, which was exacerbated by the emergence of “fraudulent” cooperative that do not pay the Argan workers fairly. The research contributes to the academic debate on the effect of globalization on indigenous communities in developing countries.

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2018-2019

Thesis Conference

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Abstracts

Zero Capacity: Bordering the U.S. Asylum System in a Trump Era
Brian Elizalde
Advisors: Matt Gutmann (Anthropology), Almita Miranda (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs)
Central America is marked by legacies of armed conflict and regime change facilitated by political, economic, and military intervention from the United States. Post-Cold War fear of popular uprise and corporate lobbying led the U.S. to support right-wing authoritarian regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador through military training and technologies throughout the 20th century. The resulting widespread violence, corrupt institutions, and social inequality is exacerbated by U.S.-driven neoliberal reform and military intervention from its War on Drugs. Despite its ongoing involvement, U.S. immigration courts have continually denied asylee status to Central American refugees. This ethnographic research project examines the experience of the contemporary wave of Central American refugees in the El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua border region during the Trump administration. It evaluates the transformation of refugee testimonies upon arrival and throughout their journey in the U.S. asylum system. I argue that Central American refugees are subject to transborder violence before and since their arrival to the U.S.-Mexico border. Enacted by individuals, ideologies, and institutions, transborder violence displaces refugees from their homelands, deters their entry into U.S. territory, and dismisses their legal claims to asylum status.

Waithood and Social Transitions in Contemporary Rwanda
Bonheur Karigirwa
Advisors: Nitsan Chorev (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Sociology), Stephen Kinzer ( Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs)
My thesis studies and documents ways through which youth in contemporary Rwanda experience waithood, which is a prolonged period of suspension and uncertainty as youth await to become social adults. Given Rwanda’s youthful population, the inability to make the expected social transitions makes a significant alteration on social structures. I specifically look at how unemployed college graduates navigate terrains informed by four elements: the history, formal education, philosophy of resilience and the informal economy as they actively look for ways to get out of that limbo where they are no longer children in need of parental care nor independent adults, at least according to the socio-economic standards and expectations of Rwandan society. I argue that the inability to attain conventional markers of adulthood, such as being employed or owning a house, is no longer as stigmatized as it used to be. Semi-structured interviews conducted with college graduates across Rwanda suggest that a wave of generational sympathy and changing social structures are allowing Rwandan youth to redefine for themselves what the end goal of a social transition should look like. This challenges both the Rwandan government and society to rethink the role and place of youth hold as this inevitable change continues.

A Multitude of Responsibilities: Non-Governmental Practice in Delhi Slums
Casey Lingelbach
Advisors: Sarah Besky (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Anthropology), Alexander Nading (Political Science)
This thesis examines the work of a specific NGO based in Delhi, India, which undertakes comprehensive water and sanitation projects in slums. Responsibility is used as an operative concept to understand how the NGO navigates the relationships it forms with the community, donors, and the government. To what extent does the government maintain responsibility in the eyes of the community even when it ceases to be the primary or sole entity providing services? How do NGOs grapple with their responsibilities to donors and manufacture an appearance of compliance? In what ways can the responsibility of the government be reified through negotiations with NGOs, and how does playing a negotiating role in turn shape the relationship between the NGO and the community? What does it mean to transfer responsibility to empower a community? By drawing on primary ethnographic fieldwork and an array of literature including Nikhil Anand’s leakages, Nancy Rose Hunt’s middle figures, and concepts of development discourse, patronage, and empowerment, I aim to attend to the ways in which NGOs mediate these varied tenuous yet critical relationships. By highlighting conflicting notions of responsibility, we can better see the limits and potentialities of work performed by NGOs.

Independence in the Interim: Development in the Exile Tibetan Community
Rachel McMahon
Advisors: Sarah Besky (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Anthropology), Dan Smith (Anthropology)
My thesis examines the formulations and implications of development strategies in the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India. Often referred to as a “successful” refugee community, the Tibetan exile community has managed to develop a coherent government, a strong education system, relative financial security, and a network of Tibetan-run businesses and service organizations in exile. However, despite these material successes and after sixty years in exile, the Tibetan community is no closer to attaining the ultimate goal of securing and returning to a free Tibet. I argue that cultivating and discussing independence is a strategy for navigating the interim situation of exile, the impermanent state between departure from and return to the Tibetan homeland. The centrality of independence as an object of discourse and as an aspiration in the Tibetan exile community is a product of the Dalai Lama’s teachings, Buddhist philosophy, Western liberalism, the influence of development theories of freedom and self-reliance and the Indian and Western actors whose aid is contingent upon Tibetan alignment with those theories. My research treats democracy, development, education, and individual and community aspirations as flash points that reveal the friction between the reality of dependence and the desire for independence. Ultimately, in the exile space of lived impermanence, Tibetans pursue a what I term ‘independence in the interim’ as a means of cultivating an individual and communal Tibetan identity through preserving their past, surviving the present, and planning for their future return to a free Tibet. What emerges from this strategy is a web of interdependence where dependence on the Dalai Lama, the Indian host state, and Western sympathy overlaps with Tibetan desires for independence in complementary and contradictory ways.

A Critical Reconstruction of Indigeneity: from the Western Hemisphere towards Trans-Indigenous Futures
Ruth Miller
Advisors: Theresa Warburton (American Studies), Sandra Haley (History)
Indigeneity was introduced to this continent long after Indigenous cultures first began to grow. As colonial powers began seizing land, capital, and domination over knowledge, the “Indigenous” identity was constructed, superimposed across an amalgamation of thousands of different nations and Tribes. This category was first introduced as a process of racialization, creating white supremacy in this State. However, it is more so now a political identity, a complicated discursive landscape used to uphold the hegemony of modern multicultural neoliberal states and limit the potential for Indigenous sovereignty. By investigating the roots and mobilizations of this term by diverse Indigenous peoples, I reveal how these groups are redefining what it means to be Indigenous through their movements for justice and liberation. In a Western hemispheric approach, the three regional communities of Alaska Natives, Wampanoag and Narragansett of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and Mapuche of Southern Chile enter in conversation with one another. This reveals both similar and diverse techniques of subversion and victories of sovereignty by these groups, and opens the potential for transnational collaboration. Through this work, we see great opportunity for network building and collective emergence as Indigenous groups across the world discursively and psychically reclaim their lands, cultures, and identities.

Uncertain Futures: Experiences of African Asylum Seekers in Israel and the Global Failure to Protect
Jessica Murphy
Advisors: Vazira Zamindar (History), Alex Winder (Middle East Studies)
This thesis uses the experiences of African asylum seekers in Israel to reveal weaknesses in international systems of refugee protection. I draw upon ethnographic data gathered at the African Refugee Development Center in Tel Aviv to study the impacts of racialized exclusionary policies and discuss attempts at support and solidarity. Israel has a unique and complicated history of displacement: it has been both a haven for Jewish refugees and a site of forced displacement of Palestinians. The case of asylum seekers from African countries demonstrates a global unwillingness to protect vulnerable populations through the lens of Israel’s particularities. Nonprofit organizations provide services and support to asylum seekers in the absence of government aid, and collective memory of the Holocaust lends to solidarity with survivors of genocide from Darfur. However, these expressions of solidarity and support are limited by racism and xenophobia in both public opinion and political rhetoric. This study emphasizes the liminal space that asylum seekers occupy, and it explores the perpetual “in-between” state in which they are held. It indicates the need for stronger systems of international refugee protection that transcend domestic limitations.

The Rise of the Hanfu Movement: Identity Construction, Fashion, and Ethnic Relations in Contemporary China’s Online Discourse
Katrina Northrop
Advisors: Edward Steinfeld (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Political Science), Elena Shih (American Studies)
This thesis is a study of the Hanfu movement, which has gained popularity over the past two decades in China and involves participants dressing in traditional clothing. “Hanfu” translates as “clothing of the Han people,” referring to the ethnic group that makes up more than ninety percent of the Chinese population. How should we characterize the Hanfu movement? To understand the ideological diversity in the movement, I conducted a qualitative analysis of discourse on online Hanfu forums, which provide an essential space for Hanfu enthusiasts to communicate. I argue that there are three categories of discourse: The first category is apolitical, as it helps participants to forge connections through fashion and aesthetics; the second category develops a national identity through clothing; and the third category characterizes Chinese national identity in a exclusionary manner through nationalist and ethnonationalist rhetoric. Though this discourse seems irreconcilable, all three categories represent a method for Hanfu enthusiasts to form personal identities through traditional clothing. My thesis concludes with a discussion about a New York Times article about Hanfu that I wrote with Chris Buckley, which prompted negative responses in the Hanfu community. The enthusiasts’ belief that we mischaracterized their community reveals the assumptions that I brought to my reporting, and unveils the preconceptions that can influence cross-cultural observations of societal phenomena like the Hanfu movement.

Girl Activists in the United Nations? An Analysis of Strategies for Girls’ Participation in International Policy Making
Mira Reichman
Advisors: Catherine Lutz (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Anthropology), Susan Short (Sociology)
How can girls be meaningfully involved in law and policy making at the United Nations? Girls’ rights advocates argue that girls must be directly involved in law and policy making at the international level in order for international law and policy to reflect the daily realities of girls’ lives and the intersecting age-based and gender-based discrimination that girls face. Yet girls’ participation at the international level is a concept that is fraught with fundamental ethical and practical challenges. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the fundamental challenges that are associated with meaningful girls’ participation in international policy making in order to envision new approaches to meaningful girls’ participation. Can girls’ voices that bring novel perspectives, are critical, and are maybe a little rebellious be heard and valued within the formal, institutional space of the UN? This thesis brings a new perspective to this question by drawing on literature about girls’ activism outside of formal spaces to envision new approaches to meaningful girls’ participation within the UN. How can girls’ activism and intergenerational feminist activism outside of the UN inform a vision of critical, girl-led participation at the UN?

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2017-2018

Thesis Conference Program

Thesis Conference Video [Thursday]  [Friday]

Breastfeeding Trends Across Socioeconomic Status in Mexico and Implications for Current Promotion Efforts
Hardenbergh, Leah
Advisors: Professor Margot Jackson, Sociololgy, and Dra. Diana Bueno-Gutierrez, School of Medicine at La Universidad Autónoma de Baja California

I examine the evolution of the relationship between breastfeeding rates and socioeconomic status (SES) in Mexico over the last 50 years. Based on Mexico’s compatibility with a model that predicts future trends, it is expected that rates will continue to fall among women of low SES and are beginning to rise in women of high SES. I explore how women of different SES experience current promotion efforts, and find that current promotion efforts disproportionately benefit women of higher SES. I argue that for promotion efforts to be more impactful, they should work to include lower SES women, as rates will continue to decline in these communities without intervention.      
Key words: Breastfeeding, Mexico

Becoming Bilingual: Power, Politics, and the Failed Promise of Bilingualism in Postcolonial Cameroon
Hertling, Liliana
Advisors: Jennifer Johnson, History, and Rachel Kantrowitz, Education

Since independence, leading Cameroonian scholars and politicians have called for widespread bilingualism to foster greater unity between the French-speaking majority and the aggrieved Anglophone minority. In 2009, Cameroon’s Ministry of Secondary Education (MINESEC) launched a pilot bilingual curriculum in 40 secondary schools across the country, open to high-achieving students. Using a case study of the program at the Lycée Bilingue d’Etoug-Ebe in the capital city of Yaoundé, based on interviews with students, teachers, and parents, this thesis concludes that framing language competency as a way of remedying social tensions alone has  limited potential. While the program demonstrates a promising shift away from reliance on European knowledge and systems, to have an impact on Anglophone-Francophone relations, such an educational program must be accompanied by changes in institutions that give more weight to the minority cohort. While this study is unique to Cameroon, it has broader implications for the potential of educational intervention to tackle social and political issues in a postcolonial setting.
Key words: Colonialism, Language ideology, Bilingualism, Education, Cameroon.

A Right to Remember: Reconciling the Armenian Genocide through Visual Art
Ilgin Korugan
Advisors: Melten Toksoz, History, and Hanan Toukan, Middle East Studies

The Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the then Ottoman Empire took more than one million lives. During World War I, amidst the rise of nationalist politics around Europe, the Ottoman CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) government took violent measures to eradicate any Armenian presence in the region, which they saw as a threat. Despite its massive consequences, this massacre is still denied by the Turkish government, blocking the way of any potential reconciliation in Turkey, and, as I argue, sustainable development. Recent works of Armenian visual artists that were exhibited in Istanbul place visual art in relation to reconciliation and thus unravel another use of art that both creates connections between communities and provides healing for survivors. As such, art exhibited in Istanbul can speak for the right to remember in the place of the genocide, therefore contributing to the justice process necessary for the development of Turkey.
Key words: Armenian Genocide, Turkey, Transitional justice, Reconciliation, Visual art, Memory

The "Savior" State: Uncovering the Violence of U.S. Humanitarian Immigration Law
Erin West
Advisors: Amy Howe, Religious Studies, and Elena Shih, American Studies             

The United States' immigration system categorizes a significant portion of its programs as humanitarian efforts. Purporting to offer refuge from violence, USCIS grants legal protection to political refugees, battered women, victims of trafficking, and other non-citizens in precarious situations. My thesis unearths the inherent contradiction between USCIS’ declared humanitarian aims and the systemic violence it perpetuates as a system built on regulation and exclusion. Humanitarian immigration law crafts rigid stratification as to who is worthy of entry to the United States. This system shuts out thousands of migrants seeking shelter from violences not recognized by the state: economic exclusion, displacement through settler colonialism, and other global systems of violence in which the United States government plays a central role. Through a discursive analysis of six humanitarian immigration applications (asylum, VAWA petitions, and T-visas) filed in Providence, RI, my thesis investigates how immigrants to the U.S. are compelled to script their experiences within stratified categories of worthiness--a stratification that is violent in who it excludes. My work is especially concerned with how worthiness relates to constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Ultimately, my work aims to demonstrate how an immigration system enacts violence upon those very people it purports to protect.
Key words: Violence, Immigration, Law, Visas, US government

Innovating Access to Reproductive Health Care: Care Groups, Information & Communication Technology, and Community Health Actors in Southern Senegal
Witkin, Zachary
Advisors: Daniel Smith, Anthropology, and Jennifer Johnson, History

This thesis examines the ways in which a project implemented by Africare called Collaborative Community Based Technology To Improve Maternal and Child Health in Senegal (CCHT) affects access to reproductive health services. Using a theoretical framework engaging scholarship on community participation, social network theory and social determinants of health, I interrogate how the implementation of maternal health support groups (Care Groups) and an informational and community technology platform (CommCare) affect relationships between communities, community health actors and professional health workers as they provide and seek out reproductive health care. I examine the role of Care Groups as structures of social and economic solidarity and support that enable women to seek out preventative reproductive health services, while subverting traditional patriarchal household structures. I also look at the effect that CommCare has on the ways in which community health actors provide care to the communities they service. 
Key words: Reproductive health care, Care groups, Community health, Senegal  

2016-2017
Dill, Sarah-Eve	Migrant Social Networks and Strategies for Assimilation in China's New Urbanization
Ellmann, Nora	Socorristas and Jane: Underground Feminist Abortion Care in Argentina and Pre-Roe Chicago
Garza, Cecilia	Where the Transnational and the Local Meet: Contextualizing Women’s Empowerment in the Moroccan Rif
Ladics, Julia	Comparing the Effects of World Bank and Chinese Investment on Development: The Case of Nigeria
Luksic James, Isabella	Cultural Structures and Practices of Social Transformation: The Ecosystem of Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship in Chile
McClung, Jamie	A Sprinkling of Emeralds in a Turquoise Sea: How Eleuthera and the Commonwealth of the Bahamas Illustrate the Difficulty of Multi-Island Nations
Nhlengethwa, Tezzy	A Millennium Development Goal lost in translation: the difficulties of implementing Free Primary Education in Swaziland
Pandiloski, Pepi	Do New Factories Affect Incumbents’ Electoral Outcomes? Evidence from Foreign Direct Investments in the Republic of Macedonia
Sharma, Pranav	Mental Health Care and the State
Zhu, Andrea	Ruthless Fantasies: Infrastructural Development and Gendered Immobility and the China-Myanmar Border

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2015-2016

Biren, Charlotte	Exploring Otavaleño Kichwa: Multimedia Projects of Cultural Reimagination in the Neoliberal Era
Brooks, Rheem	Poetic In-Justice: Carceral Geographies and the Myths of Criminality in Rhode Island and California
Durand, Laura	Dishing it out with Dignity: An Ethnographic Study of Restaurant Work & Worker Organizing in Rhode Island
Holmes, Anisa	Elections in Haiti: Aid, Intervention and the Developmental State
Malkki, Kari	If Money Grows on Trees: Exploring Perspectives on Conservation and Development in Brazil's Mata Atlantica
Schein, Yvette	Healthcare Experiences of East African Refugees in Rhode Island: Barriers, Successes, and Ongoing  Challenges
Tadesse, Merone	First and Still Alone: Depoliticization, Misrecognition and FirstGeneration College Student Discourse Within the Ivy League

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2014-2015