Browsing by Subject "Ethnography"
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Item Ancestors of the race : the antimodern ethnography of Henry Steel Olcott's People from the other world(2012-12) Sussman, Sarah Gail; Murphy, Gretchen, 1971-; Lesser, WayneIn this report, I will examine People from the Other World (1875), a text which documents the transition from American Spiritualism to international Theosophy. The narrative is based off of reports which lawyer-turned-mystic Henry Steel Olcott wrote concerning the validity of séances that were held by the famous mediums, the Eddy brothers, at their rural homestead in Chittenden, Vermont. These gatherings were unique because unlike early Spiritualist séances, which featured the ghosts of departed family members, the Eddy brothers most often contacted a more diverse group including Native American spirits, the ghost of a Khourdish warrior, and the ghost of an Egyptian juggler, among others. I attribute the variety of spirits at these séances to three intersecting tides of cultural influence: The first is the rise of ethnographic studies and the subsequent vogue of ethnographic subjects. Secondly, the Eddy group exhibited signs of antimodern ambivalence towards an age rich with new inventions which may have seemed, to the lay person, to be the work of magic. Finally, at the Eddy séances costumed play is used as a form of therapeutically reassuring ritual during this time of rapid change. While some critics in recent years have posited that such Theosophic meetings may have served as a sign of cross-cultural civic engagement, I will argue that it is far more likely that for the Eddy group, becoming possessed by foreign spirits served as a tool for self understanding which helped them to adapt to the encroachment of a seemingly haunted age.Item Bangladesh’s forest NGOscape : visions of Mandi indigeneity, competing eco-imaginaries, and faltering entrepreneurs in the climate of suspicion(2013-05) Dodson, Alex Ray; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-The assemblage of competing development programs I call an "NGOscape", effective in Bangladesh's forest spaces, is a window into understanding both local and extra-local imaginings of the future of these spaces. By tracing the close interaction of three of the most prominent forces in operation in Bangladesh's forest NGOscapes: indigeneity, environmentalism, and entrepreneurialism, I discuss how the government and NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) work to increase management and securitization of these forces. Through ethnography and close analysis of the minority Mandi community, and NGOs in the capital city of Dhaka and in rural Modhupur, Tangail, I interpret Modhupur as a vital and telling site for examining the close interdependence of these three themes. Adivasi ("aboriginal") folklorization and representation is deployed by Mandi leaders and NGOs, and provides a space for Mandi internal debates about authenticity, representation, modernity, and the way forward. Neoliberal imaginings centered on transforming Mandi livelihoods into something more appropriately modern are realized on the ground, evidenced by Alternative Income Generation (AIG) programs that push for market integration, and attempt to utilize claims about adivasi indigeneity to advance a security-management paradigm, national stability, and civic responsibility. Young activists and environmentalists based in Dhaka are crucial forces in promoting the broader development and NGO agenda, utilizing the themes of environmental responsibility and progressive conservation programs. Additionally, development agendas are complicated by other factors, such as eco-tourism trends that seek to indoctrinate the Mandi and other rural actors into acceptable and responsible ways of managing environment, while also relying on national pride. These competing forces rely on national pride and social shaming to transform rural Bangladeshis from being somehow "backward" into more desirable, modern subjects. Yet severe distrust within a larger "climate of suspicion," between adivasi leaders, activists, and the state ultimately disrupt the fluidity of development practices at the local level. The result places various actors in precarious positions, left to interpret and be interpreted into development, NGO, and state-based objectives.Item Choro Paulistano and the seven-string guitar : an ethnographic history(2006-05) Sotelino, Daniel Sherwood; Slawek, StephenThis is a study of choro in São Paulo, with a brief ethnography of seven-string guitarists. Studies of choro have routinely favored Rio de Janeiro, the birthplace of choro. This work focuses on São Paulo because it has a rich choro tradition, as well as an active and creative contemporary choro scene that has frequently been overshadowed by Rio de Janeiro's. There are three main parts to this study. The first part provides background information, including the major guitarists that have contributed to the development of the guitar's role in choro, and brief reviews of the most important literature on the subject of choro. The second part discusses São Paulo, my methodology, and the music scholars that have informed this study. The second part is the analytical base for the study, in which I examine the song, "Sampa" (1978), by Caetano Veloso, and interpret the uses, functions, and concepts of choro, drawing from Alan Merriam. Part II also includes a brief discussion of the resurgence of choro in the 1970s. This work proposes that choro has as its principal functions both musical and social education. The musical education choro provides is aural, notational, historical, and improvisational. The social education choro provides is one of an idealized mythological "racial democracy." The third and final part is a brief ethnography of the contemporary choro scene in São Paulo, with a focus on seven-string guitarists, and a descriptive account for the contextualization of choro.Item Con Alma : dialogues in decolonizing counseling--reciprocal ethnographic explorations in indigenous spaces for community healing(2014-08) Enciso Litschi, Alicia Elizabeth; Ainslie, Ricardo C.Postcolonial critiques have emphasized the need for Western psychology to become more reflective of the histories, worldviews, and lived realities of historically marginalized communities across the globe (Comas-Díaz, 2000; Duran & Duran, 1995; Pickren, 2009). These works have included the contributions of liberation psychologists who advocate for the need to privilege the knowledge systems, concerns, and perspectives of local communities when proposing avenues for psychological research, intervention, and theoretical development (Watkins & Shulman, 2008). Recognizing the legacies of colonialism in North America, U.S. psychologists working with Indigenous communities have advocated for better collaboration with grassroots elders, teachers, and community groups, noting the importance of recognizing the validity of Indigenous epistemologies and the colonizing tensions that still exist between Indigenous healing systems and Western psychology (Duran, Firehammer & Gonzalez, 2008; Gone, 2007; Gone & Alcántara, 2007). Against this backdrop, the present research was carried out as an immersive, long-term ethnographic study in collaboration with Alma de Mujer (Alma), a community of Indigenous-identified women in central Texas, who are committed to creating accessible spaces for their communities to practice Indigenous lifeways and healing. Employing reciprocal ethnographic methods, the author spent two years participating in events and gatherings with the Alma community, as well as conducting in-depth interviews. Community members were consulted on an ongoing basis about the development of the research. The document centers on four objectives: First, the author traces the history of the Alma community as it emerged from social liberation and psychospiritual healing movements over the latter half of the 20th century. Second, based on the women's stories, the author presents community members' narratives about how healing is situated within the community's Indigenous knowledge systems. Specific attention is given to the holistic and reciprocal nature of healing in these stories. Third, the author includes contributions from Indigenous healers who remark on their experiences of the tensions between Indigenous healing systems and Western mental health institutions. Fourth, the author concludes with a personal critical reflection as a trainee in Western psychology and considers how dialogues between local Indigenous communities and Western psychology might be further explored.Item Democracy and values in public schools: A case study of founding members of the Visioning Institute of Texas(2010-12) Hindman, Janet L.; Klinker, JoAnn F.; McMillan, Sally; Valle, FernandoLittle empirical evidence existed that measured how democracy and democratic values were instilled in American schools. The problem of this qualitative collective case study was to investigate in what ways the efficacy and praxis of the superintendents of independent public school districts as founding members of the Public Education Visioning Institute of Texas had been influenced by their participation, how their vision for public education for their school districts and for Texas had changed through creative and innovative leadership, and how educational leadership interacted as either more of a science or as an art. Through qualitative methodology, this critical, narrative, and interpretive case study design explored what values were promoted by the Public Education Visioning Institute of Texas and if/how the superintendents as school leaders were implementing these values within their schools. Data was gathered through the use of qualitative tools of data collection, analysis, and management that included a questionnaire, interviews, observations, field notes, archival data documents, and the pilot study. This case study attempts to move from the public to the private (Denzin, 2001) through narrative and interpretive story to discover if the participants in the Public Education Visioning Institute of Texas had experienced epiphanies in regard to democracy and democratic values. Study findings indicated a transcendent epiphany in unity of values, vision, and passion for change among the superintendents through their leadership and vision and a constancy of purpose to improve public schools not only for their own students, but also for all children, and uncovered resources that informed their leadership practice. Findings confirm the need for further development of the Visioning Institute as a moral imperative to sustain democracy and democratic schools. To know who we are and where we are going in public education, a requisite need arises to conduct additional research in educational leadership as both science and as art.Item Distances and proximities : Havana and San Juan from the point of view of literature and oral histories(2015-05) Mercado Diaz, Mario Edgardo; Salgado, César Augusto; Merabet, Sofian, 1972-Cuba y Puerto Rico have for long been considered sister islands, fighting together against the influences of the Spanish Empire and the United States. The decade of the 1950s, however, proved to be the splitting point for both islands, sending them into very different trajectories of development. In their shared experience of Spanish colonization and USA interventions, how do San Juan and Havana residents perceive and use space today in their particular socio-political contexts and how does this affect the resident's sense of citizenship? I closely engage with the different urban spaces using ethnographic data and photographs taken during my recent fieldwork, creative texts describing said spaces and case studies examining the formation of racial, gender and class identities. Focusing on a specific place on the Malecón, Havana's iconic esplanade, I examine how practices of leisure, intimacy (e.g. erotic homosexual and heterosexual encounters), and self-expression challenge the revolutionary rhetoric of "sameness" (i.e. absence of race, class, crime or gender violence). As for San Juan, I dissect the layers of significance in public visual representation, as exemplified in the artwork painted over an abandoned house in Santurce, the site for queer, artistic and marginal expression. The scene, two black women drinking on the porch, rescues a sense of citizenship lost to the class and racial polarization, fragmentation, and the "ruination" of San Juan. Finally, I argue that an archipelagic city, composed of the descriptions of specific places in different cities, has been created in the sea, a space of crossing, endurance and death, within these inter-capillary exchanges of people, cultures and habits. This archipelagic city, not spoken about directly but referenced semantically, aids in the construction of trans-national identities and perspectives, specific perceptions on time and space, and the production of media and cultural forms of expression. My goal is to tie together these narrative strands linking trans-oceanic places into an urban map surpassing its own geographical context.Item Finding your voice : a collaborative, dialogic ethnographic playmaking process offering middle school girls a space to consider the multifaceted views of leadership(2010-05) Fisher, Ruth Meryl; Alrutz, Megan; Dawson, Kathryn; Hashagen, AmandaThis thesis examines the transformative potential of applied theatre, specifically through a study of the playmaking process, and the embodiment and performance of stories, as a tool for middle school girls to articulate ideas about and personalize the notion of leadership. This study documents the theory and practitioners who informed my work in the creation and implementation of an applied theatre program piloted in the fall of 2009. Through a process of qualitative, reflective practitioner research, I examined the participants’ perceptions of, and relationship to, leadership throughout the project, while simultaneously analyzing my own changing perceptions of what it means to lead and facilitate an applied theatre process and performance. The resulting discussion offers a need for a balance between the process and the product in applied theatre, and most importantly the need for practitioners to continuously reexamine their intentions and practices throughout an applied theatre project.Item ¡Hasta la utopía siempre! : conflicting utopian ideologies in Havana’s late socialist housing market(2012-12) Genova, Jared Michael; Sletto, Bjørn; Kahn, TerryThrough the broader contextualization of ethnographic fieldwork in Havana’s newly reformed housing market, this study theorizes the Cuban late socialist condition through a lens of utopian ideological conflict. A popular narrative of free market utopia has emerged in the face of the state’s recalcitrant ideology of state socialism. The popular narrative is reproduced through growth in the informal economy, while the socialist utopian narrative is maintained by the ubiquity of its bureaucratic apparatus. Inspired by postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994), this thesis theorizes the Cuban state narrative as an ideological simulation, supported only through its strongest simulacrum – the government bureaucracy. Previous work on Cuba has cited the importance of access to government-purchased goods to fuel the informal economy and individual wealth accumulation. This study highlights the reproduction of a narrative of free market utopia in the desire for access to transactions as intermediaries, particularly as the deals increase in hard currency value. The passage of Decreto-Ley Number 288, which authorized the buying and selling of homes has served to rapidly capitalize the market and encourage further development of an informal network of brokers. Greater economic hybridization in the housing sector, among others, is gradually eroding the totalizing nature of the state’s socialist utopia.Item Identity, rhetoric and behavior: The contradictory communities of Wizard Rock(2010-12) Rohlman, Kelli M.; Smith, Christopher; Cimarusti, Thomas M.; Mariani, AngelaSince 2000, a new musical genre has emerged revolving around the Harry Potter book series by J.K. Rowling. This genre, called Wizard Rock, is comprised of more than 700 bands and thousands of listeners. These individuals make up the Wizard Rock community, a musical subculture founded on the ideals of unity, charity, and equality. However, like many musical communities, Wizard Rock participants struggle to behave according to their rhetoric. In this thesis, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Wizard Rock events around the United States, videography, audio analysis, field interviews, and other ethnographic data, I will argue that there is a noticable disparity between Wizard Rock community rhetoric and its behaviors, particularly focusing upon various constructions of Identity, Social Activism, and Gender and Sexuality.Item Intertextual journeys : Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius’ Argonautica on the Black Sea littoral(2014-05) Clark, Margaret Kathleen; Beck, DeborahThis paper addresses intertextual similarities of ethnographical and geographical details in Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and argues that these intertextualities establish a narrative timeline of Greek civilization on the Black Sea littoral. In both these works, a band of Greek travellers proceeds along the southern coast of the Black Sea, but in different directions and at vastly different narrative times. I argue that Apollonius’ text, written later than Xenophon’s, takes full advantage of these intertextualities in such a way as to retroject evidence about the landscape of the Black Sea littoral. This geographical and ethnographical information prefigures the arrival of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in the region. By manipulating the differences in narrative time and time of composition, Apollonius sets his Argonauts up as precursors to the Ten Thousand as travellers in the Black Sea and spreaders of Greek civilization there. In Xenophon’s text, the whole Black Sea littoral becomes a liminal space of transition between non-Greek and Greek. As the Ten Thousand travel westward and get closer and closer to home and Greek civilization, they encounter pockets of Greek culture throughout the Black Sea, nestled in between swaths of land inhabited by native tribes of varying and unpredictable levels of civilization. On the other hand, in the Argonautica, Apollonius sets the Argonautic voyage along the southern coast of the Black Sea coast as a direct, linear progression from Greek to non-Greek. As the Argonauts move eastward, the peoples and places they encounter become stranger and less recognizably civilized. This progression of strangeness and foreignness works to build suspense and anticipation of the Argonauts’ arrival at Aietes’ kingdom in Colchis. However, some places have already been visited before by another Greek traveller, Heracles, who appears in both the Argonautica and the Anabasis to mark the primordial progression of Greek civilization in the Black Sea region. The landscape and the peoples who inhabit it have changed in the intervening millennium of narrative time between first Heracles’, then the Argonauts’, and finally the Ten Thousand’s journey, and they show the impact of the visits of all three.Item “Just out of sight” : homeless (in)visibilities in Austin, Texas(2016-05) Tate, Margaret Emily; Carrington, Ben, 1972-; Browne, Simone; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Mueller, Elizabeth; Gordon, AveryThis dissertation is an ethnographic study of homelessness as a problem of (in)visibility. The concept of visibility is central to the construction of homelessness as a societal phenomenon, but in ways that are overly simplistic and reifying of stereotypes that perpetuate the marginalization of homeless people. The purpose of this study is to analyze the meanings of visibility in the discourse surrounding homelessness in Austin, Texas, and to understand what meanings the people in my study made of their own relationships to visibility. Understanding the complexity of visibility, that is at once empowering and disempowering and somewhere in between, is important for recognizing the complex conditions within which homeless people make lives and enter frames of representation. Discursive and visual constructions of “the homeless problem” shape both the popular understanding of homelessness as well as policy responses at both the local and national level. That the urban core and the entertainment district in downtown Austin is an area that business owners and public officials manage the visual appearance of, and that this has consequences for the city’s homeless, is not a surprising outcome. How people manage to find comfort (which requires taking up space in ways that are normally restricted), and friendship (which includes the congregation of two or more visibly homeless people), within the conditions of homeless are questions that present more interesting conclusions which inform the sociological study of homelessness, visibility, and friendship. My experience in this research project, revealed in the discussions throughout, brought about a critical perspective of a variety of initiatives that are meant to address homelessness. In particular, I am critical of the dominant framework suggesting that the best way to deal with “the homeless problem” is through the goal of ending homelessness. This foundation, that homelessness must be ended, appears at first to be the only moral perspective that makes sense. However, I clarify the unintended consequences of “ending homelessness” that further marginalize and stigmatize those who experience conditions of poverty and housing instability.Item Locating Albanian otherness via the black female body : an ethnographic inquiry of (non)belonging(2011-05) West, Chelsi Amelia; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-; Neuburger, MaryThis report is an ethnographic exploration of othering and belonging in Albania . In the past twenty years there has been a significant amount of scholarship addressing the construction of difference and collective identity in the Balkans. Much of that research has focused on processes of Orientalism, historical analyses ethnic conflict, and nationalism. The work presented here has been shaped by these discussions but is also an attempt to further deconstruct identity and nationalism vis-à-vis the ethnographic examination of belonging. Specifically, this paper addresses my positionality in the field and the ways that this positionality allows for a particular inquiry of belonging. In this report I address how my identification as a Black American female shapes my day-to-day interactions with Albanian informants, and how these encounters can be used to probe representations of what I term “Albanianess”. In doing so, I reveal the ways in which the ethnographic encounter allows for an interrogation of meaning, public intimacy, difference, and local attachments to identity.Item Masters not friends : land, labor and politics of place in rural Pakistan(2013-05) Rizvi, Mubbashir Abbas; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-This dissertation analyzes the cultural significance of land relations and caste/religious identity to understand political subjectivity in Punjab, Pakistan. The ethnography details the vicissitudes of a peasant land rights movement, Anjuman-e Mazarin Punjab (Punjab Tenants Association) that is struggling to retain land rights on vast agricultural farms controlled by the Pakistan army. The dissertation argues that land struggles should not only be understood in tropes of locality, but also as interconnected processes that attend to global and local changes in governance. To emphasize these connections, the dissertation gives a relational understanding of 'politics of place' that attends to a range of practices from the history of colonial infrastructure projects (the building of canals, roads and model villages) that transformed this agricultural frontier into the heart of British colonial administration. Similarly, the ethnographic chapters relate the history of 'place making' to the present day uncertainty for small tenant sharecroppers who defied the Pakistan Army's attempts to change land relations in the military farms. Within these parameters, this ethnographic study offers a "thick description" of Punjab Tenants Association to analyze the internal shifts in loyalties and alignments during the course of the protest movement by looking at how caste, religious and/or class relations gain or lose significance in the process. My research seeks to counter the predominant understanding of Muslim political subjectivity, which privileges religious beliefs over social practices and regional identity. Another aspect of my work elucidates the symbolic exchange between the infrastructural project of irrigation, railway construction and regional modernity in central Punjab. The network of canals, roads and railways transformed the semi-arid region of Indus Plains and created a unique relationship between the state and rural society in central Punjab. However, this close relationship between rural Punjab and state administration is not void of conflict but rather it indicates a complex sense of attachment and alienation, inclusion and exclusion from the state.Item Narratives of home: home-making practices and political violence in a Kurdish border town in Turkey(2011-05) Ozcan, Omer, M.A.; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Stewart, Kathleen CThis essay analyzes a series of home narratives I gathered in Yüksekova (Gever in Kurdish) district of Hakkari (Colemêrg), a small Kurdish town located on the Iraqi-Turkish border. This essay presents and discusses the ways in which people have been struggling to create, maintain, and talk about their homes during and after a series of violent moments that have marked the local time-space of Yüksekova over the last century. Drawing an ethnographic picture of survival and home-making practices, I will trace the changing semantics of home and the social/spatial relationships and cultural imaginaries associated with it. To this end, I will focus on home-making in three violent moments in the cultural and political history of the town that are most emphasized in the narratives I gathered: 1) The massacre and deportation of Armenian and other non-Muslim peoples of Hakkari in 1915 that turned the region into a home only for Muslim Kurds 2) the destruction of homes as rural Kurds of Hakkari were displaced as a part of the recent counterinsurgency warfare against Kurdish guerillas; and 3) the struggles of people to make homes in Yüksekova. Informed by a body of literature on space that defines space meaningfully only in and through social relations, this paper aims to take an ethnographic look at home as a space that is situated in human agency and practices and which is open to change as it is shaped and reshaped as part of the dynamism of social, political and daily life.Item Nerve languages : the critical response to the physiological psychology of Wilhelm Wundt by Dada and Surrealism(2010-05) Mowris, Peter Michael; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 1948-; Shiff, Richard; Clarke, John; Charlesworth, Michael; Arens, KatherineScholarship on Dada and Surrealism has established that psychology was a major intellectual source for artists in both groups. However, a burgeoning amount of recent work in both the history of art and of science indicates that types of psychology other than psychoanalysis permeated the historical context of the avant-garde. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, physiological psychology, for example, was the dominant science of the body and mind, which grounded psychic phenomena in structures of conduction in the nervous system. Modern artists saw within this discourse a fascinating and new theory of experience. In my selective history of the avant-garde’s reception and response to physiological psychology, I will argue that artists worked within and partially according to the basic tenets of this discourse, but that they reshaped its superstructural projections away from formations and taxonomies of normalcy in consciousness and action.Item Picturing the peasant : nation and modernity in 20th century Bulgaria(2013-05) Hillhouse, Emily Anne; Neuburger, Mary, 1966-This dissertation examines representations of the Bulgarian peasant in order to explore how nationalist, agrarian and ultimately communist governments attempted to negotiate the meaning of "modernity" in predominantly rural Bulgaria. This work is not intended as a survey of displays of folk culture in the 20th century, but instead focuses each chapter on an important person, movement or organization which best seems to articulate Bulgaria's evolving sense of itself and its place on the edge of Europe. Beginning with a background chapter on the 1878-1917 period, I trace the foundation and development of ethnographic display, representations of peasants in the interwar educational press, campaigns to improve village hygiene and culture, alpine tourism, and the ever-changing image of peasants in propaganda from the years of agrarian rule in the 1920s through the early decades of communism. My dissertation explores the contested meanings of peasant images in Bulgaria's changing political and social milieu. Bulgaria's acceptance into first Europe and later the Soviet sphere of influence was for many nation-builders predicated upon her ability to attain European and later Soviet-style modernity. However, these modernities were based upon ideas of industrialization and urbanization. In the middle of the 20th century, however, Bulgaria's economy was still overwhelmingly agricultural. This represented a problem for Bulgaria's nation builders. Confronted with these seeming contradictions, different regimes attempted to incorporate the rural population into their visions of a modern Bulgaria. The changing nature of this imagined Bulgaria can be best elucidated through images of the Bulgarian peasantry. At one moment incorporated and at another excluded, modern and backward, embraced and reviled, the imagined peasantry reveals the anxieties and aspirations of Bulgarian state builders in the 20th century.Item The process of becoming : the political construction of Texas’ Lone STAAR system of Accountability and College Readiness(2012-08) López, Patricia Dorene; Valenzuela, AngelaAs systems of accountability and efficiency continue to permeate public education institutions it is important that research engage the various factors that embody how these systems come to be, whose knowledge gains access to informing their designs, and whose interests are served. Texas has long been recognized as a testing ground for such policy designs, although researchers’ points of departure on such systems have solely focused on the outcomes of these policies in practice. Research on the political construction and discourses that define the underlying goals of these systems continue to be ignored by researchers. Analyses of Texas-inspired federal policies have also predominantly taken an outcomes-based approach, or at most have had episodic engagements with political processes peering down from the balcony to observe the interaction of the obvious actors. To this end, this three-year ethnographic study conceptually and methodologically engages the various dimensions—such as race, class, history, interest, power, and agency—that embody the political lineage of Texas’ new system of Accountability and College Readiness across various contexts. This study further contributes to the dearth of literature that examines the role of research and university researchers in policy debates, and the limits and possibilities of politically engaged scholars in such processes.Item Removal, isolation, and discipline in Texas schools : an ethnographic study of a 6th-12th grade disciplinary alternative education program(2015-05) Dunning-Lozano, Jessica L.; Auyero, Javier; Crosnoe, Robert; Browne, Simone; Carrington, Ben; Hartigan, JohnThis dissertation investigates the school-level impact of punitive zero-tolerance education policies through an ethnographic study of the daily practices in place at a 6th - 12th grade Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) in Texas. This is the first ethnography of a public DAEP in Texas, a product of zero-tolerance policy designed to punish and secondly to educate. The analysis draws from a rich set of data consisting of 27 months of participant observations, 12 of these months as a substitute teacher, 90 in-depth interviews with program staff, students, parents, student survey, and an archive of student disciplinary documents. The study addresses four research questions: 1) How does the penetration of the carceral arm of the criminal justice system into public schools affect the quality of education? 2) How is discipline accomplished in this program, specifically, what are its forms, how does it vary, what is the extent of its operation, and what are its effects? 3) How does this experience vary by race, gender, class, and citizenship status? And 4) How do these disciplinary practices impact teachers, students, and families? DAEPs have little state over site, a dropout rate five times higher than mainstream schools in Texas, and have become a more common academic transition point for boys, Latinos, black, and low-income youth. This in-depth study of a DAEP offers a nuanced understanding of the form, effects, variation, and extension of discipline within and beyond the program’s bounds, and contributes to our understanding of the micro-effects of punitive school policies on children, their families, and school authorities. Additionally, it examines one way the punitive state exerts discipline over marginalized youth populations through disciplinary school practices. Lastly, the dissertation provides the knowledge needed to improve the educational experiences of the most vulnerable youth populations.Item Santa Muerte and the politics of malleability : the angel of Death in Mexico City(2016-05) McDonald, Kathryn Louis; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole Marie; Gonzalez-Martin, RachelThis thesis explores and critiques mainstream narratives of Santa Muerte, a marginalized Mexican spiritual figure, through ethnographic data collected in spaces of Santa Muerte spiritual commerce and devotion in Mexico City during the summer of 2015, with an emphasis on Barrio Tepito, Colonia Morelos and Mercado de Sonora. This thesis will argue that Santa Muerte’s malleability, particularly with regards to gender; the embrace of physicality, and its followers’ attitude towards death, demonstrate Santa Muerte’s appeal as a spiritual tool, particularly for marginalized segments of Mexican society.