Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Anthropology of citizenship processes'

Digital Citizenship is a concept typically used in discussions of how technology impacts our relationships with others and our physical world communities. It is also used to describe ways that we can leverage our technology use and skill to make our communities and nations better and stronger. Educators are now teaching "good digital citizenship" as part of a larger civics curriculum.

But, there is a second, emerging concept that I refer to as platform specific digital citizenship. I define this platform specific citizenship as the deep and abiding commitment and sense of responsibility that people develop in relation to a particular technology, such as software or technology brand. It may also refer to the ideas that people express in regard to how technology should ideally be used and what rights and responsibilities it requires of its adherents.

Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds (MMOWs) are one place researchers are finding this deep, platform specific digital citizenship emerging. These are persistent digital universes where people from all over the world develop online personas, leadership structures, discussion forums, and business and non-profit entities. The ability and extent to which this online organization is possible is largely due to the underlying structure, rules and allowances of the world of which people choose to be a part.

One online world, Second Life, has a large, active and vocal disabled population. They have committed to this environment because of the unique opportunities and freedoms that it provides. As a user content created environment, residents, as Second Life participants are referred to, are given an unprecedented amount of freedom to create the kind of experience they want. This may involve developing relationships and projects with other disabled residents. It can also involve exploring other aspects of themselves and their interests that are often neglected in their real lives due to social exclusion, and/or lack of financial and physical access.

Most of the research and popular media examinations of disability in Second Life centers on participation in disability specific communities or the benefits of identity exploration through avatar design. But, the reasons disabled people stay here is much broader and varied than what this limited discussion suggests. Commitment to Second Life is strong precisely because disability community commitment and disability expression are not the only options but exist among a wide range of choices. Moreover, the expression of disability and use of such mediated environments is constantly debated in both word and deed.

This dissertation explores the concept of digital citizenship and why people that identify as disabled in real life are attracted to committed participation in virtual worlds, in particular, Second Life. What opportunities and rights are disabled people afforded here through the technology structure? What are the avenues of entry into the Second Life community, and what does the variety of these entry points and special interest sub-communities tell us about what is important to them? How is commitment debated and deepened through the use of public spaces and forums? And, what can researchers, public health and information professionals learn from these features that can improve their own outreach?

This ethnographic study looks at the development and practice of cultural citizenship among ten Mexican undocumented immigrant students at a Southern California university. Amid societal and governmental institutions such as immigration seeking to regulate citizen membership, undocumented students find a sense of belonging and incorporation through educational pathways. Not legally citizens, undocumented students encounter many obstacles to obtaining their degrees.

Consequently, students must "come out'' of the shadows to institutional gatekeepers and each other in order to access resources and public space. Through the process of coming out, undocumented students leave their liminal, undocumented status behind. Instead, they become citizens as social actors, seeking not only to participate in society--but reshape it. In this narrative, the ways undocumented students explore citizenship, "come out," and contest their status through everyday practices are examined. In developing alternative solutions to citizen-normative practices that seek to exclude the undocumented, the students are able to claim rights and space in their everyday lives and on a university campus.

This dissertation examines how racial ideologies have historically been entangled with discourses on citizenship and gender difference in the United States. In looking at the case study of the 18^th- and 19 ^th-century African American community on Nantucket, I ask how these ideologies of difference and inequality were experienced, reinterpreted, and defied by women and men in the past. Whereas New England has maintained a liberal and moralistic regional narrative since the early-19^th century, this dissertation builds on scholarship which has increasingly complicated this narrative, documenting the historically entrenched racial divides in the region.

Historic African American community philosophies and social ideals are investigated through newspapers, pamphlets, and other records of the time. To address the household and individual scale, an archaeological investigation was undertaken at the homestead of a prominent 19^th-century black family on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House was home to a prominent late-18^th- and 19 ^th-century African American-Native American family on the island. The materiality of the Boston home—the artifacts, architecture, and landscape features—are the basis for making interpretations of the lives of the individuals that once lived there.

African diaspora theory, black feminist thought, and theories of performativity form the basis for the interpretive framework of this dissertation. The process of community formation and mobilization is considered with regard both for the uniting potential of cultural background and the uniting potential of political and social goals. The diversity of the African diaspora is seen as both an asset and a challenge to the uniting of the community on Nantucket. Race, gender, age, social status, and other vectors of social cohesion all contributed to the experience of intersectional identities. The concept of performativity, which proposes that identities are temporarily stabilized during actions, is also part of the foundation on which identity is theorized in this dissertation.

The historical analysis which contextualizes this research project focuses on the establishment and perpetuation of African American community ideals in the northeastern United States during the 19^th century. Notions of citizenship and gender ideals were racialized and defined according to white standards. Women and men of African descent, as well as of other cultural backgrounds, were seen by dominant white culture as outside the bounds of citizenship by virtue of not being white and outside the bounds of womanhood/manhood by not being white women/men. Black communities, or communities of color, in the Northeast countered these hostile ideologies with a complex set of strategies for redefining, rejecting, or transforming dominant ideals of womanhood and manhood. Black gender ideologies represented the synthesis of several sets of cultural traditions, economic circumstances, and political goals. While these changed in important ways over the course of the 19^th century, black gender ideals were consistently based on a normative notion of respectability while at the same time critiquing the race and gender ideologies of the society that defined respectability. In addition to this, people of color were increasingly defining a sense of collective identity based on these shared ideas of respectability and uplift and the ways that women and men achieved this in the home as well as in more public spaces.

This dissertation first examines how the Boston-Micah family of the late-18 ^th and early-19^th centuries contributed to the founding of the community of color on Nantucket island. African American, Native American, Cape Verdean, European, and people from other lines of descent were a part of this community and in the early-19^th century they united around the identifier of "people of color." Seneca Boston and Thankful Micah were among the first of these people to strike out and settle on the southern edge of town. Through an analysis of their material worlds—including ceramics, their house itself, and their plot of land—it is suggested that they were actively negotiating dominant discourses on racial exclusion, citizenship, and gender which excluded people of color from the rights and privileges of full personhood.

The 19^th-century occupants of the house contributed to the growth, florescence, and survival of the African American community through the boom of the whaling industry on the island, an economic depression, and the resurgence of the economy with the coming of the tourism industry in the late-19^th century. Mary Boston Douglass, Eliza Berry, Lewis Berry, Phebe Groves Talbot Hogarth, Elizabeth Stevens, and Absalom Boston experienced the race and gender ideals of the black community in the northeast, and wider American society, in a variety of ways. An analysis of ceramics, personal adornment objects, and small finds is used to examine their experiences. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This dissertation is an ethnography of human-soil relations that examines the cultural, scientific, political-economic, and ethical stakes of alternative agricultural practices and life processes that resist military-led, growth-oriented development. Moving across laboratories, greenhouses, forests and farms, it weaves together a symmetrical analysis of two kinds of local-practitioners—soil scientists in the capital city of Bogotá and small farmers in the southwestern frontier department of Putumayo—to track how soils emerge with political importance in the construction of what I call agro-life proposals for peace in the Colombian Amazon. Theoretically, it interrogates concepts of "sustainability" emerging among scientists and farmers, suggesting they imply a complex reframing of liberal notions of property, health, wellbeing, labor and autonomy. These observations reimagine the interface between political economy and ecology and science and technology studies that can account for new ecological notions of territoriality linked to practices of economic 'degrowth', and the alternative agricultural life-worlds I encountered in southwestern Colombia.

Classical dance has been tightly woven into discourses of national and international heritage as a representation of Cambodian cultural identity, particularly after the country’s devastating civil war in the 1970s. This dissertation articulates how Cambodia’s classical dancers and teachers negotiate the effects of large-scale processes, such as heritage development policies, on the art form and their bodies. Several scholars and dancers have developed perspectives on the revitalization efforts of the classical dance form in the period after the Khmer Rouge Regime, but this dissertation fills a gap in the documentation of the role that international nongovernmental organizations and tourism have on dance production.

The dissertation research in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in 2011 and 2012 traced the training and performance activities of practitioners at a broad range of arts NGOs and tourism venues to examine the large-scale processes that affected the lives of practitioners. To demonstrate the deeply woven connections among global heritage, tourism, NGOs, nationhood and Cambodia’s dance artists, this dissertation first articulates the process through which classical dance transformed from ritual practice to global commodity while maintaining ritual functions. Second, it demonstrates how practitioners navigate their personal corporeal economies—the labor of practice and performance—to balance the benefits of their bodily work with the possible alienation of their bodies being commoditized. Third, it shows how UNESCO intangible heritage directives are interpreted and embedded in local context, creating paradoxes for dance practitioners. Fourth,it develops a web-based model for understanding classical dance production, preservation and development in Cambodia—a social web that practitioners must navigate to survive. And finally, it further develops Bruner’s (2005) borderzone concept, expanding it into a borderzone field, to analyze the experiences of both audiences and performers in tourist settings.

The amalgamated framework proposed in the dissertation, including tourism, heritage, development, and economic theory is necessary to peel away layers of phenomena from the global to the local while unpacking their links to the lived experiences of classical dance practitioners.