Refugees gain access to benefits and services in the United States through the bureaucratic birthdates recorded in the documents they carry when they first enter the country. Examining how and why chronometric age based on these documents was essential to resettlement was the starting point for my dissertation, which explores...
Changing economic activities bring significant cultural, epidemiological, and nutritional transitions. These transitions have important and lifelong effects on the health of populations experiencing them. Infancy represents a critical period when rapid growth and metabolic programming occur, making infants particularly vulnerable to long-lasting biological changes due to such transitions. The objective...
This dissertation asks how deepening global inequalities reshape the ways families negotiate “economic moralities,” normative expectations of material obligation and entitlement. It focuses on the families of middle class migrants: French-educated Senegalese urbanites whose diplomas no longer protect them from discrimination in Paris but who, among Africans, are still construed...
Our research group is currently working to develop the first cross-culturally validated household water insecurity scale. In order to do this, we have partnered with numerous collaborators to implement the survey in diverse ecological settings. As part of the survey, participants are asked to recall how long it takes to...
This dissertation investigates whether residents of Windhoek's squatter settlements are changing urban space through their efforts to secure housing and to conduct remunerative work from their dwellings. Studies about the informal economy have moved from analysis of it as a distinct sector to the social and political processes that create...
Bosnian women war refugees are not only trauma survivors, but are actively engaged in economic and social practices that shape their American sites of relocation. These economic activities--wage labor, and unremunerated volunteer and kin labor--are embedded in a moral framework of mutual obligation rooted in the concept veze / connections,...
This dissertation examines the role of market makers in making markets for options and futures on Chicago's derivatives exchanges. Recent institutional and technological changes in the ways that financial products are traded have given rise to the possibility of markets without market makers, raising the question of how these developments...
Racial disparities in cardiovascular health constitute one of the most pressing current public health problems in the United States. This dissertation examines how individual's cultural experiences of stress become embodied and contribute to these racial health inequalities. Anthropologists have traditionally approached culture through narrative ethnographic methods that are difficult to...
This dissertation addresses the problem of the development of cities in Upper Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.E. I investigate these cities through their settlement patterns and urban plans. I argue that these cities were not planned or organic, but exhibited degrees of planning. I treat my reconstruction of the...
As in other parts of the global south, economic difficulties in rural areas of Bolivia have forced many of Bolivia's indigenous people to migrate to urban areas such as El Alto, where formal employment and access to services are limited. Women are particularly vulnerable as they must balance economic activities...
This study in media anthropology uses participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, and recorded broadcasts to analyze how people use FM radio technology in the Koutiala area of southeast Mali, and particularly how they use FM radio to produce locality by relating audience members to one another, to the dominant national culture,...
"I Love You": Coercion and Consent in Sexual Relations in Postapartheid South Africa Judith L. Singleton This dissertation is an ethnographic study which explores and documents several discourses and practices surrounding sexual coercion and consent in the black South African township of Mpophomeni. I trace and examine discourses and practices...
This dissertation reviews the contexts and conditions for the appearance of monuments in the upper and middle St. Johns basins of peninsular during the Mt. Taylor period. Beginning with an attempt to determine if mortuary monuments built of shell could be distinguished from shell middens, the archaeology of four preceramic...
This dissertation examines how producers in the capital city of Burkina Faso manage to generate gains in producing utilitarian goods from scrap materials. Aluminum-smelting, tinsmithing, and tire-workings are three modern trades that have developed with the rising import of scrap supplies and consumer goods from Europe, the Middle East, and...
This dissertation examines how preparing settlements for war (i.e. fortification) relates to the maintenance of power relations. Violence has psychological and physical effects that can lead to asymmetries of power and extreme forms of social inequality (Brumfiel 1998; Carneiro 1970; Earle 1997; Fanon 1968; Farmer 2005; Flannery and Marcus 2012;...
This dissertation explores how the environment shapes energy expenditure and cardio-metabolic disease risk by investigating multiple timescales of adaptation to cold stress among the Yakut, an indigenous circumpolar population. This study pursues three main objectives. First, the adaptive and health significance of brown adipose tissue (BAT) is explored by examining...
Raising California Together, an ethnography of licensed family childcare homes, contributes significant theoretical and empirical knowledge to our understanding of workfare, immigration and education institutions that shape the lives of the youngest subject-citizens and of those who care for them. I draw from more than three years of participant observation...
The dissertation illuminates the centrality of communication to the way environmental policies and practices arise and unfold, and it shows how the living materiality of ecological phenomena are entangled with the social dynamics of communication. The work innovatively bridges insights from the field of political ecology with theory and method...
Migrant illegality gives way to irregular livelihoods in Spain and around the world. Studies on migrant illegality have generally focused on its political, legal and economic production and the social impact of a states specific biopolitics. While invaluably important, there remains the need to better understand the modes of life...
In the era of international volunteerism, mounting evidence suggests that the presence of unskilled and culturally unaware volunteers in the Global South fosters “voluntourism”, and endangers the very populations and institutions that volunteers want to help. Northwestern does not enforce a pre-trip curriculum for student organizations that coordinate private service...