This presentation is concerned with how return migrants articulate and experience belonging within faith communities in Accra. Focusing on Christian women, the paper investigates how interlocutors traverse ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of Pentecostal/Charismatic practice in Accra. In it, I discuss their connection to Hope City Church, parsing out the relationships...
This dissertation focuses on the topic of pseudowords and how speakers pseudoword processing relates to that of real words. Three main lines of inquiry are pursued with respect to pseudowords and real words: mechanisms of gradient well-formedness, theories of morphological decomposition, and indexical associations for morphemes in complex words. It...
The decision to breastfeed or formula feed is a largely contested one by mothers, healthcare administrators, and politicians. Yet, research suggests that both breastfeeding and formula feeding are healthy ways to provide nourishment to newborn babies. Considering this, I sought to analyze why this decision is such a site of...
Penelopian Figures: Narratives of Work and Resistance in American Literature, 1840-1900” examines literary representations of workers who engage in covert opposition to their circumstances. In chapters on The Lowell Offering textile magazine, Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, Louisa May Alcott’s “How I Went Out to Service” and...
Using interviews and friendship mapping with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally (LGBTQ+) community members as well as ethnographic observations, this dissertation analyzes post-gay LGBTQ community in River City, a small, Midwestern city. My findings reveal a formation I call ambivalent community: even as participants express a desire for...
"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...
Sleep is affected by social relationships and institutions, but much research has studied sleep within an individualized framework. In this dissertation, I analyze sleep in a series of specific social contexts to examine how these contexts shape gender and socioeconomic differences in sleep. Given prior findings suggesting the importance of...