<p> The Occupy Movement arose out of an atmosphere of dissatisfaction with the political and economic structure of the country. The objective of my research was to look at individuals in the Denver Occupy Movement in order to understand what their personal goals for the movement were, as well as what tactics they were willing to partake-in as a way to change society's dominant power structures. A key characteristic in Occupy is how diverse it is in terms of the political will and the express direction its members wish it to go in. My anthropological work is applicable to Occupies across the country as well as other similar socio-political movements since it sheds light on how the individual within the movement expresses his/hers agency not only in shaping acts of resistance but the structure of the movement itself. The theoretical framework of my thesis is based upon three foundational frameworks: Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and various social capitals, Giddens's theory on how agency and structure interact to result in structural change, and concepts in cognitive anthropology. Through these frameworks I show how an individual's background shapes their actions of resistance and mediates how they negotiate the structure and culture of Occupy itself.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Advisers: John Pettegrew; Dawn Keetley.

<p> This descriptive phenomenological study investigated Anglo Saxon Americans' lived experience of self-identity. The focus was to determine if construction of their self-concepts was influenced by Ancestral connectedness, characterized by: (a) lived recognition of one's Ancestral origins and the experience of connection to one's larger constellation of familial lineage, (b) reverent encounter with one's Ancestors on a daily basis as expressed in Ancestor communion, and (c) felt responsibility to ensure the Ancestors' continued well-being and positive disposition toward the living through the practice of remembering the Ancestors in active storytelling, prayers to the Ancestors, and the making of libations and offerings to the Ancestors. Three Anglo Saxon Americans participated in the study. Each participant completed two half-hour, one-on-one, in-person interviews and also completed a demographic questionnaire about his or her background. Participants were asked to describe (a) their identities and how they understand themselves, (b) their understanding or definition of Ancestor, (c) how they think about their Ancestors, and (d) how their connectedness to their Ancestors influence their self-identities. Giorgi's (1985, 2009) four-step descriptive phenomenological method was used to analyze the data and produce a psychological description of the phenomenon studied. Study results revealed a general structure for the Anglo Saxon American self-concept in relation to Ancestral connectedness consisting of eight constituents: (a) a lack of importance placed on the question of self-identity, (b) an emphasis on individuality and separation, (c) a negative approach to self-identity, (d) changes in self-identity independent of Ancestry, (e) awareness of the White race and its privileges, (f) socioeconomic status, (g) an unconscious Ancestral influence, and (h) no establishment of a positive Ancestral influence on self-identity. The results also revealed a limited amount of conscious understanding of one's Ancestral origins and personal connection to a larger constellation of familial lineage, suggesting partial fulfillment of the first criterion of Ancestral connectedness. However, this was the extent of the lived experience of Ancestral connectedness in relation to the Anglo Saxon American self-identity formation.</p>

<p> This is an ethnographic and depth psychological study of Post-Cool Kids, people born into the 1960s American counterculture between 1964 and 1978. This population has been predominantly overlooked by the academy apart from the Family Lifestyles Study completed at UCLA twenty years ago. In this, the first study of its kind, I explore the ethnological specificity of this set of people, Post-Cool Kids. </p><p> I have integrated the methodologies of Michel Foucault and the theories of archetypal psychology developed by James Hillman with work done by Victor Turner as well as other work from the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, feminist theory, cultural studies and histories of the sixties era. I use this interdisciplinary data to inform a qualitative study of eighteen subjects raised by countercultural parents. I asked my subjects about their lives as children, teenagers, young adults, and currently approaching midlife. Through an analysis of these interviews I identified six cultural complexes specific to the counterculture that I then deconstructed and discussed as systems of knowing within the American culture of the last forty years: freedom, anti-authority, intense experience, cool, being real, and utopia. These complexes together provide a unique way of experiencing the world that informs the ethnological and psychological perspective of Post-Cool Kids, and provides them with a multi-schematic, process-based way of engaging with the world around them. I also discuss such topics as alternative education, communal experiences, drug addiction, creative thinking, embodied trauma, parental entwinement, and personal activism. My objective was to identify the transmission of culture from counterculture parents to their Post-Cool Kids. In the process I developed several unique methodological approaches. Merging postmodern theory, archetypal psychology and methods from religious studies and anthropology, I evaluate the nature of belief within a secular cultural context. Ultimately, I place American historical concepts of utopia side by side with the experience and multi-schematic perspective of Post-Cool Kids to suggest that they represent an emergent pattern in culture, and show how they can inform new theories of utopia.</p>

<p> This study draws a rich, vivid portrait of a marginalized and hidden dance community and how it made a visible impact on the mainstream and in countries around the world. In the 1980s black and Latino teens in Los Angeles performed a street dance called pop locking. During this time dancing helped keep urban teens out of gangs and create positive identities. In the 1990s pop locking went underground, but less than ten years later returned in areas outside of Los Angeles. This allowed 1980s dancers to serve as teachers and mentors to new dancers. </p><p> Twenty-seven pop lockers who danced from the 1980s to the 2000s were interviewed from June 2010 to July 2013. These interviews capture the history of the dance that started on the streets of California. Participant observation was conducted at Homeland Cultural Center in Long Beach, which is a hub for pop locking in Southern California.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of New York, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3283178. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3639. Adviser: George A. Corbin.

<p> From <i>silva dimes</i> to <i>po-boys</i>, r-lessness has long been a conspicuous feature of all dialects of New Orleans English. This dissertation presents a quantitative and qualitative description of current rates of r-lessness in the city. 71 speakers from 21 neighborhoods were interviewed. Rpronunciation was elicited in four contexts: interview chat, Katrina narratives, a reading passage and a word list. R-lessness was found in 39% of possible instances. Older speakers pronounce /-r/ less than younger speakers, and those with a high school education or less pronounce /-r/ far less than those with post-secondary education. Race and gender did not prove to be significant predictors of r-pronunciation. In contrast to past studies, many speakers in the current study discuss their metalinguistic awareness of /-r/ and their partial control of /-r/ variation, discussing switching between r-fulness and r-lessness in different contexts. </p><p> In New Orleans, this metalinguistic awareness is attributable in part to the devastation following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the near-disappearance of the city intensified an already extant nostalgia for local culture, including ways of speaking. Nostalgia and amplification by advertisers and popular media have helped recontextualize r-lessness as a variable associated with a number of social meanings, including localness and authenticity. These processes help transform r-lessness, for many speakers, from a routine feature of talk to a floating cultural variable, serving as a semiotic resource on which speakers can draw on to perform localness. </p><p> This dissertation both closes a gap in research on New Orleans speech and uses New Orleans as a case study to suggest that the social meanings of linguistic features are created and maintained in part by a constellation of interrelated social processes of late modernity. Further, I argue that individual speakers are increasingly agentively engaged with these larger processes, as part of a global transformation from more traditional, place-bound populations to more deracinated individuals who choose to align themselves with particular communities and local cultural forms, particularly those that have been commodified.</p>

<p> A thematic study grounded in transnational and transatlantic studies of modern and postmodern literatures, this dissertation examines five contemporary Irish poets&mdash;John Montague, Padraic Fiacc, James Liddy, Seamus Heaney, and Eavan Boland&mdash;whose separation from Ireland in the United States has produced a distinct body of work that I call, "the poetics of return." As the biological heirs of the Civil War generation and the intellectual heirs of the Irish high modernists, these poets are some of the leading lights of the renaissance in Irish literary arts after midcentury. </p><p> This dissertation argues that an important aspect of this era has been its reevaluation of narratives of political and artistic exile; those created by nationalists and republicans, on the one hand, and modernists such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, on the other. Drawing on the criticism of Patrick Ward and Seamus Deane, I argue that the atomization of the critical vocabulary of exile has enabled modern poets greater means to consider the cultural anxieties surrounding their separation from Ireland. Accordingly they have become less interested in the meaning of leaving Ireland and more interested in the meaning of return. This project engages a range of scholarly literature devoted to the Irish poets and poetry of the last half century and reevaluates a number of standard readings and assumptions.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4754. Adviser: Nancy Abelmann. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-230) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.