“Domesticating Detroit” is an ethnographic investigation into the intersecting worlds of art, creative industries, real estate, philanthropy and urban revitalization through the material lens of the single-family home. In March of 2015, Detroit faced a foreclosure crisis that threatened to add almost 70,000 homes to the annual tax foreclosure auction and evict nearly 100,000 people. While the city’s population continues to drop, the private sector is investing millions in Detroit’s artists and creative industries, valorizing creativity, innovation, and design as the hopeful saviors of the city and thus imbuing artists and creative entrepreneurs with the social responsibilities of ameliorating Detroit’s many ills. Throughout Detroit's history, single-family homes have been fought for and neglected, the object of real estate speculation and artistic appropriation, symbols of belonging, and means of racial discrimination. Today, the sheer quantity of vacant single-family homes, estimated at almost 30,000, makes them one of Detroit's most easily exploitable and malleable resources. Amid public discourse of Detroit’s long-awaited renaissance, they have become a renewed site of control and subversion, an ostensible indicator of the city’s health, and the philosophical, material, and political site in which urban transformations are envisioned, enacted, and engaged. This dissertation concludes that creative interventions on single-family homes help to establish normative concepts of “community" and urban citizenship, redefine public and private spaces, and make visible the rhetoric of top-down efforts that seek to define the 'right way' to revitalize Detroit's neighborhoods. / Anthropology

This dissertation describes how desiring subjects make devotional worlds in times of radical change. I argue that what is centrally at stake for people who pass through the Şumuleu Ciuc (Hungarian: Csíksomlyó) pilgrimage site in Transylvania, Romania is the question of what makes a good Catholic in relation to the Virgin Mary. Disputes about this question revolve around notions of the desiring subject: What role should forms of sexual, material, and affective self-interest – or lack thereof – play in the life of Mary’s devotees and the life of the Mother of God herself? This formulation of desire and change as intersubjective and relational processes involving divine and human beings breaks new ground among dominantly sociological and symbolic studies of religious change in contemporary Eastern Europe. Chapter One broadly outlines 20th and 21st century social transformations in the Ciuc valley. Chapter Two explores the annual Pentecost pilgrimage event as a ritual intricately caught up in everyday processes of emerging post-socialist masculine subject formation. Chapter Three tells the story of a young woman’s vision of the Virgin Mary that resulted in the installation of a new statue and shrine at the pilgrimage site. Where other scholars have treated similar events in terms of abstract political processes of resacralizing and nationalizing post-socialist space and time, I seek to re-site the “politics” of the shrine in the tension between religious experience and semiotic form. Chapter Four blends phenomenological and pragmatist theories of materiality to address recent infrastructural transformations to the pilgrimage site as efforts to “remodel Mary’s home.” One set of new structures outside at the shrine materialize and enact the ambivalent search for a post-socialist lay Catholic leading class that I introduced in Chapter One. Chapter Five takes up my previous concern with gender in order to examine women’s Marian healing practices in secular post-socialist hospitals. Chapter Six beings with a consideration of the intersubjective politics of storytelling and the new role played at Csíksomlyó by the global Catholic radio network, The World Family of Radio Maria.

While the “Second Cretan Lie” of Odyssey xix 199–359 and xvii 417–44 is presented as fictional tales within Homer’s larger myth, some elements have striking analogs in Late Bronze–Early Iron Age reality. This thesis examines these portions of the hero’s false ainos within their fictive context for the purpose of identifying and evaluating those elements. Particular focus is given to Odysseus’ declaration that he led nine successful maritime raids prior to the Trojan War; to his twice–described ill–fated assault on Egypt; and to his claim not only to have been spared in the wake of that Egyptian raid, but to have spent a subsequent seven years in the land of the pharaohs, during which he gathered great wealth. Through a comparative examination of literary and archaeological evidence from the Late Bronze–Early Iron transition in the Eastern Mediterranean, it is shown that these aspects of Odysseus’ stories are not only reflective of the historical reality surrounding the time in which the epic is set, but that Odysseus’ fictive experience is remarkably similar to that of one specific member of the ‘Sea Peoples’ groups best known from 19th and 20th dynasty Egyptian records: the ‘Sherden of the Sea.’

This work explores how the tragic poets, by means of snake imagery, convey the notion of disease. Moreover, it examines how snake imagery contributes to the process of healing through the emotion of fear that it triggers. My analysis of the tragedies in which the three main tragedians employ snake imagery builds upon findings from ancient authors that refer to snakes and their characteristics, and upon the findings of contemporary scholars. My overall method relies on tools from structuralism and psycholinguistics. Through snake imagery the tragic poets portray disease as it manifests itself through arrogance, deception, physical pain, and madness. For this purpose the poets employ images inspired by the particular anatomy and behavior of the snake. Within the context of tragedy, and through the fear that it triggers, the snake imagery encourages self-knowledge and healing through self-correction.

<p> The aim of this investigation is to analyze the effects of incorporating scent-based elements in ethnographic exhibits. Specifically, it attempts to identify changes in patron response to a visual display, with and without a scent element. Groups of patrons were observed throughout their engagement with the exhibit, and interviewed post-engagement to generate data on information retention, opinion on content and empathetic response in relation to the exhibit. Findings suggest that the inclusion of scent did increase memorization of the limited facts reinforced through the scent element. However, there was no detectable difference between the groups on measures of overall comprehension of the subject matter, nor their empathetic responses toward the exhibited culture. The results of the study are discussed as a measure of the observer&mdash;observed dichotomy, and the argument is made that multisensory representation in the museum can aid in the facilitation of cross-cultural education.</p>

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Doble Identidad conveys my experience as someone who struggles with their cultural identity. Through the expository modes of self-reflexivity, participatory, experimental, and poetics, the film displays the factors that molded my cultural identity. My childhood memories and interactions with my loved ones help me tell the story of how my cultural identity has and continues to leave me with feelings of inadequacy of not being Mexican or American enough.

As stay-at-home mandates were put in place to curtail the spread of COVID-19, the extent to which today's youth has been affected by such efforts has gone largely under examined. Through a collaborative qualitative study with Big Thought, a Dallas-based nonprofit geared towards empowering youth, we sought to answer how the social interactions and socioemotional wellbeing of their 2021 summer program participants were impacted, as well as how Big Thought was able to exhibit organizational resilience. Methods used for this study included digital and in-person ethnography, interviewing, and interactive media projects. Findings showcased noticeable adverse effects to the socioemotional wellbeing of youth (particularly among older cohorts), shifts in communication, gaps in learned practices of socialization, and coping through digital device use. Despite Big Thought's ability to display organization resilience, there is a clear need for additional concerted efforts to be practiced in reacclimating and guiding youth back into social environments and providing them with the resources and support to get there.

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