This dissertation examines the production of knowledge around global climate change and the character of environmental literacy among youth in Tafuna, on Tutuila, American Samoa. I analyze this production of environmental knowledge across multiple social fields (i.e. status hierarchies, governance structures, etc.) and subjectivities (school-specific, village-based, and Samoan cultural identities) during a period of social, political, economic, and environmental transformation. I interrogate the emerging forms of control that have come to structure the formal educational system in American Samoa, such as standardized or "containerized" curriculum, assessment and accountability measures, and the assignation of risk/creation of dependency on funding, deployed by American governmental agencies such as the Department of Education, and utilized by state actors such as the American Samoa Department of Education. Of particular concern is the how these structures create contradictions that affect the possibilities of teaching, learning, and the integration of youth into meaningful social roles. Informal learning about the environment includes village-based forms of service, church initiatives concerning the environment, governmental agency programming, such as that provided by the American Samoa Environmental Protection Agency, and youth-serving non-profit programs concerned with engaging youth as leaders. In both these formal and informal contexts for environmental education, American Samoan youth dynamically co-create knowledge within and outside the parameters of the socialization processes in which they are embedded. This research encompassed four trips to American Samoa over the course of three years, and utilized ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, archival research, and demographic data analysis, as the primary forms of data gathering. What this data reveals is the disengagement American Samoan youth feel for school-based environmental education because their science classes, as structured, do not integrate the co-relatedness of the social, the political, and the environmental fields that youth encounter. I discovered that youth are largely ambivalent about their future aspirations because they lack some of the cultural, linguistic, and educational tools necessary for local participation as well as for opportunities to study and work on Hawaii or the mainland United States. Lastly, I found that American educational ideals continue to be contradictory in the American Samoan context; whereas schools value and promote individually-oriented goals and responsibility, youth are also embedded in the values of communal identification and practice known as fa'a Samoa. I conclude that young people lack social integration and plan for a future away from American Samoa. / Anthropology

For nearly three decades, public health officials have been telling Americans that being overweight or obese is extremely dangerous for their health and well-being through public services announcements, popular health news articles, and scientific studies – all decrying the “obesity epidemic” plaguing the United States. In this same period, mean Body Mass Indexes and rates of overweight and obesity in the US have either increased or remained steady, but have seen no wide-spread reversal in direction. Thus, despite public health officials’ diligent efforts, Americans do not seem to be responding to these messages. Any number of causal mechanisms could explain this; however, we should consider the possibility that Americans simply do not believe that being “fat,” “heavy,” or “overweight” is bad for their health. In this dissertation, we ask the question “do you think that being overweight is bad for your health?” by analyzing data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2012 – an era in which the frequency of publication on the obesity epidemic reached a record high. Ultimately, we find that Americans are more likely to associate their own status as overweight individuals with lower self-reported health when this status is defined through multiple avenues at once: being clinically overweight, perceiving themselves as overweight persons, and having clinicians tell them directly that they are overweight. Saying “being overweight or obese is unhealthy” is not enough. If Americans do not believe that they are overweight, and if they do not receive personal counsel from medical professionals about their weight status, then they are unlikely to change their opinion of their overall personal health status in light of their status as overweight or obese individuals. Anti-obesity and weight-awareness advocacy has established the mantra: being fat is bad for you. The challenge for public health officials now is to raise awareness about what overweight and obesity truly mean, and to convince clinicians to become much more determined in upholding clinical weight guidelines and informing their patients of their weight statuses. / Sociology

This dissertation explores the creative responses of domestic violence advocates, activists, and other professionals working to address domestic violence in a South Atlantic U.S. state. Neoliberal political-economic policies have supported the development of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to address social ills that the state has increasingly relinquished responsibility for. While personal responsibility and the work of civil society is extolled as the best way to address social problems and offer social services to the public, state-level cuts of funding streams to NGOs have made it increasingly difficult for these entities to perform their missions. Moreover, reliance upon the state for funding leads to a slippery slope whereby missions shift and projects may be selected based on funding availability rather than what target communities could truly benefit from. Limited resources and time available to adequately conduct organizational missions within NGOs has helped promote new forms of community coalition building across agencies and systems. Based on ethnographic research within a quasi-state agency and multiple community coalitions, this dissertation examines the knowledge and practice of actors situated within these different sites and their relationships with the state. I address the following questions: 1) how are actors affected by and then in turn respond to the socioeconomic affects of neoliberalism; 2) how do socially defined categories of difference shape knowledge and practice; and 3) what is the relationship between dominant and alternative discourses of domestic violence and the differentially positioned actors who adopt them. My research sheds light on the process of community coalition building and activism in the context of a national financial crisis, which supports politically driven hostility towards domestic violence activist work. Through an in depth analysis of the early development of a community coalition to end domestic violence in the LGBTQQI community, I examine the ways actors heterogeneous social compositions and life experiences shape understandings of domestic violence, and receptiveness to alternative forms of knowledge and practice. Material constraints produced by neoliberal political-economic policies further hinder knowledge production and actors' capacity to contend with alternative frameworks for analyzing domestic violence. / Anthropology

Iranian documentary filmmakers negotiate their relationship with power centers every step of the way in order to open creative spaces and make films. This dissertation covers their professional activities and their films, with particular attention to 1997 to 2014, which has been a period of tremendous expansion. Despite the many restrictions on freedom of expression in Iran, especially between 2009 and 2013, after the uprising against dubious election practices, documentary filmmakers continued to organize, remained active, and produced films and distributed them. In this dissertation I explore how they engaged with different centers of power in order to create films that are relevant to their society. To focus this topic, my research explores media institutions, their filmmaking practices, and the strategies they use to produce and distribute their films. This research is important because it explores the inherent contradictions in the existence of a vibrant documentary film community in a country that is envisioned as uniformly closed and oppressive in the West. The research is also personally motivated, because I have close connections to the Iranian documentary film world, where I previously made films and produced television programs. I conduct the study with a multi-faceted approach, utilizing participant observation in the field in a four-month period, in-depth interviews with key players, personal reflections, and textual analysis of the films. I focus on about twenty filmmakers and their films, chosen from a pool of more than 500 documentary filmmakers, giving a cross section of this community based on their age, sex, and their professional history and success within Iran and internationally. / Media & Communication

Based on fieldwork with human rights organizations in New York City and Belize, Central America, this dissertation explores--through the prism of ethics--how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) represent violence against indigenous women--in text, image, and action--as human rights "evidence." By ethics I mean the deliberate use of morals, stated or unstated, in the representation of human rights abuses. In New York, my research focuses on the production, launch, and circulation of a United Nations shadow report on violence against indigenous women. In Belize, I contextualize indigenous women's experiences of gender violence within an indigenous movement to obtain collective land rights, a national women's movement, and national rhetoric on culture and gender. In both locales, I consider and compare: 1) how the "ethical" stance of NGOs shapes human rights activism; 2) how NGOs create visual and discursive "evidence" to represent violence and indigenous women's experiences; and 3) very real neoliberal state repression that immobilizes social movements for human rights and social justice. My concern is with the ways social movement NGOs struggle to maintain their feminist and social justice objectives as they interface with the demands of a transnational human rights system, and the strategies they use as they suffer from vilification, marginalization or mainstreaming, and lack of resources. Far from protective, human rights claims, explored here as "evidence," often obscure both social inequalities and the response of state-level policies to these inequalities, especially for marginalized women. / Anthropology

Chinese medical research professionals utilize their intellectual cultural capital and flexible citizenship for their lives in two localities: the western suburban metropolitan Philadelphia area and Shanghai, China. In addition, this dissertation discusses modern Chinese culture through Chinese returnees' eyes in Shanghai. This research will discuss migration of skilled intellectuals under globalization and the change in these Chinese professionals' transnational identities in different localities. Moreover, this research presents the impact brought by neoliberal ideology in the United States and by policies of privatization in modern Chinese society to these transnational professionals as part of the global process of migrating professionals. This research contains two parts. The first part of this research will study Chinese medical research professionals' lives in the western suburban metropolitan Philadelphia area--the Philadelphia Mainline, West Chester, and Exton. The second part of my research studies these Chinese medical research professionals' return experience when they relocate back to Shanghai, China. Most of these Chinese professionals who I studied came to the US from China (the People's Republic of China), Hong Kong, and Taiwan (the Republic of China) for their graduate degrees. After graduation in the 1980s and 1990s, they stayed for work in pharmaceutical companies in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Despite having US citizenship or permanent residency, these Chinese professionals never identify themselves as "Americans". Their lives in the historically European-American cultural dominant western Philadelphia suburbs are challenged socially and culturally when they try to carry out their "American dream". Not being able to engage in activities in American society and often feeling disempowered, these Chinese professionals maintain their social connections with their "hometowns" in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in many cultural ways. At the same time, these Chinese medical professionals are involved in cultural activities such as Saturday Chinese Schools and Chinese Christian churches. Saturday Chinese Schools and Chinese Churches provide pivotal social network milieu for these Chinese professionals to construct their safety network in living in the western suburban Philadelphia area. Unlike Chinese immigrants in California and New York City where the Chinese population is huge, these Chinese professionals do not distinguish themselves by their countries of origin since they all consider themselves as a pan-Chinese minority in this Philadelphia metropolitan area. They do, however, distinguish themselves from Chinese immigrants in Philadelphia's Chinatown owing to social and economic differences, though a shared sentiment of pan-ethnicity emerges when they experience racial discrimination. These Chinese professionals conceive of neoliberal ideology as a natural fact of life in the US which they appreciate. They consider the social milieu of China as making it harsher for them to be prosperous than in the US since they do not need to have existing guanxi networks based on their families and friends in the US context. Intergenerationally, these Chinese professionals try to pass down their cultural heritage by ensuring that their children are educated, formally and informally, in Chinese language and culture. Their children--the second generation Chinese immigrants--identify themselves mostly as Chinese Americans with an imagined identity that connects them with their parents' respective homelands. Gender plays a vital role for these second generation Chinese immigrants with respect to the issue of becoming well-adjusted in attending to American high schools. Girls are more accepted by non-Asian peers than boys. Most of these second-generation Chinese boys tend to socialize only with Asian boys, and are very protective about themselves with respect to other groups in high schools. The second part of my research discusses these Chinese medical research professionals' return experience to China, particularly to the fast-paced, rapidly developing context of Shanghai. Starting from the year 2007, the economic recession has gradually been taking over the United States. At the same time, the booming Chinese market and economy are becoming the new focus of American companies. American pharmaceutical companies in the Philadelphia area recognize that these Chinese medical research professionals' transnational background enables them to broaden the company's economic development in China; therefore, they repatriate some Chinese medical professionals to China at management levels. Simultaneously, other Chinese professionals are returning to China to start their own small businesses because they were laid off in the United States. Having come to the US to pursue their American dreams, the unexpected return challenges Chinese professionals in every aspect of life. First, the process of relocation of the whole family can take years and lead to separation of the family. The separation leads to a shift in gender roles. Usually the mother takes charge of the whole family while the father moves to China for work. Some families are broken because some family members opt to stay in the US, which leads to adoption of children, love affairs, and divorces. China has developed dramatically economically and culturally since these Chinese professionals left in the 1990's; therefore, these Chinese professionals, who become returnees after returning to China, realize that they have difficulties adjusting themselves to life in Shanghai. Feeling like outsiders again, they have developed strategies to counter these difficulties. First of all, these Chinese returnees find that their identities as Chinese are strongly challenged since they are recognized as Americans by local Chinese. They realize that they have been Americanized in their social behavior, and they have had to force themselves to adapt to contemporary modern Chinese culture--which is heavily influenced by capitalism and neoliberalism after the PRC market reforms. Realizing that guanxi relationships are the main element in social networking in Chinese society, these Chinese returnees have to learn to adjust themselves to guanxi politics and engage themselves in Chinese style networking. Trying to avoid local people's secretive attitudes, these Chinese returnees tend to be friends only with people of similar background. Having social status and economic privileges in Shanghai, most Chinese returnees are able to maintain their own personal spaces and privacy by avoiding public spaces and public transportation. Most Chinese returnees are aware of the embedded social control by Chinese government in every corner in the city, and see the freedom they have in China as limited mostly to economic aspects. Some devout Christian Chinese returnees are always prepared to be deported by Chinese government since they insist on holding their non-legally authorized gatherings for fellowship and worship in private properties. These Chinese returnees' children are surprised to find that China is extremely different from what they have imagined after their move to Shanghai. They identify themselves as Americans and refuse to learn Chinese language and culture in order to distinguish themselves from local people. While people in Shanghai enjoy their imagined participation of globalization by consuming the Shanghai EXPO, these Chinese returnees keep themselves updated with US news and media through satellite television in order to retain a broad view of the world. These Chinese medical research professionals' lives in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and in Shanghai are examples of the migration and return migration of skilled professionals under the force of neoliberal ideologies and globalization. Their living experiences in China highlight changes in their ideas about national identity as Chinese transnationals in the context of modern Chinese society, which is highly influenced by state controlled capitalism and Chinese nationalism promoted through mass media and propaganda. This research will contribute to the lack of literature about Chinese professional immigrants to the East Coast of the United States, and their return migration to China. / Anthropology

"Materializing Blackness: The Politics and Production of African Diasporic Heritage” examines how intellectual and civic histories collide with the larger trends in the arts and culture sector and the local political economy to produce exhibitions at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) and structure the work that museum exhibitions do to produce race visually for various audiences. Black museums are engaged in the social construction of race through their exhibitions and programs: selecting historical facts, objects and practices, and designating them as heritage for and to their audiences. In tracking this work, I am interested in 1) the assemblages of exhibits that are produced, as a function of 2) the internal logics of the producing institutions and 3) larger forces that structure the field as a whole. Looking at exhibits that engage Blackness, I examine how heritage institutions use art and artifacts to visually produce race, how their audiences consume it, and how the industry itself is produced as a viable consumptive market. Undergirded by the ways anthropologists of race and ethnicity have been explored and historicized race as a social construction I focus on an instantiation of the ways race is constructed in real time in the museum. This project engages deeply with inquiries about the social construction of race and Blackness, such as: how is Blackness rendered coherent by the art and artifacts in exhibitions? How are these visual displays of race a function of the museums that produce them and political economy of the field of arts and culture? Attending to the visual, intellectual, and political economic histories of networks of exhibiting institutions and based on ethnographic fieldwork in and on museums and other exhibiting institutions, this dissertation contextualizes and traces the production and circulation of the art and artifacts that produce the exhibitions and the museum itself as a way to provide a contemporary concrete answer. Overall “Materializing Blackness” makes the case for history and political economy as ghosts of production that have an outsized impact on what we see on exhibition walls, and are as important to the visual work as a result. Further it takes the Black museum as a site of anthropological engagement as a way to see the conjuncture of the aesthetic and the political, the historical and the material in one complicated node of institution building and racecraft in the neoliberal city. / Anthropology

Since the time of their arrival beginning around 2005, there remain approximately 46,000 African asylum seekers in Israel. The following paper reviews the foundations and implications of Israel’s political discourse in reference to the presence of this community. I situate the treatment of the asylum seekers in their relationship to the Jewish State, Zionist ideology, international refugee law, and Israel’s human rights community. I argue: 1) that the discourse surrounding the asylum seekers reflects larger changes within the ethos of the Jewish State and models of Israeli personhood; 2) that notions of “security” and “threat” in relation to the asylum seekers take on new meanings shaped by Israel’s ongoing demographic concerns; and 3) that the political response to the African asylum seekers sheds light on irreconcilable goals of the Zionist nation-building project seeking to both maintain a Jewish majority and liberate world Jewry from life segregated and isolated in the Diaspora. / Anthropology

Focusing on the search for family history and identity, Saba and Savta is a personal and participatory documentary film about a Jewish-Italian couple, married for 50 plus years, searching for their lost family history while preserving what culture they know, before their memory dissipates. Sheldon and Joan Treibitz, residents of Lake County, FL for 20 years, travel back to Brooklyn, New York to visit the places of their birth, where they raised their children and where their family members are laid to rest. Joan and Sheldon take viewers and their granddaughter, Shelley, the director of the film, on a journey of acceptance and the chronicling of a family's history as they revisit their past lives in Brooklyn, and their family's first documented history in the United States, Ellis Island; Rewriting and sharing their past with the future generation of their family.

Through both a theoretical analysis of the framework itself, as well as ethnographic research of one particular university-community engagement project underway in Provo, UT, this thesis explores both the process of training students for this type of community engagement as well as the malleability of the program format for potential application across other schools and communities. The research findings highlight how the program itself, taking the form of an offered undergraduate course at a liberal arts college in Provo, offers unique opportunities for undergraduate students to engage in applied anthropological work for a client, as well as how the local community center partnered with the university benefits from (and in some cases, resists) the findings of the community engagement made possible through the program.