<p> Contemporary urban mothers experience many challenges, even those in the middle class. Many of the challenges they face stem from western socio-economic and political systems. The present study recognizes the modern complexities of urban parenting and examines how and why many women are coming together in what I call social support peer networks, in order to mediate the plethora of challenges mothers experience today. </p><p> This research explores the &ldquo;mommy group&rdquo; phenomenon, through the ethnographic study of one such Southern California group, the &ldquo;Family Cooperative,&rdquo; which has adopted the adage &ldquo;it takes a village to raise a child&rdquo; in response to mothers&rsquo; feelings that &ldquo;you can&rsquo;t do it alone.&rdquo; This mother-centered study recognizes the fact that urban residents of the U.S. no longer live in small, traditional villages, yet still need socio-emotional support while raising their children. As such this research examines the ways in which these urban mothers come together, and why they do so. </p><p> In this research I found that flexibility in participation allowed a variety of mothers to participate &ldquo;at will,&rdquo; and to have access to the type and amount of resources they required and desired. The close-knit core expressed the greatest appreciation and shared the most resources, such as material goods and child-sharing. Peripheral members, including some that only participate online, especially appreciated the sharing of vetted informational resources and the camaraderie found in the online forums. All of the participants expressed an appreciation for access to a community that helps alleviate the fears of motherhood. These fears stem from the confusing mothering ideologies in particular, and lead to uncertainty about being a &ldquo;good mother,&rdquo; and the subsequent fear of judgment that is pervasive in urban motherhood today.</p>

<p> In Taiwan&rsquo;s experimental theatre, the &ldquo;Grotowski phenomenon&rdquo; is too prominent to be ignored. The &ldquo;Grotowski method,&rdquo; as it is called in Taiwan, has nurtured a generation of experimental theatre workers ever since the mid-1980s. In this dissertation I will investigate the entire picture of how the Grotowski-to-Taiwan transmission began. This investigation begins with the American encounter between the Polish exile and two Taiwanese overseas students in the Objective Drama Program at U.C. Irvine in 1985 &ndash; and what subsequently developed from that encounter in the context of Taiwan&rsquo;s Little Theatre Movement and New Age Movement. Their encounter is not simply a manifestation of Western cultural hegemony. Grotowski&rsquo;s physical training fills a cultural need in Taiwan, a place in which the grand narrative of the Great China ideology was dissolving and liberation of both language and body was beginning in earnest. Taiwan&rsquo;s liberal religious and spiritual environment gave Grotowski&rsquo;s post-theatrical work, particularly the &ldquo;inner aspect&rdquo; of his work, a promised land full of fertile ground. And it was upon this fertile ground that the seeds of Grotowski&rsquo;s ideas fell, with time took root, grew vigorously and finally bloomed in a way that Grotowski could never have imagined.</p>

<p> In this ethnographic study I demonstrate how eight Barrow, Alaska entities communicate during meetings and how different Barrow groups perceive the stakeholder engagement process as it has taken place in the past forty years with development organizations. This research was motivated by the limited research on locals&rsquo; perspective on development meetings. Nearly all the participants were men and identified themselves as I&ntilde;upiat; most had spent significant time in Barrow and in stakeholder engagement meetings. Interviews and participant observations reveal the complex communication practices in stakeholder engagement meetings including local and external norms, the expression of common local concerns, nonverbal communication patterns, and the use of the I&ntilde;upiaq language. While many participants were tired of repeating their concerns, experienced meeting burnout, and were frustrated by outside groups &ldquo;checking the box&rdquo; (just going through the motions without real engagement), they also considered that the stakeholder engagement process has improved due to the increased benefits and diminished risk associated with development projects. Furthermore, participants&rsquo; explanations of the oil &ldquo;seasons,&rdquo; a term they use to describe fluctuating market conditions, align with the frequency distribution analysis conducted on stakeholder engagement meetings over the last decade. Recommendations derived from this research include a need for sharing of stakeholder perceptions and concerns, modifying cultural awareness sessions, consolidating all organizations&rsquo; stakeholder engagement meetings, and changing the format of public development organization meetings. </p>

<p>This dissertation explores the emergence of Millennium Development and the promise to end poverty by 2015. After exploring the global scale phenomena, the project turns to the implementation of the "end of poverty" in the model Millennium Village of Sauri, Kenya.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Located in South America, and being a post-colonial Dutch colony, Suriname has an ethnically diverse population of transplants. After its independence in 1975, Suriname underwent gruesome civil unrest while ruled by a Militia coup that killed specific ethnic groups for claiming their own identities, juxtaposed to its acceptance of ethnic diversity. The film, <i>Suriname&rsquo;s Identity Construction and Negotiation</i> by Danielle Celeste Castillo, follows a select group of people who claim to be Surinamese and something else, as they reject or claim prescribed forms of identities further negating ethnicity and nationality&rsquo;s relationship with a person&rsquo;s internal and external selves. This project shows identity is fluid and also fixed depending on the context while also expanding anthropological, psychological and sociological works on ethnic and national identities.</p>

<p> In this study, I re-tell the life stories of two Khmer high school &ldquo;dropouts,&rdquo; Thom and Kevin. Through the collection and reflection of their life stories, I specifically discovered what led Thom and Kevin to &ldquo;drop out&rdquo; and uncover whether either had planned on pursuing or dreamt of a four-year postsecondary education in high school. Through interviewing, surveying, and participant-produced visual art, I offered glimpses into their everyday experiences and hopes and dreams for their futures. Based on the stories of Thom and Kevin and Khmer stories in the literature, I provided &ldquo;Khmer-up,&rdquo; culturally responsive, and proactive actions to see educational justice for Khmer lives. Issues of invisibility, loneliness, lack of a sense of belonging, personal hardships, challenges in school and community, and their desires for better lives for themselves ricocheted from their stories.</p>

My ethnography begins providing its bibliographical, historical and geographic frameworks along the methodological issues in Chapter I. There, I outline the most explicit phenomena of postsocialism in Gjirokastër city, the introduction of private vehicles and private immobile property and their relationship with the radical transformations of the urban topography. This city today gradually centralises the road infrastructure, reflecting and facilitating the respective postsocialist social centralisation of spatial mobility and the increasing impact of the cross-border network on the social life of the city. The thesis continues in Chapter II with the history of motor-roads in Albania, with particular focus on the relationship between highways and modernisation during socialism and the paradox relationship between society and these infrastructures. During socialism Albanians had to build roads, but they were not able to use them, a process that paved in fact the way for the postsocialist social perceptions of roads and automobility. The main ethnographic and synchronic part begins in Chapter III and continues in Chapters IV and V where I study how the particular cross-border road network is perceived in postsocialist Gjirokastër, while I discuss its social agency after 1990. In Chapter III I focus on the contemporary road mythology in the city and I discuss it in reference other motifs of road mythology that are available in the bibliography. Chapters IV and V are the most important for the argument of the thesis as I emphasise the two most comprehensive road myths of the contemporary socio-cultural condition in Albania and I talk about their relationship with the actual materiality of that infrastructure in reference to the material dimensions of globalisation and transnationalism. In Chapter IV I present the politico-economic asymmetries of postsocialist capitalism in Albania as they are formed dialectically in the material and social constructions of Kakavije-Gjirokastër. In Chapter V, I continue with the dialectical scheme focusing on the social and material articulations of this transnationalism and fluidity from below, with focus on the ontological and material extension of the road: the houses built by migrants. There I show how the super-fluid and asymmetrical global relationships of the postsocialist transition are being familiarised and to a certain degree absorbed within the intimate material entity of the house, via the same road which incorporates and facilitates the international dependency of the society to the migratory process. The last chapter (VI) presents my conclusions emphasising the relationship between anthropology and roads, locating the current ethnography on the wider theoretical discussions on automobility infrastructures, space, time and scale.

<p> This dissertation examines digitally-mediated identity and community construction through the lens of the Otherkin, a group of several thousand people who identify as other-than-human. They recognize their biological humanness, but nonetheless experience non-human memories, urges, and sensations. I argue the Otherkin characterize a larger shift in body-identification that is underway in many industrialized countries, away from bounded, biologically defined bodies and toward a more plastic, negotiable type of embodiment I am calling <i>open-bodied identification</i>, evidenced in growing numbers of people identifying as trans*, nonbinary, fluid, and neurodiverse. </p><p> Otherkin experience can be understood as a form of animism, yet it arises out of a post-Enlightenment paradigm that rejects the infrastructural elements needed for animist thought (e.g. magic, spirits, kinship with natural elements). The industrialized West simply does not have the cultural vocabulary to comprehend the virtuality that is animist experience. What it <i>does</i> have are the virtualities of language and of Internet technology. Therefore, departing from conceptions of the body as disciplined citizen-subjectivity or an embodied politics, I approach the human body as a media platform, mediating a Self. I offer the theoretical and heuristic <i>spectrum of virtuality</i>&mdash;a sliding situation of being-in-the-Internet, between poles of the corporeal and the digital&mdash;as a way of tracing this Self-mediation, and through the virtualities of Internet space and language, I propose an experience of animism that is legible to the West, because it is articulated through its own tools. </p><p> The Otherkin experience an incongruence, i.e. "misfit" in the relationship between their corporeal bodies and their Selves, so they turn to Internet technologies to facilitate an "alignment" between the two. This dissertation traces Otherkin engagement with the techno-virtuality afforded by the Internet, along the spectrum of virtuality&mdash;through chat forums, personal blogs, 3D virtual worlds, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit&mdash;troubling conventional notions about our relationships with the virtual, our understandings of the Self, and what it means to be a human. Analyzing the Otherkin use of these technologies sheds light on the ways in which we all work to understand ourselves through the animist virtuality of the Internet.</p><p>

<p> A central feature of Christianity is the observable historical fact that the gospel of Jesus travels across cultural and geographic boundaries, influencing and transforming each new culture and place it touches. Postcolonial migration, urbanization, and the simultaneous development of global communication and transportation technologies have radically increased the frequency and duration of cross-cultural contact worldwide. </p><p> This study explores hybrid identity construction in a multicultural church in the Paris Region in order to understand the influence of the gospel within transnational French-speaking networks. I found that French hegemony, historically rooted in the colonial project, contributes both to the cohesion of multicultural churches and to the cross-cultural spread of the gospel within French-speaking networks. </p><p> Cultural hybrids serve as bridge people within transcultural, transnational, French-speaking networks. They maintain identities and social networks on both sides of given cultural, linguistic, geographic, and national frontiers. Unique hybrid identities offer equally unique opportunities to influence for Christ on both sides of a given boundary. </p><p> Cultural hybridity can be a privileged in-between space where the distinct nature of Christian faith becomes manifest. When observing one&rsquo;s original culture as an outsider and taking on a new culture as an insider, both cultures are relativized. This critical posture unmasks totalistic ideologies and sends the cultural hybrid in search of a coherent identity, which participants found in Christ and his church. </p><p> While transnational French-speaking networks and cultural hybridity contribute providentially to the spread of the gospel, they can also be pursued as strategic resources for the mission enterprise. Transnational French-speaking social links can be intentionally followed across missional boundaries. These networks take many forms, each pregnant with unique opportunities. Cultural hybrids can lead strategically between diverse peoples for specific missional purposes within transcultural and transnational French-speaking networks. Hybrid leadership stands on a two-way bridge, bringing diverse peoples across in both directions for reconciliation, for cross-cultural collaboration, and to announce the good news where Jesus is not yet known.</p><p>

This practice-based research investigates floor-based living, focusing upon the realm of Korean everyday life. My particular concern is with the relation of the body to domestic space through memorised rituals, such as cleaning, polishing and removing shoes. The thesis asks the question: how does space determine and respond to such repetitive activity? It traces how the spatial typology of the floor, so important for Korean architecture, has been transformed by changes in such domestic activities. I present a series of design responses that draw upon everyday domestic performance, addressing a number of issues such as ritual, trace and materiality. By developing a spatial practice focusing on the ondol (traditional Korean floor heating) and the dot-jari (floor mat), this research explores territory that is un-theorised and underdeveloped as a subject in a Korean contemporary design context. The floor is a way to explore the wider role of ritual and trace in the construction of symbolic space, and is central to the Korean cultural and spatial identity. My research therefore explores floor-based living as a manifestation of a social practice: one that has spatial consequences. The Korean expression of ilsang ei eisik (everyday ritual) is defined here as a bodily-embedded activity that is inherent within the culture. A series of my spatial installations, such as Trace of Ritual Ceremony (2014), Beyond the Boundary (2015), Invisible Space (2015) and Spatial Extension (2016), deal with issues of transience, warmth, comfort and tactility, locating my everyday performance in architecture or public space. The gathering of dispersed visual research materials is a significant part of my methodology, and the research has involved compiling and editing images into the thesis in order for it to be conceived as a visual archive.