This dissertation develops an overdeterminist transnational feminist approach to discourse analysis—transnational feminist literacy practices—to interrogate current approaches to women and development and women's empowerment in particular. This methodology builds on transnational feminist and post-development approaches in order to challenge the developmentalism that sustains transnational inequalities. However, both transnational feminist and post-development approaches, despite their persistent critique, share with the mainstream developmentalist approach highly essentialized visions of women and economy that make it difficult to develop alternative strategies to transform transnational inequalities. In order to continue a direct challenge to developmentalism, I first reformulate an approach developed by a transnational feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty by drawing on overdeterminist theories, namely, anti-essentialist Marxist theory of class, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and discourse theory. Through the lens provided by this reformulated approach I then identify economic and power essentialisms and other features that harbor transnational inequalities in two different articulations of women, empowerment and development, examine the mechanisms and consequences of these essentialisms and illuminate possibilities, diverse economies and unconscious desire, which are not visible within Foucauldian post-development critiques. By re-articulating empowerment with women and development, this dissertation offers a methodology to construct an alternative transnational feminist political imaginary that may function as a nodal point which will create and sustain conditions of existence for communal transnational feminist praxis on multiple scales and in multiple locations. To outline one dimension of its productivity this dissertation concludes with an exploration of its pedagogical implications for a Northern university context.

In a dissertation about museums on the American frontier in the early 19th century, I trace the demise of scientific cabinets and the accompanying rise of popular, pseudo-educational entertainments. Though I have written principally about Cincinnati between the years 1820 and 1830, I have also examined other Ohio museums operating in this decade and the cabinet of curiosities exhibited by General William Clark in St. Louis. I conclude that western museums in general gave way to dazzling but suspicious displays because these latter were far more profitable than scientific cabinets and because the promoters of popular entertainment were more interested in attracting audiences than were men of science in the West. In following the disintegration of scientific cabinets, I focus particularly on various museum efforts to attract public attention to systematized displays of western natural history and culture. The Western Museum in Cincinnati probably owned the nation's most extensive collection of regional specimens in the 1820s and 30s but its displays were not profitable enough to keep the institution in business. In the hopes of resuscitating the museum's fortunes, the owner of the museum built optical “machines” and cosmoramas that offered visitors a grander setting in which to behold pictures of local landmarks and local people. These were moderately popular. I show that their most successful incarnations succeeded by affording visitors images of aristocratic splendor; these provided the museum's customers with a flattering context for self-evaluation. I also show that the success of these exhibitions depended on the precision with which the museum's artists could copy nature. Ultimately, I argue, this enthusiasm for the accurate copy expressed itself in the wildly profitable household goods marketplace of the 1850s in which mechanically reproduced items were prized over all things handmade. In the latter chapters of my dissertation, I show how the Western Museum restored itself to prosperity by staging exhibits that provided visitors with a sharp, critical view of landscape and culture in the West. The criticism was directed by Frances Trollope, a recent immigrant to Cincinnati, who employed her children, their drawing instructor, and the sculptor Hiram Powers to construct painted, mechanized visions of the spiritual condition of western citizens. My dissertation shows that the windfall generated by Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1831) was anticipated by the success of her “Invisible Girl” and her “Infernal Regions,” shown at the Western Museum in Cincinnati between 1828 and 1830. I argue that these exhibits succeeded so well because, like her books, they proposed a drastic but resonant vision of life in the West in which the coarseness of local manners, religious customs, western art and nature itself in the Ohio Valley was indignantly denounced. Trollope's Infernal Regions was profitable enough to be copied by the other contemporary museum in Cincinnati; it was also recast in panoramic facsimile in St. Louis, and eventually transported, intact, in 1839, to the City Saloon on Broadway, in lower Manhattan.

This dissertation looks at the spatial strategies which people enact in their daily lives and which, in turn, become part of the sociocultural and historical context of their existence. It examines this nexus, which conjoins human behavior with the physical world, in the context of an urban built environment located in Europe during a period of intense social and political change early in the twentieth century. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on life in one part of Berlin—Moabit—during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), drawing on historical data and life histories I gathered from people who lived there during that period. The chapters which make up the first part of this study explore historical documents and studies to establish that Moabit was home to a heterogenous urban population and to sketch out the social profile of this population. The assertion that Moabit was socially heterogeneous is in direct opposition to popular and scholarly stereotypes of the area as a working-class district. The contradiction between this stereotype and how people talk about Moabit in their life stories gives rise to questions about how places gain reputations and how we think and talk about places. The second part of the dissertation is ethnographic and plumbs personal narratives to show how different place-related practices contributed to an urban heterogeneity that was sociohistorically specific to the Weimar period. It opens with a look at what we can learn from the different ways in which people talk about the place named Moabit in their life histories. Ensuing chapters reveal that people's construction and practice of place were intimately involved with their sense of social identity, both integral components of and contributors to a system of social relations which set the working and middle classes in opposition. Further, spatial strategies varied within both these groups as well, most clearly along gender and political fines and in ways indicative of attitudes towards social change and modernity. Finally, the life histories allow us to trace how such practices of differentiating urban place developed through the socialization of children and youth. In conclusion, this work returns to an examination of the importance of place as a cultural construct in Weimar Berlin, by looking at the value placed on being sedentary. I argue that the ideal of sedentarism was a cultural response to the contemporary economic and social stresses experienced by Berliners, but was rooted in politically-loaded practices of the modern era in Europe as well. During the Weimar Republic this cultural construct provided a vehicle for place-making practices which concurrently addressed people's material and social needs.

This work explores the impact of the “vanishing Indian” paradigm on historical, museological, and anthropological interpretations of Native American Indian peoples along the Quinneticook—the middle Connecticut River Valley of west-central Massachusetts. The seventeenth century documentation of the region’s Agawam, Nonotuck, Pocumtuck, Quaboag, Sokoki, and Woronoco people is surprisingly dense, but their presence after that time is poorly understood. Sophisticated systems for reckoning and maintaining Indigenous governance, trade, kin relations, and inter-tribal alliances, and various means of preserving localized knowledges, were in operation long before colonial settlement, and survived after colonization. The records of this activity and the movements of Native families to other locales were obscured, during the nineteenth century, by local White historians. Accurate understandings of local Native histories have subsequently been difficult to reconstruct, given the lack of ethnographic information in Euro-American records, the flawed representations of Native people and events in local town histories, and the failure to recognize the lineal descendants of middle Connecticut River Valley Native families among today’s Western Abenaki populations. I suggest that the “invisibilizing” of the valley’s Native peoples is a trick of misdirection, caused, in part, by the research interests of three local collectors: geologist Edward Hitchcock Jr. of Amherst College, antiquarian George Sheldon of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and zoologist Harris Hawthorne Wilder of Smith College. These men unearthed numerous Native individuals from local gravesites, and amassed thousands of artifacts, portraying the skeletal remains of dead Indians as “real,” while representing their descendants as “unreal” remnants of the presumably more authentic Native past. This project, therefore, discusses the ways in which local Native histories and oral traditions were marginalized, ignored or colonized, at the same time that Native bodies were being exoticized, fetishized, and commodified. One means of decolonizing the valley’s Native history is a four-part process that: first, reveals the discursive processes that disconnected living Native peoples from their own histories; second, investigates the physical interferences of archaeological collectors; third, articulates the persistence of Native families over time by linking oral traditions, family names, and material evidence; and fourth, begins to repair some of the damage done by restoring and repatriating the scattered archaeological collections. To illustrate the impact of misrepresentation on local Native histories, I discuss the appearances, in various documents over time, of one local Native family lineage (from Shattoockquis to Sadochques to Msadoques to Sadoques), and their repeated efforts to make their presence known to Deerfield historians. This case study directs attention to some of the Indigenous knowledges and territorial understandings that could be used to construct more accurate regional narratives. In sum, this work aims to demonstrate how decolonizing methodologies can reveal heretofore missing connections, while establishing a more equitable social venue within which the real work of restorative history can begin.

This study combines interviews and participant-observation to explore the negotiation of gender, race, and class in three youth cultural projects: Puerto Rican Wannabes, Goths, and evangelical Christians. While these projects seem very different, they are all examples of local identities mobilized to solve a range of shared problems. These strategies, beyond the personal and idiosyncratic, are all about gender, race, and class locations. They allow young people to navigate gender, race, and class expectations by manipulating or transgressing established gender, race, and class boundaries. Despite variations in these strategies, each project is hemmed in by the intractability of inequality. Thus, these projects show us the possibilities and limitations of intersectionality as it is experienced on the ground.

The purpose of this study is to describe and interpret young children's shared narrative construction and story acting practices within an early childhood visual arts program. Narrative and story acting offer children unique opportunities to explore ideas, thoughts, and questions. Listening to children and trying to understand their perspectives, thought processes, and experiences is a necessary and vital way of illuminating our understanding of curriculum practice. Based on the researcher's kindergarten art workshop program, this inquiry specifically addresses: (a) What is the context (the structure and organization) of the shared narrative process to be studied? (b) What are the major themes that emerge in the children's small group narrative? (c) What does this collection of narratives tell about what these particular kindergarten students feel and think about their world? This study provided an ethnographic-type account of the young children's co-constructed narratives in response to works of art. The study included 18 children from a private Montessori school in the northeast. The kindergartners worked in three separate small groups of six. Each group took part in 9 sessions. The children ranged in age from 4.9 to 5.9 years old. The primary methodology is that of participant observation. The design of this project is exploratory, descriptive, and interpretive in nature. The data in this study was gathered via audiotape and observational field notes. Data analysis primarily consisted of reviewing field notes to identify themes, patterns, events, and actions in the children's narrative activities as well as to generate working hypotheses. The application of the coding system by Wolf (2002) aided classifying co-constructed conversational sequences in order to allow the frequencies of each category to be calculated and compared. Analysis consists of the three aspects of data transformation advanced by Wolcott (1994). This ethnographic research emphasized the importance of listening to children's voices.

Deploying a surplus-labor theoretical framework, I incorporate results from interviews with South Asian families in Chicago to investigate how immigrants juggle and assume a variety of revenue positions: in nuclear and extended families, as full-time wage earners, as home-based independent producers, in retail stores, in 'family councils,' etc. Family councils will be defines as an important institution inside immigrant households in which potentially all family members partake, making a series of financial and non-financial decisions that affect all the class and nonclass processes in which household members participate. In addition, the chapter on the household also explores a class analysis of extended families, a particularly important institution for US-bound immigrants since the majority of contemporary entrants arrive on family reunification visas. By examining how immigrants actively seek out multiple revenue positions, not only does this thesis map their survival strategies but also emphasizes changes in the acceptable living standard and more specifically the private value of labor power as reasons why immigrants take on new economic positions. This thesis examines the evolution of the immigrant's private value of labor power, and the many effects generated for immigrant-employing capitalists, non-immigrant-employing capitalists, immigrant households, and non-immigrant consumers of commodities produced by immigrants, and, of course, for immigrants themselves.

This qualitative study explored how people in rural Nepal understand and make meaning of development, Bikas, at the local level. In Nepal, the terms "development," Bikas, and "modernization," Adhunikaran, are often used interchangeably. At the community level, the experience of change is how most people describe their perception of development. Open ended in-depth interviews and participant observations were the primary methods used. The research questions engaged the participants in reflecting about past and present experiences with development in their community, especially in how they have observed their quality of life change. Additionally, the members of the Mothers Group, Ama Toli, were also interviewed. The members were interviewed for two reasons, (1) to better understand the role of women and their experiences with development and (2) to develop a case study to understand how community based organizations can be agents of change. The findings showed that local people have recognized that development does not necessarily mean good changes for everyone. The rich narratives provided a glimpse into how different generations and gender experience development. These findings have major implications for sustainable development in rural communities. How individuals or groups of individual experience development will have an impact on how they participate, support or resist future initiatives. Additionally, what each group believes the gains and losses to be is important for those working as change agents. The study raises to the surface the experiences and views of those whose views and opinions are generally not included even though they are the supposed recipients of development. The development discourse focuses on the critical need for sustainability. This study affirms that for development to be sustainable all members of the community must have a voice and role in determining the community's course of change/development.

This is a dissertation that examines peace. In particular this dissertation will explore the paradox of peace on the island of Cyprus, a paradox that has continued to challenge both international and local peace activists in their pursuits to build peace. For how does one build peace when it seems that peace already exists? Yet, how can peace truly exist within the context of a stalemated, decades-old protracted ethnic conflict on a politically and ethnically divided island? The paradox of the Cyprus conflict being deemed a peaceful conflict only begins to touch upon the problems and limitations inherent in building peace on the island. This dissertation explores what those problems are through the eyes of local peacebuilders, and argues for a more anthropologically informed peace research in order to help surpass peacebuilding limitations in Cyprus and in other post-conflict zones around the world. This dissertation explores how peacebuilding theories and methodologies in Cyprus have and have not shifted within the wake of the opening of the Green Line and the subsequent sociopolitical changes on the island. It explores the changes in methods and theories of peacebuilding on the island by focusing on the activities and perspectives of local Cypriots involved in peacebuilding. In particular this dissertation describes the historical context in which bicommunal peacebuilding came about as a strategy; it explores the principles and goals that defined the particular kind of peacebuilding that emerged in Cyprus; it describes who was involved in the local world of peacebuilding; and it explores the multiple changes to the island that have also affected and changed the nature of peacebuilding – and it does so particularly through trying to understand how local peacebuilders have experienced and conceptualized those changes. Through the extended interviews and observations of the networks and activities of peacebuilding that I conducted in Nicosia, I argue that we can learn a great deal about the complex ways that peacebuilding is experienced by the intervened, and that those experiences can help contribute to the transformation of the doing of peacebuilding in the future.

Bloom (1981) argued that English has a salient counterfactual marker--the subjunctive to express hypothetical and implicational meanings whereas Chinese has no distinct lexical, grammatical or intonational device to signal entry into the counterfactual realm. He suggested that the lack of a linguistic means to mark counterfactuality in Chinese influences the cognitive behavior of speakers of Chinese: they are less likely to reason counterfactually. To test his hypothesis, he presented stories featured by counterfactuality to both English and Chinese speakers and compared their responses to counterfactual questions. The overall result of his experiment was that his American English subjects scored significantly higher than Chinese subjects. Bloom interpreted his findings as evidence for the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language influences thought and linguistic differences entail corresponding cognitive differences. This dissertation intends to demonstrate, through a survey of literature and interviewing of native Chinese informants, that although Chinese does not have a syntactic means equivalent to the subjunctive in English to mark counterfactuality, it does have lexical devices to express hypothetical and implicational meanings. In addition, there are contextualization cues such as stress, pitch and intonation that make counterfactuality explicit. The fact that some Chinese were reluctant to respond to Bloom's hypothetical questions as he had expected may not be a reflection of differences in cognitive processes, but rather a reflection of differences in cultural values. Data collected for this dissertation also indicate that differences in linguistic categorization are not necessarily paralleled by cognitive differences. The educational implication of this dissertation is: to be a competent speaker in any language it is not sufficient only to learn linguistic forms. It is essential to learn the culture and social norms of a particular society and the use of language in contexts: topic, setting and participants in order to communicate appropriately and effectively.