This study is an exploration of the lesbian subculture in Russia focusing in particular on the subculture as a unique heterogeneous space of social interaction and cultural production that is not self contained or isolated from mainstream society, but incorporates a variety of cultural flows and traditions that are a part of Russian mainstream culture, other Russian subcultures, or global cultural flows. Some of these cultural flows and traditions are more compatible than other ones. The increasingly globalized images and ideas of what a gay and lesbian community is, or perhaps should be like, are only partially compatible with contemporary reality in Russia. The high value placed on visibility and explicitly political, even radical activism, in gay and lesbian subcultures in the West, must in Russia be reconciled not only with the totalitarian past, and the increasingly authoritarian present, but also with the traditions and practices that developed as a response to the repressive regime and enabled people to live and even thrive within it. Using private spaces as public space, and public space as private space established a practice of multilayered spaces that are continuously maintained through social inclusion and exclusion, visibility and invisibility. However, the subculture is not only an intersection of external cultural flows and traditions, it also has it’s own unique traditions, knowledges and practices. Poetry, music, literature and art form the backbone of the flow of activities within the subculture. Visual and grammatical cues, styles, jokes and lesbian genders are integral aspects of the subculture as it is continuously renegotiated by its participants also on an individual level.. The study is based on fieldwork, participant observation and interviews, mainly in Moscow, and to some extent in St Petersburg, during 2005 with recurring visits during 2006 and 2007.

This ethno-historical undertaking captures the story of the implementation of one major US city's first and only single-sex public school and the consequent shaping of the school culture according to its unique context. A comprehensive literature review demonstrates race, socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, and other contextual factors are important considerations when probing educational access and achievement and the development of school cultures. Moreover, principals -- their individual attributes and the cultures they create -- are key to understanding and interrogating equitable practices in schools. Findings substantiate the complex interface between historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts, stakeholder decision making in the ethnographic present, and the enactment and negotiation school culture vis-à-vis the intersectionalities of student identities. Findings suggest the conditions that facilitated the high achievement of the students in this study might be transferred under the right conditions including: a balance of strong leadership and principal and teacher autonomy; the enduring belief that any student can and will learn; a rigorous, non-segregated, college prep program, and; an informal curriculum that prepares students for academic and professional cultures. Findings also bring to the fore important considerations that must be addressed by practitioners and policymakers alike; specifically, students' difficulties concerning the "burden of acting white" and the "burden of acting straight." Finally, findings from this study suggest single-sex public options can be done legitimately and effectively but additional safeguards must be implemented by the US Department of Education to ensure both male and female students' civil rights are protected. Additionally, while some magnet schools such as the one studied are local sites of resistance that play a liberatory role for those distinctively involved, one cannot surmise that such local efforts -- which may be viewed by some as a site of relative privilege -- can alone overcome the serious striations that exist in the greater society. / text

This study provided an in-depth and immersive field study of the process of protective order hearings. The goal of this study was to examine the communication taking place in the courtroom on Protective Order (PO) day to provide a foundation for uncovering discourse dynamics that affect the experiences of applicants and respondents, as well as the role that legal decision makers play in the process of issuing protective orders for cases of family violence. There are numerous ways in which communication defines and affects the protective order process in the courtroom on PO Day. For the purpose of this study, the focus consisted of communication surrounding 1.) The institutionalized process (role of gatekeepers, access to representation by respondents, and the physical structure/environment of the courtroom---open, public, and fast-paced nature of the docket process), and 2.) Communication as the primary means of evidence (how communication constitutes credibility and the fact that applicants must face their alleged batterer in order to obtain an order of protection). This study focused on viewing institutional discourse in protective order hearings that extends beyond the official legal record in order to broaden our understanding of legal behavior, family violence, and discursive characteristics of the Protective Order courtroom culture. The analysis consisted of macro (immersive ethnographic fieldwork and detailed observations) and micro approaches (Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis). The findings uncovered multiple layers of communication challenges that manifested themselves in all steps of the PO process. Environmental communication challenges were present from the moment applicants initiated the application process and continued through their respective hearings. The physical space presented challenges to access and representation, and the gatekeepers provided differing (and sometimes unequal) levels of support for the applicants and respondents. The functional communication challenges stemmed from the constraints of the legal language to meet the necessary burden of proof for cases of family violence. Implications for future research by communication scholars, as well as for practitioners who work with victims and alleged batterers of family violence, are discussed. / text

Much of the research done on religious gays and lesbians has focused upon the cognitive strategies they employ in order to negotiate conflicts experienced between their religious and sexual identities. In contrast to taking a psychological approach, this study focuses upon the role of social context in helping gay and lesbian Catholics to successfully negotiate their religious and sexual identities. Using participant-observation data of a small gay and lesbian Catholic community, the Holy Cross Community (HCC), as well as from interviews with ten of its members, I examine the role of the interpersonal context in identity processes. I outline the way that members create a community of inclusion, a community of affection, and a community of shared responsibility, which helps HCC's members in successfully enacting both their religious and sexual identities within a social context. In the discussion, I explain how HCC provides a place where members experience a sense of normalcy and where they worship in an environment that does not challenge their identities. From a social movements perspective, this in turn has a diminishing effect on the impetus for HCC's members to effect change on their behalf.

There have been fewer studies performed to understand real-world software-testing practice than for other areas of software engineering, such as software requirements, design and development. In particular, surprisingly little is known about global software-testing practices---the practice of outsourcing testing activities to a company offshore---which is currently a large industry and is continuing to grow rapidly. Hence, it is important to study this practice. Moreover, research and anecdotal records provide evidence suggesting that cultural factors greatly impact aspects of the global software-engineering practice (e.g., quality and productivity). The evidence indicates that culture appears to have a greater influence on global software-engineering practice than originally envisioned. Thus, it is important to understand culture's influence particularly on the global-software testing practice. Most of the global software practice studies have used the cultural-dimensions (e.g., Hofstede's dimensions) approach to understand culture’s influence on this practice. However, such dimensional perspectives of culture significantly limit the meaning of culture. Hence, it is important to study culture's influence on global software-testing practice by adopting a non-dimensional perspective of culture so that hidden cultural facets can be identified and uncovered. In this dissertation research, I conducted three ethnographically-informed studies at different Indian vendor organizations, who provided software-testing services to their respective clients in a global setting, to better understand what and how cultural factors influence the global software-testing practice. I used the “culture as models” perspective, adapted from the cultural anthropologist Bradd Shore, to analyze the data from these studies. The dissertation provides a detailed description of the study design, the data analysis, and the insights that emerged from the study. The study provided insights into four embedded cultural models that have emerged from this practice---Agreement, Trust, Flexibility, and Global Software Delivery Cultural Models -- which are described and discussed in detail. This dissertation makes the following contributions. First, it describes a framework that facilitates conducting culture-based studies in the global software- engineering domain. Second, it exposes significant cultural models that are embodied in the specific global software-testing practices investigated to better understand the affordances and clashes of cultural facets of such practices more widely. Third, it presents a ``thick description'' of the role and interplay of these cultural facets in the global software-testing practices investigated. Finally, based on the study insights, the dissertation provides implications for practice and future research.

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a sport on the rise within the field of martial arts in which competitors fight in a cage and utilize full-contact movements using their fists, elbows, and knees as well as kicks, other strikes, and submission techniques to defeat their opponents. MMA has become a modern social movement in combat sports that has become globalized in a short time and is the fastest growing sport in the world. MMA encompasses disciplines from various martial arts and Olympic sports such as boxing, kickboxing, karate, kempo, jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, tae kwon do, wrestling, sambo, judo, etc. The rounds are five minutes in length and there are typically three rounds in a contest, unless it is a championship fight in which case the contest lasts five rounds. The aim of this study is to analyze the bodily constructions and productions within the MMA culture and especially the constructed human violence associated with the sport. Based on autoethnographic participation in three Swedish MMA clubs, as well as shorter fieldwork case studies conducted in Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Brazil, and the US, this thesis investigates the interrelationship between MMA, excitement, sensationalism, and the spectacular physical violence that stains the participants’ bodies. Concepts taken from performance ethnography are applied to an analysis of what is reconstructed bodily. This is followed by an analysis that attempts to outline what body-violence means and how this understanding of the informants’ bodies, as well as of the researcher’s body-knowledge, reconstructs the definitions of MMA. A phenomenological approach to the concept of fighting is also included in relation to the MMA landscape. Thus, I present how the body learns the cultural enactments in fighting and how these forces shape the fighters’ gender, habitus, and way of resisting the discourse of critical opinions on MMA practice. Moreover, in trying to grasp the inner sense of MMA, I argue that the physical phenomenon of MMA is dependent on an intersubjective engagement and on the control of one’s inner coordination, which teaches a fighter how to deal with power, pain, suffering, aggression, and adrenaline flows.   Keywords: abject, adrenaline, anthropology, athletes, autoethnography, body, combat arts, culture, desire, embodied, enculturation, ethnology, fieldwork, field-making, flow, fighting, full-contact, gender, harm, homosociality, intercultural, interobject, intersubjectivity, martial arts, materiality, masculinity, MMA, method, pain, personal, performance, performativity, phenomenology, pleasure, posthuman, postmodern, power, ritual, risk-taking, rush, self-reflexive, sportive, sport, stained, struggle, suffering, thrill, UFC, violence.

Nicaragua has undergone several major upheavals in the last three decades that have fundamentally shaped and reshaped society. The Sandinista government (1979-1990) ended with the election of Violeta Chamorro in 1990 that ushered in 16 years of neoliberal government. In 2006 former president and leader of the current Sandinista Party, Daniel Ortega, was reelected to the presidency. At every step, education has been an essential component of the struggle to shape the state according to certain ideological precepts. Each administration has produced its own educational reforms that are ostensibly in the name of improving quality, but more precisely about developing schools consistent with the philosophy of the ruling classes. In this study, I seek to examine the Nicaraguan educational system as a site of multiple global and local processes that interact to produce lived experiences for teachers and students in and out of the classroom. In examining the most recent iteration of educational reforms and their effects in the communities of San Marcos, Estelí and Bluefields, I ask the questions: What role or function does education play in society? How does it “work” to (in most cases) normalize certain values, ideas and beliefs? And what forms do resistance and acquiescence to these processes take in an educational system like that of Nicaragua that has numerous internal and external forces attempting to condition it in contrasting ways? Major themes that emerge from the research include the prominence of social, historical and geographical factors that people use to fashion their language and perceptions of the world and the dominant influence of local power relations in conditioning people’s behaviors and actions. Analysis of responses to the current educational reform efforts demonstrates that local social connections and networks are paramount to studies of ideology and hegemony. The overriding message from Nicaragua is that chronic underfunding and constant reform have weakened the ability of the educational system to disseminate ideas, beliefs and values, particularly when they run counter to those of other powerful institutions in society. / text

My dissertation analyzes the architectural voice of the Islamic bourgeoisie by evaluating contemporary government-funded urban renewal projects in Turkey. This topic also discusses the counter voices' response to the urban renewal programs which sparked the Gezi Park protests of summer 2013. My dissertation explores how the AK Party is framing Ottoman history and remaking the Turkish urban landscape by urban development projects. I spell out specific ways in which Erdogan uses cultural capital of the Ottoman past to frame Erdoganian Neo-Ottomanism. My work investigates the AK Party's Islamic form of neoliberalism with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. Specifically I look at the application of Istanbul as the European Capital of Culture (ECoC), an urban renewal project by the AK Party in the Ankara neighborhood of Hamamonu, and the protests at Istanbul's Gezi Park and Ankara's Ulucanlar prison complex.

This dissertation focuses on minoritized youth digital literacy practice and participation, drawing on an 8-month video ethnography in a 6th grade language arts classroom with primarily bilingual Mexican-American students in a Southwestern public middle school. The case study utilized ethnographic and video analysis methods to examine interactions through, with, and around laptops in a one-to-one laptop classroom. Multiple simultaneous videos of student onscreen activity and webcams paired with a tripod-mounted camera captured whole class and small group interactions. Students, sometimes in different classrooms, were captured communicating online while interacting with their peers around them. Interview data with individuals and small groups focus on out of school digital media use and involvement in participatory cultures. From the large corpus of data, a few literacy events were picked out to represent broader trends among students. I argue that informal digital literacy practices of one group of girls playing a fashion themed massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) were more complex than formal, assigned practice. Like many of their more affluent peers at other schools, the girls harnessed the affordances of digital media to connect with interest-driven online/offline communities, whereas their classmates generally did not connect deeply with participatory online cultures. In doing so, the focus peer group co-constructed a classroom underlife (Goffman, 1961) that simultaneously created space for their sub rosa (Gilmore, 1986) digital literacy practices while resisting without disrupting the official curriculum or their performance as successful students. I conclude that designers of learning environments, teachers included, can foster literacy development by utilizing technology to draw flexibly on student digital funds of knowledge (González et al., 2006) while providing a basis for broader social participation.

The Petroglyph National Monument Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Project had two primary goals. One was the identification of those American Indian Tribes, Pueblos, and Spanish heritage groups who wanted to participate in a long -term consultation process with the National Park Service about the management of the new Petroglyph National Monument located outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The second goal was to document the cultural resource concerns of the Native Americans and the Spanish heritage people, so that protection of these cultural resources could be put into the General Management Plan the National Park Service (NPS) is developing for the Petroglyph National Monument.