Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 355-364). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S. in Community Research and Action)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2007. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Bordados e bordadeiras, um estudo etnográfico sobre a produção artesanal de bordados em Caicó/RN tem objetivo investigar como o bordado uma prática artesanal, doméstica, feminina permite acessar questões de ordem social, econômica, histórica e cultural de uma determinada região do nordeste brasileiro. As redes sociais, tecidas em torno da produção do bordado, são hábeis para recriar relações várias em função das necessidades, das influências, das confluências, das apropriações e das transformações em torno da prática artesanal. Por isso, esta tese se dedica a apresentar, descrever e analisar o bordado como um eixo das relações sociais, fornecendo, ainda, pistas para novas leituras sobre uma região estigmatizada pelas ideias que cercam a sua geografia e sua história. Para investigar esse processo, a etnografia foi utilizada como método (incluindo: entrevistas, foto-entrevistas, acompanhamento do processo de produção e de comercialização de bordados). E, a fim de percorrer as múltiplas relações que se tecem nesse contexto, foram priorizados: (a) apresentação da região e da cidade, (b) descrição dos bordados, (c) elaboração da rede composta pelas bordadeiras e (d) bordados em circulação. / Embroidery and embroider, an ethnographic study on the craft production of embroidery in Caicó/RN aims at investigating how the embroidery, a handcraft, domestic and female practice, allows the approaches of questions about certain part of the Brazilian northeast regarding its social order, its economy, its history and its cultural factors. The social networks, woven around the embroidery production, are capable to recreate several relationships regarding the needs, the influences, the confluences, the appropriations and the transformations around the handmade practice. Therefore, this thesis has the purpose of presenting, describing and analyzing the embroidery as a spindle of the social relationships, which also provides leads to new readings about a stigmatized region regarding the ideas related to its geography and history. To investigate this process, the ethnographic method was used (including: interviews, photographic-interviews, monitoring of the production process as well as the embroidery commercialization). In order to wander the multiple relationships that weave in this context, the following has been prioritized: (a) the presentation of the region and the city, (b) the description of the embroideries, (c) the elaboration of embroiders network and (d) the embroidery in circulation.

Masters of Art / The aim of this thesis is to conduct an ethnographic analysis of the traditional male circumcision intervention by government, through the Application of Health Standards in Traditional Circumcision Act, No 6 of 2001, of the Eastern Cape. More specifically, the thesis seeks to understand how different stakeholders respond to this intervention and what steps they take to indicate their responses. / South Africa

I led a participatory action research (PAR) project with the staff and homeless clients of Ahope Day Center in Asheville, North Carolina, which was meant to evaluate client satisfaction with services and attitudes about certain issues. Project is led by an inquiry group consisting of members of Ahope staff and Ahope clients. The project is a co-designed, co-implemented, and co-interpreted mixed-method evaluation of Ahope's services, client attitudes about education and the environment, client adaptive strategies, optimism levels, and a mapping of client daily routines. The data was collected through participant observation, document analysis, surveys, a listing activity, and informal interviews. Documents were coded using grounded theory and themes emerged related to the value of the intangibles of security, community, and ‘being seen' at Ahope while some suggestions were also made. Findings included client attitudes indicating the importance of the environment and education to clients, high optimism levels among clients, and a number of suggestions for the improvement of Ahope's services.

The translator’s workplace (TW) has undergone radical changes since microcomputers were introduced on the market and, as a result, digitization increased enormously. Existing translation-related technologies, such as machine translation (MT), were enhanced and others, such as translation memory (TM) systems, were developed. It is a noteworthy fact that implementing new translation-related technologies in the TW is done in various conditions according to specific goals that subsequently define new work conditions for translators. These new work conditions affect translators’ satisfaction with their job, and their satisfaction will influence career development and employee retention in the translation industry over the long term. In the past two decades, Language Service Providers (LSPs) have started integrating MT into TM systems to benefit from MT suggestions when TM is not helpful. Neither TM nor MT is unfamiliar to the translation industry, but the combination, i.e. TM+MT, is fairly new. So far, there have been few studies on translators’ satisfaction with TM+MT. This study consists of an ethnographic research project on seven translators in a Canada-based company where TM+MT is used. Observations, semi-structured interviews, and in-house document analysis have been used as data collection methods. The data obtained has been analyzed and discussed based on Rodríguez-Castro’s task satisfaction model (2011). This model addresses intrinsic and extrinsic sources of translators’ satisfaction with the activities they do in their job. Investigating the factors and variables of her model in the aforementioned company, I concluded that those sources of satisfaction cannot be considered separately from the job-context factors, such as the company’s policies in implementing TM+MT.

The aim of this study has been to explore how Ugandan pupils narrate themselves as learners within the mathematical classroom discourse and classroom but also as part of the school culture in the context of Uganda. Mathematical understanding and performance has been considered largely by policy makers and the wider public of critical concern to empower learners as future citizens, and for the advancement of local communities (United Nations, 2017). However, mathematical understanding encompassess more than the context of the mathematical classroom, thus, in this paper, an attempt is made to examine the narratives that motivates and shapes the pupils in their mathematical endeavors. Starting from a socio-political position, regards to the cultural, political and social context is taken. Hence, knowledge acquisition is seen as the product of discourses and the circumstances in which it is cultivated. The study was confined to a single classroom, with four pupils and the class teacher. Through micro-ethnographic methods, the study aimed to examine how these pupils positions themselves within the mathematical classroom, as pupils of today as well as adults of tomorrow. Methods for collecting data included semi-structured interviews, participatory observations and visual documentation through photography. The theoretical concepts applied in the process of analysis were: actual and designated identity (Sfard & Prusack, 2005a), and use value and exchange value (Black et.al., 2010). The pupils’ narratives show four main themes for basis of narratives: fear of corporal punishment, religious motivation, mathematical understanding, and the possibility of rewards for exceling. These four themes are acting interrelated, and exist in varying degrees within the pupils. The analysis of pupils’ narratives show that no single component is responsible for molding the pupils’ mathematical identities, but rather, that the cultural and social influences in their every-day-lives play paramount roles in shaping their narratives.

La collection « Terre Humaine » (1955-2015) dirigée par un géographe et explorateur français, Jean Malaurie, se présente comme un espace de diffusion d’idées, d'objets, et de pratiques permettant d’explorer, dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, la perméabilité des frontières du champ littéraire au contact de l’anthropologie et de la photographie. La diversité des profils des auteurs, des modes d’écriture, des espaces et des périodes, dissimule l’unité souterraine d’une aventure éditoriale à vocation universelle qui cherche à comprendre les populations les plus variées, à la fois dans le temps et dans l’espace, afin de percer les mystères de l’existence humaine. La mise en réseau de témoignages portant sur des sociétés dispersées à la surface de la planète engendre une vision parallèle de l’espace mondial. En écho avec l’aventure des Annales mais aussi avec le réalisme et le naturalisme du XIXe siècle, une réflexion initiale sur les modalités d’écriture en sciences sociales finit par donner naissance à une littérature ethnographique fondée sur l’exploration de modes de vie et de pensée de populations marginales à l’échelle du globe. L’ethnographie est envisagée non plus seulement comme méthode scientifique de collecte de données mais plus généralement comme un mode d’écriture textuel, visuel et audiovisuel narrant la métamorphose tragique de sociétés au contact d’une civilisation. / “Terre Humaine” Publishers’ Series (1955-2015), which is supervised by a French explorer and geographer, Jean Malaurie, may be examined as a heuristic space of diffusion of ideas, objects and practices to explore, in the 2nd half of the twentieth century, the tightness of the literary field in contact with anthropology and photography. The diversity of the authors’ backgrounds, writing genres, spaces and periods of time, masks the underground unity of an editorial and self-claimed universal enterprise which aims at understanding the most diverse populations, both in time and space, to uncover the mysteries of the human existence. Networking testimonials on societies scattered around the globe discloses a parallel worldview. In connection with the Annales review and the 19th century realism and naturalism, early reflections on writing in social sciences end up spawning an ethnographic literature grounded in exploring ways of living and thinking among marginalized groups worldwide. Ethnography is not anymore only considered as a scientific method to collect data but more broadly as a textual, visual and audiovisual writing genre relating the tragic metamorphosis of a society in contact with a civilization.

Black Eyez: Memoirs of a Revolutionary engages in an investigation of the performative relationship between race and color. It offers a review of the genesis of race as a political invention, to articulate the intersubjective relationship between Black Power ideology and the Black Aesthetic. By highlighting the historical recovery of Black subjectivity, I argue Black aestheticians produced a form of performative decolonization. I then suggest the use of ethnographic dramaturgy as both an informed approach to staging the self, as well as a space to offer my personal performance philosophy. The script "Sole/Daughter" is offered as an augmentation of The Revolutionary Theatre's paradigmatic assumptions.

This study aimed to answer these research questions: what role do transnational screen media play in how urban Indian children think about their culturally hybrid identities? In what ways does transnational screen media consumption influence these children's perceptions of their lived sociocultural realities? Using survey and ethnographic research methods comprising a survey for children, participant observation and in-depth interviews with children, and in-depth interviews with parents and teachers, the research for the study was conducted in Bangalore city in southern India. The study found that the children’s major socialization agents, i.e. the family, the school and the transnational screen media they consumed played an interrelational role in children’s formulating and negotiating their culturally hybrid identities. The implication of this finding is that as these children mature, they are challenged to exercise a critical reflexivity that may only reconcile the differences between their perceptions of mediated globalities and their lived sociocultural contexts uneasily, at the intersections of these children’s sociocultural identity markers. / Media & Communication