acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Sonita Singh

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered a geographic concentration of Type 2 Diabetes patients in 11 Southeastern states in the United States. Since its acknowledgement by the public health community, little has been done to address the rising rates of diabetes onset and resulting mortality. This thesis provides a medical anthropology analysis to the 'Belt' by critiquing secondary sources in order to construct a productive discussion on socio-medical contributors to Type 2 Diabetes. My thesis documents the numerous social, economic, political, historical, and medical barriers to health equality in the Southern United States and their influence in determining individual, community and population health. Additionally my thesis provides policy recommendations that if enacted, would dramatically equalize the United States health care system. By addressing a current public health crisis in the United States, my thesis provides necessary scholarship on health inequality in the 21st century.

Recent writing in the anthropology of affect and cognate fields has positioned hope as a useful category with which to examine socio-political life and formulate a political and theoretical response adequate to its form. This dissertation extends this endeavour by exploring the ‘hopeful projects' mothers and families undertake in order to secure their children's futures in contemporary Cape Town. Based on ethnographic research conducted with Black mothers between March and October 2018, I argue that the supposedly private maternal hopes my interlocutors hold are in fact indexical of the ways in which social inequality functions and becomes manifest in everyday life and care. Situated at the interface of embodied experience and political histories, their hopes are indicative of how liberal logics of selfextension, self-mastery, and self-maximisation are inhabited to produce alternative futures. At the same time, however, such hopes are continually undone by contexts of intractable structural violence and deprivation, reinvested into normative notions of kinship, domesticity, sexuality, and the body, or marshalled to perform reparative work that should properly fall under the purview of the state. In detailing the ways in which my interlocutors attempt to craft more capacious, more just, and more materially abundant futures for their children, I illustrate the affective entailments of life-building in post-Apartheid South Africa

This study offers an ethnographic account of the Brazilian protest movement that erupted in June of 2013. I conducted fieldwork in Rio during this time, including unstructured interviews, participant observation, unobtrusive observation, and collection of narratives to gain an understanding of what people living in Rio believe about these protests and social movements in general. The initial motivation for the protests was an increase in public transportation fare, but the movement quickly evolved into a fight for citizenship rights. With the upcoming mega-events in Rio (World Cup and Olympic Games), the city has spent billions of dollars on construction that many people think is unnecessary and ultimately useless. Brazil is a country rife with socioeconomic inequality, and many citizens lack access to having their basic needs met. Protesters in Rio argue that this money could be better spent on providing health care, education, and other fundamental necessities to the city’s population.

This study offers an ethnographic account of the Brazilian protest movement that erupted in June of 2013. I conducted fieldwork in Rio during this time, including unstructured interviews, participant observation, unobtrusive observation, and collection of narratives to gain an understanding of what people living in Rio believe about these protests and social movements in general. The initial motivation for the protests was an increase in public transportation fare, but the movement quickly evolved into a fight for citizenship rights. With the upcoming mega-events in Rio (World Cup and Olympic Games), the city has spent billions of dollars on construction that many people think is unnecessary and ultimately useless. Brazil is a country rife with socioeconomic inequality, and many citizens lack access to having their basic needs met. Protesters in Rio argue that this money could be better spent on providing health care, education, and other fundamental necessities to the city’s population.

The financial misconduct and corruption at the very top of the class system that in 2008 caused the collapse of the world economy saw no reaction from the criminal justice system. In contrast, the 2011 English Riots at the bottom rungs of society, estimated to have caused 200 million pounds of damages, produced a ruthless response from the judiciary where sentences were almost treble the usual rate. Politicians were quick to condemn the rioters as mere wanton criminals and framing their actions within a behavioural explanation calling for severe punishments. My thesis’s aim is to show that it was instead decades of neoliberal policies that pushed these people to vent their frustration through rioting. Their ensuing anomic ethic is understood by considering the rioters’ actions through the prism of both Strain Theory and Institutional Anomie Theory. To contextualise their place within today’s capitalist society I categorized them within an emerging social class: The Precariat. Through a qualitative analysis of 17 interviews’ extracts, all that transpired was their desires to be active consumers by grabbing what they could; the riots were merely an excuse to bypass the structurally imposed limits that stood before the desired higher social status. This research speaks of an increasingly unequal society, which positions individual economic success above collective well-being. These disturbances are symptoms of a deep seated malaise and of a stripped-down manifestation of what neoliberalism really is. To reverse it, we ought to implement holistic socioeconomic policies that empower people through the creation of secure and well-paid jobs, encourage collectivism over individualism and that promote better education towards sustainable living and happiness.

This study seeks to understand how local and national newspaper articles and African American residents frame obstacles to returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It explores how recovery planning processes and policy changes influenced the decision-making processes of African Americans displaced to Houston through a content analysis of the media and qualitative interviews with displaced and returned residents. The study shows the media and participants framed disaster recovery policies as creating opportunities and gaps in assistance that varied by location. Participants described how policy decisions that created gaps in assistance compounded the difficulty of returning for working- and middle-class African Americans. The findings suggest planners and policy makers need to consider how disaster recovery policy changes may intersect to create obstacles that impede residents' ability to return and rebuild after disasters. Contact Dr. Mosby at kmosby517@gmail.com.

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Texas in Dallas, Texas offers an array of services and programs to residents in southern Dallas and other areas. However, interest in the state of access to veterinary care has been questioned for southern Dallas residents. In an area that faces certain compounding stressors, such as food deserts and transportation difficulties, a lack of access to veterinary care for pet owners is considered an additional possible stressor. Pet owners in southern Dallas, along with the SPCA of Texas, contemplate how to best provide medical care for local pets. In this body of work, I describe community access to veterinary services in southern Dallas. I provide a resident-centered explanation based on in-depth interviews with locals that discuss the current state of access to veterinary services while simultaneously analyzing the links between access to veterinary care, the area of southern Dallas itself, and ongoing issues with roaming and stray dogs.

This study investigates the South Sudanese government’s policy titled South Sudan National Action Plan 2015–2020 on UNSCR 1325 to identify the discourses in the policy document and examine whether they can be linked to the concepts of power and agency. The thesis uses the feminist theory of power and agency with Carol Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) framework as a method to answer the research objectives. The thesis finds that the South Sudanese government justice system is represented as the dominant “problem” representation because the government is represented as lacking the political will to change its formal and customary laws that have harmful consequences for women in South Sudan. The Ministry of Gender, Child, and Social Welfare (MGCSW), via the SSNAP, is blaming the government for the overall challenges that South Sudanese women endure, which in turn works contrary to the policy objectives since the government oversees allocating financial resources and enacting legislation. Further, the empowerment and agency of women in South Sudan are also undermined since they are portrayed as powerless and dependent on the change in formal and customary laws by the government.