The Israel-Palestine conflict constitutes one of the longest standing conflicts in modern times. Its continuation has often been attributed to the very nature of the conflict: two peoples pursuing an incompatible goal-ownership of the same piece of land. Violence has constituted a characteristic feature of this struggle, widely employed by the two peoples. The analysis of violence, however, has often been limited to acts of direct and physical violence that can be attributed to an individual subject. This thesis investigates violence in the conflict going beyond this traditional conceptualisation of violence. It employs Johan Galtung’s conceptual and theoretical framework, in which he identifies three types of violence: direct, structural and cultural. This thesis argues that all three types of violence are symbiotic in nature. The underlying assumption in this thesis is simple: violence breeds violence. Thus, in order to understand the persistence of the conflict, it is essential to analyse all three types of violence. The thesis proposes the hypothesis that the continuing failure to address all forms of violence, as well as omitting or minimising the importance of any of them, prevents the possibility of resolving the conflict, and thus has contributed to the protraction of the conflict. In order to examine this assumption empirically, the thesis investigates the violence in the conflict, concentrating on the Israeli barrier. The study poses two central research questions. The first asks what led to the construction of the barrier. The second asks why the barrier remains, and the Israeli occupation continues. The answers to the research questions and the account of violence have been the subjects of two contrasting narratives: Israeli and Palestinian. In order to provide both Israeli and Palestinian contributions to these questions, the thesis is divided into two accounts: Palestinian narrative and Israeli narrative. The empirical analysis of violence in the conflict, embedded in the theoretical framework of Galtung's conceptualisation of violence, and divided into the two narratives, reveals a complex cycle of violence in the conflict. It demonstrates the interconnection between the three types of violence and shows the impact of the violence on the intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

An estimated one in five Hondurans live outside of Honduras, and 25% of the Honduran GDP is measured in remittances from migrants living abroad. This means that all Hondurans are implicated in international migration. Utilizing qualitative interviews with Honduran migrants and their families in the context of modern Honduran society, this thesis focuses on the ways in which international immigration structures impact the lives of Hondurans. Over the past two decades, the reasons and mechanisms of migration have changed dramatically and have become increasingly dangerous due to US and Mexican immigration policy. This thesis explores the experience of migrants and their families by focusing on deportees, migrants who are injured in the journey, and those who disappear en route. I conclude that structural violence intersects every aspect of Honduran migration, from the construction of push and pull factors motivating migration to the implications of natural, legal, and structural barriers.

Wellbriety is a multifaceted concept utilized in Native American communities that demonstrates meanings of health in Native-based discourse. Conceptually, wellbriety symbolizes strength through resilience. During this ethnographic study, I spent two years working within an Urban Indian Health Service facility where I used community-based participatory research methods. I examined complex intersections between meanings of urban native identities, colonization, and tribal sovereignty. Through deconstructing structural violence, I seek to place current urban native health status in a socially-informed context. This research explores how Native peoples define wellbriety and wellness through the lens of healthworld, which addresses how Native communities attempt to heal from traumas inflicted by the U.S. Federal Government. Additionally, I analyze dimensions of food sovereignty among Native community members by exploring how the act of consuming food shapes social and identity meanings which impact community members’ health.

In this research, I examine the mediating role of transit and the mobility needs and experience of individuals who are homeless in the suburban community of Surrey, BC. I have used Harvey’s (2005) conception of social spatial sorting as a means of understanding the suburbanization of poverty and Galtung’s structural violence (1969) as a means of understanding the experience of homeless transit access. I employed a multiple case study, using semi-structured interviews, with residents and staff of three homeless shelters, located in three distinct neighbourhoods in Surrey. A cross-case analysis of the interview data was undertaken, to draw conclusions and recommendations for policy development and research concerning the transit needs of people who are homeless. To provide a policy context, a review of existing transit access programs available for people who are homeless and/or low-income is presented demonstrating the range of criteria and best practices. Four dimensions of transit access were identified by residents and staff: physical, temporal, social and financial (Kenyon et al., 2003). Residents had the most constrained agency (Coe & Jordhus-Lier et al., 2010) in relation to the physical and temporal dimensions, so that these dimensions became the most problematic in this suburban context. The importance of considering and understanding the geographic context of shelters and potential impacts on mobility and social inclusion for shelter residents, exiting from homelessness, are demonstrated. / Graduate

I conducted a four-month ethnographic fieldwork study to document the stories of thirteen post-kidney-transplant minority patients and three nephrologists at Boston Medical Center. My research explores how patients’ interactions with health professionals, medical regimens, dialysis treatments, and adaptation to living with transplanted kidneys constantly shape their identities and perceptual worlds. Patients’ narratives highlighted the emotional struggles they encountered along the path of End-Stage Renal Disease, which unfolded as distinct experiences influenced by their varied backgrounds. The majority of my patient-participants lived on the verge of poverty, and in some cases, their insurance status caused delays in their being registered on the transplant waiting list, making them endure a long wait. Some patients were afraid of wearing short sleeves because they thought the scars on their arms from dialysis treatment would lead others to think they were gangsters. Instantiations of various theories emerged from the saturated data and narrative analysis, from Bourdieu’s concept of habitus with regard to the process of how patients alter their consciousness through interactions with medicine to Foucault’s ideas of power relations and technologies of the self that address the issues of agency and power that influence the formation of patients’ identities. The intersection of these theoretical frameworks led me to develop the critical medical anthropological-oriented concept of biological citizenship. This paper examines 1) the ways in which “race” interacts with the theoretical concept of biological citizenship and 2) the ways in which socioeconomic status and race tailor a kidney transplant patient’s illness experience, and related discourse.

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Over the last few decades, forensic anthropological research has made significant strides in developing better methods for decedent identification and increasing the accuracy of time since death/postmortem interval (PMI) estimations within medicolegal contexts. Until recently however, there has been little emphasis placed on how socioeconomic considerations might be connected, especially regarding recovery times for individuals from various demographic backgrounds. Using intersectional and biocultural frameworks and data collected from forensic anthropologists and medicolegal labs throughout the Southeastern US, this research aims to decipher the role that inequality, through instances of social vulnerability and structural violence, plays in recovery time data throughout the region. Considerations of how systematic violence can impact socioeconomic and sociopolitical factors for a demographic groups' recovery times could highlight disparities in how politics, law enforcement, and medicolegal personnel assist and conduct casework based on sociocultural and socioeconomic factors.

This thesis challenges the conventional theory of forced migration by expanding the narrow definition of violence that prevails, not only within international refugee legislation, but also within the academic field of migration. As such, this thesis argues that by limiting the scope of forced migration only to include victims of direct personal violence, manifested in physical harm, we are neglecting the victims of indirect structural violence, that is, the violence of oppression and inequality, where insights and resources are monopolized by a certain group within society, making access unattainable for others. By analyzing personal narratives of six economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa that has fled their countries to escape structural violence, this thesis aims to shed light on the limitation within the conventional theory of forced migration.

No description available.

Adolescent substance abuse represents a complex, difficult challenge in the United States. Substance addiction research requires rich contextualization that takes into account individual, familial, and community experiences. This project focuses on how adolescent girls' substance use interacts with risk and vulnerability. More specifically, how the social and biological body influences substance initiation and how local contexts and constraints effects recovery from addiction. The sample includes adolescent girls who are enrolled in substance abuse treatment programs. The methodological approach encompasses a mixture of quantitative and qualitative, including analysis of a nation-wide dataset, narrative interviews, participant observation, and case following. While the quantitative analysis was with the nation-wide dataset, the qualitative data are derived from a sample of adolescent girls in Tucson, Arizona. Risk is assessed along three axes, biocultural, familial, and structural. Biocultural risk examines the influence that an early pubertal developmental trajectory has on substance initiation. Familial risk analyzes how the culture and habitus of the family affects youth initiation of substance use. Structural risk highlights the continued vulnerability that youth who are raised in the `system' face and specifically their challenges to recovery after substance abuse treatment. Findings from the nation-wide sample include a significant relationship between pubertal timing and age of onset of substance use. In the Tucson sample, familial immersion in substance use was so extensive that girls were not only expected to begin using but also initiation of use became a 'rite of passage' within the family. Finally this research documents the unintended role the child welfare system plays as a structural impediment to girls' recovery from substance abuse.