Ciara Edwards-Mendez’s AHSS Summer Research Project

Ciara is another one of SOAN’s recipients of the AHSS summer research project grants. With her funding, Ciara returned to Los Angeles for the summer, and has designed a fascinating oral history project that explores aspects of her own neighborhood and its history. As the faculty advisor of her project, I asked Ciara to provide our departmental audience with a bit of detail about her emerging project. Here’s what he had to say!

My research doesn’t propose a singular research question, but instead is a collection of ex-graffiti gang members remnants and a set of interviews making up an oral history of their time in the gangs in the 1990s. When gathered, I will correlate all their individual yet analogous recollections to analyze what graffiti meant to them, and assess their perspectives during this time, with particular attention to the dichotomy between art and vandalism, which captures the social realities of the graffiti writers in urban environments. ​​Altogether, this research will explore a multitude of different topics and social themes, such as poverty and violence, and will investigate these artists’ experiences along social, cultural, and political lines. East Los Angeles is a marginalized urban community in which residents began establishing territories and reconfiguring urban space well before the 1990s. But because of tensions, largely defined by the racial and ethnic segregation, and coupled with a deep distrust of the police and ongoing violence, gangs rose in prominence in this period. Graffiti served as a way for members of this urban community to mark turf and establish territory.

I have been in contact with subjects that are now working as muralists or as established graffiti artists. They have detached themselves from any involvement in any graffiti gang activity for the past twenty years, and as I have commenced this project, these artists have brought me to the places in the neighborhood that are important locations from their yesteryears: I’ve been at the walls they’ve tagged, into their houses, and via ethnographic methods, I’ve been trying to blend into the scene, so that I might deploy participant observation to gather as much evidence as possible in addition to the interviews I’m conducting for the oral history​. 

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A composite image from two of the photographs that Ciara collected in early interviews.

Ciara, that sounds so interesting, and we’re looking forward to hearing more. We’ll catch up with you again in a few months as your project nears completion!

Andrew

Presentation to Skyline International for Human Rights

Hi all,

Thanks to an invitation from Dr. Daniel Rivera and Tal Shergill, I was asked to provide their audience with a brief lecture and interview on their Facebook channel. While focused foremost on human rights, Skyline International for Human Rights places particular emphasis on the freedom of speech and all the rights that underpin it. Migrants and migration to the Arabian Peninsula is one theater of concern for the group. The lecture I provided — The Migrant Journey to Arabia — seeks to provide a very basic overview of migration to the Arabian Peninsula, and this still shot is linked to the interview on Skyline’s Facebook page.

Zach Hermann’s Summer Research Project

Zach is one of the University of Puget Sound’s Matelich scholars, and that scholarship has allowed him to pursue an independent summer research project in cadence with the AHSS summer research students on campus. As the supervisor of his project, I asked Zach to provide our departmental audience with a bit of detail about his research interests this summer. Here’s what he had to say!

The primary research question I seek to engage with in this project will be: How does Reform Jewish youth engage with and understand their role in Palestinian liberation movements?

In recent months, the Israeli occupation has continued to encroach on territory within the West Bank. In response to the actions of the Israeli government, the If Not Now​ movement has created a petition for Reform Jews to demand more from the Union of Reform Judaism in regards to condemning Israeli apartheid. I hope to learn from engaged Reform Jewish community leaders who have signed onto this petition in order to better understand their perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and what drives them to engage with the If Not Now movement.

I hope to create of a resource based on what I learn from the testimonials of engaged research participants in order to propose means for improving If Not Now’s engagements as well as providing insights for the Union of Reform Judaism to better understand the growing ideological shift within young community members.

As Palestinians oppression continues to be justified in the name of Jewish safety, the need for Reform Jews to understand the shifting consensus surrounding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has never been greater. As anti-semitism increases across the globe, the Jewish people must find solidarity in humanity’s collective liberation of the oppressed. Through movements like If Not Now, Reform Jews are learning a new side to their story and face an urgent need to reevaluate their approach to Israel education within the faith. In this proejct, I hope to bring forth voices that can bring clarity to the ways in which both the Union of Reform Judaism and the If Not Now movement can increase and retain their engagements with Reform Jewish youth.

Although Zach’s semester with me in SOAN 299 Ethnographic Methods was thrown out of whack by the pandemic, the project he’s pursuing here certainly reflects the aspirations I try to convey to students — to design projects that are of scholarly and academic interest, but also incorporate applied goals that are useful in assessing real world issues or friction. We’ll check back with Zach at the end of the summer and hear more about his findings then!

Andrew

Hana Morita’s Independent Project: Representations Of People Of Color in Palo Alto History

Hana Morita, SoAn Major

Due to COVID restrictions, I decided to spend the Fall 2020 semester in my hometown of Palo Alto, California. Influenced by the past summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the arising discussions around examining systems of oppression rooted in history, I wanted to take the opportunity to engage with and analyze my local city’s history. I was specifically interested in understanding the representation (or lack-there-of) of people of color in Palo Alto history. The option to create an Independent Study course for the semester provided me a space to actively engage with my local history and community despite the isolating reality of stay-at-home regulations.

Hana Morita

With the guidance of SoAn professor Gareth Barkin, and History professors Nancy Bristow, and Doug Sackman, I compiled a website which highlighted popular historical myths, underrepresented histories, and the necessary sociopolitical and historical context that is necessary to understand the experiences of people of color in Palo Alto. I also included a page of resources which included books, articles, websites and podcasts.

The idea of California as “virgin land” for white settlers to colonize is one of several tropes explored in the project’s website.

I did not intend this website to be a fully completed anthology on the history of people of color in Palo Alto. While my intentions of the project were to provide a more diverse historical narrative, there are still many topics, events, people and narratives that were not included. However, I aimed for this project and this website to be a starting point to prompt students, teachers, and community members to reflect on their understanding of Palo Alto history and be inspired to search for more. Recently, my website has found a home in the Palo Alto Unified School District library guide as a reference site for students and teachers to learn more about Palo Alto History and to use the sources and information I gathered for future research projects and lesson plans.

Amelia Burkhart’s AHSS Summer Research Project: Exploring the Olmsted City Beautiful Legacy in Washington

The AHSS summer research program allows students to pursue independent research projects under the supervision of a faculty member. While competitive, the summer research program provides students with sufficient funding to explore topics and issues that interest them. With the AHSS program’s emphasis on independent research, students in SOAN have been particularly successful with this competitive grant program. I asked Amelia, one of this year’s recipients, to describe her project. Here’s what she had to say:

The main research questions that I will address will be: What is the scope and nature of the Olmsted legacy in Washington state. How has that legacy shaped the urban form in our state, and where is its legacy still visible in the built landscape?

The City Beautiful movement was about creating spaces where nature and humans could coexist. Before the movement, cities were not planned at all, but were instead an outgrowth of the industrial capitalist process. The City Beautiful movement was the first attempt to bring nature into the urban landscape. Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the architects for this movement. You can see his impact throughout the American landscape, in places such as Central Park. His legacy continued through his two sons — John and Frederick Jr. — who had the same interest in integrating natural spaces in densely populated cities.

Amelia Burkhart

The Olmsted brothers lived in Seattle, where some of their larger projects were incorporated into the 1903 Olmsted Plan and the 1908 Park Expansion Plan. These two plans included the building of seventeen parks and eighteen boulevards in the state. The Omstead brothers’ architectural legacy in Washington is truly vast. Their designs and the architecture therein reflect the current issues occurring at the time the sites were built. In my project, I will assessing their legacy and its impact nearly a century later.

What makes the Pacific Northwest so unique is the fundamental role nature has played in our urban landscapes. And while the basis of my project is investigating the Olmstedian legacy in Washington, I am also interested in more than the history of the space: I will also be exploring the enduring value and social utility of these spaces, which I will be documenting in my project.  

Proletarian Enclaves, Photo Exhibit

Hi all,

Although we remain mostly locked down by the pandemic, a variety of scholarly and academic organizations are hosting virtual conferences this academic year. I’m happy to announce that my photo exhibit — Proletarian Enclaves in the Urban Landscape of Doha, Qatar — was accepted by The Nature of Cities (TNOC) 2021 Festival, and is showing there all this week!

This particular set of images has an interesting backstory. The images included in this exhibit are part of a larger collection that I put together early this summer, thanks to the generous offer of Kevin McGlocklin, the owner of Tacoma’s Bluebeard Coffee Roasters and Cafe. Culling a thematic set of images from my time and work in Qatar, I was able to carry some of the elements from the Bluebeard show to the TNOC exhibit. Here’s the short blurb from the new exhibit, along with several of the included images:

“These images explore the peripheral urban enclaves where much of the foreign workforce dwells in Doha, Qatar. These transnational migrants, most of whom come from South Asia, both build and service the modern city. Although a few stragglers still dwell in the urban core of Doha, most migrant workers now occupy enclaves constructed at the periphery of the city. In the lifeworlds of these men and women, these migrations are, for most, an economic necessity for the households behind them. But these migrations also serve as a right of passage, and comprise a great and difficult adventure that is sometimes rewarding. The cities they inhabit upon arrival, like the one portrayed here, are far from home for millions of migrant men and women who dwell there, and is simultaneously the setting for this social drama.”

Special thanks to Dharmendra and Deependra for their help with several of the sojourns from which these photographs come.

Andrew

Maya Gilliam’s Research Podcast: All Things Intentional.

This posting is about the podcast that senior Maya Gilliam produced about her summer research project!

Senior Maya Gilliam

The University of Puget Sound offers students the competitive opportunity to pursue independent research over the course of the summer. Projects are funded by the university, and are conducted under the guidance and supervision of a faculty member. The SOAN Department — with its sustained emphasis on quantitative and qualitative methodological training, the disciplinary commitment to fieldwork and the value of experiential learning, and the constellation of interests that have long coalesced under the banners of sociology and anthropology — has greatly benefitted from the AHSS Summer Research Program, and we are proud of the amazing work that our students have conducted in summers over the past decade. You can glimpse some of that collected work here.

Over the chaotic summer of 2020, senior Maya Gilliam pursued an independent project that sought to explore the ideas, commitments, and practices integral to various intentional communities in the contemporary era. Although her original plans were to travel around the western states exploring various manifestations of international community, the pandemic constrained Maya to the PNW, and simultaneously made fieldwork difficult for Maya and for several other students pursing independent projects. Nonetheless, instead of producing a paper or an article, Maya pulled together this insightful and fascinating podcast that summarizes her summer exploration. I’ve linked to it below — have a listen!

All Things Intentional Audio File

This is really excellent, Maya! I love this work, and I’m now thinking about how other students might explore this medium in Ethnographic Methods. Thanks for leading the way 🙂

Andrew

Cashing in with SOAN!

Students find their way to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they’re fascinated in the mechanics of our own society. Perhaps they’re interested in the constellation of other cultures to be found in this world. Perhaps they’re interested in developing the capacity to independently conduct research projects in our diverse world — a realm that our alumni report they often mastered in their time with us at Puget Sound.

Or perhaps they were looking to make a quick million. As a contestant on ABC’s ever-popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, SOAN alumnus J. D. Barton, who works as a therapist in Los Angeles, brought his A game. The always-amazing J. D. answered a few questions correctly concerning Oort clouds and Meryl Streep’s filmography, and then decided to hop out with a cool 250K.

Notably, we had sent J. D. into this world prepared for this question, very much a possibility on game shows of this sort: In the early 1960s, anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously attended a cockfight in what country? A. Guyana B. The Republic of Djibouti C. Bali or D. The Republic of Moldova

Cheers, J.D.!

Andrew

October 1 @ 4pm “Race and Immigration Status in Warehouse Labor”

The Department of Sociology & Anthropology invites you to join us for the next discussion of our fall series, “Race and Immigration Status in Warehouse Labor” on Thursday, October 1 at 4pm. We encourage SoAn majors, minors, and alums to attend, along with anyone interested in sociological and anthropological perspectives on race.

Jason Struna will lead a discussion of the ways that race, gender, employment, and immigration status collude to create exploitative conditions for workers in the sprawling warehouse and logistics industry in Southern California. You can read an article on “The Matrix of Exploitation” by Struna and coauthors in the Journal of Labor and Society here.

If you’d like to join the conversation, please RSVP here: https://forms.gle/MbX6GDSweS3zkXyV7 to receive the Zoom link.

We’ll send a reminder email to everyone who registers on the day of the event. Please forward this invitation far and wide!

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Some questions to consider for this discussion include:

• What does intersectionality mean to you?
• How can different inequalities, modes of oppression, or social difference manifest in different ways in different contexts?
• Why can two workers doing the exact same job with the same skills, experience, and capacities be paid strikingly different wages?
• What are the most effective ways to overcome inequalities and inequities in various forms—especially in workplaces?

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The Department of Sociology and Anthropology is committed to promoting the values of diversity, equity, and human rights and to confronting racism in our fields of research, our institution, and our classrooms.

As part of these efforts and to support our students, colleagues, and communities, we are undertaking a series of discussions in the Fall, 2020 semester, to explore anthropological and sociological perspectives on race and ethnicity, constructions and experiences of race and racism, and efforts to confront structural formulations of white supremacy. The series will also explore the ways these categories intersect with other social cleavages and dimensions of inequality, including gender, sexuality, citizenship, education, health, and social class.

Discussions will be led by department faculty members in collaboration with SoAn majors and minors to build conversation within and beyond the SoAn Department. The series is open to all in the Puget Sound community and will be held on Zoom semi-weekly on Thursdays at 4PM (see below for a detailed schedule). Details and readings will be emailed and posted on our series page a week before each discussion.

You can read more about the series and the SoAn Antiracism Initiative here.

September 17 @ 4pm “Out From the Shadows of Racist Anthropology”

The Department of Sociology & Anthropology invites you to join us for the first discussion of our fall series, “Out From the Shadows of Racist Anthropology” on Thursday, September 17 at 4pm. We encourage SoAn majors, minors, and alums to attend, along with anyone interested in sociological and anthropological perspectives on race.

In this first event, Professor Gareth Barkin will lead a discussion about negotiating the racist history of anthropology through the lens of Michelle Munyikwa’s Scientific American blog post on her own struggles with that topic. Please read her short blog here.

Michelle Munyikwa, PhD

We will also discuss the Confronting Racism Discussion Series and the SoAn Department’s broader antiracism collaborations, and introduce the Sociology & Anthropology Student Association (SASA). For more information on this event, a ‘deeper dive’ reading, and the schedule for future events, please see our series webpage here.

If you’d like to join the conversation, please RSVP here: https://tinyurl.com/SoAnRSVP1 to receive the Zoom link.

We’ll send a reminder email to everyone who registers on the day of the event. Please forward this invitation far and wide!

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For this event, please take a moment to review the reading linked above, and consider the following discussion questions:

1. Professor Munyikwa describes her experiences confronting anthropology’s history of scientific racism through, among other things, being assigned authors like Lewis Henry Morgan. She concludes that an awareness of anthropology’s past is important to improving the discipline’s future. What other reflections on anthropology’s past do you see as valuable for constructing its future? What useful tools or lessons would you want to see brought forward?

2. Yolanda Moses, a prominent anthropologist of race, argued 20+ years ago that, after seeking to dismantle the American racial worldview in the early/mid 20th century, the discipline largely abandoned its efforts to engage with issues of race voice that critique outside the world of anthropology. To which current debates or issues do you see anthropological analyses of race offering important interventions? How might they disrupt or change the terms of those debates?

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The Department of Sociology and Anthropology is committed to promoting the values of diversity, equity, and human rights and to confronting racism in our fields of research, our institution, and our classrooms.

As part of these efforts and to support our students, colleagues, and communities, we are undertaking a series of discussions in the Fall, 2020 semester, to explore anthropological and sociological perspectives on race and ethnicity, constructions and experiences of race and racism, and efforts to confront structural formulations of white supremacy. The series will also explore the ways these categories intersect with other social cleavages and dimensions of inequality, including gender, sexuality, citizenship, education, health, and social class.

Discussions will be led by department faculty members in collaboration with SoAn majors and minors to build conversation within and beyond the SoAn Department. The series is open to all in the Puget Sound community and will be held on Zoom semi-weekly on Thursdays at 4PM (see below for a detailed schedule). Details and readings will be emailed and posted on our series page a week before each discussion.

You can read more about the series and the SoAn Antiracism Initiative here.