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Creative Liberty explores the mysteries that emerge at the intersection of online art education, the animation industry, and aspiration in the context of insecurity. Principally, this dissertation addresses three key paradoxes about contemporary animation education and the students who eagerly choose to pursue unregulated self-organized online learning instead of a more traditional education at an accredited art school. Organized into a three-act structure that mimics the storytelling conventions of feature animation, I ask: why might artists willfully pursue educational insecurity; and how does their awareness of that insecurity, both real and mythological, inform their choices in pursuit of career? In the first paradox, I examine why might animation have such an uncertain career pathway despite being an established profession since the early 1900s. In the second paradox, I explore why so many students pursue an insecure education towards an equally insecure career. Finally, I investigate the paradox that the animation industry is a tumultuous, insecure environment that demands high volumes of work for unpredictable pay while also being the same environment many animators staunchly defend as they explain their place in the industry. To address these paradoxes, I followed a cohort of 40 online animation students across various online platforms and classrooms as they engaged in an intensive yearlong study with hopes of joining the animation industry. Along the way, I also interviewed online art instructors, social media artists, and animation industry workers to acquire a clearer understanding of the contemporary online art education landscape and the animation industry more broadly. Overall, this dissertation engages with themes of learning and myth-making across social media platforms to contribute to anthropological understandings of education, precarity, and aspirational labor.

We live in an uncertain social world. For many people, the future feels, and frequently is, indeterminant. Climate change, technological change, demographic change, and cultural change all make it difficult to tell where society is headed. Since it is our collective actions which will shape society’s future, it is more important than ever to reflect on the nature of uncertainty and its impacts on those actions. How exactly does uncertainty impact action? In particular, how does uncertainty about society's future bear upon risk-mitigating collective action? Knight (1921) defined “uncertainty” as a state in which one does not know, does not know what one does not know, and may not even know that one does not know. Uncertainty therefore presents a challenge for rational action because it suggests there are many situations in which an informed decision is impossible. “Preppers” are a growing lifestyle movement and subculture who believe that major disasters are unavoidable, and that the world as we know it will end soon. Preppers spend impressive amounts of time, money, and energy attempting to mitigate these imagined risks. They learn about various disasters, stockpile large amounts of supplies, buy specialized gear, and learn numerous survival “skillsets.” Preppers go to great lengths to prepare for disasters that most of us don’t even consider. Therefore, preppers offer a strategic case for unpacking the mechanisms through which societal uncertainty is translated into collective action. Preppers force us to attend to: a) the prevalence, scope, and interconnectedness of real, present-day, society-threatening uncertainties, and b) the way social and cultural forces clearly shape representations of society’s future. Drawing on 5 years of participant observation with preppers in Southern California and on YouTube, I argue that preppers imagine future disasters in order to reconstruct uncertainty into risks to be avoided. In doing so, they make lines of seemingly rational action apparent. In other words, uncertainty requires preppers to use their imaginations, social interactions, and pieces of culture to make mental representations of an unknown future. This means professedly rational decisions are invariably embedded in webs of social status and cultural and moral significance. I explore this more fully in chapter one, which draws on my fieldwork with preppers during the Covid-19 pandemic to discuss the relationship between uncertainty, risk, and rationality. In chapter two, I give an overview of my methods and apply the theoretical framework from chapter one to ethnographic research. I argue that ethnography, like prepping, is characterized by considerable uncertainty, and that ethnographers appear to respond to uncertainty using the same process. In chapter three, I ask what forces shape preppers’ assessments of the risks. I argue that while preppers’ fears are often valid, both their perceptions of and their responses to risks are shaped by moral and cultural, as opposed to merely instrumental, scripts. In chapter four, I examine how preppers’ economic actions are guided by the ways in which they imagine future disasters, and by the values they assign to money. This suggests that even risk-mitigating economic action is still embedded in culture. In chapter five, I explore the discursive strategies preppers use to legitimate their expert claims about the future. I show that both the rationalist and realist discourses in which preppers ground their claims, hinge on performances of masculinity. This suggests that not only culture, but also social structure, shape actions through uncertainty. Preppers direct our attention to the way uncertainty complicates both individual rational action and historical rationalization. By all accounts, risk-mitigating action should be rational. Yet by taking seemingly rational action to extremes, preppers help to expose rationality’s underlying contractedness. My analysis suggests that social representations and imaginaries are a crucial area in which this social construction takes place, as situated historical actors project their own backgrounds, social locations, and culture into the future. By highlighting the social and cultural forces constructing rational action, this dissertation calls into question rationality’s objective (as opposed to merely normative or discursive) basis.

This research examines the intersecting and overlapping sociocultural and economic factors behind the recent increase of employment-aged (18-55-years-old) American citizens, and their families, electing to move into recreational vehicles as full-time residences instead of a more traditional housing or renting option during the post-COVID-19 era. Currently conceptualized as a lifestyle of retirement or hidden-homelessness due to impoverishment, the rising demographic of employment-aged, often middle-class, Americans who elect to exit the housing/rental market to move into RVs is not well represented within these current theorizations. Employing traditional ethnographic methods for data collection from March of 2023 until March of 2024, including participant-observation, fieldnotes, demographic surveys, and semi-structured interviews with residents and park management, alongside embodied ethnography which utilizes the researcher’s own lived embodied experience as a research medium, this project followed a grounded theory approach to gather data and generate theorizations to investigate this recent and presently unfolding phenomenon. Focusing primarily on employment-aged individuals who live within a single all-age RV park in Mesa Arizona, this research emphasizes individuals’ and families’ subjective decisions to exit the rental/ housing market, while simultaneously contextualizing the broader sociocultural and economic backdrop in which their decisions were made. Despite increasing precarity within the United States around housing and work, employment-aged full-time RVers were often stably employed and often had middle-class incomes. The decision to move into an RV was usually framed around short and long-term goals, not necessity, where RVs were seen as mediums of access to otherwise difficult or unreachable goals, such as travel, relocation, or even traditional home ownership. Quasi-homeownership then, ownership of the structure and not the land, in RVs represents both a newer response strategy to increased costs among Americans with some form of capital, and represents a newer, culturally-approved, though temporary, position within the housing life cycle that does not represent a final exit of the housing market or a dying off of the American Dream of homeownership- just an alternative route to get there in the face of increasing constraints and new opportunities.

This dissertation delves into the weaponization of history and the performance of national belonging in Crimea and Russia. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2021 in Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia, it examines the social, cultural, and political conditions preceding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how the annexation of Crimea and subsequent war in Ukraine have reshaped the embodiment and understanding of Russian citizenship. The dissertation argues that while the Russian state developed new political discourses to legitimize the annexation of Crimea—presenting it as a 'reunion' and a 'return home'—it also redefined 'Russianness' for the entire country. By promoting militarized forms of patriotism, supporting war games, and portraying Russian history as a series of conflicts, Russia crafted a dichotomous worldview dividing the 'Russian World' from Western civilization.My research aims to offer fresh perspectives on Crimea as a space between Russia and Ukraine. Fieldwork evidence indicates that prior to the conflict, despite predominantly using the Russian language in daily life, people readily switched between Russian and Ukrainian depending on context. Being Crimean meant navigating fluid identities of 'Russian-ness' and 'Ukrainian-ness,' which were not mutually exclusive. Following the annexation, state-sponsored militarization and patriotic narratives increasingly swayed Crimeans towards Russian allegiance, shaping their identities through state performances and participation.Centering performance in my analysis, I explore how war narratives, history, and myths become embodied in people’s actions. Since 2014, history has evolved into a cornerstone of Russian state politics, not merely legitimizing Crimea's annexation but informing broader international and domestic policies. The Kremlin’s emphasis on historical 'restoration' serves as both a motto for international relations and a unifying force domestically, motivating actions in Eastern Ukraine and beyond.Crimea was an entry point to Russian politics in general. Since 2014, Russia has been developing a political toolkit in Crimea that I observed between 2017 and 2024: support of pseudo-democratic forms of popular expression (such as referendums and state-supportive mass gatherings), suppression of alternative political positions, control of language and vocabulary of self-expression, and the development of social security in exchange for giving up political freedoms. By 2022, the Kremlin had begun to apply this toolkit to control the rest of Russia as well as the newly occupied territories of Ukraine. In addition to Russia’s use of such tactics, both Russia and Ukraine have developed mechanisms for fostering patriotism and nationalism by turning the historical past into a weaponized discourse in the present.

The word convivenza is used to describe peaceful ‘co-existence’ between diverse communities, particularly religious communities. The idea that convivenza is central to Sicilian identity has become commonplace in local discourse, and is often used to distinguish the island from mainland Italy and Europe. “Every Sicilian has Arab DNA,” I am often told during research in Sicily, “because Sicily was once an Islamic Emirate.” “While Jews were being persecuted in central Europe,” some argue, “they thrived in Sicily for centuries.” This narrative is neither new nor universally accepted – it is based on contested interpretations of Sicily’s past and present – but has acquired additional meanings in the twenty-first century, with Sicily now a point of arrival for migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Whereas numerous scholars have analyzed the contemporary effects of Américo Castro’s famous convivencia thesis in Spain (1948), the construction of a similar narrative in Sicily merits closer attention than it has thus far received. I focus on Palermo, Sicily’s regional capital, where this narrative is especially influential. I blend cultural studies and ethnography, both in-person and digital, to study the cultural memory of Palermo’s Jewish and Islamic past; its contemporary repercussions for the heritage sphere, and for the city’s religious landscape; and the role of the convivenza narrative in political rhetoric. I first ask how the convivenza narrative encourages ‘rediscoveries’ of Palermo’s multi-religious heritage. I study how Palermo’s Jewish history has been emphasized in the past twenty years, over half a millennium after Sicily’s Jews were expelled in the late fifteenth century. I examine the emergence of Jewish ‘sites of memory’ in Palermo, including a medieval Jewish quarter; a pool that some believe was once a miqweh (ritual bath); and a former inquisitorial prison. I then turn my attention to two mosques and a planned future synagogue in Palermo, all located in former churches, arguing that heritage-based narratives are used to weave these into the contemporary city’s fabric. Finally, I analyze political messaging by one of the most vocal proponents of a ‘cosmopolitan’ Sicilian identity: Leoluca Orlando, Mayor of Palermo until 2022. I evaluate how Orlando uses history-based rhetoric to make pro-immigration arguments, framing Mediterranean ‘hospitality’ as an inherently Sicilian value. I build on studies of nostalgia, heritage, and cultural memory, critically examining the construction of a ‘cosmopolitan’ Mediterranean identity. I analyze how the stereotyped image of Sicily as ‘not quite European’ – once used within Italy to disparage Sicilians – is being celebrated by some in the twenty-first century, particularly by those who look at Italy’s anti-immigrant central government with trepidation.

This dissertation is a history of 500 years of resistance to violence amongst indigenous peoples in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta -SNSM, in Colombia, as practices of healing and reciprocity. It is focused on the legacy of the Kaggaba People to maintain themselves as an indigenous people, confronted by violence and domination since the Spanish invasion of their territory, until to today. The work is written from a perspective of my lasting and ongoing collaboration with those peoples. It combines Kaggaba historical memory, with written historical sources and present-day situations. The work focuses on how Kaggaba practices of reciprocity form part of processes of resistance and healing. It addresses how the Kaggaba deploy precise forms of reciprocity that link territory, people and things, all connected with “the spirit”, as what the Kaggaba call the Law of Origin, involving “paying debts” at a spiritual level. We analyze how these forms of reciprocity can have effects on the other elements along those linkages, to produce results through transformations of context centered around ancestral territory. The Kaggaba consider territory as living entity which produces responses through practices of reciprocity. To approach Kaggaba practices of resistance as reciprocity, we propose the concept of articulated assemblages in which reciprocity, articulates processes of transformation between things, people, territory and the “spirit”. Reciprocity as an assemblage engages with elements from linguistic anthropology, theories on violence, articulation and relationally produced identity, and expanded concepts of context. We address implications of Kaggaba practices of reciprocity as process of rearticulation of the self with context and power in ways that transcend subject-object divides, at the heart of healing and violence.It weaves together grounded scenarios based on the deployment of debt relations. As a history, the work starts with the colonial imposition of “encomiendas” in Kaggaba territory, as forms of domination through debt and violence, and how the indigenous people redeploy those same links of reciprocity as resistance. Then it moves into Kaggaba deployments of reciprocity as linked to the “spiritual” origin of ancestral territory as hybrid strategies of coexistence with the colonial catholic church. During most of the 20th century, colonial forms of domination and debt combined with public policies for the dissolution indigenous identity and land. These elements morphed into a “State of Exclusion”, with deplorable levels of violence against the indigenous people of the SNSM, invisibly subsisting within modern nation. The dissertation addresses how the indigenous peoples of the SNSM transform violence at personal and political levels. Especially the Kaggaba and Arhuaco, directly deploy their “Law of Origin”, embedded in the ancestral territory of the “Black Line” as processes of reciprocity based on principles of care. These practices of embodied reciprocity generate profound transformative responses from territory, enabling the indigenous people to cast off those chains of debt and violence. The Kaggaba present various forms reciprocity as practices of healing. These are ancestral” practices upon which the indigenous people have based their existence since before the arrival of the Spanish. They offer new ways of conceptualizing healing and forms reciprocity between people, things, nature and territory and expanded concepts of context.

The Japanese unconvicted (pre-judicial) detention system has recently become an object of scrutiny of international news media coverage, political activism, and social science scholarship alike, primarily due to its imposition of conditions and utilization of techniques deemed inhumane by these sources. Although Japanese criminal law explicitly secures a range of rights and protections on behalf of arrestees, criminal suspects in Japan are habitually detained in police custody and subjected to sensory deprivation, social isolation, restriction of access to legal counsel, and coercive interrogation tactics throughout the period between arrest and indictment. According to recent studies, it is precisely within this gap between policy and practice that utter suspension of constitutional rights and virtually indefinite extension of the pre-conviction detention period is rendered possible in the circumstance of suspicion of criminal infraction, reinforcing Michel Foucault’s claim that “an inner tendency of the whole system [emerges] in the ambiguity between the form of the law and the actual application of the law.” Despite the critical tenor characteristic of more recent scholarship on the topic, the Japanese criminal justice system has been lauded as a global exemplar of security, efficiency, and impartiality in prior studies. Such favorable appraisal of the Japanese justice system is reflected also in public opinion; despite widespread knowledge of existing pre-conviction detention practices and their recent global exposure, there remains among the Japanese populace a strikingly high approval rate of police and prosecutorial action. These three tensions—between criminal law and its material application, between the polarized conclusions reached in late 20th and early 21st-century studies, and between international censure and domestic support—constitute the core of the ethnographic conundrum explored in this project, an ethnographic exploration of the unconvicted detention (miketsu shobun) system in contemporary Japan.

This dissertation claims a decolonial turn in healing sciences is possible by nurturing theepistemic and ontological practice that I call “panza awareness” (gut-knowing in English and elsaber de la panza in Spanish), which is the embodied exercise of listening to our gut feelings andlearning to interpret the information that comes from our body as valid knowledge. It proposes amapping (or constellation) of possibilities for healing the body that centers Black and Indigenouspeople of color (BIPOC)—with a focus on a Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx/Latinx perspective.It outlines the limits of biomedical ways of understanding the body through race-based,individualized medicine; and it introduces an alternative, race-conscious approach to producingknowledge about health and the body alongside students and community members of color.Using interpretive methodologies in a transformative action research framework, this dissertationgenerates ethnographic data through a community-engaged, BIPOC-oriented workshop calledthe Panza Knowing Workshop. I designed and tested the Panza Knowing Workshop through thepilot program discussed in this dissertation.For this dissertation’s first intervention, I 1) study and critique the cultural concept of distressknown as ataque de nervios (loosely “nerve attack”) and 2) develop panza awareness. Using adecolonial, feminist-informed critique of nervios, I propose a shift from the individualistmandate, “Te tienes que cuidar tus nervios” [You must take care of your mental health], to acollective, empowered invitation to foster panza awareness. Through panza awareness, we canbegin to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of healing and the body. As a second intervention, Idemonstrate that the Panza Knowing Workshop generates knowledge of connections betweenbody, mind, health, and knowledge of embodied and ancestral healing modalities. The workshopenacts action research by reciprocally providing psychoeducation and community resources forhealth and healing to workshop interlocutors. It imagines how biomedical and embodied andancestral knowledge of the Global South may continue to emerge in respectful, humanizing coexistence in line with the Zapatista imperative to imagine a world where many worlds arepossible.

This dissertation is an ethnographic and genealogical study of the governance of so-called “problem drug-use” in contemporary England. It is based on fieldwork conducted during a time when British policymakers were trying to reorient the English drug treatment system towards “recovery”—which they understood as a personal journey towards “freedom” enabled by the accumulative circulation of “recovery capital”—and away from harm reduction and “maintenance” approaches, which, according to these policymakers, “parked” drug users on opioid substitute prescriptions “without an expectation of their lives changing.” Building on my prior experience as the administrator of a methadone prescribing service in London, I spent a year interviewing nurses, social workers, doctors, receptionists, service managers, and other front-line workers in the drug treatment system and related health and social care services, conducting focus groups with clients of these same services, and attending a variety of professional development, care coordination, and administrative meetings and conferences related to the drug treatment system.Focusing in particular on community substance misuse services—state-contracted services which provide opioid substitute prescriptions alongside “psychosocial” care, and are often run by partnerships of NGOs and NHS trusts—I approach drug treatment in England as a site of reflexive governance, by which I mean that my interlocutors are both agents of governance, employed by the state to intervene in the lives of illicit drug users, and targets of governmental intervention in their own right. Thus, while an institution such as a community drug service may appear to be a coherent, singular governmental institution, I attempt to tease out differences between various practices and discourses of governance—of both self and others—that criss-cross these sites of reflexive governance. Over the course of this, I develop the concepts of relational and reflexive labor, and I argue, drawing on the work of Michel Serres, that, under conditions of reflexive governance, the latter takes on a parasitical relation to the former. Ultimately at stake in the question of reflexive governance, I argue, are the gift of time given and the forms of value ascribed to subjects of governance.

This dissertation examines political unrest in arguably one of the most stable regimes in the Muslim world, Morocco. It does so through a consideration of problems of historical reckoning, in line with the rhetoric and political stance of Rifian activists who point to the fundamental incompleteness of the nation’s postcolonial transition in the insistence on stamping out the radical legacy of the early twentieth-century Republic of the Rif and the challenge it posed to European colonial forces. The death of fish vendor Mouhcine Fikri in late fall of 2016 unleashed the strongest backlash against corruption and inequality in the country since 2011 and the wider context of the “Arab Spring.” Tied indelibly to the port of al-Hoceyma and a Mediterranean coastline whose (increasingly scarce) bounty is tightly constricted through a web of rules, both official and unofficial, Fikri’s death shifted the wider demands of national protest al-hirak (the movement) to a focus on historical regional tensions and in particular the status of al-shamal or the north. My research takes up questions of northern difference through a focus on the Andalusian city of Tetouan and in particular an infrastructural project to redevelop its Mediterranean port of Martil and the river connecting its northern hub to coastal waters. Closed since 1962, its abandonment coincides with a history of monarchical hostility toward the northern region as a whole following 1958 clashes in the Rif and a subsequent general move to disinvest from the Mediterranean coastline of the country. My ethnography probes attempts to resurrect Martil’s river and port, an endeavor on the part of civic activists and local historians that brings with it a host of resurrected past futures embedded in a centuries-long enmeshment with Spain extending from medieval times through twentieth-century colonial rule. In articulating these “futures past,” proponents of the port’s reopening strike a delicate balance, at one and the same time elaborating a vision for the future of the north in line with its co-constitutive role in the production of both Western Europe and western Islam and at the same time navigating a northern political difference which continues to disturb and provoke.

This dissertation describes how the labyrinth of interconnected marine, brackish, and estuarine ecosystems—that once nourished biodiversity and indigenous lifeways in the Johor Straits—have been fragmented by successive state-making projects that created favorable conditions for unprecedented harmful algal blooms (HABs). Through fieldwork observations with coastal communities and collaborative scientific study with microbiologists, this work analyses how flows of material exchange across barriers that promote collective livability, were marginalized by waves of state-making projects that fragmented peoples and environments. Consequently, specific attention is paid to the humans and nonhumans that are often consigned to the margins of state-making practices of fragmentation, and in many ways complicate the margins themselves. Two themes are explored: the idea of fragmentation as a sign of social and ecological crisis, and how human and nonhuman relationships at the edges of these crises negotiate and complicate their violent effects. This dissertation proposes that conditions favourable to recent blooms of toxic algae can be traced to the effects of two centuries of interventions by hydropolitical regimes in the Johor Straits. Offering a temporally and politically fractal and porous account of a ‘new’ environmental crisis not only challenges a presentist framing of environmental degradation but also complicates the humans and nonhumans framed as culprits and/or victims of environmental degradation.

Recent theoretical interventions have clarified how city dwellers claim their rights to a city are entangled with urban infrastructure and city governance. This focus on the technicalities of a city and urban governance helps scholars to analyze the material, empirical realities of citizenship, which has been reflected in philosophical discourses of modernity. Scholars have discussed how the crisis of city dwellers’ rights has occurred along the ways that neoliberal urbanism has caused the breakdowns of public infrastructure as well as sustainability issues have jeopardized the legitimacy of urban planners and designers in urban governance. What is lacking is an investigation of how the recent ascendancy of reflexive methodologies in planning and design gives rise to the rationalities that problematize the forms of urban infrastructure and the fields of city governance, which reshape the lived experiences of city dwellers’ rights in the post-neoliberal times.This dissertation fills the gap by examining urban regeneration in Seoul, South Korea over the last two decades. It traces a shift in urban planning and design from established, top-down interventions to designerly interventions that mobilize reflexive methodologies, which originate from behavioral economics, cognitive sciences, and data sciences, to endeavor to be human-scaled, inclusive, and participatory. Empirically investigating the construction of public squares, the establishment of new street markets, and residents-driven urban regeneration in low-income neighborhoods, this dissertation shows how designerly interventions aim at creating an assortment of human-scaled infrastructural devices to mediate the human-environmental feedback, which renders infrastructure work without malfunction and failure. The identification of infrastructural devices in designerly interventions explains how the legitimacy crisis of experts in urban planning is strategically mobilized, namely, how the ignorance of planners and designers is arranged to fashion laypersons not as recipients of infrastructure but as its producers. This dissertation shows how designerly interventions make city dwellers claim their rights as “city-users” who participate in designing human-scaled infrastructural devices and possess rights as a practical capacity to live well. Finally, it develops new modes of critical inquiry to diagnose the danger of designerly intervention that is lurking in its seemingly reflexive methodologies.

This dissertation investigates how an imaginary of East/West difference has continued to shape political subjectivities, historical understandings, and embodied conceptions of national belonging in Turkey. It draws together theories and methods from anthropology, history, political science, and comparative literature to explore how this imaginary has impacted domestic politics, social struggles, historical interpretations, and contests over the grounds and expression of cultural identity. With close attention to how the “idea” or “fantasy” of the West emerged in the late Ottoman period, developed under the threat of European colonization, and then became integral to a variety of transformative political projects (including “Kemalism,” the political ideology attributed to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the more recent “Erdoğanism” attributed to current president Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party, “AKP”), this dissertation examines the cultural forms, modes of historical understanding, and conceptions of national belonging that ideas of East/West difference—and of the “idea of the West” in particular—have enabled, the others they have suppressed, and the social and political futures these ideas may catalyze or foreclose.

This dissertation adopts an ethnographic approach to understand the complex political relations between Taiwan and mainland China, focusing on how sound and audio communication have been central in maintaining continuous dialogue across the Taiwan Strait even amidst political tensions and communication restrictions. It demonstrates that throughout 75 years of cross-strait history, people in Taiwan and mainland China have continuously found ways to speak and listen to one another. Since the Kuomintang government’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War, communication across the Taiwan Strait has been heavily restricted. Both Taiwan and mainland China’s governments maintained highly regulated media environments through the 1980s, and mainland China’s Great Firewall continues to impose strict controls on online communication today. Amidst this restricted environment, people have mobilized various audio communication technologies—from loudspeakers and radio broadcasts to social media and videogames—to project a steady stream of sound across the Taiwan Strait. While discussions of cross-strait politics often emphasize formal diplomatic negotiations and political tension, this research instead centers sound and voice communication as distinct perspectives through which to explore how individuals communicate beliefs and navigate differences as they go about their daily lives. A recurring theme in this dissertation is the concept of regulatory latency, which describes how the development and implementation of regulatory mechanisms often lag behind those of communication technologies. This latency leads to unregulated gaps that can be temporarily leveraged by individuals for open exchange in highly restricted media environments. I build on the concept of regulatory latency to demonstrate that since the 1950s, individuals in Taiwan and mainland China have continuously employed audio technologies to communicate outside of the bounds of the latest government regulations. I start with loudspeakers, which were used from the 1950s on both sides of the Taiwan Strait not only to transmit cross-strait propaganda, but also for informal exchange. Radio broadcasts similarly provided a rare space for cross-strait exchange; I specifically focus on the transitional period from the late 1980s through the early 2000s during which Taiwanese radio hosts and mainland Chinese listeners formed sustained relationships through multimedia exchanges surrounding these broadcasts. Analyzing these exchanges encourages a reconceptualization of broadcast radio as multimedia and multidirectional, while also revealing shifts in what I call the cross-strait socio-political imaginary. More recently, I consider online exchanges through a case study of the briefly popular audio social media app Clubhouse. I highlight how Clubhouse users engaged in live voice communication to escape the “echo chambers” that are common on contemporary social media, forming affective connections and empathizing with people whose beliefs differ from their own. I also explore live-voice communication in online videogames. In contrast to associations of videogames with the promotion of violence, I demonstrate how informal, relaxed interactions in the context of online play provide a site through which Taiwanese and mainland Chinese gamers can collectively confront cultural, linguistic, and political differences. Taken together, these case studies reveal situations in which individuals find ways to communicate despite restrictions, navigating their differences by speaking and listening to one another.

Infragravity (IG) waves (periods ~ 25 s to 250 s) are known to dominate wave energy inside many shallow, bar built estuaries. However, beyond their importance for sediment buildup at the sill, little is known about the impact of IG waves on these shallow estuaries. I use observations from a focused deployment in Los Peñasquitos Lagoon in Southern California during a period of large wave forcing to understand the impacts of IG waves, with a particular focus on the turbulence generated through bottom friction. I also reflect on increasing pressure for scientists to work closely with lagoon managers in the development of their questions and conduct a study of academic culture to understand how similar changes are affecting coastal physical oceanographers. In Chapter 2, I describe the field deployment in detail and use initial observations to link IG waves to sediment transport and oscillations of salinity and temperature in the estuary. In Chapter 3, I develop new methods for despiking Accoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) data and calculating turbulent dissipation from velocity measurements in the presence of IG waves. In particular I develop a new inertial subrange fitting method to improve turbulent dissipation measurement accuracy in any measurement conditions. In Chapter 4, I use those dissipation measurements to develop a new method for predicting turbulent dissipation in the wave boundary layer. I verify this method with a numerical model and observations, and use it to show that IG waves significantly increase turbulence in the estuary during neap tides and at the beginning of flood tide. In Chapter 5, I conduct 15 interviews of coastal physical oceanography professors in the United States. Using these interviews, I show that a disconnect between a relatively slowly changing academic culture and relatively swiftly changing external pressures have led to increased stress and a general over commitment of time for especially new professors in the field.

This is an ethnographic study of the role of legislatures in post-conflict democracy. Focusing primarily on the Northern Ireland Assembly, with comparative attention to the United States Congress, I argue that the symbolic nature of legislatures is both understudied and often contradictory to the lawmaking process. The paradox of legislatures is that the institutions serve both as symbols of peace and effective liberal democracy (and thus are ideal types of the lawmaking process) yet they are also as forums for the conflict of politically polarized parties (which can undercut the delivery of effective governance). This contradiction creates a dysfunctional barrier to practical lawmaking and policy development. However, I argue that for sites of conflict and post-conflict transition, the symbolism of the legislature can sometimes outweigh its efficacy as a policy-making site. Even if the typical functions of a legislature are not happening, the legislature serves as a site of non-violent conflict and, thus, has an underappreciated role in the peacebuilding process.

This dissertation examines the overlooked experiences of dispossession among Rwanda's Indigenous Twa minority in the aftermath of genocide. Despite extensive scholarly attention on post-genocide Rwanda, little consideration has been given to the unique circumstances faced by the Twa, Rwanda's original inhabitants and only Indigenous micro-minority. Through a comprehensive ethnographic exploration, this research analyzes the intersecting dynamics of environmental governance, transitional justice, and nation-building projects that have shaped the Twa's marginalization. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in Rwanda, including more than 50 interviews and extensive participant observation, this study uncovers the systematic and multi-formed dispossession experienced by the Twa. Environmental governance and transitional justice policies have rendered the Twa invisible, denying them the right to identify ethnically or as an Indigenous group. Consequently, they face eviction from their ancestral lands, exclusion from conservation initiatives, and marginalization within Rwandan society. Despite Rwanda's ambitious goals to transform the nation into a "non-ethnic" luxury eco-tourist destination, the Twa remain excluded from these initiatives, perpetuating their impoverishment and dispossession. Furthermore, the legal limitations on Indigenous discourse hinders the Twa's ability to advocate for their rights and challenge state-sponsored expropriation. This research contributes to broader anthropological discussions of dispossession by analyzing the ideological underpinnings perpetuating marginalization and dispossession. By centering the experiences of the Twa, this study challenges dominant narratives of Rwandan history and ethnicity, highlighting the symbolic significance of the Twa in understanding identity formation and reconciliation processes.

Academic scholarship on undocumented immigration has theorized undocumented through frameworks of necropolitics in which undocumented people exist as socially dead, in the shadows, voiceless, and without agency. While studies should continue to examine the social, legal, and political violence inflicted on the most vulnerable immigrant communities, it is important not to reduce individuals to violence because, in doing so, it is inflicting an epistemological form of violence. In this dissertation, I examine how undocumented visual artists navigate, process, and refuse the violence embedded in their undocumented immigration status. Through art, undocumented immigrants claim agency and, in many ways, humanity. To highlight the multidimensional experience of livability in undocumented life through art, I center the lived experiences of predominantly queer undocumented artists. I conducted two years of ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork between 2020 and 202I, in which I carried out interviews, participant observation, and archival research in the US and Mexico with visual artists. Drawing on feminist theories of refusal, belonging, and livability, this dissertation examines undocumented livability as a politics that affirms a self-determined life as a basic human right in which marginalized individuals contest and rearticulate terms of visibility and imagine other worlds beyond violence. I examine the politics of art to explore how undocumented art politics and aesthetics imagine freedom beyond borders, subjectivity beyond legal categories, and envision belonging outside the confines of legal citizenship. By centering livability in art politics, I examine how undocumented aesthetics of livability create a utopian political project that is critical of biopolitics responsible for violence and aims to create a better world.

In the city of Lahore, Pakistan, plots of land are traded like stocks. While land has traditionally held together families, communities, and a national political order, in recent years it has become liquid, or an asset that can be quickly bought and sold. Across a transnational real estate market, plots of land circulate between diasporic Pakistanis living across the Middle East, Europe, and North America, and in Lahore’s oldest residential areas the World Bank is digitizing a colonial-era land records system to increase the speed of transactions. And yet, even in the context of financialization, land's value continues to be shaped by ethical norms. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with real estate developers, diasporic investors, government officials, and local residents, this dissertation examines the ethical practices that drive financialization in Lahore and how urban space and life are transforming as land becomes liquid. It approaches land as an exemplary case study for understanding how objects can be imbued with multiple and contradictory forms of value and how people negotiate those tensions when they inevitably arise. Ultimately, it argues that when economic gains are seen as a vehicle for ethical ones this leads to the most unethical outcomes of all.

This dissertation uses mixed methods to critically investigate the role of listening and the constitution of listenership in various contexts of asylum processes. Drawing from scholarship in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and speech perception, I developed three distinct, yet related, studies. The first study, in Chapter Three, reconciles these diverse bodies of work by developing an experiment that investigated the effects of bias on listeners evaluations of migrants’ narratives. In the second study, in Chapter Four, I ethnographically investigate listening practices in interaction based on two years of fieldwork with a mutual aid group that hosts monthly pro se clinics to assist migrants with filing their asylum applications. An investigation of how participants in the group use various modes of listening as they co-construct asylum narratives, this study also addresses how listening is a vital yet underacknowledged component of bottom-up initiatives to expand access to asylum. The third study, in Chapter Five, goes further by exploring how nonhuman entities can also act as listening subjects of asylum speakers. Here I scrutinize a new US asylum policy whereby officials use text analytics to screen asylum applications for fraud. To do this I comparatively apply sentiment analysis, a form of text analytics, with a discourse analytic evaluation of a corpus of migrants’ narratives. This study shows how regimes of hearing can become embedded in technologies used by states to adjudicate asylum policies. In the conclusion, Chapter Six, I synthesize what I have learned from the studies and review my contributions to the linguistic study of asylum and to the social theory of listening and listenership. In doing so, I underscore the value of critically aware listening as a form of mutual aid and advocacy for asylum seekers.

This dissertation asks: How do marginalized communities navigate and resist state surveillance and control, and what strategies do they use to preserve their cultural identity and historical consciousness against state-imposed narratives? More specifically, how do state surveillance practices, cultural representation, and tourism initiatives affect the daily lives, identities, and resistance strategies of the Kurdish Alevi community in Dersim, Turkey? Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023, I examine the intersections of urban space, memory, and affect in a region marked by political violence and marginalization. Dersim, officially renamed Tunceli, is home to a double-minoritized population that is both ethnonationally Kurdish and ethnoreligiously Alevi. The city has long been a focal point of political subjugation, marked by the genocidal campaign of 1937-1938 and persistent militarization. I explore how state power permeates daily life through surveillance and control of the spaces and bodies, processes that are contested by the local population. This dissertation employs a multi-methodological approach, drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, archival research, and media and material culture analysis. It illuminates the affective encounters and ordinary acts of resistance that characterize life in Dersim. By framing Dersim as an ‘affective geography,’ the study underscores the ontological connection between the people and their sacred landscape. It highlights how environmental destruction serves as a form of cultural and symbolic violence.The dissertation posits that while state surveillance and control shape the daily lives of marginalized communities, these communities actively resist such impositions through various strategies. The strategies include the negotiation of public and private spaces, the creation of counter-narratives, and the maintenance of cultural practices that reinforce historical consciousness and local identity. The dissertation contributes to the broader discourse on urban space, memory politics, state power, and resistance. It offers a nuanced understanding of how marginalized communities navigate and contest their imposed identities and histories in contemporary Turkey.

This dissertation examines the settler colonial, multispecies, and microbial politics of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in what is now British Columbia, Canada. Salmon aquaculture production systems enable 18 million Atlantic salmon to be raised in nets that are anchored to the seafloor in the coastal waters of British Columbia each year. Aquaculture is recognized as the fastest growing method of food production worldwide and is often positioned as a “blue revolution” capable of providing sustainable, affordable seafood in the midst of salmon population declines. In British Columbia, however, the raising of Atlantic salmon in critical Pacific salmon migration routes has engendered concerns about emerging industrial uses of the waterscape and the ability for farm-borne viruses to move between species. By investigating how industrial aquaculture is encountered, negotiated, and resisted on-the-ground, particularly by Indigenous communities in whose waters the practice is occurring, I instead propose that aquaculture is not a radical departure or a revolutionary break from the past, but is steeped within and dependent upon histories of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism that have long transformed salmon and waterscapes into sites of state and economy-building.Stemming from ongoing uncertainties regarding the potential for pathogens to transfer between Atlantic and Pacific salmon, this dissertation particularly focuses on historic, scientific, and political controversies that surround salmon viruses. In the absence of state monitoring for salmon pathogens like Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), Indigenous leaders and their allies travel to sites of aquaculture production to monitor the daily operations of farms and gather underwater video footage from within farm sites. Campaigns to enact stronger fish health protections and document the spread of viruses and pollution also become part of broader political movement aimed at reclaiming territory and restoring Indigenous forms of governance within coastal waterscapes. While pathogens come to reflect and reinforce colonial structures of dispossession, I argue that Indigenous-led efforts to track pathogens throughout salmon bodies and ecosystems are shifting power dynamics in ways that offer new possibilities for the “blue revolution.” This research brings scholarship on pathogens and industrial landscapes into conversation with enduring concerns about the material consequences of environmental injustice and colonialism. In situating aquaculture as part of an under-explored extension of settler colonial logics, structures, and governance into marine space, I suggest that the dominant framing of settler colonialism as land-based leaves large openings for understanding how colonialism and sovereignty are enacted in water-centered and maritime regions. Illuminating how industrial aquaculture and efforts to track pathogens take place within a broader politics of asserting sovereignty “at sea” reveals how historical inequalities and ongoing power dynamics become inscribed within oceans, with important implications for understanding contemporary ocean politics in the 21st century.

The intensity of the maritime traffic across the Eastern Mediterranean signals that the movements of ships are tied to and routed with the convulsions of unstable Mediterranean economies and regimes. Along their route between Turkey and Greece, formerly detached rural coastal towns turn into industrial boom towns. In my research, I explore the economic, political, and environmental development of coastal towns in the Gulf of Izmit in Northwestern Turkey, which reached its peak and turned remote towns into international shipping hubs at the beginning of the 2000s. Heterogeneous and unequal encounters between the landscape/seascape and the boom-and-bust economy of coastal towns led to new arrangements of coastal environments of a hardened shelf. Further the sediment in the Gulf’s basins restored years of industrial runoff and kept a record of coastal development. From algae in ballast water to anti-fouling paint sloughing off the hulls, ships carry much more than their manifests describe. Ships bring places with them, creating new inter-place dynamics in their materiality. I track the events that escalated the transformation of out-of-the-way small towns into shipping hubs in the Gulf of Izmit. Specifically, my project uses ethnographic work among maritime industry workers, municipal archives, regulatory agencies, marine biologists, and residents of these towns. By digging into the material landscape of insular concrete infrastructures, logistics hubs, and coastal waterscape, my project illuminates the processes that shift the geo-bio-morphology of the narrow, enclosed sea. I argue that shipping makes coasts in its historical and material contingencies, and that the sea is not a smooth surface for the speed of logistics but is full with entanglements.

This dissertation explores the opportunities to citizenship queer individuals in Mexico are engaging in and/or resisting as the Mexican government is incorporating LGBTQ+ rights and anti-discrimination legislation. I use a broader definition of citizenship that exists beyond legal citizenship that delineates citizenship as a subject-making, place-making and relational process in order to investigate the diverse ways queer individuals are including queerness into the Mexican national imaginary and enacting social change for different queer communities. This includes engaging with ordinary forms of citizenship that are enacted by common queer individuals who are working towards improving the quality of queer life. Likewise, I approach queer value as not an intrinsic but instead something that is actively produced through exchanges and encounters and variable across contexts. Hence, I utilize a queer geographies framework to explore how the benefits of queer inclusion, value and queer visibility under legal citizenship are unevenly experienced by different racialized queer subjects across the Mexican geography. This stems from the notion that the ideal Mexican citizen subject has been historically and sexually conceived as heterosexual and racialized as mestizo. Therefore, I argue the different configurations of race, gender and sexual differences influence how individuals understand sexual diversity, racialization and citizenship as well as feel connected to others subjects. By analyzing the intimate economies and encounters among queer and non-queer subjects, this work explores the ways different queer subjects and sexual subjectivities are “queering” spaces, bodies and social relations. Specifically, I explore how queer social boundaries are understood, recognized, and engaged as the mobile queer body traverses through Mexico’s social landscape to understand how queer value and spaces are transformed. So, by living in queer communal life, I explore how queer and “othered” sexual subjectivities are “queering” and/or creating an alternvative Mexico while reproducing and contesting the national ideology of Mestizaje. I also propose the need for experimental ethnographic methodologies, such as queer soundscapes, to percieve “othered” sexual subjectivities, encounters in unrecognizable queer spaces. In all, I explore how queer subjects are engaging with citizenship, boundaries and values while reproducing, contesting and producing Mexico’s alternative queer geographies.

Think before you act may be backward. In childhood, most of us learned a lot about ourselves, the world, and what it means to live a good and happy life by reading children’s books. We gained acceptance of the world and its people as they are rather than try to beat up on, or contest designs for living that differ from our own. Children’s books taught us beautiful universal humanisms, like ‘live and let live’ and ‘love is the answer.’ In adulthood, detached from childlike principles of kindness, everyday life appears to have normalized selfishness. Living by the principle of humanity-for-all learned so long ago is not always easy. The pressures and expectations of contemporary society can block us from taking the right action. What, then, could be a way back to principled and purposeful living that supports all people? My proposition is simple: don’t think, act. This ethnographic project, based on over three years of fieldwork with a youth media organization in California’s Central Valley, highlights a method for staying true to the values and virtues learned in childhood. Specifically, it focuses on the unity of a group of young people acting their way into proper orientation to life. They share their personal stories, document community concerns, organize and participate in social justice events, and publish media projects based on the outcomes of their youth-action work. Taken together, action prior to deliberation supports social-emotional well-being and critical-evaluative skills building. Using the idea of ‘secret sympathy,’ that aura among the group that produces conformity to unity, this field research suggests that a group acting without overthinking produces a sense of belonging that young people need. The hope that permeates this research relates to the journey toward the discovery of one’s true self so that values formed foster an awakening to aspirations beyond the limits presented in contemporary society. Aspiration under neoliberal ideals works either against such an awakening or stagnates growth because it locks children and youth in that status quo at moments when they are beginning to see and sense social injustice. This, in turn, produces negative thoughts such as disidentification and maladjustment to reality. Getting active in the world and taking action on literally anything in support of conformity to unity in the name of community health frees young people from dominating social constraints. This supports and activates aspirational awakening to all of life’s possibilities, uncontrolled by institutionalized demands.

This thesis contributes to the fuller project of decolonization by focusing on the development of Yoga in the 20th century and up to the present. The essay considers understandings of Yoga that reinforce the dichotomous West/Non-West image of the world. It develops new research on contemporary yoga in Mexico to show the limits and distortions of this appearance. The research focuses on ensembles of yoga practices, understood as a domain of relational interaction and change, rather than as a finished form of ether non-Western or Western (translated) provenance. From this perspective, we better appreciate that overcoming the unevenness and constraints of any relation come out of the relation itself, rather than from one pole.