Senior Thesis
Take a Peek
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
View Micaela Dybbro's Senior Thesis Research project on Women's Rugby Culture (2:15)
More Resources:
The anthropology major culminates in an independently designed two-semester ethnography. Students design, implement, and write up an original field project on the topic of their choice under the guidance of a thesis supervisor.
The anthropology curriculum exposes students to the methods of field work and the skills of critical thinking and analysis needed for ethnography. Each student shows her mastery of anthropology during the senior thesis seminar. In the first semester, students conduct field research on a specific project that each student has selected. They complete a series of ethnographic and scholarly exercises designed to help with the thesis and write their thesis plan in the form of a prospectus. During the spring, students work closely with their thesis supervisors as they complete field work, engage in analysis of their findings, and write and revise their own ethnographic monographs. The spring semester ends with public presentations by all the seniors on their research, individual oral examinations with the department faculty, and a finished thesis.
2008 Senior Thesis Projects
SHASHI NEERUKONDA
"My thesis research analyzes how African Americans and immigrants from different African countries are marked by stigmatizing processes of HIV/AIDS in Philadelphia. There are two types of markers that are being analyzed, disease and racial, and three levels at which the different processes are being analyzed, physical, social relations, and psyche."
CAITLIN COTTER
"My thesis explores how religion fits into the Bryn Mawr undergraduate community, particularly as that community has been constituted as a Queer Space. I examined the ways in which Bryn Mawr could be defined as Queer and how religion and religious identity is defined, expressed, and discussed on campus."
JENNY RABINOWICH
"I am studying AIDS activism within two specific communities designed to fight AIDS in Nairobi, Kenya and in Philadelphia. I am looking at the ideologies which these groups create and perpetuate about how a person with HIV should live with the virus, and how these idealized versions of the truth interact with the real experience of living with HIV."
JILL FOLEY
"My thesis is about the construction and maintenance of identity via "cultural markers," specifically the coca leaf in Bolivia."
IPPOLITA DI PAOLA
"My thesis is about indigenous women from the Western highlands of Guatemala, and their interactions with community development projects and personnel in the aftermath of Hurricane Stan. I explore the problems with the discourses of community and community development in this post-conflict landscape."
MEAGAN HUME
"Egypt’s contemporary Islamic revival is a popular response to the failings of the Egyptian State. Egypt’s long history of popular revolution along with its juxtaposition of Tradition and Modernity lead Egyptians to be susceptible to the global Islamic trend."
JANE WEBER
"I am studying the interactions between social service providers and the homeless through participating and observing with a mobile syringe exchange, a street side medical team, and a college food distribution group. I am particularly interested in exchange and how these organizations view their roles as changing lives through meeting the immediate needs of street populations."
EMILY GREEN
"I am writing about consumption and capitalism in the online community Second Life. The virtual world has its own self-sustaining economy, with people spending and earning real US dollars, and I have been examining how they earn, what they buy, and why."
CAITLIN CAVEN
"I am writing on comedians as cultural producers. There are sections on women in comedy and the particular challenges they face, satire as a communicative tool (and a discussion of whether it is useful as such a tool), and discourse: how comedians talk about themselves and their craft."
ELIZABETH SHRIVER
"I am comparing two organizations in Philadelphia and their creative approaches to the meaning and the method of building a community. The Wayfinder Experience engages youth in fantasy role playing games such as Capture the Flag with foam swords. Spiral Q builds giant puppets and puts on parades with students in Philadelphia public schools and after school programs."
JACLYN MILLS
"For my thesis I am examining mechanisms of surveillance and self-governance at Haverford and how physical and figurative spaces affect student behavior and perceptions of the campus. "
KAREN BARKER
"I am writing my thesis about the community art of Spiral Q Puppet Theater. I am looking at how aesthetic performance can be transformative to the performance of everyday identity."
MICAELA DYBBRO
"My essay investigates collegiate women’s rugby and the conflict between the cultural ideology surround the sport with a drive towards a ‘professionalization’ of women’s rugby in the US. I focus on Bryn Mawr-Haverford women’s rugby team and its shift towards a more professionalized image and mainstream identity, and the forces that are behind this change."