Senior Thesis
All anthropology majors finish their career at Haverford with a year-long senior thesis seminar. Each student designs, implements, and writes up an original research project based on primary source materials.
Some students will do participant-observation field research or ethnography. Others will work with textual or visual archives or material culture. All will position their research in a field of scholarly work on that topic, do comparative analysis, draw on theoretical models to interpret their data, and produce original insights about their object of study.
Students should begin thinking about their thesis topic during the spring of their junior year, if not before. Many students choose a research topic related to a study abroad program, an internship, or a research fellowship. Students whose research entails travel to particular communities, library or museum collections, or monuments should take advantage of opportunities for research funding offered by the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship and Hurford Humanities Center.
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Gloria Vidal HC'09
Filmed and Edited by Patrick Lozada '11 with help from Prof. Maris Gillette.
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2011 Senior Thesis Projects
Andres Celin:
My thesis research focuses on the experience of women beneficiaries of a non-profit microcredit program in Cali, Colombia. I explore the ways in which their financial relationship with the microfinance institution contrasts with the socially embedded financial relationships they have previously established within their communities. I also problematize the concept of "women's empowerment" found in much of the economic development literature through my findings on these women's experiences as household managers and income-earning workers.
Carmen Delehanty
My thesis looks at the influence of globalization on shaping national identity through the construction and performance of Chinese Dance. Based on field research with the Penn Chinese Dance Club, I explore how the idea of harmony and the use of balance are integral to the visual construction of "Chineseness."
Laura Gilroy
My eight-month field project was designed to promote a deeper understanding of drug addiction and the nature and magnitude of forces behind the instance and experience of long-term drug addiction in contemporary urban environments. My analysis was based on observations drawn from work in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, where I worked with Prevention Point, a syringe exchange and street-side health project, and in Phnom Penh Cambodia, where I completed a service learning project at Korsang, a harm reduction community center.
Joy Heller
Based on fieldwork I did with adoptees and adoptive Korean families in Philadelphia, PA and Seoul, South Korea, I examine articulations of selfhood, kinship, and national identity in the context of transnational Korean adoption as a globalized institution. I examine how, through Korean cultural 'performances,' adoptees and their families negotiate a tension between essential and practice-based notions of ‘Koreannness,’ to carve out spaces of individual, familial, and national belonging.
Emma Hilbert
In this thesis, I compare two parochial elementary schools, and look at the ways in which student-teacher dialogue may work toward social class reproduction.
Marie Lorraine Kirton
Black elites have carved a place out for themselves within White dominant culture, but they must navigate their success through contradictions of class and race. In part, black elites are limited by the expectations held by other blacks, who view them as” less black.” Based on ethnographic interviews and field research at Jack and Jill and black Greek societies, I propose that black elites straddle two worlds in which they only desire acceptance, but find rejection and hostility.
Taylor Ray
My thesis is about the training of Capoeira, an African-Brazilian martial art and dance, in North Philadelphia. Through both participation in and observation of the class, I was able to tell the stories of the different members and demonstrate how training helps maintain the culture of Capoeira outside of its original context.
Elizabeth Svokos
I studied the narratives of the elderly in South Philadelphia. Using research from linguistic anthropologists, I identified cultural themes, tropes and patterns in the full-life narratives I collected. I then analyzed the meaning behind the common themes and asserted that the elderly frame their stories in order to self-identify themselves the way they want to be seen.
Emily Temple
My thesis examines issues of justice for domestic violence survivors in Philadelphia, based on field work and case studies from the non-profit advocacy group Women’s Law Project. I argue that the state and nonprofit systems in place to serve women victims of domestic violence are inadequate, and that the disparity between the state's and nonprofits' pursuit of justice, and the vision of justice held by the women, only furthers existing structural inequalities.
Raffi Williams
My thesis is an ethnography of the socialization process of students at an elite boarding school. I focus particularly on how two students from the People’s Republic of China do or do not fit in at the school, and why.
Jenny Zhu
This thesis on Philadelphia’s Chinatown explores the larger question of the ways in which diasporic groups, such as the Chinese, construct notions of community and ethnic identity. I argue that members of the Chinatown community engage in different types of ritual events/ performances to gain a sense of home and belonging in Philadelphia, and thus, are actively reimagining and appropriating their ethnic identities to address feelings of displacement in the diaspora.
2010 Senior Thesis Projects
Zachary Dutton
“Restorative Justice doesn’t Work? An effort to re-conceptualize punishment and to reevaluate restorative justice from the perspective of culture and ritual.”
Lila Maycock
“Second generation Indian America youth face the problems of identity formation in various ways. There is a constant pull between the influence of American culture and the expectation that they must conserve their Indian identity. Many scholars cite this as the “identity crisis” because it is often seen as something opposing and conflicting. There is a popular idea the American and Indian culture must be opposite and are irreconcilable. This thesis lays out the sources of these assumptions and explains the political and economic background of this polarization.”
Diana Tung
“This essay examine how neoliberalism, in the form of revitalized market-based ideologies and policies, impacts the ways in which low-level bureaucrats deliver food assistance policies to their low-income clients.”
Samuel Leath
“When hearing students take their first American Sign Language courses, they quickly learn that Deaf people can do anything but hear. This thesis is a fierce call to anthropology to contribute to the weakening of colonial ties that continue to oppress Deaf culture.”
Amira Shulman-Kumin
“This thesis addresses the topic of morality and character in schools, asking how morality, values and character were taught in a local first grade classroom. My experiences in the classroom as a participant observer throughout the year formed the basis for my answer to this question. In this thesis, I argue that moral instruction the classroom took two forms. First, moral instruction occurred during formal lessons that addressed various values and instructed on good behavior. Second, and just as important, were the lessons that were more hidden, implicitly taught through the way the classroom functioned and the relationships between students and teachers. I argue that implicit lessons were embedded within the formal lessons, and that those lessons reinforced the values that were learned through students’ participation in the classroom environment”
Shasha Chen
“This thesis explores the relationship between technology, body and culture and more specifically it examines the effect of reproductive technology on perceptions of the term motherhood for 21st century women in the US.”
Danielle Helme
“This ethnographic thesis delves into one of the essential questions about how our education system attempts to socialize children with moderate to severe autism. It asks the question the question: What stops many of these children at the end of their formal education from being able to leave the classroom setting and become more active members of society? I argue there are two significant factors that hinder these children from becoming more active member of society. First that the classroom environment does not sufficiently help them overcome their limited ability to readily internalize rules and apply them flexibly to different situations. The second is the unwillingness of some of their parents to encourage and fight for them to be able to achieve their full potential.”
Jennifer Phung
“My thesis seeks to show how the notion of Asian American is both a categorization and an identity and that while the two are not one and the same, they are interrelated. The notion of Asian American has been constructed through both internal and external forces. One of these external forces is in how Asians and different ethnic groups within this category have been represented by society. The meanings of how these images and stereotypes originated and their social roles are important in understanding the experiences and identity of Asian Americans. There was also a conscious move on the part of the community in forming a coalition and creating a panethnic organization. While the categorization of Asian American may be set, their identity, just like their culture, is not essentialist. Identity is fluid and is in constant negotiation and continually reconstructed through a group’s experiences. My examination of the historical processes that have shaped the Asian experience in the United States will also lead to my discussion about how economic, political and social forces have shaped the identity and group formation of Asian Americans.
Allison Elkin
“Using Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and gender, I will examine the ways in which the wedding dress serves as both a performance in and of itself and a doorway which allows other performances to occur, particularly within the process of selection.”
Melibea Sarant
“This thesis if an exploration and analysis of immigration policy in the United States. I found that immigration policy in the US is largely characterized by exclusion. Different groups of immigrants have been targeted by policy since the founding of the US, the most recent being the Arab and Muslim American immigrants. The terrorist attacks of September 11th were a historical event that influenced new policy. I examine resulting legislation, the USA Patriot Act, in depth. Throughout the history of our country, anti-immigrant sentiment has driven these exclusionary policies. Through interviews I conducted with immigrants and immigrant community service agencies and case studies I was able to examine the different manifestations of the negative sentiment, which became much overt post-9/11. Finally I look at how exclusionary policy and discrimination affect immigrant’s concept of identity and citizenship in the US.”
Elle de Moll
“My thesis compares tattooed women, who belong to the counter-cultural “tattoo community,” and middle class women who have tattoos but pass as untattooed. My goal is to address the ways in which tattooing is perceived as social resistance by women who do not meet conventional modest, feminine ideals. At the same time, I will address how the mainstream has appropriated, and thereby redefined normative, gender-appropriate boundaries for tattooing, which has questioned the resistive power of tattooing. The middle class, through the creation of tattoo narratives, negotiates the social stigma associated with tattooing.”
Kathryn Schaeffer
“The relationship between women and comic books is complicated. Superheroines such as Wonder Woman have reached feminist icon status in American culture, but many women question whether the sexy, spandex-clad super hero women are appropriate models of female power. Like the wonder women of the comic book pages, female comic book fans and artists have also found themselves struggling to fit in to a generally masculine space. I explore how these phenomena are related, and how women are blending in or fighting back.”
Julia Jordan
“This paper explores the ways in which lesbian women in Cape Town, South Africa identify with queer social spaces in the city.”
Louis Christella
“The First Haitian Church of God in Philadelphia believes that there are certain bodily moral standards that should be followed by its lay members and advocates that all Christians should be modest in apparel. Some of the various policies on dress code within this community are beginning to be challenged as a result of a number of forces that deal with issues around changes in religious and spirituality ideology, shifts in cultural practices as well as economic factors.”
Misha Baker
“This paper will show how Blackness as a metaphor can be used to mark the morphing desires of the Czech reggae scene in relation to the Czech Republic’s changing political and social climate.
Ashley Walters
“This paper will explore the smallest community within dance in America, the male and specifically, the gay black male community. It will uproot the dichotomy of the hyper-masculine representation as juxtaposed with the effeminate.”
Aimee Lanning
“My thesis explores how individuals within a group create positions of authority for themselves. The ethnographic context is a college-level theatrical production run by two students. I position this research in a literature on group dynamics and on student-run organizations, and argue for a performative model of authority.”
Katherine McDonald Zager
“This thesis explores the elements of labor relations that determine workers’ attitudes towards unionization, what constitutes appropriate working conditions, and who is responsible for protecting the worker from abuses.”
Sasha Rodriguez
“Puerto Ricans are categorized by academic literature in the dichotomy of either islanders or mainlanders. The two groups are presented as polar opposites and the only options for representing Puerto Rican identity. I conclude the exiting definition of Puerto Ricanness should be challenged and reconstructed to include all Puerto Ricans.
2009 Senior Thesis Projects
Dagem Gabriel
“This is an investigation into the role of Kindergarten as a socializing educational institution. My theoretical framework looks at the history of the study of children and how education acts as a socializing institution.”
Matthew Stitt
“Philadelphia is still recognized as one of the most dangerous cities in the country. Generation after generation, crime still seems to be the topic of discussion around the city. Every political campaign is prioritized with how the politician will handle the ongoing crime crisis. There is a reason why crime continues to be the topic of concern for the city, and this reason is evident in the disconnection between the city government and its local citizens. This study will show how this distrust between the state and its sectors of government creates a relationship that contributes to the instability of the state and the state’s inability to control the city’s crime.”
Lauren Kibbe
“United States citizenship is a multifaceted status. There are many politicial, social, cultural and historical circumstances that are associated with it as a mode of social positioning. This paper seeks to express some of those diverse perspectives by illuminating the experiences that shape the implications, values and function of United States citizenship in the lives of several Vietnamese immigrants.”
Amanda Gibbons
“Foucault describes hospitals as being a positive result of disciplinary power. When marginalized patients enter the worlds of the hospital, their bodies are disciplined in ways resulting from prison rather than from the hospital. Foucault describes the very mechanisms through which disciplinary power affects patient care in the hospital. The hospital is a site of disciplinary power that creates subjectivity in patients, makes docile bodies. The patient, engaged in a constant power struggle with disciplinary forces, loses his voice and is assessed by the hospital.”
Yesenia Ibarra
“In this thesis I will examine various frameworks that people use to assign and impose identity; how this process establishes ‘authenticity’ and how these identity tests set up power relations among students and at the institutional level. These frameworks act like Foucault’s “discourse” and create relations of power and hierarchy. I use informal meetings and gatherings to study how Haverford negotiate their Latino identity and what Latino students think about their own identity. At the same time, I will also look at the social process through which students perform particular identities at Haverford College.”
Gloria Vidal
“In 2008, with soaring prices of global crude oil, fuel oil and electricity became unaffordable for many rural Alaskans. These high fuel oil and electricity costs are causing a number of problems for rural Alaskans, who are dependent on fuel oil and electricity for generating heat and light for their homes, and also their morotized vehicles for transportation. My interest in the rural Alaskan ‘energy crisis’ sent me to Tanana, Alaska, for four weeks where I saw how the Koyukon Athabascan people of Tanana use fuel oil as a stimulus to practice traditional activities.
Sofia I. Pantel
“The removal of a significant part of the Parthenon in the 19th century by Thomas Bruce, the British Lord Elgin, and their subsequent sale to the British Museum has been the source of an on-going debate of museum ethics and rights, national identity, and international politics. This thesis examines the debate from both the British and Greek perspective and includes anthropological concepts of art, ethnicity, national identity and ethics as they relate to the issues of the debate over the Elgin Marbles’ repatriation.”
Jessie Blumberg
“This ethnography of the Wise Woman Center, located in upstate New York, explores the ways in which women (re)conceptualize their bodies and bodily experiences….. I use feminist philosopher Amy Allen’s definitions of power-to and power-with as a framework for understanding how women experience this ‘empowerment’ both as inner power and as collective power with other women.
Meredith Sine
“Drawing upon discourse analysis and a Foucauldian conception of power as a dynamic set of interconnected forces, I analyze the ways in which three local breast cancer organizations represented questions of medical authority, risk, and responsibility; survivorship and suffering; and gender, race, sexual orientation, and class. I argue that breast cancer education and advocacy organizations’ representations of breast cancer promote particular subjectivities which women are urged to inhabit, and define the scope of women’s agency in clinical encounters.”
Zac Arbitman
“In the 18th century, the barbershop has served as a space defined by male ritual. It acts as a sanctuary housing the performance of the ever transformative haircut that proves critical to the initiation of a young boy into manhood and the reaffirmation of a man as a member of his gender. I explore these notions through ethnographic research at a barbershop in the Philadelphia area.
Sean Hofman
“Athletic footwear has been ubiquitous within American society and culture since the mid-1950’s. I investigate the ability of consumers, through the consumption of sneakers, to tactically assign meaning to the objects they purchase as resistance to corporate strategy alá Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘making’.”
Lucie Steinberg
“This paper examines both internal and external attitudes towards Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. As a museum of medical history that exhibits the remains of ‘abnormal’ and ‘monstrous’ bodies, the museum is engaged in a paradoxical project that seeks to order and bind bodies that are defined by their very taxonomic recalcitrance. Relying on the insights of Mary Douglas’ theory of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution,’ I investigate the ongoing ambiguity and anxiety that is inscribed upon these bodies.”
Meredith Bentley
Religions of Proof: Paranormal Investigators of the Delaware Valley in a study of ghostbusters in the Philadelphia area.
Alison King
“This thesis analyzes ethnographic date accumulated from my fieldwork at the Swarthmore Players Club, a community theatre located in the suburban borough of Swarthmore, PA. I ask, why would people who make their livelihood outside the theatre devote six to eight weeks of their limited free time to attending rehearsals, memorizing lines, creating a character, and ultimately performing for free? I followed a production of The Retreat From Moscow from the first audition through the final performance, and found that the Players Club exists as a liminal space, where actors feel comfortable temporarily trading their real life identities for those of characters in a play. Within this liminal space, actors are encouraged to play. The actors experimented with new voices, new physicalities, and new personalities in the process of creating their characters. Using their discoveries to construct and furnish the world of the play, the cast formed a unique, heightened kind of bond akin to an anthropological notion of ritual communitas. “
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."