2020
Adolescent depression and anxiety symptoms remain prevalent in sub-Saharan African countries, yet treatment options remain scarce and inaccessible, and stigma limits help-seeking. Brief, empirically supported treatments that contain stigma-free content and use trained lay-providers can expand access to mental health treatment. We developed and evaluated such an intervention, targeting adolescent depression and anxiety in Kenya, where mental healthcare is limited by social stigma and a paucity of providers. The treatment, called Shamiri (Kiswahili for “thrive”), consisted of growth mindset, gratitude, and value affirmation exercises. The content was delivered by recent high school graduates trained as lay-providers. Adolescents met once a week in groups of 9-12 youths for four weeks. The Shamiri intervention appears to reduce youth depressive symptoms and, to some extent, youth anxiety symptoms. If replicated, the Shamiri intervention may be an effective treatment option for youth depression and anxiety symptoms in sub-Saharan African countries and other low- and middle-income countries.
In 2007, a series of mountain gorilla massacres in Virunga National Park (Congo-Kinshasa) received international media attention, a standout headline in the near-constant series of stories of African conservation tragedy: resilient fauna lost at the hands of "savage" poachers. Through a political ecology of Virunga and its extension, Volcanoes National Park, in Rwanda, I challenge the common narrative that human and animal well-being in "wild" Africa are inevitably dichotomous, exposing the legacies of power and fiction that render it so. Utilizing archival work centered at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, I present Virunga, the continent's first national park, as a site of collision between Western scientific inquiry, tethered as it was to fictitious human-animal and social-natural binaries, and material colonial governance. Beginning with the precolonial, where social and natural governance were blurred in subsistence systems, the human-exceptional line is traced and contested under various governing regimes. This alters the "ins" and "outs" of the human polis and of the parks, with the social and political identities of affected local populations, international agencies, national governments, and perhaps even mountain gorillas themselves transforming as their governance does. Looking to the present, then, I build upon field work in the parks to theorize the agency of populations rendered "subhuman"—existing outside of both political and natural governing lines—and of gorillas, destabilizing contemporary assumptions of poachers and the poached. By exposing the archaeology of power and injustice that underlies modern gorilla conservation in the Virunga massif, I argue that current governance mechanisms are neither optimable nor inevitable; so long as the conservation of mountain gorillas relies upon the creation of a subhuman "other," the entire project remains unsustainable and incomplete.
My thesis examines how a country's domestic institutions—its regime type—influences its military decision making. In particular, I compare the military decision making of India, Pakistan, China, and Vietnam, during the First Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948, the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and the Sino-Vietnam War of 1979. During these three border disputes, these states displayed varying approaches to military decision making: India and Pakistan, on the one hand, were overtly concerned with maintaining territorial control and security over their states. China and Vietnam, however, often made puzzling security decisions, focusing more on “punitive strikes” and political objectives than on territory or military victory. What can explain these variations in military decision making? I hypothesize that regime type determined these states’ respective security objectives: the leaders of the Marxist-Leninist party-states Vietnam and China predominantly sought security for their regimes while leaders in democratic India and Pakistan prioritized “state security,” which included the defense of their countries’ territory and people. Thus, this thesis examines “state security” and “regime security” as frameworks that can explain different regime types’ approaches to conflict. I implore both quantitative and qualitative methods to test the viability of my hypothesis in explaining state action. As this thesis is a work in progress, I would be grateful for any feedback on how I can best frame and define these two security frameworks.
This thesis investigates the interactions, tensions, and competing justifications for actions among stakeholders involved in the decade-plus conservation process of the historic Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong between 2007 and 2018.
I build on Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of justification to account for the ways in which the different actors taking part in the Central Police Station conservation process engage in legitimacy-shaping discourses unique to Hong Kong’s contentious sociopolitical context and urban realm. I place Boltanski and Thévenot's framework in conversation with urban theory literature to analyze three periods of tension and controversy through the Central Police Station conservation process: initial debates over the proposed design, disagreements over the site’s proposed operator, and ongoing controversies over the site’s uses now that it is in operation.
Drawing upon extensive interviews with key stakeholders involved in the Central Police Station conservation process, as well as archival research, this thesis suggests that Hong Kong’s unique sociopolitical and geographic contexts gave rise in the mid-2000s to new discourses of justification and assertions of legitimacy over heritage that had not previously seen significant engagement in the public sphere. Given the relative newness of discourse over heritage in Hong Kong’s public sphere, an examination of the stakeholders involved in the Central Police Station conservation process reveals a process of self-education wherein stakeholders attempted to assert and maintain legitimacy while simultaneously still educating themselves about that over which they were asserting legitimacy. This thesis builds upon understandings of justification and legitimacy maintenance through assessing the ways in which various actors assert their legitimacy over a realm, in this case heritage preservation, where each actor has scant prior experience.
Higher education exchange plays a crucial role in the cooperative pillars of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar infrastructure investment and global development project launched in 2013. As part of its reemergence as a global power in recent decades, China and its higher education system have undergone tremendous modernization, in part through a renewed emphasis on attracting and educating global talent. This thesis examines contemporary Chinese education diplomacy from the perspective of foreign students in Shanghai, China from BRI signatory countries. Situating their experiences in the literatures of soft power and public diplomacy, and contextualizing this inflow of students within China’s long history of educational exchange, I consider whether these students are “successful” subjects of China’s international education system. These students, most of whom are attracted to China by generous scholarships and better postgraduation employment prospects, are simultaneously potential diffusers of positive foreign perception for the Chinese state, and a population of strong recognized legitimacy and political agency in their home countries. Through a foreign student survey and qualitative interviews with students, exchange student administrators, and Chinese education policy officials, I attempt to trace the impact of these students on China’s hallmark international aid and investment project of the twenty-first century.
My interdisciplinary thesis, a creative ethnography of South African homeless women traversing Cape Town during the water shortage, examines the legacy of spatial apartheid as it affects their access to spaces and places, both real and imagined, and the resources available in these locations. Through the examination of homeless women’s experiences of exclusion from urban public space, this thesis denaturalizes the modern cityscape by highlighting their social, embodied, imagined landscapes.
My collaborative research has found that the women reclaim spaces beyond the bounds of typical urban usage, which I call “unmappable places.” These places allow a new avenue for existence. The effects of apartheid, racism, and sexism are still very much present in these reclaimed spaces; however, my interlocutors have found an alternate urban reality—one in which they can defy, reject, or manipulate societal norms. Depicting the “unmappable” pathways these women navigate on their quest for clean water, my interlocutors and I have created “mapped artifacts” via processes of walking and drawing. Counter-cartography is a useful method to visually critique the current spatial inequalities in a politically and racially tense city, as well as provide a platform for homeless women to reclaim space and assert their presence in Cape Town.
My project strives to adopt practices and methodology from artists, researchers, ethnographers, and homeless women. Together, the merging of both fields of art and anthropology offers a thick description of female homelessness in Cape Town. This interdisciplinary approach interrogates the multifaceted problem of gendered access to public space and inspects the interrelatedness of identity, social relationships, environment (both built and natural), and resources.
In the beginning of 2018, Cape Town made headlines the world over. After three years of drought, the city was facing the prospect of "Day Zero," when all the taps would be shut off and residents would have to line up to collect their water rations. City officials, climatologists, and foreign media all gestured to the crisis's underlying explanation: climate change. Yet on the ground, Capetonians were widely skeptical of this narrative; on many accounts, Day Zero had nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with defective governance. This paper explores how the narrative of Day Zero was produced and legitimated, as well as how it was woven into the larger narrative of climate crisis. It studies why and on what grounds that narrative was contested, and argues that this contestation bears important lessons about the way we narrate climate change more broadly. It employs an interpretive social science method and wrestles with questions of knowledge-production and social drama. Its aspiration is a story of climate change that is both more capacious and more just.
This thesis seeks to explain why and how European Union member states repeatedly fail to respectfully evaluate and care for LGBT asylum seekers and refugees under the minimum requirements set forth by both European law and European Court of Justice rulings. Through six weeks of field interviews with national asylum agencies, NGO leaders, and asylum lawyers in twelve different EU member states, my preliminary hypothesis is that member states lack the basic “legal infrastructure” necessary for their asylum agencies to properly process and handle LGBT asylum cases. I also identify a general failure on the part of most national asylum agencies to consider the unique challenges that LGBT asylum seekers face throughout the asylum process—including considering how housing, medical care, and psychosocial support are different for LGBT asylum seekers when compared to their heterosexual or cisgender counterparts, with whom national asylum agencies are much more accustomed to working. I posit that this lack of foresight has led to many LGBT organizations and refugee NGOs to divert their own resources to “fill in the gap” of a lack of LGBT-adapted services that national governments should be providing to LGBT asylum seekers in the first place. Through my field research, I’ve found that when asylum NGOs make such interventions, the asylum process, safety, and overall well-being of LGBT asylum seekers are vastly improved. Thus, national governments have much to learn from civil society and NGOs across Europe on best practices and special considerations to take while working with this particularly vulnerable refugee population.
In French, the much-studied interrelation of language, ideology, and lived experience crystallizes around the question of gender. Not only is every noun in French classified as masculine or feminine, but a whole range of grammatical features, rules, words, and linguistic practices intertwine gender ideologies and language to the point that they become co-constitutive. This group of phenomena, which I call “languagender,” has arisen both as a result of historical linguistic factors and as a result of language projects intended to reinforce gender binarity and hierarchization, with the masculine gender cast in the dominant role.
Recognizing that languagender enables, encourages, and even imposes acts of gender violence upon francophones with various gender identities, many have attempted in recent years to develop alternative grammars which are more inclusive. Drawing on interview data and on literary analysis, my thesis explores such practices of languagender resistance and dismantling mobilized 1) by gender nonbinary Quebecers in their daily lives, and 2) by French and Quebecois writers in works of fiction. I read these two corpuses together with the objective of writing an accessible text that suggests best practices for those looking to construct and use a more inclusive French language. Having done so, I propose that the best course of action, and that most respectful of nonbinary people’s goals, is not to create and impose a new series of words and rules, but to adopt practices that embrace language fluidity, multiplicitity of practices, and metalinguistic thinking and discussion.
This thesis explores the Ghanaian government's recent application of copyright law to the domain of national folklore, looking both at larger, international standard-setting for folklore management and the particular interface of politics and traditional culture in Ghana. I show how, beginning with international policy recommendations in the 1970s and 1980s, the Ghanaian government developed a legal and bureaucratic apparatus to consolidate and define folklore in order both to “protect” it from degradation and misuse and to “promote” it as a symbol of national unity and a tangible asset. By looking at the historical trajectories of cultural policy, and copyright law specifically, from Ghanaian independence in 1957 to the present day, I hope to illustrate the ways in which understandings of folklore are constructed and deployed by the state, as well as the ways in which these understandings come into conflict with one another.
Ultimately, this study seeks to articulate and respond to several questions: What does it mean to define folklore as a category subject to copyright law and legal regulation? What are the potential uses, implications, and implementations of such definitional projects? What are the limitations? Looking at these questions in the context of Ghanaian nation building and cultural policy writing illuminates the multivalent and evolving contradictions at their core.
Cambodia’s modern fate was sealed on April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge came to power following years of political turmoil and civil war. The regime ended in January 1979, but not before killing at least 1.5 million Cambodians and annihilating all of Cambodia’s modern infrastructure. The Khmer Rouge’s ideology was the result of centuries of Cambodian struggle against foreign nations—the culmination of a desire for an empowered and unified nation centered on Khmer values and culture, harkening back to the glory days of the Khmer Empire. The policies that they implemented centered around the use of violence, paranoia, and deceit, which they used as tools for maintaining control over the general population. Their policies maintained party ideology, seeking to eliminate all foreign influence, and were also designed to enforce compliance with lofty goals for Cambodia’s production and development. Cambodians were evacuated from their homes, relocated, and made to work excruciating hours. People died of starvation while laboring in fields of plenty. The Khmer Rouge separated families, dismantled the Khmer language, and executed people for the smallest transgressions. Beneath the surface of the Khmer Rouge’s all-encompassing policy, Cambodians rebelled. They preserved a sense of unity, snuck around within the structure that the Khmer Rouge had created, and maintained their right to silence. These hidden acts of resistance ultimately allowed for the preservation of life, culture, and nation.
This thesis offers a political characterization of one of the most curious byproducts of China’s rapid urbanization—the proliferation of vast, modern, but sparsely inhabited “ghost cities,” new districts built by municipal governments which then lie empty. Previous area studies scholars have hypothesized that ghost cities result when ambitious local officials seek to raise revenue or increase their promotion odds through urban development. However, evidence from Lingang New City, a ghost district in the exurbs of Shanghai, suggests a more nuanced explanation rooted in bureaucratic politics and institutional design. Complementing elite interviews and textual analysis to provide a complete process-tracing, this thesis argues that Lingang’s development is best understood as the product of a bureaucratic structure specifically created to achieve a narrow, preordained vision for the district’s development. Operating with a constrained mandate, multiple levels of government used adaptive policy making to achieve a planning outcome that, rational or not, had been set in stone from the beginning. Though still in progress, later sections of this thesis will aim to extend this argument to other cases, explaining new district development in China as a product of bureaucratic path dependency rather than official self-interest.
In a period of shifting perceptions of Americans and Russians by both countries, my research seeks to examine the role that education can play in contributing to these perceptions and broader US-Russia relations. In an examination of the teaching experience of US to Russia Fulbright teachers, I seek to bring light to how state-sponsored education programs fulfill both a learning function as well as an ambassadorial one. Given that the majority of Fulbright teachers in Russia teach in universities, pure English instruction often takes a backseat to transmitting American culture, values, and lived experiences. Interestingly, Fulbright teachers almost exclusively teach outside of the major European metropolitan cities of Russia, with many highlighting they were often the first American their students interacted with.
Interviews revealed that Fulbright teachers have mixed perceptions of their role in the classroom, though most saw the significance of their presence as an American in their communities. Their students came with strong awareness of American culture, and teachers mostly dealt with more complex topics and social issues, albeit carefully. Their State Department training highlights their ambassadorial role with limited teaching instruction; an element of "fear-mongering" was noted by many teachers in their preparation for representing the United States in Russia. Teachers struggle to balance their desire to maintain rapport with their students while also correcting misperceptions about the US or pointing out areas of culture clash as their job entails, namely around gender roles and issues of diversity.
In 2016, when a landmark peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC) ended decades of armed civil conflict, over 30 percent of the revolutionary guerrilla organization’s members looking to rejoin civilian society were women. Motivated by the limited consideration of gender in the reinsertion of ex-combatants in civilian society, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork with women ex-combatants in Colombia to examine women’s ongoing reincorporation experiences. What experiences do women have in and after joining armed revolutions? How do these experiences shape the women and the civilian societies they join in the post-war period? My thesis explores what the FARC meant to the women who joined it and how its disbandment as an armed group following the 2016 peace deal transformed their lives.
In Chapter One, I discuss how many ex-combatant women have transformed aspects of their participation in the FARC—for example, vocational training, organizing skills, and confidence in their ability to occupy roles that are not traditional for women—into postwar gains. In Chapter Two, I analyze social collectivity in the FARC, arguing that collective identity was shaped and reiterated through ritual performances. Lastly, in Chapter Three, I discuss the nostalgia women feel postwar for this sense of collectivity. I argue that nostalgia plays two important roles in the lives of former combatants: first, it is deployed to bond former combatants in the postwar era, and second, it helps define individuals’ social identities postwar.
Throughout the 1930s, Nazi-affiliated researchers gradually took over the academic field of Germanic prehistory in an attempt to provide pseudoscientific justifications for their racialized ideology. Assuming a supposed position of neutrality, Danish prehistorians and archaeologists chose to continue cooperating with their German colleagues, while ignoring their radical political views. This thesis examines the reception of Nazi pseudoscientific research in Denmark and the long-term effects of such scholarship on the academic field of Scandinavian prehistory. Moreover, it aims to challenge Danish national narratives, which have traditionally emphasized Danish policies of neutrality and the reluctance to cooperate with National Socialists. While previous scholarship has examined Nazi-sponsored archaeological expeditions from a German perspective, this project explores the Danish response to Nazi pseudoscience and the politicization of the Vikings. Through an examination of academic publications and correspondence, it identifies four main stages of archaeological politicization including 1) the early introduction of Nazi archaeology in Denmark; 2) international cooperation at the German site of Hedeby; 3) wartime misuses of archaeology and Viking cultural heritage; 4) the long-term effects of postwar denazification on Danish academia. Ultimately, a look at Nazi-era archaeology in Denmark challenges the country’s policy of neutrality towards the Third Reich and emphasizes the lack of clear distinctions between intentional collaboration and tacit participation.
This thesis investigates how and why Argentina and Brazil’s civilian governments consolidated control over each country’s military-managed nuclear program in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this case pairing, I address the larger theoretical question of how new democracies formed after military rule can decisively subordinate military institutions to civilian authority.
My analysis relies on process tracing methodology, over 900 pages of archival documents, and eleven interviews. I find that Brazil’s democratic transition left the outgoing military regime with significant authority and generated piecemeal civilian efforts to manage the national nuclear program, while Argentina’s democratic transition left the outgoing military regime in disarray and facilitated civilian control over the national nuclear program. I also find that Brazil’s civilian government consolidated control over the nuclear program to minimize military influence in the country’s nascent democracy, while Argentina’s government did not.
From this, I argue that the types of democratic transitions—which reflect different levels of military strength and military interest in certain institutions—affect the difficulty of establishing forms of civilian control. I then argue that the sequence of civilian controls over military institutions fortifies democratic consolidation after certain types of democratic transitions and not others. In so doing, I make a comparative-politics-driven qualitative intervention into a traditionally international-relations-interpreted topic, highlighting how nuclear programs can shed light on domestic political processes as well as international patterns of deterrence and diplomacy.
I am very grateful for any and all feedback, particularly on how to better communicate the stakes of my argument, as well as how to simplify and explain its parts.
