Browsing by Author "Kelly, Patricia"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Addressing Maternal Health in 21st Century America: An Exploration of Risk, Motherhood, and Reclamati​o​n
    (2020) Thomas, Barbara Denise; Kelly, Patricia
    African Americans' experiences of racial and gender-related stress and discrimination negatively impact their behaviours and emotions related to their health care during pregnancy 6 that is deeply rooted in the United States history of slavery and marginalization of Black women. This has resulted in higher risks for negative birth outcomes and difficulties in early motherhood that expecting mothers of other races in the U.S. do not have to face. In response to these racial disparities in maternal healthcare, black maternal health advocates and leaders have collectively taken a stand against the racial violence placed against their communities by encouraging African American women to reclaim their bodies and rights to African ancestral birth practices and reform their communities of black reproductive health workers.
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    El Valor de la Mujer: A Study of Cervical Cancer in Managua, Nicaragua
    (2013) Bilek, Kelsey Irene Z.; Kelly, Patricia
    This thesis reviews cervical cancer in Nicaragua, analyzing the causes of its prevalence, which lie in strict gender roles, stigmatization of the disease, and structural economic disparities. Responsible for 52% of deaths among Nicaraguan women annually, Nicaragua has the highest cervical cancer rates in Central America. During the time that I spent in Managua, I explored the reasons behind these high rates, interviewing women in the neighborhood of Acahualinca, as well as the local Acahualinca Women’s Health Clinic and the Berta Calderón National Women’s Hospital. With affordable healthcare treatment and a plethora of public and private campaigns raising awareness about cervical cancer, its high prevalence rates were baffling. In this thesis I further explore the facets behind the disease including the gender expectations of women and men, the violent machismo behavior, and the associations of cervical cancer with promiscuity and uncleanliness. Through analyzing these underlying factors that promote cervical cancer, I ultimately seek to provide suggestions for improving both the public and private healthcare systems and decreasing cervical cancer rates in Nicaragua.
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    Enacting Elitism: Experiencing Race and Class at Haverford College
    (2014) Zieve, Hannah; Kelly, Patricia
    Since the implementation of the G.I. Bill following World War II, college has been seen as the pathway to a more secure economic future in the United States. Significantly, though, students from wealthier homes attend college at much higher rates than those from low-income homes. The disparity is even more striking at so-called "elite" colleges and universities, which maintain their status through a combination of wealth, power and exclusivity. Despite their selective, monied and often racially charged histories, these colleges imagine and advertise themselves on a basis of diversity. I conducted thirteen interviews and ethnographic observations at Haverford College, a private liberal arts school in the Philadelphia area, in order to examine the effect this imagination had on the students who attend the school. Disproportionately, students who were identified as a racial or economic "other" in some way reported the need to adapt their habitus (the physical embodiment of their cultural disposition) in order to better fit in and succeed at Haverford. Through their stories, I argue that the college ultimately supports a hegemonic system in which elite cultural norms are valued at a higher level than others. By implicitly requiring students from "diverse" backgrounds to change themselves in order to succeed at in elite American culture, Haverford College and its peer institutions are complicit in a process of social reproduction that erases individual difference.
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    Memorialization of the Underrepresented: The Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park
    (2019) He, ShuMin; Kelly, Patricia
    While there is a significant amount of literature on peacemaking procedures after an armed conflict, there has not been much study on reconciliation processes after a violation of trust and humanity. This thesis looks at how the Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park memorializes the expulsion of Chinese from Tacoma in 1885 by comparing it with the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park and the Mankato Reconciliation Park. Using scholarly literature on the concept of space, collective memory and reconciliation, I compare and contrast each space’s engagement with historical injustices. I argue that the Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park constructs its collective memory through public programming and a spatial formation that identifies the root cause of the Tacoma Method. But the park’s goals for raising awareness about the incident is limited since its reconciliation process stresses civic harmony rather than civic engagement.
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    "Si Dios Quiere" Instability, Sustainability, and Wellness in a Vermont Migrant Worker Health Clinic
    (2020) Smith, Kelsey R.; Kelly, Patricia
    Vermont is the only state in the United States that relies heavily upon a singular export, dairy, for agricultural revenue, a dependency that has left the state and its small-scale farmers fatally vulnerable in the past decades' market fluctuations. The industrialization and consolidation of the dairy industry and the effects of neoliberal policies like NAFTA on Mexican and American dairy markets have created the perfect supply and demand chain of cheap dairy labor to the rural northeast of the United States, with over 60 percent of Vermont farms now fully supported by Latinx migrant workers. The Care Center, a free-clinic that serves uninsured and underinsured patients in Cherry County for the past three decades, has found itself the main provider of medical care for this growing migrant worker population that works in a dangerously underregulated occupation due to its deemed exceptional status by OSHA, which withholds typical worker protections. The clinic provides a wide variety of services ranging from physical exams and mental health counseling to food prescriptions, but their reliance upon grant funding and volunteers leaves the clinic, not unlike their patients, in a state of financial and functional precarity. Despite the vulnerability of the clinic and the patients they serve, the state's Department of Public Health and even high-profile private institutions continue to lean on the Care Center and their non-profit status as a method of filling the gaps in social assistance left behind by the withdrawal of the neoliberal state. The health landscape that Latinx migrant dairy workers and healthcare providers must navigate is shaped by the state's dependence on a fluctuating dairy market and its status as a rural, border state and is further complicated by race, class, and gender, but the combination of these factors has yet to be explored in Vermont. Not only does this thesis fill a gap in literature by showing that the structures of neoliberal politics/economics, citizenship, and race keep both migrant workers and healthcare providers in a state of perpetual instability and vulnerability, it invokes the notion of sustainability to frame cooperative methods of support used by community members to sustain themselves and one another.
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    When Those Who Can Do, Teach: Teach for America and the Devaluation of the Teaching Profession
    (2014) Bahn, Hannah; Kelly, Patricia
    This paper explores the ways Teach for America (TFA), a nationally-recognized non-profit organization that recruits top-performing college graduates into 2-year teaching commitments in urban and rural public school districts, devalues and deprofessionalizes the teaching profession. Using an in-depth content analysis of TFA’s marketing materials and interviews with undergraduate students who are applying to the organization, I identify how Teach for America narrates itself and explore the implications of this "master narrative." I find that TFA’s master narrative sets its corps members in opposition to "traditional" teachers (those who have gone through traditional teacher certification programs) by drawing on neoliberal conceptions of education and citizenship. The result is that Teach for America succeeds in making itself look more successful at a steep cost to the children it purports to help. In devaluing the teacher profession, TFA deters bright, dedicated individuals from viewing teaching as a worthwhile long-term career option. It is these individuals, not young adults with no training and little respect for the practice of teaching, whom America’s children need in their classrooms.
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    Witchy Business: Witchcraft and Economic Transformation in Salem, Massachusetts
    (2020) McClain, Lia; Kelly, Patricia
    Salem, Massachusetts is perhaps best known for the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, in which dozens of residents of Essex county were accused of witchcraft, and nineteen were executed. For several centuries after these tragic events, Salem had little association with the supernatural or the demonic, becoming a prosperous, and later a rather decrepit, trading port. But witches emerged once more in the coastal city during the 1970's, and Witchcraft-oriented businesses have become an essential part of Salem's economy. In the last several decades, the United States has seen a significant growth in the popularity of modern witchcraft, reflected in social media, television, and perhaps above all, the marketplace. My interest is in the tension of modern Witchcraft as a deeply embodied, yet also highly commercialized practice, and the issues presented as these bodies enter the economy both as actors and as objects. This research speaks to implications for the commoditization of spiritual practices more generally, something that could perhaps be explored more explicitly in further projects. Performing archival and ethnographic research focused on historical and modern Salem, respectively, I argue that the two appearances of witches in Salem are tied to periods of economic transformation, but that the witch is treated drastically differently in these two periods as a vessel capable of alleviating economic troubles, first through her eradication, and today through her proliferation.