Browsing by Author "Schuetze, Christine"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Deconstructing the “Black Vaccine Hesitant Subject”: The Broadening of Black Relationalities to Medicine and Power
    (2022) Banjo, Tolulope E.; Schuetze, Christine
    An exploration of the complexities behind vaccination decisions, Deconstructing the “Black Vaccine Hesitant Subject”: The Broadening of Black Relationalities to Medicine and Power, examines the public discourse surrounding vaccine hesitancy and vaccination decisions among African Americans. Through a critique of public health messaging, interviews, social media analysis an extensive literature review, this thesis attempts to deconstruct the notion behind the “Black, vaccine-hesitant subject” with a focus on resisting hegemonic narratives that paint Black people as monolithic. This thesis shows that simplifying the complexities behind vaccination decision can obscure nuances and mask the systemic issues that affect vaccination decisions. In contextualizing the perceptions and thoughts of the COVID-19 among Black people, Deconstructing the “Black Vaccine Hesitant Subject,” has the potential to provide insight into the complex relationship between Black people and medicine.
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    Encerrados: Wyoming Migrant Worker Resistance to Embodied Legacies of Violence
    (2022) Burgos Quezada, Eduardo; Schuetze, Christine
    Encerrados: Wyoming Migrant Worker Resistance to Embodied Legacies of Violence is a compilation of migrant worker life stories that resist and challenge ongoing colonial structures of labor, care, and power. Drawing on anthropological literature that engages with the body, different forms of violence, frameworks of (in)visibility, capitalism and the fetishization of commodities, and the inflammation of the land, society, and bodies, this thesis interweaves migrant worker stories with histories of violence to bring forth the dangerous contradictions that structures of domination depend on. Combining extensive participant-observation, interviews, and the implementation of a social impact project focused on migrant worker healing, this thesis sheds light to the legacies of violence that manifest as poor health in the lives of Wyoming migrant workers, creating feelings of entrapment. These feelings are exacerbated by the violence of the U.S. immigration system that produces uncertainty and confines them to the geographic space. The body becomes the entity in which the ongoing forms of violence against migrant workers are made visible and the visibility of migrants in the broader community constructs hostile anti-immigrant environments. These attitudes, ideologies, and perceptions infiltrate into the institutions of care, further creating barriers for migrant patients seeking services. Despite their existence in harmful environments constructed by legacies of violence, Wyoming migrant workers are resilient and resist ongoing colonial harms. I argue that practices of remembering, and artmaking contribute to lessen these feelings of entrapment and provide migrant workers with the agency to reconstruct exploitative environments, in effect establishing feelings of libertad and tranquility.
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    Femicide in Buenos Aries: Social Change Through Interpersonal Education
    (2016) Bleskachek, Mckinley; Schuetze, Christine; Liu, Roseann
    This paper explores the trajectory of social thought concerning femicide, particularly as it relates to the 2015 #NiUnaMenos movement in Buenos Aires. Through framing gender as a social construct, this paper illuminates the connection between cultural, structural and personal violence. In this framework, individual murders become a social phenomenon. The critical consciousness fostered by the #NiUnaMenos movement reveals the potential of interpersonal education to effect social change.
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    The Social Life of Kava: The Circulation, Transformation, and Extraction of Piper methysticum
    (2021) Yett, Ariana; Schuetze, Christine
    A commodity biography, The Social Life of Kava: The Circulation, Transformation, and Extraction of Piper methysticum examines the various ways that the meanings and forms of kava are transformed as the plant is introduced to new contexts. Combining online discourse analysis with extensive interviews with kava consumers, vendors, and scholars this thesis sheds light on the inequality of the global market and the forces shaping it. Drawing on anthropological literature that engages the globalization of food, the commoditization of indigenous products, and the pharmaceuticalization and medicalization of society, this project reveals that kava is subjected to the norms and standards of the contexts into which it is introduced. Specifically, I argue that in the presence of global markets, kava is extracted geographically, chemically, and conceptually. Geographically, kava is removed from the Pacific and introduced to new contexts. Chemically, kava is reduced to its active constituent properties, kavalactones, which are then mixed into new matrices. And conceptually, kava is reduced to a commodity that fulfills a prescribed function. Rather than approaching kava as a unique cultural good, global consumers treat it as an analogue to substances already in use. By investigating kava’s various transformations I demonstrate that it has become enmeshed in neocolonial processes that continue to reproduce unequal global power relationships.
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    Telemedicine and E-health during Covid-19: A Study on Reproductive Healthcare Practices Amidst the Pandemic
    (2021) Rothell, Francesca; Schuetze, Christine
    As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, telemedicine and telehealth websites have become increasingly more common and necessary. This thesis aims to understand how the shift to online care influences what it means to be a patient in covid-era and potentially post-covid America. It aims to explore how the patient experience is impacted by online care and how the integration of communication technologies and wearable devices are shaping health care today. Taking a specific look at the direct changes apparent in reproductive and sexual health care, this study analyses patient experiences using telehealth sites and e-health technologies.
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    Viral Fear: The Outsized Impacts of COVID-19 on Manhattan Chinatown’s Sze Yup Cantonese Elderly
    (2022) Chen, Kenny Zhi Ming; Schuetze, Christine
    COVID-19, a severe acute respiratory syndrome that emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, remains a pressing global health concern. And all the while, as insecurities, angst, and grief about the ongoing coronavirus mount worldwide, so too have crimes against peoples of Chinese and other Asian descent. Viral Fear: The Outsized Impacts of COVID-19 on Manhattan Chinatown's Sze Yup Cantonese Elderly contextualizes the hate epidemic amidst the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of (what I call) a landscape of fear. This study works to disaggregate pandemic data, and illuminates the impacts of this fear on the lived experiences of a Sze Yup Cantonese elderly population residing in New York City’s Chinatown – one of the largest yet equally underserved, invisible migrant communities in America. Through tracing historical understandings of race in America, synthesizing semi-structured interviews, engaging with online discourse analysis, and reflecting on social theory, this thesis argues that society understands disease not simply as biology, but a manifestation of political affiliation, (dis)connection, and difference on material bodies; social determinants of contagion begin with viral fear that proliferates through violence (physical, structural, mental). Throughout history and especially during the pandemic, Manhattan’s Chinatown has transformed from an immigrant safe haven into a landscape of fear. Scapegoated and vilified in the media on the false pretenses that they are to blame, multiple layers of harm against Asians living in Manhattan (and America, more broadly) emerge: the contagion itself, the racism, and the fear. Fear is then transmitted by word of mouth, by videos on the media, and through experience. The landscape of fear grows and expands across Chinatowns, nationally: a collective, communal fear. All these forces, working in parallel, have restricted elderlies’ access to healthcare, fresh produce and food, and connection – pointing to new areas of concern that must be addressed to ameliorate viral fear and its impacts.