Browsing by Subject "Ethnology"
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- ItemNavigating Health Care Worlds: Community, Belonging, and Care at Haverford College During the Covid-19 Pandemic(2024) Komatsu, Naomi Bleier; Sertbulut, ZeynepThe Covid-19 pandemic had a profound impact on how individuals and communities care for one another. It exposed and compounded the structural inequalities that are faced by marginalized communities worldwide. At Haverford College, students, staff, and faculty experienced the pandemic in different ways, depending on their social positions in the community and the wider world. The pandemic made visible an insider/outsider dynamic present within the community, but at the same time offered an opportunity for community members to contest and alter this dichotomy. Drawing on an array of anthropological scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork, including participant-observation and semi-structured interviews, that I conducted at Haverford College in the winter of 2024, this thesis addresses questions of institutional and community imperatives to provide care during the Covid-19 pandemic; what it means to belong in this community; and what care practices that are centered on an awareness of structural inequalities look like. I argue that caring and belonging in the Haverford College community are intimately linked, and involve demonstrating the values of the imagined insider: a person dedicated to social justice, egalitarianism, and community. During the pandemic, students, staff, and faculty came together to organize community care practices in order to bring attention to the social hierarchies and structural inequalities present within the Haverford College community. Through these care practices, they attempted to challenge these social structures and demonstrate their worthiness of care and protection by performing the role of an imagined insider.
- ItemThe Portal of Serendipity: Public Libraries, Children's Rooms, and the Importance of Public Space to Caregiver(2024) Dallman, Zora; Hong, EmilyThis thesis offers an exploration of children’s rooms in public libraries as a critical resource for parents and caregivers of young children. Through a case study of the Jones Library in Amherst Massachusetts, I engaged in participant observation and semi-structured interviews to understand the library as both a physical environment as well as a social sphere. I present the library as a portal of serendipity, representing the ways that libraries serve as a necessary and unique third space through providing opportunities to bring together people of multiple ages and multiple needs and create joyful encounters and experiences without any expectations in return. I frame my argument through using an anthropological lens of space and through positioning the library in the current historical moment.