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- ItemEast to West: International Educational Migration of East Asian Undergraduates to the United States(2024) Foster, Jacob Seiji; McKeever, MatthewAnnual international tertiary educational migration has tripled over the past few decades. These millions of contemporary educational migrants represent enormous flows of people, goods, culture, knowledge, and money moving around the world. A large part of this growth is due to the immense quantity of students from Asia coming to popular anglophone destinations such as the US, the UK, and Australia. Conducting interviews with 12 East Asian international students, I explore how international students decide and understand whether to pursue a tertiary degree at an undergraduate institution in the US or in their home country. I challenge extant frameworks in the burgeoning international student migration literature by arguing that predominant approaches erroneously reduce the phenomenon of international educational migration to oversimplified macrohistorical analysis that disregards the holistic, micro individual judgments part of choosing where to pursue a degree. Through analyzing qualitative data from interviews, I find that those who came to the US all shared a background of past international experiences that influenced them in pursuing a degree overseas. Interviewees all claimed personal ownership over the decision to go abroad, expressing that they were not compelled, but many also explained that it was almost expected of them given their current trajectory. This has significant implications for the literature, as opposed to how it is commonly posited, the decision to go abroad is not of a moment—or even a period of time—but is formulated through other earlier choices. These choices are nebulously made by or for them by interested parties, often parents, and are compounded by various social influences and contextual factors. One significant inclination I highlight is a commonly-expressed intrinsic, high value placed on abstract, future freedom that they would receive as a product of going abroad as opposed to staying at home.
- ItemThe Role of Collective Value Judgment in Mediating Doll Collector Community(2024) Bernstein, Ari; Kohlman, MarlaThe doll collector community is one ostensibly tied together by a shared common interest in a product, but there are other forces that mediate how the community is formed. Past literature on doll collectors have focused on their relationships to the objects themselves, leaving out much of the human interaction that goes into a hobby of collecting. This interaction, however, especially with the rapid growth of the doll collector community in the early 2020’s, makes up a large part of the hobby. Using a combination of data from participant observation of doll spaces, content analysis of doll communities on social media platforms, and in-depth interviews with doll collectors, I investigated what forces hold doll collectors together and structure their community. In line with collecting as a consumer hobby, doll collectors found their community centered around discussions of monetary value that could involve quite intense discourse. My findings indicate that the community format of the secondary market, the engagement of collectors in conspicuous consumption, and the fear of their community being made inaccessible by people trying to profit off of them combined to give deference to this price discourse as a mediator for community.
- Item“He Wasn’t Supposed to Die:” How College Students Coping with Peer Loss Differ from Other Groups of Grievers(2024) Gould, Kylan; Herrala, EliseThe existing sociological literature's failure to consider peer loss among young adults has left gaps in support systems and programming that could help affected individuals process their losses. I aim to fill this gap. I used the characterizations of grief that most frequently showed up in the literature such as religion’s role in grief and gendered grieving, and adapted them to modern young populations, demonstrating where the theories aligned with my respondents’ responses and where theories failed to capture their experiences. Additionally, I identified two grief frameworks highly relevant to young grievers, but somewhat underrepresented in the literature: substance use and the role of institutional support for bereaved college students. Given that grief is a highly individualized experience, there wasn’t one uniform response among respondents, but there were patterns in their grief responses that crucially differed from or added to the existing grief literature in significant ways. I argue that existing literature is important for understanding why college students’ grief reactions may arise, but that it fails to explain how they are grieving and for what reasons. In my thesis, I demonstrate how young adults suffering from peer loss grieve differently from the broader population through four subtopics: religion’s role in grief, the lack of institutional support, substance usage, and gendered expressions of grieving.
- ItemThe Unobserved Barriers in Undocumented Latina Women’s Reproductive Health Utilization: A Review of Health Policy Across Four States(2024) Yupe, Stephany; Montes, Veronica (Sociologist)This study examines the patterns of reproductive healthcare utilization of Latina undocumented immigrant women to contribute to a discussion of unequal health access for these women. The health-seeking behaviors of women were analyzed across California, New York, Minnesota, and Illinois to understand how state policy plays a role in preventing undocumented groups from receiving preventive services. The goal of this review is not to list patterns of reproductive health. Although it provides insight into prenatal and postpartum care rates for women. Instead, it deconstructs barriers in reproductive studies that prevent access to the health system. The undocumented Latina experience in the U.S is precarious compared to documented or U.S.-born Latinas. Undocumented women are subject to federal law that excludes them from receiving safety nets such as Medicaid. Based on a review of thirty-four qualitative articles on undocumented Latinas and health disparities, this thesis reveals how public health policy and cultural barriers influence care. The review adds to healthcare disparities for undocumented women by going beyond a mainstream model of SES barriers like income, and insurance status as determinants of health. The concept of unobserved barriers such as fear of deportation is used instead. The study is corrective to the thin literature on Medicaid policy by showing how state insurance has an intimate relationship with the undocumented. The findings reveal that undocumented women were receiving prenatal care at alarmingly lower rates than documented women or were receiving inadequate care. In all cases state sovereignty for public health was influential to the services women lacked. The prominent unobserved barriers were English proficiency, lack of knowledge, fear of deportation, and temporary coverage. The cases of California, New York, Minnesota, and Illinois reveal that to improve access unobserved barriers need to be taken seriously in the face of insufficient health policy.
- ItemUnderstanding Black Culture Through the Eyes of non-Black POC Communities(2024) Johnson, Taylor; Herrala, EliseFor non-Black communities, navigating Blackness can be similar to traversing a playground, with forms of expression and cultural values frequently toyed with and manipulated for the benefit of non-Black people—and to the detriment of Black communities. To understand recurrent themes and modes of Black cultural appropriation, scholarly writing primarily analyzes this dynamic through the relationship between Black and white communities in the United States. These dialogues typically concern cases where a white individual achieves notoriety in the media through adopting Black speech or even identities, which benefit them financially or socially. But in less direct cases of what we might call “identity theft,” it can be difficult to pinpoint what Black culture consists of and to whom, as well as to what, appropriation looks like; Black communities and their values are not monolithic. Yet it appears that despite some ambiguity in defining these cultural attributes, there exists an unspoken understanding that there is an inherent opposition between white and Black communities that cannot allow for a comfortable cultural exchange — according to scholars, and Black individuals who are most reluctant to share their culture. But what happens when we ask these questions outside of the Black-white binary? Identifying and addressing instances of Black cultural appropriation becomes more difficult when considering other minority communities, in part because they may have similar histories of being “othered” and there is not the same level of systemic domination between these groups. As a result, cases of Black cultural appropriation enacted by non-Black communities of color typically do not attract the same amount of attention or scrutiny in the media and interpersonal conversations. How, then, do non- Black American people of color (POC) engage with Black American culture through language, and to what degree is their comfort level with Black English usage? This paper aims to break down the implications of what Black cultural appropriation by POC would mean in terms of harming Black communities as compared to examples of white appropriation and to explore the differing intersectional positions of the POC that engage with Black culture. By doing this, I establish the differences between how POC appropriation of Black American culture is perceived by Black individuals as opposed to white appropriation. Further, I question whether the same terminology can even be used due to these historic and racially stratified differences.