Anthropology

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    The Solution, Not the Problem: The Unseen Experiences of Living with Chronic Illness at Haverford College
    (2024) Cohen-Shields, Maya; Hong, Emily
    In this thesis, using photovoice methodology, I strive to better understand and find commonalities among the experiences of students with chronic illness, including myself, at Haverford College. With this greater understanding of the ways in which these students cope, function and succeed in a college space, I am able to understand how the ableist foundations of higher education impact students with chronic illnesses, and how their experiences can give insight into moving past those foundations. Through understanding disability models and the concepts of normalization and disability as a problem, I argue that those with chronic illnesses are still pushed into the idea of normalization and “compulsory able-bodiedness” but show by our lived experiences how we are pushing those boundaries and finding ways to still be able to succeed in these spaces. However, what is now needed is for colleges to look to students with chronic illnesses to understand how they can better shift the college’s policies and fundamental functioning to move beyond seeing disability as a problem to be fixed and more as people needing to be included and set up for success within the higher education system itself.
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    The Portal of Serendipity: Public Libraries, Children's Rooms, and the Importance of Public Space to Caregiver
    (2024) Dallman, Zora; Hong, Emily
    This 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.
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    Navigating Health Care Worlds: Community, Belonging, and Care at Haverford College During the Covid-19 Pandemic
    (2024) Komatsu, Naomi Bleier; Sertbulut, Zeynep
    The 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.
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    Existing Between Two Worlds: Haverford College Students and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Negotiate Social Justice Work
    (2023) Roy, Naren Sebastian; Sertbulut, Zeynep
    The Center for Peace and Global Citizenship supports Haverford and Bryn Mawr students in gaining work experience with non-profit/community organizations, placing them in partnership with individuals already pursing justice work or funding independent proposals with a similar purpose. Since Haverford’s CPGC began operating in 2000, the college has continued to evolve as a small liberal arts institution with Quaker roots. What is the relevance of the CPGC today, over two decades after its founding? I argue that students’ CPGC Fellowship experience allows them to navigate important issues from the ground up, while being undergraduate students because of CPGC’s unique positionality as an internal Haverford academic funding center with an infrastructure that faces outward. This emphasizes ongoing connection with professionals and community organizers outside of academia. CPGC’s unique role of mediating in between Haverford and the outside world permits students to call upon their personal, professional, and intellectual sides, often at the same time. Moreover, the entire Haverford community can critically interrogate how intellectualism can be something expansive and applicable in real world civic engagement.
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    Yesh Breira/There is an Alternative: Towards the Development of Anti-Zionist Jewish Community
    (2023) Sloan, Jared; Saleh, Zainab
    We are in the midst of a generational shift in Jewish attitudes towards Israel, with one of the largest waves of young Jews since prior to the 1967 war either distancing themselves from Israel or rejecting it entirely. Despite this shift, the overwhelming majority of American Jewish institutions are still explicitly Zionist, often in ways that are openly hostile to non-Zionist beliefs. My research enters into this generational gap, seeking to understand the ways in which Jewish non-Zionist young adults navigate their desire for Jewish community and political commitments to Palestinian liberation. As current college students and recent graduates, many of these individuals have newfound opportunities to take control over their Jewish identities and particularly the communities and modes of practice they choose to engage with. Taking inspiration from prior scholarship by anti-Zionist Jews, particularly Atalia Omer’s Days of Awe, as well as work in critical theory, I explore the delinking of Judaism and Zionism that my interlocutors embody, and the forms of Jewish practice that can emerge. Centrally, I argue that while they separate Judaism from inherent support for Zionism and the Israeli state, most of them feel called to fight for Palestinian liberation not in spite of their Judaism but because of it. Through a mixture of intentional communities, ritual practice, and political activism (while blurring the boundaries between all three) young non-Zionist Jews are powerfully articulating a different way to be Jewish that is grounded in solidarity and justice.