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- ItemExisting Between Two Worlds: Haverford College Students and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Negotiate Social Justice Work(2023) Roy, Naren Sebastian; Sertbulut, ZeynepThe 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.
- ItemYesh Breira/There is an Alternative: Towards the Development of Anti-Zionist Jewish Community(2023) Sloan, Jared; Saleh, ZainabWe 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.
- ItemAlongside Other Harmonies: Art as a Means of Growth, Advocacy, and Justice for Philadelphia Youth(2023) Muno, Carolena; D'arcy, MichaelViolence has a profound but generally well-understood impact on bodies and communities. Less understood, however, are ways in which these lasting impacts and their systemic roots can be addressed. This thesis attends to this discrepancy through an examination of the role that collaborative community arts programs play in disrupting cycles of interpersonal and structural violence. This examination is performed through an analysis of ethnographic research which includes both participant-observation within and interviews with students, staff, and community partners of a Philadelphia musical arts program. This arts program, which I call Ridge Avenue Music Project, serves incarcerated and otherwise system-entrenched youth. This analysis reveals that entrainment (modulation to external circumstances) to program values of trust, openness, safety, and student autonomy can disrupt the restricted habitus of these youth on an individual and community level. I characterize this habitus as “Jupiter habitus”, which describes the lived embodiment of violence endured by youth held within modern day systems that emphasize policing and surveillance whilst enacting community disinvestment. The disruption of Jupiter habitus and the facilitation of social justice advocacy within musical training allowed youth to create affective and systemic alterations oriented towards the building of a more just collective reality.
- Item"This is What We Sign Up For": Questioning the Student-Athlete Experience at Haverford College(2022) Morrison, Moorea; Moses, JoshuaHistorically, concepts and values of health have primarily focused on physical health without considering the implications that mental health has on physical health and general well-being. With growing conversations about what it means to maintain "good" mental health, this thesis explores the ways that mental health plays out in the dynamics of collegiate student-athletes, but this conversation is not always prevalent in regards to smaller NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Division III schools like Haverford College. Mental health has a major role in the everyday life of collegiate student-athletes as a result of the emphasis on the physical body within athletics coupled with the pressures that come along with attaining a college education. Through feminist ethnography and autoethnographic work, I highlight the experiences of four fellow student-athletes as well as my own experiences as a student-athlete at Haverford College to explore the sailence of mental health for student-athletes, including the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. Through this exploration, I argue that structures within collegiate athletic departments and the higher education institution of Haverford College shown through expectations of student-athletes stress an idealization of the student-athlete experiences. This idealization leads to values and social norms that create an environment of toxic positivity that are internalized and impact the ways that student-athletes understand and approach challenges with mental health. Ultimately, these settings are not conducive with the promotion of positive mental health and can actually create more challenges, and this thesis questions whether the current structure of higher education is able to properly support student-athlete mental health and student's mental health generally.
- ItemAgainst Virtuosity: A Political Framework for Music Education as Care, Possibility, and Curiosity(2022) Penrice, Maria; Eisenberg-Guyot, NadjaThis thesis pays close attention to the insights provided by affective responses and emotional states to interrogate the overinvestment in classical music education in the United States. Through autoethnographic reflection and conversations with a small group of interview participants, I trace how identifying emotional disconnects in music education settings is a crucial source of information for disrupting severely imbalanced power dynamics and analyzing the alliance between white supremacy and heteropatriarchal powers. In synthesizing my personal reflection and interviewees' insights alongside the work of a diverse set of theorists, I hope to articulate a vision of music education that is based on critical wellness, genuine emotional connection and caring relationships, curiosity, and the building of political solidarity. Focusing on questions of race, power, and capitalism in my research process, I was led to artists, movements, and traditions that have long enacted a radical vision of music education. Throughout the paper, I undertake a process-focused methodology that seeks to leave the reader with a set of ongoing, unanswered inquiries that I will continue to grapple with far into the future.