This paper intends to provide a qualitative description of an experimental alternative education program for formerly incarcerated adolescents. In doing so, it intends to construe this school as a site of liberation - in opposition to its former iteration as a correctional institution. It examines the school’s architecture, pedagogical practices, and practices around care to reveal that this institution has been reconfigured to empower students in any number of ways - from meeting their material needs to providing the conditions for immense intellectual enrichment. This ethnographic exploration may be used as a manual for replication or as fodder for thought on what education can do and mean.

In this thesis, I use ethnographic fieldwork to exemplify the relationship between urban agriculture and socioeconomic development, specifically low-income status. The goal was to look into urban agriculture through the themes of sustainability, community development, and food insecurity. Through this study, the initial idea was to develop if urban agriculture can be seen as a solution to food insecurity in low-income communities. The focus location is Newark, New Jersey, one of the heavily populated cities in the state with high rates of poverty. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I volunteered at an Urban Agriculture Cooperative to assist in the daily work of the farming, packaging, and transportation process of produce. Through participant-observation, immersive research, and field interviews, I was able to understand the process and benefit of urban agriculture but see the effects in person. The main themes found were the positive influence of urban agriculture on community bonding, togetherness, environmental sustainability, and food security for the community. In the end, my contribution is to provide a guide to starting urban agriculture to prospective leaders within low-income communities. This will be able to have all resources in one spot and able to reference when needed. Urban agriculture is a growing movement that can be the future for food security and environmental sustainability.

Through this thesis, I argue that grief is a form of disorientation against the normative that requires the bereaved person to reorient themself through a world that continues to implicate the deceased person. I use auto-ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork notes from interviews with my family, both of these related to losing my nana, to reflect different forms of (dis/re)orientation caused by grief, including through religion and collective forms of grieving. Many of my family members feel that, through the Christian understanding of heaven, they are guaranteed to meet Nana after their death. I, however, feel that there must be a continued relationship between myself and Nana. Based on a discussion of Christianity being grounded in whiteness, at least in Brazil, I argue that, to honour Nana’s life as a Black woman, we must move beyond understanding her passing through a framework based on whiteness. To do this, I reflect on examples from various cultures and focus on examples from Afro-Brazilian religions, all which suggest that there’s a continued relationship between the living and the dead. Through this, I argue that by subverting normative expectations of grief, understanding it as a connection with the spiritual realm in which the people we grieve now reside, we can come to see death not as a finality as a liminality. This allows us to reflect on how we are connected by one continuous life wherein the self is in one instance living and in another dead, or living beyond death. We can then come to interpret grief as a new relationship between the living and the dead, where grief is a connection with the spiritual world, and we then can reorient ourselves through loss by focusing on new relationalities supported by traces of the dead.

Randomized controlled trials and quantified evidence have become the cultural standard of acceptable treatments in the practice of Western biomedicine. Yet, non-Western medicine, while often lacking this “evidence,” is backed by thousands of years of experience. Why does Western medicine eschew the application of so many of these practices? This thesis argues that the marginalization of many non-Western medicinal practices within Western sports medicine is due to a complex interplay of factors such as their framing rather than solely their efficacy. As evidence, I present original data from interviews with athletic trainers and student-athletes of NCAA division 1 Princeton University athletic teams. Results from my interviews reveal that trainers successfully apply non-western treatments to aid in the healing and performance of their athletes, while facing obstacles from institutional barriers and participating in cultural translation. While testing a full range of practices is encouraged, this thesis suggests that a deeper understanding of the cultural, social, and institutional factors influencing the acceptance of alternative therapies is crucial for fostering a more integrative and equitable sports medicine system.

This thesis explores the shifting landscape of reproductive health care in the United States through an ethnographic lens, focusing on how the individuals most engaged in this field- activists and physicians- navigate, reinterpret, and anticipate change in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Drawing on interviews with those across a wide range of ideological lines, I explore how participants understand their roles within a rapidly changing sociopolitical environment and how these roles are constantly renegotiated in response to legal, cultural, and institutional uncertainty. As opposed to previous literature which has framed abortion as a binary conflict, this research foregrounds the complexity of lived experience and moral understanding across the reproductive health spectrum. Building on anthropological scholarship of care, uncertainty, temporality, and moral subjectivity, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how reproductive futures are endlessly shaped in the present.

In times of war, personal narratives become one of the few things that survivors are left with. The ongoing war in Sudan has been named the worst humanitarian crisis in recorded human history; with millions facing famine, displacement, and unimaginable violence. Despite this, the world stands idle and indifferent to their suffering. This thesis explores the power of storytelling as a tool for resistance, historical preservation, and advocacy. By centering firsthand accounts from displaced Sudanese individuals; it counters the dehumanization– minimizing human lives into statistics and policies– that typically drives war narratives. The study examines storytelling’s role in processing trauma, reclaiming agency, and challenging dominant narratives shaped by governments and media. Through historical contexts, theoretical analysis, and collected testimonies, this work highlights how personal stories shape collective memory, resilience and justice. It aims to ensure that Sudanese voices are neither ignored nor forgotten. In amplifying their stories this work serves as a testament to the idea that storytelling is more than just recounting events- it is a means of reclaiming identity, fostering empathy, and demanding justice. Keywords: storytelling, war, narrative, displacement, agency, humanize, preservation

This thesis examines how Black athletes have long used sports as a platform for political resistance, tracing a century-long lineage of activism from Jack Johnson to Colin Kaepernick and beyond. It argues that Black athlete activism is not a recent phenomenon but an enduring form of protest that confronts the intertwined forces of white supremacy, nationalism, and institutional surveillance. At the core of this study is an original analytical framework that identifies four archetypal approaches to Black athlete activism: the Johnson Approach of defiant resistance, the Owens Approach of excellence as contradiction, the Robeson Approach of global ideological protest, and the Robinson Approach of strategic navigation through white institutions. These models provide a historical foundation for understanding contemporary activism in the age of social media. Methodologically, this project blends historical and discourse analysis with hashtag ethnography and autoethnographic reflection. Drawing from autobiographies, archival imagery, and digital protest movements like #TakeAKnee and #MoreThanAnAthlete, the thesis explores how today’s Black athletes use social media to resist the white gaze, reclaim their narratives, and amplify political dissent, while also facing intensified backlash and surveillance. Ultimately, this study shows that Black athlete activism continues to be a crucial site of democratic struggle, where visibility and vulnerability collide. It reasserts that protest is not an intrusion upon sport, but a central function of it – one that forces the nation to confront the gap between its ideals and its realities.

Working against the upswing of the United States homelessness epidemic, social workers face an ever-increasing brunt of bureaucratic regulation, obligation, and contradiction as they seek to forward their homeless clients’ access to housing. When the experience of homelessness exceeds bureaucratic legibility, it is through narrative construction, interpretation, and reframing that social workers make meaning of the excess. This thesis seeks to interrogate the social worker’s practice of narrative construction and reframing as it scales across personal, interpersonal, and institutional registers. Pushing against bureaucracy’s reductionist force while operating within it, social workers turn to narrative as a means not only of expressing the inexpressible, but with the hopes of expanding the possibilities of what bureaucracy can (and should) assimilate. Spread across community mental health clinics, psychiatric facilities, and homeless encampments, this ethnography follows social workers as they mediate between the intimacies of homeless experience and the primacy of bureaucratic regulation. Exploring how case managers both adhere to and subvert the treatment plan paradigm, Part 1 explores the ways in which social workers reimagine institutional treatment plans to forge cohesive “client narratives” capable of accommodating both homeless experience and bureaucratic regulation. Part 2 interrogates how social workers subsequently mobilize these client narratives as they navigate institutional deviance, while Part 3 addresses the gap between experience and narrative as social workers seek to reconcile client experiences with institutional narratives of homelessness. Questioning whether this gap between homeless experience and clinical narrative can ever be fully reconciled, in the conclusion I turn to the homeless community’s own means of structuring and expressing experience as a generative ground not only for social work and homeless outreach, but ethnographic writing itself.

As of the beginning of the 2024 college football season, student-athletes are still not being paid directly as employees. However, changes made official in 2021 to the rules around the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) policy within college athletics have changed the landscape of the industry. Endorsement deals and commercial use of an athlete's likeness, once forbidden, are now legal. The introduction of this form of economic opportunity presents major implications for the future of the sport that was once heavily grounded in community-based ideals. I argue that it has taken a few years for these NIL changes to fully come into effect, with the 2021-2023 seasons acting as an incubation period for NIL college football. Teams and players alike took time to adapt to the new rules and determine the most advantageous ways to use them for a competitive or financial advantage. I consider the 2024 season to be the pinnacle of the effect of NIL on college football. It has left us with almost entirely new systems of recruiting and valuing young athletes. In this thesis, I researched the economic and social landscape of the 2024 college football season. I gained insight into how the new systems came to be and how athletes are navigating the uncertain waters. I discovered that the creation of a ‘pay for play’ system has taken over the sport, where teams use NIL as a way to pay their players like professional athletes. The result of which has created a capitalist frenzy with no regulation. The rise of these cultural ideals focused on money has led to two major social shifts: the loss of community and a change in how college athletes' bodies are valued.

To be a fan is to love something beyond expectation; this thesis aims to explore what that love looks like. Taking the virtual fan community for the hit reality TV series Survivor as a paradigm, I attempt to move beyond our traditional conception of television fanhood as a pastime of individual, passive consumption in favor of a more complex understanding of fans’ microinteractions and motivations. My ethnographic work consists of a thorough content analysis of three different online fan forums created for Survivor, with special points of focus being defining the fan identity, the allure of the reality TV genre, unique fan rituals like gamification, and the implications of emotional ownership. By zooming in on the ways that Survivor fans perform their devotion to the show and to one another, I hope to illustrate two key ideas: (1) the evolution of TV fandom into a collective, active, and sometimes dangerous practice, and (2) the paradoxical relationship between fan and text that simultaneously empowers and limits the possibilities for fan engagement.

This thesis examines how Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) reforms have restructured the landscape of collegiate sports by blurring the boundary between amateur and professional sports structures. Through a historical analysis, my own argument and analysis, and ethnographic interviews with current and former Division I athletes this thesis investigates how athletes navigate the institutional structures that have been shaped by commercialization, visibility, and labor dynamics. This study reveals how NIL has promoted athlete advocacy and empowerment while also complicating the role of amateurism and the erosion of the NCAA’s control over collegiate athletics. Within this argument, I explain how NIL has generated both benefits and unintended consequences to its amateurism model and question the role of the NCAA’s authority in the future.

Keywords: Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), NCAA, Amateurism, Commercialization, Professionalization, Agency

Based on analysis of social media, readings in anthropological and social theory, and ethnographic research in Los Angeles before and after the devastating fires of January 2025: this thesis takes the case study of Erewhon Market to analyze shifting conceptions of luxury and consumption in the United States amid times of disaster. Erewhon Market, a Los Angeles based grocery store, provides anecdotal evidence of how competitive consumption manifests itself in food. In-person ethnographic research conducted before the fires combined with journal and news articles and social media content showcase the broad category of consumers who prioritize natural and organic foods that can be purchased at specialized grocery stores. As our conception of luxury has shifted over time, food has come to the forefront of affluent consumption. The ideas of ethical consumption have been commonly studied as the pressures to consume have amplified under the current disparate wealth environment. As status symbols shift to more everyday luxuries, brands must adjust to this new conception of affluence in an era of intensely competitive consumption. The proliferation of content on social media highlighting abundant food consumption encourages people to purchase the items to adhere to the trend or risk falling behind and out of favor. Increasingly targeted algorithms also contribute to this feeling of struggling to keep up; as you engage further with content related to food and wellness, you run the risk of falling down a variety of rabbit holes. This ethnography challenges our preconceived notions of luxury, which are necessarily predicated on the world order we observe; when disaster strikes, how does our perception of essential change?

At time of writing, the war in Gaza has been ongoing for nearly two years with at least 65,000 Palestinians murdered. The occupation of Palestine has been ongoing for decades longer than that. On October 7, 2024, over 1500 men, women, and children were murdered, and over 250 kidnapped and brought into the Gaza Strip. As one Israeli activist with a member of their synagogue held hostage in Gaza put it, Israel is no longer a project, but is a real place with real people. This thesis is an analysis of fieldwork conducted in Israel and Palestine over the summer of 2024. Through collaboration with an Israeli nonprofit as well as networks I had independently forged, I conducted a series of conversations, interviews, and participant observations, and was able to meet a broad swath of the Israeli left and participate in protective presence on behalf of Palestinians. This ethnography presents an argument about the character of the social space in Israeli society at present, and the consequences of that character on the ability of Israeli and Palestinian activists to conduct their work.

In the town of Ridgewell, it’s natural for any boy or girl to pick-up a lacrosse stick at a very young age. This thesis explores how lacrosse within this prosperous suburban town is considered so much more than just an athletic activity. Lacrosse has become synonymous with the town (a “Lacrosse Town”), and over the decades, this sport has contributed to shaping its identity, reinforcing their community values, and successfully bequeathing these societal privileges from one generation to the next. Beginning in the 1st grade, boys and girls alike are enrolled in the lacrosse youth program where they start learning the fundamentals of the game and also begin interacting with other kids their own age and affluent status. This ethnographic study investigates the factors that have elevated the Ridgewell High School boys’ and girls’ lacrosse teams into an enduring dynasty. To reach such a pinnacle in the sport, my thesis will examine the unwavering contributions from experienced coaches, early player enrollment, proactive family involvement, extensive community participation, and also the overwhelming financial support. At the same time, I will introduce other defining attributes and necessary requirements from the players on Ridgewell lacrosse: dedication, camaraderie, character building, and collegiate aspirations. On a macro-scale, this thesis will also take into account the structural inequalities that limit access to the sport from the neighboring minority communities…and thus, preserving its exclusivity to affluent towns such as Ridgewell.

This thesis investigates the dual realities of Black student-athletes at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), revealing how their experiences are shaped by racial stereotypes, social exclusion, and systemic commodification. Through a combination of historical analysis, scholarly literature, and over a dozen interviews from Black student-athletes themselves, this study uncovers the structural dynamics that influence how Black student-athletes are perceived, supported, and utilized by their institutions. At PWIs, athletes often face spaces, highlighting a pattern of conditional inclusion rooted in racial assumptions. In contrast HBCUs offer cultural affirmation and a greater sense of community however, they are often hindered by chronic underfunding and limited resources which inevitably affects the quality of athletic and academic support.

Drawing on the works of scholars such as Billy Hawkins, Pierre Bourdieu, Elijah Anderson, Shaun Harper, and others, this thesis frames college athletics as a modern continuation of historical systems of labor extraction, where Black bodies are commodified for institutional gain. Key concepts like social capital, the “cosmopolitan canopy,” and habitus help explain how exclusion and exploitation are embedded in the fabric of higher education. Through interviews with student-athletes from both institutional types, the research offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day realities, emotional tolls, and strategies of resistance that define their collegiate journeys. The thesis concludes by calling for structural reforms that move beyond symbolic gestures and instead center the holistic development, academic achievement, and personal agency of Black student-athletes. In doing so, it reimagines college athletics not only as a site of competition but as a potential platform for equity and transformative change.

This thesis will explore the gut microbiome as a sociopolitical inscriptor of violence, a biological marker of vulnerability, and a site of collective resistance within Triqui migrant farmworkers from Oaxaca, Mexico. Extending on Seth Holmes’ ethnography titled Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, critical biomedical and sociocultural anthropology, and synthesizing the different cyclical elements of their microbial implications, this paper argues for future research and knowledge production to contend with the microbiome as a biological mirror of systemic violence, dispossession, exploitation, and racialization. This research helps reveal the different structural drivers, such as institutionally coerced migration, racialized labor hierarchies, malnutrition, overt state violence, and chronic stress, and their involvement with the disease outcomes and physiological futures of marginalized communities. Each chapter will position the microbiome as a living archive of state terror, physical and psychological displacement, and moral blame within clinical settings. The stories of Abelino, Bernardo, and Crescencio will be centered around this microbial interaction and how trauma, injustice, and survival become lodged in gut microbial communities and interactions. Their stories will also help address the need for reformed ethics procedures and a relational and transnational care framework that addresses inequitable healthcare policy and microbial therapeutics. This thesis ultimately addresses the tension present between ethical microbial study, scientific knowledge production, and clinical practice, from key interlocutors whose suffering is biologically embedded in their system. Their microbiomes are archives of what institutions seek to erase. Within these archives is a call for justice.

The thesis project aims to explore how community doulas utilize non-biomedical approaches in advocating for their clients in and outside of medical spaces. By doing fieldwork with the Children’s Home Society in Trenton, NJ, I was able to do participant observation with doulas, clinicians, and social service providers. I also interviewed them, in addition to a postpartum mother, to gain insight into their respective careers and what they believe Black women desire from the perinatal experience. The overarching question for the paper is: using intersections of race, gender, and relationality, how does the nonmedical approach of doulas demonstrate patient advocacy for women from traditionally underserved populations? Furthermore, how do differences and similarities in care between doulas and clinical providers influence the Black pregnant patient's ability to fulfill their physical, mental, and cultural needs? Through the findings, it was determined that cultivating and strengthening relationships between those involved in the maternal health field is essential to begin envisioning reproductive care that is more equitable and suits the needs of women of color.

This ethnographic project explores how Latina family caregivers contend with and redefine sociocultural expectations to find purpose and meaning in their role. With over 11 million family caregivers supporting individuals with Alzheimer’s disease in the United States, the majority of whom are women and disproportionately women of color, understanding caregivers’ lived experiences to provide adequate and accurate support is important now more than ever. Existing literature on this topic often frames this labor as burdensome and coercive, emphasizing the ways in which cultural values, gender norms, and caregiver burnout negatively impact the caregiver’s wellbeing. While these frameworks are critical, they overlook how caregivers themselves make sense of their role. Through the stories of Gloria and Catalina, I aim to demonstrate that while stepping into the role of a family caregiver can be challenging and emotionally demanding, these same sociocultural forces were often cited as sources of strength, purpose, and pride. In doing so, this project argues that while caregiving may be shaped by sociocultural forces and accompanied by moments of burnout, it is also often internally experienced as a calling that, through religious grounding, provides caregivers with a profound sense of purpose.

Breast cancer is one of the most culturally visible diseases in the contemporary United States, leading to cultural norms about identity and healing. Through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and ethnographic engagement, this thesis examines how women engage with two dominant cultural norms: the breast cancer “survivor” label and the support group. The primary interlocutors are women who have had breast cancer, including those involved with institutions and those who are not. Subject-position theories, narrative theory, and religion theory are frameworks through which I analyze how women respond to life after breast cancer in intentional, multifaceted ways. The “survivor” label is a subject-position within the breast cancer discourse. Thus women’s purposeful engagement with or rejection of “survivor” constitutes both identity craftwork and ethical labor. In the Frauen Care Center (FCC) group, therapeutic emplotment emerged as a collaborative, ongoing narrative construction that created a coherent, collective narrative to navigate life after diagnosis. Further, a comparison between FCC and North Oncology Institute (NOI) demonstrates that even among breast cancer support groups, there are diverse healing paradigms. Through religion theory, I frame these groups as symbol systems with ritualistic structure and a shared doctrine of communal healing–as two sects of the same secular healing religion. Ultimately, this thesis challenges the rigidity of dominant cultural norms and underscores the varied, purposeful ways women engage in identity craftwork and communal healing in the aftermath of breast cancer, undertaking the labor of managing the unmanageable.

This thesis synthesizes existing scholarship with the perspectives of young, socialist-identifying New Yorkers to elucidate the mechanisms and limitations of American socialism under contemporary capitalism. I find my entry in the study of narratives, both unconscious and agentively told. I argue that socialism is polysemic and adopted as a positionality when it offers a narrative that maintains individual imaginaries as cohesive with personally observed contradictions within synecdoches of capitalism. “Capitalism,” in its totality, is only available for representation, and thus criticism, in its microcosms and mechanisms; not all structural appendages are equally opposable, and not all opposition is politicized. I elaborate on two mechanisms of contemporary leftist practice, consumption discretion and digital activism, which reaffirm the desirability of ideology and are qualified by more than just their potential political efficacy. I analyze two aspects of contemporary capitalism – digital capitalism and financialized private equity real estate – and focus on the ways those structures are affectively experienced in order to conceptualize political agency in the contemporary condition. Contemporary American socialism, with all its contradictions and limitations, fosters competing imaginaries of a better world; for my interlocutors, even limited imaginations are more habitable than resignation to the status quo.