In this thesis, I explore the formation of digital tipping culture in American counter service establishments through an ethnographic study conducted in Princeton, New Jersey. I begin by situating tipping within its broader historical, legal, and economic contexts, tracing how it evolved into a normalized component of the American service economy. Using participant observation, interviews, and classical theoretical frameworks, I examine how digital point-of-sale systems have reconfigured tipping as an economic ritualized interaction shaped by cultural pathways, reciprocity, morality, and social relations. I argue that while tipping appears as a voluntary expression of gratitude, it is structurally embedded in labor relations and shaped by power asymmetries across customers, tipped employees, and managers. By foregrounding the screen as both prompt and agent, I trace how digital infrastructure reshapes the emotional, economic, and symbolic dimensions of tipping. My analysis centers not on the “correct” way to tip, but outlines digital counter service tipping as a culture in formation, where social and moral negotiations occur within everyday transactions – those brief yet loaded moments where people must decide whether and how to tip.

This thesis investigates instructor and student experiences in two higher education in prison programs, Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative and Bard’s Prison Teaching Initiative. For the first two chapters, I draw on semi-structured interviews with current and former instructors at PTI and participant-observation from PTI’s training and course planning meetings. For the last chapter, I conduct a close-reading of the film College Behind Bars as an archive of student-prisoner experience. In the first chapter, I explore common narratives from PTI instructors which attribute empowerment and agency as results of PTI classwork. I break these down into three categories: agency within the classroom, agency through critical thinking, and agency through trauma-informed education. In the next chapter, I explore instructor narratives who differ from these common ones in the ways that they connect with students and also admit to a failure to empathise with their students. Finally, I highlight the perspectives of students in College Behind Bars to emphasize the precariousness of higher education in prison and the ways that students use their classes to escape prisonization, find redemption, and to navigate the difficulties of carceral citizenship. Overall, I argue that higher education in prison, at these two sites, as sites which empower students through connection and acceptance.

This thesis explores how people perform their religious identities, commitments, and ambivalences, taking special interest in the negotiations of queerness and religious belonging and of dance and spiritual practice. I use three methods to consider three sites: 1) rhetorical analysis of digital resources for queer Muslim youth; 2) ethnography of Princeton’s student Christian dance company; 3) autoethnography of my (queer? Muslim?) improvisational dance practice. The first chapter examines how online brochures employ the analytics of social constructivism to argue that queerphobia is man-made whereas queerness is Islamic, overwriting the discursive incompatibility of queerness and Muslimhood with a divine compatibility. The second chapter demonstrates how religious performance is imbricated in and made possible through ‘secular’ social conventions, particularly by exploring how questions of skill surface in an inclusive Christian dance environment. The third chapter looks to my own dance practice to ask how the theories of queer performativity might bear on the practices that constitute religion: if queerness is improvised and enacted through doing and dancing, can the same be said for my queer Muslimhood? Altogether, this thesis proposes and takes a performative approach to study how people ‘do’ their religions and strive to belong.

The Indian Claims Commission (active between 1946-1978) was a legal entity created to allow Native American tribes to demand justice for historical wrongs at the hands of the United States’ federal government. Because of the reliance on historical and culturally specific evidence, anthropologists were primarily relied upon as expert witnesses. Stepping into these roles confronted anthropologists with a myriad of ethical, methodological, and practical issues, compelling these scholars to consider anthropology and Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the law more generally. This thesis examines the anthropologist as an expert witness from the Indian Claims Commission to today. It primarily relies on an examination of the archival materials of Anthony F.C. Wallace, an anthropologist operating during the Indian Claims Commission, and the insights of other scholars contemporary to that time to understand how anthropologists have adapted to these roles. Finally, it contrasts these scholars’ methods with those of anthropologists working in the legal realm today to understand how the field has evolved. Rather than providing one resolution, this thesis offers recommendations that suggest perhaps upheaval is necessary in moving forward towards greater collaboration among the law and anthropology, and a more equitable justice system for Indigenous peoples.

This thesis is based on six weeks of ethnographic research conducted with an NGO in Tamil Nadu, India during the summer of 2024. During my fieldwork, I conducted semi-structured interviews with beneficiaries and participant-observation with NGO staffers to learn more about how the NGO was facilitating health access. Drawing from this material, I question why welfare services are still not reaching marginalized communities despite the abundance of welfare schemes in Tamil Nadu. I point to narratives of deservingness stemming from dominant political imaginaries that construct beneficiaries as lazy and stigmatize welfare. I highlight how these narratives, the hidden costs of accessing welfare, and historical dehumanization serve as barriers to availing of free schemes. I then examine waiting as an obstacle to care. Finally, I look at the role of care and affective labor within the NGO in facilitating access by addressing feelings of misrecognition and maintaining initiatives in the face of scarcity.

Within this thesis, I examine how Senegalese migrant street vendors in Barcelona navigate survival within systems that simultaneously criminalizes and depends upon their labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted along La Rambla and with the cooperative Diomcoop, this work aims to challenge dominant narratives framing informal counterfeit economies as inherently deviant. Instead, I argue that both informal street vending and formalized cooperative labor are deeply entangled within broader structures of governance, racialized capitalism, and legality. Building off of the theoretical frameworks like Denise da Silva limits of justice, Mayfair Yang’s concept of guanxi, AbdouMaliq Simone’s “people as infrastructure,” and Mezzadra and Neilson’s “differential inclusion, this project demonstrates that Senegalese migrant vendors do not exist outside of the system, but move along a continuum of precarious incorporation. While informal networks provide mobility, care, and economic opportunity, formal structures such as Diomcoop offer conditional stability and legibility without resolving underlying inequalities. Ultimately, this thesis aims to illustrate how survival itself constitutes a form of political practice. Rather than privileging visibility, rupture, or idealized resistance, survival foregrounds endurance, negotiation, and strategic engagement as central to migrant life. In doing so, it critiques dominant Western frameworks of justice and activism, revealing the limits of legality and the necessity of rethinking political action through the lived realities of marginalized communities.

This thesis presents a narrative ethnography that details revitalization in Damascus, Virginia, a small rural Appalachian trail town devastated by Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters. It accomplishes this by drawing upon lived experience, community engagement, and anthropological analysis. This thesis works to examine what it means to attempt to contribute to the recovery of a place from a position of partial outsiderness. The method of this thesis relies upon the anthropological mechanism of firsthand research and ethnography in which centers my own individual efforts to aid a community I myself claim, yet naively approach. For decades, Damascus, Virginia has organized its economy almost entirely around the Virginia Creeper Trail, a 34-mile-long recreational trail that serves as the town’s primary source of economic revenue. When Hurricane Helene’s flood destroyed local infrastructure, the true vulnerability of the community became exposed, raising broader questions around revitalization efforts in rural Appalachia. This thesis traces those questions that arose and follows my own personal journey into crafting a nonprofit looking to simply bridge what I consider my “two worlds.” This is completed through examining extractive industries, cultural stereotypes, and tourist development dependences. Lastly, this thesis is not designed as a roadmap or a solution to how revitalization in Appalachia should be practiced, but rather offers an honest account of what happens when the distance between two distinct worlds collapses, and what that collapse reveals about the true nature of identity, power, and revitalization in Appalachia.

This thesis examines how Black fathers participating in the St. Louis-based program Dads to Doulas reimagine masculinity, reproductive justice, and maternal advocacy through communal birth education. Based on two months of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews with facilitators and participants, the project explores how Black men are trained to support partners during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care while navigating a medical system shaped by racial inequality. I argue that the program cultivates a form of benevolent masculinity rooted in care, emotional accountability, advocacy, and collective responsibility rather than dominance or stoicism. Participants challenge stereotypes of Black paternal absence by becoming informed advocates within the clinic and active contributors to family and community health. Drawing on Black feminist theory, reproductive justice, and scholarship on obstetric racism, this thesis demonstrates how Black men can be meaningfully incorporated into movements for maternal equity. Dads to Doulas reveals fatherhood as a site of healing, political consciousness, and transformative community care.

This thesis examines the Northwest Michigan cherry community enduring the multifaceted crises of this decade. By working on a farm and engaging with a diverse range of growers, their attitudes and histories, I have uncovered the tensions surrounding familial, systemic, and emotional dimensions that afflict this region’s culture. Cherries represent Leelanau County’s identity emblem, centered around their primary commodity. I intend to explore how primarily fourth and fifth-generation farmers perceive and respond to the shifting climate, the urgent economic challenges stemming from globalized imports and declining cherry demand, labor shortages, and uncertain succession, as well as their views on the future through concepts of failure, legacy, and purpose. I utilize assemblage to capture the dynamic array of influences, employing theoretical frameworks such as runaway change, commodity fetishism, alienation, vocational “calling,” and habitus to understand the complexities among these various factors.

This thesis seeks to consider how Mexican migrants work to sustain and build relationships with loved ones “back home,” amidst trying to find social and economic footing in the United States. I analyze my father, José’s, first and second migrations to the United States in the context of 21st century United States surveillance-oriented, restrictive immigration policy and as an experience of uncertainty (Chapter 2). Looking at letter and telephone call communication, I consider what each technology affords and the moments of relational strain and not that are produced (Chapter 3). I examine how remittances are used for home construction “back home” and signal, public-facingly, the position and health of a migrant’s relationships to community and non-migrant families. I contextualize how these cross-border exchanges form, and work to create an aesthetic of migration by focusing on my father’s architectural plans for his family home in Mexico (Chapter 4). My thesis does not intend to romanticize such aesthetics. Rather, I hope to engage with them critically and consider how they might help us determine the future modes of our cross-border relationality.

This thesis, "Beyond 'Cool Japan': explores the global phenomenon of Japanese popular media through an anthropological lens. This project explores ways that members of the global audience engage with their experiences of Japanese media. The methodology utilized for this research involves a multi-sited ethnography that has followed the circulation, appropriation, and re-signification of Japanese media both digitally and physically. Chapter 4, "The Personal Cultural Project," provides an in-depth examination of how participants have adapted mass-produced media content into personally meaningful cultural resources to form communities and develop their individual identities. Chapter 5, "Digital Mediascapes and Infrastructure," explores the fan-created structures that enable these personal cultural projects. The chapter also highlights the cultural labor performed by fans in localizing content and creating transnational communities. The central argument presented in this thesis is that the global success of Cool Japan is mediated through the unpredictable agency of fans and challenges cultural imperialism. This thesis provides ethnographic evidence for the glocalization of the Cool Japan phenomenon. This research calls for re-examining notions of soft power and for considering the conceptual fluidity of culture, as well as the importance of informal grassroots initiatives in shaping global cultural influence.

In this thesis, I examine how Bitcoin’s value is interpreted, experienced, and reimagined by three key stakeholder groups – Miners, Institutional Investors, and Retail Participants – by tracing its origins through the sociocultural forces that shaped its emergence. I draw upon conversational interviews and a close analysis of both primary and secondary sources of money and value to demonstrate that Bitcoin is not a conventional form of money, but rather an extension of long-standing symbolic systems of credit and debt. Assessing Bitcoin within the crux of anthropology, finance, and the social sciences enables me to argue that Bitcoin’s value is practically indeterminate – its value is contingent upon the imagination and implementation of each user. Ultimately, I conclude that Bitcoin diverges from traditional monetary functions; each user engages with it through a unique lived experience, belief system, and perception of risk.

Resident doctors of the British National Health Service have gone on strike fifteen times in the last three years, leading to over 1.5 million patient appointment cancellations and a loss of billions of pounds. Public debate has cast these strikes as a moral crisis, asking whether doctors, bound by centuries of moral exceptionalism, can ever ethically withdraw their labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in London, including interviews with physicians and patients, participant observation in public and private medical settings, and an analysis of media coverage, this thesis offers a two-part intervention. Currently in the UK, approximately 40,980 doctors will apply for the mere 12,833 Specialty Training (ST) posts available to match into this year. Given this reality, the doctors I spoke with treated the ethical question of strikes as secondary to navigating their precarious job realities. Through additional shadowing with two South Asian physicians, with one excluded from clinical roles and the other running his own private medical practice, I came to learn that even this understanding is incomplete as it collapses doctors into a single, uniform category and obscures how the NHS's demands fall unevenly across different bodies, especially in a system where 40% of doctors are non-UK nationals. Taken together, this thesis argues that the British media produces and spreads a specific moral panic, in addition to obscuring how the burdens of the NHS manifest differently along lines of race and identity. Drawing on anthropologies of labor and medicine, this thesis demonstrates how the failures of the British healthcare system are ultimately misdiagnosed and misattributed.

This senior thesis uses digital ethnography and object studies to explore the socialities inaugurated and facilitated by Haitian contemporary art and artists which challenge the limits imposed by “The Art World.” The introduction outlines narratives of disaster that occupy Haiti in the global imaginary and establishes a framework for thinking about Haitian art. The first chapter examines perceptions of Haitian art as fragile and ephemeral, but insists upon its contemporaneity by offering digital and physical gathering spaces centering Haitian art. The second chapter discusses the communicative labor performed by Haitian artists whose depictions of Haiti creates or affirms affective ties by evoking nostalgia and History. The third and final chapter explores the narration of violence. It begins with an exploration of how Haitian artists challenge narrative authority by depicting Historical instances of violence done onto Haiti. It then presents the iconicity of revolutionary violence and its ubiquity in Haitian art as another effort to draft counternarratives to redeem Haitian History from the narrative violence that haunts it. The chapter ends by pursuing the ways the visual narration of violence can be generative for Haitian contemporary artists (re)imaging the temporality of the Haitian everyday and futurity beyond violence.

This thesis places the fashion industry under the microscope, illustrating its role in the construction, restriction, and commodification of Black identity. More broadly, I investigate the entertainment industry's reliance on distorted depictions of Black masculinity. In investigating the modeling industry as a space of aesthetic creation, I uncover a site of racialized meaning-making that upholds Eurocentric ideals. Through my ethnographic fieldwork, I center the lived experience of Black male models, revealing structural inequalities that challenge narratives of progress and inclusion. Ultimately, I question who gets to be represented, how, and by whom, calling us to reimagine modes of representation outside of the limitations of controlled-inclusion.

This thesis examines Hudson Headwaters through an anthropological lens of medical trust due to its unique history, infrastructure, and ways of providing care compared to other U.S. community health centers. Because community health centers serve a significant number of the U.S. population (more than 31 million patients in 2023), my research explores the evolving nature of healthcare over the past fifty years using Hudson Headwaters as a case study (Pillai, Corallo, and Tolbert 2025). Due to Hudson Headwaters’ well-documented series of growth in their historical archives, I was able to detail the provision of women’s healthcare and how methods of care have changed over time from its humble beginnings providing only prenatal services to its current status as the only women’s health provider in the Glens Falls, New York area. Drawing on the oral history of Hudson Headwaters’ creation through qualitative interviews with Hudson Headwaters’ providers and staff, I aim to introduce new interpretations of the barriers that come with living in upstate New York, allowing a more multidimensional understanding of rural women’s experiences that otherwise are rendered invisible. This dissertation emphasizes the simple yet core values of successful caregiving: mutual trust, patient agency, and identifying and responding to a community and an individual’s needs.

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.

Clinical research operates as a biosocial actor, revealing the complexities of care within an environment while becoming embedded in the community's understanding of what health means. This work utilizes ethnography and literature research to explore the intricate dynamic between clinical research and South Africa, a hub of clinical research designed to investigate HIV. HIV or Human Immunodeficiency Virus is one of the most prevalent and stigmatized infectious diseases within the country (Kamali et al. 2015). The views of non-governmental organization workers and clinical researchers converge to illustrate a setting in which health is defined by the existence of clinical research to supplement existing systemic gaps. This thesis examines the role of medical research within a country defined by its polarizing characteristics to emphasize the significance of clinical trials within the health care system. My analysis argues that the scope of clinical research is expansive as it operates as a substitutionary healthcare for communities blocked by disparities while mirroring the national and international health priorities. This thesis aims to emphasize the true impact of clinical research within South Africa to highlight the potential uses and abuses that come with relying on a healthcare source designed to view patients as research subjects.

This thesis examines the Mondragón cooperative network in Spain's Basque Country as a lived site of contradiction between cooperative ideals and global capitalist pressures. Drawing on nine days of ethnographic fieldwork, formal interviews, and participant observation conducted in July 2025, the project investigates how cooperative norms are experienced, negotiated, and eroded in everyday working life. Rather than adjudicating between the degeneration and spillover theses, the field's two dominant frameworks, the thesis demonstrates how both dynamics unfold simultaneously and unevenly within Mondragón's institutional reality. Applying Bourdieu's concept of habitus, Raymond Williams' theory of hegemony, and James Scott's moral economy in combination, I argue that cooperative democracy persists not as a static inheritance but as a continuously recalibrated practice under pressure. Tensions across industrial competition, internationalization, market rationality, declining participation, and generational talent drain reveal that Mondragón's significance lies not in its perfection as an alternative to capitalism, but in the ongoing contradictions through which cooperative ideals are reproduced, strained, and redefined.