Amanda Cook
I am studying how decision-making structures affect participation in heterogeneous worker cooperatives. Worker cooperatives are businesses or organizations owned and democratically managed by their workers. Previous research on worker cooperatives indicates a tendency towards homogeneity, meaning that worker-owners in a given cooperative share very similar backgrounds. However, since these studies were conducted in the 1970’s and 1980’s, worker cooperatives have become more diverse. A recent case study on a large and diverse worker cooperative suggests that formalizing decision-making structures might facilitate widespread democratic participation. I will expand upon this research […]
Briana Robertori
For 10 weeks, I will be living up the mountainous rural coffee growing area of Matagalpa, Nicaragua studying the tourism that I myself will be a part of. I will be studying how the UCA San Ramon coffee cooperatives agroeco-tourism project is affecting the families and communities of the mostly female tourist hosts. To survey both the positive and negative effects, I will be distributing a questionnaire to all of the forty host mothers, or alojadoras. I will also be conducting between eight and ten filmed interviews with alojadoras, tourist […]
Ann Chen
Anna R Melyantsev
Sudev Jay Sheth
Responding to an earlier work by ethnomusicologist Daniel M. Neuman entitled The Life of Music in North India (1980), my research topic aims at understanding how the life of music has evolved in the quarter-century since that seminal study was published. The creation of both public and private institutions of teaching, research, documentation, archiving, and performance have significantly increased since Neuman’s work. Accordingly, I will explore how they have impacted the life of music rather than accepting at the outset that they have played a favorable role. I will be […]
Natalie M. Avalos
I am interested in verifying the existing research on the correlations between Tibetan Buddhist sacred knowledge and Native American sacred knowledge. I will focus specifically on Hopi Indian knowledge. I intend to explore the relationship between practices, beliefs and their metaphysical understanding of the world. Additionally I will investigate the idea of being connected to all things, a belief that they share; looking at how this process manifests itself from an internal to an external awareness or vice versa. Ultimately I would like to know the significance of their correlations […]
Meghan Elisabeth Lowe
My history thesis project will analyze the Santiago de Chile of 1964 to 2006 from the perspective of shantytown women, with an emphasis on the community institutions that offer them employment, personal development opportunities and/or activism networks. I will examine what poor women do within these institutions, why these opportunities are significant in their lives and what this civic participation represents in the greater context of womens rights in Chile. Additionally, I will examine the consequences of dictatorship and democracy on shantytown women, to determine whether poor women have greater […]
Yehuda Donde
I am working in a field of public finance that aims to develop a model indicating the optimal level of redistributive taxation in a given community. Assuming that public preference to redistribute income is determined by some combination of self-interest and civic altruism, the model must take into account the community’s various social, behavioral, and economic attributes. Using surveys, I will be gathering data on the effects of social factors, such as group cohesion, and behavioral factors, such as aversion to risk, on the tax policy decisions of kibbutzim – […]
Brittany Gabel
International tourism provides tourists with a physical space that allows them to encounter new experiences, exotic places, and unfamiliar cultures. For the most part, these experiences abroad stimulate inter-cultural contact, which results in the formation of an ethnic relation between strangers. My research aims to identify the different affinities, misunderstandings, and stereotypes that can characterize this relationship in the tourist setting of San Jose, Costa Rica. I will study two groups: tourists from the United States who come to San Jose for short-term vacations and tour-guides from Costa Rica who […]
Yael Danovitch
HIV/AIDS remains a significant threat to many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In order to understand HIV transmission in this context, it is crucial to understand the practices and understandings that facilitate its spread. In Malawi, HIV is spread primarily through sex, and sex itself constitutes a deeply culturally embedded practice. With this in mind, I will be spending this summer in Malawi examining the way in which discourses on sex influence HIV/AIDS patterns. Drawing on a collection of conversational journals collected by the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project of […]