Anthropology Honors Thesis Presentation

Join us for the Anthropology Honors Thesis Presentations!

Lunch and Reception to follow - Please RSVP to ensure enough food and drinks for all

Victoria Sampors Chiek- Colorism in Cambodia: Race, Indigeneity, and the Ambivalence of Pride and Shame

Colorism in Cambodia: Race, Indigeneity, and the Ambivalence of Pride and Shame is a research and ethnography-based project that examines the lived, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic experience of colorism in Cambodia. I seek to delineate the roots of colorism in Cambodia which has to deal with ideological indigeneity, racialization, racial paradigms in Asia, and ethnoracial socioeconomic stratification in Cambodia. The thesis attempts to draw the relationship between these underlying causes to produce the stark ambivalence between shame and pride among Cambodians and in Cambodian cultural representations, national representations, and political relations.

Ilina Rughoobur - The Trap Called “Youth”: A Mauritian Ethnography on Adulthood. Becoming And Belonging at The University of Mauritius

Investigating the relationship between institutionalized stress and ‘becoming’ as it intersects with well-being among emerging adults in Mauritius, my research question asks the following: If adulthood is the process of becoming, in the transitional stage of college, how do social expectations and institutionalized pressures about adulthood and youth shape college students’ wellbeing at the University of Mauritius?

Draven A. Rane - The Family Prison

The opioid-affected families of the rural Midwestern town of Hillsdale, Michigan reveal how foster care is the sister institution to prison and the ways these institutions have historically and presently work together to enforce an elite imagining of family. The Family Prison is born out of this institutional relation and signifies the ways that the state’s response to the opioid-crisis has trapped families facing poverty and parental addiction beyond the margins in a liminal space, where they long to escape family death, violence and intergenerational suffering. While both fostered youth and their addicted parents in Hillsdale participate in a bottom-up approach to counter-power, their forms of resistance often further entrench them into the system. Turning to San Francisco’s pilot foster care program, Family & Me, we learn of an organized top-down approach to resistance that fostered youth participate in to redistribute power in a system that has historically oppressed them on an intergenerational and cyclic path to prison.