Projects from 2008
Projects from 2006
Projects from 2005
Projects from 2003
Projects from 2001
This research explores the construction of community that leads to barriers for taking responsibility on issues of sexual violence at Warren Wilson College. I discovered that the reinforcement of these barriers impede change and the prevention of sexual violence. Through interviews, observations and a campus-wide survey, I found most campus members are more likely to overlook sexual violence in the community and distance themselves because it contradicts the image that they would like to believe.
This essay explores textile artists living in and around Asheville, North Carolina. It discusses the many ways textile artists (weavers, felters, quilters) pose an alternative to the dominant values of a capitalist mode of production. It also explores what happens when a pre-industrial mode of production is reintroduced, re-enact within the dominant capitalist context. This paper employs the ideas of Karl Marx, George Ritzer, Walter Benjamin, and Roberto J. Gonzalez in the analysis of textile art within a capitalist contemporary society and mode of production.
This ethnography of a shelter for displaced veterans explores how the shelter works to reincorporate the veterans into their own homes. The shelter provides helpful services that allow the veterans to save up money and purchase their own home or apartment. The veterans pass through a processural rite of passage by entering the shelter, saving up to get their own place, and then moving into their own place. Sobriety is not mandatory at the shelter, and inebriation is mildly tolerated. Substance abuse inhibits the effectiveness of the rite of passage. The effectiveness of the shelter is determined by the individual’s choice of how they utilize their time at the shelter. This paper discusses the process of recovering and finding a home as a rite of passage.
While many Americans are content to live their lives in accordance with the established social orders they encounter, activist subcultures prefer to imagine and actively try to cultivate grassroots changes to work towards what they consider to be a more responsible, sustainable world. This ethnography explores several ways in which activist artists create hybridized forms of art to express and provoke public consciousness. Activist artists cause others to question the idea of private property by using the cityscape as their canvas, and in doing so help the people who occupy these spaces in their everyday lives reclaim their ability to collectively interact and voice their opinions in these spaces. A second theme addressed in this paper is how activists are using art as a tool for public education. By explaining the interconnected nature of the world through images, groups such as the Beehive Collective help the viewer visualize the current results of American foreign policy and a society based on consumerism, as well as his or her role within the system. These examples tie into a range of social changes that activists are pursuing through art that ‘agitates, educates and organizes’.
Through an exploration of community status and hierarchies, this article seeks to undermine the notion that small communities threatened by development are passive in their forms of resistance to the neo-capitalist system of tourism and high-end development. With a special focus on a mill town in what used to be a rural part of Appalachia, the purpose of this discussion is to show the ways in which new development is represented in the community as well as to deconstruct the often hidden ways in which people on the outer edges of the capitalist system challenge the power of newcomers and developers through everyday interactions in the context of local society.
Explores the Schemas that Warren-Wilson students use when choosing a major. This is done through the use of a survey and interviews done with students. The survey only returned 79 responses out of 790 so it was used mainly as a representation since it cannot be considered valid. The interviews consisted of five altogether. Three categories were studied in relation to majors: Interesting, Practical, and Hard. This was based off of Moffat’s book Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. Out of these three Interesting turned out to be the most important since based on the interviews students pick majors based on their personal interests. Cognitive Anthropology was used to analyzes the results of this survey, especially the use of Schemas to describe how students view their major and other majors.
This research explores the ways Arabs living in Asheville, North Carolina negotiate and transform their ethnic identities through the acculturation process. Specifically, it shows how Arabs adopt local cultural forms and preserve aspects of their home cultures. The fieldwork consisted of formal and informal interviews with Arab persons living in Western North Carolina and participant observation at a local mosque. I found that some behaviors and familial roles reflect home country norms/values and are primarily confined to personal living spaces. Public representations of identity reflect a readiness to accept new cultural forms, particularly among younger Arabs. Ultimately, Arabs living in Asheville have integrated (or acculturated) due to the city’s relative lack of cultural pluralism and ethnic social groups.
The focus of this paper is the identities and culture created by long distance hikers. I broke down my research into three specific themes through which I viewed long distance hikes and hikers. These three themes are: a chosen separation from an urban setting, the language hikers, and long distance hiking as pilgrimage. These three themes are further explicated through common themes from in theoretical anthropology, such as theories of identity and social roles. In the conclusion of this paper I illustrate ways in which the research could be furthered on a more sociological perspective of long distance hiking.
Gardens have been used as learning environments in schools for centuries. There are many reasons why a garden creates such an enriching environment for young children. This study explores some of these benefits within the context of educational psychology, experiential learning, and environmental education. Research for this study has been compiled from my experiences working with elementary students at Hall Fletcher Elementary, located in West Asheville, North Carolina. The major findings of this study and the purpose of this paper are threefold. First, I found the school garden creates an environment that promotes teamwork, and teaches responsibility. Second, it is an environment where students are often exposed to things for the first time leading to a heightened sense of understanding. Lastly, the school garden is an environment that gives concrete examples of the abstract concepts learned in the classroom.
I attempt to discover the roots of perceived elitism present in the environmentalism practiced at Warren Wilson College in the 2000s. I investigate food as a key arena, finding that the system of distinction between “good” and “bad” food constitutes an ambiguous body of knowledge that serves as a form of cultural capital. I apply four anthropological perspectives of food to the “foodism” found at the college: food as an aesthetic preference, as a political statement, as a key symbol, and as a religion. I find that no matter what approach taken, the system of distinction is still an integral factor that allows for the implementation and reproduction of cultural capital, thus introducing elitism into the environmental values of the college. I also view college as a coming of age ritual and explore how the identity-forming aspect of this ritual intersects with the system of cultural capital described above.
This is an ethnographic study that examines the images that represent Warren Wilson College, and the lived everyday realities of community participants within that representation. This representation is discussed by describing the college in relation to its history, and how the founding of the school has created an ongoing discourse of being an ‘alternative’ to the dominant society. By breaking down these representations of ‘alternative’, we find something interesting in what each community member represents, and what it means and does not mean to be the ‘alternative’ culture to the dominant society and culture of capitalism and consumerism.