ARAB MUSICIANS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. AREA: ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY

Musicians living in the Arab Diaspora around the Washington, D.C. metro area are a small group of multi-faceted individuals with significant contributions and intentions to propagate and disseminate their music. Various levels of identity are discussed and analyzed, including self-identity, group/ collective identity, and Arab ethnic identity. The performance and negotiation of Arab ethnic identity is apparent in selected repertoire, instrumentation, musical style, technique and expression, shared conversations about music, worldview on Arabic music and its future. For some musicians, further evidence of self-construction of one's ethnic identity entails choice of name, costume, and venue. Research completed is based on fieldwork, observations, participant-observations, interviews, and communications by phone and email. This thesis introduces concepts of Arabic music, discusses recent literature, reveals findings from case studies on individual Arab musicians and venues, and analyzes Arab identity and ethnicity in relation to particular definitions of identity found in anthropological and ethnomusicological writings. Musical lyrics, translations, transcriptions, quotes, discussions, analyses, as well as charts and diagrams of self-identity analyses are provided as evidence of the performance and negotiation of Arab identity.

The tithe: Public research university STEM faculty perspectives on sponsored research indirect costs

This study sought to understand the phenomenon of faculty involvement in indirect cost under-recovery. The focus of the study was on public research university STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) faculty, and their perspectives on, and behavior towards, a higher education fiscal policy. The explanatory scheme was derived from anthropological theory, and incorporated organizational culture, faculty socialization, and political bargaining models in the conceptual framework. This study drew on two key assumptions. The first assumption was that faculty understanding of, and behavior toward, indirect cost recovery represents values, beliefs, and choices drawn from the distinct professional socialization and distinct culture of faculty. The second assumption was that when faculty and institutional administrators are in conflict over indirect cost recovery, the resultant formal administrative decision comes about through political bargaining over critical resources. The research design was a single site, qualitative case study with a focus on learning the meaning of the phenomenon as understood by the informants. In this study the informants were tenured and tenure track research university faculty in the STEM fields who were highly successful at obtaining Federal sponsored research funds, with individual sponsored research portfolios of at least one million dollars. The data consisted of 11 informant interviews, bolstered by documentary evidence. The findings indicated that faculty socialization and organizational culture were the most dominant themes, while political bargaining emerged as significantly less prominent. Public research university STEM faculty are most concerned about the survival of their research programs and the discovery facilitated by their research programs. They resort to conjecture when confronted by the issue of indirect cost recovery. The findings direct institutional administrators to consider less emphasis on compliance and hierarchy when working with expert professionals such as science faculty. Instead a more effective focus might be on communication and clarity in budget processes and organizational decision-making, and a concentration on critical administrative support that can relieve faculty administrative burdens. For higher education researchers, the findings suggest that we need to create more sophisticated models to help us understand organizations dependent on expert professionals.

A Figured Worlds Perspective on Middle School Learners' Climate Literacy Development

The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of the relationship between middle school science learners’ conditions and their developing understandings of climate change. I applied the anthropological theoretical perspective of figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) to examine learners’ views of themselves and their capacities to act in relation to climate change. My overarching research question was: How are middle school science learners’ figured worlds of climate change related to the conditions in which they are embedded? I used a descriptive single-case study design to examine the climate change ideas of eight purposefully selected 6th grade science learners. Data sources included: classroom observations, curriculum documents, interviews, focus groups, and written assessments and artifacts, including learners’ self- generated drawings. I identified six analytic lenses with which to explore the data. Insights from the application of these analytic lenses provided information about the elements of participants’ climate change stories, which I reported through the use of a storytelling heuristic. I then synthesized elements of participants’ collective climate change story, which provided an “entrance” (Kitchell, Hannan, & Kempton, 2000, p. 96) into their figured world of climate change. Aspects of learners’ conditions—such as their worlds of school, technology and media use, and family—appeared to shape their figured world of climate change. Within their figured world of climate change, learners saw themselves—individually and as members of groups—as inhabiting a variety of climate change identities, some of which were in conflict with each other. I posited that learners’ enactment of these identities – or the ways in which they expressed their climate change agency – had the potential to reshape or reinforce their conditions. Thus, learners’ figured worlds of climate change might be considered “spaces of authoring” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 45) with potential for inciting social and environmental change. The nature of such change would hinge on the extent to which these nascent climate change identities become salient for these early adolescent learners through their continued climate change learning experiences. Implications for policy, curriculum and instruction, and science education research related to climate change education are presented.

Resilience to Climate Change: An Ethnographic Approach

Global projections for climate change impacts produce a startling picture of the future for low-lying coastal communities. The United States’ Chesapeake Bay region and especially marginalized and rural communities will be severely impacted by sea level rise and other changes over the next one hundred years. The concept of resilience has been theorized as a measure of social-ecological system health and as a unifying framework under which people can work together towards climate change adaptation. But it has also been critiqued for the way in which it does not adequately take into account local perspective and experiences, bringing into question the value of this concept as a tool for local communities. We must be sure that the concerns, weaknesses, and strengths of particular local communities are part of the climate change adaptation, decision-making, and planning process in which communities participate. An example of this type of planning process is the Deal Island Marsh and Community Project (DIMCP), a grant funded initiative to build resilience within marsh ecosystems and communities of the Deal Island Peninsula area of Maryland (USA) to environmental and social impacts from climate change. I argue it is important to have well-developed understandings of vulnerabilities and resiliencies identified by local residents and others to accomplish this type of work. This dissertation explores vulnerability and resilience to climate change using an engaged and ethnographic anthropological perspective. Utilizing participant observation, semi-structured and structured interviews, text analysis, and cultural domain analysis I produce an in-depth perspective of what vulnerability and resilience means to the DIMCP stakeholder network. Findings highlight significant vulnerabilities and resiliencies inherent in the local area and how these interface with additional vulnerabilities and resiliencies seen from a nonlocal perspective. I conclude that vulnerability and resilience are highly dynamic and context-specific for the local community. Vulnerabilities relate to climate change and other social and environmental changes. Resilience is a long-standing way of life, not a new concept related specifically to climate change. This ethnographic insight into vulnerability and resilience provides a basis for stronger engagement in collaboration and planning for the future.