Culture's Calling: Mobile Phones, Gender, and the Making of an African Migrant Village in Lisbon

In this article, I explore how immigrants from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau living in Portugal use mobile phones in their daily lives in Lisbon. Whereas one might assume that mobile phones and other new information technologies facilitate transnational communication between Africa and Portugal, the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Lisbon from 1999 to 2003 revealed a different scenario. Instead, mobile phones as imagined and used by the Guinean immigrants I met in Lisbon revealed less about transnationalism and globalization than they did about constructing community and identity in a new locale. As Guinean immigrants in Portugal reconfigured their relationship to their former colonizers and struggled to make their way in a new, multicultural Europe, they used their mobile phones to engage local networks, shape local identities, and transform Lisbon's sprawl into an African migrant village. Here, I highlight the gendered dimensions of this process and contend that Guinean men's and women's varied uses of mobile phones in Lisbon underscore contrasting experiences of migration, mobility, and belonging.

Expanding Women's Worlds?: Development, Gender, and Environment in Rural Morocco

This honors thesis is an anthropological exploration of women's cooperatives in two regions of rural Morocco. Specifically, I am interested in how contemporary development projects such as the cooperative are understood by the peoples of these regions. By conducting first-hand ethnographic research among women's cooperatives in two drastically different environments of rural Morocco, I gain further insight into the roles that culture and geography play in determining the 'success' of cooperatives inlocal communities. In using the term 'success,' I will compare notions of success as used by both Western development organizations as well as local people in Morocco. I examine and analyze the very delicate and complex interaction that occurs between largely Western development agencies and local cultures particularly through the lens of gender. I will also convey the importance of an exchange of cultural practices through development projects rather than the imposition of one cultural system on another. In writing this thesis, I hope to contribute to the growing field of the anthropologyof development, a subset of cultural anthropology that examines international development practices and the economic, social, and political factors that have an impact on the local culture. I examine cooperatives from the perspectives of both the people whoparticipate in them through personal interviews as well as development institutions through an ongoing body of published literature. Focusing on gender implications that such development initiatives have on the rural cultures of Morocco, I argue that gender identities are crucial aspects of local cultures that must be addressed within development practices. On a broader scale, I argue that a deeper knowledge of local cultures is essential if development agencies are to be 'successful' in non-Western cultures.

Developing a smoking cessation program for Turkish-speaking migrants in Switzerland: novel findings and promising effects

Introduction: Recent studies show that smoking prevalence in the Turkish-speaking migrant population in Switzerland is substantially higher than in the general population. A specific group treatment for Turkish-speaking migrants was developed and tested in order to provide the migrant population with equal access to smoking cessation programs and to improve the migration-sensitive quality of such programs by sociocultural targeting. Methods: The evaluation of the program included quantitative (questionnaires t1 and t2 and follow-up by telephone) and qualitative methods (participant observation and semi-structured interviews). Results: The results showed that 37.7% of the 61 participants were smoke free at the 12-month follow-up. The factors of being in a partnership and using nicotine replacement products during the program were positively associated with successful cessation. We also demonstrated the importance of “strong ties” (strong relationships between participants) and the sensitivity of the program to sociocultural (e.g., social aspects of smoking in Turkish culture, which were addressed in relapse prevention), socioeconomic (e.g., low financial resources, which were addressed by providing the course for free), and migration-specific (e.g., underdeveloped access to smoking cessation programs, which was addressed using outreach strategy for recruiting) issues. Conclusions: Overall, the smoking cessation program was successfully tested and is now becoming implemented as a regular service of the Swiss Public Health Program for Tobacco Prevention (by the Swiss Association for Smoking Prevention).

Microscopic and Spectroscopic Methods for Probing the Clay Water Interface

Clay minerals have a fundamental importance in many processes in soils and sediments such as the bioavailability of nutrients, water retention, the adsorption of common pollutants, and the formation of an impermeable barrier upon swelling. Many of the properties of clay minerals are due to the unique environment present at the clay mineral/water interface. Traditional techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) and absorption isotherms have provided a wealth of information about this interface but have suffered from limitations. The methods and results presented herein are designed to yield new experimental information about the clay mineral/water interface.A new method of studying the swelling dynamics of clay minerals was developed using in situ atomic force microscopy (AFM). The preliminary results presented here demonstrate that this technique allows one to study individual clay mineral unit layers, explore the natural heterogeneities of samples, and monitor swelling dynamics of clay minerals in real time. Cation exchange experiments were conducted monitoring the swelling change of individual nontronite quasi-crystals as the chemical composition of the surrounding environment was manipulated several times. A proof of concept study has shown that the changes in swelling are from the exchange of interlayer cations and not from the mechanical force of replacing the solution in the fluid cell. A series of attenuated total internal reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) experiments were performed to gain a better understanding of the organization of water within the interlayer region of two Fe-bearing clay minerals. These experiments made use of the Subtractive Kramers-Kronig (SKK) Transform and the calculation of difference spectra to obtain information about interfacial water hidden within the absorption bands of bulk water. The results indicate that the reduction of structural iron disrupts the organization of water around a strongly hydrated cation such as sodium as the cation transitions from an outer-sphere complex with the mineral surface to an inner-sphere complex. In the case of a less strongly hydrated cation such as potassium, reduction of structural iron actually increases the ordering of water molecules at the mineral surface. These effects were only noticed with the reduction of iron in the tetrahedral sheet close to the basal surface where the increased charge density is localized closer to the cations in the interlayer.

The Relationship Between the Valence of Self-Talk Statements and Social Anxiety: An Analysis of Gender and Athletic Status

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between self-talk statements and social anxiety and specifically to examine the difference in this relationship between males and females and athletic status.

The Impact of Gender and Pedagogy on the Development of Self-Regulated Learning Strategies in Undergraduate Engineering Classrooms

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which pedagogy and gender of instructor impact the development of self-regulated learning strategies as assessed by the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) in male and female undergraduate engineering students. Pedagogy was operationalized as two general formats: lecture plus active learning techniques or problem-base/project-based learning. One hundred seventy-six students from four universities participated in the study. Within-group analyses found significant differences with regard to pedagogy, instructors’ gender, and student gender on the learning strategies and motivation subscales as operationalized by the MSLQ. Male and females students reported significant post-test differences with regard to the gender of instructor and the style of pedagogy. The results of this study showed a pattern where more positive responses for students of both genders were found with the same-gendered instructor. The results also suggested that male students responded more positively to project and problem-based courses with changes evidenced in motivation strategies and resource management. Female students showed decreases in resource management in these two types of courses. Further, female students reported increases in the lecture with active learning courses.