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Dissertations

Dissertations written by students in the Department of Anthropology for the past few years are listed chronologically.  All of the dissertations are available through the Northwestern University Library and can be found using the library’s online catalog.

2025

"Victims Without Perpetrators: The Making of White Innocence in the Wake of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre"

"Fire Governance and Indigenous Responses in Indonesia"

"An Impossible World: A Social Life of Heteronormativity and Islamic Orthodoxy in Indonesia"

"Global Medical Apartheid: Let Die, Contain, and Make Live Through HIV in Uganda"

"Banking on Doubt: Law and Ambiguity in the Everyday Life of Islamic Participation Finance in Turkey"

"The Outside Within: Scaling the Biocultural Biochemistry of Food Systems, Dietary Practices, and the Gut"

"Investment in Children, Intervention for Mothers: Human Capital Development in Indonesia’s Stunting Prevention"

"This City is So Empty: Street Art, Youth, and Urban Futures in Amman, Jordan"

2024

"Building Landscapes in Western Suffolk; Understanding Natural Resource Management through Vernacular Architecture"

"Mobile Confinement: Criminal Justice Reform, Community Supervision, and Carceral Transformations"

"In the Shadow of Territory: Gendered Mobilities in Siwa, Egypt"

2023

"Developmental Influences on Reproductive Investment: Linking Maternal Nutritional History with Pregnancy Metabolism and Fetal Growth"

"Identifying the Biosocial Drivers of Postpartum Depression and Breastfeeding among Chicagoland Birthing Parents"

"The Making of the Indonesian National Front Yard"

"Amplifying Gentrification: Contestations of Sound and Space in Brooklyn, NY"

"Foreclosing and Enclosing: The choreography of harm of perinatal opioid use disorder"

"Schools without Allah: Islam, Race, and Education in Belgium"

"Logics of eating in Alicante, Spain: Biosocial relationships connecting migration, food, stress, and health"

“The Traveling Dead: Narratives of displacement and death in post-2011 Lebanon”

"Navigating Power: An Archaeological Examination of Movement on Lowcountry Waterways"

"Consuming Care: Household Medicine Consumption in Washington, DC, 1840-1920"

"'Legitimate' Trade: Local Taste Practices & Consumer Power in Southeastern Ghana, Amedeka (19th to early 20th C A.D)"

2022

"We Dance With Existence: Black/Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as México and Beyond"

"An Uncertain Prognosis: Critical Care in Critical Times in Argentina"

"Early life determinants of the infant microbiome: social environments get 'under and on the skin'"

"Urban Commoners, Inequality, and the Longevity of an Ancient Maya City, Aventura, Belize"

"Dams and Displacements: Biosocial Impacts of the Thwake Multipurpose Dam in Makueni County, Kenya"

"Integrating geographic and anthropological perspectives in the study of urbanization and health in Cebu's extended metropolitan region"

"Credit Worthy: Pentecostal Finance in West Africa"

"A Life History Approach to Innate and Adaptive Immune Function Across the Lifespan in Cebu, Philippines"


2021

"Three Modeling Problems in Human Evolutionary Ecology: Implications for Integrative Biocultural Anthropology"

"Ontologies, Ecologies, and Inequalities: Human-Environment Relationships at the Ancient Maya City of Aventura, Belize"

"The Promise of Authenticity: Neo-Ottomanist Historicity and Politics of Youth Culturing in Turkey"

"Living with Ruins: Community Regeneration after Political Collapse at the Ancient Maya City of Ake, Yucatan, Mexico"

"More than sun and skin: An investigation into the social and developmental determinants of vitamin D"

2020

"Biological memories of apartheid: Intergenerational effects of apartheid-based trauma on birth outcomes, stress physiology, and mental health in Soweto, South Africa"

"Redemptive Surveillance: Race, Secularism, and Muslim Politics in the City of Angels"

"Tradeoffs between Reproduction and Aging in the Human Epigenome"

2019

"The Price of Transgender: Gender, Race, and the Institutionalization of Marginality"

“Biological Memories of Diet: Examining Early Indicators of the Intergenerational Health Effects of Traditional Alaska Native Foods”

"A Hard Kind of Freedom: Land, Labor and Material Culture in Post-emancipation Dominica"

"Assessing Barriers to Fertility Preservation Among Transgender Youth: Insurance, Costs, and State-Specific Policies"

"Ovarian Reserve Testing in the United States: Beyond Quantifying Fertility with the 'Egg Timer' Test"

“'Peaceful Little Revolutions' in the New South: Race, Inequality, and City-Making in Suburban Atlanta"

"Island Taskscapes: Heritage, Ritual, and Sustainability on Inishark and Inishbofin, Ireland"

2018

"Strategies for Survival: Assessing the Impact of Coordinated Health Promoting Programs on Managing Metabolic Syndrome in the Austin Community of Chicago"

"Becoming Equestrian: People and Horses in Bronze Age Hungary"

"Morality at the Margins: Senegalese 'Parallel Worlds' in Barcelona, Spain"

"Affective Secularism: Journalistic Coverage of Religious Differences in Turkey"

"Narratives of Death: Social change and funerary at the Bronze Age cemetery of Kajaszo, Hungary"

"Conservation and Conversation: Language and Political Ecology in a Tanzanian Forest"

"Documenting Lives: The Material and Social Life of the Case File in the US Foster Care System"

"Raising California Together: Race, Gender and the Cultural Politics of Childcare"

2017

"Methodologies in the Archaeology of Warfare:Toward a Study of Practice and Social Relations"

"Por su propio bien: A case study and needs assessment of pre-, peri-, and postnatal care in Nuñoa, Peru"

"Growing Babies, Growing Inequalities: A Biocultural Examination of the Influences of Infant Growth in Nunoa Peru"

"Living in Legal Limbo: Migration, Citizenship, and Mexican Mixed-Status Families in the Neoliberal Era"

"Human Energetics in a Changing Climate: Health, Lifestyle, and Adaptation among the Yakut of Northeastern Siberia"

"Giving, Taking, and Sharing: Reproducing Economic Moralities and Social Hierarchies in Transnational Senegal"

2016

"Embodied Authenticity in Moroccan Contemporary Dance"

"Policing the boundaries of the 'O/orthodox': Modernity, Evil, and Morality in Exorcisms of Post-Socialist Addis Ababa"

"Excavating Undocumented Lives: Raced citizenship, colonial marketscapes, and the materiality of private property in 16th century household archaeology of Moquegua, Peru"

"Hearing Sex: An Ethnographic and Ethnomusicological Study of Striptease in the Midwestern US"

"Marketing Manners Makeover: Self-help and Women’s Islamic Education in Contemporary Singapore"

"Maintaining the State: Centralized Power and Urban Neighborhoods in Copan, Honduras"

"From Coercion to Compensation: Labor Systems and Spatial Practice on a Plural Farmstead, Long Island"

"The Nature of Bureaucracy in the Cook County Forest Preserves"

"'Women Always Work More Here': Gendered Labor and Chosen Families in the Rural Andes"

"Unsettling Age: Constructions of Later Life and Support in US Resettlement Bureaucracy"

2015

"A New Day for Domestic Workers? Multicultural New York City Care Workers' Labor and Activism amid the Introduction of Labor Law"

"Packaging Care, Regulating Poverty: NGOs and New Modes of Neoliberal Governance" 

"Lifestyle Change, Vulnerability, and Health among the Awajun of the Peruvian Amazon"

"Growing Public Health: Implications from a Qualitative Study of Food Gardeners in Chicago"

"Growing Good Food in the City: A Multi-Method Study of Gardening and Health in Two Chicago Communities"

2014

“Festival Encounters:  Value Logics and the Political Economy of Cultural Production in Ghana"

“Followers of the Marabout? Knowledge, Exchange, and Spiritual Relations in Niger”

“Commoner Contributions to the Rise of Urbanism in Noh K’ uh in Chiapas, Mexico”

“The Weight of Structural Violence: Syndemic stress and obesity among black urban youth in the US”

“When the White People Come: Gentrification and Race in Puerto Rican Chicago”

“Kuchus in the Balance: Queer Lives under Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill”

2013

“The Children of the Tsimane': Exploring how children create and negotiate health outcomes”

"Deconstructing Normal: Leptin variation across and within populations"

"A responsibility to speak: The discursive orders of Christianity and Confucianism among the Jinghpo in Southwest China"

“Remaking the Rural: Private Prisons, Land-Use Policies, and Punitive Governance in Central New Mexico”

"Mums Matter: Intergenerational Effects of Maternal Stress"

2012

"Human Telomere Biology: Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives"

"Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Male Socioendocrinology: Insights from Cebu, Philippines"

"Speculative Normalcy: Time, Agency, and Ambiguity in Changing Bulgaria" 

"Democracy Building: Local Elections and Governance in Northern Mali"

“The VIDDA Syndemic: Distress and Diabetes In Social and Cultural Context”

"Saltmaking, Craft, and Community at Late Postclassic and Early Colonial San Bartolome Salinas, Mexico"

"Empires and Everyday Material Practices: A Household Archaeology of Aztec and Spanish Imperialism at Xaltocan, Mexico"

"The World in a Bottle: Gender, Age, and Direct Sales in Costa Rica"

2011

“Economic Specialization in Late Chalcolithic Animal Systems:  The Fauna at Hacinebi Tepe, Turkey”

“Domestic Economies and Regional Transition: Household Production and Consumption in Early Postclassic Mexico”

“Being Closer: Children and Caregiving in the Time of TB and HIV in Lusaka, Zambia”

"Life Course Influences on Milk Composition in Filipino Women"

2010

“The Archaeology of Farmscapes: Production, Place, and the Materiality of Landscape at Xaltocan, Mexico”

“Negotiating Power in the Wari Empire: A Comparative Study of Local-imperial Interactions in the Moquegua and Majes Regions during the Middle Horizon (550-1050CE)”

2009

“Performative Politics: Landless Workers' Creative Strategies of Resistance in lowland Bolivia”

“The Eye of the State: Business Visibility and the Production of Public Authority in Northern Cameroon”

“Market integration, Stress and Health: An Exploration of HPA Dynamics among the Tsimane’”

"Long-Term Indigenous History on a Colonial Frontier: Archaeology at a 15th-17th Century Maya Village, Progresso Lagoon, Belize"

2008

“Monumentality During the Mid-Holocene in the Upper and Middle St. Johns River Basins, Florida”

"Kazane Höyük and Urban Life Histories in Third Millennium Upper Mesopotamia"

"Working at Risk: An Ethnography of Making Markets in Chicago"

“Social Support and Women's Health in El Alto, Bolivia”

“Making Gains from Industrial Scrap: Small-Scale Production in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso”

"'I Love You': Coercion and Consent in Sexual Relations in Postapartheid South Africa"

"Exploring the Early Development of Health Inequality: Culture, Stress, and Health among African American Adolescents"

"Radio Ways: Society, Locality, and FM technology in Koutiala Mali"

2007

"Tired Bodies and Traveling Women: Gender and Economy in the Bosnian Refugee Migration to the United States, 1992-2005"

"You're more poor": Squatter efforts to shape urban space, housing, and informal work in Windhoek, Namibia

2006

“The Creation of a Propertied Landscape: Land Tenure and Agricultural Investment in Medieval Iceland”

"Households, Daily Practice, and Cultural Appropriation at Sixth Millennium Tell Kurdu"

"Spoken Tibetan, Written English: Communities of Practice and Linguistic Market Places in the Tibetan Diaspora of McLeod Ganj, India"