This research covers Japanese animation and its popularity in the United States. It focuses on hardcore fans for whom this animation has become part of their lives. Using interviews of self-identified anime fans, this research explores how anime fandom has become a part of American life despite originating in a...
This thesis explores the reasons for conversion to Islam for ten well-educated, Caucasian, American born women of European descent in a small, relatively affluent college town in Oregon, United States. It follows their process of constructing a new identity with their families, with friends, within the Muslim community and within...
As Turkey's cultural and economic climate has experienced dramatic shifts in accordance with its changing role in global society, a neo-Ottoman movement has taken root in recent years which can offer insight into the new Turkish identity. This sociopolitical movement captures a diverse set of cultural attributes through a contemporary...
How do fishing guides of the Cascade and Coast Range rivers negotiate the conflicting tensions between their client’s desire to experience the wild and the extractive nature based tourism of their role as fishing guides? How do they position their services relative to the environment and an imagined landscape that...
An overarching explanation for environmental degradation has been humans' disconnection from the natural world. Utilizing Whiteheadian theory, I offer that there is no disconnection. Rather, I propose that there is a dearth of relational acknowledgement. I suggest that the Cartesian dualism and modern science led to an illusory belief that...
This research is based on in-depth interviews with 20 women farmers and
ranchers from the state of Oregon. These women employ a variety of methods and
subscribe to a number of divergent philosophies regarding agricultural practices.
The intention of this study is to examine how women who are the primary...
This dissertation explores the real world problem of rural youth out-migration and finds that the central problem is one of persistent class difference in this rural Oregon town. The research that informs this dissertation was conducted in a rural community of approximately 2300 residents in Eastern Oregon, here called Talltown....
The Senior Farmers' Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP), piloted in Oregon in 2001, provided $100 worth of vouchers (aka coupons) to low-income seniors to buy fresh local produce from farmers at farmers' markets and roadside stands. Presented in a political ecology framework, this research integrated the perspectives of beneficiaries and their...
Limited research has analyzed how the values espoused by Western alternative food systems, such as taste and territoriality, are adopted and refashioned in post-socialist societies. Muscovites now echo the global quality turn that reconnects consumers to their food sources. This research qualitatively explores the perspectives of the cosmopolitan consumers of...
Ideals of freedom, independence, and land ownership helped form and perpetuate the mythology of ranching in the United States. However, stereotypes emerged as a result of distortion from the media and the move away from the land. Social philosophies changed
regarding the environment, land use, and the health and safety...