My experience on a short term medical mission trip to Guatemala in 2010 left me with an uneasiness. In the face of the experience itself, much post-trip discourse has been centered largely on its value as social capital. The goal of my research is to begin to unravel the complex emotions that take place both at the site of contact in the third-world host country and after returning home. In the face of the ubiquity of short term mission trips, their increasing necessity for professional and educational development, and the vast amount of development literature, this emotional ambiguity is left out. I plan to unpack and illuminate this internal conflict as a way to understand the dual nature of its effects. As an overall objective, I hope that this project invites further discussion about short term volunteer programs and their complexities. Additionally, my research questions ask what evidence of this duality in their own experiences there might be in personal accounts of returnees. Additionally, I plan to address the source, context, and representation of this ambiguity, if it does in fact exist for others, as well. My methods consist of revisiting my experience through an autoethnography and collecting data from the trip. I also include personal narratives from several returned volunteers willing to share their experiences, as well as reviewing much of the academic literature about short term trips. I plan to present emergent broad themes and possible significance for others preparing to go on a short term volunteer trip. These themes include mixed feelings about the trip in the form of a duality, the manner in which relationships formed in the contact zone might affect personal beliefs about the work being done on the trip, and the ambiguity of short term mission trips in terms of their helpfulness or harm.

Maps and their borders, established by states or social norms, are multidimensional tools that play an important role in the way individuals interact with each other and with the space around them. While many borders are meticulously defined and heavily guarded, others are invisible and fluid. For this research I examined the municipal border that runs through the rural community of San Antonio in Madriz, Nicaragua and the problems it presented for the development organization Amigos de las Américas while working in San Antonio during the summer of 2013. For Amigos personnel without prior experience in San Antonio, there was much confusion around the existence and meaning of a border that appeared to be acknowledged only at certain times. I conducted ethnographic research from June – August 2013, observing, interacting with and interviewing community members and Amigos personnel. Based on field notes and recorded interviews, I posit that the border in San Antonio, while known to inhabitants, was silenced by inhabitants and thus made invisible and unknowable to outsiders unfamiliar with San Antonio’s specific history. This silencing of political borders in public performances of belonging such as everyday speech and interactions, I hypothesize, is the result of painful community memories from the most recent civil war in Nicaragua (approximately 1975-1990) whose content does not fit within the nationalist, Sandinista narrative.

North and South Korea have grown increasingly distant culturally, economically, and ideologically since the division of the Korean peninsula in 1948. Although the 1953 armistice agreement ended the Korean War, North-South tensions have persisted. Yet, North Korea often takes on a dual role in the South Korean national imaginary as not just a threat, but also a lost family member. This project asks why the desire for unification, which might have made sense after the Korean war but has become more difficult to achieve, continues to resonate in South Korea such that there is a fixation on unification as the one true solution to North-South tensions. My hypothesis posits an answer in two parts. First, unification is fixated on because national division represents the continuation of a historical pattern demonstrated by Korea’s internal response to the fall of the Ming dynasty, the colonization of Korea by Japan, and the Korean war. In each case, a traumatic event triggered an anxiety over political legitimacy. I examine how the internal response to each crisis was to remove any member of the nation, construed as family, who threatened the legitimacy of the state, to suggest that unification as a continuation of this pattern symbolizes the reconciliation of this divided family. Second, unification continues to resonate because it perpetuates the problem it attempts to resolve -- that is, unification itself reminds of this historical process wherein North Korea continues to be both family and enemy. To this end, I examine recent South Korean television dramas related to unification: first, to observe how the internal response to threats to Korean legitimacy exhibited by Korea in the historical pattern I have outlined constitutes a repeated narrative trope, and second, to analyze the tension between portrayals of North Koreans as both family and enemy in these dramas.

The goal of this research is to examine how the Bulgarian community in the greater Seattle, Washington, area is attempting to maintain its cultural heritage through specific efforts such as carrying on traditional practices. I had witnessed a few performances of traditional Bulgarian songs and dances, and was interested to discover if there was an organized, consistent community effort to continue practicing traditions, maintaining social structures and networks, and perpetuating ideologies or attitudes about their Bulgarian heritage. I began inquiring of Bulgarians living in the area, and then networked through social media, websites, and by attending meetings and rehearsals to examine whether this heritage maintenance was indeed happening, and what it looked like. The Bulgarian community in Seattle appears to indeed be actively involved in retaining their Bulgarian heritage, and this heritage maintenance primarily is evident in preparation for outward acts or events showcasing their traditions and customs. It is during the rehearsals and preparations for these events that the bulk of heritage maintenance occurs. Elements of this include uniting under shared memory, language, music and dance, researching family histories, building community and networking, reintegrating lost cultural practices in the home, observing cultural rituals, wearing traditional dress, and performing for a presumably non-Bulgarian audience, which includes elements of commodification of culture. The motivation for displaying this culture serves as an impetus for identity formation and assimilation into the larger, diverse community of Seattle. Thus a symbiotic relationship is manifested between assimilation within a diverse community such as Seattle, and performance of distinct cultural heritage.

In recent years, multi-cultural education has become commonplace in policy making and public discourse. While policy makers, educators, parents and community members surely make an earnest effort to seek out and implement standards and practices which fairly address multiple cultures, many children and young adults remain faced with intense challenges in the form of curriculum and social pressure. This study sought to better understand how students in a South Seattle refugee community negotiate identity and achievement while engaged in this American public education system. It also attempts to explore how and why certain aspects of social fabric are maintained and others dismissed in favor of mainstream American culture and the ways which these interact with this system. The common view of multi-cultural education is based on supplementing otherwise standardized curriculum and the creation of certain types of spaces. This process of supplementing pre-existing curriculum is problematic because it leads to the exclusion of increasing numbers of students from both the public education system and future socioeconomic advancement in the United States. While this system deeply affects the lives of children, young adults, parents and community, these issues remain underexplored. Therefore, this study engaged participants from South Seattle’s Yesler Terrace neighborhood to explore these concerns using ethnographic data collected based on a “mosaic approach”, including one-on-one and group participant led interviews, photo-voice, social mapping and participant observation. Using these methods, this study explored two sites within this neighborhood. The first is an after school tutoring program run by Catholic Community Services at the Yesler Terrace Community Center which pairs students one on one with tutors for help outside of the classroom. The second is a first grade classroom at a neighboring elementary school. This study has found that the complexities faced by young people in the United States education system are incredibly individualized experiences. One of the primary goals of this research is to emphasize the importance of these individual experiences over those understood through collective sets of data. It is hoped that this study may open doors for further exploring the lives of individuals in order to better serve them in the public education system. Simultaneously, this study focuses on the anthropological process and the relationships that arise from it, the various roles of anthropologists and the impacts of research.

The Pacific Northwest is a dialect region thus far largely understudied by linguists. Also, the Japanese-American community in the American Pacific Northwest, although a minority population, has been a salient part of the region’s history since the late 1800s. This study both draws on recent prior linguistic research and examines the speech of two second-generation, Seattle-born Japanese-American sisters in order to answer the following questions: First, do these two sisters express differently their experiences with each the Japanese, Pacific Northwest, and Japanese-American communities? And second, to what extent do Japanese-American speakers and Caucasian-American speakers similarly articulate the vowels in words such as "bag" /æ/ and "beg" /Ô‘/? A conversational interview, a reading passage task, and a word list reading task were recorded for both sisters. This interview, in which both sisters participated, was transcribed and tagged for metalinguistic themes. Tokens of both vowels were taken from the individually recorded reading tasks for each sister and were measured in Praat for the formant frequencies of F1 and F2. The trends revealed in plots of each sister’s formant data are linked to the connectedness of each sister to the Pacific Northwest community. Through these collective data, this study seeks to show two things: that perceived negative experiences with a culture to which a person has ties are correlated with increased expression of disconnectedness from that culture; and that perceived positive experiences with a culture to which a person has ties are correlated with increased expression of connectedness with that culture. Finally, by drawing on recent prior research of Caucasian speech patterns in the Pacific Northwest and comparing it to the Japanese-American data in this study, this study seeks to show that Japanese-American speakers and Caucasian-American speakers show similarity in the articulation of the vowels /æ/ and /Ô‘/.

 I will argue that youth homelessness and society are intertwined existences and that we should move beyond narratives of blame and silence in order to find a more unconditional compassion for homeless youths. I will draw from my experiences volunteering at ROOTS Young Adult Shelter over the past three and one-half years, as well as from interviews conducted there during Summer 2013. The material gathered with be analyzed through Timothy Pachirat's (2013) "politics of invisibility" and Donna Haraway's (2007) "becoming with." The narrative we use to structure our opinions of homeless youths, what I call the personal agency narrative, attributes their situations to their laziness, addictiveness, and/or generally disagreeable behavior. However, an examination of the encounter with the homeless youth, which informs the personal agency narrative, reveals that the economic, political, and cultural contexts of youth homelessness, as well as the personal experiences (before and after becoming homeless) of homeless youths are left invisible. This, I believe, is a microcosmic analog to the broader pattern of dealing with youth homelessness as a society, within which we find a conditional compassion--we only are able to empathize with certain homeless youths-- which is tied to the personal agency narrative. I will argue that we should move beyond this conditionality, recognizing the multiple ties that bind society to youth homelessness, and vice versa, to see that society is in a state of becoming with youth homelessness. We therefore have a responsibility to youth homelessness.