Through a comparative project researching sex work in Seattle and Amsterdam, this study provides insight into how the legality of sex work directly affects the amount of consent, autonomy and safety of sex workers. Building on a pilot project conducted during a month long study abroad through the University of Washington Honors and Law, Societies, and Justice Program, I was able to examine how the amount of consent, autonomy and safety of sex workers is influenced by spatial construction, police enforcement, and legal statute. My time in Amsterdam also provided insight into issues around stigma, racism, and privacy violations. This project extends the first by comparing sex work in Amsterdam to sex work in Seattle, specifically along Aurora Avenue and 85th and various online forms of sex work in the area.This research project utilizes ethnographic techniques and open ended interview protocols to explore the ways in which feminism and moral ideas around sex work shape consent, autonomy and safety and help construct a more holistic understanding of some of the differences between Seattle and Amsterdam. I employ a Third Wave Feminist lens, which incorporates anti-essentialism feminism and intersectionality, to draw links between sex workers’ level of consent into entering the sex work industry and their experiences to their identities and levels of oppression. I find that there is a hierarchy created in the sex industry in Seattle, where higher levels of autonomy and safety seem to correlate to less profit and being higher up on the hierarchy. Through examining these relationships between monetary value, safety, autonomy, and hierarchy, I determine how legal policy is not only inadequate at dealing with these variety of experiences, but conflates this hierarchy, not accounting for the safety based, monetary based, or sex based empowerment that varies worker to worker.

For West Indian women, the immigration journey’s “search for a better life” is commonly constructed as being positioned at the center of two competing yet co-determining axes – on the one hand, labor, and on the other, sacrifice. The privilege of economic citizenship in the developed world is understood to come at the cost of a fragmentation of the extended family structure upon which West Indian society is built. Missing from this discourse are West Indian’s women’s own narratives, those stories that move migration theory from an abstract understanding of the migration experience to a complex accounting of the multiplicity of personal motivators, social forces, and institutional agendas that shape the migration journey. Further complicating the story of West Indian women’s migration is their disproportionate vulnerability to adverse reproductive health outcomes, including preterm births, gestational diabetes, and low birth weight infants. Existing literature has failed to examine comprehensively the reasons for West Indian women’s risk for these negative health outcomes. This exploratory study addresses these gaps by embracing a theoretical perspective of embodied transnationalisms, which directs this research in its goal of uncovering the associations that West Indian women make between their states of reproductive health and the physical and social geographies of migration. A phenomenological approach is used to layer the life, migration, and reproductive health histories of the study’s participants into a rich, multidimensional narrative. Drawing on alter/native and autoethnographic research methods, the researcher is both participant and investigator, her life history forming one of the study’s case studies. What emerges from these women’s narratives is a story about the transformation of vulnerable reproductive spaces into spaces of resistance. This study opens up a space for analytic autoethnographic methods within migration theory and provides a patient agency-based model for providers attending to the health care needs of migrant women.

This paper presents the progress from my independent study project working on the development of a public health campaign done in close collaboration with Rachel Chapman in the department of Anthropology. This campaign seeks to reduce maternal-child transmission of HIV in Mozambique as well as the stigma around HIV treatment. Despite high rates of prenatal screening for HIV during pregnancy, there are low rates of adherence to anteretroviral treatment among HIV+ mothers who begin treatment, and even lower levels of treatment for exposed infants. Factors that discourage HIV-infected mothers from seeking treatment include the necessary high frequent visits to clinics, costly transportation, and negative social image. The campaign I worked on, known as OPÇÃO B+ (Option B+), advocates a "test and treat" approach to HIV treatment with attention to prenatal and postnatal care. The purpose of this intervention is to encourage HIV-infected women to start treatment early and consistently through provision of support from healthcare providers and support groups consisting of other women going through different stages of treatment. My role in the development of the campaign was to illustrate the flipchart, which is the tool being used by nurses and other healthcare professionals to help educate patients. The campaign is being piloted and conducted in six hospitals in Mozambique. I will report on the process of creating the flipchart as well as present the initial data consisting of trends of patient visits in the first two clinical sites. It is the goal to see whether the use of the flip chart as a visual aid in education sessions for mothers living with HIV groups to provide information, education and communication (IEC) is an effective means of communicating an idea, in this case, HIV education, that may also lead to an increase of consistent clinical visits from patients seeking treatment.

The shaman is a historically important cultural and healing figure in the Madre de Dios region of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Shamans work with the ayahuasca vine, a cultural medicine and strong hallucinogen. The knowledge of the shaman and use of ayahuasca is changing with the recent influx of tourism, an important event relating to shifting understandings of indigenous knowledge as a result of globalization. The aim of my research is to document the changing positionality of the shaman and the effects of tourism on the indigenous cultures, specifically ethnobiological knowledge, of the region. The central research question is: how do the local indigenous and touristic worlds position the shaman and his/her ethnobiological knowledge, and how do shamans respond to pressures at the intersection of these two worlds? Study locations include the city of Puerto Maldonado, Peru and three indigenous communities on the Las Piedras river, 50 to 200 kilometers from the city. These communities are part of the Yine tribe and hunt and gather for sustenance. Methods used are participated observation, interviews, and visual and auditory anthropology. Data are analyzed and presented to improve understanding of local indigenous and touristic views of the shaman and the knowledge shamans hold. The results of this research will be significant to understanding the shaman's current role and the effects of tourism on this role, as well as the impact of globalization on ethnobiological knowledge.

Ayurveda, one of the oldest medical systems in the world, is steadily gaining popularity around the world as an alternative to Western medicine today. According to a survey conducted by the National Health Interview Survey, an estimated 200,000 U.S. adults used Ayurvedic medicine in 2006. Over the past few years, the Puget Sound area has also experienced an increase in Ayurvedic medical clinics. Through this project, I will analyze individual choice for treatment through Ayurveda despite access to Western healthcare. I aim to collect the stories of the Ayurvedic practitioners and patients in the Seattle area through research methods of observations, interviews, and informal discussions. Thus, the focus of this ethnographic research is to obtain the perspectives of the individuals utilizing Ayurvedic care. This approach will aid in the discovery of the different factors that may influence the patient choice of alternative care. Using qualitative data, I focus on the experiences of patients and practitioners at Ayurvedic centers to identify recurring themes in patient perception of Ayurvedic medicine. The project findings will provide beneficial information to modern health systems in the Seattle area regarding the influences of medical pluralistic ideas that may shape medical preference and provision of care. To date, the main finding of this study is the absence of correlation between patient choice and his or her ethnic background. However, an exception exists within the Indian-American community in which the social and historical skepticism and transnational identity influences its choice against the use of Ayurvedic medicine in an international space.

In the Quran, the Muslim holy book, God says “There is no compulsion in religion.” What does this phrase mean? Does this mean that people should not force women to wear hijab in the name of Shariah law? In this research, I want to use this phrase from the Quran, “There is no compulsion in religion,” as a theoretical framework to interview several local Islamic scholars in Washington regarding whether they think it is a religious obligation to enforce aspects of Sharia law that have been perceived as oppressive to society. I will ask them to provide evidence from the Quran and Sunnah regarding their opinions. Then I will do a comparative analysis of their views to those of other Islamic scholars and Islamic literatures to understand the different rationales regarding what components of Shariah law should be considered as a religious obligation. After completing this research, I will have enhanced understanding of how scholars interpret “Shariah.” I will have discovered how Shariah has been applied to various Muslim majority countries and what components of the application of Shariah have been deemed to be religious obligations. The Islamic literatures I will look at are the Quran, the interpretation of the Quran, the major Hadith books and Usul Ul Fiqh (the principle of Islamic jurisprudence). This project is important to religious scholarship because it will reveal that Muslims use the same sources to derive laws, but they all came up with different verdicts. Thus, understanding the logic of whether it is determined a religious obligation to enforce aspects of Sharia law that have been perceived as oppressive is very interesting for scholars who are exploring questions about Islamic views on religious laws. This research will enhance tolerance of Islam in the broader community because it will emphasize the pluralism among Muslim scholars.

Ascaris lumbricoides is the most common parasitic roundworm that infects humans globally. Currently, this parasitic worm presents a substantial health burden on countries with poor hygiene and sanitation practices. An estimated 1.2 billion people are infected worldwide, and consequently 60,000 deaths occur yearly. Typically, infection occurs when humans ingest foods contaminated with Ascaris ova from feces found in surrounding soil. Extracting ova from biosolids and soil is necessary in order to determine its prevalence in the environment and assess subsequent transmission risk. Extraction methods need to be efficient and affordable; therefore, a method that introduces samples with separate solutions that would be vigorously shaken to suspend and wash ova is referred to as the “University of Arizona method.” This method was developed to improve simplicity without sacrificing efficiency in Ascaris ova extractions. Consequently, the goal of this project is to further explore factors to optimize overall ova recovery from different substrates and compare differences in viability. Previously, different extraction treatments were tested with various liquids that create a concentration gradient in order to remove large particulates called floatation solutions, and liquids that remove the adhesive properties of ova called wash solutions. Floatation solutions investigated included reagent grade magnesium sulfate, store bought Epsom salt, and sucrose solutions. In addition, wash solutions investigated included deionized water and MP Biomedicals, Inc. 7X™ lab detergent. Preliminary results show that a combination with reagent grade magnesium sulfate and 7X™ lab detergent had the highest recovery (43.7%). After extraction is completed, enumeration and observation over 30 days of Ascaris ova was performed to determine the recovery and viability. In the future, improvements will require testing with different materials or reagents that will help optimize this method.