Showing 11 - 19 of 19 Items

Localizing Resistance: How Southern Women Locate Sexual and Bodily Autonomy and Strategically Resist the Institutions Aiming to Shape Them

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Gillian Raley

Access: Open access

This paper analyzes the methods of resistance enacted by women-identifying people in Mississippi against the institutions seeking to police how they understand their own sexuality and bodily autonomy. This analysis draws upon a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in the summer of 2020 focused on construction of community, intersectional identity, relationship with the body, and what inputs frame how women in Mississippi understand sex. This project puts these interviews in conversation with literature from a variety of subfields, including resistance studies, the Sociology of the South, and the Sociology of sexuality, all of which help bring the argument behind these data to light. Resistance looks different in different eras, and generally scholars like to analyze resistance as collective action, collective voice, collective struggle. These data instead argue that strategic, individualized resistance is just as vital to marginalized bodies, particularly when explosive action is not possible. Studying strategies of resistance that lurk beneath the surface not only expands what we now see as “radical,” but it also lends insight into where lasting change can begin.


"What's it like to be a lesbian with a cane?": A Story and Study of Queer and Disabled Identities

Date: 2018-05-01

Creator: M.M. Daisy Wislar

Access: Open access

People with disabilities are largely conceptualized as asexual; this systematically excludes disabled people from achieving agency in their sexual landscape. Drawing from interview data on the sexual lives of nine queer people living with disabilities, this project explores the lived experiences of physically disabled queer people as they relate to sexuality, sexual identity, intimacy, and the sexual body. Queer people with physical disabilities navigate identity, community, various sexual fields while also challenging misconceptions about these marginal identities. Excerpts and analysis of these interviews reveal the various strategies that queer and disabled people utilize in order to make their identities legible in the face of numerous assumptions about their experiences. Illuminating the voices of queer and disabled people, this thesis offers an important intervention to the sociological study of sexualities, gender expression, and disability, which too frequently marginalizes the voices of people who are queer and disabled.


Placemaking and Community-Building among Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer (LBQ) Women and Non-Binary People during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Gabby Unipan

Access: Open access

This paper draws on data collected through in-depth interviews with multi-generational participants recruited from various online sites to explore the place-making strategies among lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women and trans- and gender-non-conforming people (tgncp) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Historically denied public space, placemaking in immaterial space (i.e., digital spaces) has been essential to the production and maintenance of communities for LBQ women and tgncp. Because these populations rely on non-traditional placemaking strategies that are not always instantiated in material space, sociologists often overlook their efforts to create place for themselves. This paper corrects this omission by exploring how communities create place through the deployment of subcultural capital onto immaterial space. Introducing four main strategies of community placemaking, material-constant communities, material-transient communities, immaterial-constant communities, and immaterial-transient communities, this article expands sociological conceptions of space to accommodate the placemaking strategies of marginalized communities who might lack the economic and political resources to foster communities in material spaces. Beyond the investigation of lesbian-queer placemaking, this research contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, fluid, contested, and ephemeral nature of place and placemaking in the context of increasing Internet use.



Miniature of “I belong as much as I want to”: Changing Perceptions of Belonging through COVID and After among Elite Undergraduates
“I belong as much as I want to”: Changing Perceptions of Belonging through COVID and After among Elite Undergraduates
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      Date: 2025-01-01

      Creator: Fiona Bor

      Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



        Urban Pastures: A Computational Approach to Identify the Barriers of Segregation

        Date: 2022-01-01

        Creator: Noah Gans

        Access: Open access

        Urban Sociology is concerned with identifying the relationship between the built environment and the organization of residents. In recent years, computational methods have offered new techniques to measure segregation, including using road networks to measure marginalized communities' institutional and social isolation. This paper contributes to existing computational and urban inequality scholarship by exploring how the ease of mobility along city roads determines community barriers in Atlanta, GA. I use graph partitioning to separate Atlanta’s road network into isolated chunks of intersections and residential roads, which I call urban pastures. Urban pastures are social communities contained to residential road networks because movement outside of a pasture requires the need to use larger roads. Urban pastures fences citizens into homogenous communities. The urban pastures of atlanta have little (


        The experience of crunch in the video games industry amongst current and aspiring developers

        Date: 2022-01-01

        Creator: Radu Ioan Stochita

        Access: Open access

        The video games industry relies on crunch - overworking the developers, usually towards the end of the project in order to meet a required deadline. In this paper, I analyze the different relationships that aspiring and current game developers have with the games industry and how they position themselves when it comes to crunch. Passion is a major component of people's desire to join the games' industry, later being used to justify one's need of staying overtime: "Since I am passionate about video games, it did not feel like work at all." Other aspiring or current developers are more skeptical when it comes to crunch and are developing secondary plans, either to quit the industry, join labor unions or push for better working conditions.


        Miniature of Something’s Gotta Give:  Guns, Youth, and Social Change in Denver, Colorado
        Something’s Gotta Give: Guns, Youth, and Social Change in Denver, Colorado
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            Date: 2019-05-01

            Creator: Carlos Manuel Holguin

            Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



              How the Caregiver Learns to Care: Institutional, Resource, and Emotional Tensions Among Sexual Assault Support Staff

              Date: 2025-01-01

              Creator: Hanna Cha

              Access: Open access

              This study examines the institutional and emotional dynamics within a multidisciplinary team that consists of law enforcement (LE), the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), and sexual assault support staff who handle child sexual abuse cases. Employees interpret trauma differently depending on the organizational framework they operate within. The way professionals construct trauma shapes caregivers’ outlook on the process and ultimately affects how they care for their children. While LE and DHHS prioritize legal compliance, the sexual assault support staff advocate for trauma-informed care. Using semi-structured interviews with seven sexual assault support staff members who identified as women or non-binary, this research explores the way they manage the gendered burden of emotional labor, the systemic undervaluation of trauma-informed practices, and the emotional challenges caregivers face in supporting child survivors. Findings show the friction between the multidisciplinary team, emphasizing the need for integrated trauma-informed training and community-based support systems for caregivers.