Welcome to another year of my cultural anthropology dissertation picks. Every year my scanning of the year’s dissertations reveals different prominent themes, as informed by my search of Dissertation Abstracts International (which as I have noted in previous year’s posts, is anything but international; as far as I can tell, the scope is nearly 100 percent U.S.).
This year I was struck by the many studies related to food and to gender, and more studies focusing on race, education, and media. Health continues to be important as do rights and the rise of activism, both intersecting with race, class, gender, and ability. The rise of food as a topic is particularly poignant given the recent death of Sidney Mintz. Mintz can well be considered the founder of “food anthropology” with his landmark publication of Sweetness and Power in 1985. He would no doubt have been pleased to see this trend and these many wonderful studies.
My usual search terms reflect the focus of the anthropologyworks blog: social diversity, social inequality, structural violence and resistance, and the importance of cultural anthropology in studying and revealing complex relations in all the above and offering findings that can help change the world for the better through their research, writing, teaching, advocacy, and activism.
The question of open access to these sources thus arises. As far as I can tell, of these 40 dissertations, only four are open access (Antoine, Donaldson, Oliveiria, and Richard); one is embargoed until April 30, 2017, after which it will presumably be open access.
Given the facts that many of these dissertations are the product of education at publicly funded institutions and that much of the research was funded by public money such as the National Science Foundation, it is difficult to understand why the public is excluded from accessing most of these works. I have no idea what kind of a deal ProQuest has with universities in the United States, but Proquest is likely making quite a nice profit from payment to access dissertations. Or, it may not be, since the price is so high in which case the Proquest arrangement serves to keep important new knowledge out of the public domain because of its pricing, just like the scholarly journals. [Readers, if I am missing something important here, please let me know].
On a brighter note: Congratulations to these 40 dissertation writers. I wish you well and look forward to hearing about your accomplishments in the future.
See also the best cultural anthropology dissertations of 2009, 2010, 2011,2012, 2013, and 2014.
Continue reading “Best Cultural Anthropology Dissertations 2015”
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