This capstone project investigates the subject of bird rehabilitation in the city of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil through a series of short documentary portraits. By showcasing the individual work of a range of artists, environmental activists, and biologists currently involved in the fight against illegal bird trafficking in the city, the collection seeks to raise awareness about the importance of these feathered animals in urban spaces. In its final form, the project will be showcased in an interactive web-based platform to encourage audience engagement and further exploration, ultimately drawing threads between human rights and activism to the fight for animal rights and the collective fight against climate change.

This is a monitoring and evaluation study conducted in Ethiopia from June to July of 2019. Through qualitative (Focus Groups) and quantitative methods (Scorecard), this report seeks to measure how effective Cluster Level Association (CLA) groups are at operating within the Women’s Self-Help Group approach in the country. This research was done in collaboration with a Consortium of Self-Help Approach Promoters (COSAP), an umbrella organization that works with 28 Ethiopian non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The world is not new to humanitarian crises, but with a growing global population under threat of a pandemic, more complex conflict, and global environmental catastrophe looming on the horizon, the traditional humanitarian response model is not capable of responding to the needs of today’s crises. The current model is reactive and slow, only responding to disaster once it has already occurred. The time needed to assess needs and mobilize funding results is lost lives and livelihoods. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a primary humanitarian response coordination agency, has started to shift towards a disaster response model that is anticipatory, where crises are mitigated before they occur. However, convincing external stakeholders that this new model should be the primary response modus operandi has proven to be difficult. As a result, The New School consultancy team has developed a communications memo that guides OCHA’s internal stakeholders on how to effectively advocate for a more anticipatory humanitarian response model when engaging with various external stakeholders.

This project was with the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), which is partnering with the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and the European Union to promote gender-mainstreaming to combat small arms trafficking and misuse. The client gave the practicum three tasks: First, map policy literature on gender and small arms for a database to be accessible by NGOs around the world. Second, facilitate connections with other organizations and research centers—Reaching Critical Will, the Center for International Policy, and the Center on International Cooperation—to share knowledge and foster cooperation. Third, produce two in-depth reports analyzing the state of gender and small arms and light weapons (SALW) control, one on Peru and the other on El Salvador. These reports have become the template for a series that maps data on existing campaigns, policies, initiatives, programs, and resources focused on gender mainstreaming in SALW in six priority countries and helps establish a baseline for identifying promising practices and examples. These reports will allow IANSA and UNODA to better understand how countries are working to address the connection between gender specific approaches and impacts, women’s rights, small arms control and armed violence at the local and community level.

As the need to identify UNICEF's role as a development agent becomes evident, a deep-down review of UNICEF's progress is essential. This review must provide a more in-depth exploration of UNICEF's work with other development agencies, as well as exploring where progress has been achieved and where it has not been achieved, and what lessons can be learned from good practices and those where outcomes were not positive. The goal of this project is to provide background information through the review of UNICEF documentation on UNICEF's goal areas, focusing on the level of collaboration between UNICEF, UN agencies, non-UN agencies, and national governments.

Fast Fashion has been the rising trend in today’s garment industry offering trendy and cheap clothing that samples ideas from top designers or celebrity culture and turns them into garments for mainstream stores on an accelerated timeline. New styles are being changed and rotated every week of the year leaving fast fashion stores with fifty-two seasons. Behind this world of fashion lies exploitation and ambiguous supply chains. If systematic change trumps consumer behavior shifts it is still important for individuals to educate themselves and understand where their garments came from so they are able to become more critical consumers. We need to educate consumers in a way that’s engaging and allows them to make enough of a relative connection that will encourage them to change their buying habits. Increased transparency is needed to shed a light on this industry and consumers can be the push for that.

My research portfolio has taken the U.S. fracking debate and analyzed its potential health implications as well as the socio-economic effects that industry migrations have had on rural boom towns. Fracking technology is still in a relatively infant stage; therefore, we do not yet know the full effect it can and will have on our communities. However, federal and state governments are continuously distracted by its economic prospects, thus allowing the practice to go unregulated for the most part. I assert that greater regulation be implemented until research can catch up to the industry in order to safeguard our health and protect the public services of local economies.

Liberty Avenue is a web documentary that cumulates in the form of a non-linear, digital platform. It combines interviews, outside media, existing research, and resources, to highlight community members, organizations, activists, and artists. This documentary aims to amplify the voices of womxn in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora communities of Queens, New York, around conversations on gender-based violence, shame, activism, and art as a catalyst for change. It seeks to serve as an advocacy tool for its featured organizations and artists, to drive funding and support, while housing resources for those in need.

For members of ethnic minority groups in Turkey who cannot gather in overwhelmingly Turkish public spaces, private spaces are key. This paper covers two such places: 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory, in honor of the murdered Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, and Roştiya Demxane, a small Kurdish tea house where people come to drink tea, listen to music, and talk with others. In the diaspora, too, these community spaces are essential. Baran’s Kurdish Restaurant in Cape Town is a hub of social justice and education about Kurdish rights, and though it may be in the multicultural world of South Africa, the oppression of Turkey is never far from conversations. In New York, St Vartan Cathedral plays an important role in bringing people together for services, events and classes, and preserving Armenian history to be passed down to the next generation. Though different in their structure and usage, all four spaces are critical in Armenian and Kurdish communities for not only their ability to bring people together and allow them to organize, but for how they facilitate a public presence for communities that in Turkey would otherwise stay in private spaces.

The Kenyan NGO Mission with A Vision is working to reduce FGM and ECM among the Maasai by carrying out comprehensive workshops that will explain the basics of female genital mutilation (FGM), related practices like early childhood marriage (ECM) and alternatives to FGM as a rite of passage. These workshops will be tailored to each audience (law enforcement officers, parents, religious leaders, etc.) and have a three-year timeline. Our role has been to design a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) strategy which will allow the stakeholders to understand and measure its results in the short, medium and long run. The M&E strategy includes: gathering baseline data, defining the indicators, creating data collection tools, and providing a timeline for data collection. The development of the M&E strategy is supervised by Professor Mark Johnson.

The Franco Narratives began as a research media project, conducted during the summer International Field Program in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to spread awareness about the rising violence towards women and LGBTQ+ identified people. The project is inspired by councilwomen, human rights activist, and feminist Marielle Franco, a gay woman of color, who was murdered and since has become a symbol of resistance. The project's goal is to shed light on art activism work, and experiences of women artists and students in Rio in their own words, their narratives. The website uses Brazil, specifically the city of Rio de Janeiro, as a case study, with a strategy of storytelling and advocacy through media projects about issues women face, using website design, advocacy video production, and interview collection.

Over the past year, we had the opportunity to work on a monitoring and evaluation project for World Connect. World Connect is a nonprofit that identifies local leaders all over the world and invests in their initiatives to drive transformative change in their communities. We were assigned four projects to evaluate that best represent the different sectors and issues that the organization values. In this presentation, we will review the progress we have made with our evaluations.

 The social determinants of Cuban health: a focus on social support in Vedado, Havana" is a two-part project investigating the non-biomedical factors that contribute to Cuban well-being. The first essay looks at why, despite being economically isolated and resource-poor, Cuba exhibits health outcomes comparable to highly developed nations like the United States. One of these explanations is explored further in a second paper that includes first-hand research on food (in)security among women and families in the town of Vedado. While social measures put forth by the government help bolster citizens' health, social support and community networks are ultimately essential for survival.

World Connect is a nonprofit foundation that identifies and cultivates grassroot developmental projects in under-resourced areas of the world by providing funding, professional guidance, and technical support. The organization assigned students to devise new mechanisms for instilling project design and evaluation methodologies into their grant processes. As such our project took a two-pronged approach - the first to create an organizational level logical framework and theory of change to make the company's ethos, methods, and theories explicit. The second was to enhance their monitoring and evaluation tools provided to grantees to streamline project development and instill best practices.

Through an autoethnographic exploration of a hundred years of personal and family history I tell the stories that illustrate the consequences of the market economy and the pervasiveness of neoliberalism in Dominican migrants' lives who settle in northern Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood colloquially known as Dyckman. Through personal anecdotes and academic research I explain what globalized neoliberal urbanization is, how gentrification operates as a component of that process in Dyckman-- and how the process affects the long term Dominican population in the area, including myself and my family. By assuming the centrality of my experience I get a hold of, and explain the globalized neoliberal urbanization process that has so overwhelmingly driven the course of much of my life. There are those of us whose lives are in the throes of a process we have no control over and no say about -- a process that seems to have no end in sight, a process increasingly making us poorer. I aim to know and understand what the hell happened and strive to expose the technicalities of this process, usually only in the grasp of the intelligentsia, in order to better understand what in the world --literally-- is going on.

This research portfolio contains an analysis of the Washington Consensus imposed on Argentina by Western Powers, and an analysis of the Beijing Consensus imposed on Africa by China. While global discourse has focused on highlighting distinctions between the ideologies, the WC and BC ultimately endorse the same set of free-market principles, which disregard the diverse histories, circumstances, and needs of societies across the developing world. Significantly, the policy prescriptions of the WC and BC are the exact opposite of the development strategies undertaken by Chinese and Western economies alike. Considering such contradictions, this research portfolio aims to explore the ways in which capitalism organizes the global economy. Through this lens, it becomes clear that economic disparities between the Global North and South are a product of capitalism’s uneven development rather than any intrinsic superiority of developed countries or shortcomings of developing countries. Although initially concerned with the unequal distribution of global wealth for the sake of the Global South, the magnitude and speed of both Argentina’s economic collapse and China’s economic growth suggests the instability of capitalism’s inherent economic cycles poses a constant threat to even the most advanced Western economies.

My capstone work has consisted of a practicum conducted under the supervision of Professor Mark Johnson. The two course components of this practicum were realized during the spring of 2019 in Humanitarian Aid Practices Studio and the summer of 2019 in the Ethiopia IFP. Across the spring of 2019 in New York and the later summer fieldwork in Ethiopia, I studied the same issue from opposite ends: the flow of secondhand clothing from oversupplied domestic markets in the Global North to developing countries, focusing specifically on those in Africa given my IFP site, and investigating the imported secondhand clothing sector (alongside the growing new apparel production sector) in Addis Ababa, Adama, and Hawassa, Ethiopia. Fieldwork was characterized by an attempt to gain access to and understand as many facets of the industry today, and involved secondhand clothing market site visits in multiple cities, visits to contemporary Ethiopian stores and malls, reaching out to producers, and piloting surveys in different contexts, such as in site visits to Self-Help Groups through CoSAP, an ongoing IFP collaboration undertaken by many fellow students. Work was conducted with the help of Mark as well as Ethiopian colleague and interpreter Henok Mengistu, a previous GPIA student also. Fieldwork, by facilitating analysis of many elements on the ground, interaction with Ethiopian people, and the observation of dynamics largely invisible in literature, enabled a final deliverable that challenged prior conceptualization of the issue. This is fitting, given the complexities that field experience introduced to prior theoretical familiarization with the topic, and the result is a compilation research and field findings on the current landscape of Ethiopia’s apparel industry.

My capstone thesis project, Squeaky Clean: Japan’s Soft Power Attraction, is an analysis of Japan’s soft power assets for the purpose of examining how the assets contribute to Japan’s overall soft power-based strategy and attraction. Whilst using Foreign Minister Taro Aso’s speech at Digital Hollywood University in 2006 as a cornerstone for defining the move of Japan toward pop culture diplomacy, I describe how three major parts of Japan’s soft power assets contribute to Japan’s overall soft power strategy. The three soft power assets I analyze are: 1. Pop Culture Diplomacy 2. The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program 3. Japan’s role in and in relation to the United Nations. Through a generally qualitative methodology, my analysis concludes that Japan has been able to develop a significant soft power presence in the international community because of its implementation of various cultural assets into governmental, public diplomacy programs and its global spread of popular culture.

Neoliberal capitalism has failed to provide a sustainable, just, and equitable way of organizing our societies and economies. In the face of a clear tension between our economies and the environment, concepts and discourses such as sustainable development and green growth have proliferated, but in practice, they seem to be trapped into the neoliberal ideology and market mechanisms that are the very root of the problem. At the same time, other alternative discourses and concepts have arisen with more radical proposals and an explicit rejection of the growth imperative. One of them is degrowth, which departs from a critique of economic growth to defend its abolition as a social objective and proposes a desired direction of socio-economic transformation, in which societies will produce and consume less, while maintaining or increasing the levels of prosperity, wellbeing, and happiness. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a detailed review of the starting points, proposes, and strategies made by the theory and movement of degrowth, as well as to make two new contributions: an analysis of the connections between degrowth and a number of other alternative economic proposals, and the proposal of five ways in which Anthropology can contribute to degrowth.

This project worked with Slum Dwellers International - Kenya (SDI-K) to facilitate a community-based participatory planning approach to informal settlement upgrading in Mukuru, Nairobi. In 2017, the Nairobi City Council government declared Mukuru a special planning area (SPA), effectively freezing development of the area for two years until an integrated development plan is produced through a collaborative effort with Mukuru residents. Throughout the semester the team assisted in drafting and editing development reports to be presented to Nairobi City Council and provided data analysis on the state of education in Mukuru. The team also analyzed existing educational guidelines to determine whether informal schools in the SPA were eligible to register with the state to receive funding. The project culminated in the development of a policy brief for key policy makers and donors as a final deliverable.