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 Pathways to Knowledge: A Lecture Series for Undergraduates
Spring 2004
February 24, 2004
7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Grant Auditorium
The Work of Deaf Mothers:
Language and Power in Public and Private Spaces
Cheryl G. Najarain
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Sociology and Women's Studies
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This qualitative study investigates the everyday lives of college-educated deaf women in both their mothering and paid work experiences. Throuhg this life history research with ten deaf women in two different cities in the northeast, we are better able to understand the seemingly "invisible work" involved as these women negotiateplaces for themselves and resist various obstacles in their paid and unpaid work lives. One goal of this study is to show how, through these experiences, the women develop strategies to negotiate being part of the deaf world, hearing world, or somewhere, as they describe, "in between."
By uncovering the seemingly invisible identity work of these women, I aim to show how these findings might influence our education and hiring practices.
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March 30, 2004
7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Grant Auditorium
The Cosmopolitan Project:
Constructing Gender and Power in Post-Liberalization Bombay
Susan Runkle
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
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This dissertation examines what the advent of a post-liberalization economy in 1991 meant for elites in Bombay, India. Utilizing a theoretical framework that includes social network models, feminist theory and the decontextualization/deterretorialization of identity exemplified in some scholls of postmodern thought, along witha a methodology of life histories, participant observation and intensive interviews, this dissertation problematizes notions of First/Third World and development/underdevelopment by examining the lives of elite individuals in a country largely depicted in the anthropological imagination as impoverished.
It includes chapters on the manipulation of the body via plastic surgery and the gym, the Hindi film industry, beauty, women's fashion magazines and the fashion industry, consumption, the city as a social actor, urban women's sexuality and the experience of gender, which combine to create a clearer picture of what it means to be an elite in the inceasingly transnational environments that exist in pockets throughout uban India elites.
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April 13, 2004
7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Grant Auditorium
Using Yeast to Understand Us:
The Spatial Regulation of Morphogenesis
Nancy Mackin
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Biology
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Directed or polarized cell growth isimportant in such biological processes as neural development and cell motility. These processes require cells to reorganize or polarize their components such as organelles, proteins, and nucleic acids to create distinct cellular asymmetries. We are interested in understanding the cellular mechanisms and components that are required to create these asymmetries or microenvironments within a cell.
To investigate the mechanisms of polarized growth, we use the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Due to the availability of biochemical, cell biological, and genetic techniques existing within this organism, yeast provides us with a simpler system for our investigation. In particular, my studies have focused on understanding the role of one protein, Paxillin-like protein 1 or Px11p, in the process of polarized cell growth. Interestingly, Px11p bears homology to the protein paxillin that is involved in directing growth in mammalian cells.
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