Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Washington D.C., my dissertation examines the cultures, socialities and struggles of professional accumulation among aspiring think tank professionals, and how they are shaped by the hierarchies and competitive pressures of DC social worlds. I argue that being a member of the think tank professional class is not a natural attribute of persons, but rather an ongoing social process of becoming through which aspirants come to learn how to enact, inhabit and embody their professionality in everyday life. Focusing primarily on lower-status workers such as interns, I explore how aspiring professionals navigate desires and struggles for professional advancement within professional and employment hierarchies in which they are situated as relatively subordinated. Rather than simply sites for knowledge production, this dissertation shows that think tanks are institutional and social terrains for professional class formation and socialization, which both require and replicate subordination as central rites of passage. While think tanks are often understood to be defined primarily by their ideological-political orientation and function as policy knowledge producers, I show that social processes of becoming a professional subject within competitive hierarchies are central to understanding the role of think tanks as institutional actors that create and reproduce professional class worlds.

Throughout the dissertation, I highlight the ways that professional social formations structured by the imperative of professional accumulation create competition for prestige, status and advancement, and how this shape workers’ subjectivities, everyday practices, self-understandings and relationships with others in the social field. In response to pressures of accumulation and the desire for advancement, I attend to how workers not only craft and regulate their own professional subjectivities, but also construct and mediate symbolic understandings that hierarchically differentiate themselves from others. By showing how understandings and forms of professionality and expertise are structured by hierarchies of valuation, this dissertation also sheds light on how power, struggle and differentiation constitutively shape contemporary professional social worlds.

In this thesis, I discuss the production of wilderness ideologies in a settler colonial society, based in part upon the dichotomization of nature from culture. Specifically, I analyze the effects of settler colonialism in the creation of America's National Park system, looking at the Everglades National Park as a unique case study that both perpetuates and breaks away from the traditional construct of National Parks. To do so, I use magazine narratives of the Everglades region and National Park from the 1930s-1960s. This work serves to contribute to the field of settler colonial studies by highlighting the interconnections between settler colonialism and American ideologies of wilderness.

In the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), there are at least two groups of people with privileged claims to the islands' territory: The U.S. Military and the native Chamorro and Refaluwasch peoples. As some of the longest colonized islands in the Pacific, nestled among waters with great biodiversity, the CNMI is an exemplary site of the intersections between militarism, indigeneity and the environment. The U.S. military retains certain legal rights over the islands-including the adjacent sea and air space-and conducts weapons testing and training such as live-fire exercises, and chemical and munitions testing. At the same time, the CNMI's Constitution grants exclusive legal rights over the ownership of land to people of Northern Marianas Descent (NMD) to protect its scarcity and sacredness. Increasingly, both Indigenous people and the Department of Defense (DOD) articulate territorial claims in terms of “the environment”-stewardship, conservation, and protection for future generations. Using ethnographic methods, this research examines the shared cultural spaces that emerge from the overlapping claims to the environment made by Chamorros, Refaluwasch and the U.S. Military. By understanding the environment as a contested site situated within a longer history of imperialism in the Pacific, this research asks: how do U.S. Military and Indigenous Peoples’ claims to the environment overlap and diverge? What are the multiple understandings of and relationships to "the environment," and what is at stake? The findings from this research reveal that the environment (land/sea/sky) remains a critical site from which to explore contemporary manifestations of United States imperialism in the Northern Mariana Islands, where militarism is naturalized through various federal environmental planning processes that work to reconfigure Indigenous lands into spaces of U.S. sovereign power. Ultimately, this work argues that the current framing of sovereignty in the CNMI forecloses possibilities for Indigenous self-determination by privileging statist ideologies that are bound to U.S. political status. Sovereignty must therefore be re-conceptualized to account for a more dynamic and holistic vision of contemporary Indigenous sociopolitical life and its connections to the land.

To counteract their historical erasure and economic marginalization within American settler society, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma repurposes economic development robustly. Choctaw sovereignty, reinvigorated by economic development, enables the Nation to assert their political presence in ways that have transformed southeastern Oklahoma economically. Ethnographic examination of Chahta Anumpa Aiikhvna (School of Choctaw Language) and the history of Chahta anumpa (Choctaw language) in Oklahoma demonstrates how Choctaw Nation has accomplished both of these things. Additionally, this thesis critically examines Choctaw citizens’ complex experiences with economic development, which are shaped by an continual process of Indigenous dispossession. Understanding how these experiences and histories link together in turn opens up alternative possibilities for Choctaw futures grounded in Choctaw ways of life.

Mainstream American environmental education (EE) programs often place undue privilege on inquiry-based scientific epistemologies and settler colonial wilderness ideologies (Cronon 1995b, Wolfe 2006) as the primary drivers in determining program design. Those programs in the urban setting add an environmental justice layer to these frameworks, by focusing their efforts on underserved minority youth. Specifically, they take them to nature and teach through science in an effort to provide an informed, equitable experience that might cultivate a love of nature and future environmental stewardship. In Los Angeles, the programs offered by the century-old Los Angeles Audubon Society (LAAS) and a few other local non-profits and nature centers pride their innovative (though increasingly common) focus on local place-based nature excursions for underserved youth, often seeking to foster environmental experiences within the source schools.

This project examines these questions through the primary lens of LAAS programs and their intentional focus on science-based environmental education within the Ballona Creek Watershed. To understand their work and its impacts on the communities they hope to transform, I draw on literatures in urban anthropology and political ecology, knowledge production, settler colonialism, and the racialization of nature. I focus on the following four aspects embedded in these programs: 1) construction of “real” urban nature, 2) the centrality of rational and inquiry-based science content, 3) the precarious potential of embodied nature experience, and 4) racialized natures and their relationship to place-based community-building.

Despite the transformative potential of urban environmental education, educators tend to (unwittingly) reproduce potentially restrictive hegemonic environmental values, knowledges, and practices without considering the historical context and ongoing socio-political inequities enabling them. This results in significant gaps and friction (Tsing 2005) between educators’ environmentalisms and their desires for inclusivity and justice in the environmental movement by targeting low-income communities of color. It is in the generative friction of these gaps that I suggest a rhizomic (Ogden 2011) environmental education paradigm forefronting the layered histories of local place, with an intentional integration of epistemological diversity, cultural history, and community experience to re-center environmental education as a key access point for a socially critical and ecologically aware urban citizenry.

Despite today’s era of political and economic revitalization due in part to American Indian economic development, Oklahoma Choctaw people still contend with land dispossession facilitated by state and federal governments. Considered alongside the state of Oklahoma’s contentious relationship with tribal nations today, this dissertation examines how US settlers have utilized the collusive power of history and law to constitute settler sovereignty and facilitate Indigenous land dispossession. By ethnographically examining the legal life of settler historical production and how it continually reshapes the conditions for landownership among Choctaw people living in their post-removal homelands, it reveals how US and state laws – informed by anthropological and historical scholarship that proclaim the decline of Indigenous sovereignty and legitimate the settler regime of private property – have continually worked to dispossesses Choctaw people of their lands throughout time. Nevertheless, despite the relegation of Choctaw sovereignty to the past in scholarly publications and its minimization in the present by state actors, Choctaw people who maintain Choctaw ways of life consistently challenge such claims and efforts. Furthermore, the dissertation addresses the discrepancy between the massive, underutilized archival sources created by Oklahoma Choctaws and published scholarship. Consequently, it argues for the usage and development of tribal histories that are attentive to the work of settler colonialism and that draws upon overlooked and underutilized archival materials. By holding an ethnographic study of contemporary Choctaw economic development, a critical historiography of the Choctaws and Five Tribes, fieldwork on Choctaw archival materials and their repositories, and the wide breadth of tribal history informed by cultural knowledge within the same frame, the dissertation importantly highlights the interrelated relationship between the production of history, US law, and ongoing land dispossession in an era of resurgent American Indian political-economic power.

A broad examination of settler colonial hegemony of the City of Los Angeles and its municipal water institution the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is employed to understand the impacts of erasure for two tribal communities; the Tongva who are the original people of the LA Basin and the Owens Valley Paiute (N��m�) who are impacted by the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The paths of each tribe are different in terms of federal recognition and water rights claims but there are notable similarities in dispossession enacted by the City of LA that in turn have produced unique tribally led counter hegemonic movements to insert native history and assert tribal sovereignty to protect their ancestral water. A critical reading of histories written about LA is presented to examine hegemonic forces propagated by the City of LA in the production of narratives and rhetoric that erase Native American history, thus minimizing the ability of Native peoples to be heard in discussions of water within the city today.

The climate crisis has been severe in the Philippines, which has been experiencing historically unprecedented super typhoons, worsening floods and droughts, coral-reef destruction from oceanic acidification, and sea-level rise that threatens to submerge islands and coastal regions throughout the archipelagic country. In response, Philippine climate-justice activists have been waging an increasingly powerful struggle to transform the economy of the Philippines to be sustainable, economically just, and powered by 100% clean and renewable energy. Using ethnographic methods, this dissertation investigates the political struggle being waged by the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ), the largest and most prominent voice for climate-justice activism in the Philippines. The dissertation analyzes the postcoloniality of Philippine climate justice, calls for “climate reparations” from the Global North to the Global South, a movement of “insurgent ecological citizenship” in a coal-affected community in the province of Bataan, efforts for energy democracy and energy decolonization in the push for 100% renewable energy, and the terrible role of authoritarian political violence against environmental advocates in the Philippines. The dissertation contends that Philippine climate-justice futurity is fundamentally based on political-economic and cultural decolonization. Philippine climate justice seeks to create a clean-energy and sustainable future that is also based on egalitarian social relations free from oligarchic inequality, authoritarianism and violent impunity, and foreign imperial interventions.

This thesis examines the cultural burning practices of the Nisenan of the Nevada City Rancheria. Prior to state policies of fire suppression and the genocidal Gold Rush era, Nisenan people used fire in numerous ways to care for themselves and their homeland nestled between the Bear and Yuba River watersheds. Their relationship to fire was an inseparable part of an integrated way of life. This thesis argues that mobilizations of cultural burning as "traditional ecological knowledge" by state and corporate entities in the present omit important aspects of Nisenan uses of fire. This omission represents a failure to meaningfully engage with Nisenan perspectives. The argument unfolds through an examination of two Nevada City Rancheria projects: consultation for the North Yuba Forest Partnership, a multi-agency forest restoration project on public land; and the Rancheria's own burning project on private land. This discussion is situated in the context of the Gold Rush genocide and the ongoing erasure of Nisenan people from their homelands. It includes a critique of past anthropological work by Alfred L. Kroeber which has directly contributed to the Rancheria's erasure.

In this dissertation I examine how stand-up comedians challenge racism and sexism in their performances. Stand-up comedy is among the least socially proscribed forms of public expression in contemporary US, and comedians often talk about “sensitive” topics (including race and gender) in direct and humorous ways. Some offer a social critique of hegemonic discourses; they “push the edge.” I argue that by looking at “edges” of hegemonic discourses of race and gender, and how comedians push them, we can deepen our understanding of how racism-white supremacy, sexism, and heteronormativity presently operate in the US, and how to challenge them.

I focus on comedians who challenge racism and sexism through joke material and in their affective and performative work on stage. Key ways they do so include: performing slavery as anti-racist critique; targeting genocide and colonialism; challenging the “terrorist label” and racialized masculinities, and through female embodiment.

I conducted 18 months of ethnographic research in Los Angeles (LA and New York are the largest US sites for stand-up), focusing on male and female comedians of color, but also producers and managers. I attended over 130 shows and saw more than 550 comics perform live (including 30 core participants, whom I also interviewed).

In this text, I first show the discourses on race and gender that circulate in the comedy world and the US more broadly. With this, I also set up what comedians push against. I then introduce “the edge” and “pushing the edge” as concepts, using energy/affect, authenticity/sincerity, and performativity as analytical tools, before I show how comedians push the edges of race and gender discourses. I also discuss performances that “implode” and expose the core of hegemony.

These comedians’ work becomes part of broader anti-racist discourses through social media, film, and television. Their work shows that we need to pay more attention to affect and performativity in how we assess what challenges to hegemonic discourses look like and their impact. Stand-up comedy, then, provides useful analytical tools for making the often-invisible aspects of everyday anti-racist and anti-sexist resistance visible, and for attuning us to the subtlety of hegemonic violence.