This thesis contributes to the fuller project of decolonization by focusing on the development of Yoga in the 20th century and up to the present. The essay considers understandings of Yoga that reinforce the dichotomous West/Non-West image of the world. It develops new research on contemporary yoga in Mexico to show the limits and distortions of this appearance. The research focuses on ensembles of yoga practices, understood as a domain of relational interaction and change, rather than as a finished form of ether non-Western or Western (translated) provenance. From this perspective, we better appreciate that overcoming the unevenness and constraints of any relation come out of the relation itself, rather than from one pole.

“Citizenship” is conceived as an identity that confers certain rights—freedom from removal, violence, and injury; freedom of political opinion, social group membership, etc. However, for poor Honduran youth “citizenship” confers none of these rights. Rather, within the U.S. Latin American interstate regime, a transnational political structure dominated by the United States and Latin American elites and comprising Central America, Mexico, and The United States, Honduran citizenship combined with poverty produces the pervasive threat and fact of both violence and removal—in fact, the opposite of “citizenship”: illegality. Therefore, this paper denaturalizes the concepts of “citizenship” and “illegality” in order to show how illegality’s consequences—forced migration, labor exploitation, and a lack of public services provided by the state—are created not merely through the law as writing but by the law as tactics. In this sense, “illegality” is produced by the state through various practices that structure power, discipline actors, and channel capital within the U.S.-Latin American interstate regime. Through interviews with recently-deported migrants and members of Honduran civil society I show how such illegality is produced in Honduras by divestment in education, extreme unemployment, youth-targeted anarchic and state violence, structural violence, economic exploitation, deportee discrimination, a failure to reintegrate returned deportees, and a rhetoric of youth criminality. In doing so, I show how Honduran youth experience their production as illegal and exploitable subjects in a circular and compounded fashion throughout the U.S.-Latin American interstate regime.

Numerous scholars and activists attempt to define what the transnational sex trade is and what it should or should not be. Each of the groups involved in this struggle to categorize sex labor channel different representations of the category, or discourses. This paper analyses how three feminist scholars, of varying perspectives, define transnational sex labor, and despite their widely different viewpoints, marshal similar conceptual categories. Their discourses rely on notions of or attempts to police women’s “appropriate” labor and/or comportment and human rights and workers’ rights discourses. While the authors do not identify their works as such, I argue they are all part of a wider conversation of defining the realm of social reproductive labor. Throughout these three scholar’s writings, the category of social reproductive labor is silent, but represents another way of understanding and interpreting both transnational sex labor and political mobilization, contextualized within capitalism.

This thesis consists of a prospectus and two bibliographies for a research project that seeks to explore how memories of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami may be documented or perceived in the southern Thai provinces of Phuket, Krabi, and Phang Nga in the present. This research project centers the event of the tsunami to examine the immediate impact of the disaster in the region on its residents as well as its tourists. Additionally, I address the potential effects of the tsunami’s “long shadow,” which I define as the twenty-year period after the tsunami that extends up until 2024. Exploratory fieldwork in these provinces during the summer of 2022 shape this project. This prospectus also contains a literature review that contextualizes haunting and ghostliness across disciplines such as anthropology, history and Thai studies as well as the literature on tourism, tsunami responses, and disaster management in the region. I discuss the relations between haunting and memory work that have been explored in scholarly literature, and describe the emergence of analytical frameworks shaped by notions of haunting and spectrality. Finally, I conclude this prospectus by offering a discussion of my research methods, timeline, and budget for the project.

At the onset of the pandemic, Costa Rican news on coffee-related issues increased. Reports touched on the impact the pandemic has had on coffee farmers, the demand for coffee pickers and the possibility of lowering national unemployment rates by hiring domestic work, in spite of the fact that coffee is not the country’s greatest export nor is it the largest source of income. Coffee has been an important symbol in the Costa Rican imaginary, but why does this increased coverage arise during the pandemic? To understand this turn to coffee, I look first at the history and political economy of coffee to identify why coffee is important to Costa Rica, how that importance was consolidated into an ideology, and how coffee lost its economic priority over the years. Then, I analyze news sources, in the form of newspaper articles and news reports, to identify the ways coffee ideology is used and reflected during the pandemic and why. I focus in particular on a TV news report on Dota, the last canton of Costa Rica to remain without transmissions for 5 months, which highlights the area’s reputation as coffee growers as one of the main motivators to keep transmissions low. I argue that media coverage of coffee in 2020 reveals a crisis in Costa Rican identity, which has been constructed around coffee. Issues of nationalism, political power, and the accuracy of coffee ideology in the present (and the past) seep through the invocations the media and the general population make.