The creeks of the San Mateo Point watershed empty into the Pacific Ocean at the intersection of San Onofre State Beach, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, and a famous group of surf breaks called Trestles in Southern California. This site brings into view several transecting borders: land/water, public/private, human/non-human and recreational/militaristic/environmental. This dissertation explores the disjunctive intersection of these borders in the production of what I term “Trestles’ surfscape.” The term reworks Appadurai's “globalscapes” with Lefebvre’s “production of space,” and the more recent calls for an “amphibious anthropology” by René ten Bos. This dissertation is an ethnography of “Save Trestles,” a campaign to save San Onofre State Beach and its world-famous surf breaks from the development of an eight-lane, sixteen-mile toll road extension. The campaign demonstrates sophisticated social-change networking and advocacy that considers the coupling of human-natural systems. Social actors include the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation, scientists, surfers, the global surfing industry and transportation agencies. In 2016, a legal settlement prohibited any future transportation projects through the state beach/park; stakeholders celebrated, declaring Trestles “saved forever.”

I employ a transdisciplinary methodology to show how the political ecology of Trestles’ surfscape reveals an elaborate web of relationships between (non)humans and their lived environments, past and present, local and global. My methodology is rooted in the ocean literacy I acquired as a surfer, as well as data-gathering techniques I learned as a citizen scientist for the Urban Tides initiative. This dissertation calls into question the success of the campaign given that rising sea levels remain Trestles’ ultimate threat. Furthermore, the push to build a toll road near San Clemente continues, and climate change science is under assault. This case study is organized into four chapters. The first chapter provides a historical overview of the production of Trestles’ surfscape. The second chapter focuses on the campaign to “Save Trestles.” Chapter 3 looks at the contemporary surfscape as an abject anthropogenic space. The last chapter turns to the Urban Tides Initiative and concerns over the impact that sea-level rise will have on Trestles’ economic future.

More than 20 years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990), reconciliation remains elusive. A number of factors contribute to this stasis. No agreed-upon historical narrative exists by which Lebanon’s 18 ethnoreligious groups can make sense of the war, and the state has interests – both economic and political – for burying common memories and erasing common spaces. In light of these erasures, the capital Beirut, like much of the country, remains divided along spatial, ideological, and mnemonic lines.

The extant literature has generally considered the perils of what Samir Khalaf (2006) calls Beirut’s “geography of fear.” By contrast, this dissertation considers the city a realm of possibility. “Re-membering Beirut: Performing Memory and Community Across a ‘Postwar’ City,” fuses ethnographic research, analysis, and performative writing to introduce the ide of “re-membering,” a term I use to describe how people engage the

residual material of the city-at-war – its textures, tempos, routes, and representations – to render legible the shared pasts and current political claims of historically divided communities. Through case studies including a walking tour, a protest, and street art, I argue for considering the city’s in-between spaces as loci for emergent cross-communal politics, and for movement as both object of analysis and method. The sometimes ephemeral publics that take shape around these performances and practices reconfigure how Beirutis understand themselves in relation to their city and each other, whilc simultaneously revealing the city’s persistent ideological and spatial terrain.

The project contributes to a fuller picture of how people across the Middle East and North Africa (the MENA region) are using urban space and cultural production – in the wake of the Arab revolutions and most urgently in the midst of the ongoing Syrian crisis – to communicate shared pain and dissent, and to mobilize in the face of failing or oppressive political systems. As the region once again divides itself along both old and new fault lines, the study explores the perils of occluding violent histories, as well as the critical role of culture in inter-communal postwar healing.

This study focuses on strategies or practices that members of a Salvadoran community have incorporated to their everyday life in order to cope with gangs. Through time, gangs in El Salvador have transformed into powerful social actors, and currently, their dynamics distort the quotidian life of those who live under their rule. I argue that gangs have imposed rules or constraints to people’s behavior, and that community members have incorporated these rules and produced practices to co-exist with gangs or to survive their rule. Among these practices of co-existence, I describe precautionary strategies, negotiations and finally exile.

This research is based on an ethnographic fieldwork that took place from July to September 2014 in a Salvadoran community of the state of La Libertad. I conducted 35 semi-structured interviews and participant observation during the above-mentioned period. I conclude that, through these strategies, it is possible to observe that gangs are parallel structures of power to the Salvadoran sate and that in some cases strategies to cope with gangs also reproduce their power.

This dissertation considers sites where policing is visualized, staged, rehearsed, and performed to theorize how performances of racialized police violence become ordinary in the constructed training worlds of police officers. Through methods in performance and visual culture, I ethnographically examine the materials that shape officers’ and recruits’ training and professional vision. By focusing on the ways these visual logics travel across sites of policing, I argue that racialized police violence emerges as a tacit expectation of police training rather than an object of its address. Through tracking the violent logics embedded in policing’s historical and lived material culture, I theorize how training performances become citable in the field of patrol work, work which “feeds back” into acts of training.

Based on more than 24 months of fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2021, I examine the material history and contemporary practices of the police ride-along by observing police-civilian encounters from behind the windshield of the on-duty patrol car. While “riding along” with officers from the El Cajon Police Department through heavily policed communities of refugees in East San Diego County and while performing as a role-play actor in San Diego’s regional police academy, I turn my interpretive attention toward the scripts officers and recruits mobilize to stage and rehearse police vision. I historicize this vision through 19th-century parallel mobile technologies of automobility and cinema that prefigure the ride-along and its cinematic mobilities. I trace this “mobile police vision” through the methodological entanglements between press, police, and academic researchers, and the consequences of this vision for Assyrian, Chaldean, and Arabic policed communities in El Cajon. Lastly, I employ performance ethnography to “read against the grain” of training scripts in the police academy by role-playing in scenes opposite officers and recruits. I argue that engaging policing’s scripts – from cinematic architectures to role-play scenarios – figures new language for theorizing the mobility and visuality of these performances as they travel between the academy’s “backstage” and the “front stage” of everyday policing, appearing in both sites as mimetic re-enactments of racial violence, anti-immigrant sentiments, and anti-Blackness.