Event

May 12, 2025 3:00 - 5:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall BA Thesis Symposium 2025

Please join us for this year’s Anthropology undergraduate symposium, which will showcase the work of graduating fourth-year students who have completed a BA thesis for departmental honors.

Panel #1: Ritual, Religion, and Ways of Relating (c. 25 min: 7 min per presentation, ~10 minutes for Q&A)

Roland Blake, “A Mouthful of Clouds: Dependency, Possession and Value in the Vape Economy” Bianca Meyer, “The Inventing of Tradition in the 2024 Chicago Spiral Dance and Samhain Ritual”

Panel #2: Community, Language, and Identity (c. 30 min: 7 min per presentation, ~10 minutes for Q&A)

Carolyn Meng, “200 Years of Inting: Language’s Relationships to Power Dynamics in the League of Legends Community” Daián Rodríguez, “Unsettling the Entrapments of Puerto Ricanness” Georgia Wluka, “Going the Distance: Supercommuters and American Car Culture in Tension with Metropolitan Identity in Rockford, IL”

Panel #3: Bodies, Borders, Bureaucracy (c. 30 min: 7 min per presentation, ~10 minutes for Q&A)

Ophelia Domínguez, “Borders of Reasoning: Truth and Trust in Statistical Genetics” Jordan Miller, “Frontier Biopolitics: Smallpox Eradication, Knowledge Generation, and Indigenous Removal in the 1830s” Jonah Valverde, “Building Bureaucratic Water Worlds: Water Rights and Resource Management in Mexico City”

Panel #4: Making and Marketing Images (c. 25 min: 7 min per presentation, ~10 minutes for Q&A)

Tommy Hughson, “Subjective Digital Brand Construction as Analyzed through Themed Japanese Instagram Pages” Isabela Pacheco, “Marketing the Future, Selling the Past: Kodak Advertising the American Corporation in the 1980s”

The symposium will be followed immediately by a department picnic in the Classics Quad outside Haskell Hall.