Every year, Anthropology faculty nominate particularly excellent senior theses for "exemplary thesis" status. These are theses that exemplify the kind of in-depth research, creative use of primary and secondary sources, incisive anthropological analysis, and clear and compelling writing that the Department seeks to produce. Together, they illustrate the wide range of potential areas, topics and methodologies Anthropology seniors can address. They can serve as models as you consider your own thesis topics and potential sources.
Like all theses, these are available to the general public in the Reed College Library in the Thesis Tower or Reed Special Collection & Archives or to Reed students, faculty, staff, and alumni in the Electronic Theses Collection.
How to search for inspiration:
Search for theses with similar topics as your own
Pay attention to their introduction chapters, a sample analytic chapter, and the conclusion.
Look at their bibliographies for source ideas.
Make an appointment with your subject librarian to help gather other materials on your topic.
More than Tomatoes: A Political Ecology of Organic Farming in Taiwan
Sky Ford ('22)
Reconstructing Dinosaurs: Practices, Paleo-ontologies, and Experiencing Prehistory
Gian Gregorio ('22)
Reconfigurations of Indigeneity and Tourism in Yucatán, México
Elena Turner ('22)
Springtime Dwelling: The Poetics of Pacific Northwest Salmon
Jane Calderbank ('21)
Judicial Flogging in Botswana: The Sociality, Language, and Phenomenology of Chiefly Punishment
Cheryl Fok ('21)
Orisha Traditions through YouTube: Virtual Interactions in Enduring Communities
Paul Molamphy ('21)
In Our Hands: How Biologists Negotiate Unpredictability to Make and Share Knowledge
Leila Shokat ('21)
The Thorns of Rose City: Social and Environmental Pollution Discourses in Unhoused Placemaking and Neighborhood Response
Sara Hansen ('20)
Process Without Peace: An Ethnography of Space, Security, and Subjecthood in Belfast
Ruairi O'Mahony ('20)
In the Shadows of the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur
Laurel Schuster ('20)
Poésie, mon bivouac: Translation, Nationalism, and Poetics in Quebec
Guin Wright ('20)
"We Women Have More Values": Feminist Ethics, Political Corruption, and Practices of Care in an Indigenous Guatemalan Town
Abigail George ('19)
Defining the Nation through Exclusion: Citizenship Law, Embodied Borders, and the Politics of Belonging in the Dominican Republic
Savannah Hugueley ('19)
Grace McNalley ('18)
Futuristic Globalisms: On the Possibility of Modernity in Imperial Ruins
Jolon Timms ('18)
Labor Relations: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in Cambodia
Natalie Codon ('17)
Negotiating Exclusions: Migrant Domestic Worker Subjectivity and Collective Action in Hong Kong
Maya Kimura ('17)
Vital Reckonings: Cartographic Power, Abyssal Thought, and the Birth of Modern Piracy in Southeast Asia
Stefan Stackhouse ('16)
Communing with the Dead: Spiritualism, Language, and the Construction of Science from 1865-1914
Maddy Adams ('16)
Kate Johnson ('16)
Satan on the Skin: Divine and Demonic Mediation in Papua New Guinea's Pentecostal Public Sphere
Rachel Apone ('15)
The Politics of History and Gendered Nationalisms: Contested Memories of Japan's Comfort Women
Rachel Dallal ('14)
Aspirational Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Law in a Guatemalan Mining Conflict
Samuel Law ('14)
"Here, One More Ingyō!": Being a Surplus Human in Contemporary South Korea
Hoyoung Moon ('14)
Through the Eyes of Immigration: Politics, Entextualization and Bureaucratic Arbitrariness of the U-Nonimmigrant Visa
Amina Rahman ('14)
Government websites
Research and nonprofit organization websites
EBSCO online databases
Intimacy and Assemblage: Israeli Nationhood and the Everyday Violence of Sexuality
Jake Silver ('12)
Films and YouTube videos
Israeli and international online news sources
Feminist Wire
Israeli tourism/birthright websites
Activist movements online
Magazines (972 Magazine, Maxim) and advertisements
The Liberalism of Piracy: Ethics, Technology, and Breakdown on a File-sharing Forum
Peter Von der Porten ('11)
File sharing websites
Online news sources
Journals
Branding Heaven: Commodity, Fantasy and Conceptual Architecture in the Chinese Countryside
Nathaniel Rickert Flagg ('11)
Journals
Online news sources
Dancing Identity: The Politics of Performance and Embodiment in the Argentine Tango
Rachel Mercer ('10)
Focauldian
Journals
Artifice and Androgyny: David Bowie and the 1970s Glam Rock Counterculture
Athena Abrams ('09)
Foucault
Geocities
Demon
"It comes up better": Helping Nature Along in the Indigenous Miwok Landscape of the California Sierra
Nevada Judson Daffern ('09)
Journals
Gifting Nationhood Through Tourism: Taglit-birthright Israel, Travel, and Contemporary Zionism
Gabriel Gao ('09)
Cognitive Practice and Non-local Being: Pragmatic Activism in a Transcendent American Context
Ian Lowrie ('09)
aero2012
Journals
Dissertation
Reed thesis
Organizing Around the Center: Problems, Process, and Place in Portland's Day Labor Center
Genevieve Peterson Roudane ('08)
Going Country: An Examination of Irony and Sincerity through a Portland Country Bar
Hannah Smith ('08)
Journals
Keeping Watch from Space: Genocide and Technologies of Witnessing in the Age of Digital Surveillance
Amanda Marjorie Ufheil-Somers ('08)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Journals
Personal interviews
Experiencing Neoliberalism at the Border: Economic Restructuring and Cultural Change in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
Daniel Peter Denvir ('05)
Online news sources
Journals
Email contact
"It's Not Fake, It's Entertainment": Professional Wrestling and Working-Class Masculinities
Adam Carl Sargent ('05)
Online news sources
Journals
Enemies, Allies, Sacrifice and Smoke: Construction of Relational Ontology in the Lakota Sun Dance
Gabriel Tusinski ('04)
Journals
Closing Doors and Minds: Processes of Marginalization During the Operation and Aftermath of Sangatte
Anita Hannig ('03)
Journals
The Mitzvah of Remembrance: Holocaust Twinning and the Production of Memory
Ariana Paulson ('03)
Jewish news sources and temple websites
Journals
Lecture given at Reed College
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