Category Archives: Page 99 for CaMP Dissertations

David Griffin discusses page 99 of his dissertation

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Members of the Sovereign Citizen conspiracy movement have been described as “paper terrorists” because of the way that they attempt to intimidate their enemies with mountains of nonsensical, legal-seeming paperwork. The documents they produce often feature bizarre elements such as atypical spelling and punctuation (names, for example, are often styled “FIRST-MIDDLE: LAST”) and mysterious arrays of postage stamps and thumbprints, with the latter sometimes made in the author’s own blood. For my PhD, I compared a corpus of documents filed by Sovereign Citizens in an American courthouse to a corpus of documents written and filed by actual attorneys. While I found thumbprints aplenty, page 99 has nothing to do with that; in many ways, in fact, its topic is just the opposite.

Page 99 contains two tables relating to the use of explicit negators (i.e. words like “not” and “no”) in the two corpora. I found that these words are used at statistically similar rates and in qualitatively similar manners in Sovereign Citizen texts and legitimate legal texts. While this may not be as attention-getting as the inclusion of actual human blood in some of the texts I examined, it is one of the more important findings of my thesis. Frequent negation is generally held to be one of the more distinctive features of legal English and Sovereign Citizens’ ability to accurately mimic this and related features in their own writings shows that they can’t simply be dismissed as being “bad” at writing legal texts. Instead, those who study the Sovereign Citizen movement should understand that they’re doing something purposefully distinct.

Whether consciously considered by the Sovereign Citizens or not, the animating principle behind their documents seems to be that there is power in the language used by lawyers, and that Sovereign Citizens can not only claim but enhance that power by taking the linguistic features of legitimate legal filings and making them, essentially, stranger. It is my hope that approaching Sovereign Citizens and members of other related conspiracy groups from this perspective will lead to more effective strategies for dealing with the harmful effects of contemporary conspiracy movements. Page 99 might not be the splashiest page in my thesis, but at least in this way, it gets to the heart of the matter (and for the thumbprints and postage stamps, see pages 200 to 211 instead).

Hannah Foster takes the page 99 test

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Page 99 is found in my second chapter where I discuss how English becomes iconized (Irvine and Gal 2000) as an elite index through practices of learning English at private educational centers in Astana, Kazakhstan. Page 99 includes an ethnographic example of what I characterize as an ostentatious display of English—the head of a small company, a woman I call Raushan, contacted the educational center that served as my primary field site to ask about private English lessons. Raushan’s request was considered ostentatious because she wanted private (and therefore more expensive) English tutoring that would take place at her office during her lunch break. To demonstrate its ostentatiousness, I recount the educational center director, Zhibek’s, response which was to laugh at how ridiculous it was that “even the heads of tiny companies think they’re so important that everyone should accommodate their schedule and needs.” This page describes one experience of learning English at private educational centers that I try to capture in my dissertation—that of the elite, upper middle class. The remaining content chapters explore other experiences connected to English such as entrepreneurial self-development and aspirations for class mobility.

My dissertation proposes that learning English in private educational centers offers students an opportunity to take up different subjectivities, not just opportunities for finding employment or accessing higher education. I show ethnographically how learning English is one practice among many that enables students to take up elite or entrepreneurial ways of being in the world. I also argue that students’ experiences in the English language classroom reflect broader cultural and ideological shifts that are reshaping contemporary Kazakhstan. Though my interlocutors’ experiences are not unfamiliar to English students living in other areas of the globe, what makes learning English in Astana (and its many frustrations) unique are the private educational centers in which most students encounter English. My dissertation focuses on these centers and the students who frequent them in order to present an ethnographic portrait of those in the middle class in Astana. Page 99 is then one piece of that portrait and reflects a partial but relevant portion of that overall goal.

References:

Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Jonathan A. Gómez takes the page 99 test

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From my first steps towards considering how Black Americans hear and represent themselves in musical sound, I have wanted to address the question of how Black musicians can effectively organize around the idea of shared musical histories and practices without straying into essentialist discourses. My goal has been to work towards understanding how sounds recognizable as Black emerge, develop, and transform over time, simultaneously offering a challenge to Blackness(es) as purely biological rather than cultural. Page 99 of my dissertation, “The Way We Play: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical identity,” is a critical point at which I make an intervention into anti-essentialist discourses. Roughly a quarter of the way through my second chapter, a case study of vocalist Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), in a sub-section titled “the qualia of Black voice,” I argue:

While Hunter foregrounds race-based suffering as a component for “authentic” blues performance, her earlier claim that Black performers possess little “tricks” of performance that others frequently overlook, situates blues performance in practice rather than biology. The instability of these tricks from performance to performance, modified intentionally (as Hunter did to avoid a stable model for [vocalist Sophie] Tucker’s mimicry) or not, further marks an underlying improvisatory aesthetic which makes a singular set of performance characteristics difficult, or impossible, to grasp. I further argue that Hunter’s understanding does not reflect a biological notion of race but rather one socio-politically and culturally rooted in the particular experience of Black Americans within the racial hierarchies of U.S. society. (page 99)

The culturally-rooted practices to which I refer function semiotically as indexes of Blackness for those who hear them, commenting metapragmatically (cf. Silverstein 1993) on Black musical history through the act of performance. I reframe these practices as “musical qualia of Blackness,” sonic embodiments or manifestations of the quality Blackness, shared and transformed between and amongst Black American musicians across time and space.

Page 99 is a point of transition in my argument made via Black feminist scholar bell hooks’s thinking on “strategic essentialism” in her oft-cited Teaching to Transgress (1994). She argues that adopting an essentialist position may function as “a strategic response to domination and to colonization,” (hooks 1994, 83), offering an important lesson for the study of music. For Black musicians whose histories and culture are so frequently stolen, appropriated, or “silenced” (Trouillot 1995), music has been a critical site for the development, maintenance, and transmission of this historical and cultural knowledge. Such processes of knowledge production and sharing are accomplished via a kind of musical interdiscursivity (cf. Silverstein 2005), connecting Black musicians in the present to performances and performers from Black musical history. In that way, I pose a challenge to anti-essentialist considerations of Black music, by augmenting hooks’s argument, insisting that Black musical identities are historically-grounded and carefully “curated,” to borrow form Daphne Brooks (2021), within Black communities. Page 99 is a useful window into the thought process behind my desire to understand to offer an alternative to essentialist understandings of Blackness, taking seriously the histories, experiences, and choices made by Black musicians across time and space.

Jonathan A. Gómez. 2022. “The Way We Play”: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical Identity. Harvard University, PhD diss.

Dillon Ludemann takes the page 99 test

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The subject of my dissertation, the anonymous image-board forum called 4chan, is a space that, while many who know of it often have a very strong, negative reaction to (and usually for good reason). My project showed me overwhelmingly that 4chan is a space that defies categorization, which I have taken  to heart within my dissertation and the research that followed.

Simply, my dissertation examined what many would consider to be some of the worst parts of this website (yes, there is a hierarchy!). That is, I looked at what is widely recognized as a politically incorrect subforum, known colloquially as /pol/, and how users on this particular board talk about politics.

On page 99 of my dissertation, one particular statement sticks out to me:

“Given the continued description of the board throughout this project, one may wrongly infer that talk on this website is always one hundred percent wild; that discourse on this website is always incredibly visible, violent, and chaotic, with all capital letters and exclamation points deriding all manner of politics and practices. While these types of display are still obviously present in this space, there is generally just as much dialogue that appears in a more tempered or even-keeled manner.”

While I cannot speak to the quality of work this page represents for my overall work (I’d like to think I did a solid job), this statement speaks to some of the way that I was drawn to studying 4chan in the first place. This is a digital space that, for many anthropologists and others not within the field, is considered lawless, chaotic, and almost impermeable for scholarship. 4chan, and /pol/ more specifically, exists as a digital boogeyman, a place by which many have heard of, but few well-meaning folk ever explore, or in some cases, is seen as the entrance to the dark web. My work has sought to complicate this notion and legitimate exploration of this space as a linguistic anthropologist. Not as a way to condone the actions and discourses that occur within /pol/, but rather to offer an examination of digitally located, far-right political discourses, such as the alt-right (which will no doubt resurge this upcoming US presidential election cycle) that does not outright dismiss, but instead highlights the important of studying these spaces, and the impacts that it has on other social media platforms, and beyond.

Dillon Ludemann. 2022. ” And Their Name was Legion: Discourse and Politics on 4chan’s /pol/ Board.” SUNY Binghamton Phd.

Eléonore Rimbault takes the p. 99 test

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No matter the size of shows, and the actual count of the public, the Indian circus works hard to appear larger-than-life. The image of the circus, in other words, is in many ways larger than the show itself, the publicity that fuels it traveling ahead and enticing expectant crowds before a company’s arrival. The circus and its image bleed into each other, they exist symbiotically; when one is attacked, the other suffers with it.

In my dissertation, I track the ongoing disappearance of the circus in India as performances get associated with accusations that prove increasingly difficult to shrug off, including charges of animal mistreatment.

On P. 99, I locate one such shift in the public’s perception of the circus to a period from 1988 to 1998. Drawing from reports and opinion pieces appearing mainly in the Times of India, I track animal rights NGOs’ strategies as they shifted from earlier suits against individual street performers and animal tamers to large-scale reports and rescue operations targeting itinerant circus companies. Because the public did not tend to differentiate between one company and another, these strategies ultimately led to the entire profession being seen as complicit, at all levels, in the mistreatment of animals.

Caption (translated from Malayalam): This circus bear rides a motorcycle by himself

Source: Mathrubhumi weekly, January 1955.

P. 99 also notes the class disparities that mark the stark divide between the ideals of interspecies ethics that exist among circus practitioners and the more abstract notions of humane treatment and harm stipulated by members of animal rights organizations removed from the material conditions of work with animals.

Interestingly, both sides play upon the image of animals and humans working side by side in the circus foregrounded by circus publicity: one in the name of sociality, the other in the name of exploitation. Both also invoke the motif of the circus’s disappearance to their own end—one to harken back to the circus’s former glory and bestow upon it the mantle of an expiring art form, the other to look forward to a future in which its practices have been definitively relegated to the past.

Ironically, I claim, both sides, in insisting on the circus’s disappearance, have contributed in their way to sustain the ongoing presence of this performance, whose survival now seems predicated precisely on its being an object of dispute, always disappearing, yet never out of view.

Eléonore Rimbault. 2022. Disappearance in the Ring: The Perpetual Unmaking of India’s Big Top Circus. University of Chicago Phd.

Kailey Rocker takes the page 99 test

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When I reflect on Ford Madox Ford’s statement, I immediately think of branching trees and river bends. Each branch is self-similar to its predecessor, demonstrating both infinite relationship and fragmentation. While I could comment on the self-similarity of page 99 to my dissertation as a whole, I think it more apt to focus on what it tells us about the iterative or branching nature of writing. In my dissertation that touches on various local, state, and extra-state actors’ definitions and applications of communist-era history in Albania, page 99 represents a moment of transition between the project that I had initially imagined to the one I came to know during the fieldwork and writing process, from a statement on collective memory production to one on transitional justice.

“As interviews with project staff and media responses to their projects make clear, both the communist past and the future of Albanian youth (and Albanians more broadly) as they stand are infused with a quality of uncertainty that stems from Albania’s narrative of democratic consolidation, one of permanent transition (see Introduction). The past as an uncertain subject appears to have no truth…” (Rocker 2022, 99).

On page 99, I introduce two of my key nongovernmental organization (NGO) collaborators – whose work inspired me to begin this project on the afterlives of 20th century history. Since the 2010s, both organizations have found a place in Albanian civil society promoting the discussion of topics such as cultural heritage, history, and democracy and both have identified young adults born in the 1990s and later as important targets of that work. I had initially viewed their efforts as a response to decades of State Socialist control over history and its interpretation (Kodra-Hysa 2013) and a drive by international donors in the region for democratization. Gradually, I realized that NGO workers’ efforts were also responses to earlier attempts to address past wrongdoing following the end of single-party rule (transitional justice) in the 1990s within a present that was not living up to the potential that had been promised at the start of the country’s political transition (Nadkarni 2020).

The Page 99 test ultimately encouraged me to think about the iterative and branching nature of research and writing. While I had set out to study collective memory efforts, I learned even more about transitional justice, and its ongoing translation by various actors, especially NGOs and young adults. While many Albanians, scholars and media included, have characterized Albania as stuck in “permanent transition” (Pandolfi 2010), my interlocutors pushed against this idea through their projects aimed at the past. Instead of mourning for the loss of futures promised in the 1990s, they focused on the work they could do in the present to engender new futures for themselves tomorrow.

References

Kodra-Hysa, Armanda. 2013. “Albanian Ethnography at the Margins of History 1947-1991: Documenting the Nation in Historical Materialist Terms.” The Anthropological Field on the Margins of Europe, 1945-1991. Edited by Aleksander Boskovic and Chris Hann. UK: Global Book Marketing, 129-152.

Nadkarni, Maya. 2020. Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Pandolfi, Mariella. 2010. “From Paradox to Paradigm: The Permanent State of Emergency in the Balkans.” Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Intervention. Edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi. New York: Zone Books, 104-117.

Rocker, Kailey. 2022. Translational Justice: Facing the Past to Take on the Present in Albania. University of North Carolina, Phd. https://doi.org/10.17615/5414-9q81

April Reber take the page 99 test

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Page 99 falls in chapter two of my dissertation. This chapter, “Moments of Disruption,” describes how members of the radical right group, Alternative for Germany (AfD), message a different view of Germany’s Nazi past to promote patriotism. Messaging refers to the crafted image political actors communicate through broad communicative methods such as video, clothing, gestures, and speech patterns (Lempert and Silverstein 2012).

In chapter two, I describe Germans’ changing perception of history, including German victimhood during World War II alongside narratives of the country’s aggression. AfD members participate in these changing narratives to disrupt how Germans think about Nazism. The two ethnographic examples in this chapter focus on how people across the political spectrum took part in AfD meetings to sonically and linguistically disrupt, silence, and articulate competing narratives about Germany’s past to gain control over its future.

Since page 99 is the last page of the conclusion, the “page 99” test is only slightly accurate. Page 99 is the final page of this chapter’s conclusion where I iterate my discussion of structural nostalgia (Herzfeld 2016). I understand structural nostalgia to be “a competition between hegemonic and counter narratives, images, and interpretations of Germany’s past and future which openly reveal the nation’s imperfections and through which, one can see Germans’ changing self-image” (Reber 2022: 99). Structural nostalgia is one way that AfD members message normalcy and democratic legitimacy. It creates a societal space in which members can draw on and substantiate already-existing normative notions in Germany.

In the broader dissertation, I examine how radical political actors messaged normalcy and democratic legitimacy to reframe their image through social media, in-person campaigning, and repurposed everyday materials and national symbols. These emergent radical politics, framed as “normal,” reveal schisms and skepticism about nation-building, liberal democracy, and national identity. The intellectual intervention I make is to examine ethnographically how radical political actors engage time-sensitive projects of normalcy and democratic legitimacy in structures that already support these actors. I build on contemporary scholarship that investigates how democratization is a process of exclusion (Partridge 2022), leading to already-partitioned democracies built on historically normative notions in each country. The social intervention I point to in this dissertation is that normalcy and democratic legitimacy, being unwieldly terms, can be and are manipulated by political actors to transform the future of communities and countries.

Lempert, Michael and Michael Silverstein. 2012. Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency. Bloomington:Indiana University Press.

Partridge, Damani. 2022. Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin. University of California Press.

Reber, April L. 2022. “The ‘Extremist’ Next Door: Normalcy and Democratic Legitimacy in Germany.” University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Antti Lindfors contemplates page 99 of his dissertation

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Page 99 of my dissertation, titled “Intimately Allegorical: The Poetics of Self-Mediation in Stand-Up Comedy”, consists of the thesis’ reference literature. More precisely, this page showcases some of the authors consulted in the thesis whose last name starts with the letter B. From Regina Bendix to Charles L. Briggs – illustrating my dissertation’s rootedness in the borderlands between folklore studies, linguistic anthropology, and European ethnology – through Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, and Lauren Berlant – reflecting my thesis’ indebtedness to cultural studies more broadly – I relied on writers from a variety of disciplinary traditions in devising my perspective onto the genre of stand-up comedy as poetic form in social context.

Upon retrospective reflection, four years after the defense, my dissertation really revolved around the two main features (or rather ideals) of this poetic form that has recently seemed to experience another resurgence in popularity (this time globally): its metaphysics of presence and its desire for immediacy, to borrow Derrida (1976). As elaborated on page 31 with reference to the constitutive tripartite relationality between the stand-up comic, her routines, and audience:

While the former relationship (between the comic and routines) is perceived in terms of authentic self-presence—the comic’s routines referencing or deriving from her “real” self, in that stand-ups “play themselves”—the latter relationship (between the comic and audience) is perceived through the immediacy of being together in place and time by way of direct interaction.

Undoubtedly, stand-up thrives on the reappropriation of these very ideals, as comedians deftly engage in layers upon layers of self-referential commentary on the intricacies of their own performances. Come to think of it now, it probably had something to do with this mercurial nature – coupled with affective intensity – of stand-up comedy that initially captivated my interest and led me to embark on its study, although it took me several years to explicitly articulate just that.

Oh, and in case you were wondering why the thesis seems to come to its conclusion already on page 99, it’s an article-based dissertation with four peer-reviewed articles besides the introduction.

REFERENCES

Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology. Trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

You can find the dissertation here:

https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/147073

Amanda Cullen takes the page 99 test

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Frankly, I was hoping that page 99 of my dissertation would capture the voices of one or more of my participants. Unfortunately, what I arrived at was the second page of my methods chapter. Although not what I had hoped for, I am fortunate that this particular page included a clear statement of intent.

“I seek to offer an understanding of gendered disparities and disjunctions faced by women in Western streaming contexts [emphasis added]. In this dissertation on the experiences of women live streamers on Twitch, I: conducted discourse analysis on forums that featured discussions of gender, performance, and feminism in live streaming; watched hundreds of hours of live streams on Twitch as a participant observer alongside other viewers; and interviewed 17 women, femme non-binary, and genderfluid streamers about their experiences.”

While this paragraph is pretty dry, it also speaks to what motivated me in this project- to understand why the earnest efforts of women in streaming are discounted and policed through rhetoric (like the stereotype of the “titty streamer”) and harassment campaigns online and to hear firsthand from those involved what the impact has been on their labor.

Using the framework of double binds as patterns of competing expectations, my dissertation explores how popular notions of authenticity in video games culture interact with stereotypes about women in the live streaming ecosystem. Live streaming is a creative cultural industry fundamentally based in gendered forms of labor such as emotional labor, but in the case of video game live streaming this fact is downplayed by a masculine prioritization of skillful game play. The central double bind revealed in this work is between gender and a gamer-streamer identity. Stereotypes about women in games -that they are naturally less technically skillful- only place them further at odds with the streamer subject position when they are forced to choose between skillful play and emotional engagement.

This tension is further complicated by the demands of live streaming culture to commoditize the intimacy and vulnerability of all streamers, because it is even more true for femme and women streamers. They are expected to go even further to provide a positive customer service experience for their viewers, but doing so often means sacrificing skill during gameplay. It can be hard to perform a technical task well and carry on an engaging conversation with dozens of viewers at the same time. (I’m sure by now years of Zoom teaching have taught many of you this.) This places women streamers in a tricky situation where on the one hand if they focus on emotional labor or aesthetics they are accused of playing games badly or for the putatively wrong reasons and thus are being inauthentic. On the other hand, a focus on gameplay might result in their successes being minimized or invalidated with epithets like “girl gamer” or statements like “good for a girl.”

What the methods outline above- particularly the insights of my interviewees- revealed to me is this: Streaming is based in feminine labor, but that labor is evaluated by masculine standards of success.

Amanda L. L. Cullen. 2022. “Playing with the Double Bind: Authenticity, Gender, and Failure in Live Streaming.” University of California, Irvine, PhD.

Gaby Greenlee takes the page 99 test

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Page 99 of my dissertation reflects on a detail in an elite type of garment that the Inka Empire (ca. 1476-1532 CE) fabricated in its workshops during the period before contact with Europeans. Alongside an accompanying image, it discusses a type of Inka tunic that carried significant ideological and socio-political import for the state, and comments on a design feature that broaches one of the dissertation’s main inquiries: how the Inka state conceptualized the notion of “borders” more broadly.

“…the elite tapestry workshops of the Inkas were careful to make their textile webs hermetically contained forms, with no loose threads at the selvedges (edges). However, certain Inka textiles within the category of male unkus (tunics) have another detail at the “edge” that merits further discussion. This is the zigzag form that is embroidered onto the fabric web frequently towards the bottom edge of elite unkus…”

Andean textiles are frequently discussed as metaphors of the inhabited space. The tunic referred to here seems to exhibit this capacity. According to some scholars, its checkered patterning may invoke the Inka terraces constructed on hillsides and mountainsides throughout their territory or symbolizes the storehouses they distributed across their domain. Furthermore, Inka military personnel likely wore this tunic type, thus linking it to state mechanisms that had a hand in territorial acquisition.

This page is significant to the rest of the dissertation for its interpretation of the tunic’s borders in relation to how textiles may resonate symbolically with territorial space. While the tunic is woven to be a self-contained form and adheres to strict Inka standardized practice allowing no stray threads at any of its edges, it is noteworthy that the Inka weavers disrupted the “sealed” quality by applying a zig zag embroidery to the bottom hemline. The zig zag counters the careful enclosure of the garment-aka-territorial edge. This, I suggest, speaks to an Inka notion of borders (whether territorial, spiritual, cultural) as spaces of interaction and volatility, regardless of how “contained” or integrated the matrix space may be. Throughout, my dissertation explores how the Inkas—both in the pre-contact and into the colonial period—perceived borders to be productive sites regardless of any tension, abrasion, or even hostility that accompanied encounters between oppositional factions. This also draws on ideas of relationality, for how Inka power was continually revitalized through engagement with their counterparts in, for example, spiritual, cultural, political, biological, or even supernatural realms.