Anthropology

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9870

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Anthropology.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Browsing Anthropology by Author "Hoeppe, Goetz"

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    iNaturalist: Understanding Biodiversity Through a Digital Medium
    (University of Waterloo, 2018-01-23) Anderson, Stuart; Hoeppe, Goetz
    Much of the current excitement about citizen science is due to the innovative use of internet-based media platforms. These are designed to enable data production while seeking to be instructive or even entertaining for its users. The present thesis demonstrates how these two distinct uses can be in a tension, and how users seek to resolve it. It draws on an ethnography of uses of iNaturalist, a digital platform promoted to document biodiversity by BioBlitz Canada, at the Ontario BioBlitz at Rouge National Urban Park in Toronto, and the rare Community BioBlitz in Cambridge. Through interactions with the diverse members of these events, I have found that the opinions surrounding new media and citizen science vary significantly and that users adopt specific techniques to circumvent the challenges they experience with a given medium.  
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    North End Narratives: Grid-Group Analysis for Environmental Justice in Hamilton, Ontario
    (University of Waterloo, 2016-01-21) Lawrence-Nametka, Samantha; Hoeppe, Goetz
    This paper explores environmental inequality and perceptions of environmental risk among people living in proximity to the industrial sector of Hamilton, Ontario (Canada). This sector is adjacent to Hamilton’s lower city, where on average socioeconomic status is low and rates of poverty, ill-health, and exposure to air pollution are high compared to the upper City of Hamilton (“the Mountain”). Using interviews with lower Hamilton residents and local environmental activists and ethnographic data, I seek to assess whether the grid-group and Cultural Theory approaches developed by anthropologist Mary Douglas are suited as tools for recognizing and analysing perceptions of environmental risk among Hamiltonians and making visible populations or cultural views that may be overlooked otherwise. I also assess grid-group and Cultural Theory as means for improving risk communication and informing public policy-making regarding environmental health hazards. I conclude that grid-group and Cultural Theory can serve as valuable tools for making visible some of the social influences on risk perception, but also identify drawbacks of the classificatory nature of Cultural Theory. As such, this paper contributes to the existing literature on environmental risk and offers an exploratory approach to this topic by using grid-group and Cultural Theory as a framework for conceiving of risk.