Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2016 and 2019 and a massive data collection of social media entries and online comments on news article pages I have collected since 2011, this dissertation takes a bottom up approach to study how sect-identities impacted the ongoing conflict in Syria. I ask how are sect identities produced, reproduced over time, and lived at the popular level, online and offline? How do these identities evolve over time, and why do they sometimes, but only sometimes, become divisive and violent? What aspects of ordinary Syrians’ daily-life interactions have translated online, on social network sites, and what aspects have not? I propose sect habitus as an analytical tool to theorize the daily workings of sect identities, in order to understand the conditions under which sect identities become sectarian and in turn violent at the popular level.

This dissertation will examine how the labor process shapes the progression and outcome of strike action.

Contemporary scholarly literature on strikes utilizes theoretical frameworks and concepts largely drawn from the study of collective behavior and social movements to understand why and how workers take action (Rhomberg & Lopez, 2021). These scholars provide important insights into how strikers mobilize internal and external resources to wrest concessions from their employers (Dixon & Martin, 2012; Lopez, 2004; Mirola, 2003; Schmalz, Ludwig, & Webster, 2018; Kallas, 2024), how strikers “frame” or make meaning out of their conditions in order to mobilize one another (Schmitt 1993; Conell & Conn, 1995; Martin, 2003; Coley, 2015; Danaher & Dixon, 2017; Levine, Cobb, & Roussin 2017), how workers’ perception of political opportunities and threats may spur collective action (Barrie & Ketchley, 2018), and how differences in strategic capacity shape the efficacy of workplace organizing (Ganz, 2009). However, unions are not social movement organizations and workers differ from other movement activists in important ways (McAlevey 2015; Rhomberg & Lopez, 2021). This dissertation will argue that, while social movement literature has been a useful resource for those studying labor movements, it fails to capture a key determinant underpinning the shape of strike action: the labor process. To advance my argument, I will analyze a series of strike actions that took place amongst academic workers at the University of California, Santa Cruz between 2019 and 2024. Drawing on the varied tradition of workers’ inquiry, I utilize movement ephemera, internal and external communications, collective writing projects, original photographs, and workers’ own account of their strike action(s) to demonstrate how the academic labor process (teaching and research, specifically) influenced strategy, tactics, and the feelings of collectivity necessary to sustain militant action.

The Deschutes Basin, a watershed spanning central Oregon, is one of countless regions across the American West experiencing an increasing demand for water amid a rapidly decreasing supply. The human population in the Deschutes has the fastest growth rate of any county in Oregon, but while municipal demand has skyrocketed, available surface water supplies are already over-allocated. In addition, during the spring and summer irrigation season, water diversions cause a dramatic reduction in the Deschutes River’s flow, contributing to degraded fish habitat and poor water quality.

The Deschutes is emblematic not only for its water supply concerns. The basin is also nationally renowned for having undertaken an innovative approach to solving its water distribution problems. In 2001, tribal members, irrigation district managers, and environmental proponents came together and established a water market for managing and distributing the basin’s fresh water supply. Since the inception of the Deschutes Water Bank, water marketing has become increasingly popular across the American West and the Deschutes has served as a model for many of these initiatives.

My dissertation examines the ways in which more-than-human encounters matter when it comes to natural resource politics. In foregrounding the commodification of local waters, current management strategies tend to overlook the everyday practices and encounters that are central to waters’ movement through the landscape. I turn to theories of affect and emotion in order to demonstrate that how we know, feel, and relate to local waters and to local politics is central to our water management practices and key to understanding and participating in equitable water policies.