Sorority Life: Sisterhood or Sisterhood Resentment?

Felando, Amy

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/16349 Copy

Description

Title

Sorority Life: Sisterhood or Sisterhood Resentment?

Author(s)

Felando, Amy

Issue Date

2010

Keyword(s)

• sorority
• deactivation
• pledging
• Greek
• decisions
• ANT300
• Syracuse
• Spring 2010

Abstract

Through my research and interviews, I have come to a clear understanding of why people deactivate from a sorority. By interviewing the girls I interviewed, many decisions led to their disassociation from their organization. The results from the interviews of why they disassociate was: time commitment, conflict of interest with girls in the house, image, and financially. I changed my interview questions constantly as I narrowed down the ideal direction I wanted to take my paper. I realized that the girls I interviewed felt very strongly about their reasoning behind deactivating. They did not hold anything back and this added a lot to my research paper in the long run.

Series/Report Name or Number

• The Ethnography of the University: Studying Scholarship in Action was designed to introduce undergraduate students to ethnographic methodologies, institutional analysis, and the research publication process. Students conducted ethnographic studies of Syracuse University Scholarship in Action projects of their choosing and had the opportunity to produce their results on the web. All the steps in the research process, from the formation of research questions to the creation of final research papers, was produced on-line at a collaborative website, Moodle, that has been created at the University of Illinois to facilitate undergraduate ethnography of the university projects. This project is titled the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI).
• Students were encouraged to make their work public so that their research subjects, fellow students and Syracuse community participants, would be able to comment and provide feedback on their research. The IDEALS on-line archive would enable this process to be recorded for future students in the hope that they will build on present student research. The archiving of “scholarship in action” research for ANT 300 may help Syracuse University better understands the learning outcomes of “scholarship in action” initiatives.
• It is important to remember that “The Ethnography of the University” is not only a course but also part of two larger projects, the “Imagining America Project,” a national project combining the arts, humanities and social sciences to create interdisciplinary discussions about America’s future http://www.imaginingamerica.org/ , and the University of Illinois centered project, the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI) http://www.eui.uiuc.edu/.
• The Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI) includes several universities and community colleges located in the state of Illinois. All of these schools are public. Syracuse University is the first non-Illinois and first private university to join the group. This class joined an inter-campus learning community in which many classes from several schools (most, however, are located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) explore their universities and colleges ethnographically. In order to explore Syracuse University ethnographically, we needed to think about what “the university” is, what “ethnography” is, and what “scholarship in action” is. Broadly, we explored the university as a composite of prose, numerical, and visual narratives.
• The course also introduced students to ethnographic methods. The bulk of this class was devoted to students’ own ethnographic projects on a Syracuse University “Scholarship in Action” endeavor although it was possible to carry out research on other areas if students presented a good case for doing so. A wide variety of social practices and learning processes were expected to become part of what students researched.

Type of Resource

text

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