Digital Commons Network^™

Not A Hearing Loss, A Deaf Gain: Power, Self-Naming, And The Deaf Community, David J. Thomas

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

Self-naming has long stood as the primary assertion of power for disenfranchised communities in the western world. While person first language (e.g. person who is deaf) has been the preferred language of disability and disability services for the last 20 years, members of the Deaf community have asserted their cultural capital, and indeed, their Deafhood, or defining the experience of being ‘deaf in the world’, through the power of self-naming. This research examines attitudes toward language, self-naming, and disability in the Deaf community and seeks to move toward a more attentive, sensitive, and responsive language policy in the academy.

Historically, …

Women In Engineering: Identity Communication In Social Media, Dongni Wang

All Theses

This thesis examines women engineers' experience in social media with a focus on identity communication. Framing as a case study, this study attempts to explore women engineers' online presence and how they utilize social media in their daily activities. Using the concept of intersectionality, this study addresses the differences of social media usage among women engineers in terms of the use of social media by professional organizations of women engineers and the use of individual women engineers. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the public available data from a Facebook page maintain by a well-known women engineers' professional organization. Online …

Exploring Professional Identity, Scott G. Banghart

College of Communication Master of Arts Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which organizational members define what it means to communicate professionally, the extent to which enacting professional identity reflects organizational identification and individual identity, and the specific contexts in which professionalism is most encouraged. Data collected from participant interviews highlighted three intersectional components related to the enactment professional identity and perceptions of [un]professionalism—technical, behavioral, and social. Further, the results of this study suggest that professionalism as a communicative construct manifests itself in the midst of ongoing tension between individual agency and organizational constraint, conflating individual identities with norms, values, and expectations set forth by the …

Performing The Personal Within The Organizational: Communicating Professional Identities Through Taiwanese Commercial Airline Pilots' Personal Narratives, Kai-Chun Chuang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation project explored professionalism and the performance of identities by examining Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' discursive practices in everyday life. The intentions for this project were to not only expand current knowledge of organizational communication from a critical rhetorical perspective, but to further explore the under-appreciated concept of professionalism of organizational members. Theoretically, I traced theoretical analysis in the sociology of professions and further investigated scholarship from identity research in organizational communication studies. This research agenda helped to advance communication-based understandings of the meanings and practices of professional identity as a complement to the sociological conception. I further merged …

Masada Performances : The Contested Indentities Of Touristic Spaces, Ariel Gratch

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Masada, a Herodian fortress and the site of an ancient struggle between Jews and Romans that culminated in a mass suicide by 960 Jews, is a symbolically important site for the country of Israel and for the Jewish people. Previous research on Masada has focused on how the story about the site, told through popular culture, in history books, and at the site, has been used to create and maintain a national Israeli and, more broadly, Jewish identity. Masada is the second most visited site in Israel, attracting over 800,000 people each year, and the number of visitors to the …

An Exploration Of Social Media Use Among Multiply Minoritized Lgbtq Youth, Alfie Leanna Lucero

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study responds to a need for research in a fast-growing and significant area of study, that of exploring, understanding, and documenting the numerous ways that multiply marginalized LGBTQ youth between the ages of 14 and 17 use social media. The primary research question examined whether social media provide safe spaces for multiply minoritized LGBTQ youth to express and explore issues of sexuality and gender. In addition, the study explores and categorizes multiple ways that the participants interact with social media and makes comparisons to prior work with more general populations. The study provides descriptions of the participants in terms …

Identity As A Compass For Understanding Media Choice, Emily Marie Pfetzer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The changes to our socio-technological media environment over the past 30 years have heightened the interest in identity across the social sciences. The spread of networked digital communication technologies and mobile media have increased the urgency for media scholars to better understand how and why individuals consume media as they do. Several media choice scholars have recently started considering how individuals’ identity and self-concept relate to media choice, but have not yet systematically addressed how identity might be related. This dissertation takes the first steps toward advancing an identity-based approach to understanding individual media choice in the 21st century by: …