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What Does It Mean To Be The Goat: A Narrative Study On Retired White Male Elite Individual Sport Athletes?, Tyler Behrmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The greatest of all time (GOAT) is a topic commonly discussed in sports today (Lundberg & Rosenberg, 2020). Despite this increased use of the term, there is a lack of research on the topic of the GOAT which could serve to benefit individuals in performance domains. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to investigate characteristics that describe a GOAT and the impact these characteristics of the GOAT have on individuals. Two participants were included in this study. The participants were white male, retired, and individual sport athletes who competed in multiple World Championships. Participants were interviewed using semi-structured …

A Sign Of The Times- How Ethnonationalist Executives Affect Democracy, Adam M. Sikes

Honors College Theses

In the immediate post-Cold War era, proponents of democracy envisioned a world with few barriers to the spread of democracy and its institutions globally. However, a clear trend has been definitively established in the recent academic discourse pointing to a marked decline in the quality of democracies in several democratizing states. While the root causes for this decline continue to be a contentious subject, much of the existing literature depends on institutional theory to explain the cause of democratic backsliding. Concurrently, we have seen a dramatic stream of news about the state of democracy in two of the world’s most …

Isolation, Athletic Identity, And Social Support: An Exploration Among Injured Collegiate Student-Athletes, Ally W. Claytor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Season ending and career ending injuries make up a large portion of all injuries (Tirabassi et al., 2016). Among psychological consequences to these types of injuries, isolation is a social consequence that has been identified as occurring after injury (Gould et al., 1997). Isolation is related to loss of identity for an athlete (Mankand et al., 2009). Additionally, low levels of support have been shown to increase feelings of isolation in injured athletes (Mitchell et al., 2014). The purpose of the present study was to explore the experience of isolation as a psychological response to injury among athletes with career …

Lowcountry Identities, Labor, And Material Culture: An Archaeological Survey Of 38ja1138, Zachary W. Dirnberger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Archaeologists have long struggled with understanding the relationship between material culture and actual, emic identity. Early practitioners assumed that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the two and that a suite of artifacts recovered archaeologically could be matched with a specific ethnic affiliation or peoples that produced and utilized those artifacts. Later generations of archaeologists challenged this view by demonstrating how mutable and historically situated identity is, and how often material culture crosscuts ethnic boundaries. Historical archaeologists have played a central role in this debate. In this thesis, I examine 38JA1138, a largely undocumented late eighteenth-century site in Jasper County, …

The Importance Of Music Festivals: An Unanticipated And Underappreciated Path To Identity Formation, Kimberly F. Rudolph

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this study is to understand and explain the growing popularity of music and art festivals around the world. Music festivals are events consisting of a variety of bands and musical artists performing shows, on numerous stages, over a period of days to a large audience in outside and inside venues. Through field research, participant-observation, personal interviews, and survey research at the 2015 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, this study suggests that they are much more than simple entertainment venues. Because humans desire to belong and music functions in the capacity as a global language, music festivals are …

Constructing The World's Largest Prison: Understanding Identity By Examining Labor, Hubert J. Gibson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

A Civil War prison camp operated by the Confederacy known as Camp Lawton was once considered the largest prison in the world. This label was attributed to the fact that Lawton’s stockade enclosed 42 acres. The historical record does not have a clear picture of who built it. Newspaper interviews claim the construction was carried out by 500 impressed slave laborers and 300 Union POWs, but these lack the credibility of official orders. Unfortunately, many Confederate documents were lost when Sherman’s army came through Millen, GA. This study archaeologically examines construction techniques utilized for building stockades in an effort …