Digital Commons Network^™

Rendering Documentary Portraiture: An Interrogation Of Archival Discourse Through A Critical Exploration Of Nineteenth Century Stage Actress Charlotte Cushman’S Material Memory, Skyler Sunday

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Visual depictions of nineteenth century stage actress Charlotte Cushman, such as photographs, engravings, and painted portraits assist researchers in re-envisioning her both as an actress and as a person, but what do her remaining archival possessions further reveal to researchers about her memory? How do different objects operate as portraits that allow the researcher to tap into and remember specific moments and memory? How does the effort to preserve memory take different forms? This project argues that, when viewing the archive through its stored objects, our collective notion of portraiture can be expanded and used to interrogate existing methods of …

Listen To The River: Dolores, Ophelia, And Female Resistance In Opera, Daniel Aaron Barnidge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The music of female characters in the great masterpieces of opera often demonstrates resistance to and undermines the abuse they have historically received in opera plots. The Mexican folktale that my opera, The Tragedy of La Llorona, draws inspiration from plays on many of the same tropes historically found in female characters in opera including madness, sexuality, and lack of agency. This led to research into the portrayal of women in opera as part of my pre-compositional process and my desire to access this tale free from the traditional 'marianismo' and 'machismo' narratives it is associated with and which …

Female Motivation In Engineering, Manufacturing, And Stem-Related Trades, Leaann Nichole Manz, Leaann Nichole Manz-Young, Leaann Nichole Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historically, female representation in engineering and manufacturing trades has been underrepresented compared to their male counterparts. Given this trend, the scope of this paper is to analyze the motivational factors among females who are currently working in Engineering and Manufacturing related trades in the surrounding lower East Appalachian area. Literature research will support an analysis of the following focus: Females in Engineering and Manufacturing Trades. The study focuses on analyzing questionaries from thirty-two females based on the Social Cognitive Career Theory and its three components: “outcome expectations, career interest, and career self-efficacy”. The major findings of this study …

What Women Bring To The Fight: An Analysis Of Female Leadership In U.S. National Security, Alison Tobey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Women have held some of the highest-ranking national security positions in the United States, though the overall number of women in leadership positions has remained relatively small until recently. The Biden Administration has achieved gender parity in their national security leadership positions, with over fifty percent of these positions being held by women. Since this is the first time in U.S. history that women have such a significant presence in the defense field, it is important to analyze and understand the changes that can come as a result.

The purpose of this research is to broadly understand the impact that …

Authentically (Un)Real Assessing Vh!'S Basketball Wives And Its Violent & Colorist Portrayals Of Black Women., Wilma Denae Powell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Does reality television serve as solely a form of entertainment, or could reality television also be maintaining hegemonic beliefs and reinforcing biased views of Black women? Since 2010, Vh1’s Basketball Wives has given audiences the opportunities to entertain themselves by watching women who are/were married to, dating, or are the mothers of children fathered by professional basketball players. Despite the show’s name, few members of the cast are currently married and audiences only get mere glimpses of the cast in motherly or marital interactions. So, what does Basketball Wives offer audiences who tune in to watch Black women for entertainment? …

Are You My Nurse? The Effects Of Patient-Delivered Gender Microaggressions On Women Trainees’ Clinical Work In Integrated Primary Care, Julia Ratchford Kauffmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gender microaggressions are a form of sexist discrimination that have detrimental effects on women’s psychological well-being. Unfortunately, these sexist occurrences are commonplace in the United States and can be experienced in a variety of ways. As such, there is a need to understand behavioral health providers’ experiences with patient-delivered gender microaggressions. In doing so, we may be able to better support women behavioral health trainees’ during their clinical development by potentially understanding the ways in which women trainees are affected by sexist patient encounters. Therefore, the present study sought to apply the Social Cognitive Model of Counselor Training and the …

Exploring The Relational Impact Of Breast Cancer On Younger Women Partnered With Women, Kaitlin V. Ross

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Approximately 268,600 new cases of breast cancer in women are diagnosed each year in the United States. Due to improvements in cancer detection and treatment, survivorship is higher than in the past. More than ten percent of new diagnoses are in women 45 years or younger. There are approximately one million sexual minority individuals living with cancer in the US, yet this population is understudied in cancer care. For sexual minority women with breast cancer, sociocultural factors such as lack of affirmative care influences their disease experience. Further, sexual minority women and women partnered with women may be subject to …

Crafting Up A Narrative: An Ethnographic Study Of Fair Trade Marketing Practices And The Representation Of Female Handicraft Producers, Jessica Bradley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unlike the exploitative supply chains that exist under neoliberal globalization, where the social conditions of their supply chain are largely hidden; fair trade attempts to reveal the conditions of their supply chains through transparent marketing practices. Transparency is often presented in the form of storytelling wherein fair trade organizations (FTOs) reveal intimate details of the artisans they partner with to educate consumers on the interrelations of their product supply chains. I wanted to explore the implications of sharing artisan stories to further sales of the handicrafts they produced. How does sharing intimate stories of artisans formulate the perceptions Western consumers …

Care Infrastructure Accessibility And The Gender Wage Gap – A Way To Improve Women’S Ability To Equitably Engage In The Paid Labor Market?, Julia Schinnenburg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

World-wide, women are less integrated into the labor force than men and if they are, they earn considerably less on average. This unequal treatment of women results in negative consequences for all members of society, as it harms women’s financial realities and also affects women’s care receivers due to a lack of resources that women can spend on their care giving. The research presented analyses how much the institution of better accessible care infrastructure could improve women’s ability to work for pay and decrease their daily workloads. The extent to which improved care infrastructure accessibility affects women’s lives is determined …

Regardless, ‘I’ And ‘You’: Lessons From Black Feminist Literature, Jasmine Veronica Sauceda

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple from a Black feminist perspective to demonstrate oneness as capacious being. This project explores an I-You dialogue that works toward future-making through the notion of regardless, an idea from Walker’s definition of Womanist, deployed through sustained engagement with Kevin Quashie’s notion of oneness. Thus, this work extrapolates lessons found in the selected texts to demonstrate what it means to embody a capaciousness of being and how this then fosters healing in the face of trauma. In so doing, …

“Damned If Ya Do, Damned If Ya Don’T”: A Critical Narrative Inquiry Exploring The Gendered Racism Experienced By Black Women Housing Professionals In Higher Education, Shaniquè Jazmine Broom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Between 1999 and 2018, there was an 11% decrease in Black women staff and administrators at post-secondary institutions. This study utilized Black Feminist Thought and Sista Circle Methodology to uncover how Black women reflected on experiences of and coped with gendered racism at PWIs. Participants offered reflections on their relationships with Black women and men, white men and women, and students. Black women shared their reflections with discrimination and a deceptive institutional culture. Black women also discussed utilizing several coping strategies such as hyper-awareness, hypervigilance, enacting personal and professional boundaries, avoiding hypervisibility and engaging in personal and familial connections with …

Exitosas On Their Own Terms: Centering Latina Testimonios To Understand Latina Undergraduates’ Student Success Beliefs, Lauren R. Contreras

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing testimonio methodology grounded in LatCrit and Chicana Feminism, this research centered the voices of 11 Latina undergraduates attending a 4-year private, predominantly white institution in the Western U.S. to understand how they defined and measured their own success in higher education. Traditional success measures focus on the institution's dominant measures, such as graduation and persistence rates. These success measures do not fully represent Latina/o/x values nor how Latinas undergraduates define their own success in higher education. This research revealed that Latina undergraduates define their success by academic achievement, career attainment, Latina/o/x values of familismo and comunidad, and their …