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From Prison To Homeless Shelter: Camp Laguardia And The Political Economy Of An Urban Infrastructure, Christian D. Siener Sep 2018

From Prison To Homeless Shelter: Camp Laguardia And The Political Economy Of An Urban Infrastructure, Christian D. Siener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At this time of increasing housing insecurity, recent reforms in homeless shelter policy have attracted the attention of scholars and activists. This research sheds light on these changes by placing them in historical and political-geographic perspective, focusing on the role of homeless shelters in stabilizing social displacement by destabilizing solidarity. It demonstrates historical continuity between prisons and homeless shelters in New York City through a case study of conditions surrounding the transition of Camp LaGuardia, a prison that slowly transformed into the city’s largest, and longest lasting, homeless shelter. The case study is an empirical demonstration of some of the …


The Connection Between Race And Performance Of Nba Draft Picks, Jeremiah Mitchell Aug 2018

The Connection Between Race And Performance Of Nba Draft Picks, Jeremiah Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between race and performance in terms of one of the highest forms of efficiency in basketball, field goal percentage, based on college statistics, with regard to draft position, career earnings and NBA win shares.


James Baldwin's Soundscape And Grain Of The Racialized Body, Vallerie M. Matos May 2018

James Baldwin's Soundscape And Grain Of The Racialized Body, Vallerie M. Matos

Theses and Dissertations

I will investigate the language around, and in direct relation to, the musicality of James Baldwin’s work. The interdependence of music and literature compose the majority, if not all, of his literary corpus. However, at some point both art forms bifurcate and we are confronted by the difficulties of writing about music and sound, and about music in text. I confront Roland Barthes’s disdain for the adjective and his theory of the “Grain of the Voice” in order to argue that attention to Black expressive musical narrative forms make audible and allow readers to witness to the grain of the …


Race And Gun Violence In The United States: A Case Study Of Policy Reform In Missouri, Morgan C. Williams Jr May 2018

Race And Gun Violence In The United States: A Case Study Of Policy Reform In Missouri, Morgan C. Williams Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gun violence remains an important contributor to racial differences in mortality within the United States. Despite the existence of these significant racial disparities in firearm homicide victimization, the relationship between gun control policy and racial disparities in homicide remains largely unexplored within the empirical crime literature. Previous research suggests that access to secondary firearm markets serves as a salient contributor to local gun violence with the regulation of private firearm sales falling exclusively within state-level jurisdiction. The role of state-level background check requirements for private firearm sales in reducing gun violence remains controversial in both the empirical literature and gun …


Swimming In A Sea Of No's: Controlling And Managing The New York Public Pools, Mette L. Jensen May 2018

Swimming In A Sea Of No's: Controlling And Managing The New York Public Pools, Mette L. Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Swimming in a Sea of No's: Managing and Controlling the New York Public Pools traces the genealogy of the regulations, surveillance, and rules employed at New York public pools. The thesis discusses the intent and implications of the spatial strategies created to order and control the environment surrounding the swimming pools, and discusses how municipal public pools as specific, local landscapes manifest broader social and cultural processes. The main focus is on the transformation of the pools during the 1980s and 1990s, two decades after the fiscal crisis in 1975, when the pools had become defunded, dysfunctional spaces. By tracing …


The Structurally Adjusted School: School Restructuring And Youth Political Incorporation In Suburban America, Erin Michaels May 2018

The Structurally Adjusted School: School Restructuring And Youth Political Incorporation In Suburban America, Erin Michaels

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that key 21st century education reforms intended to improve education for Latinx and Black students are actually new mechanisms of educational inequality. I examine this trend in the suburbs where Latinx and Black populations are growing due to new immigration and gentrification. I show how state-mandated education reforms use conditional financing and coercive restructuring policies to undermine the school’s local control by tying major reforms to vital school aid and threatening it with closure. I relate this model to the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) the IMF and World Bank use globally in order to coerce countries to …


The Color Of Desire: Contradictions Of Race, Sex, And Gay Rights In The Federal Republic Of Germany, Christopher B. Ewing May 2018

The Color Of Desire: Contradictions Of Race, Sex, And Gay Rights In The Federal Republic Of Germany, Christopher B. Ewing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the current artificial dichotomy between European and Islamic sexual mores is rooted in competing impulses in German homosexual rights movements to seek solidarity with communities of color while simultaneously exoticizing their members. Interdisciplinary scholars of contemporary Europe have examined the many ways in which white Europeans have imagined Islam as inherently homophobic and misogynistic, rendering it incompatible with Western Europe's purported commitment to LGBT rights. My research historicizes this work by showing how, in the struggle against legal persecution and discrimination, homosexual West Germans turned to anti-racism as a political tool while simultaneously seeking out "exotic" …


Pawns Of Policy And Problematized Perception: The Sustainability Of Inequality Through The Space Of African-American Childhood, Jen-I S. Costosa May 2018

Pawns Of Policy And Problematized Perception: The Sustainability Of Inequality Through The Space Of African-American Childhood, Jen-I S. Costosa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

African American children are simultaneously entrapped by the construct of race and while excluded from the construct of childhood. Race has bifurcated the timeline(s) and bastion of childhood in which one has clear milestones and expectations and the other is nonlinear, fickle, and subject to a suspicious gaze. Recent research describes this phenomenon as “dehumanization”, “age overestimation”, and “adultification.” However, the aforementioned classifications of African American children’s’ experience presents the assumption in which this particular group would first have to be viewed both as human and also as a child, which is arguable. Policy, both children centric and otherwise, along …


Using Authentic Inquiry To Unpack Emotions And Thorny Issues Within Teaching And Learning, Leah Denise Pride May 2018

Using Authentic Inquiry To Unpack Emotions And Thorny Issues Within Teaching And Learning, Leah Denise Pride

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This manuscript-styled dissertation embodies the theoretical and methodological framework of authentic inquiry (Tobin, 2006). In the holistic context of this dissertation, authentic inquiry as a theoretical framework encompasses deep epistemological and ontological questions such as: What is knowledge and how is it informed by research? Who may engage in research? How does positivism compare to authentic inquiry? What are thorny issues and how do they relate to authentic inquiry? How do we research thorny issues in classrooms? What mindfulness practices may be used to research emotions when discussing thorny issues? How do we nuance “safety” in learning spaces where emotions …


Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash Feb 2018

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …


Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald Jan 2018

Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis foregrounds the import of national geography in nineteenth-century African American literature. Authors like Elizabeth Keckley and Martin Delany confront problems of national geography by interrogating illusion, rewriting geographic space, and constructing themselves within both the physical and conceptual geography of the nation. In so doing, they challenge the fallacy of a uniform national geography and attend to the myriad historical conditions that exist within geographic spaces.


Seeing Whiteness: The Progression And Regression Of White Identity In Four Post-Civil War Literary Generations, Sara N. Stone Jan 2018

Seeing Whiteness: The Progression And Regression Of White Identity In Four Post-Civil War Literary Generations, Sara N. Stone

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the concept of white identity as seen in literary works in four time periods: Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement and the 21st century. It examines the work of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut and contemporary writers George Saunders, J.D. Vance, and Jonathan Franzen. It seeks to understand patterns in racism, white nationalism, and white supremacy as part of the fundamental construct of the literary white man, and follows the evolution of that construct over time.


The Perpetuation Of Mass Incarceration: Analyzing Systemic Effects Of The U.S. Penal System, Lillian Barreto Jan 2018

The Perpetuation Of Mass Incarceration: Analyzing Systemic Effects Of The U.S. Penal System, Lillian Barreto

Theses

This paper is divided into four parts, Part I. Perpetuation of a Disparate System , Part II. Perpetual Marginalization , Part III. My Personal Research and Part IV. Moving Forward . Part I serves to show the pervasive racial disparities throughout the criminal justice system and how these disparities portray a system which discriminates primarily against poor men of color. Part II shows how this community is disadvantaged in various parts of their social, economic and political lives because of the extent of punitivity and criminalization. It explains the way these disadvantages translate to men of color being discriminated against …