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Me And My Homeboys: An Autoethnography On A Sense Of Belonging As A Detroit Latino Student, Juan Jose Martinez

Wayne State University Dissertations

ME AND MY HOMEBOYS: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY ON A SENSE OF BELONGING AS A DETROIT LATINO STUDENT

by

JUAN JOSE MARTINEZ

MARCH 2018

Advisor: Dr. Sandra Gonzales

Major: Curriculum and Instruction, Bilingual Bicultural Education

Degree: Doctor of Education

Using autoethnographic research for this study, I intimately explore my experiences in school as a Detroit Latino male and the relationship with my family, community, and school and how they intersected and helped me achieve academic success. I excavate the indigenous roots that characterizes my family’s way of knowing and explore how that foundation laid the ground work for the values that have …

Remote Screening And Self-Monitoring For Vision Loss Diseases Based On Smartphone Applications, Hussein M. H. Khairallah

Wayne State University Dissertations

Remote Healthcare Monitoring System (RHMS) represents remote observing of patient’s well-being and providing therapeutic services. Sensors play an essential part in RHMs. They measure the physical parameters and give continuous information to health organizations, doctors. The presence of Smartphones and other portable devices have allowed us to utilize remote healthcare monitoring system for an assortment of structures. Also, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) advances considered as one of the critical research factor healthcare application for enhancing the standard of living.

In this dissertation, I have presented three tiers operating in the remote healthcare monitoring system; the Body Area Network (BAN), the …

Constitutive Memories Of City Space: Rhetorics Of Civil Rights Memory In Detroit’S Urban Landscape, Scott Mitchell

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines public memories of civil rights injustice and resistance as constitutive rhetorics of urban culture and spatiality for the city of Detroit. By studying the city of Detroit as it navigates an ongoing period of dramatic change and redevelopment, this study demonstrates how material manifestations of memory become the constitutive forces that define what many describe as “Detroit’s heart and soul.” This project illustrates the embedded cultural logics produced from sites of public memory, thereby arguing city spaces as locations bound to their legacies and beholden to material and symbolic consequences of their past. This dissertation proceeds through …

Envisioning The City Of The Future: Responses To Deindustrialization, Segregation, And The Urban Crisis In Postwar Detroit, 1950-1970, Andrew Hnatow

Wayne State University Dissertations

Following Second World War, cities in the United States appeared to be in trouble. The urban crisis revolved around poverty, unemployment, segregation and discrimination, suburbanization, and deindustrialization. Using metropolitan Detroit as a case-study, this dissertation examines responses by local residents, urban planners, and federal policy-makers to these changes. Local community and union members centered around the Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn rallied against industrial decentralization in the early 1950s. Community members in Grosse Pointe practiced systematic housing segregation, while other members of the community organized a Human Relations Council to support integration and interracial understanding. Constantinos Doxiadis led a …

Accumulating Risk: Environmental Justice And The History Of Capitalism In Detroit, 1880-2015, Josiah John Rector

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an environmental history of Detroit, Michigan from the 19th century to the present. Recent scholarship on the history of capitalism has largely ignored the problem of environmental inequality, and the negative externalities of economic growth. In contrast, studies of the environmental justice movement have richly documented race, class, and gender inequalities in environmental risk exposure. However, they have neglected the relationship between the development of the environmental justice movement and the restructuring of American capitalism since the 1970s, including deindustrialization and the shift to neoliberalism. Bringing these fields together, this dissertation connects Detroit’s long-term economic transformation to …

“I Can See My Values In Places”: Relationships, Place, And Growing Old In Detroit Neighborhoods, Wendy Daniel Bartlo

Wayne State University Dissertations

The central focus of this dissertation is to examine the inextricable link between persons, their social worlds, and their environments. I do this through an ethnographic study of senior members of non-biologically based kinship groups with an affiliation to place. Critical to this examination is the city of Detroit itself, as members of these groups ultimately collectively identify as Detroiters through space and time. It is this collective identity, strengthened mostly through their defense of an outsider deemed unsuccessful city that renders Detroit a good place for the older person to maintain connections, participate socially and civically, and to organize …

Sex, Labor, And The American Way: Detroit Aesthetic In Mid-Twentieth-Century Literature, Jenna F. Gerds

Wayne State University Dissertations

The essay analyzes Sinclair Lewis short fiction in If I Were Boss, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. The primary literature is juxtaposed with a study of visual texts and historic research with a locational and thematic basis in Detroit. Ford Times and early automobile advertisements, Diego Rivera's mural Detroit Industry, photographs of the Sojourner Truth housing project riots, and the accounts of gay union workers comprise a framework for each of the central texts. Detroit aesthetic is gritty, realist, …

Growing 'Homeplace' In Critical Service-Learning: An Urban Womanist Pedagogy, Vanessa Lynn Marr

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores the role of critical service-learning from the perspective of urban community members. Specifically, it examines the counternarratives produced by Black women community gardeners who engage in academic service-learning with postsecondary faculty. The study focuses on this particular group because of the women's deep involvement with grassroots organizing that reflects their sense of self and other community members, as well as their personal and political relationships to Detroit, Michigan. Given the city's economic disparities rooted in racial segregation, structural violence and gender oppression, Detroit is a site of critical learning within a postindustrial/postcolonial context. This intersectionalist approach to …

Higher Than Those Of Their Race Of Less Fortunate Advantages:Race, Ethnicity, And West Indian Political Leadership In Detroit's African American Community, 1885-1940, Kathryn Lorraine Beard

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores West Indian immigrants in the city of Detroit and their leadership of key institutions in the African American community from 1885 to 1940. This work is divided into two parts, with the Great Migration as the line of demarcation. The research method consists largely of collective biographies and a survey of periodicals, census records, and records generated by the institutions that had West Indian leaders. The dissertation concludes that West Indian immigrants perceived middle-class status and ethnicity as a means of distinguishing themselves from their African American counterparts, but race became a more significant factor as more …

The Rise Of Public Sector Unionism In Detroit, 1947-1967, Louis Eugene Jones

Wayne State University Dissertations

In 1947, the Michigan Legislature passed into law the Hutchinson Act banning strikes of state and local workers. The law provided for the termination of striking public sector workers but did not require state and local agencies to bargain with public employees or their representatives. It even allowed for fines and prison sentences for non public sector workers who influenced public sector workers to strike. The law forced public sector unions into an untenable state of "collective begging." Indeed, it was often referred to as punitive and draconian. 18 years later, the Michigan Legislature passed and the governor signed into …

Wastewater Treatment Comes To Detroit: Law, Politics, Technology And Funding, Barry Neal Johnson

Wayne State University Dissertations

Detroit was one of the cities identified by the International Joint Commission as polluting the Great Lakes in contravention of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. The United States Public Health Service also reported on the pollution that entered the Detroit River from Detroit's sewers. Pollution by sewage threatened lives with a dramatic increase in cases of Typhoid Fever and other gastro intestinal sicknesses. Chlorination of water supplies reduced these incidents to an acceptable level minimizing the arguments of sanitarians proposing wastewater treatment. Expansion of the city to encompass a rapidly rising population channeled the city's financial resources into infrastructure. …

An Analysis Of Teacher Distribution Across Districts And Schools In The Detroit Metropolitan Area, Christina Susanne Krispien

Wayne State University Dissertations

The demand that today's schools shall produce better educational outcomes of their pupils is stronger than ever before, especially in front of the background of our globalized, competitive world. Past and current research has supported the hypothesis that the teacher is the most important ingredient in the educational process. As the Detroit metropolitan area, consisting of the three counties of Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne, provides a diversified picture of academic achievement and community background and a number of charter schools (public school academies), research regarding the distribution of teachers with certain desirable attributes across a student population distinguished by achievement, …