Digital Commons Network^™

A Necessary Shift? A Qualitative Exploration Of Black Women’S Experiences With Altering Self-Presentation For Job Attainment, Dorothy Rachael Kemp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore how Black women describe their experiences with shifting for job attainment, including their perception of identity, and how they interpret and negotiate any outcomes of shifting. The study was guided by the following research questions: (1) How do Black women describe their experiences with shifting for job attainment? (2) How do Black women interpret and negotiate any outcomes of shifting? (3) How do Black women perceive their identity in terms of their experiences with shifting?

Ten participants shared their personal experiences shifting throughout their job attainment process. Each participant self-identified as Black …

Identity Construction In The Yoruba Group Project Abroad: Discourse Analysis Of Language Use, Tawakalitu Odunayo Lasisi

LSU Master's Theses

This research examines the experiences of five Nigerian Americans who participated in the Yoruba Group Project Abroad in the year 2018. After taking classes on Yoruba language at the basic, intermediate and advanced levels in their various universities here in the US, the students traveled to Nigeria in the summer of 2018 to immerse themselves in the native speakers’ environment in Ibadan, Nigeria. While in Ibadan, they were paired with Nigerian host families (Yoruba speakers) in order to have an overarching immersive experience. These students constitute the population of this research. Using a qualitative research method and an in-depth online …

Not All Fun And Gaymes: Technology, Transgression, And Representation Among Gaymers, Kyle Bikowski

LSU Master's Theses

Over the past decade, a new identity has emerged within gaming and gay communities. This identity, Gaymer (Gay-gamer), incorporates elements from both gaming and gay communities, but is accepted by neither. This thesis asks how the interplay of actual and virtual worlds have shaped Gaymer identities, and further asks what the relationship between Gaymers and both the gay and gaming communities are; what elements are conducive to the formation of Gaymer communities; how Gaymers work with or around affordances to assert their identities in virtual and actual spaces; and to what degree representation, either within games as playable characters or …

A Narrative And Performative Methodology For Understanding Adolescent Cancer Stories, Patrick Mcelearney

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The field of health communication places considerable attention on coping with cancer, typically using social scientific approaches to investigate uncertainty, information, and/or social networks. Social scientific models of coping with adolescent cancer often measure how behaviors seek to manage cancer’s uncontrollability and/or uncertainty; however, how adolescents cope with cancer has been unclear. Short-term studies show adolescents typically and atypically cope. Long-term studies show a significant portion of survivors exhibit post-traumatic stress. The narrative and performative turns expose the role narratives and performatives play in shaping human subjects as meaning makers rather than merely information sharers. A narrative subject reframes cancer’s …

Education Ain't Black: The Disidentification Of African American Students, Erica Lynette James

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis, I will discuss the influence of education on the identity formation of African American students. Based on the scholarly literature in education theory, I will argue in Bourdieuan theory education, formal education, fails to accommodate the specific needs of African American students because education influences African American students to develop constructions of “whiteness" that education reinforces. As education attempts to uphold the “status quo” of American society, education simultaneously forces African American students to question the relevance of education. In questioning the relevance of education through high-achieving African American students’ use of language and pursuit of academic …

"Crappy New Year": Evaluation, Stance And Drinking Stories, Martin Edward Pfeiffer

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis is an examination of drinking stories and how authors, through linguistic means, achieve narrative, social, and cultural goals. Language is a biological fact of Homo sapiens and narrative is a universal method by which humans make sense of their world. Humans’ primeval relationship with alcohol is an expression of the innate desire to achieve altered states of consciousness. To study drinking stories is to study a manifestation of the essence of humanity. This research employs the narrative theories of Labov (1997) and Labov and Waletzky (1967) combined with Du Bois’s (2007) model of stance. I focus on the …

Literary Expressions Of Creole Identity In Alfred Mercier's L'Habitation Saint-Ybars And Johnelle, Mary Florence Cashell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century Louisianan author Alfred Mercier’s novels and their roles as emblems of Francophone Creole cultural identity. During the nineteenth century following the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent anglophone influx, the French-speaking Creole population faced a cultural upheaval. Unable to completely identify as either French or American, Creoles occupied an uncertain space. This study demonstrates that Alfred Mercier’s works articulate a hybrid identity that is neither French nor American but rather a multicultural construct. The first chapter examines the nineteenth-century Creole community’s problematic positioning between French and American cultures. Chapters two, three, and four center on two of Mercier’s …

Displacement And The Text: Exploring Otherness In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé'S La Migration Des Coeurs, Rosario Ferré'S The House On The Lagoon, And Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish, Melody Boyd Carriere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of how some displaced Caribbean and Italian American women examine identity within a literary tradition that considers them "Other." I have chosen four culturally diverse novels to explore, each one written by a different female author: Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé's La migration des cœurs, Rosario Ferré's The House on the Lagoon, and Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish. I identify the causes of the protagonists' displacement, and analyze the actions they take to make themselves heard in a tradition that has formerly silenced them. The role of the mother is especially important in …

Sites Of Resistance: Language, Intertextuality, And Subjectivity In The Poetry Of Diane Wakoski, Cordelia Maxwell Hanemann

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the interconnectedness of language and related cultural texts and women’s subjectivity. The poststructuralist feminist enterprise of examining and critiquing language and signifying practices for the ways in which they impose social values and of interrogating and undermining the fixity of meanings in cultural texts will serve as my primary frame. Concerned with the individual (gendered) consciousness, poststructuralist feminist theory of subject formation posits that while language, along with ideologically biased texts of the culture, construct subjects, language and the cultural texts also serve as sites of resistance for the deconstruction and reconception of individual and collective subjectivities. …

The Art Of Living - The Marketing Of Identity Through Nationality And Spirituality, Shirisha Shankar

LSU Master's Theses

Spirituality has been a term that has always been associated with the East and more specifically with India. Spirituality has been revamped and repackaged in glossy packages by various spiritual groups and organizations in India. One among these organizations is the Art of Living, a non-governmental spiritual organization that has risen in popularity since 1996. This thesis concentrates on the Art of Living as an organization and of the dissemination of the new spirituality through this institution. This research study pertains to the identity of self and of the sense of nationhood through the discourse and the practice of certain …

Text, Context, And Identities In Pointe Coupee, Louisiana: Six Young Women Positioned As Writers, Patricia Meeks Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Texts are contextualized¡Xtied to times, tied to places, and tied to the people who live in those times and places. This dissertation is based on a study of writing and identity set at Catholic High School in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana. For their senior English class, the six young women participating in the study produced a number of pieces of writing of various types, contrasting in genre, length, content, and register. These kinds of writing represent varying discourse practices, and it was within these practices that the young women positioned themselves or were positioned by influences in their social context. The …

Musical Play Across Ethnic Boundaries In Western Jamaica, Ronald Eric Dickerson

LSU Master's Theses

An ethnography of music, ritual, and festival in western Jamaica, this thesis reports on fieldwork performed in St. Elizabeth and St. James Parishes between June 2002 and January 2003. Featured field sites include rural dancehall events, Kumina performances, Accompong Town's Maroon Heritage Festival, and a Rastafarian music and nutrition festival called "The Supper of Rastafari." Building an account of these and other sites of cultural performance, this study focuses on social connections between groups of participants, traced through poetic, historical, and personal relationships among performers, especially across boundaries of ethnic, stylistic, or religious difference within Jamaica's national cultural identity.

Feathers And Tuxedos: An Analysis Of Political Cartoons About Indian Gaming, Michael Stephan Nasirov

LSU Master's Theses

Feathers and Tuxedos: An Analysis of Political Cartoons About Indian Gaming is an exploration into the changing stereotypes of Indians in illustrated media. Beginning with general issues such as poverty and media coverage, this thesis continues to cover chronologically the origins of modern Indian gaming and the resulting expenditure of profits into social welfare of the tribes and the continuous three-way battle between state, federal, and Indian sovereign rights. Normative U.S. societal reactions to Indian gaming are contrasted with their Indian counterpoints. Cartoons allow for a visual representation of contested relationships, including recent imagery of well-to-do entrepreneurs profiting at the …

Reticent Romans: Silence And Writing In La Vie De Saint Alexis, Le Conte Du Graal, And Le Roman De Silence, Evan J. Bibbee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Apart from discourse and yet somehow part of it, silence is a powerfully ambiguous linguistic phenomenon that blurs the lines between presence and absence. Eluding the material aspects of oral and written language, it is only perceptible as the gaps or spaces between words. Nonetheless, it plays a role in all linguistic productions: although silence itself cannot be directly communicated, it can influence communication. In a literary text, silence may takes on many different guises, including rhythmic hesitations, rhetorical omissions, and poetic oppositions that mimic the audible gaps of spoken language. The visual, aural, and fictional interaction of all these …