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Is Faith On The Campus Tour? Rural, Public College Students' Exploration Of Spiritual And Religious Identity, Tamara Durant

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Abstract

This dissertation examined how students of diverse spiritual or religious beliefs or worldviews at a rural, public college interpreted, made meaning of, and drew upon their spirituality in relation to other aspects of their identity (e.g., race, gender, sexual identity), focusing particularly on the intersections of students' multiple marginalized identities. It was a single-site, qualitative study involving 20 participants attending a rural, mid-sized, predominantly-White northeastern public university. The researcher used semi-structured, in-person interviews, gathering and analyzing data using symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) with the critical stance possible from applying the lens of the Reconceptualized Model of Multiple Dimensions of …

Khwaja Sira: Culture, Identity Politics, And "Transgender" Activism In Pakistan, Faris Ahmed Khan

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In 2009, the Pakistani Supreme Court began granting rights to gender ambiguous people who are locally known as khwaja siras. The Court organized this population into taxonomic groups and ordered the government to `mainstream' them. These actions were based on certain cultural assumptions and occurred amid uncertainties about who khwaja siras really were. Meanwhile, khwaja siras began to mobilize in an effort to control their public image. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork on the identity politics of khwaja siras in Karachi, this dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which gender ambiguous people constructed, negotiated and represented themselves …

Aspiring Literacy Specialists' (Un)Certainty: A Critical Discourse Analysis, Elizabeth Years Stevens

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The purpose of this study was to explore the identities and discourses of 10 students who were completing their Literacy Education MS studies to gain certification as literacy specialists. More specifically, it asked: 1) What do beginning literacy specialists' discourses reveal about their evolving identities? 2) On what discourses do they draw? 3) How are situational, institutional, and societal contexts implicated?

A sociocultural view that context, history, culture, discourse, power, and ideologies influence literacy, instruction, and teacher identity grounded this study. The analysis drew on Gee's (2000) notions of identity and discourse. It used critical discourse analysis to consider the …