Digital Commons Network^™

Memories And Trauma Of An Absent Past- Women Filmmakers In Argentina, Nicholas P. Pezzote

Doctoral Dissertations

This work analyzes the relationship between personal and historical memory in five Argentine films made after the end of the country's last dictatorship. All are directed by, and feature, women. Besides approaching the topic of memory, this work examines how patriarchy influences narratives of both personal histories and, more broadly, of history in: Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984), Un muro de silencio (Lita Stantic, 1993), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003) and La mujer sin cabeza (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). Trauma and the handing down of memory—issues that appear in all of the chosen films—are approached from a critical feminist perspective. At …

Legality Is Not Morality: The Legal Socialization Of Prosocial Rule-Breakers, Paul Hennigan

Doctoral Dissertations

Legal socialization research is the backbone of many educational, forensic, and intervention programs aiming to prevent criminal behavior, yet researchers in this field and other disciplines define rule-breaking exclusively as harmful/antisocial behavior. This classification fails to explain rule-breaking motivated by prosocial intentions (e.g., clashing with police over racial injustice, hiding Jewish families during Nazi Germany, and violating racial segregation laws during the civil rights movement). The studies described here intend to adapt two legal socialization models so they clearly distinguish prosocial rule-breaking from antisocial rule-breaking. Across three studies, I present findings that validate the distinction between morality and legality, identify …

The Political Economy Of Intimate Partner Violence And Crisis Management: An Institutional Ethnography In Rural Vermont, Anna L. Mullany

Doctoral Dissertations

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant public health issue affecting one in four women in the United States. Tasked with addressing IPV, crisis centers can significantly impact women’s health outcomes and approaches to perpetrator accountability and community education. Informed by eight months of field work at a rural crisis center and 40 in-depth interviews, this dissertation investigated how the lives of Vermont women experiencing violence and crisis center work are both shaped by larger social, political, and economic relations within capitalism. Dorothy Smith’s method of institutional ethnography provides an investigative pathway for centering survivor experiences and examining crisis center …

Leader Type And Responses To State-Sponsored Terrorism, Arjun Banerjee

Doctoral Dissertations

State-sponsored terrorism (SST) has for long been used as a tool by countries to inflict costs on rival states without direct confrontation, as the latter risks inviting limited to full-scale war. The literature on SST has so far focused primarily on the motivations, facilitating factors, and the timing of state sponsorship. What has been insufficiently studied, however, are the responses of victim states to SST. Why does state response to SST vary spatio-temporally in different countries, under different governments, and even under different leaders of the same ruling political dispensation in a country? Under what conditions does a state respond …

“Putting Coyolxauhqui Together”: An Autoethnographic Exploration Of Identifying And Healing Fragmentation Through Decolonial Feminist Creative Writing Practices, Elizabeth Parker Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations

There has been a chronic need for more high-quality children’s books by minoritized authors, yet few scholars have examined the historic contexts and formative processes impacting such authors’ success. This critical autoethnographic study employs a decolonial feminist lens and creative practices to help one children’s book writer examine the formative sources impacting both her fragmentation and her inner strength. The Vietnamese American author specifically examines historic sources of Anti-Asian racism in the United States including those that influenced her directly during her childhood. On a personal level, she explores artifacts from her K-12 and college experiences that help her understand …

"Take It With You": Humanizing And Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies As Racial Literacy In Undergraduate Education, Robert Jamaal Downey

Doctoral Dissertations

Given the current racially charged climate around the world, but more specifically in the US and on college campuses, we as instructors of undergraduates are vastly underserving our future generations by avoiding tough questions in the classroom surrounding race. Without the proper language and space to discuss issues surrounding race, students are left behind without the words to express how they are thinking, feeling, and dreaming. The purpose of this qualitative critical ethnographic study through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework is to examine the ability of humanizing and culturally sustaining pedagogies to elicit racial literacy in three White undergraduate …

White Discipline, Black Rebellion: A History Of American Race Riots From Emancipation To The War On Drugs, Jordan C. Burke

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of American race riots, within and across historical eras, from Emancipation (1863) to the War on Drugs (1972). I argue that changes in the status of African-American citizenship produced different forms of race rioting. Examining riot events across eras reveals how ethical principles at the core of democracy are undermined in specific socio-historical contexts—especially equality of participation in collective self-governance. Congressional testimony, state-sponsored riot investigations, and archival data indicate that riots have been used historically to structure racial inequality in both political institutions and economic relations. While race riots have proven instrumental in maintaining …

White Discipline, Black Rebellion: A History Of American Race Riots From Emancipation To The War On Drugs, Jordan C. Burke

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of American race riots, within and across historical eras, from Emancipation (1863) to the War on Drugs (1972). I argue that changes in the status of African-American citizenship produced different forms of race rioting. Examining riot events across eras reveals how ethical principles at the core of democracy are undermined in specific socio-historical contexts—especially equality of participation in collective self-governance. Congressional testimony, state-sponsored riot investigations, and archival data indicate that riots have been used historically to structure racial inequality in both political institutions and economic relations. While race riots have proven instrumental in maintaining …

Angels Who Stepped Outside Their Houses: “American True Womanhood” And Nineteenth-Century (Trans)Nationalisms, Gayathri M. Hewagama

Doctoral Dissertations

“Angels who Stepped Outside their Houses” examines the fashioning of a gendered white American middle-class Protestant subject called the “American true woman” as a fitting representation of the emerging new American nation, as reflected in the writings of white American women authors from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Locating the formation of this identity on a transnational plane, this work argues that in their myriad texts, these women authors reveal the significant role that imperial Britain and the non-national/not-yet-national colonial Orient played in the (de/)construction/(de/)centering of American true womanhood. For, in the face of a particular Englishness and …

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair

Doctoral Dissertations

Cultural and literary theorists have been increasingly advocating for a posthuman ethic that challenges oppressive binaries of all kinds. In turn, the field of queer ecology, which investigates discourses of sex and nature for implicit heterosexism and androcentrism, has come to the fore. This dissertation, rooted firmly in this newer branch of ecocriticism, focuses on various inter-species environments imagined by early twentieth-century queer women writers. Each of their works, in different ways, challenges the naturalization of social hierarchies based on gender, sexuality, race, class, and species being reinforced in the burgeoning fields of sexology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Their novels …

When Healing And High-Stakes Meet: Restorative Justice In An Era Of Racial Neoliberalism, Dani O'Brien

Doctoral Dissertations

Based on a 3-year ethnography, this dissertation documents the story of Presente, an explicitly critical youth-led restorative justice group attempting to dismantle the school-prison nexus and create a more youth-centered culture at their high-reform high school. This dissertation addresses the questions: How does serving as a restorative justice peer leader impact students? What challenges and opportunities arise as the school tries to transition to more restorative practices? And how do the values central to restorative justice come up against, challenge, and get challenged by neoliberal education reform?

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Peer Engagement And Knowledge (Peak): A Community-Based Group Intervention For Youth In Hawai‘I, Jennifer T. T. Ho

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a program evaluation with a mixed methods design that evaluated the effectiveness of Peer Engagement and Knowledge (PEAK), a six-week community-based group intervention that incorporates mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) to address multiple health behaviors for multiracial youth in Hilo, Hawai‘i. A total of 51 youth, ages 12-23 years old, participated in this study which included pre-/posttest analyses of health risk factors such as substance use and depression and health promoting factors such as resilience, self-esteem, and mindfulness. Responses from two subsets of participants, who engaged in a focus group (n = 11) and composed gratitude letters ( …

Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the advocacy work and political activism of Latin American social movement organizations based in the United Kingdom. I examine how activists working in Britain as it prepares to exit the European Union, make sense of their collective agendas, strategize to achieve their goals, and evaluate the outcomes of their advocacy efforts. In doing so, this project provides insights into the ways that identity movements are negotiated and performed during periods of increased political and public hostility toward their constituents and agendas. I illuminate the relationship between identity movements, immigration discourses, politics, and policy implementation and explore how …

The Confluence Of Domestic And International Law In The Institutionalization Of The Human Right To Water, Corinne Tagliarina

Doctoral Dissertations

The norm of the human right to water has emerged over the past two decades and grown in international specificity and support. Finnemore and Sikkink’s theory of norm life cycles appears to explain the rise in prominence of this norm. As I gathered data on domestic water policy to explore this theory, my data allowed me to identify a discrepancy in the expected norm formation and institutionalization timeline dominant in constructivist international relations scholarship on human rights norms. Rather than a top-down norm internalization process from the international level, instead we see the norm recognized in domestic law before appearing …

Fine Structure In The Ionosphere, Bruce Fritz

Doctoral Dissertations

Fine-scale structure plays an important role in the ionosphere and can be used to learn new information about a whole host of phenomena. This dissertation presents three separate studies of fine-scale ionospheric phenomena. First, morphological behavior of black aurora with pulsating aurora provides new information on how pulsating aurora interacts with the ionosphere. Black curls in conjunction with pulsating aurora indicate diverging electric fields in and above the ionosphere, which is visual evidence that black aurora is part of an ionospheric feedback mechanism. Next, a year of magnetometer observations in the extremely-low frequency (ELF) range placed new physical constraints on …

Irish Harps, Scottish Fiddles, English Pens: Romantic Satire And British Nationalism, Shannon Raelene Heath

Doctoral Dissertations

"Irish Harps, Scottish Fiddles, English Pens: Romantic Satire and British Nationalism" discusses the intersection between satire and nationalism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury British Romantic poetry. Using case studies of three prominent satirists, Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, and George Gordon, Lord Byron to represent marginalized nationalities within the British state, I examine the ways in which each poet expresses a sense of dis-ease or uncomfortableness with their own national identity, an anxiety caused either by the ways in which their nationality was perceived within the British public, or by their own ability or inability to express that nationality. Thus, …

Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford

Doctoral Dissertations

Queer writers in Britain during the early twentieth century found themselves in a fraught geopolitical context formed by imperial violence and the First World War. In this dissertation, I argue that many queer modernist artists employed performative strategies in order to navigate the increasingly narrow vision of WWI-era British national culture that accompanied this historical context. While performance allowed them to express queer politics and desires without risking total exposure and persecution, their performative aesthetic depended on a problematic use of racial tropes through which these desires were channeled. By attending to moments of national and gendered performances in the …

From Householder To War-Lord To Heavenly Hero: Naming God In The Early Continental Germanic Languages, Michael Moynihan

Doctoral Dissertations

Using an interdisciplinary approach and building upon earlier work by Northcott, Green, Eggers, Schirokauer, and others, the present study presents a reappraisal of the development of the Germanic vocabulary adopted to designate the divine Lord (God or Christ) in the early stages of Christianization on the continent during the first millennium. The words used to translate Greek kyrios and Latin dominus were drawn from the sphere of Germanic social institutions and thus their adoption was influenced—and to some extent determined—by external conditions and values. In Wulfila’s fourth-century translation of the Bible into an East Germanic dialect of Gothic, the word …

Politics At The Intersection Of Sexuality: Examining Political Attitudes And Behaviors Of Sexual Minorities In The United States, Royal Gene Cravens Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

The existing political archetype of sexual minorities in the United States present lesbians, gays, and bisexuals as more ideologically liberal and Democratic than heterosexuals, as well as politically driven by issues specifically related to LGBT life. Ascribing political distinctiveness based solely on identification with a group, however, commits the fallacy of “difference-as-explanation” (Shields 2008:3030), equating a “shared [LGBT] history of sexual oppression and [LGBT] political sympathies” (Duong 2012:381).

Post-modern theories posit that social positions in society, i.e., socially-constructed categories of identity, exist as part of a simultaneously-experienced and mutually-reinforced “matrix of oppression” (Collins 2000:18). The personal meaning and political effects …

Viewing Power, Politics, And Loss: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Mass Media’S Representations Of Teacher Unions In The United States And The Consequences Concerning Policy, Melissa Ann Harness

Doctoral Dissertations

From 2011 to 2012, in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker and legislative republicans passed ACT- 10, a law severely limiting public sector/teachers union’s collective bargaining rights. This legislative effort shocked the nation with the bold move toward stricter regulations concerning the public sector, as Wisconsin is historically one of the most progressive states concerning labor within the United States. Teachers unions within the state took ACT-10 as an assault on their very profession. Shortly before the passing of the act, sit-ins and protests abounded within the capital of Madison that caught attention from both the local and national media.

To answer …

Anaphora, Inversion, And Focus, Nicholas J. Lacara

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a novel analysis of as-parentheticals, a class of anaphoric constructions introduced by the morpheme as. These include utterances like Mary kissed a pig, as John also will and Tim is happy, as is Daisy. I defend the view that the anaphoric component of these constructions is derived by verb phrase ellipsis. This builds on previous research (especially Lacara 2015, To Appear) that argues that as-parentheticals must contain elided syntactic structure rather than null operator movement as originally proposed by Potts (2002). I also propose an analysis for some of the unusual properties that as-parentheticals display. …

Re-Mapping The Space Of The Sacred In The Nowell Codex, Teresa Marie Hooper

Doctoral Dissertations

The most recent codicological studies of London, British Library Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, part 2, also known as the Nowell Codex or Beowulf-Manuscript, have looked to its many depictions of monsters as an explanation for why it was compiled. Nicholas Howe, however, proposed that the Nowell Codex functioned as a “book of elsewhere,” treating the five texts as a “gathering” particularly invested in a reappraisal of the cultural implications of geography. This dissertation describes the three prose texts of the Nowell Codex as one such “gathering” which explores alternative ideas of spiritual geography, specifically in regards to the religious …

“If There Are Men Who Are Afraid To Die, There Are Women Who Are Not”: African American Women's Civil Rights Leadership In Boston, 1920-1975., Julie De Chantal

Doctoral Dissertations

Since the 1980s, narratives surrounding the Boston Busing Crisis focus on South Boston white working-class’s reaction to Judge Arthur W. Garrity's forced desegregation order of 1974. Yet, by analyzing the crises from such narrow perspective, the narratives leave out half of the story. This dissertation challenges these narratives by situating the busing crisis as the culmination of more than half a century of grassroots activism led by Black working-class mothers. By taking action at the neighborhood and the city levels, these mothers succeeded where the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People and the Urban League had failed. …

From Wilde To Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015, Todd Barry

Doctoral Dissertations

From Wilde to Obergefell:

Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015

Todd Barry, PhD

University of Connecticut, 2016

This dissertation examines how theatre and law have worked together to produce and regulate gay male lives since the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials. I use the term “gay legal theatre” to label an interdisciplinary body of texts and performances that include legal trials and theatrical productions. Since the Wilde trials, gay legal theatre has entrenched conceptions of gay men in transatlantic culture and influenced the laws governing gay lives and same-sex activity. I explore crucial moments in the history of this unique genre: the Wilde …

A National Style: A Critical Historiography Of The Irish Short Story, Andrew Fox

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the artistic, historical and theoretical concerns that, for the past century, have shaped the Irish short story, the Irish nation and the body of criticism that mediates between the two. In Ireland, I argue, the prevailing critical narrative of the short story’s emergence and ongoing literary purpose has been bound up with the political narrative of the nation state’s decolonization. This process I view as symptomatic of a broader critical tendency to view Irish cultural narratives as inextricable from national ones, whereby literary interventions either are viewed as mere reflections of, or are assimilated to systems of …

‘Misticall Unions’: Clandestine Communications From Tristan To Twelfth Night, George W. Eggers

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that important modes of self-definition in the Renaissance draw on the linguistic uncertainty in medieval literary constructions of lovers. Just as in Renaissance texts, medieval lovers such as Tristan and Isolde fashion themselves as a “misticall union”: a conglomerate self that shares one mind and erases all distinctions between sender and receiver as well as grammatical subject and object. This unity expresses itself in the lovers’ inexplicable ability to interpret correctly the most arbitrary of messages from one another while misleading those around them. Considering Shakespearean lovers in this context suggests how deeply this model of self-definition …

Legitimate Illegitimacy: Measuring Terrorists' Legitimacy During And After Negotiations, Brenna L. Bridwell

Doctoral Dissertations

Policymakers often refuse negotiations with terrorist groups for fear that those groups will become legitimized in the eyes of the population, and that the state will become the victim of future attacks as other groups attempt to emulate the negotiating group. While scholars have analyzed whether or not negotiations are effective in ending terrorist groups, scholarship is lacking as to whether or not policymakers’ fears regarding legitimization are accurate. In this vein, I analyze the IRA/UK negotiations during the Good Friday Accords using tobit regressions and Critical Discourse Analysis to determine whether the IRA gained political legitimacy via their portrayal …

Nonatonic Harmonic Structures In Symphonies By Ralph Vaughan Williams And Arnold Bax, Cameron Logan

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the pitch structures of passages within certain works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Arnold Bax. A methodology that employs the nonatonic collection (set class 9-12) facilitates new insights into the harmonic language of symphonies by these two composers. The nonatonic collection has received only limited attention in studies of neo-Riemannian operations and transformational theory. This study seeks to go further in exploring the nonatonic’s potential in forming transformational networks, especially those involving familiar types of seventh chords. An analysis of the entirety of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony serves as the exemplar for these theories, and reveals that …

Innocent Artists: Creativity And Growing Up In Literatures Of Maturation, 1850-1920, Whitney Elaine Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting …

Unsettling: Transgression And Travel In The Literature Of The Medieval North Atlantic, Jeremy P. Deangelo

Doctoral Dissertations

This project examines the significance of travel, both as practice and metaphor, in Anglo-Saxon literature, placed in the context of the neighboring traditions of the Irish and the Icelanders. It identifies in early Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse literature a metaphor wherein one’s literal movement (“conduct”) in the story represents their behavior (“conduct”) in life. Using the poem The Whale as its test case, it describes the Christian concept of discretio spirituum (“the Discernment of Spirits”) as a tool for distinguishing good conduct from bad. With these terms established, the project examines actual travelers in Anglo-Saxon literature for lessons in conduct. …