Digital Commons Network^™

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

Negotiating Motherhood And Intersecting Inequalities: A Qualitative Study Of African American Mothers And The Socialization Of Adolescent Daughters, Brandyn-Dior Mckinley

Doctoral Dissertations

'Archival abstract submitted'

Mixed Feelings: Growing Up Biracial In America, Alexandra Boothe

Capstones

My mom is the daughter of 2^nd generation Swedish and Danish immigrants and my dad is the son of Jamaican immigrants, who settled in the segregated city of Baltimore just months before his birth in a black-only hospital. In the eyes of Americans, they were a white woman and a black man embarking on a relationship that was less than palatable to many in this country-- including my mom’s own family.

Growing up, society was constantly forcing me to question my identity, but it was also true within the context of my mom’s side of the family. There was …

"Big Black Beasts": Race And Masculinity In Gay Pornography, Desmond Goss

Sociology Dissertations

Although there is a good foundation of feminist research at the intersection of performative labor, pornography, and sexuality, there are few (if any) published studies that examine race in porn content intended for gay men’s consumption. What’s more, existing research samples solely from corporatized porn, which is expressly produced, scripted, and directed. Bound by the conventions of the market, however, corporate pornography must abide by a consumer demand that reflects white machinations of black sexuality rather than the self-proclaimed sexual identity of African American men. Instead, I employ an exploratory content analysis of pornographic videos categorized as “ebony” on a …

Race, Socioeconomics, Intelligence, And Criminal Offending: Accounting For Variation In Criminal Justice Outcomes, Elise Marie Ferguson

Sociology ETDs

Racial disparities in arrests and incarceration are well documented and typically considered the result of differences in rates of offending. However, research indicates variation in rates of arrest and incarceration by race is not due entirely to differences in offending. While criminal offending can result in part from differences in economic and social factors, these factors also influence criminal justice outcomes. The focal concerns perspective posits that criminal justice actors develop a schema – a pattern of thought or behavior – which can influence decision making and lead to differential treatment by race in criminal justice outcomes. This schema can …

An Examination Of Child Abuse Disclosures In Mississippi: The Effects Of Child And Interviewer Characteristics, Morgan Colley

Theses and Dissertations

Each year, hundreds of thousands of children fall victim to child abuse in the United States, most often perpetrated by a parent or legal guardian (Children’s Bureau – An Office of the Administration for Children and Families, 2015). The current project used secondary data from a Children’s Advocacy Center to explore abuse disclosure rates in forensic interviews. The three main objectives of this project were as follows: 1) to determine whether children with certain demographic characteristics (i.e., race, gender, and age) were more likely to disclose abuse, 2) to determine whether interviewers with certain demographic characteristics (i.e., race and age) …

Art And Race: Exploring Social Justice Issues Through Visual Culture, Alaiyha S. Bryant

Honors Capstones

Art and Race: Exploring Social Justice Issues through Visual Culture, a high school art curriculum, explores how race and social justice issues in visual culture connect to historical concepts within the realm of social studies. Students will learn to achieve: creating visual narratives, making visual connections, and expressing themselves through artistic processes to combat stereotypes and misconceptions about social issues surrounding race. In this curriculum students will learn how to communicate their experiences with racial issues visually in order to be advocates for social change. There are three units in this curriculum and each unit will build upon the next. …

Communication Barriers And Health Among Hispanics: A Quantitative Study Exploring Race, Ethnicity, And Language, Daisy Angeles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sociological and medical research on Hispanic health often emphasizes the phenomenon termed the "Hispanic Paradox;" however, it is currently unclear whether this applies equally for Hispanics who only speak Spanish, speak both English and Spanish, or exclusively speak English. I conduct a two-step analysis using data from 2005 and 2010 from the National Health Interview Survey to examine how race, ethnicity, and language influence various health measures, controlling for sex, age, and education. Findings from the first analytic stage demonstrate that there is significant health heterogeneity within the Hispanic group because of communication barriers. Findings from the second analytic stage …

Race And Sexual Orientation Lssues In Graduate Classrooms: How Faculty In Psychology Experience Them Emerging Alongside One Another, Raymond L. Sheets Jr.

Dissertations

The inclusion of sexual orientation and race-related issues into mainstream psychology has gained much needed momentum in recent years. The field of counseling psychology, in particular, has helped fuel this momentum with its appreciation for, and commitment to, developing academic and applied psychologists who attend to an evolving multicultural society. Within the academic environment, faculty members have the responsibility of facilitating student learning in their respective classrooms; this facilitation becomes challenging in the face of emotionally charged topics such as race and sexual orientation. How then do graduate faculty who teach these courses experience race and sexual orientation comingling within …

Race, Socioeconomic Status, And Implicit Bias: Implications For Closing The Achievement Gap, Elizabeth Schlosser

Dissertations

This study accessed the relationship between race, socioeconomic status, age and the race implicit bias held by middle and high school science teachers in Mobile and Baldwin County Public School Systems. Seventy-nine participants were administered the race Implicit Association Test (race IAT), created by Greenwald, A. G., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R., (2003) and a demographic survey. Quantitative analysis using analysis of variances, ANOVA and t-tests were used in this study. An ANOVA was performed comparing the race IAT scores of African American science teachers and their Caucasian counterparts. A statically significant difference was found (F = …

Contributors To Wisconsin’S Persistent Black-White Gap In Life Expectancy, Max T. Roberts

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

For decades, blacks have faced shorter life expectancy than their white counterparts. This persistent disparity has led to a gap in life expectancy between the two groups. Nationally, this gap has decreased over the last 40 years. However, this is not the case at the state-level as some states have experienced little or no improvement in the life expectancy gap. Such is the case in Wisconsin, where the life expectancy gap is the largest in the nation for males, and the gap actually has grown for females over the last two decades. This study seeks to examine this persistent gap …

An Investigation Of Employment And Wage Distribution In The Construction Industry By Race/Ethnicity And Gender, Binit Kumar Shrestha

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

One of the largest job providers in the U.S, is the construction industry, an industry that suffers from critical problems pertaining to a labor shortage. Yet the industry also struggles with insufficient interest and inconsistent participation from underrepresented demographic groups. To address the issue of workforce income inequality and bias, the industry must better understand the current situation regarding inequality; it needs to pinpoint some basic problems. To do so, analysts must scrutinize the following aspects: 1) the current differences within the construction workforce by race/ethnicity and gender with regards to the total employment and 2) the current disparity within …

Race And Gender Differences In The Need For Postsecondary Mathematics Remediation, Scotty Glen Houston

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Remedial education in postsecondary institutions has been a topic of discussion for policymakers and educators for many years. The subject where most of the remediation occurs is mathematics. A population skilled in mathematics is necessary for many of the current job openings, and many more jobs to come, as countless occupations are becoming even more technologically sophisticated. Researchers have determined that upwards of sixty to seventy percent of incoming students in college and universities need math remediation, and factors reanging from family income, race and gender to admissions test scores and grade point average have been shown to influence remedial …

Contested Citizenship And Social Belonging? Latinos In Mixed-Status Families Managing Illegality And Race In Los Angeles, Cassaundra Rodriguez

Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary immigration policies that sacrifice family cohesion in favor of punitive enforcement approaches have contributed to record-breaking rates of immigrant deportations in recent years. As a result, mixed-status families grapple with the reality or possibility of a loved one’s detention and deportation, as well as the various everyday limitations of illegality. Mixed-status families include members with different immigration statuses and are often characterized by one or two undocumented parents and at least one U.S. citizen child. Conceptualizing citizenship as not only a legal category, but also a social category that is continually contested, this dissertation asks: how do non-citizens and …

Immigration And Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, And Care Outsourcing Exacerbate And Erode Earnings Inequalities, Eiko H. Strader

Doctoral Dissertations

The rhetoric against immigration in the United States mostly focuses on the economic threat to low-educated native-born men using a singular labor market competition lens. In contrast to this trend, this dissertation builds on a large body of previous work on job queuing and ethnic competition, as well as insights gained from the studies on female labor force participation and the outsourcing of care work. By exploring regional differences in the wage effects of immigration across 100 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2007, I argue that immigration is an intersectionally dynamic localized source of wage inequality and equality. The first …

Negotiating Race, Work And Family: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Vaughan Curington

Doctoral Dissertations

In Portugal, high levels of women’s labor force participation, rapidly aging populations, along with the retrenchment of welfare states, has led to the expansion of publicly subsidized private care work such as home care. Much of this caring work is carried out by low-paid citizen and migrant women from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an independent archipelago nation off the West African coast. At the same time, Portugal is a “post-colonial” setting, with comparatively progressive policies around family settlement for migrants, and where the language of “legal race” does not exist. Taking the lived experiences of Cape Verdean …

#Sayhername: Negotiating Issues Of Victimhood, Violence, And Visibility, Carol Ann Jackson

Master's Theses

This thesis analyses both news articles and tweets discussing #SayHerName and both implicit and explicit discussions of race, gender, and sexuality. Prior research on media representations of race, gender and violence has found that black women have been denied visibility as victims in unilateral media portrayals of gendered violence, which has contributed to the social problem of black women’s marginalization as their experiences of injustice become invalidated. This denial is not directly stated, rather it functions through a use of controlling images which reproduce racist, sexist, and heteronormative media messages by naturalizing black women as devious, promiscuous, and aggressive. This …

Intercultural Accommodation: Accommodating Communication To People Of Different Groups, Marcus M. Gruwell

Theses and Dissertations

The current study attempts to address the widening division of race and communication due to a large continuation of demographics in Western countries like the United States. Using Communication Accommodation Theory and studies from Postcolonialism to the study, the researcher hopes to develop a more concrete understanding as to why people will change their speaking behaviors when encountering different groups. Concepts of the behavior of Postcolonial mentality and changes in speaking behaviors will better create a more social construct as to why people act in certain ways towards different people

Documenting An Imperfect Past: Examining Tampa's Racial Integration Through Community, Film, And Remembrance Of Central Avenue, Travis R. Bell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the Civil Rights Movement in Tampa, Florida through documentary film to recognize an imperfect past and visually reconstruct Central Avenue as a physical and Thirdspace site of remembrance located at an intersection of race and community. Motivated by an ethnographic approach and through community engagement, Tampa Technique: Rise, Demise, and Remembrance of Central Avenue is a 54-minute film that explores Central Avenue’s rise to prominence through segregation, its physical and symbolic demise as a racialized site of communal space, and how it is remembered through collective and public memory in the location it once occupied. Documentary film …

Out Of The Core: Negotiating Everyday Difference And Belonging Among Racialized Youth In East-End Toronto Neighbourhoods, Anuppiriya Sriskandarajah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this study is to examine the way youth negotiate belonging in two priority neighbourhoods - Malvern and Chester Le in Toronto’s east-end. It asks how youth experience belonging and negotiate difference in ‘priority neighbourhoods’. In what ways does space shape belonging and difference? How do youth reproduce dominant scripts and rupture others in their quest for belonging in their communities? In contrast to the previous studies that are spatially decontextualized, I argue that neighbourhoods are the very sites where youth negotiate differences and connections as they engage with peers, families, friends and residents. The importance of space …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Perceptions Of Asian American And Female Leadership Candidates: The Impact Of Descriptive And Prescriptive Stereotyping, Jane I. Lim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although Asian Americans and women tend to be relatively well represented in professional roles, they continue to be underrepresented in executive-level leadership positions. This paper examined a combination of factors believed to contribute to the shortage of Asian American and female leaders in organizations – in particular, descriptive and prescriptive stereotyping. Thus, the current study examined how participants responded to an Asian American or White, male or female applicant being considered for a leadership role. All targets were qualified, but varied on levels of warmth and/or dominance. Overall, it was hypothesized that the Asian American and female candidates behaving counterstereotypically …

The End Of Aids: Gender, Race And Class Politics In New York's Campaign To End The Epidemic, Lauren Suchman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since its official discovery in 1981, the story of HIV/AIDS has been a story of inequality. Not only has the virus spread more easily among those marginalized due to their gender, race, or class, but AIDS activism itself has tended to elevate the voices and needs of the more powerful over those with less privilege. While we might point to 1981, when the CDC issued its first official report on HIV, as the official “beginning” of HIV/AIDS, where and how does the story end? This dissertation examines one attempt to bring the story to a close: New York State’s “Ending …

Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that white women played crucial roles in the economic, political, and cultural circuits that linked the United States and Cuba, and the hemisphere broadly, during the nineteenth century. It inserts white women into a historical account of U.S. imperialism by analyzing the literary works of a number of American women who traveled to or simply fantasized about Cuba during this period of intense and widespread interest in the island. It identifies white women not just as providing the symbolic rationale for Cuban annexation or intervention – the preservation of their chastity being a common justification for the …

Mapping The Self: Reconciling Identity Through An Expansion Of The American Road Genre, Tinesha K. Mix

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the American road genre. I argue that in addition to the automobile and the highway, a discussion of trains, boats, and walkers and their alternative roads must also be included in the genre. Each method of transportation expands the genre by adding new themes and ideas. Hobos and tramps can take to the road in search of community in order to discover more about themselves; some boatmen can use America’s racial history to discover themselves; walkers can go through a state of liminality in order to discover their internal selves. When these travelers complete their journeys, many …

Searching For Color In Black & White: Epistemic Closure, The Rit Archives, And The Colonial Roots Of White Invisibility, Andrew James

Theses

When examining an image, a viewer often focuses on what they see and less often on what they are able to see. Nowhere is this as true, and as problematic, as it is with the visual representation of persons of African descent. This study describes how problematic photographic representation was used as a powerful semiotic tool in the Victorian age conquest of the other, was exported to early Hollywood (creating a lucrative hate-based industry), and was then pushed back into the cultural recesses, settling finally into systemic forms of modern oppression, empowered by the invisibility of whiteness. Images from the …

By Degree: A History Of Heat In The Subtropical American South, Jason Hauser

Theses and Dissertations

Heat has a history, both because temperatures changed and the way humans understand and experience those temperatures changed. This dissertation excavates that history by examining how southern heat—heat considered distinct to the subtropical American South—affected the social, economic, and political development of the United States. This dissertation argues that southern heat proved consequential for the nation as both a physical force and human construct, and that only by keeping the materiality of relatively high temperatures in conversation with the idea of heat does a full history of southern heat emerge. By looking at how humans interacted with southern heat, both …

Harriet Jacobs And Toni Morrison: A Tradition Of Narrative Resistance, Allyson L. Molloy

Theses and Dissertations

This article considers historical constructions of power and the narrative as a mode of resistance. Working in different centuries, under extremely disparate circumstances, Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Toni Morrison in her novel The Bluest Eye, utilize specific narrative strategies to challenge and question institutionalized power which is evidenced through their deliberate employment of narrative strategies not only to challenge the institution of slavery or the hegemonic ideal, but also to question the racial and gender oppression systemic to those institutions of power.

An Impossible Direction: Newspapers, Race, And Politics In Reconstruction New Orleans, Nicholas F. Chrastil

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines the racial ideologies of four newspapers in New Orleans at the beginning and end of Radical Reconstruction: the Daily Picayune, the New Orleans Republican, the New Orleans Tribune, and the Weekly Louisianian. It explores how each paper understood the issues of racial equality, integration, suffrage, and black humanity; it examines the specific language and rhetoric each paper used to advocate for their positions; and it asks how those positions changed from the beginning to the end of Reconstruction. The study finds that the two white-owned papers, the Picayune and the Republican, while political opponents, both viewed …

A Multi-Level Discourse Analysis Of African American, Middle School Girls? Science Identity Development, Katherine Wade

Middle and Secondary Education Dissertations

This research argues that the lack of African American women in science careers is the result of a nuanced and complicated process and can only be adequately addressed through consideration of multiple levels of discourse. Specifically, a better understanding of macro level discourses that are present in and circulated through schools and work to position African American girls in ways that are outside of science learning is necessary. This research used a critical ethnographic approach to explore the science experiences of African American middle school girls. Data were collected on the macro (school wide), meso (classroom and after school program), …