Digital Commons Network^™

The Crisis Of Identity In Post-Revolutionary Cuban Film: A Sociological Analysis Of Strawberry And Chocolate, Andrew Zachary Shultz

Kaleidoscope

This paper analyzes Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío´s Strawberry and Chocolate (1993) from the sociological perspective of film as a cultural text informed by the political, historical, and social world in which it is produced. A symbolic interactionist/cultural studies model is used as a guide for the interpretive and qualitative methods utilized in approaching the film. Of particular interest to the sociological analysis of the film is the changing political context of the Cuban Revolution during the “special period” of the early 1990s, the use of stereotypes in the characterization of the actors, and finally its representation of …

Introduction To Volume Six: An Identity Rebus, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Gender Identityand Stereotype Awareness On Sexual Negotiations Strategies For Women, Or'shaundra Tre'nay Benson

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

The consequences of unsafe heterosexual sexual behaviors including unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections continue to create significant public health problems in the United States. Although research has demonstrated that young adults in general have higher rates of sexually transmitted infections compared to other age groups, young women are especially vulnerable to the ill-effects of unsafe sexual practices, as they must contend with the physicality of an unplanned pregnancy and larger incidences of asymptotic infection transmissions. However, missing from the research and discourse regarding what specific factors may be contributing to high rates of risky behaviors in heterosexual women is …

The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the …

"Go Back To Your Loom Dad": Weaving Nostos In The Twenty-First Century, Corinne Ondine Pache

Corinne Pache

For centuries writers and artists have adapted and transformed Homer's Odyssey in endlessly inventive and surprising ways. Yet the disposition of genders in the poem is seldom altered from its ancient pattern: a man leaves, a woman stays at home and waits until he returns. In her 2007 play, Current Nobody, Melissa Gibson departs from this conventional fidelity to the ancient narrative by rewriting the Odyssey as a twenty-first century family story with a wandering wife and a husband who is left behind. In Gibson's playful tragicomedy, Pen, a female war photographer, leaves her husband, Od, and daughter Tel …

In The Thick Of National Consciousness: Difference And The Critique Of Identity In Elias Khoury’S Little Mountain And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Karim Abuawad

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

How should the relationship between literary texts and nationalism be explained? What is the difference between texts that resist nationalism’s logic aesthetically and those that do so discursively? The answers to these questions form the core of this study whose central inquiry focuses on how the internal operations of fictional narrative handle the persistent depositories of national culture represented by a visceral bond between individual and nation. Most crucially, the potential of unraveling this resilient bond is located in the narrative’s aesthetic operations, not in its discursive pronouncements, irrespective of how critical such pronouncements may be.

Rather than promoting …

Hmong Culture Club As A Place Of Belonging: The Cultivation Of Hmong Students’ Cultural And Political Identities, Bic Ngo

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

In this article, I draw on a year-long ethnographic study of an after school “Hmong Culture Club” to illuminate the ways in which it provides students with a place of belonging. I reveal the ways in which Hmong students in this setting take up ideologies of multiculturalism in response to a sense of the “loss” of Hmong culture. I explore the ways in which the Hmong Club provided Hmong students with a place to belong that simultaneously cultivated their cultural and political identities. Ultimately, I suggest that school extracurricular cultural clubs may provide insights to subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999) as …

Tangled Hair: Uncertain Fluid Identity, Niloufar Salimi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier consists of three chapters. Chapter one is an extended artist statement within which I discuss a very particular notion of identity that acknowledges its fluidity and ever-shifting qualities. Further in this chapter, I address my studio practice processes and its overall development, as well as making a detailed comparison with Roni Horn’s drawings and also Mona Hatoum’s artwork. Chapter two is a documentation of selected works that I have made in the studio during my two-year candidacy at Western University. Each work is accompanied by a brief description. Chapter three is a case study on Shirin Neshat’s photography …

Writing Oneself As A Writer: Intellectual Identity And Moral Agency In Contemporary Chinese Novels, Fang-Yu Li

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The discussion of “identity” in current scholarship on modern Chinese literature is mostly centered on the political dynamics between national, cultural, and gender identity. Contemporary Chinese language novels from late 1990s to the present, however, seem to show a sense of confusion and disorientation towards one’s existence in the rapidly changing society. Among the works that address individual’s existential crisis, self-reflexive novels are particularly intriguing as they reveal a strong sense of self-doubt on part of the author, and in particular, towards one’s role as a writer in contemporary society. This dissertation investigates this sense of self-doubt by examining closely …

Branding A Professional American Football Franchise, John J. Ragone Jr.

Theses

The original intent of my thesis was to create a professional-level team identity that a community can embrace and emotionally bond with by utilizing contemporary design trends. As I researched the visual aspects of the brand strategy, it became apparent that current trends toward multiplicity of uniform designs could become a threat to an organization’s brand equity.

A corporate identity is the strategically engineered “personality” of an organization created to facilitate business objectives. How that identity is perceived and accepted supports relationship building between an organization and its audience or customers. Brand equity is developed through ease of recognition and …

Embattled Communities: Voluntary Action And Identity In Australia, Canada, And New Zealand, 1914-1918, Steve Marti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines voluntary mobilization during the First World War to understand why communities on the social and geographical periphery of the British Empire mobilized themselves so enthusiastically to support a distant war, fought for adistant empire. Lacking a strong state apparatus or a military-industrial complex, the governments of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand relied on voluntary contributions to sustain their war efforts. Community-based voluntary societies knitted socks, raised funds to purchase military equipment, and formed contingents of soldiers. By examining the selective mobilization of voluntary participation, this study will understand how different communities negotiated social and spatial boundaries as …

Food And Nationalism In An Independent Ghana, Brandi Miller

History Theses

In 1957 Ghana became the first nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve independence from a European colonial power. During this time Kwame Nkrumah’s government concerned itself with the creation of a national identity that would speak to the new African Personality and Nkrumah’s Pan-African goals. In Nkrumah’s national project, regional cultural and economic contributions were at times subsumed. The absence of an identifiable national cuisine is a lens into ethnic conflict generated in part by the crafting of the national identity. I argue that in general the absence of a national cuisine represents the strength of the desire to maintain …

Finding A Happier Ending: The Role Of Narrative In Post Traumatic Meaning-Making, Donna Henson

Donna Henson

This chapter explores the intersections of meaning-making, the narrative construction of identity, and story-telling as implicated in the experience of post traumatic recovery. Based on the view of human-beings as storytellers, the intent here is to explicate the idea that victim recovery, that living post-victimhood, may be best achieved through the recognition that recovery is both outcome and process. Toward this end, the chapter presents a critical review of literature drawn primarily from the fields of psychology and communication, centering on contributions across the domains of post traumatic growth and narrative. Despite the unavoidable conclusion that there is no neat …

Identity Construction In The Margins:A Case Study Involving Non-Conforming Youth, Alice M. Harnischfeger

The Qualitative Report

This qualitative instrumental case study explores how student members of an alternative educational program in a successful public middle school constructed identity, and how they interpreted their schooling experiences in relation to hegemonic educational practices. It draws on sociocultural and postmodern theories to focus on these youths’ identities and on their perspectives of self and school practices. Its multiple methods collected data through alternative and mainstream classroom observations, focus group sessions, semi-structured individual interviews with students, parents, and school professionals, and an analysis of school documents. The youth participants of this study held multiply-constructed identities, and actively resisted and affirmed …

A Discourse Analysis Of Beginning English Teachers' Identity Development, Joshua Peter Johnston

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation was a discourse analysis of how beginning English teachers’ talk contributes to the development of their teacher identities. The study drew on the epistemological and ontological assumptions of discursive psychology, and as such it used methods consistent with discursive psychology and conversation analysis. The data for the study were comprised of twenty-one audio-recorded meetings of eight student teachers in a year-long internship and their field supervisor, who was also the researcher. Orienting to the construct of identity as socially negotiated, unstable, and multiple, the study sought to identify specific discursive strategies that beginning English teacher’s employ to negotiate …

Contested Notions Of Irishness: Social Integration And The Multiple Intersections Of Ethno-Racial, Religious, And National Identities In Dublin, Ireland, Neil Conner

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation evaluates the contested notions of identity (e.g. ethno-racial, religious, and national) and the growing tensions between native-born Irish citizens and recently arrived immigrants living in the Republic of Ireland. Examining these political and cultural intersections broadens our geographic understandings by contributing to larger geographic literatures consisting of: the geographies of inclusion and exclusion; collective identity construction; sense of belonging; community – both real and imagined; small-scale human territoriality; (social) integration; religiosity; and, of course, notions of Irishness. Despite the significance of these geographic issues in contemporary society, there exists a considerable lacuna within the discipline of Geography as …

The Development Of Language And Identity: A Sociocultural Study Of Five International Graduate Students Living In The U.S., Alexandra Dema

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this sociocultural study was to analyze the longitudinal process of identity development of international graduate students as their lives unfolded across time and experience in the second languaculture. Furthermore, it was aimed at exploring what role is attributed to second language in this process. The study relied on the mainstream sociocultural perspectives on individual development that originated from Vygotsky’s work and were further elaborated by his followers to address the issues of identity and language development of second language learners. As part of such perspectives, it integrated the unit of perezhivanie into the examination of individual experiences …

“I Guess Someone Forgot To Ask Us If We Wanted To Be America’S Diversity Mascots”: The Identity Journey Of Transracial, Transnational, Korean Adoptees, Molly Jin Ah Rigell

Masters Theses

Korean, transracial, international adoptees (TRIAs) have been given an opportunity to tell their stories in the anthologies Seeds of a Silent Tree, Voices from Another Place, and More Voices. Through an examination of twelve stories from these three anthologies, I pinpoint issues that are faced by TRIAs who were raised in white families, and the significance these issues hold. I also discuss the unique perspectives displayed in each anthology, and the overall view of racial identity that can be observed through the study of a unique community. Through their status as in-between races and cultures, Korean, transracial, international adoptees can …

Overcoming The Loss Of Nonverbal Cues Encountered By The Adventitiously Blind: Reconstructing Relationships And Identity, Vernon Floyd Humphrey

Dissertations

In this study, couples shared their experiences adjusting to one of the members loss of sight. Through interviews, their narratives expressed their values, actions, inactions, successes, failures, needs, obstacles, and feelings. Participants explained their standpoint/perspective about vision loss, when it happened, how it affected them, how they reacted and responded, through hindsight how they thought they should have responded, and how they reconstructed a shared interpersonal relationship. Narratives about situations and events after the loss of sight revealed descriptions of their relationships and interactions with each other and other people in their circle. Through constant comparative analysis the individual narratives …

Presentation Of Bicultural Identity In Hispanic Children’S Literature, Elena B. Lofton

Honors Theses

Children of all backgrounds can use literature as a means to understand the world in which they live. Therefore, it is important that children’s books represent diverse cultures and experiences. This study analyzed Hispanic children’s literature published in the U.S. that contained child characters with bicultural Hispanic-American identities. The aim of this study was to determine how the linguistic and literary elements in five books, which contained bilingual Spanish-English interwoven text, combined to present a bicultural identity and lifestyle in the United States today. The literary elements analyzed included themes, character portrayal, the roles of family and the elderly, and …

Impact Of Athletic Identity And Emotional Competence On Athletes’ Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help, Garett V. Weatherhead

Dissertations

Athletes have been found to have more negative attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help than non-athletes (Watson, 2005) despite experiencing comparable amounts of mental illness (Markser, 2011). The purpose of the present study was to examine factors that are associated with athletes’ help-seeking attitudes, including athletic identity and emotional competence. A sample of 144 college student-athletes from a small, private Midwestern college in the United States participated in the study. The athletes competed at the NCAA Division III level. Participants were asked to complete the following measures: Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (Brewer, Van Raalte, & Linder, 1993), Attitudes Toward Seeking …

Sounding Identity: Soundscapes, Music, And Technoculture In The Chinese Diaspora Of Panama, Corey Michael Blake

Masters Theses

Present in Panama since the 19^th century, the Chinese diaspora in Panama City, Panama represents an empowered community of individuals who identify as both Chinese and Panamanian. These Chinese Panamanian hybrid identities emerge within sonic environments through an engagement with transnational media and digital technologies, notably within retail stores. Specifically, music surfaces as an especially important sonic marker of the Chinese Panamanian hybridity. Within the mall of the Panamanian Chinatown of El Dorado, an interesting mixture of both Chinese and Latin American popular music genres sounds throughout the various stores. This mixture of music genres demonstrates Chinese Panamanian agency …

The Sense Of Loss In Jean Rhy’S Voyage In The Dark: The Absence Of Mother And Imagined Black Identity, Zita Rarastesa

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

The sense of loss of a mother leads Anna Morgan to her imagined black identity. Being a Creole from Dominica, Morgan is alienated both in her home country and in London. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness substantiates Morgan’s sense of alienation. The racial issue here is not only socially constructed, but it is also personally constructed, as Morgan does not consider England as her homeland although she is as white as English people. people. The character is struggling from identity conflict, as she internalizes the impact of the British colonialization to the black people in Dominica. She feels more …

Why Diversity Matters: A Roundtable Discussion On Racial And Ethnic Diversity In Librarianship, Juleah Swanson, Ione Damasco, Isabel Gonzalez-Smith, Dracine Hodges, Todd Honma, Azusa Tanaka

Ione Damasco

After presenting together at ACRL 2015 to share their research on race, identity, and diversity in academic librarianship, the authors resumed the conversation, which resulted in this article. Here, they discuss why diversity really matters to academic libraries, librarians, and the profession, and where to go from here. They conclude the article with a series of questions for readers to consider, share, and discuss among colleagues to continue and advance the conversation on diversity in libraries.

Why Diversity Matters: A Roundtable Discussion On Racial And Ethnic Diversity In Librarianship, Juleah Swanson, Ione Damasco, Isabel Gonzalez-Smith, Dracine Hodges, Todd Honma, Azusa Tanaka

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

After presenting together at ACRL 2015 to share their research on race, identity, and diversity in academic librarianship, the authors resumed the conversation, which resulted in this article. Here, they discuss why diversity really matters to academic libraries, librarians, and the profession, and where to go from here. They conclude the article with a series of questions for readers to consider, share, and discuss among colleagues to continue and advance the conversation on diversity in libraries.

Transnationalism, Mobility And Identity: The Making Of Place In Flushing, New York City, Shaolu Yu

Doctoral Dissertations

'Archival abstract submitted'

Review Of M. Lee, Body, Dress, And Identity In Ancient Greece, Laura Gawlinski

Classical Studies: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Infants' Agent Individuation: It's What's On The Inside That Counts, Hernando Taborda

Masters Theses

Developmental studies have revealed that preschool-aged children believe that an agent’s internal properties are more important than its external properties for determining its identity over time. The current study examined the developmental origins of this understanding using a manual-search individuation task with 13-month-old infants. Subjects observed semi-transparent objects that looked and behaved like animate agents placed into box that they could reach but not see into. Across trials infants observed objects with either the same- or different-colored insides placed into the box. We found that infants used internal property differences more than external property differences to determine how many agents …

Identity: Cultural Knowledge--Self-Knowledge. Disclosure Interviews Linda Alcoff, Ann Ciasullo, Christine Metzo, Jeffery Nicholas

Jeffery Nicholas

No abstract provided.

From Socialist To Post-Socialist Cities: Narrating The Nation Through Urban Space, Joshua Hagen, Alexander Diener

Joshua Hagen

The development of post-socialist cities has emerged as a major field of study among critical theorists from across the social sciences. Originally constructed under the dictates of central planners and designed to serve the demands of command economies, post-socialist urban centers currently develop at the nexus of varied and often competing economic, cultural, and political forces. Among these, nationalist aspirations, previously simmering beneath the official rhetoric of communist fraternity and veneer of architectural conformity, have emerged as dominant factors shaping the urban landscape. This article examines patterns, processes, and practices concerning the cultural politics of architecture, urban planning, and identity …