Digital Commons Network^™

Expendable To Essential: Conceptualizing The Rhetorical Othering Of Frontline Workers, Sarah Sexton

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Examining Housing Experiences Among International Students At The University Of Tennessee, Knoxville (Utk), Rosemary Achentisa Ayelazuno

Masters Theses

As more students from across the world enrol in higher education to take advantage of the opportunities it offers, schools and universities are starting to address a problem that an increasing number of their students are experiencing, namely housing insecurity. With an increase in the number of students due to growing interest in higher education institutions, student housing has become a significant area of concern. More overseas graduate students are pursuing their degrees without regular access to their housing needs due to a lack of inexpensive and accessible housing, high tuition prices, and insufficient financial help. To better understand the …

Highlighting Teacher Voices: Discussions On Race And Racism In The Elementary Classroom, Carrie Lynn Buckner

Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout my career in education, I have observed that teachers are challenged by engaging in discussions involving race and racism. This study seeks to understand teachers’ feelings further when discussing race and racism in the elementary classroom by answering the research question: How do elementary teachers experience race and racism in their schools and classrooms?

This qualitative, critical narrative inquiry dissertation focused on three participant interviews with public-school elementary teachers in Tennessee. The data generated from these interviews informed narratives and were then analyzed through the lens of Critical Race Theory. This was followed by In Vivo and structural coding …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Dyslexia Risk, The Simple View Of Reading, And The Tests Of Dyslexia Probability Index, Virginia Marie Jacobs Mcclurg

Doctoral Dissertations

One hundred eighteen participants identified as having dyslexia were matched on grade, gender, race/ethnicity, SES, and geographic location with examinees from the standardization sample of the Tests of Dyslexia (TOD; Mather et al., in press) in order to determine the relationship between two theoretical operationalizations of dyslexia: the Simple View of Reading (SVR; D X C = R) and the Dyslexia Probability Index (DPI) from the TOD; in addition, the relative power of the SVR and DPI to predict dyslexia status was examined. Additional analyses were conducted on a larger, non-matched sample (n = 1475) to determine the extent to …

Defining Black Masculinities: Intersectional Analyses Of Gender, Race And Sexuality In Caribbean And Latin American Literature, 1955 To Present, Jerry Eugene Scruggs Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of my dissertation is to define and construct parameters for analyzing the Afro-descendant male experience in four specific texts: Mi compadre el General Sol [General Sun, My Brother] (1955), Adire y el tiempo roto [Adire and Broken Time] (1967), Sortilégio II: mistério negro de Zumbi redivivo [Sorcery 2: Black Mystery of Resurrected Zumbí] (1979), and Negro: Este color que me queda bonito [Black: This Color Looks Good on Me] (2013). Black masculinities are distinct and this study sets five parameters: 1) Sexual Prowess, 2) Contentious relationship with the White woman, 3) Violence and Toxic Masculinity, 4) Emotive Numbness, …

Exploring Memorable Message About Law Enforcement, Max Ray A. Davenport Jr

Masters Theses

Research demonstrates that Black Americans are placed at a higher risk for having negative interactions with law enforcement. As a result, Black American families may engage in racial ethnic socialization (RES) practices aimed at preparing Black youth for racialized experiences, reducing the psychological effects of racism, and perserving the lives of Black American citizens. Guided by the memorable messages framework, the present study examines memorable messages about law enforcement as recalled by Black American young adults. More specifically, this study examines the specific type(s) of memorable messages Black American young adults recall receiving about law enforcement from sources such as …

The Fragility Of White Masculinity: An Exploration Of The White, Heterosexual Male Fantasy Of Gender In Horror, Allison D. Clark

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Racial Disparities In Maternal Mortality In The United States: A Systematic Literature Review, Alexandria J. Lamie, Samantha F. Ehrlich

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Temembe And Sven: The Ethics Of Racist Mirth, Stephen Wilke

Masters Theses

You walk past a crowd of people at a bar, grouped around one person. He’s in the middle of telling a joke, the kind you wouldn’t tell your parents but is often told in the amenable company of close friends. You realize that the butt of the joke, the punchline, assumes that people of color are lazy and entitled. This is not an assumption you agree wit, but you find yourself with a feeling of mirth while scoffing at the comedian. His timing is well executed, and the turn of phrase is witty. The joke was racist, and yet emotionally …

The Evolution Of Defining Rape In The United States, Sophia Rhoades

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Group Threat And Racial Disparities In Police-Caused Killings, Ruben A. Ortiz

Doctoral Dissertations

Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate than whites and Asians, but whether racial discrimination accounts for these killings remains disputed. I contribute to this debate by assessing whether group threat theory is associated with the overall, and race-specific count of police-caused killings at the metropolitan and county level across the US. Furthermore, I assess whether there is evidence of racial bias in police-caused killings, and if county-level measures of threat are associated with measures of racial bias at the individual level. Using data from the Census Bureau, American Community Survey, The Washington …

“If You Could Ball You Were On The Court”: Race, Team, And Culture In High School Boys’ Basketball, Alexander Deeb

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a substantial body of research examining the experiences of Black collegiate student athletes at primarily White universities. Many studies, however, have privileged exploring the experiences of college athletes over high school athletes. The purpose of the current study was to explore the role of race in the context of high school boys’ basketball by investigating whether and how race manifests as part of team dynamics and culture. An additional purpose of the current study was to examine high school boys’ basketball players’ understandings of and experiences with race, particularly within the context of sport. Interpretive phenomenological interviews were …

Chocolate City Way Up South In Appalachia: Black Knoxville At The Intersection Of Race, Place, And Region, Enkeshi Thom El-Amin

Doctoral Dissertations

Popular perceptions of Appalachia depict a rural region populated by poor, "backward," uneducated whites. Despite a more than two-hundred-year black presence in Appalachia, the perceived racial homogeneity of the region and the scholarly discourse that downplay racial difference (c.f., Coleman 2001) create a story of Appalachia focused on poor (white) problems that ignore race. Through an ethnographic case study of Knoxville, this dissertation seeks to disrupt popular and scholarly conceptions of Appalachia by considering how scholars might research, recognize and think about race in the region not simply through the experiences of whites, but through an examination of the lives …

Studying The Effects Of Race On The Duration Of Child Mentoring Matches, Meredith Hawk

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Living The Change They Seek: Social Studies Teacher Educators Who Incorporate Race Into The Curriculum, Sara Beth Demoiny

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite the increasingly diverse K-12 study body within the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2014) and the numerous examples of racism and racial tension that continue to be exposed through news outlets and social media, race and racism remain at the periphery of social studies teacher education. Although social studies is a discipline whose main goal is citizenship education, race, which has been intertwined with citizenship through U.S. history, continues to be marginalized in social studies curriculum and instruction.

Grounded in critical race theory, I developed a study exploring the perspectives of 11 social studies teacher educators who …

The Effects Of Racialization On European American Stress In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Kimberly T. Wren

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores disparities in stress among European Americans (EA) and between EA and African Americans (AA) in racialized communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Comparisons among EA and between EA and AA are conducted to understand the biological consequences of racialization. Racialization is the process of assigning people to hierarchical categories for purposes of political, social, and economic discrimination. This dissertation investigates how racialization might have affected childhood stress using biocultural theory and facets of critical archaeology theory. Indicators of stress from skeletonized individuals in the William M. Bass Donated Skeletal Collection, Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection, and the Robert …

Color-Blind Stancetaking In Racialized Discourse, Abigail Christine Tobias-Lauerman

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I examine how language constructs and constrains racialized discourse in post-Jim Crow contemporary America. Drawing on rhetorical and sociolinguistic work set forth by Booth, Shotwell, Bonilla-Silva, Omi and Winant, and others, it is apparent that racial organization— and racial identities and categorization— in the US is reliant upon specific markers that signify racial meaning. Such markers are assimilated into wider, unconscious discourse through what Shotwell and Booth describe as seemingly inherent— yet ultimately constructed— matters of “common sense,” and are expressed through evaluative stance acts. I explore the origins and construction of these markers and the relationship …

Laughing At Ourselves: Music And Identity In Comedic Performance, Peter Trigg

Masters Theses

Standup comedy actively performs and engages with constructions of self and social identity, especially in terms of ethnic difference and the negotiation of American race relations. Musical comedy, wherein standup comedians perform song onstage, represents one facet of this expression that configures musical texts and expectations in the service of cultural observation and critique. Bo Burnham and Reggie Watts characterize two disparate approaches to the practice based on their aesthetic tastes, existential anxieties, and racial experiences. The two present their respective identities onstage in relation to a changing American political landscape of the early 21st century that has seen widespread …

Beyond Black And White: Visualizing Cultural Identity Amidst Racial Anxiety And Nativism In American Modernist Novels, Emily Moore Harrison

Masters Theses

Walter Benn Michaels’ Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism highlights that the search for identity is a mutual project of both nativism and Modernism and reveals how relevant racial identity is in American Modernism. While this is an important relationship in American Modernism, I argue that many recent studies following Michaels’ legacy of scholarship on race and nativism in modern American literature reduce individual authors’ projects, too often interpreting them all to have similar anxieties and desires for American racial identity and citing the presence of racial tropes as evidence of the authors’ own social and political arguments. Michaels set …

The Hunt For Lost Blood: Nazi Germanization Policy In Occupied Europe, Bradley Jared Nichols

Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the Second World War, the National Socialist regime enacted a wide-ranging campaign to enhance the German nation by assimilating conquered populations into its demographic structure. At the axis of this multifaceted enterprise stood the Re-Germanization Procedure, or WED – a special program designed to absorb “racially valuable” foreigners into the German body politic by sending them to live with host families in the very heart of the Third Reich. The following dissertation provides the first ever study of the Re-Germanization Procedure and examines the momentous influence this initiative exerted over Nazi policy-making in occupied Europe. It is a story …

¿Qué Es La Patria?: Peruvian National Identity And José María Arguedas, Sydney S. Welch

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Deficit Discourse, Literate Lives: Success Narratives Of Black Youth, Ann Marie Bennett

Doctoral Dissertations

The current dialogue surrounding Black youth portrays these youth as “thugs” who come from “broken” families and “apathetic” communities. Even some educational discourses portray Black youth as “at-risk” students who lack the resources necessary to achieve in school. These dialogues traffic in deficit language without paying attention to the successes found in the Black community. The purpose of this study was to utilize an anti-deficit perspective to capture the stories of how urban Black children in a mid-sized Southeastern city are achieving positive literacy and academic outcomes in the upper elementary and middle grades. I sought to understand how Black …

Recreando La Imagen Literaria De La Mujer Afrodescendiente En Las Narrativas Femeninas Afrocubanas Y Afrobrasileñas Contemporáneas., Luciana Da Trindades Prestes

Doctoral Dissertations

In the XIX century, Brazil and Cuba created the abolitionist novels whose main theme emphasized black women as their main literary figure. Even though these novels aimed to denounce and depict the atrocities of the modern slavery system, the discourse of this literary corpus portrayed women of African descent under a phallocentric and racist ideology. Consequently, their image carried many negative stereotypes that have relegated them to literary and sociocultural invisibility. With this in mind, the dissertation “Recreando la imagen literaria de la mujer afrodescendiente en las narrativas femeninas afrocubanas y afrobrasileñas contemporáneas” explores how through the stimulus of a …

“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 …

Internalized Oppression, Restricted Affection, And Psychological Distress In Asian And Latino Men Who Have Sex With Men, Nicholas S. Bishop

Masters Theses

Research on internalized oppression in intersecting identities remains vitally important for the mental health of minority individuals. This study investigates the mediating effect of restriction of affectionate behavior on the relationship between multiple oppressions (i.e, internalized racism, internalized heterosexism, and internalized sexism) and psychological distress in 172 Asian (n = 57) and Latino (n = 115) men who have sex with men. Data were collected using online snowball sampling via Facebook and listservs. Findings revealed that internalized racism and internalized heterosexism were related to psychological distress, and that restrictive affectionate behaviors with other men fully mediated these relationships. That is, …

Drawing The Primetime Color Line: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Interracial Marriages In Television Sitcoms, Jodi Lynn Rightler-Mcdaniels

Doctoral Dissertations

Changes throughout history, particularly those surrounding race relations in the U.S., frequently have a direct effect on personal social experience and the current structure of society. Although public discourse often emphasizes the rhetoric of racial progression, subtle racism abounds – both in society and in media – masked under the façade of equality. This is especially true when examining race relations between Blacks and Whites, particularly those involved in intimate heterosexual interracial relationships, as they have traditionally been viewed as negative, dangerous, and threatening to the status quo.

Television representations are often socially and culturally rooted with real issues, hence …

Trends In Children's Literature And The Social Implications, Rebecca A. Johnson

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Language, Race, And Body Rhetorics: Relationships Of Hegemony In Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, Kathryn E. Peck

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Who Supports Labor? The Intersection Of Race And Skill In Union Campaigns, Zachary Joseph Mckenney

Masters Theses

In the past half century, there has been an unprecedented decline in labor union membership, organizing ability, political effectiveness and strike activity in the United States. As a result, the ability of labor unions to influence the debate on labor standards and social reforms has experienced a significant decline. Using a mixed method approach, this research explores differences in attitudes and orientations towards labor unions across racial groups in the United States as well as organizational strategies and capacities of a labor union in a right-to-work state. Although African Americans and Latinos have been discriminated against at the hands of …

Racial Discrimination In Health Care Among African Americans In America, Rachel Ann Davis

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.