Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Performance art, with its origins in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, has long been a political, politicized, and transgressive form of art, posing challenges to art world institutions, political and social norms, and the nature of art itself through practitioners’ unconventional uses of the body, space, and audience/viewer participation. Much of the power of performed art comes from its performative and transitory nature: it does not simply express, represent, or communicate information. Rather, performative art forms such as installation or performance are productive of political aesthetics. Art may not necessarily intervene directly with political, legal, and legislative decisions or acts, but …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

An Examination Of The Relationship Between Ethnic Identity Development, Cognitive Complexity, Differentiation Of Self, And Reports Of Racial And Ethnic Microaggressions, Deshae C. Gatti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although individuals may not engage in racism consciously due to social undesirability, they may have biases that manifest in more subtle and unconscious ways. Research has found that people of color experiencing different racial and ethnic microaggressions in their everyday lives are subject to pervasive and negative impacts on their mental health, though little is known about the influence of one’s ethnic identity formation, affective processes, and cognitive processes. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the degree to which ethnic identity development, cognitive complexity, and differentiation of self were associated reported experiences of microaggressions. The analysis indicated that …

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.

The Impact Of Supportive Parenting On Career Confidence Of Young Adults, Salma Ettefagh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Despite freedoms for women in modern economies, there remains a large disparity between female graduation rates and women achieving high-ranking positions in the business world. Confidence may be one factor why women are underrepresented in the executive class.This

exploratory research investigated if supportive parenting has an effect on self-reported career confidence among undergraduates. A quantitative ANOVA analysis found that instrumental support factors (for example, money and tuition) overall were significant in predicting performance-based confidence, particularly for males. However, qualitative results showed that supportive parenting and confidence are not always correlated.

Exploring The Caregiver-Child Relationship In Institutional Care Facilities In South Sudan, Jennifer Joy Telfer

MSU Graduate Theses

Institutional care for children separated from parents is expanding in Africa, but little research exists on caregiving at these institutions. This study explores the caregiver-child relationship in two residential institutions in South Sudan by investigating how caregivers experience their role and how children experience their lives in the institution. Semi- structured interviews assessed 14 caregivers’ backgrounds, parenting experience, attitudes, education, and motivations. The Orphans and Vulnerable Children Wellbeing Tool (OWT) assessed 98 adolescent residents, who also gave feedback about their answers. Caregivers employ parenting styles used by their parents and report treating non-relative children the same as biological children. Children …

The Divinity Of Crime: How Spirituality Can Strengthen The Resilience Of Criminal Organizations, David R. Vegvari

Student Theses

This thesis conducts a systematic analysis of open source data that discusses ideational factors of resilience in criminal organizations. It does this by looking at the role of spirituality – referred to as an individual’s moral or ethical codes influenced by cultural, ethnic, and religious values – and its effects on an organization’s durability, impenetrability, and adaptability. To understand spirituality as a factor of resilience in criminal organizations, it is delineated into four Dimensions of Spiritual Influence (DoSI). They are (1) trust, (2) spiritual neutralization, (3) strategic arenas, and (4) the logistical use of spiritual institutions. In order to analyze …

"Don't Be Such A Girl, I'M Only Joking!" Post-Alternative Comedy, British Panel Shows, And Masculine Spaces, Lindsay Anne Weber

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the gender disparity in British panel shows. In February 2014 the BBC’s Director of Television enforced a quota stating panel shows needed to include one woman per episode. This quota did not fully address the ways in which the gender imbalance was created. This thesis argues that the gender imbalance stems from post-feminist sensibilities and masculine-centric trends in British comedy and culture. This work demonstrates this through a discourse analysis of the opinions expressed about panel shows by the British popular press and media personalities from 2002 to 2017. The discourse analysis exposes patterns where British producers …

And They Entered As Ladies: When Race, Class And Black Femininity Clashed At Central High School, Misti Nicole Harper

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“And They Entered as Ladies: When Race, Class and Black Femininity Clashed at Central High School,” explores the intersectionality of race, gender and class status as middle-class black women led the integration movement and were the focal point of white backlash during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School crisis. Six of the nine black students chosen to integrate Central High School were carefully selected girls from middle-class homes, whose mothers and female family members played active parts in keeping their daughters enrolled at Central, while Daisy Gatson Bates orchestrated the integration of the capital’s school system. Nevertheless, these women …

Coming Out And Losing Out: Gay Men In Emerging Adulthood And Family Support, Joshua Cafferty

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis utilizes interviews completed on twenty homosexual, cisgender men who are in emerging adulthood to gain a better understanding of the ways in which family support functions, and can change at this lifestage. Unlike much of the previous research, this qualitative study argues that family support is not a question of simple acceptance or rejection, but is instead a complex combination of multiple forms of support, that can be lost or sustained for a multitude of reasons. Emerging adulthood is applied to show the benefits of family support during this life-stage, as well as to show the complexity of …

Contexts Of Reception And Constructions Of Islam: Second Generation Muslim Immigrants In Post-9/11 America, Shahriyar Smith

Dissertations and Theses

The World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 fundamentally transformed the context of reception for Muslim immigrants in the U.S., shifting it from neutral to negative while also brightening previously blurred boundaries between established residents and the Muslim minority. This study explores how second-generation Muslim immigrants have experienced and reacted to post-9/11 contexts of reception. It is based on an analysis of ten semi-structured in-depth interviews that were conducted throughout the Portland Metropolitan Area from January to April of 2016. It finds experiences of discrimination to be primarily affected by two factors: public institutions and gender. It also finds, …

Music And Race In The American West, William Steven Schneider

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the complexities of race relations in the nineteenth century American West. The groups considered here are African Americans, Anglo Americans, Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. In recent decades historians of the West have begun to tell the narratives of racial minorities. This study adopts the aims of these scholars through a new lens--music. Ultimately, this thesis argues that historians can use music, both individual songs and broader conceptions about music, to understand the complex and contradictory race relations of the nineteenth century west.

Proceeding thematically, the first chapter explores the ways Anglo Americans used music to …

Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, And Power In San Francisco And Its Hinterlands, 1846-1915, Darren A. Raspa

History ETDs

“Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, and Power in San Francisco and its Hinterlands, 1846–1915” follows the history of San Francisco’s spectrum of formal and informal policing from the American takeover of California in 1846 during the U.S.–Mexico War to Police Commissioner Jesse B. Cook’s nationwide law enforcement advisory team tour in 1912 and San Francisco’s debut as the Jewel of a new American Pacific world during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. These six decades functioned as a unique period wherein a culture of popular justice and grassroots community peacekeeping were fostered. This policing environment was forged in …

Examining Forty Years Of The Social Organization Of Feminisms: Ethnography Of Two Women’S Bookstores In The Us South, Mary Catherine Whitlock

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the height of their popularity in the 1990s, there were 140 feminist bookstores in the US and Canada (Onosaka 2006). Today, in 2017, there are thirteen left. Feminist bookstores began opening in the 1970s promoting ideas about lesbian separatism, woman only spaces, and nurturing a feminist community. Although many functioned as for-profit stores, many also operated community centers and non-profit organizations. Feminist bookstores provide an excellent site for scholars view decades of social movement organizing merging theory, practice, activism, and academics. As a social movement organization, feminist bookstores as are the quintessential node of academia and activism. Of the …

Women’S Entrance Into The Fire Department: A Theory Of Collaboration And Crisis, Sarah Vee Moseley

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation builds on recent feminist rhetorical scholarship of women’s entrance into the workplace by considering women’s fire department contributions across the twentieth century, from ladies auxiliaries, to volunteer firefighting, to career firefighting, taking up the call to examine “larger histories of gender” to explore re/gendering in different times and places of professions, labor, and workspaces (Hallenback and Smith 201-202). Expanding Lindal Buchanan’s theory of collaboration by bringing in sociology research on crisis, I offer a framework for understanding gendering and women’s movement into and out of foreground fire department service: during the crisis of fire, if there are insufficient …

Behind The Curtain: Cultural Cultivation, Immigrant Outsiderness, And Normalized Racism Against Indian Families, Pangri G. Mehta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative dissertation uses an Indian dance studio based in the suburbs of a mid-sized Florida city as an entry point to examine how racism impacts the local upwardly mobile Asian Indian community. Utilizing two and a half years of ethnographic data collected at the studio as a Bollywood instructor, 24 in-depth interviews with Indian immigrant parents and their children, 12 self-portraits drawn by children during their interviews, and home visits with 13 families, this project examines the strategies of accommodation and resistance that Indian families use to construct a sense of home and belonging. Applying socialization, visual research methods, …

“Can You Believe They Think I’M Intimidating?” An Exploration Of Identity In Tall Women, Elizabeth Joy Fuller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the United States today, there is a dominant cultural narrative telling us that tallness is desirable and enjoyed by those who experience it. Much of the existing research on height correlates tallness with promotions, higher salaries, and general happiness. However, this research does not take into account the limitations of some of the previous research which tends to accept tall people’s vocabulary of motives at face value as the totality of their experience as a tall person. In particular, tall women tend to have much more to say about their lives as tall women than simply that it has …

Social Order And The Culture Of Corruption In India, Arunodhaya Jebamani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corruption is rampant in India and is prevalent in every sector of the Indian society. The purpose of this paper is to discuss selected cases to understand the widespread corruption that occurs in various sectors of the society such as academia, business, banking, law enforcement and other everyday services. This paper will address how the social order contributes to these corrupt practices, and tries to shed some light on how corrupt practices have been socially accepted and have become an unavoidable norm in many cases. The paper also studies the structures that exist and aide in augmenting corruption in India …

The Expansion Of The Mandarin Mind, Tyler Okney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will examine and contrast two periods of xenophobia and stagnation, late Qing dynasty China, and the PRC under Mao, with a genuine market place of ideas, Shanghai and the other foreign treaty ports in the period 1849 to 1949, and explain how this period of cosmopolitan ferment has had beneficial effects on China today. Countries that have shut themselves off from the outside world have frequently suffered first stagnation, and then decay. While this might appear a commonplace in the abstract, the application of this insight in the development of particular nations has been neither as thorough or …

Beyond Vulnerability: Refugee Women’S Leadership In Jordan, Widad Hassan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While both men and women are affected by conflicts and humanitarian crises, 80 percent of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons are women and children, indicating that women experience conflict and war differently. The emphasis on women’s vulnerability during conflicts and humanitarian crises leads to their exclusion from leadership roles and decision-making on humanitarian programs and issues that impact them. Though women experience numerous socio-cultural barriers to exercising leadership in humanitarian settings, they have taken on important roles in emergency response and in refugee camps. This paper traces the progress of UN and humanitarian agencies recognition and development of …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

La Humanización Del Otro Inmigrante En Tres Libros Álbum De España Y Estados Unidos, Kathryn K. Evans

Honors Theses

In both the United States and Spain both of which have higher rates of immigration than emigration the media and many government officials promote anti- immigrant sentiment as part of a nationalistic ideology. Nationalism which uses xenophobic rhetoric to unify and advance the citizens of one country at the expense of all others allows governments businesses other institutions and individuals to discriminate against "inferior" foreigners who are seen as a threat to national identity security and prosperity. The opposing ideology cosmopolitanism views all of humanity as one entity arguing that man-made borders between countries irrelevantly divide people who are in …

Monstrous Mothers: The Politics Of Forced Mothering, Gillian Henry

Honors Theses

Can a woman be a woman without being a mother? By studying the control of women's bodies around reproduction, my work elucidates the insistence on women becoming "good mothers" for society. Is the childless woman a monster? Analysis of the Medea trope identifies that the most monstrous woman of all is thought to be the woman who kills her children. And while white women fight for reproductive choice, women of color fight for reproductive freedom, as coercive policies such as forced sterilization deprive women of color as even being considered as potential mothers. Society's insistence on women fulfilling their destiny …

"We Poor Devils": The Interactions Shared Experiences And Differing Fates Of The Cheyenne Sioux Buffalo Soldiers And U.S. Army In A Post-Civil War America: 1865- 1890, Meghan Keegan

Honors Theses

As a real yet imagined place, the “American West” has a mythical aura surrounding it that hides a deeper reality of extreme violence and chaos. It is a place where great feats have been achieved and profound defeats have been suffered. The wars fought over control of the Great Plains lasted longer than any other armed conflict in United States history. From 1865 through 1890, the chaotic nature of seemingly unorganized warfare and the ensuing violence plagued the lives of those who, either willingly or not, took art. The two most recognizable and seemingly homogenous groups in this conflict were …

Modernizing A Podcast Media Organization Via Social And New Media Rebranding Methods, Randi A. Hair

Journalism

The following study and subsequent public relations campaign is intended to explore the difficulties, opportunities, caveats and all facets of transitioning a traditional travel media organization to new media. It unearths the pitfalls/barriers that naturally occur and aggregate over time when an organization or journalist (specifically “Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer” in this scenario) has not adapted nor altered their practices for changing common practices in the media industries. In this campaign, journalist Thomas Wilmer is seeking to increase his podcast audience and digital presence.

The research conducted for this study is two-fold. Firstly, the research demonstrates best practices …