Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Effects Of Internet Exclusion On The City Of Detroit, Alexander G. Haddad

Honors College Theses

Introduction

The rise of Information Technology (IT) in the past 50 years has revolutionized many areas of human life and activity. Information Technology’s most obvious areas of impact are often those where they add a great and obvious value to a particular industry, and it is extremely difficult to find some aspect of life that has not changed since its inception. Some examples include the digitization of stock trading, the automation of factories and life-saving operations, and the enhanced communication and collaboration across public education, enterprise activity, and international affairs. However, what is often overlooked and understudied are the secondary …

Envisioning The City Of The Future: Responses To Deindustrialization, Segregation, And The Urban Crisis In Postwar Detroit, 1950-1970, Andrew Hnatow

Wayne State University Dissertations

Following Second World War, cities in the United States appeared to be in trouble. The urban crisis revolved around poverty, unemployment, segregation and discrimination, suburbanization, and deindustrialization. Using metropolitan Detroit as a case-study, this dissertation examines responses by local residents, urban planners, and federal policy-makers to these changes. Local community and union members centered around the Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn rallied against industrial decentralization in the early 1950s. Community members in Grosse Pointe practiced systematic housing segregation, while other members of the community organized a Human Relations Council to support integration and interracial understanding. Constantinos Doxiadis led a …

Constitutive Memories Of City Space: Rhetorics Of Civil Rights Memory In Detroit’S Urban Landscape, Scott Mitchell

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines public memories of civil rights injustice and resistance as constitutive rhetorics of urban culture and spatiality for the city of Detroit. By studying the city of Detroit as it navigates an ongoing period of dramatic change and redevelopment, this study demonstrates how material manifestations of memory become the constitutive forces that define what many describe as “Detroit’s heart and soul.” This project illustrates the embedded cultural logics produced from sites of public memory, thereby arguing city spaces as locations bound to their legacies and beholden to material and symbolic consequences of their past. This dissertation proceeds through …

A Communal Bridge: The Detroit Jewish News, The Detroit Jewish Welfare Federation And The Detroit Jewish Community In 1942, Alan Mark Hurvitz

Wayne State University Theses

While many historians writing about Jews in America focus on dissonance and disorganization during the 1940s among national Jewish leadership and national Jewish organizations which accounts (partially) for their inability to effectively advocate for European Jewry, Zionism, and other Jewish causes, this was not necessarily true on a local level. Jews in Detroit were effective in raising funds for these causes, supporting institutional infrastructure, battling anti-Semitism, and participating in the war effort. An important part of that was a unique partnership entered into between the nascent Detroit Jewish News and the established Detroit Jewish Federation, the most important part of …

Accumulating Risk: Environmental Justice And The History Of Capitalism In Detroit, 1880-2015, Josiah John Rector

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an environmental history of Detroit, Michigan from the 19th century to the present. Recent scholarship on the history of capitalism has largely ignored the problem of environmental inequality, and the negative externalities of economic growth. In contrast, studies of the environmental justice movement have richly documented race, class, and gender inequalities in environmental risk exposure. However, they have neglected the relationship between the development of the environmental justice movement and the restructuring of American capitalism since the 1970s, including deindustrialization and the shift to neoliberalism. Bringing these fields together, this dissertation connects Detroit’s long-term economic transformation to …

Mass Incarceration In Detroit: A Historical Narrative, Labreonna \. Bland

Wayne State University Theses

Mass incarceration has pervaded throughout the country and in its wake, the United States is looked to as the country that imprisons the largest percentage of its population than any other place in the world. The phenomenon of mass incarceration continues to be deconstructed by scholars in an attempt to turn the tide and understand the various intricacies that lie at the center of our carceral state. This paper attempts to explore those intricacies on a local level by looking at Detroit, Michigan. The city of Detroit has been constantly restructured economically, politically, racially, and socially throughout the years as …

Sex, Labor, And The American Way: Detroit Aesthetic In Mid-Twentieth-Century Literature, Jenna F. Gerds

Wayne State University Dissertations

The essay analyzes Sinclair Lewis short fiction in If I Were Boss, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. The primary literature is juxtaposed with a study of visual texts and historic research with a locational and thematic basis in Detroit. Ford Times and early automobile advertisements, Diego Rivera's mural Detroit Industry, photographs of the Sojourner Truth housing project riots, and the accounts of gay union workers comprise a framework for each of the central texts. Detroit aesthetic is gritty, realist, …

Growing 'Homeplace' In Critical Service-Learning: An Urban Womanist Pedagogy, Vanessa Lynn Marr

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores the role of critical service-learning from the perspective of urban community members. Specifically, it examines the counternarratives produced by Black women community gardeners who engage in academic service-learning with postsecondary faculty. The study focuses on this particular group because of the women's deep involvement with grassroots organizing that reflects their sense of self and other community members, as well as their personal and political relationships to Detroit, Michigan. Given the city's economic disparities rooted in racial segregation, structural violence and gender oppression, Detroit is a site of critical learning within a postindustrial/postcolonial context. This intersectionalist approach to …

Higher Than Those Of Their Race Of Less Fortunate Advantages:Race, Ethnicity, And West Indian Political Leadership In Detroit's African American Community, 1885-1940, Kathryn Lorraine Beard

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores West Indian immigrants in the city of Detroit and their leadership of key institutions in the African American community from 1885 to 1940. This work is divided into two parts, with the Great Migration as the line of demarcation. The research method consists largely of collective biographies and a survey of periodicals, census records, and records generated by the institutions that had West Indian leaders. The dissertation concludes that West Indian immigrants perceived middle-class status and ethnicity as a means of distinguishing themselves from their African American counterparts, but race became a more significant factor as more …

The Rise Of Public Sector Unionism In Detroit, 1947-1967, Louis Eugene Jones

Wayne State University Dissertations

In 1947, the Michigan Legislature passed into law the Hutchinson Act banning strikes of state and local workers. The law provided for the termination of striking public sector workers but did not require state and local agencies to bargain with public employees or their representatives. It even allowed for fines and prison sentences for non public sector workers who influenced public sector workers to strike. The law forced public sector unions into an untenable state of "collective begging." Indeed, it was often referred to as punitive and draconian. 18 years later, the Michigan Legislature passed and the governor signed into …

Down On Hastings Street: A Study Of Social And Cultural Changes In A Detroit Community 1941-1955, John Fredrick Cohassey

Wayne State University Theses

The study of the Hastings Street jazz and blues scene affords a look into Detroit's African-American community when it faced the burden of segregation, and also shared in the city's economic prosperity. The study of the street contributes to the understanding of racial relations in Detroit, concentrating primarily on the years 1941 to 1955. The delineation of the distinct features separating the migrant Southern folk blues culture and the older established jazz community reveals the diverse social and cultural elements of Detroit's African-American population.