Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Reification, Resistance, And Transformation? The Impact Of Migration And Demographics On Linguistic, Racial, And Ethnic Identity And Equity In Educational Systems: An Applied Approach, Rebecca Ann Campbell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Using an applied anthropological approach focused on language, this study investigates the relationship between linguistic, racial, and ethnic identities and school resource access in the context of migration. This project examines how these identities are established, experienced, reified, and resisted by various school actors. Exposing power at its roots through a multi-level analysis, this research informs on how people negotiate socialization into particular identities, propelling them toward positions in school and society of varying opportunity.

Focused on two elementary schools in a central Florida county that has been and is undergoing demographic changes, this work offers applications for educational institutions …

Declining City, Born-Again Citadel: Faith-Based Organizations And The Reconstitution Of Inequality In Postindustrial America, Michael J. Boyle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the context of the hegemonic neoliberalism of recent decades, faith-based organizations (FBOs) have flourished as mechanisms for addressing poverty and other varieties of social need. For all of the contributions of contemporary anthropological research to the study of FBOs, however, most analyses have stressed the potency of FBOs and elided the agency of recipients. The present dissertation aims, through a multisited study of Evangelical FBOs in the postindustrial American city of Plainfield, to focus on the latter theme. Owing to the traditional behaviorism of American culture and also its Evangelical reproduction in FBO settings, the pursuit of charity thrusts …

An Epigenetic Clock Analysis Of Race/Ethnicity, Sex, And Coronary Heart Disease, Steve Horvath, Michael Gurven, Morgan E. Levine, Benjamin C. Trumble, Hillard Kaplan, Hooman Allayee, Beate R. Ritz, Brian Chen, Ake T. Lu, Tammy M. Rickabaugh, Beth D. Jamieson, Dianjianyi Sun, Shengxu Li, Wei Chen, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Maud Fagny, Michael S. Kobor, Philip S. Tsao, Alexander P. Reiner, Kerstin L. Edlefsen, Devin Absher, Themistocles L. Assimes

ESI Publications

Background: Epigenetic biomarkers of aging (the “epigenetic clock”) have the potential to address puzzling findings surrounding mortality rates and incidence of cardio-metabolic disease such as: (1) women consistently exhibiting lower mortality than men despite having higher levels of morbidity; (2) racial/ethnic groups having different mortality rates even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences; (3) the black/white mortality cross-over effect in late adulthood; and (4) Hispanics in the United States having a longer life expectancy than Caucasians despite having a higher burden of traditional cardio-metabolic risk factors.

Results: We analyzed blood, saliva, and brain samples from seven different racial/ethnic groups. …

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

“Race Talk” In Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study Of Two Texas Chambers Of Commerce, Natasha Shrikant

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes an interpretive, discursive approach to understanding how organizational members create meanings about race, and other identities, through their everyday communication practices in the workplace. This dissertation also explores how these everyday discourses about race might reproduce, negotiate, or challenge ideologies that maintain the dominant position of Whiteness in United States racial hierarchies. I draw from data collected during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork (from Jan-Aug 2014) with two chambers of commerce in a large Texas city: an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) and what I call the “North City” Chamber of Commerce (NCC). The AACC explicitly …

Making A Place For People At A Wildlife Corridor On Chicago's South Side, Alexis Winter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

What role do environmental conservation projects play in the transformation of American cities? How do these projects affect city residents? In this study, I ask these questions at the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, where the Chicago Park District worked with institutional and community-based partner organizations to engage city residents in the creation of a lakefront wildlife habitat and public nature area. Through ethnographic interviews and participant observation I explored how actors at various levels understand this changing landscape and their roles in shaping it. I situate the Burnham Wildlife Corridor project in the broader context of a state-level plan, the Millennium …

The Symphony Of State: São Paulo's Department Of Culture, 1922-1938, Micah J. Oelze

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1920s-30s São Paulo, Brazil, leaders of the vanguard artistic movement known as “modernism” began to argue that national identity came not from shared values or even cultural practices but rather by a shared way of thinking, which they variously designated as Brazil’s “racial psychology,” “folkloric unconscious,” and “national psychology.” Building on turn-of-the-century psychological and anthropological theories, the group diagnosed Brazil’s national mind as characterized by “primitivity” and in need of a program of psychological development. The group rose to political power in the 1930s, placing the artists in a position to undertake such a project. The Symphony of State …

What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is a historical and ethnographic project that delves into the conflictive relationship between the development of the Dominican state and the formation of the community of the port city of Samaná. The African diasporic community of Samaná has actively constructed the local space throughout shifting political projects, while sustaining their collective voices against the waves of dispossession crashing on their shores. Using a combination of archival research, participant observation, oral history and ethnography, I document multiple instances of state intervention to understand how the Samaná community has been coerced over time to consent to these processes. I juxtapose …

Speaking In Tongues: Language And National Belonging In Globalizing Europe, Uli Linke

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

In contemporary Europe, the problematic concept of the nation has been recuperated to fasten subjects to political space. Under the impact of globalization, marked by increasing rates of human mobility and concurrent security concerns, European Union states have begun to push for cohesive measures to reclaim their national sovereignty. Revised immigration laws and refugee policies are publicly supported, presumably to keep the nation safe. At the same time, European countries advocate for openness and permeable borders to attract foreign capital investment. In the national interior, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments have come to coexist with the outward dissemination of promotional images …

The Vibrant Traditions Of Masaya: El Mestizaje As A Culture, A Process, And A State Of Being, Isabelle Lee

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

“The only constant in life is change.” What this old adage leaves out is that the processes that catalyze these changes can occur in vastly different ways which impact the product. In the case of the history of Masaya, Nicaragua, today’s dominant culture of mestizaje is the result of the arrival of the Spaniards to the Americas and the process of racial and cultural blend that followed between Spanish, indigenous and African peoples. But in this mixing process, Spaniards held disproportionate power: most of the changes they imposed were made through violent and deceptive imposition. Yet indigenous and African people …

Racemaking In New Orleans: Racial Boundary Construction Among Ideologically Diverse College Students, Natalie Young, Lourdes Gutierrez Najera

Natalie A.E. Young

Symptomatic Leadership: The Impact Of Changing Demographics On Global Business, Linda L. Ridley

Publications and Research

The past several decades have displayed a focus on diversity in the workplace throughout the corporate environment. Questions remain: has the effort been at all impactful – or, due to its symbolic nature, has it only been a distraction? What behaviors would have been better emphasized to achieve full participation and opportunity by all actors in a firm?

Considerable research has revealed that attempts at diversity are clumsy at best; and spurious at worst. [i] The challenge for firms has been to develop a “business case” for why those contributing groups represented by women and people of color should be …

Inequality In A "Postracial" Era: Race, Immigration, And Criminalization Of Low Wage Labor, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Over the past four decades, increasingly punitive and enforcement-oriented U.S. immigration policies have been legitimized by a rhetoric of criminality that stigmatizes Latino immigrant workers and intensifies their exploitation. Simultaneously, there has been a sevenfold increase in the prison population in the United States, in which African Americans are eight times more likely to be jailed than Whites (Western 2006, p. 3). In this paper, I draw on scholarship in history and sociology, as well as my own anthropological research, to develop the argument that criminal justice policies and immigration policies together disempower low-wage U.S. labor and maintain categorical racial …