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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Dropping The Invisibility Cloak: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Sense Of Belonging And Place Identity Among Rural, First Generation, Low Income College Students From Appalachian Kentucky, Brenda Abbott Jul 2019

Dropping The Invisibility Cloak: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Sense Of Belonging And Place Identity Among Rural, First Generation, Low Income College Students From Appalachian Kentucky, Brenda Abbott

Doctoral Dissertations

In a country that once was 95% rural in the late 1700s, only 19.3% of the population of the United States now live in rural areas (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). The shift in population from rural to urban areas is not simply demographic; it imbues a shift in who and what matters. Only 13.6% of adults over 25 in Appalachian Kentucky have earned bachelor's degrees, 18.9% below the national average (Appalachian Regional Commission, 2016). This phenomenological study seeks to understand how rural, first generation, low income college students from Appalachian Kentucky experience a sense of belonging in their first year …


When Healing And High-Stakes Meet: Restorative Justice In An Era Of Racial Neoliberalism, Dani O'Brien Jul 2019

When Healing And High-Stakes Meet: Restorative Justice In An Era Of Racial Neoliberalism, Dani O'Brien

Doctoral Dissertations

Based on a 3-year ethnography, this dissertation documents the story of Presente, an explicitly critical youth-led restorative justice group attempting to dismantle the school-prison nexus and create a more youth-centered culture at their high-reform high school. This dissertation addresses the questions: How does serving as a restorative justice peer leader impact students? What challenges and opportunities arise as the school tries to transition to more restorative practices? And how do the values central to restorative justice come up against, challenge, and get challenged by neoliberal education reform?


Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim Jul 2019

Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the connections between changing family structures and economic inequalities in the United States. While previous research shows that motherhood lowers women’s earnings, few studies explore how wage penalties for motherhood change over women’s lives. Moreover, most research examines only the baby boomer cohort; consequentially, little is known about how millennials experience this wage penalty and how such burdens of motherhood have changed across cohorts. This study investigates whether and how the motherhood wage penalty changes both across women’s life course and cohorts with these questions: (1) Does the motherhood penalty change over women’s lives? (2) What are …


Public And Private In The Blogosphere, Sarah Ford Jul 2019

Public And Private In The Blogosphere, Sarah Ford

Doctoral Dissertations

The public/private distinction is one of the most influential concepts of the modern era, both in terms of social theory and everyday life. For many, public and private have been treated as completely separate. The assumption that public and private are a dichotomous pair has influenced numerous aspects of social life, ranging from the gendered division of labor to the development of the suburb. However, the division between the public and private realms has proven to be permeable; the public and private realms have bled over into one another, and can no longer be treated as dichotomous. Information and communication …


The Impact Of Ptsd And History Of Involvement In The Criminal Justice System On Medication Treatment Success In Opioid Use Disorder, Kirk Sanger Mar 2019

The Impact Of Ptsd And History Of Involvement In The Criminal Justice System On Medication Treatment Success In Opioid Use Disorder, Kirk Sanger

Doctoral Dissertations

This analysis examined the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), history of trauma, and a history of involvement in the criminal justice system (CJS) on treatment outcomes related to medication treatment for opioid use disorder. This study employed a secondary analysis of data derived from a multi-state, multi-site treatment center focused on substance abuse and more specifically opioid use disorder treatment. The total sample size was 19,970 patients. The majority of the sample received treatment in Massachusetts, was white, and non-Hispanic. Those with PTSD accounted for 9.5% of the sample, while 12% had a history of trauma. Just under 1/4 …


"No One Is Gonna Tell Us We Can't Do This": The Development Of Agency In Student-Initiated Community Engagement, Shuli A. Archer Mar 2019

"No One Is Gonna Tell Us We Can't Do This": The Development Of Agency In Student-Initiated Community Engagement, Shuli A. Archer

Doctoral Dissertations

By its simplest definition, service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) connect work in the community and reflection on that work with credit-bearing academic courses. SLCE has been critiqued for, among other things, an incomplete consideration of power dynamics, and scholars and practitioners have recently expressed a desire to reinforce service-learning as primarily promoting agency, or the capacity to make change in society. Student-initiated community engagement programs offer a unique perspective and context to study agency. These programs, much like student-initiated retention projects, provide spaces where students take the lead in curriculum development, community partner relationship development, and program administration. Using Emirbayer …


Three Essays On Network Dynamics And Liminality, Diego F. Leal Nov 2018

Three Essays On Network Dynamics And Liminality, Diego F. Leal

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the emergence and evolution of social networks by paying particular attention to the spanning of cultural boundaries that segregate actors in the context of specific societies. In particular, I use systems science methods to study the bridging of cultural holes in small and relatively dense artificial societies, as well as in an American high school. I also study the significance of local triadic configurations in giving rise to the highly hierarchical system of aggregate-level migration flows in place in the Americas during the late 20th century. I use the concept of liminality as a way to …


Cultural Practices And Social Formations In A Reforming Society: The Transnational Fandom Of European Football In China, Yuan Gong Nov 2018

Cultural Practices And Social Formations In A Reforming Society: The Transnational Fandom Of European Football In China, Yuan Gong

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the Chinese fandom of European male football and its relation to the formation of the Chinese urban middle class. I use online and offline ethnography, critical discourse analysis and textual analysis to examine the socio-cultural roots, technological conditions, and political implications of Chinese fans’ transmedia practices. My findings are twofold. First, I argue for the articulation between the European football fan identity and the subject of urban middle class emerging from the post-Maoist social restructuring. This articulation is reflected from these fans’ active reading of the European football text and their access to European football as conditioned …


Organizational Factors Influencing Quality And Equity In Pediatric Primary Care: A Mixed Methods Study, Sarah L. Goff Nov 2018

Organizational Factors Influencing Quality And Equity In Pediatric Primary Care: A Mixed Methods Study, Sarah L. Goff

Doctoral Dissertations

The research conducted for this dissertation broadly explored the relationship between characteristics of healthcare organizations and quality and equity in pediatric healthcare. The first of the three studies identified characteristics of pediatric practices with high scores on measures of quality and patient experience using qualitative methods. The second study assessed whether the candidate characteristics identified in the first study were quantitatively associated with performance on quality measures using a statewide survey and publicly available quality data. This study found several potentially modifiable factors associated with performance, including an organizational culture characterized by good communication and interpersonal relationships amongst providers and …


Re-Thinking ‘Sustainability’: Management And Organization Theorizing For A More-Than-Human-World, Seray Ergene Nov 2018

Re-Thinking ‘Sustainability’: Management And Organization Theorizing For A More-Than-Human-World, Seray Ergene

Doctoral Dissertations

A widespread conversation has emerged around the concept of sustainability in management theory and practice today. The origins of this notion have forwarded a vision of economic development for improving social conditions in different parts of the world, as well as promoting environmental protection to reduce the harmful effects of economic activity on Earth (Brundtland Report, 1987). Emerging from these origins, solving sustainability problems today has come to signify attending to three seemingly distinct pillars: social equity, environmental protection, and economic development. In this dissertation I join these conversations by following recent theoretical discussions suggesting the pillars are actually interrelated …


"The Whole Nation Will Move": Grassroots Organizing In Harlem And The Advent Of The Long, Hot Summers, Peter Blackmer Nov 2018

"The Whole Nation Will Move": Grassroots Organizing In Harlem And The Advent Of The Long, Hot Summers, Peter Blackmer

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Whole Nation Will Move” provides a narrative history of grassroots struggles for African American equality and empowerment in Harlem in the decade immediately preceding the era of widespread urban rebellions in the United States. Through a street-level examination of the political education and activism of grassroots organizers, the dissertation analyzes how local people developed a collective radical consciousness and organized to confront and dismantle institutional racism in New York City from 1954-1964. This work also explores how the interests and activities of poor and working-class Black and Puerto Rican residents of Harlem fueled the escalation of protest activity and …


The Negritude Movements In Colombia, Carlos Valderrama Oct 2018

The Negritude Movements In Colombia, Carlos Valderrama

Doctoral Dissertations

Black politics is a diverse range of social practices, actions, and thoughts through which subordinate groups, political figures, activists and artists negotiate power relations and propose alternatives to their forms of oppression. Negritude was the framework which facilitated the emergence of sites and forms of black politics in Colombia during the 70s. While the founders and leaders of the negritude movements -among them, Étiene Léro, Jules Monnerot, René Menil, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, Léonard Sainville, Aristide Maungée, the Achille brothers, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Osmane Sosé and Dirago Diop, from French colonies-, were thinking of “It is time for good Cuban …


Maternal Postpartum Depression And Father Involvement Across The Transition To Parenthood, Katie Newkirk Oct 2018

Maternal Postpartum Depression And Father Involvement Across The Transition To Parenthood, Katie Newkirk

Doctoral Dissertations

Maternal postpartum depression is a common complication of childbirth that affects the whole family. Fathers’ greater involvement in childcare can buffer children from the negative effects of mothers’ depression, and aid in mothers’ recovery, so it is important to understand under what conditions fathers become more or less involved when mothers are depressed. Prior research has supported both a compensation hypothesis, whereby fathers compensate for the effects of mothers’ depression on mothers’ parenting by being more involved in parenting, and a spillover hypothesis, whereby mothers’ negative emotionality causes fathers to pull back from family life and be less involved in …


The Military And Incarceration: Hidden Mechanisms Of Racial Inequality In The U.S. Labor Market, 1980-2010., Joohee Han Oct 2018

The Military And Incarceration: Hidden Mechanisms Of Racial Inequality In The U.S. Labor Market, 1980-2010., Joohee Han

Doctoral Dissertations

U.S. incarceration since the 1980s is increasingly concentrated among black men, reinforcing their racial inequality in the labor market. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that the military, which provided employment, income and educational opportunities to black men disproportionately, has downsized at the same time during this same period. Mass incarceration has rarely been studied in relation to military downsizing. I seek to understand how prison and the military, two crucial but often-neglected labor market institutions, have jointly influenced racial inequality in the labor market over time along with other major institutions such as higher education and …


Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson Oct 2018

Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson

Doctoral Dissertations

Sociologists have always acknowledged the complexity of gender, but despite acknowledging this complexity, much sociological research does not put this knowledge into practice; indeed, a great deal of research focuses on distinctions between men and women with regard to some other variable, reinforcing a narrow and binary understanding of gender. This tendency has two limitations: (1) it does not recognize the variability in men's and women's expression of masculinity and femininity; and (2) it does not recognize gender identities other than those of cisgender man and cisgender woman (i.e., transgender people). This study mitigates this limitation through telling a story …


Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart Jul 2018

Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation draws from in-depth interview data to compare the schooling choices of 95 mothers living in United States. The sample is split between white and black mothers. Within each racial group, one set teaches their children at home and a second set sends them to public schools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to current U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked in these debates. To date no research has compared homeschoolers to other schooling families in the same region, or examined …


Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones Jul 2018

Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines three organizations that promote premarital sexual abstinence. These three organizations broadly mirror different strands within the New Right: an evangelical Christian abstinence ministry called Purity Ring Posse, Revolutionary Romance, an elite group of conservatives on an Ivy-League campus, and Stand Up! a group at a Mormon university that seeks to “burst the bubble” and facilitate outreach between pro-family organizations and students. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and content analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how each group attempts to promote a unique version of abstinence that can be successfully mobilized in the public square. Purity Ring Posse articulates “ …


Unequally Adrift: How Social Class And Institutional Context Shape College Academic Experiences, Mary Scherer Jul 2018

Unequally Adrift: How Social Class And Institutional Context Shape College Academic Experiences, Mary Scherer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how class background and institutional context shape students’ experiences of faculty mentorship, academic success strategies, and the relationship of college values and academic decision-making. In this comparative study, I draw from 68 interviews with working- and upper-middle-class students at a regional and flagship university to identify how institutional variation matters across moderately-selective public universities, the kind where the majority of four-year college students matriculate. Mentorship, often informal, is a resource most easily accessed by students with preexisting cultural capital—specifically, the knowledge that mentoring relationships are available and advantageous, and the skills for cross-status interaction with professors. …


Labor Migration And Intangible Cultural Heritage In Postsocialist Rural Romania, Alin Rus Jul 2018

Labor Migration And Intangible Cultural Heritage In Postsocialist Rural Romania, Alin Rus

Doctoral Dissertations

The processes of industrialization and modernization, as well as those emerging from them, have produced radical changes in the lifestyle of the peasantry. These transformations went hand in hand with the degradation of community lifestyle and of the customs it contained. Among the many rituals performed by rural communities, this dissertation focuses on mummers' plays. The present paper is an attempt to outline a brief history of mummers' plays beginning with an age when they were simple community rituals and going to the recent decades when they entered a rapid decline, and when state institutions together with international organizations such …


Rethinking The Creative Economy: The Diverse Economies Of Artists And Artisans In Rural Massachusetts, Abby Irene Templer Rodrigues Mar 2018

Rethinking The Creative Economy: The Diverse Economies Of Artists And Artisans In Rural Massachusetts, Abby Irene Templer Rodrigues

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the contours of artistic economic activity through participatory action research conducted with artists and artisans in the Greater Franklin County, Massachusetts. The creative economy has drawn significant attention over the past ten years as a principle economic sector that can stimulate the redevelopment of post-industrial cities. However, dominant creativity–based development strategies tend to cater to the tastes of an economically privileged, and implicitly white, “creative class,’ leading to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically …


Golden Palimpsests: America, Cervantes, And The Invention Of Modernity/Coloniality, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada Mar 2018

Golden Palimpsests: America, Cervantes, And The Invention Of Modernity/Coloniality, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada

Doctoral Dissertations

While many theories of colonial discourse emphasize an imperial power imposing its way of thinking and modes of expression onto colonial cultures and peoples, in this dissertation I consider that this imposition affects members of the colonies and the metropolis in different but related ways. In core and periphery alike, the subjects of Spanish colonialism produced documents in which we recognize overlapping, conflicting narratives. I call this strategy for narrative resistance “golden palimpsests” because, as the epigraph suggests, they appear to tell the story of donkeys covered in gold, while in fact they hide the true story of noble horses …


Collective Action As Relationship In Late Modernity: Animal Advocacy In A Repressive Political Climate, Catherine M. Wilson Nov 2017

Collective Action As Relationship In Late Modernity: Animal Advocacy In A Repressive Political Climate, Catherine M. Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

Since the mid 1990s, in the United States, social regulation and activity with regard to animal care and the nature of acceptable human-animal relationships has changed remarkably rapidly, even as animal rights activism has become less prominent. Utilizing extensive ethnographic, artifactual, and interview data, this dissertation interrogates some of the relational processes that have contributed to these changes. After first sketching a brief history of animal advocacy discourses in the U.S., In Chapter Four, I document a shift from disruptive to productive strategies in animal advocacy. I argue that two important contributing factors to this shift were anti-terrorism legislation that …


Immigration And Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, And Care Outsourcing Exacerbate And Erode Earnings Inequalities, Eiko H. Strader Nov 2017

Immigration And Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, And Care Outsourcing Exacerbate And Erode Earnings Inequalities, Eiko H. Strader

Doctoral Dissertations

The rhetoric against immigration in the United States mostly focuses on the economic threat to low-educated native-born men using a singular labor market competition lens. In contrast to this trend, this dissertation builds on a large body of previous work on job queuing and ethnic competition, as well as insights gained from the studies on female labor force participation and the outsourcing of care work. By exploring regional differences in the wage effects of immigration across 100 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2007, I argue that immigration is an intersectionally dynamic localized source of wage inequality and equality. The first …


Three Essays On “Doing Care”, Gender Differences In The Work Day, And Women’S Care Work In The Household, Avanti Mukherjee Nov 2017

Three Essays On “Doing Care”, Gender Differences In The Work Day, And Women’S Care Work In The Household, Avanti Mukherjee

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation provides a theoretical perspective on why women’s responsibility for care work lengthens their workday relative to men due to subsistence requirements, and draws attention to the relevance of other female family members. Building from theories of institutional bargaining research insights from “doing gender”, I develop a theoretical perspective on “doing care” that considers both bargaining power and social norms as determinants of differences in time allocation across and within gender. Conventional bargaining models predict that women who earn incomes can substitute hours of paid work for unpaid work. Using qualitative field work from India, and my theory of …


Negotiating Race, Work And Family: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Vaughan Curington Nov 2017

Negotiating Race, Work And Family: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Vaughan Curington

Doctoral Dissertations

In Portugal, high levels of women’s labor force participation, rapidly aging populations, along with the retrenchment of welfare states, has led to the expansion of publicly subsidized private care work such as home care. Much of this caring work is carried out by low-paid citizen and migrant women from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an independent archipelago nation off the West African coast. At the same time, Portugal is a “post-colonial” setting, with comparatively progressive policies around family settlement for migrants, and where the language of “legal race” does not exist. Taking the lived experiences of Cape Verdean …


Factors That Shape Arab American College Student Identity, Abdul Rahman F. Jaradat Jul 2017

Factors That Shape Arab American College Student Identity, Abdul Rahman F. Jaradat

Doctoral Dissertations

Arab American identity has not yet received the research attention and scholarship that it deserves. In this dissertation, I have qualitatively studied the narratives of young Arab American college students and recent graduates. The research questions that I explored include what makes them Arab Americans, and what are the factors that help them identify as such. By focusing on Arab Americans and their identity factors, I have presented the narratives of those women and men who self-identify as Arab American and quoted their accounts of how they navigate this undervalued, misunderstood, and stereotyped identity. I have used ethnic and racial …


Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton Jul 2017

Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton

Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers in speech-language pathology and ethnolinguistics have worked to gain knowledge about typical and atypical language patterns of African American children who are identified as African American English (AAE) dialect speakers. Much progress had been made, but limitations in this field of knowledge have persisted, especially for AA children who demonstrate variable use of AAE, presumably through the process of assimilation in the school setting. Therefore, more information is needed to provide diagnostic markers for deviations in typical language development for variable AAE-MAE speakers. Prior empirical research has found that third- and fourth-grade AAE-speaking children with typical language development overtly …


The Role Of Resistance And Social Capital In Facilitating Latino/A College Success, Patricia Sánchez-Connally Jul 2017

The Role Of Resistance And Social Capital In Facilitating Latino/A College Success, Patricia Sánchez-Connally

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between race and educational achievement among inner city, low income, first generation, and high achieving Latino/a students. Research on students of color has focused on cultural deficit models, which portray students as culturally deprived and proposes cultural assimilation as the solution (Nieto 2010; Delpit 2006; Solórzano & Yosso 2002). As a way to contest these models, I describe the role of Academic Support & College Readiness Program (ASP) as a place where community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005) is being created and transferred. Community cultural wealth is an alternative concept that uses Critical Race Theory (CRT) …


Getting It Right: African American Male College/University Presidents And Their Early Cultivation Of Self-Efficacy, James Randall Jul 2017

Getting It Right: African American Male College/University Presidents And Their Early Cultivation Of Self-Efficacy, James Randall

Doctoral Dissertations

GETTING IT RIGHT: AFRICAN AMERICAN MALE COLLEGE/UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS AND THEIR EARLY CULTIVATION OF SELF-EFFICACY MAY 2017 JAMES ANTHONY RANDALL, B.A., MOREHOUSE COLLEGE M.S.W., UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, COLLEGE OF SOCIAL POLICY AND PRACTICE Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by Joseph B. Berger Education remains the single most important means by which individuals in the United States can empower themselves economically, socially, and personally. In spite of this, a significant percentage of young African American males do not even appear to be competing or reaching for the educational opportunities before them as they rank the poorest amongst their peers in a …


The Role Of Social Class And Construal Level In Social Justice And Fairness Beliefs, Prerana Bharadwaj Jul 2017

The Role Of Social Class And Construal Level In Social Justice And Fairness Beliefs, Prerana Bharadwaj

Doctoral Dissertations

What predicts support for the redistribution of resources to improve socioeconomic inequality? Social class, or the subjective perception of one’s resources and position in relation to others in a larger society, was examined as one relevant characteristic. Across four experiments, social class as subjective social status was manipulated (two) and measured (all four), and found to have a significant negative effect on support for the moral values of group-based equality (social justice) but not on individual deservingness (fairness) separate from political identity and other demographic characteristics. This effect was seen on stated principles but particularly relevant in approval ratings of …