Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sights And Spaces Of Moving Memory: The Public Memory Work Of The Women's Rights National Historical Park, Alia Renee Bellwood

Theses - ALL

This project analyzes the rhetoric of the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York as it expresses the historical context and effects of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention. With an eye towards feminist possibilities, the project traces the politics of emphasis and erasure by accounting for material, spatial and visual strategies in the Visitor Center and historic buildings. I argue that the park influences and reflects public memory of the early American women's rights movement that has rhetorical implications for modern iterations of the movements that follow.

Alongside archival research, I critically analyze the experience of the …

Mistress Or Hero? Corruption Reports On Sina Weibo And The Construction Of Chinese Femininity, Yin Wu

Theses - ALL

This qualitative textual analysis study focuses on two Chinese women who were previously sexually involved with the corrupted officers and later reported these officers to authorities. As a Chinese version of Twitter, Sina Weibo is a powerful social networking and communication tool for their reports. The study analyzes the posts and comments available on Sina Weibo about the identity of these women and how hegemonic Chinese femininity is performed, maintained, and challenged. These discussions may reflect the potential cultural, ideological, and socioeconomic factors that can influence the construction of contemporary Chinese femininity, providing the picture of how social media and …

Pets In The City: Managing Surplus Dogs In Syracuse, New York, Kristin A. Cutler

Theses - ALL

This thesis contributes to the growing interest in animals in geography. Specifically, it situates pets within the geographic literature and addresses the causes and consequences of pet love in the United States. Using Syracuse, New York as a case study, this thesis illuminates the critical yet understudied existence of pets in the city, paying particular attention to the historical and contemporary foundations, management, and geographies of surplus dogs. Further, it explores major shifts in Americans' attitudes toward pets over the last two centuries, details the necessity for and establishment of animal management in the city, and explains the consequences (namely, …

The Practice Of Neogeography In Community-Based Organizations, Patrick Oberle

Theses - ALL

Neogeography and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) are two terms that have emerged recently to describe the practice of geography by those not formally trained in it as a discipline and spatial data provided by individuals through social media and other Web-based tools. Both neogeography and VGI can be directly linked to the growth of various online mapping websites and applications that allow for the creation of electronic maps that are interactive, adaptable, and easily shared via the Internet and Web. As recent phenomena, the practice of neogeography and VGI is not well understood, nor are the links these new fields …

The Production Of Heritage Tourism In China: A Case Study Of Three Adjacent Villages, Yi Yu

Theses - ALL

With the massive infusion of external (foreign) capital into the Chinese economy since the 1980s, some historical villages in Huangshan city have been largely transformed for heritage tourism. Preservation restrictions on altering structures are in place to keep intact the architectural and morphological integrity of the sites. Questions arise on the roles played by various governments and private sector enterprises, and their influence on local residents

In the summer of 2013, I conducted field work including interviews, participatory observation and archival research on three adjacent villages in Huangshan city: Hongcun, Chengkan, and Xucun. They were at three different tourism development …

Right To The Tent City: The Struggle Over Urban Space In Fresno, California, Jessie Speer

Theses - ALL

Through interviews, archival research, and fieldwork conducted in Fresno, California, this research explores how and why officials spatially control homeless communities, and how homeless people have resisted these controls. Drawing from the theories of Henri Lefebvre, I argue that encampments in Fresno enabled homeless people to assert their right to the city, and challenged the production of urban capitalist space by defying the norms of profit, surveillance, and homogeneity. Part One of the thesis focuses on the relationship between city's effort to destroy the encampments and its need to attract investment; Part Two focuses on the assignment of homeless individuals …

Black Effugium: Meditations On Traveling, On Understanding, And On Connecting In The Tradition Of Black Writers, Calvin Walds

Theses - ALL

This thesis project is a series of meditations, thoughts, reflections, lingering and fleeting, that move between three geopolitical locations: Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam; Kasoa, Ghana; and Detroit, Michigan. These locations are principally connected by virtue of my travels and work in all three in the summer of 2013. On a deeper level, one that this thesis elucidates, these three locations represent three different, yet connected, modalities of Black movement and existence. A modality is a mode, a single aspect or condition of a larger phenomenon. I begin in the mid-20th century, in Europe, with James Baldwin, Vincent Carter, and Richard Wright with …

Toward A Uses And Gratification's Model Of Twitter, Philip Ryan Johnson

Theses - ALL

This study proposed a uses and gratifications model of Twitter, an internet medium and micro-blog--a platform with both mass and interpersonal communication features for sending short messages to others. A survey was conducted among 242 Twitter users to test the model, including a standard investigation of gratifications sought and gratifications obtained of Twitter usage. In addition, expectations and availability of usage behaviors from McLeod and Becker's (1981) uses and gratifications model were examined. In the model, expectations were conceptualized as user expectations of satisfaction and operationalized as the difference between users' gratifications sought and gratifications actually obtained. Usage behavior availability …

Understanding The Effect Of Islamists' Online Persuasive Messages On People's Attitude Change And Information Seeking Behavior, Omnia Al Desoukie

Theses - ALL

In this study, the researcher aims to look at how people would react to Islamists' online persuasive messages. This study is designed to measure the effects of two types of persuasive messages on people's attitude changes and information seeking behavior. Participants were recruited from a diverse pool using the Mturk website. The researcher recruited participants who are considered out-group members. Those are people who are primarily non-Muslims and non-Arabs. A 3 by 3-multifactorial between subjects experiment with the factors of message type (action justification, group-identity and no messages) and pre-existing attitude group (negative, neutral, and positive) was conducted to examine …

An Examination Of The First- And Second-Level Of Agenda Building With The Image Of China's President Xi Jinping In Xinhua And Four U.S. News Outlets, Zhuqing Cheng

Theses - ALL

Sources provide information subsidies to journalists at a low cost with the intention of passing on their agendas by providing the information subsidies to the media. This process is called agenda building, serving as the theoretical framework guiding this study.

Many studies have examined agenda building in political campaigns, while others have looked at it in a business context. This study tries to further test agenda building by investigating in the context of mediated public diplomacy to see how foreign leaders use the news to build images in another country. Such image building efforts have the potential to influence the …

Interaction Effects Between The 5-Httlpr Genotype And Family Environments On Adolescent Alcohol Use And Misuse, Jueun Kim

Theses - ALL

Emerging evidence shows that the 5-HTTLPR genotype interacts with social environments and influences drinking behaviors. However, few studies have examined interaction effects between the 5-HTTLPR genotype and specific aspects of family environments on adolescent drinking. The present study investigated whether the effects of family conflict or parental monitoring on adolescent drinking differed as a function of the 5-HTTLPR genotype cross-sectionally and longitudinally. It was replicated in two independent samples consisting of 175 adolescents in the U.S. and 4,916 adolescents in the U.K. The results of path analyses and multi-group analyses showed that, in the two samples, the 5-HTTLPR low-activity allele …

Cripping The Memoir: Unraveling The Discourse Around Disabled Athletes' Identities, Jessica Kerley

Theses - ALL

This thesis rhetorically examines the discourse surrounding disability and body capabilities. I employ feminist theory, queer theory, disability, theory and performance theory as I analyze the memoirs and media surrounding two disabled elite athletes, Sarah Reinertsen and Mark Zupan. I examine the construction of identity for these athletes and what the language use surrounding these athletes means to the current status of disability discourse. These memoirs have the potential to reach a large lay audience, and therefore, the opportunity to educate and challenge assumptions. My analysis leads me to conclude that the limitations of memoir and societal pressures allow for …

Investigating The Role Of Social Environmental Stress And Implicit Motives In Predicting Salivary Alpha-Amylase Reactivity To The Social Competence Interview, Jun A. He

Theses - ALL

Salivary alpha-amylase is emerging as a promising proxy for assessing sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) axis activity. However, it is not known whether a brief semi-structured behavioral assessment, such as the social competence interview (SCI), also elicits alpha-amylase changes. I hypothesized that (1) the SCI would elicit alpha amylase reactivity, (2) social environmental stress (i.e, high levels of exposure to violence during childhood and low perceived community social status) would predict the alpha-amylase response to the interview and (3) that agonistic striving would mediate the relationship between social environmental stress and amylase reactivity. The study sample was comprised of healthy young adults aged …

Black, Yellow, And Shades Of Purple: Radical Afro-Asian Collective Activism In The San Francisco Bay Area From The Perspectives Of Women In The Struggle, 1966-1972, Jeanelle Kevina Hope

Theses - ALL

The San Francisco Bay Area emerged as radical space for student and youth driven activism during the 1960s. The area was the birthplace of Ethnic studies and a key organization of the Black Power era--the Black Panther Party. This work uncovers the shared activist centered relationship between African Americans and Asian Americans by interrogating how members of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) worked within the frameworks of grassroots and collective activism to address local and Third World liberation. Furthermore, this work seeks to bring forth and provide a space for the suppressed voices …

When Heritage Preservation Meets Living Memory: Constructing The Medina Of Fez As A World Heritage Heterotopia, Matthew Houdek

Theses - ALL

This project engages the UNESCO World Heritage program's international place-making and heritage preservation campaign, and the processes that are carried out to transform an everyday cultural place into a World Heritage site. I consider what effects these preservation projects and the tourists they attract have on communities of living memory, while also engaging non-Western conceptions of heritage and the local processes for how it is preserved or produced in such contexts. To these ends, I look at one of the first non-Western urban sites to be inscribed on the World Heritage list-- the Medina of Fez, Morocco. The Medina offers …

Fan Music Videos, Fan Romanticism, And Romantic Content, Alexis Bordeaux Finnerty

Theses - ALL

Twilight and Harry Potter have become extremely successful multimedia franchises in large part thanks to the two series' devoted fans. Many fans not only consume these two series, they also produce stories, pictures, and videos that seem to use the characters from Twilight and Harry Potter to fulfill their own romantic fantasies. However, the tremendous popularity of fan music videos and the diverse demographics of the videos' producers and consumers challenge some of the assumptions early qualitative researchers made about fan communities. The study of fandom would be greatly advanced by a quantitative study that connects producers to their content; …

20 Weeks, 13 Hours, 140 Characters: The Abortion Controversy In The Texas State Senate And Online, Elyse Nicole Janish

Theses - ALL

The abortion controversy in America has long been characterized by problematic discourse in which neither prolife nor prochoice groups make headway in persuading the other side. This thesis examines the discourse of the abortion controversy as it played out in and around the Texas State Senate on June 25th, 2013, during a filibuster of a restrictive abortion bill known as Senate Bill 5 (SB5), by Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth). The analysis focuses on three sets of data: first, the testimonies authored by citizen protestors and animated by Senator Davis; second, the question-and-answer period between Senator Davis and Republican Senator …

Starved For Information: The Conflict Between Mobilizing Hunger Strikes And Distracting Media Frames, Alicia Wright

Theses - ALL

This study considers the newspaper coverage of Irom Sharmila's on-going, 13-year hunger strike in India to question how information from the media plays a role in generation of social movement conflict. With specific attention paid to the cultural context and method of protest, the study applies theories of conflict, social movement planning, and framing to examine whether the hunger strike elicits coverage that includes salient frames generated by the movement. Such coverage could signify a potential shift in the protest paradigm applied to English-language newspapers in India. Through a quantitative content analysis, articles pertaining to Irom Sharmila's hunger strike against …