Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Remediating A Toxic Town: Power, Place, And Justice In Anniston, Alabama, Melanie Ann Barron

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines a struggle for Environmental Justice over the long term to understand the impacts of current state-led strategies for achieving Environmental Justice. Recent geographic scholarship in Environmental Justice literatures suggests that state-centric strategies come with problems scholars have yet to fully comprehend. This dissertation, based on fieldwork and archival research in Anniston, Alabama, supports this claim with three main findings: 1) Corporations produce scaled identities to advantageously empower themselves and weather shifts in their profitability, while ordinary people are limited in their capacity to respond in kind to such unequal power arrangements. 2) Current legal solutions for Environmental …

Shades Of Green: A Comparative Analysis Of U.S. Green Economies, Jenna Ann Lamphere

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent attention from scholars, policymakers, and practitioners has focused on the importance of green economy development in achieving sustainability. Efforts, however, have been complicated by the lack of agreement on what a green economy is or how to transition to one. Drawing insights from environmental sociology, new state theory, and science and technology studies, I conduct a comparative analysis of select U.S. cities with recognized green economies. Findings indicate that in each economy, the strength and role of institutions and actors is unique, forming distinct networks that vary in their pursuit of socio-environmental goals.

When Mom Goes To School: Maternal Education And Intergenerational Mobility, Maura E. Devlin

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between the timing of maternal education and children’s educational attainment and the extent to which this relationship differs by gender. I used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Child and Youth Survey to determine the timing of mothers’ education relative to the birth of their children, with additional predictors associated with children’s educational attainment included in quantitative analyses. ANOVA analyses identified statistically significant differences in educational attainment among the children grouped by mother-category, based on the timing of their mothers’ education, and between genders. Regression analyses found no statistical difference …

Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos

Doctoral Dissertations

This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …

Acculturation Stress, Psychological And Sociocultural Adjustment, And Development Of American Adolescents: A Qualitative Study Of Newton High School Exchange Students In China, Binbin Zhu

Doctoral Dissertations

Theories from the extant acculturation literature functioned to categorize international students’ adaptation experiences and predict their acculturation outcomes. Also, relevant studies focused mainly on students at the tertiary level. For adolescent students seeking self-development toward independence and autonomy, how they negotiated their identity challenges and tensions in a cross-cultural context, and how surrounding others in their socialization impacted on their psychosocial adjustment process and transformative experiences have not been actively explored. This qualitative study approached adolescent students’ acculturation as an integrated development and learning process to explore the effects of developmental and cultural factors on their cross-cultural adaptation, especially examined …

Nixon's War On Terrorism: The Fbi, Leftist Guerrillas, And The Origins Of Watergate, Daniel S. Chard

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1969, militant factions within both Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) began to form the United States’ first clandestine revolutionary urban guerrilla organizations: the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). These groups carried out bombings, police ambushes, and other attacks throughout the country, prompting responses from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. Several historians have analyzed U.S. leftist guerrillas’ motives, and much has been written on FBI operations against the Black Power movement and New Left, including the Bureau’s covert counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) …

The Professionalization Of Male Circumcision In Turkey, Oyman Basaran

Doctoral Dissertations

Male circumcision is seen as a cultural and religious event and a rite of passage for boys in Turkey. It is surrounded by public rituals and as there is no equivalent rite of passage for girl children, circumcision signifies a crucial marker of not only religious but also gender differentiation between boys and girls. Circumcision is a men’s affair and performing circumcision bestows economic privilege and social status on circumcisers (sünnetçi). In this dissertation, I trace the practical and discursive changes in the experience of male circumcision from the perspectives of practitioners. I argue that while circumcision was always a …

Attitudes And Barriers To Women’S Participation In A Proposed Community-Based Conservation Program In Western Belize, Amanda Shay Kaeser

Doctoral Dissertations

World conservation issues have been addressed in many ways around the world. The use of community-based conservation (CBC) as a method to reduce harmful practices has gained in popularity in the past few decades. This dissertation reports results from a pre-analysis of a proposed CBC program in western Belize. Through qualitative interviews with 47 stakeholders, and a quantitative survey with 486 Belizean women, we determined that a CBC program designed especially for women should be successful. Some of the aspects of a program that women expressed a desire for was more conservation and forest education. However, contrary to our assumption …

Developing And Implementing A Lgbt Family Studies Course: A Pre-Post Evaluation, Kathryn Alexandra Conrad

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the pre- and post-course knowledge and attitudes regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals and families. An upper-level, Child and Family Studies undergraduate course, Modern Families, was constructed and piloted during the Spring 2016 semester to provide students with empirically-based information on contemporary families with a heavy emphasis on LGBT individuals and families. Participants (N = 19), who were enrolled in the course, participated in a series of open- and close-ended surveys at the beginning (Time 1 [T1]) and end (Time 2 [T2]) of the semester that assessed their knowledge and attitudes towards diverse …

Internalized Heterosexism, Religious Coping, And Psychache In Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Young Adults, Jon Raymond Bourn

Doctoral Dissertations

Psychache, or unbearable psychological pain (Shneidman, 1993, 1999), has been found to be the most proximal predictor of suicidality. There is evidence that heterosexism (Crain-Gully, 2011), including internalized heterosexism (IH; Bourn & Miles, 2015), is related to psychache among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals. The current study sought to further examine the relationship between IH and psychache, by identifying potential factors that moderate and mediate the relationship between IH and psychache. It was hypothesized that, in a sample of religiously-identified LGB young adults, (a) IH would be significantly, negatively correlated with positive religious coping (PRC) and significantly, positively correlated …

Managing The Agricultural Biotechnology Revolution: Responses To Transgenic Seeds In Developing Countries, Alper Yagci

Doctoral Dissertations

There has been heated debate over transgenic or genetically modified (GM) crops in agriculture. Advocates and critics argue over possible economic, environmental, public health implications of this technology. This study examines varying policy approaches to regulating GM crop cultivation in four developing countries where the technology has large potential application. Why have some countries banned GM crop cultivation in their territory while others encouraged it? In countries where GM crops were allowed, why have varying systems of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection been constructed? To investigate these questions I comparatively examine the policy experience (1995-2015) of Argentina, Brazil, Turkey relying …

“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 …

A Mixed Methods Analysis Of The Intersections Of Gender, Race, And Migration In The High-Tech Workforce, Sharla N. Alegria

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite public policy initiatives and private sector investment to recruit more women, women’s participation in high-tech work has decreased since 1990. I use interviews with tech workers and nationally representative quantitative workforce data from the American Community Survey to examine the consequences of race, gender, and immigration for tech workers’ experiences and wages. While previous research shows a decrease in the proportion of women in tech work, these conclusions are somewhat misleading as they do not consider the intersections of race and migration with gender. I find only modest change in the absolute numbers of women. Rather, as the field …

Of Wolves, Hunters, And Words: A Comparative Study Of Cultural Discourses In The Western Great Lakes Region, Tovar Cerulli

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a description, interpretation, and comparison of talk about wolves. The study is based on diverse data—including in-depth interviews, instances of public talk, government documents, and letters to the editor—gathered over three years. An overarching research question guides the study: How do hunting communities create and use discourses concerning wolves? The study is situated within the ethnography of communication and, more specifically, the framework of cultural discourse analysis. The study employs cultural discourse analysis methods and concepts to describe and develop interpretations of how participants render wolves symbolically meaningful, and of beliefs and values underpinning such meanings. One …

Three Essays On Economic Stages And Transition, Ricardo R. Fuentes-Ramírez

Doctoral Dissertations

Cuba and Venezuela have been argued to be examples of state capitalism, populist capitalism, socialism, or simply the ambiguous “mixed economy.” By focusing on these countries as social formations in movement, or in transition, a more adequate understanding is presented. The first essay develops a theory of socialist transition, with focus on the dynamic, rather than static character of socialism. Furthermore, worker cooperatives are analyzed with a focus on the roles they play in the different stages of the transition to socialism. Finally, this framework is utilized to analyze the experience of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. The second essay …

Plugging Into Movement Work: White Racial Justice Action In The Era Of Colorblind Racism, Garrett Naiman

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative study explored the practices and consciousness of eight white identified participants, born 1970 or later, who are actively engaged in racial justice action. Although the field of critical whiteness studies has expanded markedly over the past couple of decades, little has been written specifically about white racial justice activists (and activism). This may be serving as a disconnect for white people who are trying to find their way in racial justice movement work.

Participants were involved in one or more of the following: community organizing, education, religious work and cultural arts. Research data was primarily generated/collected through qualitative …