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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Gaming For Life: Gaming Practices, Self-Care, And Thriving Under Neoliberalism, Brian Myers Nov 2019

Gaming For Life: Gaming Practices, Self-Care, And Thriving Under Neoliberalism, Brian Myers

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation frames gaming practices in relationship to thriving, an area of inquiry that has received little attention within the fields of video game studies and cultural studies. It argues that video games can be used by audiences as a tool for thriving, provided we define thriving outside of the framework of success and failure established by a neoliberal political rationality. Using survey data from 70 video game audience members, textual analysis, and ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methodologies, this dissertation first describes how video game audience members define thriving by distinguishing it from a related term, self-care. It then moves to …


[X]Splaininggender, Race, Class, And Body: Metapragmatic Disputes Of Linguistic Authority And Ideologies On Twitter, Reddit, And Tumblr, Judith C. Bridges Jul 2019

[X]Splaininggender, Race, Class, And Body: Metapragmatic Disputes Of Linguistic Authority And Ideologies On Twitter, Reddit, And Tumblr, Judith C. Bridges

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the language of “citizen sociolinguists,” everyday users of social network sites (SNS) who contribute to the discourses about language on Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr, platforms with distinctive user demographics and technological affordances. The data were collected through keyword searches for mansplain, whitesplain, richsplain and thinsplain, metapragmatic neologisms which are lexical blends of the verb explain and one of four social categories. Disputes of macro-level ideologies are revealed by users’ creative meaning-making strategies and metapragmatic awareness of micro-level texts and utterances. Making use of the linguistic practices of the SNS, as well as the concisely-compacted semantic and pragmatic …


Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon May 2019

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …


The Effect Of Social Class On Political Party Affiliations In The African American Community, Sindiso Mafico May 2019

The Effect Of Social Class On Political Party Affiliations In The African American Community, Sindiso Mafico

Sociology Senior Seminar Papers

Does social class affect political party affiliation in the African-American community? Drawing on two contrasting theories: the theory of group interests and class-based theories of stratification put forth by Wilson and Shelton (2006), I propose that African -Americans who report being of a high socio-economic class are more likely to be Republican than African Americans of a lower socio-economic class. Through secondary analysis of data provided by the General Social Survey (GSS), I investigate the relationship between political party affiliation and social class in the African-American community. By combining data across 20 years between 1996 and 2016, the sample size …


Consuming Appalachia: An Archaeology Of Company Coal Towns, Zada Komara Jan 2019

Consuming Appalachia: An Archaeology Of Company Coal Towns, Zada Komara

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

Material culture is an understudied aspect of social life in Appalachian Studies, the multi- disciplinary investigation of social life in the Appalachian region. Historically, material culture in the region has been largely studied for its semiotic properties, decoded as a tangible symbol of “a region apart,” lagging behind the rest of America in terms of moral, mental, economic, and social development. Critical material studies from archaeology and other disciplines paint a different picture, however, and construct a region as American as any other. This study utilizes discourse analysis of material rhetoric about Appalachia and archaeological and oral historical data from …


Beyond Repair: An Investigation Of The Experiences, Interpretations, And Self-Construction Of Black Women Welfare Recipients In The Deep South, Eniyah C. Willingham, Eniyah Willingham Jan 2019

Beyond Repair: An Investigation Of The Experiences, Interpretations, And Self-Construction Of Black Women Welfare Recipients In The Deep South, Eniyah C. Willingham, Eniyah Willingham

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Based on six in-depth interviews with Black women in the Metro-Atlanta area who have at some point in the past ten years received welfare assistance, this project serves to understand how Black women relate to the welfare system in the current moment. To best understand their circumstances, I set forth a three-part question: how do Black women welfare recipients experience the welfare system in the current moment?; how do they interpret these experiences?; and lastly, how do these experiences and interpretations lend to how they conceptualize, construct, and/or manage their identities as Black women welfare recipients? I argue that my …