Sociology Commons^™

Spheres Of Identity: Theorizing Social Categorization And The Legitimacy Of Criminal Justice Officials, Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Identity is of central importance in the subjective experience of justice and assessments of legitimacy. In this study, the researcher explores whether perceptions of legitimacy are constructed differently across social group identity, particularly where social groups differ in relation to government (e.g., outgroup or ingroup). The analyses are conducted using data from a procedural justice study conducted in two U. S. cities. The findings suggest evidence of a generally similar construction of legitimacy though with important dissimilarities based on social group. Additionally, certain respondents’ narratives follow common narrative scripts in describing interactions with police, suggestive of a shared master narrative …

Examining The Contextual Effects Of Racial Profiling, And The Long-Term Consequences Of Punitive Interventions: Testing Labeling Theory With The National Longitudinal Study Of Adolescent To Adult Health Data, Margrét Valdimarsdóttir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The overrepresentation of minority youth in the juvenile justice system has been well documented. More research has, however, been needed on levels of discrimination, particularly on potential biases in the earliest point of contact, such as police decisions to stop and arrest young people. Further, few studies have examined individual and neighborhood characteristics simultaneously, which has limited the understanding of citizens’ experiences with the police. Focusing on potential biases in the juvenile justice system is essential as recent studies indicate that most types of interventions have different negative consequences for the lives of young people, such as increasing the probability …

Going Viral: Youth And Sexual Assault In The Digital Age, Anna Gjika

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the growing phenomenon of using digital media technologies to capture and perpetuate sexual abuse. Focusing on instances of high-profile juvenile sexual assault, I use case studies, interviews, focus groups, and thematic media analysis to investigate (a) how crime, gender, status and technology intersect for young people growing up digital, and (b) the ways technology intersections with sexual abuse to create new forms of crime, new ways to victimize and perpetuate harm, as well as new opportunities to investigate and address sexual violence both through the criminal justice system and in the public. I argue that young people …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

The Freddie Gray Uprising: Persistence And Desistance Narratives Of Community-Engaged Returning Citizens, Maurice Vann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explored how selected returning citizens in Baltimore who experienced the Freddie Gray Uprising of 2015 quelled community violence, stopped looting, and cleaned up the community in the aftermath made meaning of their experiences of the unrest. The central purpose of this study was to collect and analyze the life stories of returning citizens in Baltimore who experienced the Uprising. These men who had been incarcerated for between 5 and 20 years responded to government officials who called on them to quell violence in their neighborhoods that stemmed from the in-custody homicide of Freddie Gray.

The informants provided narratives …