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American Understandings Of U.S. Economic Inequality: Redistribution And Resistance, Jacklyn Stein Oct 2021

American Understandings Of U.S. Economic Inequality: Redistribution And Resistance, Jacklyn Stein

Doctoral Dissertations

Why has economic inequality in the U.S. continued to grow despite widespread and strong public opinion in favor of reducing it? In this dissertation, I argue that Americans are upset by current levels of economic inequality and support downward redistribution as a means to reduce it. At the same time, many have hesitations about or resistance to the mechanisms through which such redistribution might be carried out. This resistance, I found, varied across respondents’ class and race (and, to some extent, gender). Across groups, respondents’ desires for change were stymied by a social and political context of differential visibility that …


The Welfare States: Examining U.S. State-Level Benefits For Families With Children, 1987-2015, Anthony Huaqui Dec 2020

The Welfare States: Examining U.S. State-Level Benefits For Families With Children, 1987-2015, Anthony Huaqui

Masters Theses

Welfare state scholars have amassed competing theoretical explanations for the development of welfare policies. When considering the U.S. case, a discussion of federalism is central to these theoretical examinations. How power in policymaking is distributed amongst the varying levels of government is influential in the construction of the U.S. welfare state. Standard quantitative approaches to U.S. welfare research have offered a limited analysis of how theoretical explanations change after historical moments of welfare reform. In this study, I examine the institutional changes introduced to U.S. welfare in 1996 by way of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). …


The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein Jul 2020

The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein

Doctoral Dissertations

The main intellectual problem I address in this study is how everyday communication activates the relationship between creativity, conflict, and change. More specifically, I look at how the communication of creativity becomes a process of transformation, innovation, and change and how people are propelled to create through everyday communication practices in the face of conflict and opposition. To approach this problem, I use the case of communication in modern-day Belarus to show how creativity becomes a vehicle for and a source of new social and cultural routines among the independent grassroots communities and initiatives in Minsk. On one level, I …


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?


The Process To Political Mobilization In Five College Capitalism: Forms Of Antiracism, Personal Reflection And Community-Building, Caitlin B. Homrich Mar 2017

The Process To Political Mobilization In Five College Capitalism: Forms Of Antiracism, Personal Reflection And Community-Building, Caitlin B. Homrich

Masters Theses

The town of Amherst, Massachusetts is home to the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, and Hampshire College, institutions that have greatly influenced the town’s prolific history of political activism as well as the high educational attainment and economic status of the majority of its residents. Often hailed as a liberal utopia, research on the political mobilization occurring in this town provides insight into the process and limitations of ally politics: when most of the residents of Amherst are White, how do they engage in racial justice activism? When most of the residents are wealthy and/or highly …


Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott Mar 2017

Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …


The Radicalism Plateau: Working Class Transformation, Housing Foreclosure And The Hegemony Of The American Dream, Aaron C. Foote Nov 2016

The Radicalism Plateau: Working Class Transformation, Housing Foreclosure And The Hegemony Of The American Dream, Aaron C. Foote

Masters Theses

Much research has been done to explain how the late 2000s housing bubble burst, but little work has been done to see how working-class people responded and are responding to the issue of foreclosure in their communities. City Resistance, a grassroots community organization, transforms working class people from passive actors going through foreclosure to militant activists seeking to stay in their homes. My two-year ethnographic study chronicles the meetings, civil disobedience, and everyday lives of an organization of 300+ members in a medium sized, declining city, in the Northeast. It seeks to understand the multiple processes by which primarily Black …


Black Politics Of Folklore: Expanding The Sites And Forms Of Politics In Colombia, Carlos Alberto Valderrama Pibe Jul 2015

Black Politics Of Folklore: Expanding The Sites And Forms Of Politics In Colombia, Carlos Alberto Valderrama Pibe

Masters Theses

This paper puts into question ideas of politics limited to the theories of social movements and contentious politics. In using the concept of black counterpublic, understood as a web of relations and spaces, I show how black politics of folklore expands the sites and forms of politics in Colombia of 1960. In doing so, I describe two aspects of the black counterpublic from the point of view of black political intellectuals into the racialized field of Colombian folklore: a. the way black political intellectuals understood race and racism in Colombia and, b. their forms of politics. That is, their form …


On Belonging, Difference And Whiteness: Italy's Problem With Immigration, Flavia Stanley Mar 2015

On Belonging, Difference And Whiteness: Italy's Problem With Immigration, Flavia Stanley

Doctoral Dissertations

In the past thirty years, Italy has transitioned from a nation defined in part by a history of emigration, to a nation where immigration and attendant issues surrounding increased cultural and ethno-racial diversity dominates as a national concern. The research presented in this dissertation illustrates the ways in which, within this context, immigration is promoted and perceived unequivocally as a “problem” and a “threat.” However, rather than discussing Italy’s immigration problem, the issue here is recast as Italy’s problem with immigration. Despite deep regional differences and identities that continue to exist, increased immigration and the permanent settlement of …


Review Of Reclaiming Basque By Kathryn Woolard, Jacqueline Urla Jan 2014

Review Of Reclaiming Basque By Kathryn Woolard, Jacqueline Urla

Jacqueline L. Urla

Book Review of Reclaiming Basque by Kathryn Woolard. American Ethnologist February 2014.