Sociology Commons^™

Overparenting And Young Adult Narcissism: Psychological Control And Interpersonal Dependency As Mediators, Nathan Alexander Winner

Dissertations

Overparenting, or “helicopter parenting,” is a unique style of parenting characterized by parents’ well-intentioned but age-inappropriate over-involvement and intrusiveness in their children’s lives. Recent research has linked overparenting to the development of narcissistic traits in young adults, although the mechanisms of this relationship remain unclear. Two plausible mechanisms include the parenting behavior of psychological control and the increased interpersonal dependency of the child. Psychological control is a construct that overlaps with overparenting and has been linked to both dependent and narcissistic traits. Similarly, interpersonal dependency is a key predictor of narcissistic traits. Therefore, the present study sought to examine ...

Eighteen Blind Library Users’ Experiences With Library Websites And Search Tools In U.S. Academic Libraries: A Qualitative Study, Adina Mulliken

Publications and Research

Telephone interviews were conducted with 18 blind academic library users around the U.S. about their experiences using their library and its website. The study uses the perspective that blind users’ insights are fundamental. A common theme was that navigating a webpage is time consuming on the first visit. Issues identified include the need for “databases” to be defined on the homepage, accessibly coded search boxes, logical heading structure, and several problems to be resolved on result pages. Variations in needs depending on users’ screen reader expertise were also raised. Suggestions for libraries to address these issues are offered.

Outsider Ethnic Minorities And Wage Determination In China, Andrew Macdonald, Reza Hasmath

Reza Hasmath

What Explains The Rise Of Majority-Minority Tensions And Conflict In Xinjiang?, Reza Hasmath

Reza Hasmath

Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys Of Homelessness And Healing [Readers' Guide], Susan Celia Greenfield

Sociology

In a metropolis like New York, homelessness can blend into the urban landscape. For editor Susan Greenfield, however, New York is the place where a community of resilient, remarkable individuals are yearning for a voice. Sacred Shelter follows the lives of thirteen formerly homeless people, all of whom have graduated from the life skills empowerment program, an interfaith life skills program for homeless and formerly homeless individuals in New York. Through frank, honest interviews, these individuals share traumas from their youth, their experience with homelessness, and the healing they have discovered through community and faith.

Edna Humphrey talks about losing ...

Project Renew Worcester, Danni Yue, Amy Zhang, Jing Han, Omid Ashrafi, Yiming Xu

School of Professional Studies

n The client for this capstone project is RENEW Worcester which is a fledgling solar power project whose main goals are to bring renewable energy in the form of solar power into local, primarily low-income communities and are committed to the mission of making the transition off of fossil fuels to clean, renewable power. Based in Worcester, Massachusetts, they are a local chapter of Co-op Power which is a consumer-owned sustainable energy cooperative (co-op) made up of numerous different local chapters all over the New England area as well as the state of New York. The problem that we will ...

Bluegrass And Old-Time In Catalonia: An Ethnographic Case Study Of Aesthetic Communitas, Michael J. Luchtan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is an ethnographic case study of a musical community in Catalonia centered around the performance of bluegrass and old-time music. By using Victor and Edith Turners’ ideas of normative communitas, this paper identifies an aesthetic communitas model which describes a community centered around a performative genre. Through participant observation in the 16th Annual Al Ras Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival and interviews with local musicians, fans, venue owners, and luthiers, the ethnographic narrative details the characteristics of the aesthetic communitas in Catalonia and searches for associations of Appalachia that accompany the cross-cultural manifestation of bluegrass and old-time music ...

Social Justice Guest Speaker Series: Does More Immigration Mean More Crime In The United States?, Ramiro Martinez Ph.D.

Social Justice & Activism

Professor Martinez is a quantitative criminologist. Within that broad arena, his work contributes to violent crime research. His core research agenda asks how does violence vary across ecological settings, and, does violent crime and violent deaths vary across racial/ethnic and immigrant groups? In 2011, he was a recipient of American Society of Criminology DPCC’s Lifetime Achievement for outstanding scholarship in the area of race, crime, and justice. In 2007 he was a recipient of American Society of Criminology DPCC’s Coramae Richey Mann Award for outstanding scholarship in the area of race, crime, and justice. In 2006 he ...

Changing Donor-Ngo Relations Thorough Viable Alternatives To Conventional Grantmaking, Kio Okawa

Capstone Collection

The purpose of this research is to explore ways in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can become more sustainable in light of a crucial challenge facing them today: that of financial instability. In the charitable sector in the U.S, NGOs, especially small-scale NGOs, have struggled with securing daily operating revenue rather than revenue for long-term program operations, in spite of the continuing needs of their beneficiaries (Janus, 2018; Le, 2017; Meehan & Jonker, 2017). Fundraising has come to involve relationships between NGOs and institutional donors such as foundations, government agencies and corporations. Competition among NGOs and rampant power asymmetry between donors and grantees has come to define grantmaking in the neoliberal era (Gilmore, 2016; Janus, 2018; Le, 2017; Meehan & Jonker, 2017; Parks, 2008). Although revenue streams have been diversified through sound alternatives to conventional grantmaking, grant funding nonetheless remains a regular source of funds (Janus ...

Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in ...

The Weather, Rob B. Budde

The Goose

Poetry by Rob Budde.

“This Is The Way I Was”: Urban Ethics, Temporal Logics, And The Politics Of Cure, David R. Anderson

The Goose

This article employs Eli Clare's concept of the "politics of cure" in order to discuss issues of disability, temporality, and ethical relations to rehabilitation, restoration, and cure in the Sex and the (Motor) City: Ecologies of Middlesex special cluster.

Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini

The Goose

Citing the pronounced lack of academic engagement with Middlesex since its publication and riffing on the novel’s recounting of the demise of the auto industry in Detroit, Mazzolini examines how cycles of obsolescence and currency work within academic discourse and ultimately advocates for the novel’s potential for examining the material and affective nature of relevance itself.

On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard

The Goose

Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present.

Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity.

Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh

The Goose

Singh draws our attention to the “mute objects” of Middlesex, particularly The Obscure Object’s silent Black maid, Beulah, who quietly supports the unfolding romance between Cal and The Object. Through careful attention to histories of people silenced by slavery, dehumanization, and violence, Singh demands that we consider where and through what means some get to be fully human while others are made and sustained as objects for their comfort and play.

From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo

The Goose

Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.

Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour

The Goose

Highlighting the architecture of the Middlesex house of Eugenides’ novel as a major technology of modernity, Seymour argues for the biopolitical understanding of such modernist architecture and for the ways in which it often works against the exploitative effects of automation and sexology, yet constitutes a complex and even contradictory force in processes of modernization, and in the novel itself.

Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber

The Goose

Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.

Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins

The Goose

Collins approaches the ethical nuances of Cal’s intersex narrative in Middlesex, drawing comparisons with current debates in North Carolina concerning gender-normative bathroom use and trans rights, in order to advocate for more ethical practices of relation and responsibility outside of mere knowledge creation and policy.