Digital Commons Network^™

Identity Composition: A Qualitative Study Of Community College English Composition And Lgbtq-Inclusive Pedagogical Practices, Lucas Michel Gassen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research investigates the identity-based practices and experiences of English composition instructors who teach at community colleges and assesses the extent to which LGBTQ-inclusive pedagogical approaches are undertaken to meet the needs of sexual and gender minority students. The participant pool was comprised of community college instructors within the Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS) who have taught English composition courses within the past five years. This study aims to answer the following research questions: 1. In what ways and to what extent is identity-based instructional content incorporated in community college English composition courses? 2. In what ways and …

A Necessary Shift? A Qualitative Exploration Of Black Women’S Experiences With Altering Self-Presentation For Job Attainment, Dorothy Rachael Kemp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore how Black women describe their experiences with shifting for job attainment, including their perception of identity, and how they interpret and negotiate any outcomes of shifting. The study was guided by the following research questions: (1) How do Black women describe their experiences with shifting for job attainment? (2) How do Black women interpret and negotiate any outcomes of shifting? (3) How do Black women perceive their identity in terms of their experiences with shifting?

Ten participants shared their personal experiences shifting throughout their job attainment process. Each participant self-identified as Black …

A Narrative And Performative Methodology For Understanding Adolescent Cancer Stories, Patrick Mcelearney

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The field of health communication places considerable attention on coping with cancer, typically using social scientific approaches to investigate uncertainty, information, and/or social networks. Social scientific models of coping with adolescent cancer often measure how behaviors seek to manage cancer’s uncontrollability and/or uncertainty; however, how adolescents cope with cancer has been unclear. Short-term studies show adolescents typically and atypically cope. Long-term studies show a significant portion of survivors exhibit post-traumatic stress. The narrative and performative turns expose the role narratives and performatives play in shaping human subjects as meaning makers rather than merely information sharers. A narrative subject reframes cancer’s …

Thoreau's Melancholia, Walden's Friendship, And Queer Agency, Julia Morgan Leslie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Walden queers its readers. While many have investigated Thoreau’s queerness, there has been little notice of Walden’s queerness. This project begins with a situational analysis that identifies the melancholic antecedents of Walden in Thoreau’s life and his choices that led to the illumination of his melancholia. Thoreau had already been experimenting with what Branka Arsić identified as “literalization.” Nevertheless, a period of crisis, detailed by Robert Milder, made him aware of what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have referred to as the melancholic’s blind skill of “demetaphorization.” I suggest that Thoreau exploited this skill to produce Walden’s unique …

Skin Color And Social Practice: The Problem Of Race And Class Among New Orleans Creoles And Across The South, 1718-1862, Andrew N. Wegmann

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to uncover the story of the New Orleans Creoles of color—the mixed-race, francophone middle class of New Orleans and the surrounding area before the Civil War. It shows how the people who became the New Orleans Creoles of color worked endlessly, over three colonial and territorial regimes and nearly 150 years, to define themselves according to the ever-changing cultural, social, and racial landscapes before them. It places this local history in the wider context of the North American continent and the Atlantic World—the space within which these people actually lived. In so doing, it …

Mind Playing Tricks: Individualism, Upward Mobility, And The Commitment To Self-Determination Among The Urban Poor, Will Bryerton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The ethos of the American Dream offers a popular and straightforward prescription for success: Work hard, rely on yourself before others, avoid bad choices, and prosperity will follow. It is a decidedly optimistic, largely undefined, and intensely individualistic promise with serious implications for Americans’ views on achievement and upward mobility. For all of these reasons, the validity of this ethos has come under attack. Philosophically, it is seen as illusory, ambiguous, and unrealistically demanding of individual exceptionalism. Sociologically, it is admonished for being too dismissive of structural constraints, systemic inequalities, and the value of relationships, social embeddedness, and mutual dependence. …

"Give Me Something That Relates To My Life" : Exploring African American Adolescent Male Identities Through Young Adult Literature, Angelle Leblanc Hebert

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Research suggests that when students realize a personal connection to their learning environment and feel their identities are supported, successful learning can take place (Nasir, 2012). Specifically, the use of texts that are meaningful to the lives of African American males can provide spaces for them to explore their unique identities (Tatum, 2009). Such texts can include young adult literature, which offers potential for motivating students to engage in reading, especially because of its themes relevant to teen readers. While much research exists about the various YAL books available, less is known about “what actually happens when teens read young …

Identity As A Compass For Understanding Media Choice, Emily Marie Pfetzer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The changes to our socio-technological media environment over the past 30 years have heightened the interest in identity across the social sciences. The spread of networked digital communication technologies and mobile media have increased the urgency for media scholars to better understand how and why individuals consume media as they do. Several media choice scholars have recently started considering how individuals’ identity and self-concept relate to media choice, but have not yet systematically addressed how identity might be related. This dissertation takes the first steps toward advancing an identity-based approach to understanding individual media choice in the 21st century by: …

Masada Performances : The Contested Indentities Of Touristic Spaces, Ariel Gratch

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Masada, a Herodian fortress and the site of an ancient struggle between Jews and Romans that culminated in a mass suicide by 960 Jews, is a symbolically important site for the country of Israel and for the Jewish people. Previous research on Masada has focused on how the story about the site, told through popular culture, in history books, and at the site, has been used to create and maintain a national Israeli and, more broadly, Jewish identity. Masada is the second most visited site in Israel, attracting over 800,000 people each year, and the number of visitors to the …

The Contentious Performances Of Culture Jamming : Art, Repertoires Of Contention, And Social Movement Theory, David M. Iles Iii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Culture jamming is a form of contentious politics in which activists utilize ironic frames to challenge a dominant set of social relationships and institutions. Despite its contestational nature, scholars rarely apply the insights of social movement theory to explain this curious phenomenon. The main concerns of this project are to provide an empirical analysis of culture jamming organizations and to develop a theoretical approach to explaining repertoire change and tactical choice. The primary thesis mediating these empirical and theoretical concerns is that a close relation exists between the development of twentieth century art in advanced Western democracies and culture jamming. …

The Decline In Trust In The European Union, Nathan Donald Price

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

After twenty years, the European Union is undoubtedly at a crossroads, as its institutions try to manage the sovereign debt crisis in member states and the uncertainty surrounding the future direction of the project. The challenges the European Union has faced, and the response to them, have drawn considerable attention on the capacity of the European Union to manage the interests of the Europeans. In this dissertation, I discuss the process of Europeanization and why it has resulted in suboptimal outputs. Additionally, I discuss the perception of a democratic deficit in the European Union. The purpose of this is to …

Essays On Social Networks, Emre Unlu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The first chapter provides a way of evaluating a player's contribution to their team and relates their effort to their market values. We extend the work of Ballester et al. (2006) by incorporating a network outcome component in the players' payoff functions. As an illustration of the theory, we create a unique data set from the UEFA Euro 2008 tournament. To capture the interaction between players, we create the passing network of each team. This all allows us to identify the key player and key groups of players for both teams in each game. We then use our measure to …

Destructive Behavior Among Adolescents: The Role Of Social Integration In The Academic Institution, Matthew E. Wilkinson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the relationships between the social environment of the academic institution and the self-destructive behavior of the students within it. My approach combines elements of strain and social control theories to expand the concept of social integration and its importance in influencing adolescent deviant behavior; I include theories of identity, efficacy and locus of control, and self-concept in my theoretical model. My primary focus is on the importance of social integration in anchoring the individual into the social environment, providing him/her with pro-social sources for identity, efficacy, and social support. For students, the social environment of the school …

Hope For Today And Tomorrow: Identity Construction Power, And Persistence Of Community College Women Who Are First In Their Families To Attend College, Crystal Deer Lee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation was a case study of four community college women who were first in their families to attend college. Through this study, the “first-generation” construct was analyzed in regard to its uses and limits. The researcher found the label as an identifier becomes problematic through social discourse. These results confirm London’s (1996) finding that students themselves do not necessarily find anything unique about their situations or anything in common with other students simply based on their being the first in their families to attend college. Therefore, the “first-generation” construct may be viewed primarily as a higher education versus an …

Displacement And The Text: Exploring Otherness In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé'S La Migration Des Coeurs, Rosario Ferré'S The House On The Lagoon, And Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish, Melody Boyd Carriere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of how some displaced Caribbean and Italian American women examine identity within a literary tradition that considers them "Other." I have chosen four culturally diverse novels to explore, each one written by a different female author: Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé's La migration des cœurs, Rosario Ferré's The House on the Lagoon, and Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish. I identify the causes of the protagonists' displacement, and analyze the actions they take to make themselves heard in a tradition that has formerly silenced them. The role of the mother is especially important in …

Sites Of Resistance: Language, Intertextuality, And Subjectivity In The Poetry Of Diane Wakoski, Cordelia Maxwell Hanemann

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the interconnectedness of language and related cultural texts and women’s subjectivity. The poststructuralist feminist enterprise of examining and critiquing language and signifying practices for the ways in which they impose social values and of interrogating and undermining the fixity of meanings in cultural texts will serve as my primary frame. Concerned with the individual (gendered) consciousness, poststructuralist feminist theory of subject formation posits that while language, along with ideologically biased texts of the culture, construct subjects, language and the cultural texts also serve as sites of resistance for the deconstruction and reconception of individual and collective subjectivities. …

Text, Context, And Identities In Pointe Coupee, Louisiana: Six Young Women Positioned As Writers, Patricia Meeks Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Texts are contextualized¡Xtied to times, tied to places, and tied to the people who live in those times and places. This dissertation is based on a study of writing and identity set at Catholic High School in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana. For their senior English class, the six young women participating in the study produced a number of pieces of writing of various types, contrasting in genre, length, content, and register. These kinds of writing represent varying discourse practices, and it was within these practices that the young women positioned themselves or were positioned by influences in their social context. The …

From Oklahomans To "Okies": Identity Formation In Rural California, Toni Ann Alexander

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the twentieth century difficult economic circumstances have resulted in reduced employment opportunities. In-migrants have long borne the brunt of these limitations, facing open hostilities from residents who felt that these "outsiders" were undeserving of employment and social services. Within the context of the 1930s Depression in the Central Valley of California, such negative public sentiment was often directed at "Okies," the 315,000 former residents of the "Western South" who crossed the California state line in search of employment in the agricultural fields of the Golden State. In this dissertation, I examine the changing conceptualizations of Okie identity throughout the …

La Poetique Du Paysage Dans L'Oeuvre D'Edouard Glissant, De Kateb Yacine Et De William Faulkner, Nabil Boudraa

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the different ways in which Edouard Glissant, Kateb Yacine and William Faulkner combine landscape, history and identity in their work. The depiction of landscape in literature is not new, but the French Romantics in the 19th century, for instance, tended to describe the beauty of landscape without conceiving any rapport between landscape and humankind, and thus created a gap between the two. For Kateb and Glissant, landscape is also a witness of History. The (hi)story of their respective communities has been confiscated and shattered by the respective colonizers, hence the necessity to recreate it through the poetics …