Digital Commons Network^™

Student To Make His Own 'Motorcycle Diaries' During Bolivia Trek, Michael Newsom

University of Mississippi News

Jess Cooley, 2020 Barksdale Award Winner, plans to document forest fire devastation in Bolivia

University Recognized For Community Engagement Efforts, Edwin B. Smith

University of Mississippi News

UM earns Carnegie Classification, recognized for 'exemplary institutional practices'

When Aging Out Means 'Going Without', Abigail Meisel

University of Mississippi News

UM sociologist researching elders, rural poverty with National Institutes of Health grant

Spring Southtalks Begin Jan. 29, Rebecca Lauck Cleary

Blog Posts

Series includes broad range of topics, including series on Southern population shifts OXFORD, Miss. The SouthTalks series, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, is offering a wide variety of events this spring, including five lectures focused on movement and migration in the South.

Spring Southtalks Begin Jan. 29, Rebecca Lauck Cleary

University of Mississippi News

No abstract provided.

January 22, 2020, The Daily Mississippian

Daily Mississippian (all digitized issues)

No abstract provided.

Charleston, Ms - M Partner Pilot Phase, Laura Martin, Albert Nylander

M Partner Publications

A partnership between the City of Charleston and the University of Mississippi.

Youth And Young Adults These Days: Perceptions Of Community Resources And Factors Associated With Rural Community Engagement, Wilson Majee, Adaobi Anakwe, Karien Jooste

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

Young people’s decisions to engage or disengage in community activities can be attributed to their perceptions of community resources and opportunities. This study examined South African rural young adults’ perceptions of their future communities and influences on engaging in health promoting activities and community leadership. Survey data were collected from 58 youth and 52 young adults affiliated with key community organizations. Correlational analysis examined perceptions of community resources and participation in community leadership. Perceptions about the future of their communities differed by age, educational attainment, employment status, and number of years spent in the community and were strongly correlated with …

Change Agents (2020), University Of Missisisppi. Office Of Research And Sponsored Programs.

Publications of the ORSP

This publication highlights a few of the significant research efforts at the University of Mississippi during the past year.

Southern Register. 2020.1 (Winter 2020), University Of Mississippi. Center For The Study Of Southern Culture

Southern Register

No abstract provided.

Social Distance, Stigma, And Help-Seeking: An Exploration Of Autism Beliefs In The Southern United States, Christian Shannon Courson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stigma has been associated with physical and mental health conditions and their treatment long before formal care systems. Negative perceptions within the lay community, such as stigma and social distancing, negatively impact individuals with autism and their families. The purpose of this study was to explore factors associated with autism stigma among laypeople in the Southern United States. Specifically, the study explored how demographics, knowledge, and familiarity are related to social distancing and stigma, and how these factors relate to beliefs about and intentions of help-seeking. Using a lay sample (N=108) of rural Southern towns, survey data was collected in …

Holding Space: Learning From A Black Art Organization, Tierney Anne Bamrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Minority-led nonprofit organizations are marginalized in the United States arts sector, analyses of which rely heavily on data from dominant, often White-led institutional arts organizations. This study seeks to understand the experience of a minority-led arts organization in that context. I ask, what does artistic practice – both creative and organizational – look like for this organization? And what are the implications of that practice for the arts sector more broadly? Drawing on over a year of ethnographic work with The Network, a Black-led arts organization in a southern U.S. city, I argue that their asset-focused treatment of place, their …

What's Next? The Intersection Of Politics And Marketing: A Look At Its Impact On Shareholder Wealth, Ashley Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first essay attempts to explain the heterogeneity in the stock market’s reaction to a firm’s lobbying for good efforts. It is hypothesized that higher (a) CEO equity-to-pay ratio, (b) marketing influence in the TMT, (c) marketing capabilities, (d) corporate social performance, and (e) institutional ownership, will be associated with less negative abnormal stock returns. Results indicate that firms with a greater amount of marketing influence in the top management team experience greater negative abnormal returns. While firms with a higher CEO equity-to-pay ratio and a greater level of institutional ownership experience less negative abnormal returns. The second essay explores …

Beautiful And Terrible In The Face: Reconfiguring The Southern Beauty Myth Through The Short Fiction And Autobiographical Writings Of Eudora Welty, Katherine Elizabeth Howell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From her personal appearance as the “ugly duckling” of southern literature, to her narrative preoccupations as a writer of grotesques, Eudora Welty has been critically separated from the realm of southern beauty and femininity. Drawing textual evidence from Welty’s strategic invocation of beauty acts and products in her short fiction and autobiographical writings, this thesis insists upon Welty’s lifelong stake in beauty culture, as it is practiced by southern women across the socioeconomic spectrum. Across her body of short fiction—a substantial portion of which was first published in women’s fashion magazines—Welty details the ways in which beauty, as expressed through …

It's A Cis-Gendered Man's World: How Drag Kings Define Good Drag In Their Fight To Be Seen As The Best Performers, Madison Shappley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is based on field observations in Ridgeville, a Southern city, at an LGBTQ bar, that I call Rainbow Bar and on in-depth interviews with Rainbow Bar drag performers. Through my study at Rainbow, I set out to answer: 1) What do drag kings consider to be “good drag” for themselves and for other kings?; and 2) Who is considered to have the best drag? And who determines what the best drag is? I found that Ridgeville drag kings felt as though they had to work harder than Ridgeville queens in their drag. To have good drag, Ridgeville kings …

Learning Community Impact On Low-Socioeconomic Student Success In A 4-Year Public University, April Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Low-socioeconomic students often persist and graduate from institutions of higher education at lower rates than middle and upper-socioeconomic students. Learning communities are one proactive program established in higher education to support first-year students in their academic and social acclimation into college. However, learning community literature tends to focus on the success of the participant population as a whole. This study sought to contribute to existing learning community literature and low-socioeconomic student literature by measuring learning community impact on low-socioeconomic student academic success in terms of GPA, same-institution retention, and same-institution degree completion within six years. This quantitative study measured GPA, …

African American Gospel Piano Style In The 21st Century: A Collective Case Study, Roderick Vester

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the African American gospel piano style in the 21st century, further examining the role of musical enculturation, transmission, and preservation through the lived experiences and perspectives as reported by five gospel pianists throughout the United States. A collective case study design (Stake, 1995) was used to explore how the gospel piano style is being learned, developed, transformed, transmitted, and preserved. Research questions focused on participants’ beliefs about the stylistic transformation of gospel piano in the 21st century and factors that influences those beliefs such as past and present stylistic developments. The data …

Instant Schools: The Frenzied Formation And Early Days Of The Mississippi Private School Association, Ernest Flora Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The founding leadership of the Mississippi Private School Association (MPSA) used individual experience and extensive networking via the Citizens’ Council along with the community’s belief and desire to maintain white-only schools to create a coalition of quickly formed but well-resourced private schools. This political and social clout afforded them the ability to create a large, powerful organization almost “instantly” during a pivotal moment of southern educational history. Scholar Kenneth T. Andrews called the establishment of all-white academies in Mississippi, “a countermovement strategy that floout of the prior history of organized white resistance to the civil-rights movement.” The significance of this …

Factors Associated With Student Withdrawals At A Mississippi Community College, Kathryn Harlow Cox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The three manuscript dissertation examines the factors associated with student withdrawal at a Mississippi Community College. Student withdrawal is a consistent concern for administration at this institution. The research focuses on reasons for withdrawal, student demographics, and subject withdrawal. Understanding the factors associated with student withdrawal at this institution could encourage retention and persistence. Manuscript One will provide an overview of the problem of practice, review of literature, and guidance from successful retention programs. Manuscript Two will provide a summary of data collection and presentation of findings from each of the four research questions. Manuscript Three will provide a summary …

Examining The Influences Of University Image And Campus Visits On Students’ College Choices, Jennifer Lea Mcclure

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenological study provides qualitative data in the areas of university image, campus visits, and college choice. The purpose of the study was to examine the value of university image and campus visits in students’ college choices. Twenty matriculated freshmen at the University of Mississippi who participated in campus visits as prospective students and who applied for admission in the months of October through April were selected via purposeful sampling to participate in open-ended interviews about the images that they hold of the university, their campus visit experiences, and their college choice processes. The data collected show that students place …

The Preparedness Of First-Year Football Student-Athletes In Online Classes At The University Of Mississippi, Cliff Mccain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Colleges and universities in the United States currently face an n issue of student-athletes enrolling in online courses and not being prepared. Research has shown that students take these classes for a variety of reasons and perceive a variety of advantages and disadvantages to these types of classes and even more specifically, the subjects taken in the online format. Their level of preparedness, the reasons for this level, and the perceived assistance needed were also issues to be examined. This study aims to determine how prepared for online courses the first-year football student - athletes were during the 2018-2019 school …

Out To Get Us: Contemporary Evangelical Expressions Of Identity In Interaction, Pace Tyler Ward

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Evangelical Christianity occupies a dominant position in American culture and politics. This thesis extends previous research on evangelicalism in America by identifying how evangelicals collectively construct their distinction and uniqueness in small group settings. By conducting an ethnography of bible study meetings organized by an evangelical church in North Mississippi, Mercy Church, I examine how church participants collectively differentiate themselves from the rest of the world. Rather than imagining themselves at odds with a single, monolithic Other, this study shows that evangelical identity is formed and crystallized through small battles with numerous outsiders, both Christian and non-Christian. Specifically, I find …

Timescales Of Variation In Diversity And Production Of Bacterioplankton Assemblages In The Lower Mississippi River, Jason T. Payne, Colin R. Jackson, Justin J. Millar, Clifford A. Ochs

Faculty and Student Publications

Copyright: © 2020 Payne et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Rivers are characterized by rapid and continuous one-way directional fluxes of flowing, aqueous habitat, chemicals, suspended particles, and resident plankton. Therefore, at any particular location in such systems there is the potential for continuous, and possibly abrupt, changes in diversity and metabolic activities of suspended biota. As microorganisms are the principal catalysts of organic matter degradation and nutrient cycling in …

Top Ole Miss Stories Of 2019, Staff Report

University of Mississippi News

Year-end review showcases highlights, achievements across UM

All Are Welcome? Southern Hospitality And The Politics Of Belonging, Betsie Garner, Andrew Harvard

Study the South

The elective affinity between southern hospitality and Christian hospitality functions as a moral framework for negotiating change and debating identity politics. An ethnographic community study conducted in Rockdale County, Georgia between 2014 and 2017 focused on the discourse and practice of southern hospitality.

Illustrations by Andrew Harvard.

New Traditions: Retrospective And Prospective, G. Richard Wetherill

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Community Development In Rural America: Sociological Issues In National Policy, Kenneth P. Wilkinson

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

Definitions of the concepts of rural, community, and development suggest problems for a policy of rural community development. An effective policy must address two barriers to development of community among residents of rural areas: 1) deficits in access to resources for meeting common needs and 2) severe inequalities in access to resources that are available. Rurality encourages community development when these barriers are low. The aim of policy should be to attack rural barriers while cultivating rural potentials for community development.

Satisfaction Among Ecological Management Workers, Theodore D. Fuller, Donald J. Shoemaker

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

This paper explores levels and correlates of job satisfaction for a series of occupations concerned with ecological management in Virginia. To enhance job satisfaction, a careful balance must be maintained between organizational requirements and individual needs. Fortunately, organizational factors over which the manager can exert considerable control (specially, dimensions of bureaucratization) are more consistently related to job satisfaction than are individual factors (extent of job training, evaluation of job training, education, and job tenure).

Agricultural Service Firms: Organizational Characteristics And Linkages To Production Agriculture, Thomas A. Lyson

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

Using data from the 1978 Census of Agriculture and the 1978 Census of Agricultural Services, this paper examines some of the organizational characteristics of firms in seven agricultural service industry subgroups. Using the 48 contiguous states as units of analysis, an ecological analysis attempts to identify structure characteristics of farm systems that give rise to, and foster development of, off-farm agricultural service firms. Results show that considerable variation exists in the organizational and labor force characteristics across the seven industry subgroups. Other findings indicate that the spread of agricultural services in a state is positively associated with the proportion of …

Agrarian And Political Attitudes Among Small-Scale Farmers: A North Carolina Case Study, Michael D. Schulman, Regina Luginbuhl

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

This paper examines the agrarian and political attitudes of a sample of predominantly black, small-scale farmers from three North Carolina counties. Factor analysis identifies agrarian (agrarianism) and political-economic attitudes (socio-political powerlessness and stratification system illegitimacy). Regression analysis identifies the social bases of agrarianism and its relationship to socio-political powerlessness and stratification system illegitimacy. Agrarianism has a differential impact upon the legitimation of economic and political inequalities among this regionally specific segment of small farm strata.