Digital Commons Network^™

Teaching Style: An Investigation Of New York City Public High School Teacher Dress Practices, Anne J. Brownstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades there has been increasing interest in regulating teacher appearance in the schools. While there is a great deal of anecdotal data available about what dress standards for teachers should be, to the best of the researcher's knowledge no one has undertaken scholarly research to investigate teacher attitudes towards their constructions of self, self-as-teacher, and educational philosophies as expressed by dress practices.

Predicated upon the theory that the study of self presentation provides a window through which we can gain insight into these constructions, this dissertation investigates how a sample of nine New York City public high school …

"If You See Something, Say Something": The Power Of The 'War On Terrorism' To Name What We See, Polly Sylvia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to understand the cultural politics of the "war on terrorism" through a case study of the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign within the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority Subway System. Drawing upon literature that focuses on an understanding of the affective transmission of culture, this research seeks to understand this particular campaign as a technique of social control. Through a content analysis of the advertisements of this campaign and a performative methodology that analyzes the performance of security within the subway system, an understanding of the connections this local campaign (as a security campaign) …

The Social Construction Of Racial And Ethnic Identity Among Women Of Color From Mixed Ancestry: Psychological Freedoms And Sociological Constraints, Laura Quiros

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the context of the 21st century, when an increasing number of people cannot be classified by an archaic system based on race, an awareness of the complexities of ethnic and racial identity is more important than ever. This study assists in the development of a critical understanding of the complexity of racial and ethnic identity by exploring the construction of racial and ethnic identity among women of color from mixed ancestry. These women are the offspring of parents from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds. As a result, their identities—both internally and externally constructed—belie traditional racial and ethnic categories. This …

Eduardo Chibás: The Incorrigible Man Of Cuban Politics, Ilan Ehrlich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is ample evidence to suggest that Eduardo Chibás (1907-1951), despite never having been president, was of primary importance to Cuba’s political system in the years 1940-1952. As a congressman, senator and presidential candidate who was also the island’s most popular radio commentator, Chibás was afforded an excellent opportunity to alter government policy and shape public opinion. Specifically, Chibás denounced what he saw as the vices and inadequacies of Cuba’s fledgling democracy, especially corruption in public office. By all accounts, Chibás was a man of unquestioned probity. Unlike his political rivals, who gained financially from their elected positions, Chibás’ economic …

Making Up The Difference: Ecuadorian Women Engaged In Direct Selling, Erynn Masi Casanova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As economic globalization progresses, employment is becoming more flexible and informalized in many parts of the world. In some developing countries, direct sales (selling branded products from person to person) is an increasingly attractive type of work, especially for women. Direct sales organizations benefit from cultural norms and structural forces that steer women away from full-time jobs in the formal economy, and also from the material conditions that lead to women's need to earn an income. This study examines the work experiences and social worlds of women affiliated with Ecuador's most successful direct sales company, Yanbal, with a focus on …

"Zum Einsatz Des Leben Fuer Deutschland": Girls' Popular Fiction During The Third Reich, Kathryn L. Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent research in the field of Cultural Studies has shown that popular fiction, more than any other genre, provides a way for readers to regulate and structure their lives. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the popular fiction which girls living in Nazi Germany read in an attempt to see how current events and policies are reflected in the novels in an effort to acclimatize girls to life under National Socialism and gain their complete support of the Third Reich. Popular fiction was expected to portray a mirror of life for young readers under National Socialism, with …

The Gatekeeping Behind Meritocracy: Voices Of Nyc High School Students, Arlene Melody Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Survey and focus group sampling of students in high achieving schools compared to lower achieving schools were used to examine why there are fewer black men graduating from high schools in New York City as well as high schools around the country compared to other groups of students. Race is disaggregated in order to look at the difference in achievement rates for African American, black Hispanic, African, and Afro-Caribbean men. The findings support the contention that foreign-born blacks do better academically than native blacks.

Focus groups consist of black males, females, and staff at six of the 12 schools; field …

Are Sisters Doing It (All) For Themselves? Elderly Black Women And Healthcare Decision Making, Carlene Buchanan Turner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the effects of health values on the decisions made by elderly Black women to use self-care methods and homecare services. The research is grounded in the healthicization or wellness promotion paradigm, which prescribes behavioral or lifestyle changes for previously biomedically defined events.

The dissertation consists of both quantitative and qualitative research. The quantitative component focuses on a sample of Black women over 70 years old (N= 642) from the 2000 NHI Second Longitudinal Study on Aging dataset. The qualitative component analyzes ten in-depth interviews with respondents from Southern Maryland used to supplement the quantitative findings.

Although the …

Navigating The Gaze: Young People's Intimate Knowledge With Surveilled Spaces At School, Patricia Krueger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 1980s introduced numerous state and federal policies that created a similar ideology of discipline and punishment in the educational system and the criminal justice system, a phenomenon known today as the school-to-prison pipeline. Several critical elements are involved in the production and maintenance of the school-to-prison pipeline, such as zero tolerance regulations, surveillance technologies, and strengthened in-school discipline practices. In this dissertation I argue that these elements of the pipeline maintain a strong presence and occupy the physical spaces of public schools. Moreover, surveillance cameras and police officers are most often installed in the cities' most under-resourced public schools, …

Raising Children The American Way: Court-Mandated Parenting Education In Alameda, California, Nicole D. Laborde

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on ethnographic research in Alameda County, California, this dissertation examines the parenting practices and knowledge that are taught in court-mandated parenting classes along with those of parents enrolled in these classes. In California, two of the primary reasons that parents would be mandated to take classes are because of involvement with Child and Family Services (CFS) or in a custody dispute that reaches the courts. I argue that the different forms of knowledge and the practices advanced in the classes, at times consistent with, at times in conflict with those of the parents, reflect the demands and social responsibility …

"Reconnecting To Resilience" A Historical Study Of Slave Narratives With Implications For Social Work Practice With African American Youth From High Risk Environments, Barbara E. Milton Ii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The often times high risk environment of African American youth negatively impacts their psychological well being, their family relations and community connections. Many African American youth today are experiencing the vestiges of historical trauma that took root in America in the 17th Century when the first Africans came to America. As a result of generational transmission of historical trauma, many youths today are disproportionately underachieving in education, disproportionately poor, disproportionately monitored by police and incarcerated and disproportionately disrespected by the society at large. In order to reduce the disparity of contemporary problems effecting African American youth, social scientists need to …

Memorial Laws: Social And Media Construction Of Personalized Legislation, 1994-2005, Faith H. Leibman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the possibility that certain social, demographic, and political factors have led to the recent adoption by American state legislatures of what are known as Memorial Laws. First enacted in 1994, these laws have become increasingly common. However, there has been little or no formal academic research into them. This investigation aims to provide a preliminary analysis of Memorial Laws and to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics affecting their passage. Specifically, this study examines a variety of demographic traits of victims and the characteristics of the crimes committed against them in an attempt to determine …

Identity Development In Pre-Service Teachers Who Are Explainers In A Science Center: Dialectically Developing Theory And Praxis, Preeti Gupta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates how teaching in a hands-on science center contributes to re/shaping one's teaching identity. Situated at the New York Hall of Science (NYHS) in Queens, New York, my research approach is to conduct a critical ethnography where the focus is on improving the teaching and learning of science for all involved. In particular, Explainers, floor staff at NYHS, who are studying to be science teachers, are invited to become co-researchers with me.

Written as a manuscript style, this dissertation consists of six chapters. Each chapter foregrounds certain events and phenomena, and theory and method are woven in to …

Turning Space Into Place In The Sprawling “New City”: Shrinking Space, Visions Of Place, Homeowners In Conflict, Lael Leslie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Was there a "real place" to be found in the sprawling "new city" landscape? This interview study considers the categories of sprawl as a placeless, apolitical space, and of the suburban white middle class, to explore how "place" is variously understood by homeowners confronting rapid spatial reconfiguration. The interviewees are residents of a municipality located in one of New Jersey's "growth corridors." Emphasis is on homeowners' experiences, and on what they view as problems related to rapid growth.

Given the long settlement history of this northeastern seaboard region, this study finds that relations among homeowners had changed over time in …

Hiding Out: Creative Resistance Among Anonymous Workbloggers, Abigail Schoneboom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anonymous workbloggers—employees who write online diaries about their work—are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the corporate cultures in which they toil. Writing under an assumed identity, these workers create satirical portraits of their supervisors and colleagues, rail against management gurus and corporate buzzwords, celebrate time-wasting capers, and daydream about quitting. Their irreverent and fictionalized accounts of work, which are shielded from the gaze of co-workers and supervisors, reveal how office workers critically negotiate a labor process that, increasingly, demands their hearts and minds.

This study, which comprises an overview of media and organizational responses to the phenomenon, …

Meritocracy: A Socio-Educational Policy Conundrum Transversing Selected Works Of James Bryant Conant, Benjamin Enoma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, adjacent strands of the meritocratic discourse intercept by accident of history. It occurs either in the Jeffersonian tradition of culling from all sectors of the populace a natural aristocracy of talents as proposed by James Conant through the development of Scholastic Aptitude Tests, or by expanding the structure of opportunity to all individuals and leveling uneven terrains through social policies like desegregation of schools and affirmative action. In other words, it is a case of policies based on the 'laissez-faire' doctrine versus those based on governmental intervention. "This interception to some degree has fused the strands …

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …

An Empirical Test Of Terrie Moffitt’S Developmental Taxonomy Of Delinquency, Jessica M. Saunders

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Terrie Moffitt (1993) hypothesized that there will be three distinct types of juveniles: (1) Life-course-persistent offenders, who begin their antisocial behavior at a young age and continue to offend over their lives; (2) Adolescence-limited offenders, who are involved in criminal behavior only through their adolescent years, and; (3) Abstainers, who do not engage in any delinquent behavior. This study tested both the theory and methodology using general growth mixture modeling.

The methodological results were conclusive whereas the theoretical ones were less clear. The different latent variable variance structures were freed and fixed to test the best model …

The Paradoxes Of Intimacy In Early Modern Drama, Brenda Marina Henry-Offor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the early modern period intimacy was neither well-defined nor discussed in the drama in the way that we do today. My dissertation is an examination of the paradoxical nature of intimacy in Renaissance drama and the impact of space on this intimacy. I am looking at the behavior of married couples and same-sex couples within the home during the early modern period. To elucidate my theory of intimacy I have chosen the plays: Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness, William Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and John Webster's …

Beyond "Vectors Of Transmission" Through Commercial Sex: Exploring Models Of Sexual Risk Taking With Clients And Casual Partners Among Internet Based Male Sex Workers, David S. Bimbi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Male sex workers (MSWs) have often been portrayed as vectors of disease although most published studies have reported high rates of condom use with clients in this population. Regardless, social psychological models of sexual behavior that have been widely utilized to examine sexual risk taking in the gay and bisexual male community have not been applied to research with MSWs. Further, sexual behaviors with casual sex partners among MSWs has been absent in most reported research. More recently, the rise of barebacking (unprotected anal sex) in the gay male community has challenged assumptions that most gay and bisexual men want …

The Paradoxes Of Diversity: Race, Class, And Gender Relations In A Federal Bureaucracy, Linda B. Benbow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative study analyzes the perspective of urban postal workers regarding their experiences in a diverse workplace. It will describe the social relations of workers and shows how race, gender, and class are implicated in those relationships. The research design involves in-depth interviews, participant-observation, and analysis of postal and postal union literature. The theoretical framework undergirding this research is multidimensional; theories of diversity in the workplace will be incorporated with race, class, and gender theories. The premise of this research is that diversity problems are rooted in the organizational structure. Power differences are inherent in hierarchically arranged bureaucratic settings and …

The Intersection Of Race, Gender, And Class In Social Transitions: Caribbean Immigrant Women Negotiating United States Higher Education, Tracy A. Mcfarlane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The experiences of immigrant women of color within US higher education provide a unique opportunity to understand the complex influences of intersecting identities within changing social contexts. This study was designed to determine how the social categories of gender, class, race, and nationality operate in Caribbean immigrant women's experience of being college students. Focus groups and life story interviews were conducted with 27 English-speaking Caribbean-born women attending CUNY undergraduate colleges. The data yielded four main findings: First, Caribbean gender roles and traditions are not homogenous; hence, there is variation in the ways in which these affect women's experiences in the …

Literacyscape: The History, Politics And Practice Of Basic Writing, Tim Mccormack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Perhaps nowhere else in American society is the ideology, theory and politics of language literacy so emphatically revealed than in the hopeful and daunting attempt by Basic Writing students to leap-frog their way over the real socio-cultural, linguistic and/or politically constructed remedial barriers and into the mainstream of college life. This dissertation documents and analyzes a Basic Writing classroom at the City College of the City University of New York in the final year that the college offered Basic Writing to matriculated students. This project details the lived experience of a single Basic Writing course and the lives of the …

"I Harbor No Hate": A Study Of Political Tolerance And Intolerance In Holocaust Survivors, Nancy Isserman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The political attitudes of tolerance or intolerance of victims towards their former perpetrators have not been thoroughly researched prior to this study. Through the data collected by the Transcending Trauma Project, a study looking at three generations of Holocaust survivor families, " I Harbor No Hate: A Study of Tolerance and Intolerance in Holocaust Survivors " examined this question. One expects that survivors will until their dying days hate the Germans and the Poles who destroyed their families, their livelihoods, their homes, and their communities. Yet, to a significant group of survivors interviewed for the Transcending Trauma project, this response …

To Stand On Their Own: Women’S Higher Education In Contemporary Kerala, India, Alcira Forero-Pena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a study of the significance for women of college education as it occurs in colleges administered by Christian nuns in Kerala, India. Particularly, it looks at the paradoxical effects of the dramatic social changes Kerala underwent during the twentieth century that guaranteed, among other things, formal education, including post-secondary, to a large proportion of women. On the other hand, it shows not only the persistence of blatant social inequalities fed by class, caste, and gender distinctions but also the increase in inequality due to the forces of globalization. On close examination, there is little correlation between the vast …

Art Or Propaganda: A Historical And Critical Analysis Of African-American Approaches To Dramatic Theory, 1900–1965, Henry D. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation surveys African American approaches to dramatic theory from 1900 to 1965, demonstrating that in the period the issue dominating the field was a great debate that defined black drama as art on the one hand and as propaganda on the other. In an African American cultural history replete with covert and overt struggles for social and political equality, the art or propaganda question necessarily reached a magnitude and importance found in no other area of twentieth-century dramatic theory. The comprehensiveness of the debate that interrogated this question and its historical and cultural depth has largely gone untreated. Moreover, …

Clothes Talk: Youth Modernities And Commodity Consumption In Dakar, Senegal, Suzanne Scheld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on twelve months of fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal and funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, this thesis examines how in the context of contemporary globalization, increased volumes of luxury commodities shape the modern consciousness of individuals in a developing African city. This project specifically examines this phenomenon through a study of youth clothing consumption. Dakar is a consumer society with particular consumer dynamics. In addition to class, patron-clientage and kinship are central to understanding contemporary patterns of consumption in Dakar. Clothing is a commodity that has been radically altered by urbanization and the globalization of manufacturing processes and advertising. …

Crime Legends In Old And New Media, Pamela Donovan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project explores the contemporary meanings and persistence of the "crime legend." A case study approach was used: three crime legends with a considerable history of public debunking were chosen. These cases were: the market in snuff films, the theft of vital organs for black-market transplant, and the abduction of children from theme park restrooms. Current versions circulating in Internet newsgroups and via electronic mail lists were collected. Discussions in Internet newsgroups were examined and twenty regular newsgroup participants were interviewed. The public newsgroup communication environment is such that salience is established by the interlocutors themselves, rather than by the …

The Police Officer As Survivor: The Psychological Impact Of Exposure To Death In Contemporary Urban Policing, Vincent E. Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All human encounters with death, whether they involve a casual contact with the death of another person or the realistic threat of one's own demise, have important psychological consequences that result in new modes of adaptation, thought and feeling. In the course of their duties, contemporary urban police officers frequently encounter the deaths of others and some participate in mortal combat situations that credibly threaten their own lives. The psychological dimensions of police officers' professional exposures to the deaths of others are to a large extent shaped by the specific duties and responsibilities prescribed by their formal task environment, while …

Mothers Of Sexually Abused Children And The Concept Of Collusion, Patricia A. Joyce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study reports the perspectives of clinical social workers on the mothers of sexually abused children whom they saw for treatment. The subjects were 15 masters-level social workers in an urban child treatment program. The study used qualitative methods based on grounded theory to examine professionals' social constructions of mothers of sexually abused children. The child's disclosure of incest provided the study's conceptual focus, since historically professionals constructed the "collusive mother," even though prior empirical research never supported maternal collusion or culpability for incest.

Respondents were interviewed for approximately one hour using a semi-structured interview guide; nearly one hundred hours …