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Flinging The Apron And Tearing The Kerchief: Janie Crawford's Gestures In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Madeline Elizabeth Celley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I argue that in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston demonstrates protagonist Janie Crawford's development through her use of gesture. As the narrative moves throughout Janie's life, she becomes progressively able to communicate her feelings and desires through the use of her body's movements. By depicting Janie's subjectivity as fundamentally embodied, Hurston indicates an awareness of the cultural oppression Janie suffers, linking her body to those of women in the past that suffered as slaves. She draws attention to Janie's body by relying on her gestures in order to emphasize the …

Moving From The Shadows: Shedding Light On Mixed-Citizenship Status Latino Families And Emotional Well-Being—A Mixed Methods Study, Ashley-Marie Vollmer Hanna

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout history and in contemporary U.S. society, immigration policies and practices have been laced with racist nativism, benefiting the dominant (white, male elite) society at the expense of Immigrants of Color (Chavez, 2008; Hanna & Ortega, 2016; Huag, n.d.; Ortega, Hanna, & Haffejee, 2014; Pérez-Huber, 2008). Today, Latinos are particularly vulnerable as they are the target of racist nativist immigration policy and practices and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

This dissertation examines the emotional well-being of Latino youths and young adults in mixed-citizenship status families using mixed methods research methodology. The study is informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latina/o Critical Race …

Living Divided No More: An Exploration Of Authenticity In Philosophically Inspired Schools, Melanie Reiser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores school authenticity (SA) by conducting research at three philosophically inspired schools. The study investigates consciousness to identity, integrity to that identity, and ascertains characteristics of authenticity across settings through an investigation of the school's congruence between the philosophy and the school ecology. Two frameworks are utilized to explore school congruence. The first framework addresses establishment of identity--the school's attention to and congruence between the philosophy and their identified core educational principles. The second investigates integrity by exploring adherence to identity--in other words, the school's attention to and congruence between educational principles and the school ecology. I explore …

Cultural Sensitivity: Early Career Teacher Beliefs, Espoused Theories, Theories In Use, Michelle Steinberger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine early career teacher practice and beliefs about students of color in their classrooms and the relationship between those beliefs and their classroom practices. In this study, seven teachers in the initial five years of their teaching career were interviewed and observed inside of their classrooms using the Quality Responsive Classroom Observation Protocol. The interview questions were developed to look at the beliefs, teacher preparation, and culturally responsive pedagogy of early career teachers. Data was then analyzed using the five tenets of the Critical Race Theory: (1) Centrality of Race and Racism; (2) …

The Online Dating Preferences Of Chinese American Older Adults, Lin Jiang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recently years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of online dating websites among adults over age 50. Nevertheless, samples collected in existing literature are mainly centered on White/Caucasian Americans. Furthermore, the only theoretical guide has been sexual strategies theory. This study fills the gap by using sexual strategies theory and acculturation theory to test Chinese American older adults dating preferences.

The sexual strategies theory discusses how males and females use different mating strategies in short-term and long-term contexts. Acculturation theory describes changes in which individuals or groups adopt another culture when it makes contact with their …

Man And Idea: Complexity And Duality In The Hero Of Wagner's "Ring", Elizabeth Mary Szott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The character Siegfried, much like the whole of Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, is open to interpretation by scholars and critics from a variety of different perspectives. Although these interpretations often reflect the historical, political, and cultural circumstances of their times, they nevertheless claim some legitimacy by appealing to the musical and dramatic texts of the Ring for evidence. This thesis examines Wagner's conception of Siegfried and different historical perceptions of the character, discusses ambiguity both in the drama and in the music itself, and suggests a reading of Siegfried as having a dual purpose: that of …

Thresholds Of Invisibility: A Perspective On Moments Of Transition In Scholarly Rhetorics, Robert D. Gilmor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation suggests that certain historical moments of transition generate identifiable schisms in scholarly discourse that leave contemporary scholars unable to communicate with one another. At these moments of Augustinian "unlikeness," established scholarly commitments, such as logocentrism, are rendered invisible to the critics that rely on them as new forms and technologies become the (ostensible) talking points of discourse. The confusion at these moments contribute to a complex of discursive practices that can be called "thresholds of invisibility," or moments of transition and division, when scholars are captivated by new forms and less attentive to the continuing influence of already …

Surviving And Thriving: The First-Year Transition Experiences Of Chinese Undergraduate Students In The United States, Kerrie Anne Montgomery

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The number of international students pursuing degrees at U.S. institutions at the undergraduate level surpassed those at the graduate level for the first time in 2013. Additionally, the majority of international students coming to the U.S. are from China. This phenomenological study used a conceptual framework of Schlossberg's Transition Model (1995) and the Culturally Engaging Campus Environments Model (Museus, 2014) to analyze the experiences of Chinese undergraduate students in their first year of college in the United States. Three transition types were identified - academic, social/personal, and linguistic - and the students' preparation, sources of institutional support, and coping strategies …

Alien Affects: Movement, Migration, And Landscapes Of Citizenship, Michael Andrew Lechuga

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alien Affects is a materialist examination of the ways citizenship landscapes are shaped by three mechanisms of control - extraterrestrial film, border security, and the legal apparatuses of the State - that accelerate flows of dominant national citizenship and hinder the movements of migrants. As bodies move through borders and through communities in the US, they are subjected to techniques of citizenship control that divide citizens from aliens. This political division maximizes the State's capacity to benefit from the mobility of its preferred citizen groups while subjugating its alien groups - those who might be characterized as such because they …

Christian Supersessionism And The Dilemma Of Dialogue In Jos Nigeria: Exploring Panikkar’S Dialogical Dialogue As A Paradigm For Interreligious Dialogue, Martin Ahiaba

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Middle-belt and Northern Nigeria are notoriously known as the epicenter for ethnic and religious warfare. The hostility between the two dominant religions—Islam and Christianity—has a beginning that pre-dates the British colonial occupation in 1903. Islamic opposition to British cultural imperialism and religious superiority continues in its outright rejection of Christian supersessionism and the formation of fundamentalist sects. Though not denying the importance of addressing the economic, ethnic, and political context of the problem of violence, this work focuses on exclusivist Christology and its hermeneutical use in framing the dialogue between Christians and Muslims in Jos Plateau.

We analyze the …

The Natural Embroidery Of Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko, Sarah Rose Hancock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I plan to investigate the role of the landscape in Thomas Southerne's play Oroonoko. Most scholarship on Oroonoko focuses on the relationship between Southerthne's play and Aphra Behn's novella of the same name. In particular, the scholarly conversation has focused on the way that Southerne white-washed Aphra Behn's character Imoininda. While this distinction is notable, my research, instead, will focus on the way these bodies—both white and black, colonizer and colonized—are framed by 18th century gardening rhetoric. This rhetoric provided naturally conceived tools for nurturing these bodies. I plan to argue that the language of the natural …

Quant Se Depart Li Jolis Tans: Betrayal In The Songs Of Medieval French Women, Hannah Harkey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For decades, the authorship of women trouvères has been questioned. Although the debate is more or less over in today’s scholarship, research continues to search for evidence of not only their existence but for their contribution to the corpus. Women’s voices in the songs call out not only because the speaker is female, but also because I argue that the author was female too. This is evidenced by the speaker’s perception of betrayal. This paper highlights three key forms of betrayal that medieval women faced: betrayal by the family, betrayal by the lover, and betrayal by the lauzengiers and the …

Quantitative Framework For Social Cultural Interactions, Taranjeet Singh Bhatia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For an autonomous robot or software agent to participate in the social life of humans, it must have a way to perform a calculus of social behavior. Such a calculus must have explanatory power (it must provide a coherent theory for why the humans act the way they do), and predictive power (it must provide some plausible events from the predicted future actions of the humans). This dissertation describes a series of contributions that would allow agents observing or interacting with humans to perform a calculus of social behavior taking into account cultural conventions and socially acceptable behavior models. We …

Justifying War In Ukraine: An Analysis Of Speeches, Excerpts And Interviews By Vladimir Putin, Irene Goudimiak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For two years now the war in Southeast Ukraine has claimed approximately 10, 000 lives and countless casualties. Pegged as a civil war, the conflict is waging on between pro-Western nationalists and pro-Russian separatists. The war ignited after the public ousting of President Yanukovch in Maidan Square in the midst of thousands of protesters, and the subsequent annexation of Crimea. Although the Russian Federation maintains it does not have a military presence in Ukraine, U.S. intelligence and Ukrainian military officials have evidence otherwise. As a result, the West has imposed significant sanctions on "Putin's Russia". This study explores how Putin …

Creation In The Image Of God: Human Uniqueness From The Akan Religious Anthropology To The Renewal Of Christian Anthropology, Eric Baffoe Antwi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Judeo-Christian belief, based on the bible, is that "God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Gen. 1: 27). This dissertation explores the Akan understanding of the human person to shed further light on creation of human beings in the image of God and to understand and demonstrate the corresponding uniqueness of the human being among God's creatures. With the help of the Akan context, we note that every human being possesses a spark of God. God, who is relational, shares relationality with human beings.

Through the …

Happily Ever After? Ambiguous Closure In Modernist Children's Literature, Marcie Panutsos Rovan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the fruitful interchanges between modernist literary technique, the culture of modernity, and children's literature. While some recent scholarship has examined works that modernist authors like Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Cummings produced for child readers, modernist children's literature remains a largely neglected field. Examining texts by A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), Gertrude Stein (The World is Round), and J.M. Barrie (Peter and Wendy) through the lens of literary modernism, this project explicates how these authors adapt modernist techniques, ideologies, and preoccupations in their writing for children. Focusing on themes of alienation, disillusionment, memory, imagination, …

El Rol De La Inmersión En La Producción Del Futuro Del Subjuntivo En Portugués, Evelin Pegoraro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Portuguese Future Subjunctive (FS) is frequently studied since out of all modern romance languages, this verbal tense and mood is regularly maintained only in Portuguese. Moreover, variation and alternation occur in the use of the FS by the speakers of the language through a substitution of the irregular inflections of the FS by the regular inflections of the Personal Infinitive (IP). The only difference between the FS and the IP is found in the irregular verbs of the FS, and these are usually "regularized" by Portuguese speakers. Since the regular verbs of the FS are identical to the IP, …

From Ashes To Ashé: Memorializing Traumatic Events Through Participatory Digital Archives, Patricia Carlton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Traumatic, cataclysmic events, whether caused by man-made or natural forces, threaten the safety, stability, and resilience of a community or state. Additionally, massive media exposure given to documenting and providing information, place the media consumers at psychological risk. As an alternative to broadcast news reports, online memorials and disaster archives provide the public the means and central locations for witnessing catastrophic events, as well as collectively commemorating and mourning the tragic losses. According to psychological and ethnographic research, narrativizing the trauma through shared memories and artifacts of mourning produce multiple therapeutic benefits, including the likely development of cognitive awareness, empathy, …

Rivalry-Prone Dyads? Interstate Religious Differences And Military Conflict, Manar Elkhaldi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The link between religion and interstate military conflict has attracted a lot of attention among scholars of international relations and also foreign policy makers and religious organizations. This study examines whether religious differences between states in a dyad may partly affect various types of militarized conflict. It is argued in the literature that religion promotes stronger loyalty and sense of obligation than other cultural identities (Juergensmeyer, 1993); I argue that religious identity may be used by states effectively to mobilize people by means of rhetoric to generate and sustain popular support for conflict with other states. Thus I expect that …

Coping And Adjustment Of Spouses Of International Students At South Dakota State University, Elizabeth Nayebare

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research investigated acculturation of female spouses of international students to life in Brookings, specifically, how they cope and adjust. It was guided by the following questions: what are the socio-economic and cultural attributes of female spouses, and how do they impact their ability to cope and adjust to life in Brookings; what strategies and activities do spouses of international students rely on or develop in order to adjust and cope with life in the United States (Brookings); and what are the processes and experiences of coping and adjustment among spouses of different professional and cultural backgrounds? The investigation was …

The Learning Experiences Of Immigrants Who Are Graduates Of An Entry-Level Baccalaureate Nursing Program In Minnesota, Marcia L. Scherer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The United States faces an immigrant population explosion with more foreignborn residents compared to any country in the world. Each immigrant enters with individual and cultural health beliefs and, as they seek health care, often prefers to receive care from someone who understands and supports their cultural beliefs and customs. Nurses comprise the largest segment of healthcare providers. Within this population of nurses, the number of ethnically diverse nurses continues to stagnate at astoundingly low levels. The literature reviewed neglected to identify interviewing immigrants separate from ethnically diverse nursing students. Understanding the immigrant’s nursing education experiences is essential to addressing …

Literary Dialect In Flannery O'Connor's "The Lame Shall Enter First" And "Good Country People", Katherine Ireland Kuiper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Flannery O’Connor is known for her widely read and loved short stories. By employing sociolinguistic, quantitative, qualitative, and corpus linguistic methods along with R Studio to gather data about literary dialect utilized in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories “Good Country People” and “The Lame Shall Enter First”, I argue that not only was O’Connor a gifted author in her portrayal of African American English and Southern English, but that her writing was also accurate in comparison to language use in the South. The findings suggest that O’Connor’s characters were true to life in the Southern US at the time of her …

Academic And Language Socialization Of Russian Ma Tesl Students At Us Universities: Struggles, Triumphs, And New Identities, Marina Lepekhova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Each year a great number of students leaves their home countries to study abroad. As a result, international students constitute a considerable portion of student body in us universities and around the world. For many students, study abroad is a holistic and a life-changing experience. Life in a foreign country and everyday exposure to new social and academic cultures make international students undergo an uneasy academic socialization process and re-imagine themselves through the use of second language (l2). This process is simultaneously coupled with academic and language socialization practices that construct novices as certain kinds of situationally organized persons, with …

Testing A Brief Directive Intervention To Reduce Symptoms Associated With Trauma, Fernando Trivelli Alessandri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A randomized controlled trial was conducted to test the relative efficacy of a brief directive protocol (DP) aimed at reducing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and an expressive writing protocol (EW), which has more than a 30-year history (Pennebaker & Chung, 2011) of research showing mostly positive effects. The DP included components with research support from studies of expressive writing, prolonged exposure, cognitive processing therapy, and mindfulness-based therapies. Participants were primarily undergraduate students at a large public university in the southern United States who endorsed at least one traumatic experience and who manifested a minimal level of PTSD symptoms. The …

The Acting White Phenomenon: An Examination Of Existing And Emerging Implications For African American Students In Rural High Schools In Mississippi, Earl W. Richard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study, The Acting White Phenomenon: An Examination of Existing and Emerging Implications for African American Students in Rural Schools in Mississippi, examines the impact the Acting White Phenomenon has on the academic and social development of African American adolescents in rural schools of Mississippi. This study uses various analytical methods and presents research conclusions, discussions and implications to guide future work in minimizing the effect and maximize the benefits to African American adolescents in rural high schools in Mississippi. Studying African American seniors in rural high schools in multiple locations, this mixed methods study gathers both quantitative and qualitative …

The Relationship Between Media And Cultural Identity In Hispanic Families In Mississippi, Marlen Polito

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a qualitative thesis with in-depth interviews with three children and one parent or caretaker of Hispanic descent. These interviews were conducted to find a connection between media use and cultural identity. By doing a qualitative project the researcher was able to do a video documentary with a written portion explaining the methods and findings. The researcher interviethree students with at least one parent or primary caretaker of Hispanic descent seventh through twelfth grade child, who serves as the main child for the study. This research investigated the relationship between the media and cultural identity among Hispanic children in …

Kiezdeutsch: Perceptions Of A Metropolitan Dialect Of German, Emily Claire Krauter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explain perceptions of the German dialect Kiezdeutsch. The basis for the research came from four recorded interviews of male and female Kiezdeutsch speakers. I used the Kiezdeutsch recordings to perform research at the University of Mississippi by interviewing nine different German students who were studying abroad for the semester. The interviewees were separated into three different focus groups. I then performed a pilot study of perceptual dialectology folloby an open discussion. Although my sample size proved to be too small and limited to yield any statistically significant results, the data was regardless intriguing. This study focuses …

Chaucerian Imperfections: The Other And The Turbulant Self, Ahmed Seif

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is interested in forms of “imperfection” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I define “imperfection” as an authorial gesture performed to narrate an idealized virwhile depriving it from its idealism. The imperfection of a virtue, however, does not happen absolutely. It is the character’s incomplete, distorted, or decadent command of a given virtue, rather than the viritself, that makes it imperfect. Consisting of three chapters, the thesis examines Chaucer’s imperfection of things idealized within two medieval spaces: a) the ecclesiastical institution of Church and b) the secular institution of Knighthood. This is why the thesis settled on the Prioress’s …

How The Soul Slips In: Virginia Woolf's (Un)Natural History Of Dogs, Allison Castle Combs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dogs have a crucial place in articulating ideas about class and sexuality in Woolf and her milieu. Her works move from considering dogs as representative instruments of class and gender in Mrs. Dalloway, to thinking more complexly about the dog/human boundary in Orlando. Human-to-animal ontologies are an evaluation of human biopolitical affiliations, where human social categories and function are embedded and reflected in canine behavior. The “anthropological machine” and the fabulated nature of the human world is exposed in contact zones associated with problems of sexuality, class, and gender, as these internal and external distinctions are able to evade human …

The Megaphone Of The Soul: Resistance Of Fraudulent Technological Idolization By Recognizing The Power Of Human Choice In Media Ecology, Richard L. Talbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Humans naturally communicate, but choose to use tools. They use them to make sense of things, even to their own detriment and the detriment of others. These tools often receive the attention, instead of the human interaction. Aristotle's notion of humans as social animals has been carried into media ecology scholarship by Arendt, Burke, Ellul, Mumford, Postman, and Ricoeur. Social media scholarship has often focused on the tool and how it affects humanity. However, a phenomenological approach is necessary, as humans communicate with or without these tools. This approach will follow multiple steps. The first is through an understanding of …