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Self-Esteem, Spirituality, And Acculturation And The Relationship With Depression In Latinos, Fernando M. Avila

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relationship between acculturation, self-esteem, spirituality and its association with depression in a community sample of Latinos. Previous research with Latinos has identified these factors as potentially being correlated with depression and with quality of life. The weight that these three variables can have on depression may be profound. Self-esteem and spirituality have been identified as protective factors that may assist individuals with depression by enhancing an individual's sense of worth. Acculturation is a construct that has been shown to influence Latinos in various ways. These variables have been established as predictors …

"I Came To America, Crying": Rebuilding A Life, Redefining The Self—Ethiopian Women Refugees In Denver (Colorado) (2012–2013), Barbara Guglielminotti Valetta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the challenges faced by Ethiopian women in the Denver community to reach harmony within their new social and cultural space and to examine what they feel they have lost and gained in their self-identity as a result of their immigration. Refugees face a multitude of dilemmas when they are compelled to relocate from their home countries to a new, foreign-host society. Ethiopian refugees have been arriving in the US since the 1970s and feel the uprootedness of being away from their homeland. Being uprooted is losing one’s culture and ways of life. …

Transmission: Premium Television Characters Outside Of The Gender Binary, Daniel L. Ketchum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Five fictional characters have emerged on the U.S. premium-pay-cable channels that blur the traditional male-or-female gender divide. The basics of queer theory (sex, gender, orientation, and transgender) and critical/cultural studies (encoding, decoding, and reading a text) are explained as a basis for the analysis of the characters, which seeks to answer the research question: does the premium-pay-cable television format offer truly empathetic non-binary transgender characters that challenge the dominant American ideologies about gender identity and expression? If so, how? If not, why not?

Shane McCutcheon from Showtime’s lesbian melodrama The L Word (2004- 2010), Lafayette Reynolds from HBO’s supernatural drama-comedy …

Putting The Person First : An Examination Of Thought Disorder And Personality Heterogeneity In Schizophrenia., Catherine Rose Robertson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Recovery Model of mental illness, emerging as the new zeitgeist in regards to treatment, emphasizes the optimization of functioning for each individual, using personal strengths and preferences to drive the recovery process. Thought disorder has long been considered a core symptom of schizophrenia and has been implicated in multiple domains of functional outcome. In spite of its relationship to functioning and substantial heterogeneity of the phenomenon, little to no research has examined potential factors which may be related to these differences in thought disorder and its related domains of functioning. The current study proposes that “normal” personality traits, such …

Composing College And Career : Mobility, Complexity And Agency At The Nexus Of High School, College And Work., Brice Nordquist

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers and theorizes findings of a two-year mobile ethnography investigating the complexity of students’ movements within and among secondary and tertiary educational institutions and the labor market. The project illustrates the lateral and recursive natures of students’ educational and occupational trajectories and thereby reveals the mutually constitutive relations among scenes of writing across space and time. While the study follows eleven students moving from different tracks of high school English through their first years at research universities, colleges and full-time jobs, this text focuses specifically on the mobilities of three students: Nadif, Katherine and James. I draw upon …

Answering The Call : An Examination Of Multicultural Competence Among Academic Advising Professionals., Tia Noelle Dumas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examined the relationship between background characteristics and multicultural competence among academic advising professionals at a large, public, urban research institution in the southern United States. It begins with a brief overview of ethical principles in academic advising, focusing on the responsibility academic advisors have to advise all students equitably. The dissertation study is guided by a conceptual framework grounded in student departure theory (Tinto, 1975, 1987, 1993), learning-centered academic advising (Lowenstein, 2005), culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), and multicultural competencies in helping and advising (Pope, Reynolds, & Mueller, 2004) to argue for an understanding of culturally responsive advising …

Globalizing Literacies And Identities : Translingual And Transcultural Literacy Practices Of Bhutanese Refugees In The U.S., Tika R. Lamsal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This critical ethnographic study explores how language and literacy shape the social identities and cultural practices of the Bhutanese refugees in the U.S., and how an understanding of their literate practices contributes to new conceptualizations of language and literacies research. Involving fifty-six Bhutanese refugees from a Midwest city, this study highlights linguistic and cultural resources utilized by the Bhutanese refugees at key literacy sites – such as an Elderly Care Center, mandatory ESL classes, weekly cultural and musical gatherings, men’s and women’s Kirtan (religious singing) groups, and youth online forums – for creating, changing, and transforming their linguistic, cultural, musical, …

A Legacy Of Letters: The Construction Of An Aging Masculine Identity, K. Tiffani Baldwin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate the construction of a masculine identity through a qualitative analysis of personal letters written by an aging man over the last two decades of his life (age 68-89). Symbolic interaction and life-span communication are the guiding frameworks behind the development of the research questions and the subsequent analyses. Research question one asks: What themes emerge from the personal letters written by an aging man? The following two themes emerged: a) relationality, and b) age and aging. Research question two asks: What do the metaphors that emerge from personal letters reveal about the …

How Does Your Garden Grow: How Planting Seeds Of Hope Inspire A Community Of Gifted African-American Learners To Flourish In An Early Childhood Setting, Danielle Elaine Macneal-Harris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested"

-African Proverb

Each day, African-American children are rarely given the opportunity to reach their full potential and flourish in American school systems. There continues to be a disparity in the number of African-Americans in the gifted population. When identified early, and with appropriate educational opportunities, young, culturally diverse gifted learners will be more likely to have long-term educational success. By utilizing an educational criticism methodology, this study discusses the importance of gifted education for African-American, early childhood students, by answering the question, how does The Hope …

The Ethos Of Conspiracy Argument : "Character" As Persuader In Conspiracy Rhetoric., Michael James Sobiech

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Conspiracy theory has, as Timothy Melley states in Empire of Conspiracy (2000), “animated our political culture from the early Republican period to the present, at times powerfully swaying popular opinion” (vii). Though it has attracted attention from a wide range of disciplines, conspiracy theory has not received significant notice within rhetoric and composition. My dissertation adds to the interdisciplinary body of scholarship concerning conspiracy theory by examining it as rhetoric, focusing on how the construction of a conspiracy proponent’s ethos/character affects the persuasiveness of a conspiracy theory. I argue that ethos construction plays a much more significant role in conspiracy …

An Analysis Of The Creation Museum : Hermeneutics, Language, And Information Theory., Steven Mark Watkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky with respect to hermeneutic, linguistic, and information theories. The popularity of the CM, with an excess of 1.6 million visitors to date and future plans to build a one-hundred million dollar theme park, raises concerns among religious and non-religious people. The CM has drawn the attention of all the major news networks and has been reported on extensively in print media. The number of visitors and money raised by the CM dwarfs other museums in the area with large federal endowments. This dissertation draws the interest of popular educated audiences as …

The Rise Of Bulgarian Nationalism And Russia's Influence Upon It., Lin Wenshuang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The exercise of nationalism is the assertion of the political sovereignty of a community in the form of a nation-state. In the case of Bulgaria, nationalism, in practice, was a long journey towards the establishment of a Bulgarian nation-state. This dissertation aims to clarify the place and role of nationalism in the reconstruction of the Bulgarian state and to examine to what extent the development of Bulgarian nationalism was influenced by Russia at the vital stage - the 1870s, when the nation fought hard against Ottoman rule and finally achieved national liberation. My motivation for examining Russo-Bulgarian historical, political and …

The Tempest Defending Prospera : The Ideation Of Spiritual Lineage And Practice In Performance For An Afro-Haitian American Actor., Iva-Kristi Maria Papailler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Imagine: William Shakespeare’s final hero, Prospero and all of his beautiful and majestic White, Italian maleness played by an Afro-Haitian American actress. Something changes. No longer does the audience see a traditional view of the character onstage. The audience sees a woman of African descent delivering lines written for a man of European descent. They may or may not question what they are seeing: certainly, I the actor, must. My Blackness brings an ancestral line to the production that makes a variety of traditional African religions part of Prospera’s spiritual lineage. My Blackness and gender also imbue Prospera with a …

Text Stylometry For Chat Bot Identification And Intelligence Estimation., Nawaf Ali

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Authorship identification is a technique used to identify the author of an unclaimed document, by attempting to find traits that will match those of the original author. Authorship identification has a great potential for applications in forensics. It can also be used in identifying chat bots, a form of intelligent software created to mimic the human conversations, by their unique style. The online criminal community is utilizing chat bots as a new way to steal private information and commit fraud and identity theft. The need for identifying chat bots by their style is becoming essential to overcome the danger of …

Servants Of My People First : An Examination Of The Political Literacies Of The Black Liberation Front International (Blfi), 1969-1973., Joilynn Karega-Mason

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a multifaceted project. First, it is a historical work of subversion and revision designed to do two things: (1) apply pressure to trends in rhetoric and composition historiography that have left under-challenged a politics of representation that historically and systematically marked Black college students of the late sixties and early seventies as under-prepared, lacking in linguistic and rhetorical resources and agency, and politically militant yet academically apathetic; and (2) construct a more nuanced portrait of the writer agency of the Black college students of the late sixties and early seventies by examining the political writings of members …

The Language Politics Of Doctoral Studies In Rhetoric And Composition : Toward A Translingual Revision Of Graduate Education In The Field., Carrie Byars Kilfoil

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation critiques graduate education in rhetoric and composition in relationship to recent calls for a “translingual” approach to the teaching of writing and a transnational, cross-cultural approach to writing research (Horner, Lu, Royster, Trimbur; Canagarajah; Donahue). Building on this scholarship, I attend to the (re)production of disciplinary dispositions toward language difference in rhetoric and composition doctoral studies. Through textual analysis of the Rhetoric Review surveys of doctoral programs in the field (1987, 1995, 2000, 2007, and the current wiki), archival materials from various programs (including three focal schools), and a survey of doctoral students currently enrolled in the University …

Competing Conceptions Of Literacy : Intersections In A Dual-Credit Writing Program., Caroline Wilkinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses how as dual-credit offerings rise, university writing programs work to respond to the pedagogical, material, and institutional concerns that inform teaching “college-level writing” in this unique space. Recent composition scholarship, such as Christine Farris and Kristine Hansen’s College Credit for Writing in High School: The “Taking Care of” Business, addresses the acceleration of these courses, questioning the extent to which the efficiency of dual credit designates writing as a “commodity easily appropriated, sold, outsourced, and knocked off” (272). My project further studies the implications of accelerated writing courses by interviewing dual-credit students, instructors, and administrators at one …

Undoings : Reversals And Dissolutions Of Binaries In The Narrative Films Of Peter Greenaway., Kristina Sue Bohleber Groves 1978-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, discussed and analyzed are the narrative films of British film director Peter Greenaway through lenses of queer theory, feminism, and theories of the monstrous to investigate Greenaway’s notion of the Other in his films. Nearly all his films include a “nonstandard” Othering of characters, a breaking down of societal binaries, as well as crossing the line of what is taboo in our society. This Othering forces viewers to reevaluate their own subjectivity, and to evaluate which groups they see themselves as a part of. In creating fantastic worlds in which the characters do not function within the …

Teacher Attitudes And Practices That Support Student Learning, Charles T. Sutton Mr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Generally in today’s classrooms educators have the responsibility to develop teaching practices that are best suited for a particular group of learners. Since the early days of 1-room schools, various teaching styles have been developed to accommodate a changing world. As the curriculum has broadened through the years, individual student needs have remained the focus as teachers have become more and more accountable for student learning.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate or identify how successful teachers manage their classrooms. It defines key student behavior issues that most teachers experience daily. The study further investigates the hypothesis …

Achievement Of Elementary School Students And Attendance In Preschool Programs In Johnson County, Tennessee, Emogene C. South Mrs.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine if a difference in achievement scores exist between students who attended the Johnson County School System preschool program and those who did not as measured by standardized TCAP achievement test Reading/Language Arts and Math scores of students in the third and fourth grades. The variables of grade level and preschool attendance were considered. The population consisted of students who were in the third or fourth grades in the Johnson County School System during the 2010-2011 school year through the 2012-2013 school year. Data gathered were from the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program achievement …

The Impact Of World Bank’S Conditionality-Ownership Hybrid On Forest Management In Cameroon: Policy Hybridity In International Dependence Development, Asongayi Venard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many developing countries depend on the World Bank for development assistance, which the Bank often provides with policy reform conditions. Resistance to World Bank’s conditionality caused the Bank to posit “ownership” as a country’s real assent to its development policies. The combination of ownership and conditionality invalidates the neocolonial, false-paradigm and dualism theses in explaining the international dependence development model. This study explains this model by investigating how the relationship between conditionality and ownership in the context of this model impacts forest management in Cameroon.

Integrating theoretical and methodological insights mainly from political science, economics, geosciences, and sociology, the study …

Telling Tales As Oral Performance: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Of Storytelling In Ireland, Scotland And Southern Appalachia, Annalee Tull

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I sought to link, through this paper, cultural performances of identity through storytelling in Ireland, Scotland, and southern Appalachia. I evaluated storytelling practices, whether it was a public or private performance, using symbolic interactionism, dramatist theory, narrative paradigm, and performance theory. The author studied abroad in Ireland and Scotland through the East Tennessee State University Appalachian, Scottish, and Irish Studies Program and experienced an array of stories. She then evaluated her own experiences with storytelling from growing up in southern Appalachia and visited the International Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. The research is rooted in grounded theory from ethnographies, with …

Developing A Curriculum For The Training Of Pastors As Agents Of Communal Reconciliation In Post-Conflict South Sudan, Charles S. North

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This doctor of ministry thesis presents the process and findings of a curriculum development project resulting in a pastor-training manual to be used in South Sudan. The project involved the staff and board members of Sudan Evangelical Alliance Partners and Christian Relief Partners in a series of sessions in the fall of 2013, bringing together various sources for theological reflection and practical in-field use. The team utilized the reconciliation theology of Ephesians 2, Miroslav Volf's theology of embrace, examples of political and social reconciliation from the African continent, and their own experience and leadership in educational settings. The sessions were …

A Ricoeurian Vision: Interpreting The Pauline Epistles For The Narrative Sermon, Mason Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two gaps currently exist within the field of homiletics relating to the Pauline literature. First, while the body of literature that focuses on Narrative Preaching has grown considerably in the last twenty years, this literature has largely ignored the Pauline Corpus. In addition to this gap within the literature of Narrative Preaching, current applications of the philosophical and theological work of Paul Ricoeur to contemporary homiletics have left questions of the applicability of Ricoeur's work to the Pauline corpus largely unanswered. The thesis attempts to fill these two spaces by offering an interpretive strategy for creating narrative sermons that combines …

Wealth And Acculturation: A Qualitative Study Of The Influence Of Wealth During Chinese International Students' Acculturation, Linshan Fu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing number of Chinese international students coming to the United States every year, a more in-depth understanding of these international students’ acculturation is necessary and urgent. Given the fact that past researches mostly describe Chinese immigrants, migrates or international students as oppressed cultural adaptors, who cannot avoid being marginalized; who suffer from various adjusting problems; and who have to make use of acculturative strategies to adapt to the new country, this thesis takes the factor of wealth and its relation with class, status and power into account during Chinese international students’ acculturation under the globalized context. Instead of …

Female Bias In Technical Communication And An Exploration Of Pedagogical Strategies For Reversing The Bias, Rebecca Beeson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores technical communication and seeks to establish that females outnumber males in the field while also holder more high-level positions. It further seeks to show why a field does not benefit from having one sex outnumber the other. The benefits of having an equal number of females and males contributing to the growth and expansion of the field are discussed. Finally, this thesis discusses potential pedagogical strategies which could be employed at the college level as a means of attracting more young men to the field and allowing for maximum growth of technical communication as a field of …

Narrative In Technical Communication, James Fenn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this research is on the involvement of narrative learning within technical communication and the benefits that such an involvement can bring to the field. I analyze literature from within technical communication to determine how narrative is perceived, as well as the traditions in technical communication that made the field resistant to the use of narrative in the past. These findings are considered with respect to the history and definition of narrative, as well as to how narrative can improve learning outcomes when compared to expository learning approaches commonly used in technical documentation. While narrative is not a …

Language And Museums: Supporting Alaska Native Languages Through Collaborative Networking, Heather J. Mcclain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the ever-increasing risk of language loss and possible extinction of the world's Indigenous languages, museums are quickly becoming active supporters and valuable resources for communities engaged in revitalization initiatives. Although working with language material is inherently difficult for museums because of their traditionally object based nature, it is imperative for museums to focus on the documentation and preservation of language as intangible cultural heritage (ICH) because of the vital connection between language and culture. This thesis examines how museums in Alaska, particularly the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, Alaska Office, are supporting Alaska Native language and cultural revitalization through collaborative …

Resource Sovereignty: The Indigenous Value Of Mount Rainier Within Activities Of Traditional Resource Harvesting, Samantha Joan Nemecek

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Nisqually, Puyallup, Muckleshoot, Cowlitz, and Yakama Indian Tribes historically utilized the plant resources of Mount Rainier until the National Park Service established Mount Rainier National Park in 1899. Since 1992 there have been formal, written requests by these Tribes to revitalize the harvest of these culturally significant plant resources in their original collection location. Through archival analysis, participant observation, and interviews with Indigenous consultants, I investigated the impetus for these requests and furthermore the role of Mount Rainier in tribally relevant plant harvesting. Data indicates a lack of plant resource monitoring in the United States Forest Service has resulted …

Japanese American Cultural Identity: The Role Of Wwii, Internment, And The 3/11 Disaster In Japan, Carrie L. Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research explores the nature of Japanese American cultural identity through an examination of the historical contexts of WWII, internment, and the 3/11 disasters in Japan. Interview data was analyzed using both interpretive and critical paradigms. I then utilized the Communication Theory of Identity (CTI), the corresponding concept of identity gaps, and critical-cultural hybridity. It was found that Japanese Americans construct, enact, and relate to their identities in markedly different ways despite belonging to the same cultural group. In turn, I am proposing further revision to CTI's communal frame to exemplify the shared and contested elements of a collective. This …