Digital Commons Network^™

Education Ain't Black: The Disidentification Of African American Students, Erica Lynette James

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis, I will discuss the influence of education on the identity formation of African American students. Based on the scholarly literature in education theory, I will argue in Bourdieuan theory education, formal education, fails to accommodate the specific needs of African American students because education influences African American students to develop constructions of “whiteness" that education reinforces. As education attempts to uphold the “status quo” of American society, education simultaneously forces African American students to question the relevance of education. In questioning the relevance of education through high-achieving African American students’ use of language and pursuit of academic …

Deciphering Babel: Dis/Locations Of The Professional Self And The Second Language Curriculum, Sandra R. Barros

The Qualitative Report

In the following (auto) ethnographic study, I draw from Burdick’s (2012) analogy of qualitative research as “auto - archeology” and from parrhesia (Foucault, 1988) as a rhetorical device of self - definition and preservation to explore the interplay of power and identity within the context of second language education discourses. Specifically, I focus on the ways in which, through the creation of particular performative strategies, two educators working within the context of Liberal Arts institutions negotiate, construct and resist the everyday pressures and implied prejudices often associated with the curriculum and instruction of second languages in the United States. I …

"Not Everyone Was Asleep": Anti-Colonial Personifications Of Antiquity And Progress In José Rizal's Touch Me Not And El Filibusterismo, Lyn K. Uratani

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The cultural emphasis placed on José Rizal’s execution in 1896 has overshadowed his life and renders his novels Touch Me Not and El Filibusterismo unfamiliar to Western readership and postcolonial scholars. Since his novels emphasize the difficult questions about the absence of progress and ethnic identity for the indigenous populace, I argue that to read them for plot alone is to overlook his main focus: the formation of the Filipino identity.

In light of Spain’s historical treatment of its colonies, my work responds to the lack of attention given to Touch Me Not and El Filibusterismo as integral texts of …

Taking People's History Back To The People: An Approach To Making History Popular, Relevant, And Intellectual, David H. Lempert

Democracy & Education

This article takes the educational vision of people’s history an additional step, combining it with experiential approaches to democratic education that have developed over the past century and presenting the tools for students and adults to take control of their own historical study, control their heritage, and personalize the study of history on the very landscapes of their own communities. Through this approach, history becomes an exciting democratic exercise not merely in storytelling but in discovery of, participation in, and interaction with history on the very grounds of the community. The new approach to history, being tested in several communities, …

Symbolic And Concrete Demands In Resolving The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Rotem Nagar, Jacob Shamir

Peace and Conflict Studies

Researchers have recently leveled criticism at the realist approach to conflict resolution by pointing out the importance of symbolic aspects of this issue. Few studies, however, have hitherto focused on symbolic demands in conflicts. The present study examines the role of symbolic as well as concrete demands in conflict resolution, and is therefore innovative in this regard. A demand is categorized as “concrete” if it is based on an interest that is viable and applicable, in that it involves tangible resources that may change hands or be divided. A “symbolic” demand, on the other hand, pivots on either refraining from …

Empowering Indigenous Community Through Community Radio: A Case Study From Nepal, Sudhamshu Dahal, I. Arul Aram

The Qualitative Report

The recently won People’s Democracy ( Loktantra ) in Nepal has transpired a contested yet ever demanding platform furthering rights and identity movements. The availability of alternative voices through community radios is a space to emancipate the identity movement towards indigenous empowerment and asserting their respectful and equitable entry in to “ New Nepal .” Within the theoretical framework of identity and democracy this research is based on the study of community radios as “ case study organizations .” We have used media ethnography and media text analysis including the observation to both corroborate and contradict with the participants’ understandings …

Not A Hearing Loss, A Deaf Gain: Power, Self-Naming, And The Deaf Community, David J. Thomas

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

Self-naming has long stood as the primary assertion of power for disenfranchised communities in the western world. While person first language (e.g. person who is deaf) has been the preferred language of disability and disability services for the last 20 years, members of the Deaf community have asserted their cultural capital, and indeed, their Deafhood, or defining the experience of being ‘deaf in the world’, through the power of self-naming. This research examines attitudes toward language, self-naming, and disability in the Deaf community and seeks to move toward a more attentive, sensitive, and responsive language policy in the academy.

Historically, …

Discursive Tactical Negotiations Within And Across Literacy Coaching Interactions, Carolyn S. Hunt

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, the researcher employed de Certeau's theoretical insights into cultural production in everyday life to examine how literacy coaches and teachers discursively negotiated issues of identity, power, and positioning during coaching interactions. The study also explored how literacy coaches and teachers enacted emotions within these discursive negotiations of identity, power, and positioning; and how physical, social, and ideological spaces were shaped by and reflected in coaching interactions. Data were generated during a yearlong qualitative study of literacy coaches and teachers interacting within a mid-size, suburban district in the U.S. Midwest. The researcher used a microethnographic approach to discourse …

Memory-Texts And The Interdiscursive Construction Of Identity Among The Khmer Diaspora, Brandon Bales, Dr. Janies Nuckolls

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Displaced people present a problem for ethnographic research in that they generally lack stable socio-cultural contexts on which researchers rely for making empirical observations. This study shows how people produce memory-texts as a way of recontextualizing themselves in new or unstable social situations and establishes memory-texts as the empirical material necessary to produce analysis on displaced people. The discursive production of memory-texts is an activity displaced people engage in to recontextualize and stabilize themselves in shifting or new environments. Memory-texts are composed of the interface between defining moments in people’s lives and recent experiences and cultural frameworks. As an interdiscursive …

Amanda Knox And Bella Figura, Denise Scannell Guida

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Return Of The Serbian Other: Interpretative Repertoires Of Nationalism And Identity Politics In Online News Discourses On Serbia's Integration In The European Union, Jelena Petrovic

Communication ETDs

After more than a decade of political investment in integration, Serbia is still awaiting full membership into the European Union and thus is kept on the periphery of an imagined European community. In this difficult and uncertain process, Serbs have faced fractured national discourses that are inscribed with new forms of liminality encapsulated in an externally ascribed position of "flawed Europeans." This dissertation explores the co-construction of national identities in the context of public debate about the country's integration into the EU on Serbian online news websites. Informed by the theoretical and methodological framework of discursive psychology, this research identified …

Mascaras Y Trenzas: Reflexiones. Un Proyecto De Identidad Y Analysis A Traves De Veinte Anos (Masks And Braids: Reflections, A Project On Identity And Analysis Over Twenty Years), Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

This article uses Critical Race Theory and LatCrit methodologies, vocabulary, categories, and pedagogical approaches. In this Section, titled 'On Mascaras,' I am grappling with race (and gender secondarily) in public space -- un/masking my professional persona. In using the word 'wrestle' in the subheading I am referring to this struggle over a re-allocation of the social power that inheres in racial hierarchies, namely, the back-and-forth exchanges involved in changing the racial ambiance by exposing and transforming the presumptions, especially regarding notions of inferiority, that cabin our thinking and restrain our relationships. My original paper was something of an outburst, challenging …

Individual Discourse, Language Ideology And Spanish Transmission In El Paso, Texas, Isabel Velázquez

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

This paper reports the results of an analysis of the use of metaphors, metonyms, referential strategies, and expressions of deixis used by a group of middle-class bilinguals in the border city of El Paso, Texas, when speaking about use of Spanish and English in their city and in their home. A total of 234 metaphors referencing processes, institutions, and ethnic groups related to Spanish/English use were included. The goal of this study was to analyze how speakers conceptualized language use and language users in their community, and to examine if and how individual discourses map onto larger linguistic ideologies. The …

Experiencing Citizenship In A Globalizing World: The Impact Of Off-Campus Programs, Ryan Owen Williams

Political Science - Dissertations

College serves as a critical time in the lives of young adults in the formulation of their identification with citizenship, of their sense of belonging or affiliation. In an era of increasing globalization, this psychological dimension of citizenship requires further research and elaboration. This project seeks to determine if and how the academic and off-campus choices students make in college impact their worldview, their loyalties and sense of responsibility toward others. How far do students' allegiances extend and what experiences in college help to create these bonds and commitments? This study asks whether international experience via study abroad is a …

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …

Critical Conversations: Developing White Teachers For Diverse Classrooms, Omobolade O. Delano-Oriaran Ph.D, Tynisha D. Meidl Ph.D

Journal of Praxis in Multicultural Education

Many White, middle-class educators experience challenges as they attempt to teach in racially diverse classrooms. This article explores and challenges a widely held and often unexamined conception of White in-service teachers as learners about issues of diversity and equity vis-à-vis voluntary professional development. This study sought to examine how White in-service teachers explore their racial identity and how identity awareness influences their ability to successfully meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Participants were part of a voluntary book discussion professional-development program offered by a community multicultural center in collaboration with surrounding school districts. The findings of …

Indigenous Perspectives On Contemporary Native Art, Indigenous Aesthetics And Representation, John Paul Rangel

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

In this dissertation I examine and posit Indigenous perspectives on contemporary Native art, Indigenous aesthetics and issues of representation. Contemporary Native art at this moment is best described as an expression of values—personal or communal or cultural—with an attention to material conditions and current issues. I employ Indigenous methodologies and Tribal Critical Race theory as a critical framework to intervene in the dominant discourse on Native art. This research focuses on the narratives and perspectives of eight artists who represent a cross-section of the current state of Native arts production in North America drawing from the local Native arts community …

Chicana Aesthetics: A View Of Unconcealed Alterities And Affirmations Of Chicana Identity Through Laura Aguilar’S Photographic Images, Daniel Perez

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

In this paper I will argue that Chicana feminist artist Laura Aguilar, Alma Lopez, Laura Molina, and Yreina D. Cervantez established a continuing counter-narrative of cultural hegemony and Western essentialized hegemonic identification. Through artistic expression they have developed an oppositional discourse that challenges racial stereotypes, discrimination, socio-economic inequalities, political representation, sexuality, femininity, and hegemonic discourse. I will present a complex critique of both art and culture through an inquiry of the production and evaluation of the Chicana feminist artist, their role as the artist, and their contributions to unfixing the traditional and marginalized feminine. I argue that third wave Chicana …

Cultural Identity, Deafness And Sign Language: A Postcolonial Approach, Steven Loughran

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks describes the experience of the recently de-colonized members of the Negro (as he refers to those of African descent) population living in Europe, particularly France, in the 1960s. A little over a decade later, Edward Said published Orientalism, thus adding to a growing discipline of scholarship in the fields of art, literature, and cultural studies called “Postcolonialism.” My essay attempts to show that Deaf persons who communicate with each other using sign language can be viewed as a colonized group, and that applying postcolonial theory to the study of their culture is appropriate.

Hand - I Coordination: Interpreting Student Writings And Drawings As Expressions Of Identity, Inda Schaenen

The Qualitative Report

In schools where curricular constraints and testing pressures narrow the ways in which students can take up identities as writers, longterm enrichment programs offer opportunities for the meaningful design of compositions. This paper, which presents the work of four elementary student participants in a writing workshop, shows how qualitative inquiry -- in particular critical multimodal analysis -- can enable a teacher researcher to see, interpret, and explain what might be going on in the writings and drawings of students, and how these illuminations help establish and expand the identities of students as writers. I focus especially on the work of …

How Do Comics Talk About Love?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In recognition of Valentine’s Day, I decided to write a post about love in comics. But not any kind of love, of course, will do for this post—it should be about love across boundaries and the language that instantiates it.

Scenes from a Multiverse is a web comic by Jon Rosenberg that began appearing on the web in 2010. It explores social situations from an extraordinarily wide-ranging perspective of a multiplicity of worlds. As a satirist, Rosenberg often borrows from current events or internet memes and adapts them for his own purposes, making commentary about what he sees as social …

The National Muslim Forum Nepal: Experiences Of Conflict, Formations Of Identity, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

With Nepal's recent transition to state secularism, the politicization of Muslim religious identity has emerged with increasing vitality. One particular pan-Nepali Muslim organization, the Rastriya Muslim Mane Nepal (National Muslim Forum Nepal), offers a window into the complex relationship between national and religious identity that animates this politicization. Through analysis of the National Muslim Forum's earliest discourses, produced between 2005 and 2006, both immediately before and after the people's revolution that resulted in the declaration of Nepal as a secular state, this essay highlights the ways that experiences of conflict coupled with a national political transition shape and contribute to …

Resonance Of Moral Shocks In Abolitionist Animal Rights Advocacy: Overcoming Contextual Constraints, Corey Lee Wrenn

Animal Rights Movement Collection

Jasper and Poulsen (1995) have long argued that moral shocks are critical for recruitment in the nonhuman animal rights movement. Building on this, Decoux (2009) argues that the abolitionist faction of the nonhuman animal rights movement fails to recruit members because it does not effectively utilize descriptions of suffering. However, the effectiveness of moral shocks and subsequent emotional reactions has been questioned. This article reviews the literature surrounding the use of moral shocks in social movements. Based on this review, it is suggested that the exploitation of emotional reactions to depictions of suffering can sometimes prove beneficial to recruitment, but …

Finding The Way Forward: Re-Introducing The Practice Of Discernment As A Means Of Determining God's Direction For The Church Of God Reformation Movement, Bruce W. Steffensen

Doctor of Ministry

No abstract provided.

Orisa Tradtion, Catholicism, And The Construction Of Black Identity In 19th Century Brazil And Cuba, Allison Sellers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares the role of the hybridized religious traditions Candomblé and Santería in the construction of identity for people of color in Brazil and Cuba in the 19th century. In particular, it focuses on the development of these traditions within Catholic confraternities and contrasts the use of ethnic and religious categories within them to define “African-ness” and “blackness” as Brazil and Cuba transitioned from slaveholding colonies to pos t-abolition nationstates. This comparison is illustrated through the examination of each colony’s slave trade and the nature of slavery as it was practiced within them; the analysis of the structure of …

(Pre)Determined Occupations: The Post-Colonial Hybridizing Of Identity And Art Forms In Third World Spaces, Amanda Alexander, Manisha Sharma

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this article, we present the effects of globalization on art forms in Peru and on teacher identity in India while exploring hybridization as an ongoing global paradigm in both contexts (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1979). Peruvian art forms are continuously shifting as global cultures meld and become more technologically connected, which ultimately brings about questions of authenticity. The identities of Indian art educators are evolving, and shifting indicating an assemblage or structure containing many parts working together to perform a particular function. In realizing its function, the structure can be named or its form made visible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). …

Antipodean Identities: Violent Behaviors, Pugilism And Irish Immigrant Culture In New South Wales, 1830-1861, Matthew Aaron Schownir

Open Access Theses

This essay examines the spaces in which Irish immigrants renegotiated negative stereotypes of wanton violence that accompanied them to New South Wales in the Early Victorian period. This process occurred by way of legitimizing violence through an Anglicized cultural filter or by curbing violence in instances where it was expected and publicly denounced. As these immigrants adapted to normative notions surrounding "proper" forms of violence and masculinity, they contributed to an overall shift in Australian cultural identities that recognized the significant Irish minority as a viable and valuable component of colonial society.

Feeling Knowledge : How Emotion And Identity Inform Student Learning, Rebecca M. Ossorio

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The exploratory and descriptive purpose of this work is to better understand what might be happening when students have an emotional response to learning in school and to offer a way of conceptualizing emotion, identity and student learning as deeply interrelated. The data for this study comes from four in-depth, phenomenological interviews where contemplative educators were asked to recollect emotional experiences from their formal education and tell the story of how those experiences impacted their learning. Evidence suggests that when students have an emotional response to learning it is like a beacon alerting them to the self-relevance of what they …

Nationalism In Ireland: Archaeology, Myth, And Identity, Elaine Kirby Tolbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A nation is defined by a collective identity that is constructed in part through interpretation of past places and events. In this paper, I examine the links between nationalism and archaeology and how the past is used in the construction of contemporary Irish national identity. In Ireland, national identity has been influenced by interpretation of ancient monuments, often combining the mythology and the archaeology of these sites. I focus on three celebrated monumental sites at Navan Fort, Newgrange, and the Hill of Tara, all of which play prominent roles in Irish mythology and have been extensively examined through archaeology. I …

Pedagogy And Identity In "The Night Lessons" Of Finnegans Wake, Zachary Paul Smola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores chapter II.ii of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939)—commonly called "The Night Lessons"—and its peculiar use of the conventions of the textbook as a form. In the midst of the Wake's abstraction, Joyce uses the textbook to undertake a rigorous exploration of epistemology and education. By looking at the specific expectations of and ambitions for textbooks in 19th century Irish national schools, this thesis aims to provide a more specific historical context for what textbooks might mean as they appear in Finnegans Wake. As instruments of cultural conditioning, Irish textbooks were fraught with tension arising from their investment …