Digital Commons Network^™

Finding Common Purpose: A History Of Community Organizing In Boise, Idaho, Emily Fritchman

History Graduate Projects and Theses

Members of neighborhood associations in Boise have long acted as advocates for historic preservation, environmental conservation, and effective urban growth management. However, little historical research exploring the impact of neighborhood activists on both the regional and national level exists. This project addresses the lack of scholarship through the creation of three key elements: a website that highlights both the history of neighborhood organizing in Boise and significant figures of the activist movement, a community lecture presenting these findings to the public, and a brochure detailing the goals of the project to neighbors. Additionally, this research highlights patterns that will provide …

Degeneration Of Settler Colonialism In Contemporary Cinematic Depictions Of The U.S. West: Introduction, M. Elise Marubbio, Marek Paryż, Matthew Carter

Faculty Authored Articles

The settler’s situation is underpinned by the fear of having been caught in a process of endless transition, hence the determination to define the parameters of collective sovereignty and to establish a satisfactory existential basis. The sense of uncertainty that underlies the settler’s situation accounts for the necessity of developing power structures that sustain the settler collective’s striving to complete its design, and this triggers a range of conflicts. Repeatedly addressing the eponymous region’s legacy of settler colonialism, film depictions of the American West re-inscribe oppression of racial minorities, sexual abuse, and class exploitation in order to validate the foundational …

Empire And Its Afterlives, Inder Marwah, Jennifer Pitts, Timothy Vasko, Onur Ulas Ince, Robert Nichols

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

At the time of its 2005 publication, Jennifer Pitts’ A Turn to Empire was among a handful of works in political theory probing imperialism’s constitutive influence over modern political thought.

On Beauty And Policing, I. India Thusi

Northwestern University Law Review

“To protect and serve” is the motto of police departments from Los Angeles to Cape Town. When police officers deviate from the twin goals of protection and service, for example by using excessive force or by maintaining hostile relations with the community, scholars recommend more training, more oversight, or more resources in policing. However, police appear to be motivated by a superseding goal in the area of sex work policing. In some places, the policing of sex workers is connected to police officers’ perceptions of beauty, producing a hierarchy of desirable bodies as enforced by those sworn to protect and …

Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, And Fantasies Of National Identity In Early Modern England, Sydnee Wagner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the arrival of Romani people in England in the 16th century, the figure of the Gypsy has been a staple of English literature and culture. My dissertation, Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, and Fantasies of National Identity in Early Modern England, argues that representations of Gypsies, from Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra to Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, served as a foil for English writers to create a distinctly white early modern English subject. By investigating the racialization of the Gypsy, this project considers technologies of race that lie within the parameters of England itself. Though the English …

The Colored Pill: A History Film Performance Exposing Race Based Medicines, Wanda Lakota

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Of the 32 pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA in 2005, one medicine stood out. That medicine, BiDil®, was a heart failure medication that set a precedent for being the first approved race based drug for African Americans. Though BiDil®, was the first race specific medicine, racialized bodies have been used all throughout history to advance medical knowledge. The framework for race, history, and racialized drugs was so multi-tiered; it could not be conceptualized from a single perspective. For this reason, this study examines racialized medicine through performance, history, and discourse analysis.

The focus of this work aimed …

Class Mobility And Reproduction For Black And White Adults In The United States: A Visualization, Daniel Laurison, D. Dow, C. Chernoff

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Works

The relationship between where people start out in life (class origin) and where they are likely to end up (class destination) is central to any question about the fairness of contemporary society. Yet we often don’t have a good picture—literally or metaphorically—of the contours of that relationship. Further, work on class mobility in the United States often glosses over the large differences between white and Black Americans’ class positions and mobility trajectories. This visualization, based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, shows the association between occupational class origin and destination for Black and white employed Americans ages …

Undergraduate Anthropology As White Academic Space?: Perceptions And Experiences Of Minority Anthropology Students At West Virginia University, Tanisha Adams

Undergraduate Scholarship

Used to establish scientific racism, reinforce eugenics, and create immigration laws, the foundation of American anthropology was built on colonialistic and eurocentric ideology. By focusing on discourse rather than action, decades of effort to diversify the discipline has led to graduate students and practicing anthropologists of color to continuously express marginalization within the field. In 2009, the American Anthropological Association Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology (CRRA) conducted a survey to examine the experiences and status of minorities within the field of anthropology. The survey focused on the graduate students and those in academic positions. The results of this …

Race And The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints In India, Taunalyn Rutherford, Joe Chelladurai, Vinna Chintaram

Mormon Studies Review

Paul Reeve has argued that the Book of Mormon’s imperative, “all are alike unto God,” “met its match in an American religious and racial culture which insisted otherwise.”1 The complexity of race and its construction in “Indian culture” over the course of a much longer history has created a formidable match for a Mormonism characterized at times by its “whiteness” and “Americanness.”2 Race in India is a multifarious and changing phenomenon. Contemporary scholars claim that India is facing “a race problem made up of a combination of ignorance and denial.”3 The policy of geographic boundaries rather than self-selection creates diverse …

Tecumseh And Tenskwatawa: Myths, Memories, And Messages For Present Times, Matt Hoerauf

Wayne State University Theses

Tecumseh has been hailed as the most famous Indigenous leader in the United States and Canada. Many scholars have bemoaned the difficulty to separating man from myth. One thing is clear: there could be no Tecumseh without his brother Tenskwatawa. It was Tenskwatawa who first had a religious awakening that birthed a spiritual movement. It was Tenskwatawa who was the first leader of this pan-Indigenous group of followers. Tecumseh’s leadership would not emerge until nearly six years later. In the many works on Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa’s story can be easily found. However, he is nearly always portrayed as less important and …

Genetic Race? Dna Ancestry Tests, Racial Identity, And The Law, Trina Jones, Jessica L. Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

Can genetic tests determine race? Americans are fascinated with DNA ancestry testing services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Indeed, in recent years, some people have changed their racial identity based upon DNA ancestry tests and have sought to use test results in lawsuits and for other strategic purposes. Courts may be similarly tempted to use genetic ancestry in determining race. In this Essay, we examine the ways in which DNA ancestry tests may affect contemporary understandings of racial identity. We argue that these tests are poor proxies for race because they fail to reflect the social, cultural, relational, and experiential norms …

Americans’ Explanations For Racial Disparities Across Three Decades (1985-2016): Are The Views Of African Americans And Whites Converging?, Angela M. Brown, Daniel N. Hawkins, Alecia D. Anderson

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Despite the promises of the Civil Rights Movement last century, African Americans continue to experience less socioeconomic success than their White peers. Research has found that explanations for this racial gap differ by race, with Whites more likely to adhere to individualistic explanations and African Americans more likely to agree with structural causes. We use color-blind racism, standpoint theory, and a presidential administration timeline to frame an examination of three decades (1985-2016) of General Social Survey data on explanations for racial differences. We find that among all Americans regardless of race, agreement with both person-blame and system-blame explanations has declined …

The Cultivation Theory And Reality Television: An Old Theory With A Modern Twist, Jeffrey Weiss

Capstone Showcase

George Gerbner, a Hungarian-born professor of communication, founded the cultivation theory, one of the most popular and regarded theories in the communications world. Developed in the mid 20th century, the theory focus on the long-term effects of television on people. Longer exposure to signs, images and people on television cultivates their perception of reality in the real world. The television became a household staple during this time. Families often spent time together watching programming together, however, it played out different effects for each person. Television's constant visual and auditory stimulation on a person made it easier to cultivate certain messages, …

Not Yet America's Best Idea: Law, Inequality, And Grand Canyon National Park, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Even the nation’s most cherished and protected public lands are not spaces apart from the workings of law, politics, and power. This Essay explores that premise in the context of Grand Canyon National Park. On the occasion of the Park’s 100th Anniversary, it examines how law — embedded in a political economy committed to rapid growth and development in the southwestern United States — facilitated the violent displacement of indigenous peoples and entrenched racialized inequalities in the surrounding region. It also explores law’s shortcomings in the context of sexual harassment and discrimination within the Park. The Essay concludes by suggesting …

What's Wrong With Police Unions?, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In an era of declining labor power, police unions stand as a rare success story for worker organizing—they exert political clout and negotiate favorable terms for their members. Yet, despite broad support for unionization on the political left, police unions have become public enemy number one for academics and activists concerned about race and police violence. Much criticism of police unions focuses on their obstructionist nature and how they prioritize the interests of their members over the interests of the communities they police. These critiques are compelling—police unions shield officers and block oversight. But, taken seriously, they often sound like …

Symbolic Annihilation, The Politics Of (Mis)Representation, And The Stress And Health Of Millennial Black Women, Chenoia Nicole Bryant

All ETDs from UAB

The (mis)representation of Black populations in media has been extensively explored and critiqued by several scholars. From their introduction into media through radio to their visi-bility in television and news, the tropes of Black womanhood have carried over from colo-nialist perspectives to present day. Considering race and gender as cultural structures con-straining Black women through the assignment of stereotypical scripts, it is important to consider how, when and where Black women’s agency enters. Negative racialized and gendered stereotypes are informed by culture at large, but Black women’s agency impacts the interpretation of these (mis)representations, offering space for both conformity and …

What’S Wrong With Police Unions?, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In an era of declining labor power, police unions stand as a rare success story for worker organizing—they exert political clout and negotiate favorable terms for their members. Yet, despite broad support for unionization on the political left, police unions have become public enemy number one for academics and activists concerned about race and police violence. Much criticism of police unions focuses on their obstructionist nature and how they prioritize the interests of their members over the interests of the communities they police. These critiques are compelling—police unions shield officers and block oversight. But, taken seriously, they often sound like …

White Women Who Lead: God, Girlfriends, And Diversity Projects In A National Evangelical Ministry, Kelsy Burke, Amy Mcdowell

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

A robust body of literature has used feminist analysis to study white evangelical women in the United States, but few of these studies have addressed the reproduction of racial inequality. Beginning with the assumption that women-led evangelical ministries are racialized organizations, the authors examine the relationship between racial and gender ideologies and the messages of white evangelical women leaders at the IF:Gathering, a popular annual Christian women’s conference in the United States. On the surface, the women who lead IF embody a contradiction: they support the conservative gender ideology of evangelicalism while challenging this religious tradition by encouraging all Christian …

Supporting Conversations About Race And Racism With Young Children While Watching For Manifestations Of Whiteness, Shubhi Sachdeva, Jennifer Adair

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

This article examines two first grade classrooms in Central Texas that routinely have conversations about racial justice. In both classrooms we studied, children participated in racial conversations in large group structured discussions with the teacher and in less formal peer conversations away from the teachers. We follow both classrooms and detail the ways in which the teachers supported conversations about race, racism and racial violence with and among the young children in their classes. We highlight specific strategies and mechanisms that both teachers used to open up their classrooms for social and racial justice conversations. Then, we show how even …

The Heritage Of The Spanish Antilles, Daniel Nieves

Open Educational Resources

This course seeks to explore the heritage of the Spanish Caribbean—primarily Cuba, Dominican Republic/Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. We will place particular emphasis on the historical, cultural and ethnic forces that have shaped the character of the people of these islands. As well we will explore the variety of societies and cultures of the Spanish Caribbean in their historical and contemporary setting up to and including the (im)migration experience of Spanish Caribbean people to urban North America.

Crip Time In Fin-De-Siècle Spain: Disability, Degeneration, And Eugenics, Erika Rodriguez

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

A period of intense nation-building, the late nineteenth century was marked by the search for medical and legal solutions to the increasing number of bodies that did not align with culturally constructed expectations of productivity and reproduction in Spanish modernity. Authors of this time used representations of disability to engage in urgent political questions about population control and the rights of individuals in the face of increasing medical intervention. In carrying out this analysis, I raise the question of how representations of disability created a space to reconfigure the social values that determined what lives matter. Focusing on canonical realist …

Black Aesthetics And Relative Autonomy, Michael Kelly

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

There has been a recent revival of black aesthetics unprecedented since the 1960s. Some is happening inside academic philosophy, including in this journal (Volume 7, 2009). But there are more examples of black esthetics across other disciplines. A key, controversial concept in transdisciplinary black aesthetics is autonomy. Modern Western aesthetics was racist when it was established in the eighteenth century because blacks were not considered to be capable of autonomy, necessary to have taste. Now that this anti-black racism has been exposed, but until critics are convinced that aesthetics today is free of such racism, autonomy will be viewed as …

Affect And Manhattan’S West Side Piers, Ricardo J. Millhouse

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, "Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity" (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York's west side piers queerly affective. I use "queer bodies" to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic …

To My Room’S Future Tenant, Abigail Garcia

Honors Theses

To My Room’s Future Tenant is an original collection of poems accompanied by a critical preface.

Converging Space And Producing Place: Social Inequalities And Birth Across Mexico, Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications

I combine ethnographic research of the professional midwifery model in Mexico with concepts gleaned from an interdisciplinary literature in order to illustrate how different types of spaces converge in the process of place-making. From October 2010 to November 2013, I conducted twenty-eight months of research, interviewing employees of government bureaus and public health programs, observing how the professional midwifery model unfolds in distinct contexts, performing interviews and participant-observation with casa midwifery students/alumni, and “shadowing” professional midwives and obstetricians as they engage with pregnant women in a hospital setting. Drawing from ethnographic examples, this article points to five different types of …

“Me Gritaron Negra”: The Emergence And Development Of The Afro-Descendant Women’S Movement In Peru (1980-2015), Eshe Lewis, John Thomas Iii, Spanish Translation: Https://Revistasinvestigacion.Unmsm.Edu.Pe/Index.Php/Sociales/Article/View/19567

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines the evolution of the Afro-descendant women's movement in Peru between 1980 and 2015. We examine the development of women’s conscious through other movements, specifically through the national Afro-Peruvian movement and the regional feminist encounters that have been taking place since the 1980s. Our study outlines the tensions, and points of convergence and divergence that have existed for Afro-Peruvian women in these movements. We demonstrate how these issues characterize the nature of Afro-Peruvian women's struggle and their social and political position within the realm of race- and gender-based activism. We show that this friction has prompted women to …

Story Circles, Various Anonymous (Akron Story Circle Project Team)

Hail We Akron!

No abstract provided.

Race, Town, And Gown: A White Christian College And A White Suburb Address Race, David B. Malone

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Wheaton, Illinois and Wheaton College share a name derived from early settlers, a geographic space, and conservative political and religious values. In their early years, the college admitted black students and the suburb had black residents. Their paths diverged after pressure from religious movements and suburbanization: Wheaton continued as one of the few Chicago suburbs to have black residents, yet the college stopped admitting black students around the 1920s. Wheaton passed Illinois’ first fair housing law in 1967 but controversy regarding a significant downtown project led to subsequently pursuing development aimed at wealthier residents and the proportion of non-white residents …

Dios En Carne: Rastafari And The Embodiment Of Spiritual Blackness In Puerto Rico, Omar Ramadan-Santiago

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I examine how the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico constructs, reshapes, imagines and embodies blackness as a personal, political, and ideological identity. I argue that my interlocutors refuse non-black privilege and choose blackness, an act that is understood as identification not with subjugation but with power. I consider their identification with blackness and enactment of this identity as a performance. My analysis, based on 22 months of ethnographic research, and utilizing ethnography, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews, explores how my interlocutors claim blackness as a spiritual identity. In doing so, they demonstrate the metaphysical nature of race …

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678): Converso Composer In Antwerp, Elizabeth A. Weinfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a converso of Jewish descent living in Antwerp, is the author of seven five-part Sinfonias for viol consort — the only known seventeenth-century viol music written by a woman. This music is testament to a formidable talent for composition, yet very little is known about the life and times in which Duarte produced her work. Her family were merchants and art collectors of Jewish descent who immigrated from Portugal in the early sixteenth century to escape the Inquisition; in exile in Antwerp, they achieved enormous success and provided the means with which to educate their children and …