Digital Commons Network^™

The Vibrant Traditions Of Masaya: El Mestizaje As A Culture, A Process, And A State Of Being, Isabelle Lee

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

“The only constant in life is change.” What this old adage leaves out is that the processes that catalyze these changes can occur in vastly different ways which impact the product. In the case of the history of Masaya, Nicaragua, today’s dominant culture of mestizaje is the result of the arrival of the Spaniards to the Americas and the process of racial and cultural blend that followed between Spanish, indigenous and African peoples. But in this mixing process, Spaniards held disproportionate power: most of the changes they imposed were made through violent and deceptive imposition. Yet indigenous and African people …

Developing Little England: Public Health, Popular Protest, And Colonial Policy In Barbados, 1918-1940, Brittany J. Merritt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes struggles over the development of Barbadian health and sanitation during the period between the world wars. In doing so, it examines how the British Empire tried to use development policies to maintain its power overseas during the interwar years. During this period, British policymakers sought to improve health and sanitation to pacify restive Barbadian laborers influenced by transnational pan-African and socialist ideas following the First World War. However, white Barbadian elites, influenced by ideas of eugenics and population control, opposed metropolitan efforts to develop health and sanitation in the colony. Rather than repairing the colonial relationship, British …

The “Becoming White Thesis” Revisited, Philip Q. Yang, Kavitha Koshy

The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology

The claim that some non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrant groups such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews became white in historical America has largely been taken for granted these days, but we see a need for a qualified rectification of this thesis. Did these non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrant groups really become white? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how “becoming white” is defined. We have found no evidence to support the “becoming white thesis” in terms of change in the official racial classification of these groups in the record of social institutions such as U.S. censuses, naturalization laws, and …

Symptomatic Leadership: The Impact Of Changing Demographics On Global Business, Linda L. Ridley

Publications and Research

The past several decades have displayed a focus on diversity in the workplace throughout the corporate environment. Questions remain: has the effort been at all impactful – or, due to its symbolic nature, has it only been a distraction? What behaviors would have been better emphasized to achieve full participation and opportunity by all actors in a firm?

Considerable research has revealed that attempts at diversity are clumsy at best; and spurious at worst. [i] The challenge for firms has been to develop a “business case” for why those contributing groups represented by women and people of color should be …

Research Brief: "Intersecting Identities: Race, Military Affiliation, And Youth Attitudes Towards War", Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This research examines the difference between African American service members and their support for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and African American civilians who oppose the wars. Seeking counseling could be beneficial to the individual as a service member and a civilian. It is recommended that future research in this area should compare the behaviors of service members and civilians who identify as LGBTQ, and applying social identity theory is beneficial to this study as a whole.

Thugs, Crooks, And Rebellious Negroes: Racist And Racialized Media Coverage Of Michael Brown And The Ferguson Demonstrations, Bryan Adamson

Faculty Articles

The article explores how the media constructs news, and offers extensive history on the adverse narrative media tropes about Black men since colonial newspapers. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of news narratives and images, this article demonstrates how Ferguson accounts emphasized Brown’s deviance and chaos and disorder. After offering comparative analysis of White criminality and protest news narratives, the article presses upon the social effects of racist and racialized media narratives. The article examines the controversy through First Amendment free speech, hate crimes, and true threat principles as well as FCC regulation of broadcasting, and media ownership. While explicating the …

The Color Of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, And Socialization In Black Brazilian Families (Book Review), Jan Hoffman French

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Book review of the The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families by Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.

We Built It And They Did Not Come: Using Governance Theory In The Fight For Food Justice In Low-Income Communities Of Color, Deborah N. Archer, Tamara Belinfanti

Articles & Chapters

Food deserts and food insecurity have received considerable attention from various stakeholders, such as state and local governments, community organizations, and private sector institutions. These stakeholders have sought to overcome food insecurity by turning food deserts into oases by providing “access” to fresh, healthy food. However, many of their solutions—building supermarkets and sponsoring farmers markets—have missed the mark. Residents of food deserts did not flock to grocery stores to purchase fruits andvegetables. As a result, many stakeholders blame the residents of food deserts for their own predicament, lamenting, to paraphrase Field of Dreams, “we built it but they did not …

In Search Of Heterotopia: Immersive Experiences In The Museum, Nicolas Crosby

All Master's Theses

Museums everywhere are waging battle to find ways to attract new audience members. In this thesis I draw upon participant observation, interviews, and event planning in order to examine how museums create heterotopic, interactive immersive experiences. I focus on the work of two Seattle-area museums, and a gallery and a museum in Ellensburg. The Entertainment, Music, and Popular Culture museum (EMP), the Nordic Heritage Museum (NHM), and the Museum of Culture and Environment (MCE) developed opportunities for visitors to engage with museum-created heterotopic events. I approach this analysis through a theoretical framework that emphasizes structure and agency. On one hand, …

Place Matters: Contextualizing The Roles Of Religion And Race For Understanding Americans’ Attitudes About Homosexuality, Amy Adamczyk, Katherine A. Boyd, Brittany E. Hayes

Publications and Research

As laws and policies related to homosexuality have evolved, Americans' attitudes have also changed. Race and religion have been established as important indicators of feelings about homosexuality. However, researchers have given almost no attention to how county characteristics shape Americans' attitudes. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling techniques, we examine how personal characteristics and the religious and racial context of a county shape feelings about homosexuality drawing on data from the American National Election Survey and information about where respondents reside. We find that African Americans initially appear less tolerant than other racial groups, until we account for the geographical distribution of …

The Trouble With White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism And The Intersectional Internet, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

In August, 2013 Mikki Kendall, writer and pop culture analyst, started the hashtag #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen as a form of cyberfeminist activism directed at the predominantly white feminist activists and bloggers at sites like Feministing, Jezebel and Pandagon who failed to acknowledge the racist, sexist behavior of one their frequent contributors. Kendall’s hashtag activism quickly began trending and reignited a discussion about the trouble with white feminism. A number of journalists have excoriated Kendall specifically, and women of color more generally, for contributing to a “toxic” form of feminism. Yet what remains unquestioned in these journalistic accounts and in the scholarship to …

Without Mandate For Conquest: A Transnational Comparison Of Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon And Isabel Allende's Eva Luna, Vivianna Noelle Orsini

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In our current age of globalization, multiculturalism is a key component of human relations. Place, when thought of as a geographic concept is more than just coordinates on a map, it is a concentration of a set of social relations. Geographers use this information to see how places are relational to other places. Morrison and Allende are relational because of their consciousness of place especially exhibited in Song of Solomon and Eva Luna. This project examines the disparate histories, politics, and landscapes that both authors emerged from, and argue the complexity of their work stems from thinking geographically, their conscious …

Mirrors, Monsters, & Webcams: Consequences Of Tweenage Twerking On Youtube, St. Norbert College

2015-2016

Dr. Kyra Gaunt shares findings from her research and teaching about tweenage twerking from the segregated, "private" rooms of black girls and the bottom-line of who profits from this online behavior in the networked economy of YouTube and music videos.

Snc Day: Jump Around! Double Dutch Delight Day/ "Whose Turn In The Ropes?", St. Norbert College

2015-2016

The “Double Dutch to Dreams” team from Milwaukee taught how to double dutch, sing songs, and learn tricks. Dr. Kyra Gaunt, author and performer, led a family-friendly discussion, “Whose turn in the Ropes?” on the history of double dutch among kids and its influence on popular music, considering how race and gender influence the game and the sport.

Perspectives On The Evolution Of Hip-Hop Music Through Themes Of Race, Crime, And Violence, Kelsey B. Basham

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the role or race, crime, and violence as major themes in hip-hop music through existing academic literature. Utilizing the three major themes, this paper discusses the inherent ties of race, crime, and violence to the production of hip-hop music which can reflect broader social issues existing in American society over the time period from 1970-present day. Furthermore, these themes will be assessed for their activist oriented ability to suggest change in society for the primary groups affected by the issues contained in hip-hop lyrics. Over time, hip-hop, much like any artistic form, has undergone an evolution, producing …

Protecting Identity By Ignoring It? A Critical Look At The French And Rwandan Paradoxes, Frédéric Mégret

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article seeks to critically examine political and legal practices of "racial blindness" by comparing two countries that have most enthusiastically embraced it as an official policy and even ideology: France and Rwanda. By highlighting the differences but also the significant commonalities between the two, it seeks to dynamically emphasize their explicit and implicit construction of race and ethnicity The case for racial blindness is first presented in the terms in which it is largely understood in those countries, and taken seriously as an effort to deal with their unique legacies and political circumstances, notably as part of a desire …

Post-Katrina Suppression Of Black Working-Class Political Expression, Taunya L. Banks

Journal of Public Management & Social Policy

New Orleans politicians, with the aid of the federal government, used the destruction and displacement caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to implement policies that discouraged low-income and working class black residents from returning to New Orleans. Impacted communities felt the need to revitalize street parades (second-line parades), a traditional communal neighborhood activity, as an instrument of political protest. In response the City used minor municipal ordinances to more vigorously regulate these parades, doubling the fees imposed for street parades and effectively shutting them down. The City’s response raised important constitutional questions about government suppression of speech and freedom of …

Combating Racial Health Disparities Through Medical Education: The Need For Anthropological And Genetic Perspectives In Medical Training, Deborah A. Bolnick

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Despite major public health initiatives, significant disparities persist among racially and ethnically defined groups in the prevalence of disease, access to medical care, quality of medical care, and health outcomes for common causes of morbidity and mortality in the United States. It is critical that we develop new and creative strategies to address such inequities; mitigate the social, environmental, institutional, and genetic determinants of poor health; and combat the persistence of racial profiling in clinical contexts that further exacerbates racial/ethnic health disparities. This article argues that medical education is a prime target for intervention and that anthropologists and human population …

Michael Katz On Place And Space In Urban History, Timothy J. Gilfoyle

History: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Critical Race Theory And Empirical Methods Conference, Kimani Paul-Emile

Fordham Law Review

    Everyone seems to be talking about race. From the protests that erupted in cities across the country over the failure of grand juries in Missouri and New York to indict police officers in the killing of two unarmed black men, to the racially charged statements made by the owners of professional sports teams; and the college fraternity members captured on film singing a racist lynching song; race exploded into the nation’s collective consciousness. Even the Starbucks Coffee chain’s recent “Race Together” campaign, intended to promote discussion about race, sparked a controversy and was quickly withdrawn. These and other events have …

The Fruits Of Empire: Contextualizing Food In Post-Civil War American Art And Culture, Shana Klein

Art & Art History ETDs

The Fruits of Empire is a social and visual history of food in American art. With four fruit case-studies on representations of grapes, oranges, watermelons, and bananas, this project demonstrates how the visual culture of food provides a platform for examining the expansion and reconstruction of the United States in the decades following the Civil War. While chapters on grape and orange representations from California and Florida reveal the ways in which fruit serviced national expansion and the colonization of Americas fruit-lands, a chapter on watermelon imagery illustrates the racial stereotypes assigned to food that reinforced social divisions between white …

"I Do For My Kids": Negotiating Race And Racial Inequality In Family Court, Tonya L. Brito, David J. Pate Jr., Jia-Hui Stefanie Wong

Fordham Law Review

    Socio-legal scholarship examining issues of access to justice is currently experiencing a renaissance. Renewed inquiry into this field is urgently needed. Studies confirm that only 20 percent of the legal needs of low- income communities are met and that the vast majority of unrepresented litigants are low income, creating what some call a “justice gap” that has become even more urgent in recent years. State tribunals that deal with high-stakes issues particularly relevant to low-income residents, such as family courts and housing courts, are seeing an increasing number of litigants, the majority of whom are unrepresented.

Race In The Life Sciences: An Empirical Assessment, 1950-2000, Osagie K. Obasogie, Julie N. Harris-Wai, Katherine Darling, Carolyn Keagy

Fordham Law Review

    The mainstream narrative regarding the evolution of race as an idea in the scientific community is that biological understandings of race dominated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up until World War II, after which a social constructionist approach is thought to have taken hold. Many believe that the horrific outcomes of the most notorious applications of biological race—eugenics and the Holocaust—moved scientists away from thinking that race reflects inherent differences and toward an understanding that race is a largely social, cultural, and political phenomenon. This understanding of the evolution of race as a scientific idea informed the way that …

Critical Race Science And Critical Race Philosophy Of Science, Paul Gowder

Fordham Law Review

    Over several decades, feminist philosophy of science has revealed the ways in which much of science has proceeded from “mainstream” assumptions that privilege men and other hierarchically superordinate groups and existing socially constructed conceptions of gender. In doing so, it has produced a research program that, while rooted in the post- Kuhnian philosophy and sociology of science that has been taken up by many students of scientific method more generally, has been used to critique great swathes of modern science and to reveal both the biases of the mainstream, and the transformative potential of a science that proceeds from the …

When Theory Met Practice: Distributional Analysis In Critical Criminal Law Theorizing, Aya Gruber

Fordham Law Review

    Focusing on criminal law and procedure in particular, this Article seeks to expose various tensions in critical race theorizing and progressive theorizing more broadly, offer some suggestions for a unifying methodology of critical criminal law analysis, and discuss where empirical study might fit into this new program. Progressive (critical race and feminist) theorizing on criminal law is not only subject to the competing frames of critique and formalism, it also exists within an overarching American criminal law culture that can eclipse both concerns over rights violations and structural injustice. The U.S. penal system has become a “peculiar institution” and a …

Students Talk About Gender And Race Within The Classroom, Amanda Lucock

Media and Communication Studies Honors Papers

This study attempts to gain a better understanding of students’ experiences and perceptions of conversations about gender and race in the classroom. Specifically, this study focuses on issues and concerns that arise in the course of talking about gender and race. There were over 20 hours of classes observed, eight one-on-one in-depth interviews, and over three hours of recorded classroom conversations. Through my analysis, I found that students used several devices, including storytelling and attacking, to speak about these taboo issues within the classroom.

The University, The Community, And Race, Larry Davis

Center for Social Development Research

The University, the Community, and Race

Education, Crystal C. Gray

Eddie Mabry Diversity Award

Education is a spoken word poem that explores many aspects of the African American struggle within (self-knowledge). It starts with an African American college student who is disappointed with the lack of courses about her culture. Most curricula in the United States tend to be from a Eurocentric perspective, leaving out a multitude of information about people of color. All groups of people of color have unique experiences, however, African Americans have the most known (or perhaps I should say, unknown) history. The standard explanation of their existence is often limited to the start of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, when …

Chbe 9331 - Health Disparities & The Rural Underserved, Andrew Hansen

College of Public Health: Faculty Syllabi (2014-2021)

This course provides an in-depth look at health disparities, including factors related to history, politics, socioeconomics, race/ethnicity and public health. The extant literature in each of these areas will be examined and discussed.

Class Notes, Georgia Southern University

Arts & Humanities: News & Publications (2009-2023)

No abstract provided.