Digital Commons Network^™

Multiculturalism On Its Head: Unexpected Social Boundaries And New Migration In Singapore, Yasmin Y. Ortiga

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study investigates how discourses of multiculturalism shape publicdebates surrounding new migration in Singapore. Singapore’s immigration policiesled to the influx of Chinese and Indian professionals, many of whom share race andclass identities with local Singaporeans. However, Singaporeans of Chinese and Indianbackgrounds rejected these presumed similarities, using discourses of multiculturalismto differentiate themselves from co-ethnic migrants. Based on a content analysis ofnews reports and online forums, this study shows how local actors portrayed newmigrants as too prejudiced or bigoted to adapt to Singapore’s multiracial society,thereby creating a paradoxical application of multicultural ideals. This example high-lights how contemporary immigration is creating diverse forms …

“I Knew What I Was Going To School For”: A Mixed Methods Examination Of Black College Students’ Racialized Experiences At A Southern Pwi, Kamden K. Strunk, Sherry C. Wang, Andrea L. Beall, Cory E. Dixon, Daniel J. Stabin, Betool Z. Ridha

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

Researchers have consistently documented a range of racialized inputs and outcomes in U.S. higher education. Those dynamics appear especially salient, and their consequences especially pronounced in the U.S. region often referred to as the Deep South. This overwhelming body of evidence, including the documented patterns of racial segregation in Deep South higher education, disparate opportunities and advantages, and inequitable outcomes, offers less insight on how Black students make sense of their experiences. This study used explanatory mixed methods to document racialized differences in campus experiences and to understand how Black students made sense of and navigated those racialized experiences. Our …

From Prison To Homeless Shelter: Camp Laguardia And The Political Economy Of An Urban Infrastructure, Christian D. Siener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At this time of increasing housing insecurity, recent reforms in homeless shelter policy have attracted the attention of scholars and activists. This research sheds light on these changes by placing them in historical and political-geographic perspective, focusing on the role of homeless shelters in stabilizing social displacement by destabilizing solidarity. It demonstrates historical continuity between prisons and homeless shelters in New York City through a case study of conditions surrounding the transition of Camp LaGuardia, a prison that slowly transformed into the city’s largest, and longest lasting, homeless shelter. The case study is an empirical demonstration of some of the …

Gender And Racial Disparities In A Youth Urban Agriculture Workshop, Kamran Zendehdel, Lorraine Weller Clarke, Xiaochu Hu, Richard Hess

Journal of Extension

Urban youth participation in agricultural activities has been linked to positive educational outcomes. This article explores the gender and racial differences in perceived knowledge gain and intended behavior change among youths participating in a youth urban agriculture workshop in 2015. Participants were students from underserved areas in Washington, DC. Female students and Black students had about half-grade higher (0.43–0.63 points) self-reported scores for knowledge change, whereas only female students showed an increase in intent to change behavior. Our results suggest that female students may learn at a faster rate than males and that experiential learning aids Black students in gaining …

"If You Stand On This Corner, People Know What You're About": Powerful Geographies Of Airline & Goodwood In #Justiceforalton, Shannon Kathleen Groll

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis seeks to understand the multiple geographies of Airline & Goodwood, a site of protest occupied nightly during a part of summer 2016 in response to the police shooting of Alton Sterling. Through a methodology of observant-participation, interviews, and oral histories, I make the case that the politics of this site differed from other contemporaneous protest sites in the city through specific place-making activity which highlighted the site’s powerful contemporary and historical geographies. I connect protest at this site to the precarity of Black life and death in Baton Rouge through interviews and oral histories which discuss the historical …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Northwestern University Law Review

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

We Are A Fantasia: Violence, Belonging, And Potentiality In Transgender Latina Sexual Economies, Andrea Bolivar

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation ethnographically centers the lives of sex working transgender Latinas in Chicagoland. Based on 14 months of research collected between June 2015 and August 2016, I introduce "fantasia" as a racialized queer analytic to illustrate the unique ways in which transgender Latinas are objectified, racialized, and dehumanized in sexual economies of labor and in U.S. nation more broadly. Fantasia conveys trans Latinas' sexual otherness on account of their race and gender. They are imagined as hypersexual because they are Latinas, and fetishized because they are transgender women. Fantasia also indexes their ephemeral presence--they are always at risk of disappearing …

Pawns Of Policy And Problematized Perception: The Sustainability Of Inequality Through The Space Of African-American Childhood, Jen-I S. Costosa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

African American children are simultaneously entrapped by the construct of race and while excluded from the construct of childhood. Race has bifurcated the timeline(s) and bastion of childhood in which one has clear milestones and expectations and the other is nonlinear, fickle, and subject to a suspicious gaze. Recent research describes this phenomenon as “dehumanization”, “age overestimation”, and “adultification.” However, the aforementioned classifications of African American children’s’ experience presents the assumption in which this particular group would first have to be viewed both as human and also as a child, which is arguable. Policy, both children centric and otherwise, along …

The Color Of Desire: Contradictions Of Race, Sex, And Gay Rights In The Federal Republic Of Germany, Christopher B. Ewing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the current artificial dichotomy between European and Islamic sexual mores is rooted in competing impulses in German homosexual rights movements to seek solidarity with communities of color while simultaneously exoticizing their members. Interdisciplinary scholars of contemporary Europe have examined the many ways in which white Europeans have imagined Islam as inherently homophobic and misogynistic, rendering it incompatible with Western Europe's purported commitment to LGBT rights. My research historicizes this work by showing how, in the struggle against legal persecution and discrimination, homosexual West Germans turned to anti-racism as a political tool while simultaneously seeking out "exotic" …

The Green Book: Race, Geography, And Critical Understanding, Mark Pearcy Ph.D.

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

Social studies teachers face a number of disciplinary challenges--for instance, insufficient geographic knowledge, fewer opportunities for critical analysis amid shrinking instructional time--and, in terms of confronting discrimination and disparity, an increasingly racially segregated society. Teachers can, however, make excellent use of historical resources and modern mapping tools to empower students in their analysis of the Jim Crow era and segregation in American daily life. This article describes the use of The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide produced from 1937 to 1963 for African-American drivers which detailed American businesses which catered to black travelers. Using the data from these books, …

Organizational Change Plan For Closing The Black And White Achievement Gap, Markisha Mitchell

Dissertations

Abstract

Across the United States in almost every city, every suburb and every rural area there is a gap between the achievements of Black and White students. The term “achievement gap” has become an accepted label in situations where Black students severely underperform relative to their White counterparts. Many school Districts have discretely avoided discussing and or addressing this gap for decades. School District Z, located in an urban suburb just outside of a large midwestern city, is the focus of this research as they attempt to address the gap. Approximately two-thirds of District Z is composed of students of …

Review Of Race Scholarship And The War On Terror, Louise Cainkar, Saher Selod

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increased scholarship on American Muslims. In the social sciences, this work has focused mainly on Arabs and South Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or South Asians. Rather, the …

Black Panther As Spirit Trip, Laurel Zwissler

Journal of Religion & Film

This is one of a series of film reviews of Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler. This review analyzes engagement with the movie as a religious experience and considers some political implications of both its storyline and reception. In particular, the piece focuses on constructions of race, especially in relationship to Africa and African Americans, as well as practical tensions around commodifying dissent.

Policing The Riverfront: Urban Revanchism As Sustainability, Jared J. Austin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An unnoticed shift is underway in the revanchist model of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005) that is rebranding the neoliberal reorganization of space and economic growth. I call this shift “Urban Revanchism as Sustainability,” following Mike Davis and Daniel Monk (2007). In this study, I describe how Tampa elites, led by Democratic Mayor Bob Buckhorn, use politically popular discourses of ‘sustainability’, ‘walkability’, ‘bike-ability’, among others, to coopt the rhetoric and symbols of social and environmental justice as cover for urban capital accumulation. I describe how in the wake of 2008 which devastated Tampa, and in the context of the subsequent …

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …

Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis foregrounds the import of national geography in nineteenth-century African American literature. Authors like Elizabeth Keckley and Martin Delany confront problems of national geography by interrogating illusion, rewriting geographic space, and constructing themselves within both the physical and conceptual geography of the nation. In so doing, they challenge the fallacy of a uniform national geography and attend to the myriad historical conditions that exist within geographic spaces.

Belonging To The Imperial Nation: Rethinking The History Of The First World War In Britain And Its Empire, Susan R. Grayzel

History Faculty Publications

In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the First World War in 2014–18, the British government set aside funds for a range of commemorative activities. These included a number of “engagement centres” that aimed to bring together academics and local community members in addition to providing separate arts-related programming.1 The Imperial War Museum reworked its main First World War galleries, which opened with great fanfare at the centenary’s start. This denotes a kind of publicly sanctioned interest in a war that Britain had won, after all, but that popular memory had enshrined as something quite different, something that required …

Whither The Gender Of Get Out: A Critique Of The Cinematic (Im)Possibilities Of The Black Political Imagination, Daelena Tinnin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the entanglements of spatialized racial-sexual violence, conceptualizations of black female subjectivity, questions of the limitations and excesses of media representations and the socioeconomic, cultural and spatiotemptoral relations that make black images visible and (im) possible as they are situated in the cinematic black political imagination. Through a materialist media analysis of the 2017 film Get Out, I argue that the film and its articulation of the afterlife of slavery fails to account for gender by tangentially engaging black women in its dissection of race and racism. I contend that black women are the absent presence in …

South Asian American Visual Culture And Representation, Bakirathi Mani

English Literature Faculty Works

South Asian American visual culture is a diverse field of visual art, created by artists who are first-, second- and third-generation immigrants from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, among other diasporic locations (e.g., Kenya). South Asian American artists work in a range of media forms, including photography, sculpture, installation, video, painting, and drawing. Collectively, these artworks are frequently exhibited in museums and galleries as depictions of contemporary South Asian immigrant life. However, a close reading of individual works produces a more dynamic picture. Instead of viewing South Asian American visual culture solely in terms of artists’ own immigrant biographies, scholarship and …

Mental Representations Of The Homeless, Stephanie E. Mckee

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Stereotypes surrounding race and socioeconomic status often have overlapping attributes. That is, we tend to stereotypically associate African Americans and poor individuals with being incompetent. Further, people automatically associate African Americans with the concept of poor. The current research examined people’s mental representations of a homeless person, a poor person, and a person with a home, to see if people’s mental representation of a homeless varied from that of a poor person. Results from Study 1 (N = 524), using a bi-racial base image indicate that people, on average, mentally represent the poor and homeless in a similar manner. …

Three Methodological Innovations In Race And Ethnicity Research, Jeffrey Napierala

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines topics related to racial and ethnic diversity through three essays. Each essay takes a new perspective on a current issue in the literature and utilizes a unique statistical methodology to address that issue. The first essay uses the Monte Carlo Simulation Method to develop a measure of segregation for the ACS and uses it to assess whether the ACS is useful for measuring segregation in places with different sizes. The second essay considers whether a relatively unexplored factor, genetics, is correlated with migration. This perspective broadens our understanding of why migration occurs and is perpetuated over time. …

Sws Distinguished Feminist Lecture: Feminist Politcal Economy In A Globalized World: African Women Migrants In South Africa And The United States, Mary J. Osirim

Sociology Faculty Research and Scholarship

Based on research conducted over the past two decades, this lecture examines how the feminist political economy perspective can aid us in understanding the experiences of two populations of African women: Zimbabwean women cross-border traders in South Africa and African immigrant women in the northeastern United States. Feminist political economy compels us to explore the impact of the current phase of globalization as well as the roles of intersectionality and agency in the lives of African women. This research stems from fieldwork conducted in Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, as well as in metropolitan …

Mobile But Stuck: Multigenerational Neighborhood Decline And Housing Search Strategies For African Americans, Nora E. Taplin-Kaguru

Sociology Faculty Research and Scholarship

While many scholars have demonstrated that entrenched racial residential segregation perpetuates racial inequality, the causes of persistent racial segregation continue to be debated. This paper investigates how geographically and socioeconomically mobile African Americans approach the home-buying process in the context of a segregated metropolitan region, by using qualitative interviews with working-class to middle-income African American aspiring homebuyers. Homebuyers use three principal search strategies to determine suitable neighborhoods: avoiding decline, searching for improvement, and searching for stability. The findings suggest that despite these strategies African American homebuyers end up in areas that may not retain characteristics they desire in terms of …

Reckoning With Race In The Book Of Mormon: A Review Of Literature, Russell W. Stevenson

Journal of Book of Mormon Studies

Scholars of Mormonism have seen a deluge of race literature on the Book of Mormon flow over the past five years. Compared to the robust scholarship on the use of biblical literature in constructing race, Mormonism strikes one as the particularly colorful character who showed up late to the party. For a faith system that has started to imagine itself in global terms, the implications of this recent increase are profound and invite commentary from a variety of disciplines ranging from literary criticism to forensic anthropology. This review essay holds humble aspirations for itself: to trace the basic contours of …

Police, Race, And The Production Of Capital Homicides, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Racial disparities in capital punishment have been well documented for decades. Over 50 studies have shown that Black defendants more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with capital-eligible crimes, to be convicted and sentenced to death. Racial disparities in charging and sentencing in capital-eligible homicides are the largest for the small number of cases where black defendants murder white victims compared to within-race killings, or where whites murder black or other ethnic minority victims. These patterns are robust to rich controls for non-racial characteristics and state sentencing guidelines. This article backs up the research on racial disparities to …

Beyond Body Mixing: Race, Space, And The Meaning Of School Integration In A Chicago Suburb, Megan Rigsby Klein

Dissertations

Integration is often characterized as an effective means of fixing the problems associated with segregation. Whether with respect to residential segregation, education, or to public spaces in general, integration is seen as a way to undo the perils of racial segregation. Yet often times, integration takes a certain reified form with a large white majority and non-white minority. How do lived experiences of Black residents in integrated spaces affect their perceptions of integration? Drawing on data collected from arcHIVal research, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with long-term African American residents, this dissertation examines the ways in which race, space, and …

Validation Of Virginia's Juvenile Risk Assessment Instrument, Jessica P. Schneider

Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing a validated risk assessment tool to predict future offending is recommended as best practices in corrections by a number of professional organizations (Latessa & Lovins, 2010). Guided by the risk-needs-responsivity model, risk assessment tools have evolved to help inform criminal justice practitioners by identifying offenders most in need of intervention or supervision, guiding the case plan to optimize outcomes (Bonta & Andrews, 2007). The Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) utilizes the Youth Assessment and Screening Instrument (YASI) at all stages of contact with youthful offenders, including intake, probation, commitment, and parole (DJJ, 2016). However, risk assessment instruments do …

Skin-Tone And Academic Achievement Among 5-Year-Old Mexican Children, Selamawit Hailu

Theses and Dissertations

Skin-tone based social stratification has been characterized as an enduring part of the U.S. racial landscape (Hunter, 2002). Despite the plethora of research that examines the racial disparities in education (e.g., Reardon & Portilla, 2015), and an emerging literature finding that lighter skin-tones are associated with higher educational attainment among adults (Hunter, 2002) few studies have examined whether similar processes emerge during early childhood. Thus, grounded in Garcia Coll and colleagues’ (1996) integrative model, we tested whether skin-tone predicted children’s academic achievement, and whether these relations were modified by children’s ethnic-racial identification (i.e., positive ethnic-racial attitudes and centrality). Consistent with …

Community-Based Initiatives For Neighborhood And Community Rehabilitation: A Case Study Of The Mission District, San Francisco, California, Francesca Monique Gallardo

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Through the case study of San Francisco, CA’s Mission District, this research project addresses how community-based affordable housing development is operationalized to rehabilitate communities and neighborhoods experiencing effects of gentrification, mass displacement, and cultural dilution. My goals were to identify how the processes of building a sense of community, trust, and cohesion- rehabilitating and critical to affordable housing development efforts in the Mission District? And, how are nonprofit community development organizations engaging with these processes in collaboration with citizen and community partners? The final objective is to provide evidence-based strategies to assist other at-risk minority communities and neighborhoods in the …

A Divisive Community: Race, Nation, And Loyalty In Santo Domingo, 1822 – 1844, Antony Wayne Keane-Dawes

Theses and Dissertations

On 8 February 1822, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer entered Santo Domingo and ended the short-lived experiment of a moderate republic and the triumph of a popular and radical vision of nationhood. For the next two decades, this unified Haitian Republic faced the scrutiny of Spanish, French, and British slave empires, fueled by the accounts and reports of those Dominicans who rejected this change in events. Using government correspondences, reports, pamphlets, and proclamations, this study argues that the Haitian Unification affected Dominican political allegiances and drove white elites to support Spanish monarchy in contrast to those in Santo Domingo who supported …