Digital Commons Network^™

Revolución De Identidad: An Autoethnography On Spanish Heritage Language & Identity, Cristina Velazquez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This autoethnography narrative examines my journey as a first-generation Mexican immigrant woman from birth, through completion of the doctorate degree at California State University, San Bernardino. The purpose in writing this autoethnography is to present a personalized account of my experiences growing up, in communicating between two languages, the structural and personal motivators behind maintaining a heritage language (Spanish), and to reflect, in my experience, how I have negotiated with multiple social identities, including ethnic, academic, and bilingual identities. In this self-study, I bring the reader closer to Mexican-American identity, language, and culture. Specifically, this qualitative analysis of Spanish Heritage …

Navigating The Shadows: Intersecting The Undocumented And Undocuqueer Identities, Iriana Balbian

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project analyzes the navigation of social experiences of Undocumented and Queer individuals amidst broad anti-queer and anti-immigration sentiment prevalent throughout American society. To achieve this goal, this project seeks to resolve three questions. First, what are the social services that Undocuqueer and Undocumented adults need? Second, are their needs fundamentally distinct? Finally, to what extent have they been able to access those services? Crenshaw’s (1994) theory of intersectionality will serve as the overarching theoretical framework of this project, in order to better understand the multifaceted marginalization that Undocumented and Undocuqueer individuals face with everyday institutions.

In this research, I …

Anthropology's Science Wars : Insights From A New Survey, Mark Horowitz, William Yaworsky, Kenneth Kickham

Anthropology Faculty Publications

In recent decades the field of anthropology has been characterized as sharply divided between proscience and antiscience factions. The aim of this study is to empirically evaluate that characterization. We survey anthropologists in graduate programs in the United States regarding their views of science and advocacy, moral and epistemic relativism, and the merits of evolutionary biological explanations. We examine anthropologists’ views in concert with their varying appraisals of major controversies in the discipline (Chagnon/Tierney, Mead/Freeman, and Menchú/Stoll). We find that disciplinary specialization and especially gender and political orientation are significant predictors of anthropologists’ views. We interpret our findings through the …

Eating Disorder Pathology Among Individuals Living With Food Insecurity: A Replication Study, Carolyn Becker, Keesha M. Middlemass, Francesca Gomez, Andrea Martinez-Abrego

Psychology Faculty Research

Eating disorders (EDs) are stereotypically associated with thin, White, affluent women and girls. One result of the ED stereotype has been a relative dearth of ED research with marginalized communities. The aim of the present study was to replicate recent findings showing an association between severity of food insecurity (FI) and increased ED pathology. Participants included 891 clients at an urban food bank. Results replicated previous research with participants in the most severe FI group reporting significantly higher levels of ED pathology, dietary restraint, anxiety, and depression. Findings provide further evidence that the thin, White, affluent, female ED stereotype offers …

When Good Girls Go Bad (Or Do They?): Nymphomania And Lycanthropy In Verga’S “La Lupa”, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

At some point during early development, most children are afraid of the imaginary wolf under the bed or the wolf that hides in the closet at night. Traditional bedtime stories such as Little Red Riding Hood certainly do not help assuage such fears: these are atavistic dreads, similar to being scared of the dark or of death.1 In childhood culture, the wolf represents the “other,” the “furry non-human,” and almost always the viciously violent. Later, as adults, the occasional dream of wolverine violence, or of human transformation into a wolf (a lycanthropic aversion) might very well create anxiety and apprehension.2 …

Continuing Education Newsletter, Continuing Education, Georgia Southern University

Division of Continuing & Professional Education

• Bring in the Season with CE!
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• Upcoming Programs in Savannah
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• The Georgia Educational Research Association's 44th annualmeeting is right around the corner!
• The Center for Social GerontologyConference is only one month away!
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Examining The Institutional Factors Promoting The Educational Attainment Of African American Males Social Science Majors, Dorrance Kennedy, Linda Wilson-Jones

Journal of Research Initiatives

The purpose of this study was to determine the institutional factors that African American male students identified as influencing their educational attainment in higher education. The following research question guided this study: What institutional factors do African American male students identify as influencing their educational attainment at their respective universities? Throughout the years, there have been numerous theories developed to understand the challenge of college student retention. Alexander Astin (1991) proposed one of the first models, the input-environment-outcome (I-E-O) model. In this model, there are three sets of elements considered: inputs, environment, and outcomes. Inputs are the family backgrounds, demographic …

The Character Of Law: A Normative Critique Of Social-Emotional Learning Laws, Meredith R. Aska Mcbride

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note examines a widespread but barely acknowledged phenomenon within education law: the recent enactment, in all fifty states, of statutes and standards regarding students’ social and emotional learning within public schools. Despite significant empirical evidence that curricular and disciplinary interventions targeting students’ social and emotional skills are effective at building these skills and, in turn, enhancing students’ academic and long-term outcomes, this Note argues that social and emotional learning should not be legislated. Drawing on James Scott’s seminal critique of processes of state rationalization and Jal Mehta’s application of this critique to education policy, this Note shows that the …

Water, Power, And Refusal: Confronting Evasive Accountability In A Palestinian Village, Emily Mckee

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

This article interprets the meanings and motivations of refusal to pay water bills within a context of fragmented sovereignty. Residents of a village in the occupied Palestinian West Bank call for solutions to water shortages and failed infrastructure, but do so amidst capricious power, where would-be sovereigns evade accountability. Lacking avenues for direct engagement with authorities, residents speak in generalized ethical terms of their legitimate water claims, and they resort to bill refusal. Setting villagers’ bill refusals within the broader set of interactions between would-be sovereigns and subjects, this article contributes to anthropological scholarship on refusal by demonstrating how it …

Disability At The Intersections, Dara Shifrer, Angela Frederick

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Complete and accurate understandings of stratification depend on more regular consideration of disability. To build sociologists’ recognition of disability as a socially constructed axis of stratification, we first demonstrate the construction of the disability category through classic legitimating processes: moral attributions, biological attributions, separation, and dichotomization. Expanding understandings of basic processes of stratification, we then document the centrality of disability in the social construction of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and age. Finally, we show various ways disability functions as an axis of stratification in intersection with other key axes of stratification.

Commmunity, Ecology, And Modernity: Faunal Analysis Of Skútustaðir In Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, Megan Hicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the archaeofaunal remains from Skútustaðir, a middle to high-status farm in Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, to understand the experience of rural communities and their ecologies during Iceland’s transition from regulated colonial exchange to a capitalist economy during the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Archaeofaunal analysis is used to reconstruct changes in the ways that people herded, hunted, and fished, providing insights into how they managed their local environments for subsistence and novel contexts of exchange. In addition to archaeofaunal analysis, primary textual sources are explored to assess how the Skútustaðir household and its rural community mobilized long-term …

Cyber-Narrative In Opera: Three Case Studies, Naomi Barrettara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at three newly composed operas that feature what I call cyber-narratives: a work in which the story itself is inextricably linked with digital technologies, such that the characters utilize, interact with, or are affected by digital technologies to such a pervasive extent that the impact of said technologies is thematized within the work. Through an analysis of chat rooms and real-time text communication in Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2011), artificial intelligence in Søren Nils Eichberg’s Glare (2014), and mind uploading and digital immortality in Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers (2010), a nexus of ideologies surrounding voice, …

This Is What A Feminist Tweets Like: "Women's Language" And Styling Activist Identities In A #Yesallwomen Twitter Corpus, Eleanor A. Morikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents results of a study of linguistic practice in the context of feminist activism on Twitter. Twitter has become a primary medium for social and political activism and a rich venue for study of the relationship between digitally mediated language and identity production. The focus of this study is the viral Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, a hashtag that rose in popularity following a misogyny-motivated terrorist attack in the spring of 2014. This dissertation treats the #YesAllWomen hashtag as an imagined space and a Discourse (Gee, 2015) where language serves as a site for the production of gender and feminist …

Sedimenting Territory: A Political Geology Of Oil, Earth, And Spatial Politics In Turkey, Zeynep Oguz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building on the recent turn to the material and earthly aspects of resources and political power in environmental anthropology and political geography, this work historically and ethnographically examines the kinds of territorial politics that oil’s materiality, geological qualities, and infrastructures have generated in Turkey. Despite being surrounded by oil-rich neighbors in the Middle East, Turkey’s domestic oil reserves supply only 7 percent of the country’s oil, all of which has been drilled in the Kurdish provinces of Batman, Diyarbakır, and Adıyaman in Turkey’s southeast, where the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) has been fighting the Turkish state since 1984 for cultural …

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

Eugenics In The 21st Century, Jessica Linn Chin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eugenics is the science of enhancing the human population through the management of breeding and hereditary traits. This thesis explores the history of eugenics and shows how eugenic practices continue in the 21^st century with advancements in technology and positive eugenic goals that can result in adverse effects on the human body and society. When Sir Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, he intended to improve British society with the use of positive eugenics. Galton used positive eugenics to encourage people with good mental and physical qualities to produce more children. He avoided negative eugenics, which involved …

Impact Of Religiosity And Level Of Acculturation On Cultural Alignment: An Exploration Of Terror Management Mechanisms Among Muslim American Women, Farah T. Goheer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

Impact of Religiosity and Level of Acculturation on Cultural Alignment: An Exploration of Terror Management Mechanisms among Muslim American Women

by

Farah Taha Goheer, M.A.

Advisor: Joel Sneed, Ph.D.

Background: Terror management theory (TMT) is based upon the notion that human beings require ongoing psychological protection from the unyielding, existential threat of death. A large body of evidence has shown that human beings manage death-related terror by aligning with and endorsing the dominant views of their cultural worldviews. Notably, as immigrants experience a new culture, worldviews become rearticulated to incorporate elements of host and heritage cultures. However, it is …

Unlearning Don Carlos: Historical And Fictional Elements Of Innovation In César Vichard De Saint-Réal’S 'Dom Carlos, Nouvelle Historique,' Friedrich Schiller’S 'Don Karlos, Infant Von Spanien,' And Giuseppe Verdi’S 'Don Carlos', Maria-Cristina Necula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of the sixteenth-century Spanish prince, Don Carlos, has inspired numerous literary and musical adaptations that, despite the artistic limitations of historically-based content, reflect an astonishing scope of creative freedom. The myth created around Don Carlos originated in European consciousness as early as 1568. Various theories recorded in political reports and in historical works insinuated that the prince had been murdered while incarcerated by orders of his father, King Philip II. Simultaneously, hatred of Spain, intensified by Philip’s violent suppression of the revolt in the Netherlands, determined exiled Flemish nobles to launch an anti-Philip propaganda. The mystery of Don …

Unstitching The Borders: Color, Class And Consumption In Queens, New York, Cassandra R. Barnes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following thesis is a comparative multipart examination into the ways in which globalization, translocality, and gentrification influence communities and their inhabitants through the lens of fashion. Political and social forces drive processes of consumption. In the Corona and Jackson Heights sections of Queens, New York, several waves of migration and immigration have given rise to an extremely diverse yet socially complex area. Historically, four major shopping districts: Roosevelt Avenue, 74^th Street, 82^nd Street, and Junction Boulevard developed in the two towns and reflected much of the demography within. Currently these districts are physically accessible to anyone able …

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 …

‘Its Something You Do Bro’: Language And Identity On A Male Erotic Hypnosis Messageboard, Eric Chambers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on a seven-year corpus of data (total words N = 86,881) on a publicly-accessible messageboard on which self-identified gay men discuss their experiences undergoing erotic hypnosis, this study applies Critical Discourse Analysis methods to understand how posters understand their sexual identities and those of others. This study identifies the emergence of two main identity-types at-play on OnYourKnees: the jock and the coach. Jocks are generally characterized by a focus on sports and body-consciousness, a disinterest or inability to engage in scholarly/academic pursuits, and a desire to be submissive to others to achieve sexual pleasure. Coaches, on the other hand, …

Rails To Revolution: Railroads, Railroad Workers And The Geographies Of The Mexican Revolution, Hector Agredano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a historical geography of the role of railroads and railroad workers in the Mexican Revolution. It shows that despite the presence of railroads in the popular imagination of the Mexican Revolution, the role of railroads and railroad workers themselves remains largely missing from scholarly accounts of the conflict. I argue that railroad workers were central to the revolutionary process from its beginning, and I demonstrate that their close relationship to a critically important transportation network allowed them to intervene at crucial moments of the revolutionary process. Undoubtedly, this relationship to transportation networks also had a formative impact …

Poems To Open Palms: Praise Performance And The State In The Sultanate Of Oman, Bradford J. Garvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered …

Relations Amongst Power, Self-Health Patterning, And Quality Of Life In Older Adults With Chronic Illness, Philip J. Gimber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between power, self-health patterning, and quality of life in older adults with chronic illness using Rogers’ science of unitary human beings and Barrett’s theory of power. A cross-sectional, correlational design was used to examine the variables in a sample of approximately 100 older adults with chronic illness. This study revealed that power, self-health patterning, and quality of life are related to one another and that both power and self-health patterning are associated with enhanced quality of life.

Mood Choice And Context Availability: A Variationist Approach To The Subjunctive In New York City Spanish, Joanna Birnbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the variable treatment of the Subjunctive in Spanish in New York City. Both Mood choice (Subjunctive versus Indicative) and Linguistic context availability (the presence and absence of Subjunctive-inducing contexts in speech) are studied. Data are from sociolinguistic interviews with 142 informants, stratified with respect to immigrant generation, gender, age, socio-economic status, national origin, etc. Subjunctive rates are analyzed, at the macro-level, in nine linguistic contexts and, at the micro-level, in the four most popular contexts (Modal, Protasis Si, Temporal, and Apodosis Si). Results of bivariate Pearson correlations and Chi-square tests reveal consistent usage patterns of …

Claiming The Remains Of The Past: The Return Of Cultural Heritage Objects To Colombia, Mexico, And Peru, Pierre Losson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My research explores the reasons why three Latin American states (Colombia, Mexico, and Peru) claim the return of cultural heritage objects from holding institutions in the Western World, such as museums and universities. The literature on returns and restitutions, which focuses on questions of ownership and possession of objects, opposes two conceptions of cultural heritage: on the one hand, the internationalists argue that the location of a cultural object must be decided according to the interests of science and education, for the benefit and in the name of humankind; on the other hand, the nationalists consider that cultural heritage is …

Oldowan Tool Behaviors Through Time On The Homa Peninsula, Kenya, Emma M. Finestone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The adaptive significance of tool use to genus Homo is a central theme in human origins. However, what we know from the early Oldowan sites suggests that persistent technology may have begun as an opportunistic behavior with minimal investment, rather than a habitual and widespread adaptive revolution. This dissertation seeks to investigate investment in Oldowan tool production on the Homa Peninsula, Kenya, considering raw material selection, transport, and lithic production at two newly discovered Oldowan localities: Nyayanga (ca. 2.6 Ma) and Sare River (ca. 1.7 Ma).

The first section of this dissertation outlines a method that enables the comparison of …

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 …

Anxieties Of Incorporation: U.S. Territorialization And The Western Imaginary From The Louisiana Purchase To Moby-Dick, Diana Meckley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anxieties of Incorporation: U.S. Territorialization and the Western Imaginary from the Louisiana Purchase to Moby-Dick investigates the impact of territorial expansion on authorial constructions of the continental west during the first half of the nineteenth century. As both a geophysical reality or an imagined space, the west functions as a site in which American writers negotiated their ambivalence over the promises and perils of continental aggrandizement and global imperialism. This project examines representative texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Parkman, Susan Shelby Magoffin, and Herman Melville. In so doing, this dissertation traces how the western imaginaries these Anglo-American authors fashioned …

Transforming Through Power: Teachers And The Negotiation Of Authority In Schools, Madhu Narayanan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Schools are unique institutions where structural and cultural dynamics shape the actions of humans. Teachers work within structures of power to establish themselves as legitimate figures of authority worthy of the right to command respect. Such efforts are complicated by the multi-faceted and swirling relationships of power that exist everywhere in schools, defining and guiding individuals. In this study, I interview and observe the practice of seven secondary teachers working in New York City public schools. All in their third year of teaching, they were at an interesting time in their development, not novice teachers and not quite veteran. Using …