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Articles 1 - 30 of 39
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Lgbtq+ Divergent Paths In Utah: Identity And Space-Making Practices In Queer And Religious Spaces, Taliah C. Mortensen
Lgbtq+ Divergent Paths In Utah: Identity And Space-Making Practices In Queer And Religious Spaces, Taliah C. Mortensen
Masters Theses
This research explores the unique and divergent experiences of LGBTQ+ young adults as they engage in identity and space-making practices at the intersection of gender/sexuality and religion. Utilizing queer theorists’ conceptualization of identity as a form of embodied and spatial labor, I critique the approach of existing scholarship that constructs LGBTQ+ and religious identities as incompatible or at least in need of reconciliation. Based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ+ young adults in Utah, my research makes visible how vulnerability and risk impact the strategies that LGBTQ+ young adults employ to navigate their identities and make space. It shows that …
Food And/As Communication, Leda M. Cooks
Food And/As Communication, Leda M. Cooks
Sustainability Education Resources
This is a two-semester, eight-credit Communication Honors Thesis Seminar focusing on the ways we create and reflect meanings made about food. The seminar delves into the material and social meanings of food and implications for identity, culture and social justice. Students will have the opportunity to research food in the context of the meanings made about it in various institutions, businesses, nonprofit organizations, neighborhoods, cultures and communities. The first semester HONORS 499 CL (Fall 2020) will 1) introduce students to food as a vehicle through which society and social life is communicated; 2) introduce methods and tools for conducting survey …
Hiplife Music In Ghana: Postcolonial Performances Of Modernity, Nii Kotei Nikoi
Hiplife Music In Ghana: Postcolonial Performances Of Modernity, Nii Kotei Nikoi
Doctoral Dissertations
This research project examines the operation of development discourse in popular culture, how it is reproduced, contested and how alternatives are imagined. It is a post-development study of the production and consumption of Ghanaian hiplife music videos and culture. It explores how hiplife makers challenge development discourse and advance alternative ideas of social transformation. Considering the enduring (and damaging) legacies of colonialism, hiplife as a site of relative freedom of expression is fertile for the potential production of a decolonial vocabulary to heal colonial wounds— undoing colonial sensibilities imposed on the colonized. The project reveals that mainstream male hiplife stars …
Class, Gender, And Mediated Labor Activism In Globalizing China, Siyuan Yin
Class, Gender, And Mediated Labor Activism In Globalizing China, Siyuan Yin
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation analyzes the relationships between mediated labor activism and the formation of counter-hegemonic forces in contemporary China. As China becomes a seemingly ideal model to justify the normalization of global capitalism, this study seeks to demonstrate how resistance from disenfranchised groups can challenge hegemonic power. Rural-to-urban migrant workers, who have been among the most disadvantaged groups since China’s economic reform of the 1980s, suffer from institutionalized discrimination, economic exploitation, and social exclusion. Approaching the analysis from an intersectional feminist lens, I explore the politics and possibilities of working-class resistance in searching for a just and equal China. Based on …
Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden
Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the advocacy work and political activism of Latin American social movement organizations based in the United Kingdom. I examine how activists working in Britain as it prepares to exit the European Union, make sense of their collective agendas, strategize to achieve their goals, and evaluate the outcomes of their advocacy efforts. In doing so, this project provides insights into the ways that identity movements are negotiated and performed during periods of increased political and public hostility toward their constituents and agendas. I illuminate the relationship between identity movements, immigration discourses, politics, and policy implementation and explore how …
Cultural Practices And Social Formations In A Reforming Society: The Transnational Fandom Of European Football In China, Yuan Gong
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the Chinese fandom of European male football and its relation to the formation of the Chinese urban middle class. I use online and offline ethnography, critical discourse analysis and textual analysis to examine the socio-cultural roots, technological conditions, and political implications of Chinese fans’ transmedia practices. My findings are twofold. First, I argue for the articulation between the European football fan identity and the subject of urban middle class emerging from the post-Maoist social restructuring. This articulation is reflected from these fans’ active reading of the European football text and their access to European football as conditioned …
Property, Postsocialism, And Post-Yugoslav Identity: A Feminist Communication Performance Ethnography, Jennifer Zenovich
Property, Postsocialism, And Post-Yugoslav Identity: A Feminist Communication Performance Ethnography, Jennifer Zenovich
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation analyzes how women in the postsocialist former Yugoslavia perform gender in the transition from socialism to capitalism by considering their material and symbolic relationships to property. Using performance ethnography to theorize the relational, embodied, and discursive ways in which identity has been mobilized in the former Yugoslavia, the central question is how insights from the postsocialist world can critique notions of the individual as well as global capital. Through the prism of postsocialist and postcolonial feminist theory and performance studies, I focus on three contexts: women’s feminized labor as sustaining the tourism industry in Montenegro, my rape and …
Brooklyn Bedroom: An Ethnodrama On Female Sexuality, Third World Feminism And Performance Ethnography, Ayshia Stephenson
Brooklyn Bedroom: An Ethnodrama On Female Sexuality, Third World Feminism And Performance Ethnography, Ayshia Stephenson
Doctoral Dissertations
Brooklyn Bedroom is a performance that interrogates societal perceptions of race and sexuality. I have utilized the writing of the performance as my method; the performance is an act of Third World feminist resistance and liberation. Storytelling is the type of research preferred by many black female playwrights. A type of qualitative inquiry, ethnodramatic work forms a bridge between individual stories and social issues affecting society with the goal of socio-political change. The source of reality for this ethnodrama is the Rose family, their history was a catalyst for the writing of Brooklyn Bedroom. I have explored their stories to …
Asian American Heritage Seeking: Personal Narrative Performances Of Ancestral Return, Porntip Israsena Twishime
Asian American Heritage Seeking: Personal Narrative Performances Of Ancestral Return, Porntip Israsena Twishime
Masters Theses
Asian American belongings, migration patterns, and transnational identities are largely constructed in the United States as static, unidirectional, and invisible. Asian Americans complicate these constructions through the practice of ancestral return. In this thesis, “ancestral return” is constituted through one’s participation in a university study abroad program to a specific place to where one traces her heritage. I use “return” not necessarily to account for a form of reverse migration; rather “return” here names the multiple, sometimes contradictory kinds of return, including “return” to a place that one has not yet been. This project examines how Asian American identities are …
Strangers In A Strange Land: Foreign-Born Mangaka And The Future Of The ‘Japanese’ Comic Industry, Michele Fujii
Strangers In A Strange Land: Foreign-Born Mangaka And The Future Of The ‘Japanese’ Comic Industry, Michele Fujii
Masters Theses
This thesis addresses the phenomenon of the recent success of foreign-born mangaka in the Japanese comic industry. One in a long line of foreigners who have written about Japan, Swedish mangaka Åsa Ekström is a representative example whose success has been facilitated by a set of circumstances brought on by the influence of the international manga market, socio-economic policies stemming from the unique challenges presented by Japan’s declining birthrate and rapidly aging population, and changes in the landscape of the Japanese publishing industry. Drawing upon themes and excerpts from Ekström’s popular comic essay series, Nordic Girl Åsa discovers the Mysteries …
I Look To The Ground Beneath My Feet: An Insurgent Performance (Auto)Ethnography, Timothy M. L. Sutton
I Look To The Ground Beneath My Feet: An Insurgent Performance (Auto)Ethnography, Timothy M. L. Sutton
Doctoral Dissertations
This is a methodological dissertation written as a performance text within a performance paradigm. I use performance (auto)ethnography to turn the researchers’ gaze back on Western systems of knowledge creation. My approach is based on Diversi & Moreira’s (2009, 2016) betweener autoethnographies. While drawing on performance theory, I employ performance principally as my method (Spry, 2011). Within this performance paradigm, (auto)ethnography is a critically reflexive methodology that demands a commitment to embodiment in an ethical symbiosis with representation. This work is located at the intersection of the political, the performative and the pedagogical (Denzin, 2003a). From this center, I turn …
Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton
Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton
Doctoral Dissertations
Researchers in speech-language pathology and ethnolinguistics have worked to gain knowledge about typical and atypical language patterns of African American children who are identified as African American English (AAE) dialect speakers. Much progress had been made, but limitations in this field of knowledge have persisted, especially for AA children who demonstrate variable use of AAE, presumably through the process of assimilation in the school setting. Therefore, more information is needed to provide diagnostic markers for deviations in typical language development for variable AAE-MAE speakers. Prior empirical research has found that third- and fourth-grade AAE-speaking children with typical language development overtly …
The Real Housewives, Gendered Affluence, And The Rise Of The Docusoap, Alison Brzencheck, Mari Castañeda
The Real Housewives, Gendered Affluence, And The Rise Of The Docusoap, Alison Brzencheck, Mari Castañeda
Communication Department Faculty Publication Series
In this paper we position gendered affluence as a representational trend in dramatic comedies (e.g., Sex and the City [SATC]) and docusoaps (e.g., The Real Housewives [TRH]) that coalesces around themes like hyper-femininity, nouveau riche values, and conspicuous lifestyle. Through our analysis we suggest that institutional practices (identity politics, cybernetic commodification, and post-feminist technological interactivity) situated in a neoliberal context and a remediated environment enable the systematic reproduction of gendered affluence in the broader landscape of women’s television. The process of remediation is used as a lens to examine how the docusoap differs from (the immediacy …
Women, Convergent Film Criticism, And The Cinephilia Of Feminist Interruptions, Rachel L. Thibault
Women, Convergent Film Criticism, And The Cinephilia Of Feminist Interruptions, Rachel L. Thibault
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines the ways in which female film critics practice film criticism in the convergent age. In original research drawn from ethnographic interviews with eight female film critics and bloggers as well as textual, historical, and reception analyses of criticism, this dissertation argues that women who write film criticism in the convergent era are not only writing from a space of marginalization based on the patriarchal dominance of the film industry, but also face a series of obstacles through gendered and discursive conflicts that are unique to writing online and which do not exert the same impact on male …
A Soulful Egg Can Break A Rock: A Case Study Of A South Korean Social Movement Leader's Rhetoric, Eunsook Sul
A Soulful Egg Can Break A Rock: A Case Study Of A South Korean Social Movement Leader's Rhetoric, Eunsook Sul
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation introduces and analyzes Ven. Hyemoon’s rhetoric emanating from his leadership of the civic group, the Committee for the Return of Korean Cultural Property in South Korea. On the surface, he seems focused on retrieving cultural artifacts, pillaged by the Japanese colonial invasion. His work, upon deeper analysis, emerges to be about regaining a Korean cultural and national identity that is historically grounded, civically engaged and morally reflective. This study is informed by multiple theories (i.e., framing, narrative, social semiotics, critical geography, rhetoric, and social movement) to examine aspects of a phenomenon in depth – involving nationalism, social movement, …
“Race Talk” In Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study Of Two Texas Chambers Of Commerce, Natasha Shrikant
“Race Talk” In Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study Of Two Texas Chambers Of Commerce, Natasha Shrikant
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation takes an interpretive, discursive approach to understanding how organizational members create meanings about race, and other identities, through their everyday communication practices in the workplace. This dissertation also explores how these everyday discourses about race might reproduce, negotiate, or challenge ideologies that maintain the dominant position of Whiteness in United States racial hierarchies. I draw from data collected during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork (from Jan-Aug 2014) with two chambers of commerce in a large Texas city: an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) and what I call the “North City” Chamber of Commerce (NCC). The AACC explicitly …
Bootstrap Boricuas: A Family Performing And Exploring Cultural Assimilation, Ellen Correa
Bootstrap Boricuas: A Family Performing And Exploring Cultural Assimilation, Ellen Correa
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation involves myself, my two brothers, and our mother embarking, over several years, on a journey to explore the meanings we and others ascribe to our identities as second and third generation Puerto Ricans. Engaging a methodology I dub dialogic ethnography, the study produces a critical interweaving of family history, identity stories, and dialogue, within the context of U.S. racial/ethnic hierarchies. The purpose is to reflect on the ethical implications of our daily performances of cultural assimilation.
Signs Of Wildness: Codes Of The “Primitive” In Masculine Commodity Culture, Matthew P. Ferrari
Signs Of Wildness: Codes Of The “Primitive” In Masculine Commodity Culture, Matthew P. Ferrari
Doctoral Dissertations
This project broadly examines articulations of the “primitive” emerging from various sites of popular cultural production, considering their operation within the wider “semioscape”– defined by Thurlow and Aiello (2007) as “the globalizing circulation of symbols, sign-systems, and meaning-making practices.” Taking my lead from Kurusawa (2002, 2004), Torgovnik (1991, 1998), Chow (1995), and Di Leonardo (1998), who have demonstrated the importance of the “primitive” as an interpretive discourse, I add to this body of thought by extending its scope into the realm of popular media and cultural production, examining cases within film, television, advertising, sports, and associated lifestyle commodities. I pose …
The Effect Of Colorblind Racial Ideology On Discussion Of Racial Events: An Examination Of Responses To The News Coverage Of The Trayvon Martin Shooting, Stephanie Lawrence
The Effect Of Colorblind Racial Ideology On Discussion Of Racial Events: An Examination Of Responses To The News Coverage Of The Trayvon Martin Shooting, Stephanie Lawrence
Masters Theses
This study explores how participants respond to news coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting based on their colorblind racial attitudes. The purpose of this study is to understand how people’s beliefs about the salience of race and racism, as well as how framing within news coverage, contributes to how people privately respond to racial events and their willingness to publicly express their views in discussions. Participants answered questions about their racial ideology, their views about the role of race in the Trayvon Martin shooting, and whether or not they were willing to express these views in a discussion after reading …
Flying With The Storks: Communication, Culture, And Dialoguing Knowledge(S) In Prenatal Care, Liliana Herakova
Flying With The Storks: Communication, Culture, And Dialoguing Knowledge(S) In Prenatal Care, Liliana Herakova
Doctoral Dissertations
Approximately 6 million women in the U.S. become pregnant every year. Over 4 million give birth. Over 1 million babies annually are born with low birth weights or prematurely - phenomena, statistically linked to both lack of "adequate" prenatal care and to worsened health outcomes (www.americanpregnancy.org). Additionally, maternity "care" in the U.S. has been called a "human rights failure" (Bingham, Strauss, Coeytaux, 2011, p. 189), referring to the trend of increasing maternal mortality, despite the fact that child-birth related expenses in the U.S. are the highest healthcare expense in the country and are also much higher compared to other "industrialized" …
Mapping Participation Gaps In Wikipedia, Laura Quilter
Mapping Participation Gaps In Wikipedia, Laura Quilter
Laura Quilter
No abstract provided.
The Racialization Of Us Health Care Reform: The Case Of Gold-Plated Cadillac Health Plans, Emily West
The Racialization Of Us Health Care Reform: The Case Of Gold-Plated Cadillac Health Plans, Emily West
Emily E. West
The term “gold-plated Cadillac health plans” became nationally prominent during John McCain’s run for President in 2008, and high-premium insurance plans continue to be called “Cadillac plans” today. The metaphorical phrase “gold-plated Cadillac” defines health care as a consumer and even a luxury good; implies that owners of these plans are irresponsible, wasteful healthcare consumers; and evokes the stereotype of an “out-of-control” African American consumer. The history of the Cadillac brand and of gold-plated Cadillacs in particular in popular culture demonstrates the salience of these associations. The use of this phrase in recent health care reform debates is considered in …
Systemic Bias In Wikipedia : What It Looks Like, And How To Deal With It, Laura Quilter
Systemic Bias In Wikipedia : What It Looks Like, And How To Deal With It, Laura Quilter
Laura Quilter
No abstract provided.
Bringing The Frame Into Focus: How Cable News Pundits Protect The Glass Ceiling, Kathryn M. Cassidy
Bringing The Frame Into Focus: How Cable News Pundits Protect The Glass Ceiling, Kathryn M. Cassidy
Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014
In many nations, the 21st century has been about women in politics. Not only are they running for prominent political offices, but they are winning them. The trend toward success for American female politicians has been slower to progress, however, as no women have been elected to the U.S. Presidency to date, and social science research suggests persistent gender biases exist in their news coverage. In order to explore the potential role that media play in continuing this gender disparity in U.S. politics, this comparative study investigates how cable pundit programs – a dramatic, partisan genre of “news” that has …
Utopian Gender: Counter Discourses In A Feminist Community, Jolane Flanigan
Utopian Gender: Counter Discourses In A Feminist Community, Jolane Flanigan
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation is an ethnography of communication, situated in the context of a feminist utopian community, that examines members' use of communication and communicative embodiment to counter what they consider to be oppressive United States gender practices. By integrating speech codes theory and cultural discourse analysis with theories of the body and gender, I develop analyses of spoken and written language, normative language- and body-based communicative practices, and sensual experiences of the body. I argue that there are three key ways communication and communicative practices are used to counter gender oppression: the use of gender-neutral words, the "desensationalization" of the …
Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar
Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar
Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014
I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural …
Hegemonic Masculinity On The Sidelines Of Sport, Laura A. Grindstaff, Emily West
Hegemonic Masculinity On The Sidelines Of Sport, Laura A. Grindstaff, Emily West
Emily E. West
Nearly a quarter of a century old, the concept of hegemonic masculinity as developed by R. W. Connell remains both influential and contested among gender scholars. In this essay, we use our research on coed cheerleading in the United States as a springboard to explore the bounds and limits of hegemonic masculinity as both cultural script and analytic construct. Cheerleading constitutes a public stage for ‘doing gender’ in ways that highlight normative, taken-for-granted notions of gender difference; consequently, we use cheerleading as a vehicle for asking under what circumstances and to what degree heterosexuality remains central to the enactment of …
Hands On Hips, Smiles On Lips! Gender, Race, And The Performance Of Spirit In Cheerleading, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Hands On Hips, Smiles On Lips! Gender, Race, And The Performance Of Spirit In Cheerleading, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Emily E. West
Cheerleading has long been synonymous with “spirit” because of its traditional sideline role in supporting school sports programs. In recent decades, however, cheerleading has become more athletic and competitive - even a sport in its own right. This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in light of these changes. We argue that spirit is a regulating but also flexible concept that is deployed in order to manage and uphold ideologies of emotion, and that these ideologies are central to how cheerleading reproduces racialized gender difference. On the one hand, the performance guidelines for spirit stabilize …
Vilification In Fox's "24", Shara M. Drew
Vilification In Fox's "24", Shara M. Drew
Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014
This paper explores vilification in the popular counterterrorism show, Fox’s "24." A critical, in-depth analysis of three prominent antagonists from the show illustrates the different ways in which they are vilified. Each of the three characters is examined to understand which type of villain he or she embodies in "24," which of the show’s moral codes the villain affronts, and how he or she is punished or treated as a result. The analysis considers the broadcast of the show’s first six seasons in relation to neoconservative and Christian Right values that characterized the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. It …
A Taste For Greeting Cards: Distinction Within A Denigrated Cultural Form, Emily West
A Taste For Greeting Cards: Distinction Within A Denigrated Cultural Form, Emily West
Emily E. West
Greeting cards are a denigrated product category in the United States, and yet consumers use them at high rates across taste formations. Consumers with relatively high cultural capital place a premium on originality in their self-expression, hence greeting cards present a consumption problem because they are a mode of expressing the self through mass-produced means. Based on interviews with 51 people, I show that consumers with higher cultural capital are more likely to prioritize card design over sentiment; select smaller, simpler designs and sentiments; prefer cards that are handmade, look handmade, or remind them of fine art; and are more …