Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Navigating The Kaleidoscope Of Object(Ive)S: A User-Experience Approach To Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, Madeline Bruegger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Activity Theory, specifically third-generation activity theory also known as Cultural-Historical Activity Theory or CHAT (Engeström, 2001, 2015; Leontiev, 1978, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978) has largely been used as a framework for studying different networks of activity, encountered by subjects who utilize tools or mediating artifacts in order to divide their labor within particular communities. This theoretical and empirical project analyzes a transnational user’s experiences performing their identity on Instagram by answering the research question: How does a user with transnational literacy experiences perform their identity and manage communities through the mediation of particular technologies on Instagram? Using mixed-methods from four data …

“Reading Is Everywhere:” A Case Study Situating Children's Book Distribution Within The Literacy Practices Of Somali New Mainers, Rachel C H Groenhout

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Somalia has a long and rich oral literacy tradition of poetry, proverbs, and songs, while Somalia’s print literacy history has been significantly disrupted by colonization and then the Somali Civil War. Many Somalis have fled the country since the start of the civil war in 1991, and an estimated 10,000 Somalis have made a new home in Maine. When Somali citizens relocated to Maine, they were exposed to Maine’s Raising Readers children’s book distribution program. Raising Readers distributes high-quality, age-appropriate, English-language children’s books during pediatric well-child visits to foster family literacy interactions and children’s emergent literacy skills.

This study explores …

Grassroots Diplomacy And Vernacular Law: The Discourse Of Food Sovereignty In Maine, John Welton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine, a coalition of small-scale farmers, consumers, and citizens building an alternative food system based on a distributed form of production, processing, selling, purchasing, and consumption. This distribution occurs at the municipal level through the enactment of ordinances. Using critical-rhetorical field methods, I argue that the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine develops a ‘constitutive’ rhetoric that composes rural society through affective relationships. Advocates engage the industrial food system to both expose its systemic bias against small-scale farming and construct their own discourse of belonging. Based upon agrarian values such as …

L'Identité Et L'Altérité Dans Les Programmes Et Quatre Oeuvres Didactiques D'Histoire Du Canada Destinés Aux Écoles Secondaires De Langue Française Du Québec : 1955-1967, Paul Franklin Buck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the manifestation of identity and otherness in the programs and four didactical works in Canadian History for French secondary schools in Quebec from 1955 to 1967. To carry out this research, a diverse number of primary and secondary sources were consulted in order to determine if the expression of identity and otherness in the programs and four didactical works in use corresponded to two forms of clerico-nationalism and to Quebec autonomism of the period. The main primary sources of this study consisted of four didactical works in Canadian History, whose textual analysis on the theme of identity …