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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco
By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco
Doctoral Dissertations
The neoliberal reorganization of higher education has reshaped the research and education missions of university science. Much of the scholarship examining this shift focuses on faculty experiences. This dissertation centers the experiences of student scientists to explore: (1) how entrepreneurial universities manage marginal academic knowledge workers, including students, through processes that shift responsibility onto individual workers; (2) how universities use mechanisms like internships and Individual Development Plans to shift educational responsibilities onto students; and (3) how performances of masculinity in commercial spaces of university science contribute to durable gender inequalities among students under academic capitalism. Longitudinal qualitative methods were employed …
Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide
Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide
Doctoral Dissertations
The “college experience” is normatively presented as enacting independence, often while financially relying on parents. This view normalizes white, middle-class models of college and family. The three interrelated papers comprising this dissertation investigate race, class, and gender differences and inequalities at college through the lens of students’ talk of family. These inductive, qualitative studies draw on semi-structured intensive interviews with undergraduates to explore divergent ways they make sense of college, family, and their self-development. Analyses highlight the multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory meanings participants attach to themes commonly presented as simple and objective (i.e. “paying for college,” “independence,” and “adulthood”). Findings …
Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics Of Violence At Delhi's Urban Margins, Ragini Saira Malhotra
Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics Of Violence At Delhi's Urban Margins, Ragini Saira Malhotra
Doctoral Dissertations
The intensification of neoliberal economic reforms and new patterns of middle-class consumption in India have coincided with rising levels of urban inequality and poverty. Yet India’s capital, Delhi, positions itself as a “world-class city,” invoking neoliberal state aspirations to justify widespread violence against communities living and working in state-contested spaces. While much has been written about the reproduction of urban inequality and poverty in India, this body of scholarship under-emphasizes mechanisms of social control and violence, specifically, criminalization by the state.
To understand these dynamics, children’s experiences are particularly important given their age-based potential and vulnerabilities. To give visibility to …
Queering Kinship: Lgbtq Parents And The Creation Of Real Utopias, Laura V. Heston
Queering Kinship: Lgbtq Parents And The Creation Of Real Utopias, Laura V. Heston
Doctoral Dissertations
Parenting in queer families calls into question some of our most fundamental assumptions: that parents are biologically related to their children, that only women give birth, that all fathers are men, that families push away friendships and communities based in anything other than “blood” ties, and that parenting is life-long. In this dissertation, presented through five in-depth family case studies and a series of analytic chapters based on fifty semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ adults in families with children I discuss gay sperm donors, gestational fathers, non-binary foster parents, transwomen dads, queer adopters of kids from queer birth parents, trans step-dads, …
Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim
Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the connections between changing family structures and economic inequalities in the United States. While previous research shows that motherhood lowers women’s earnings, few studies explore how wage penalties for motherhood change over women’s lives. Moreover, most research examines only the baby boomer cohort; consequentially, little is known about how millennials experience this wage penalty and how such burdens of motherhood have changed across cohorts. This study investigates whether and how the motherhood wage penalty changes both across women’s life course and cohorts with these questions: (1) Does the motherhood penalty change over women’s lives? (2) What are …
Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson
Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson
Doctoral Dissertations
Sociologists have always acknowledged the complexity of gender, but despite acknowledging this complexity, much sociological research does not put this knowledge into practice; indeed, a great deal of research focuses on distinctions between men and women with regard to some other variable, reinforcing a narrow and binary understanding of gender. This tendency has two limitations: (1) it does not recognize the variability in men's and women's expression of masculinity and femininity; and (2) it does not recognize gender identities other than those of cisgender man and cisgender woman (i.e., transgender people). This study mitigates this limitation through telling a story …
Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart
Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation draws from in-depth interview data to compare the schooling choices of 95 mothers living in United States. The sample is split between white and black mothers. Within each racial group, one set teaches their children at home and a second set sends them to public schools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to current U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked in these debates. To date no research has compared homeschoolers to other schooling families in the same region, or examined …
Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones
Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation examines three organizations that promote premarital sexual abstinence. These three organizations broadly mirror different strands within the New Right: an evangelical Christian abstinence ministry called Purity Ring Posse, Revolutionary Romance, an elite group of conservatives on an Ivy-League campus, and Stand Up! a group at a Mormon university that seeks to “burst the bubble” and facilitate outreach between pro-family organizations and students. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and content analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how each group attempts to promote a unique version of abstinence that can be successfully mobilized in the public square. Purity Ring Posse articulates “ …
Immigration And Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, And Care Outsourcing Exacerbate And Erode Earnings Inequalities, Eiko H. Strader
Immigration And Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, And Care Outsourcing Exacerbate And Erode Earnings Inequalities, Eiko H. Strader
Doctoral Dissertations
The rhetoric against immigration in the United States mostly focuses on the economic threat to low-educated native-born men using a singular labor market competition lens. In contrast to this trend, this dissertation builds on a large body of previous work on job queuing and ethnic competition, as well as insights gained from the studies on female labor force participation and the outsourcing of care work. By exploring regional differences in the wage effects of immigration across 100 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2007, I argue that immigration is an intersectionally dynamic localized source of wage inequality and equality. The first …
Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos
Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos
Doctoral Dissertations
This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …
A Mixed Methods Analysis Of The Intersections Of Gender, Race, And Migration In The High-Tech Workforce, Sharla N. Alegria
A Mixed Methods Analysis Of The Intersections Of Gender, Race, And Migration In The High-Tech Workforce, Sharla N. Alegria
Doctoral Dissertations
Despite public policy initiatives and private sector investment to recruit more women, women’s participation in high-tech work has decreased since 1990. I use interviews with tech workers and nationally representative quantitative workforce data from the American Community Survey to examine the consequences of race, gender, and immigration for tech workers’ experiences and wages. While previous research shows a decrease in the proportion of women in tech work, these conclusions are somewhat misleading as they do not consider the intersections of race and migration with gender. I find only modest change in the absolute numbers of women. Rather, as the field …
The Shifting Structure Of Chicago's Organized Crime Network And The Women It Left Behind, Christina Smith
The Shifting Structure Of Chicago's Organized Crime Network And The Women It Left Behind, Christina Smith
Doctoral Dissertations
Women are underrepresented in crime and criminal economies compared to men. However, research on the gender gap in crime tends to not employ relational methods and theories, even though crime is often relational. In the predominantly male world of Chicago organized crime at the turn of the twentieth century existed a dynamic gender gap. Combining social network analysis and historical research methods to examine the case of organized crime in Chicago, I uncover a group of women who made up a substantial portion of the Chicago organized crime network from 1900 to 1919. Before Prohibition, women of organized crime operated …
Bringing The Household Back In: Family Wage Gaps And The Intersection Of Gender, Race, And Class In The Household Context., Melissa J. Hodges
Bringing The Household Back In: Family Wage Gaps And The Intersection Of Gender, Race, And Class In The Household Context., Melissa J. Hodges
Doctoral Dissertations
Using the 1980- 2008 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), this dissertation examines how parenthood exacerbates gender wage inequality within married, heterosexual households and across families stratified by race and social class. The majority of research on motherhood penalties and fatherhood premiums investigates how individual men and women’s earnings change after the arrival of children, yet it is unclear how parental bonuses and penalties accrue within coupled households. Although studies investigating child effects on individuals’ wages draw on theoretical explanations that rely on the joint decision-making of couples, empirical analysis rarely situates the effects of children on …
Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann
Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann
Doctoral Dissertations
Mothers have contributed disproportionately to women’s rising employment rates in the United States, and contemporary fathers spend more time caring for children compared to previous generations of men. Still, parenthood continues to shape women’s and men’s employment participation patterns in profoundly gendered ways. Changes and continuities in aggregate labor market participation patterns raise questions with regard to the variation in mothers’ and fathers’ employment participation, and in the ways in which different-sex couples organize engagement in paid work after they become parents. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this dissertation examine the variation in new parents’ long-term …
Gender, Social Ties, And Reentry Experiences, Jennifer Rhiannon Scroggins
Gender, Social Ties, And Reentry Experiences, Jennifer Rhiannon Scroggins
Doctoral Dissertations
A great deal of research has been conducted on factors associated with successful prisoner reentry. However, except for a few studies on women's reentry, most studies have failed to examine the role of parolees' social ties in contributing to reentry outcomes. Additionally, most studies on prisoner reentry only focused on male parolees, and few addressed the influence of gender on reentry experiences. Thus, my goal in this dissertation is to understand the influence of gender on male and female parolees' social ties, and how the resources their ties provide shape their reentry experiences. My dissertation research examines men and women’s …