Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 15 of 15

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Evaluation Of "The Wrong Answer Project" As Validity Evidence For The Social Consequences Of Testing, Darius D. Taylor Aug 2023

The Evaluation Of "The Wrong Answer Project" As Validity Evidence For The Social Consequences Of Testing, Darius D. Taylor

Doctoral Dissertations

The use of educational tests for making high stakes decisions has had societal consequences for decades. Parents, teachers, and administrators have been willing to pay off, lie, cheat, and steal so that their children, students, and they themselves would not fall prey to the negative consequences of subpar performance on educational assessments. Respected psychometric scholars have supported Samuel Messick’s claim over the years, but their advocacy has caught minimal traction. I founded an initiative in 2019 – The Wrong Answer Project – that shows promise as a vehicle for collecting validity evidence based on the social consequences of testing and …


Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation On The Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638, Gregory W. Sargent Sep 2021

Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation On The Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638, Gregory W. Sargent

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent criticism proves the malleability of theatrical space as a lens through which the discussion of Renaissance drama proliferates. Negotiating Space works towards the articulation of the importance of space in the representational mimesis of performance by examining moments of violence, violation, misuse, and misappropriation. I draw a connection between the lived, material sites of the plays’ action and the ideological import of representing those spaces dramatically using a focus on violation. Though much good scholarship exists detailing London-centric approaches to dramatic space, this study discursively reifies identifiable staged spaces to connect with the lives of theatrical patrons no matter …


Real Fake Fighting: The Aesthetic Of Qualified Realism In Japanese Professional Wrestling, Clara Marino Jul 2021

Real Fake Fighting: The Aesthetic Of Qualified Realism In Japanese Professional Wrestling, Clara Marino

Masters Theses

Professional wrestling is a performance art in which the line between fact and fiction is often obscured. Much of the existing scholarship on the medium that examines its dynamics regard reality and artifice focuses on the role of the artificial, analyzing pro-wrestling as primarily a form of heightened spectacle akin to passion plays or soap opera. However, professional wrestling in Japan, particularly that found in the country's largest promotion, New Japan Pro-Wrestling, features many elements that resemble real sports much more closely than many American promotions. These elements include fighting styles, wrestler injury, characters that do not fit easily into …


Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale Apr 2021

Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale

Doctoral Dissertations

In periods of social and political upheaval like ours, it is more important than ever to interrogate constructions of identity and difference and to understand the histories of alterity that separate us from one another. Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Drama reimagines the cultural and social effect of alien, foreign, and stranger characters on the early modern stage and re-envisions how these characters contribute to, alter, and imaginatively build new epistemologies for understanding difference in early modern London. Resisting the field’s current critical inclination toward English identity formation, this project works intersectionally to …


Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows Jul 2020

Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.


The Coyolxauhqui Process Of A Scholar Unbecoming An Enemy Of Youth: A Performative, Embodied, Self-Decolonizing Story Of Transformation And Hope, Carmen G. Hernández Ojeda Mar 2020

The Coyolxauhqui Process Of A Scholar Unbecoming An Enemy Of Youth: A Performative, Embodied, Self-Decolonizing Story Of Transformation And Hope, Carmen G. Hernández Ojeda

Doctoral Dissertations

Scholarly work may be used to foster colonizing processes upon people of color whether scholars are aware of it or not. That is the case of the study of youth bullying in the United States, an old issue that, however, became a central social concern in the United States in the late 1990s. Building upon scholars’ framing of youth bullying, a combination of moral panics on youth unfolded, fostering a law-and-order regime in schools that expanded the application of zero-tolerance policies. These policies fed the school-to-prison pipeline that funnels youth into the criminal justice system, a form of internal colonization …


Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs Oct 2019

Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs

Doctoral Dissertations

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …


Property, Postsocialism, And Post-Yugoslav Identity: A Feminist Communication Performance Ethnography, Jennifer Zenovich Jul 2018

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 Jul 2018

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 Jul 2018

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 …


Transgressive Acts: Adapting Applied Theatre Techniques For A Transgender Community, Theo F. Lefevre Oct 2017

Transgressive Acts: Adapting Applied Theatre Techniques For A Transgender Community, Theo F. Lefevre

Masters Theses

This MFA Thesis traces my work as a joker (a la Theatre of the Oppressed) and facilitator through a three-year-long project with a trans applied theatre troupe. The troupe explored several techniques, including Image Theatre, Playback Theatre, storytelling exercises, and somatic movement. In three semester-long workshops, the troupe focused work around three sets of techniques. In the first workshop, the troupe explored the community-based interview process of Undesirable Elements, as designed by Ping Chong in collaboration with Talvin Wilks and Sara Zatz. These techniques were interrogated using queer and trans temporalities. In the second unit, the troupe practiced Augusto …


Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro Nov 2014

Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation offers a new framework through which to theorize contemporary democratic practices by attending to the political agency of unauthorized immigrants. I argue that unauthorized immigrants themselves, by claiming their own ambiguous legal condition as a legitimate basis for public speech, are able to open up the boundaries of political membership and to render the foundations of democracy contingent, that is to say, they are able to reopen the question about who counts as a member of the demos. I develop this argument by way of a close reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone[1], which allows me to …


Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti Aug 2014

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …


Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar Jan 2011

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 …