Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Ethnography Of Reading Comic Books, Azadeh Najafian

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis explores why adults read comic books. This research used the ethnographic method and interviewing eleven people, four women, seven male, as its primary source. Based on information and common themes gathered from interviews, I built this thesis into one introduction, three body chapters, and a conclusion.

In the first chapter, I argued that comics could function the same as myths and explained this function and related examples under the “mythic effect” name. In the second chapter, I discussed how my informants use reading comics as a means to escape their everyday lives and how sometimes this escapism carries …

A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Higher Education Leaders As Portrayed In The Chronicle Of Higher Education, Colette Anderson Chelf

Dissertations

Leadership represents an abstraction of human thought. While functionalist theories propose leader-centric models, contemporary leadership theories embrace a postmodern paradigm acknowledging ontological and epistemological assumptions of qualitative study. This ideology suggests a multi-dimensional model of leadership that reflects the complexity and fluidity of leadership in practice. Emergent theories explore the social construction of leadership, rather than an individual leader’s traits or behaviors. Our collective understanding of leadership is manifest in the (re)creation of leadership as exemplified in social discourse such as newspaper reporting.

The purpose of the study is to reveal socially accepted archetypes assigned to higher education leaders, as …

Investigating The Intersection Of Whiteness And Racial Allies, Tyler Rife

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Through a critical qualitative approach, four focus groups of exclusively white or non-white participants were conducted in order to discover the ways in which individuals enact and navigate whiteness in discussions of racial allies. Further, this study attempted to capture how white and non-white individuals may differ in their approach to this subject matter and in their recommendations for racial allies. Findings revealed that eight themes defined these interactions: “Whiteness”, “Experience & Voice”, “Whitewashing Advocacy”, “Polite Protest”, “(Dis)Comfort”, “White Fragility”, and “The Complexity of Allyship”. The study finds that while whiteness is frequently perpetuated throughout this dialogue and white and …