Social Justice Commons^™

Humanity, Ai, And The Pedagogy Of Vince Gilligan’S Pluribus, J. Scarlett Kingsley

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This review discusses the tv show Pluribus as a contemporary television narrative that functions as an allegory for artificial intelligence and its implications for human meaning-making. Centering on Carol Sturka, one of thirteen individuals immune to a alien global virus that merges humanity into a cooperative “Hive Mind”, the series explores tensions between autonomy and collective well-being in a “peaceful apocalypse.” The analysis argues that the Hive Mind reflects key concerns surrounding AI, including the production of knowledge without understanding, personalization without discernment, and efficiency that bypasses the struggle through which meaning is formed. Drawing on John Searle’s distinction between …

Book Review: The History And Politics Of Star Wars: Death Stars And Democracy, Petra Hendrickson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Book Review: The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy

From Kitchen To Canon: Women And Culinary Recognition Executive Summary, Eulanda A. Sanders, Andra Harris

ICHRIE Research Reports

Despite women comprising a majority of the U.S. restaurant workforce, they remain significantly underrepresented in culinary leadership and elite recognition. Using an exploratory, descriptive design that draws on secondary data from the ACS, NRA, U.S. Census Bureau, and the James Beard Foundation, this study maps gender disparities across the culinary career pipeline. Women represent approximately 54% of the restaurant workforce but only 24.8% of chefs and head cooks, with a substantial gender wage gap persisting across the occupation (NRA, 2026; U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). Of 402 James Beard Award winners analyzed, 71.6% were male and 28.1% female. Disparities intensify at …

Pornography And Men's Violence Against Women And Children: From Production To Consumption, Gail Dines Phd., Mandy Sanchez Phd

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

The average age of first viewing mainstream pornography for boys is around ten to twelve years old. The pornography they encounter is largely from “tube sites,” named after YouTube, which are popular because they require no registration, no payment, and no subscription. For the most part, an adolescent only needs access to a digital device to view hundreds of thousands of free videos. As we discuss in this article, the weight of the scientific evidence shows that viewing pornography is associated with multiple social, emotional, sexual, and cognitive harms. However, none of these studies provide a detailed analysis of …

Oral History With John Barry, Dan Royles

History Faculty Scholarship

Oral history interview with John Barry, who has served as Executive Director of the Southern Tier AIDS Program (STAP) since 2008. He was born in Endicott, New York in 1966, grew up in Vestal, and attended high school at Seton Catholic Central in Binghamton before serving in Germany with the United States Army during the early 1980s. When he returned to Broome County in 1987, some of his friends had been affected by HIV/AIDS and, while earning a degree at SUNY Binghamton, Barry became involved in mutual aid efforts to help people affected by the disease. He went to work …

Review Of Supernatural: A History Of Television’S Unearthly Road Trip By Erin Giannini, Duane Ebesu

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

No abstract (book review)

Breaking The Silence: A Content And Expert Analysis Of The 2025 Ramadan Series Lam Shamseya's Framing And Subversion Of Child Sexual Abuse Discourse In Egypt, Maya Abouelnasr

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how the 2025 Egyptian TV series Lam Shamseya served as a sociocultural intervention and awareness platform for reframing and subverting the typical child sexual abuse (CSA) discourse in Egypt. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study triangulates framing theory and two complementary tools of the critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the circuit of culture model through a scene-level content analysis of 304 scenes across all 15 episodes of the series and ten semi-structured interviews with media experts, media practitioners, and psychologists. Key findings include reported corroboration of subversion of traditional tropes and archetypes, as well as reframing of …

Kitchen Table Press: A Case Study Of Regression To The Neoliberal Mean, Alaina Disalvo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the idealistic founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980 and its slow downfall, culminating in the cession of ownership of the Press to a university in 1992. It traces the ideological development of Kitchen Table Press’s key founders, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, and their respective relationships to the ideologies of other renowned feminist figures of the era, specifically June Jordan and Adrienne Rich. It examines the history of the Press through historical, intersectional, affective, and socialist lenses. This thesis argues that neoliberal pressures can bend even the most radical organizations away from their …

Policing Sex Trafficking: 'They’Re Never Taught, You Know', Anila S. Duro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research shows that victims of sex trafficking are most likely to first come in contact with the police (Baldwin et al, 2011; Twigg, 2017) and at times police have not been able to categorize cases of prostitution as trafficking even when trafficking elements were very clear (Dank et al, 2017; Dempsey, 2017; Farrell & Cronin, 2015). Despite the legal definition of trafficking, the terms prostitution, sex work, and sex trafficking are sometimes used interchangeably by law enforcement, whereas at other times, these words refer to different sets of circumstances and have different criminalization outcomes.  Research in this area is limited …

Psychological Architecture: Evaluating The "Greenhouse Model" As A Structural Standard For Lgbtq+ Well-Being, Ava Lee

University Honors Theses

Traditional LGBTQ+ mental health frameworks often conceptualize psychological safety as a matter of individual endurance. This paper critiques this focus on adaptive resilience, which systematically shifts responsibility from institutions to individuals. To counter this, the study introduces "Psychological Architecture," a framework viewing social environments as constructed infrastructures that can either support or undermine queer well-being. The model contrasts performative "Glasshouses," which prioritize visibility over safety, with engineered "Greenhouses" that nurture sustainable safety through three sequential pillars: Authentic Representation (walls), Emotional Validation (insulation), and Vocal Activism (ventilation).

Grounded in the findings of a 2024 qualitative pilot study of a queer roller …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Rainbow Promises, Uneven Promises: Framing Lgbtqia+ Educational Policy And Possibility In Education, Gerardo Lorenzo-Saucedo

Dissertations

Despite the expansion of LGBTQIA+ inclusive policies in K-12 education, disparities in students’ experiences with safety and belonging persist. This qualitative case study examines how such policies are interpreted and enacted within a high school and district in Southern California, and how these processes shape LGBTQIA+ students’ experiences.

Guided by ecological systems theory, queer theory, and multiple streams theory, this study conceptualizes policy implementation as a dynamic and socially constructed process influenced by power, ideology, and institutional context. Data were collected through interviews, document and artifact analysis, and observations, with analysis that used a multi-phased coding procedure.

Findings revealed that …

Who Gets To Be Taken Seriously? Three Atypical Scholars Navigate Doctoral Education At The Intersections Of Race, Neurodivergence, And Veteran Identity, Sr. Richard De La Garza

Dissertations

As a first-generation, neurodivergent, Mexican American/Chicano veteran, I entered the University of San Diego's doctoral program having had experiences that most institutional intake processes would label as risk factors. The Findings chapter of this dissertation begins by describing those experiences—not as a confession, but as the foundation for a systematic inquiry into how doctoral legitimacy is produced, withheld, and defended. The description of my life experiences is followed by a discussion of the doctoral journeys of two other study participants who also were atypical doctoral candidates.

The central argument being advanced is this: What higher education calls "fit," "rigor," and …

Hi Friend! Msw Portfolio Of Community Building And Advocacy, River Gerard Segar

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This MSW Portfolio emphasizes the importance of being rooted in community and demonstrates how to engage in community building in a way that helps center marginalized voices. This portfolio also highlights advocacy in the United States for transgender people and asserts the need for increased cultural competency in clinical practice with people in non-monogamous and/or kink relational structures.

Under The Guardianship: Experiences Of Mothers In Egypt’S El Nayaba El Hesbaya, Hana Khayry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the intersectional lived experience of El Nayaba El Hesbaya in Egypt. El Nayaba El Hesbaya, operating under Law 119/1952, is the administrative and judicial body responsible for overseeing the financial and legal affairs of minors whose father or mother had passed. Hundreds of thousands of mothers in Egypt have (had) children under the guardianship of El Nayaba El Hesbaya. This research delves into the experience of mothers whose children are or were under the guardianship of El Nayaba El Hesbaya, examining how it shape(s/d) their everyday life as women, mothers, widows or ex-wives, citizens, and legal subjects. …

In Her Words: The Silent Battles Of Egyptian Women With Breast Cancer, Nada Mohamed Ahmed Hassan Nh

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the emotional, social, and economic difficulties encountered by Egyptian women from middle- to working-class origins after a breast cancer diagnosis. Despite being a worldwide health concern, local cultural, institutional, and economic circumstances have a significant impact on the lived consequences of breast cancer. Women's post-diagnosis experiences in Egypt are greatly exacerbated by deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, stigma associated with cancer, and systemic injustices in the healthcare system. This research emphasizes women's situated knowledge and views their bodily experiences as crucial sources of insight into larger societal power relations. It is based on feminist perspective theory, especially the …

Reimagining Safety And Justice: Experiences Of And Resistance To Police Sexual Violence In New York City, Priscilla Bustamante

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the era following both Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, police sexual violence (PSV) currently constitutes the second most commonly reported police complaint after excessive force. Police across the U.S. are caught for some form of sexual misconduct once every five days, with on-duty officers found to commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general population. The gendered and racialized perpetration of sexual violence extends far beyond policing; however, it has been intensified within the masculine, militarized carceral structures designed to legally control and punish.

Accordingly, this dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach to offer what …

Queer Of Color Critique And The Politics Of Epistemic Agency: Rural Educators Desettling Curricular Expectations, C.A. Langerud, Madelaine Adelman, Daniel D. Liou

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

The purpose of this research is to use queer of color critique (QOCC) as an analytical framework to explore rural K-12 educators’ epistemic agency. The research focuses on educators’ engagement with a national initiative by an advocacy organization to distribute LGBTQ+ and racially diverse books to K-12 schools. The analysis centers on the educators’ praxis of epistemic agency against settled expectations associated with including queer and trans People of Color’s (QTPOC’s) stories in their schools. Our findings on educators’ epistemic agency center on three areas of knowledge and activity. First, educators demonstrate their ability to be aware of their local …

“No Ifs, Ands, Or Butts”: Analyzing Race And Gender In Sex And The City Through Black Feminist Theory, Daniella Orias

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article analyzes Season 3, Episode 5 of Sex and the City, “No Ifs, Ands, or Butts,” through the lens of Black feminist theory. It investigates how race and gender are constructed, stereotyped, and selectively represented within the episode’s narrative. The analysis focuses on two Black characters who were featured only in one episode of the series, Adeena and Chivon, and examines how the show portrays harmful stereotypes such as the angry Black woman (Adeena) and sexualized Black male (Chivon) in the episode. These limited and harmful representations are further scrutinized by the fact that the show is often …

Hosts, Scouts, And Female Indentured Sexual Servitude In Contemporary Japan, Caroline Norma, Seiya Morita

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This article sweeps away glossy abstractions obscuring the indenturing of women in sexual servitude in Japan. These abstractions were generated by anthropologists writing in English in the first two decades of the 21^st century who inverted the relationship between perpetrator and victim to suggest that female customers exploited hosts. To overturn this view and expose the ‘gendered reality that [i]s really going on’ in Japan, this article differently explains from a feminist perspective how present-day host and scout businesses indenture Japanese women in sexual servitude. This role is one of both procuring victims as well as keeping young women …

Taking A Seat In The Circle: Decolonizing Gender Roles That Argue Against The Participation Of Feminine Bodies At The Big Drum, Juli Suzukawa

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The origins of the Big Drum can be traced back to the 1860s when Tail Feather Woman, a Dakota woman, had a vision of its creation as a tool of resistance. The Big Drum has since expanded and can now be seen at various Indigenous ceremonies and social events. However, there has been controversy regarding the participation of feminine and queer bodies. While reasons for this vary, it has also contributed to harm amongst Indigenous youths that have a more fluid stand on gender identity and may not conform to colonial “gender norms”. In this paper, I will explore how …

Embarrassment As A Signal: Feminist Affects And The Commodification Of Love, Bianca L. Schmitt

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

Women’S Exposure To Incel Content, Perceived Safety, And Gender-Based Violence Risk In The United States, Deja Bledsoe

Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses

The rapid proliferation of incel-related content across digital platforms has raised concerns about online misogyny and its potential impact on women’s perceived safety. However, less is known about how exposure to such content shapes women’s perceptions of risk and emotional responses in everyday digital environments. This study examines the relationship between exposure to incel-related content and women’s perceived risk of gender-based violence and safety-related anxiety. Guided by strain theory, social control theory, hegemonic masculinity, and intersectionality, the study employs an anonymous cross-sectional online survey of women aged 18 and older. Quantitative analyses were conducted to assess whether exposure to incel-related …

Transformative Paths: Advancing Inclusive Healthcare Education, Morgan Young

Entry Level Occupational Therapy Doctoral Capstone Projects Class of 2026

Transgender individuals continue to experience significant healthcare disparities, provider bias, discrimination, and barriers to accessing affirming healthcare services (White Hughto et al., 2015; World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH], 2022). Despite increasing awareness of these disparities, healthcare education often lacks comprehensive training related to gender-affirming care (American Occupational Therapy Association [AOTA], 2021; Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion [ODPHP], n.d.; White Hughto et al., 2015). A concurrent scoping review was conducted to answer the research question: Among healthcare providers, how do educational strategies grounded in transgender perspectives and lived experiences affect provider competence in transgender healthcare? The review …

Technology-Facilitated Violence And Abuse: Portrayals And Perceptions, Christina S. Walker

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

In the past, intimate partner violence (IPV) was primarily perpetrated in person. However, due to new mediated communication technologies and capabilities like social media and artificial intelligence (AI), perpetrators can use this technology for various purposes including subjecting others to violence, harassment, and abuse. Such violence can be a form of IPV and is referred to as technology-facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA). TFVA is becoming increasingly prevalent and is encountered by a staggering percent of women. Furthermore, unlike traditional forms of IPV, even men are subjected to TFVA at increasing and disproportionate rates, particularly male teens.

In the current state …

Examining Challenges For Sociology Master’S Degree Students At California State University, David Ortuno

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to identify the lived experiences of CSU sociology graduate students pursuing a master’s degree. Seven sociology graduate students from six of the eight (75%) total sociology MA programs throughout the entire CSU system were interviewed. Their responses were designed to analyze the support systems and challenges they face while pursuing a master's degree, as well as to investigate whether their experiences correlate with or fail to correlate with the promises in the CSU mission statement, and to answer the study’s research questions and achieve the purpose of this qualitative study.

Four themes emerged from …

“We Talked About Straight People Sex”: The Health Education Experiences Of Queer And Trans Youth In Utah, Sonny Partola

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

This article explores how Utah’s health education curriculum shapes the experiences of queer and trans youth. Drawing on critical ethnography conducted at an urban public high school, the study foregrounds the voices of six queer and trans students. Findings reveal that abstinence-focused and heteronormative curricula render these youth invisible, exclude critical information on queer, trans, and intersex health, and compromise students’ well-being. Participants described feelings of discomfort, irrelevance, and pressure to act as informal educators for peers. Their accounts highlight the urgent need for queerly responsive health education that affirms diverse identities, normalizes inclusion, and provides accurate, relevant information. Such …

Journey Through, Cathan B. Tautfest

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

Journey Through is the Master's Portfolio for the University of Montana for Author Cathan Tautfest. This paper serves as the capstone graduation requirement for students of the School of Social Work. Over the final semester of the Master's program, this Portfolio was created, reviewed by committee, and defended before its publication. This Portfolio is a culmination of three years and thousands of hours to demonstrate mastery of the ten Social Work competencies, the elements of Social Work Practice, and critically reflect on time spent in the School of Social Work's Master's of Social Work (MSW) program. This Portfolio reflects on …

Criminalizing Difference: An Intersectional Analysis Of Disability In The Criminal Justice System, Rowan Eisleman

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This research addresses the central question: How do individuals with disabilities intersect with the criminal justice system, and what systemic factors contribute to their overrepresentation and victimization? Despite over 61 million Americans having disabilities, there exists a significant gap in comprehensive scholarship examining disability-criminal justice intersections, particularly regarding how people with intellectual and developmental disabilities experience unique vulnerabilities as both offenders and victims. This study contributes to disability studies and criminology by providing a comprehensive intersectional analysis examining how disability compounds with race and gender to create compounded marginalization. This study conducted a comprehensive literature review, analyzing government statistics from …

Book Review Of: Univision, Telemundo, And The Rise Of Spanish-Language Television In The United States, Elizabeth Sotelo

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Craig Allen’s Univision, Telemundo, and the Rise of Spanish-Language Television in the United States (2020) meticulously encapsulates the business challenges and subsequent success of Spanish-language television networks in the United States. Grounded in hard data, archival research, reporting, and interviews, the author expands the study beyond the U.S. to trace the initiatives’ roots to Mexico. The book’s nine chapters weave a chronological narrative that covers the period from 1961 to 2012. Throughout the book, Allen explores the beginning of Univision in San Antonio in 1961, the birth of Telemundo in 1986, the pioneers and the investments involved, and the creation …