Social Justice Commons^™

The Invisible Hand Of Networked Repression, Thuy Anh Tran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

U.S. history is awash with contentious episodes involving a legion of governmental and non-governmental actors operating through an array of means and arenas to destroy the political opposition. Yet, there has been little systematic examination in the repression literature of how and why repressive efforts proliferate so far beyond the police, military, and intelligence agencies tasked and equipped to preserve the existing order. This dissertation presents a novel framework for studying the relational basis of repression—particularly as it is organized, mobilized, and extended through a networked social structure. Social network analysis and interpretive case studies are conducted on two historical …

Bridging The Gap: Exploring The Intersection Of Formal Mental Health Services And Informal Social Supports In Bipoc Communities, Patrice D. Patton-Campbell

Dissertations

Despite growing awareness of mental health disparities, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities continue to face significant barriers in accessing culturally responsive mental health care. This dissertation explores the intersection between formal mental health services and informal social supports such as family, religious institutions, and community networks to understand which systems are more trusted, accessible, and effective for BIPOC individuals. Grounded in Urban Liberation Psychology and guided by decolonial and culturally responsive care frameworks, this qualitative study draws from focus groups and interviews with 33 participants, including both community members and service providers from the Chicagoland area and …

Post Soviet Russia: Challenges To Transition And Modernization, Chick Edmond

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a complex, often turbulent, period of transition and modernization for Russia. Unlike the anticipated linear path toward Western-style democracy and market economics, Russia’s post-Soviet experience has been defined by profound contradictions, reversals, and ongoing contestations over its political, economic, and social order (Minakov, 2016). The initial wave of reforms, particularly in the 1990s, brought about radical economic restructuring, privatization, and an attempted shift to a free-market system. Yet, these rapid changes led to significant economic dislocation, social inequality, and the rise of oligarchic power structures, which ultimately undermined …

Rebuilding Consent: Fear, Trust, And The Future Of Nuclear Energy, Austin Dunham

University Honors Theses

This thesis traces the cultural and emotional roots of nuclear fear in the United States and explores how those inherited anxieties continue to shape public resistance to nuclear energy in the face of a worsening climate crisis. Drawing on personal narrative, risk perception theory, and the history of nuclear discourse - from Hiroshima to Chernobyl to today - the research examines how trust, rather than technology, remains the largest barrier to progress. By analyzing the stories we tell about energy, disaster, control, and overall perceived risk, this work asks what it would take for Americans to imagine nuclear energy not …

Identity, Bodies, And Time: Analysis Of Transgender Education Curricula In K Through 12 Grades, Dean Weiler-Zilberman

University Honors Theses

The author analyzes lesson plans that focus on education around gender and transgender subjects--sourced from Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute (SOGI) 123 and Advocates for Youth (AFY)--and puts them in conversation with key literature on transgender education. What surfaces from their interaction are clear strong areas that support transgender education and gaps that fail transgender students.

Daily Creative Practice: A Path To Well-Being For Self + Society, Ellie Cashman

Masters Theses

Daily creative practice is a proven way to promote health and happiness, and to counteract what many are currently calling a global crisis in mental health.

There has perhaps never been a better time to be creative. Our collective healing and future human flourishing depend on it.

The author’s life and teaching experiences are explored, in the context of human history, (social) psychology and the challenges of contemporary culture.

Finally, the author offers a preview of a curriculum for Daily Creative Practice that will be further developed and implemented in Fall 2025, thanks to a grant from RISD’s Graduate Commons. …

Memeganda, Zhengxiang Huang

Masters Theses

MEMEGANDA investigates how meme culture and speculative design can transform everyday objects into covert communication tools under authoritarian censorship. In environments where digital expression is heavily restricted, memes—often dismissed as entertainment—emerge as a powerful medium of resistance. This thesis reimagines physical artifacts such as delivery helmets, receipt printers, and hotel carts as vehicles for hidden messages, bypassing digital surveillance systems. Drawing on personal experience, historical symbolism, and global examples like the White Paper Movement and banned protest songs, the project centers blue-collar workers as unlikely messengers of dissent. By embedding emotional, political, and satirical content into mundane urban materials, MEMEGANDA …

Faith In Conflict: The Role Of Religion In Conflict And Peacebuilding Among Minority Christian Communities In Ukraine And Palestine, Julia Lats

Honors Projects

Religion has long influenced both the escalation of conflicts and efforts toward peace. The wars in Ukraine and Palestine are deeply rooted in historical narratives, national identities, and religious influences. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often framed in terms of Jewish-Muslim tensions and the issue of politicization of religion and tensions within the Orthodox Church frame the Ukrainian-Russian War, these dominant narratives often overlook the role of minority religious groups. This paper examines the contributions of Protestant Christian groups in these regions, exploring how their beliefs and practices influence their actions, identity formation, interactions with others, and approaches to conflict …

Constructing Portraits Of Elementary Teachers Of Ethnic Studies: Examining The Narratives Of Anti-Racist Educators In An Era Of Common Core Curriculum And Instruction, Jennifer S. Manglicmot

Dissertations

The emergence of policies requiring ethnic studies courses in California’s secondary and higher education institutions amplified calls for anti-racist pedagogy and content in all K-12 grade levels. Currently, little empirical research exists on how ethnic studies is taught in elementary school classrooms. This absence is significant because instruction in these settings tend to focus heavily on meeting state content standards (i.e. Common Core), frameworks which have been critiqued as ignoring communities of Color epistemologies and promoting color-evasive ideologies, among other concerns. Through interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, this qualitative multiple-case study explored how anti-racist and ethnic studies pedagogies are …

Sociology: Culture, Marcia Morrison

Open Educational Resources

This work examine culture. It begins by examining the foundations of culture to include norms, values, language, symbols and knowledge. In looking at each, it breaks down the implication of each to the development of ourselves as well as the person in the environment. It moves on to look at contexts of culture such as dominant cultures juxtapose to competing cultural systems, and how the various elements of culture can serve to either promote or minimize the various cultural constructs within society.

From Industrial Building To Affordable Senior Housing: An Idea Book Beyond Code, Weiyi Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis envisions a proposal to adaptively re-purpose Rhode Island’s extant industrial building stock into affordable housing tailored to the needs of its older and more vulnerable citizens. Architectural dignity, in terms of older citizens amidst this housing crisis, is the creation of living environments that honor their autonomy, comfort, and identity through design interventions that provide accessible, luminous, breathable, and socially enriching spaces, reaffirming their rightful place within the community. With humanistic care and logical rigor, it establishes a mathematical framework for assessment and execution, anchored in five criteria: light, air, space, accessibility, and livability, and presents itself in …

Terrashift, Mill Jignesh Shah, Mill Shah

Masters Theses

Keywords: Adaptive Reuse, Vernacular Craftsmanship, Food Security, Urban Agriculture, Community Revitalization, Heritage Preservation, Regenerative Design

In India’s rapidly urbanizing landscape, Tier-I cities continue to dominate as aspirational centers, leaving smaller towns to face depopulation, economic drift, and cultural amnesia. Terrashift challenges this imbalance by proposing a regenerative model that reclaims the vitality of Tier-II and Tier-III towns through the layered strategies of adaptive reuse, vernacular craftsmanship, and integrated food systems.

Centered in Sidhpur, Gujarat—a town rich with Bohra Muslim architectural heritage and centuries of Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis—this project envisions the transformation of abandoned havelis into vibrant community anchors. These spaces, …

Embodying Altruistic Love: The Role Of Emotions In Teaching Black Students With Disabilities Within An Inclusive Elementary School, Joshua Armentrout

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Teacher emotions play a pivotal yet understudied role in shaping the educational experiences of Black students with disabilities (SWDs). This study examines how five special educators in a fully inclusive elementary school understand, experience, and navigate their emotions in relation to Black SWDs. Using a qualitative approach grounded in portraiture, this study explores the intersection of race, disability, and emotion, revealing how teachers internalize, resist, and negotiate dominant ideologies within the broader educational system.

Guided by a three-dimensional space framework from the field of narrative inquiry—temporality, sociality, and spatiality—this study traces how educators’ emotions are shaped by past experiences, social …

Health Care In Women’S Carceral Spaces, Kate Gouveia Pereira

Culture, Society, and Praxis

Canada has had a long history of mistreating incarcerated women in their jails. The carceral system was built to fit around the needs of men, neglecting to consider the various health issues that only women face. For many years. federally imprisoned women were held in one deteriorated prison, the Prison for Women (P4W), and were held in abhorrent conditions and experienced many acts of violence. Despite the opening of five more prisons and funding for various programs for women, incarcerated women continue to experience violence and health crises, leaving imprisoned women extremely vulnerable to mental and physical distress. In particular, …

[2025 Honorable Mention] Racial Marginalization And Pesticide Exposure In Monterey County, Haleigh Fagundes

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

This paper examines the concept of environmental racism in the context of harmful pesticides and their disproportionate use in prominently Hispanic communities. These communities continue to face the consequences of exposure despite their activism. The concept of environmental patriotism, as proposed by Anne Todd in Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement (2013), is incompatible with the data that supports the existence of environmental racism. In this piece Todd argues that channeling the pride one feels for their country is an effective way of promoting environmental efforts amongst individual citizens. The data to be presented denies …

Integrating A Stakeholder-Centric Approach Into Dynamic Adaptation Policy Pathways For Equitable Coastal Flood Risk Management In East Boston, Shailee M. Desai

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This research aims to illustrate a methodology incorporating diverse stakeholder values in adaptation planning to promote equitable outcomes using a hypothetical case study of the Lower Border Street area in East Boston, using the Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP) framework for managing coastal flood risk. It offers three significant contributions to the field of adaptation planning: (i) It demonstrates how to integrate a stakeholder-specific assessment within the DAPP framework and illustrates individual impacts to a variety of stakeholders, including high- and low-income residents, commercial actors, government actors, and coastal landowners hoping that the planning process remains transparent and motivates local …

New York City Misses The Exit To Traffic Safety, Joseph Caffrey

Capstones

New York City Misses the Exit to Traffic Safety investigates New York City’s mounting traffic violence crisis through the lens of a devastating crash that killed a Brooklyn mother and her two daughters. It examines the city’s inconsistent enforcement of reckless driving and the failure of the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program (DVAP), which aimed to reform recidivist speeders. The piece investigates the imperfections of Vision Zero, public backlash to automated enforcement, and the broader failure to prevent recidivist speeding. It also explores policy alternatives like Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), highlighting legislative efforts to revive accountability and save lives, while advocating …

Intersectional Analysis Of Vaccination Inequity Among Individuals With Disabilities In The United States During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Philip Ndoki, Heba M. Athar, David O. Anderson

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

We investigated how disability status, types, sociodemographic indicators, and reasons for not receiving vaccinations influenced COVID-19 vaccination rates among individuals with disabilities in the United States. Despite efforts, vaccination disparities persisted, necessitating a nuanced understanding of the barriers to vaccination. Using intersectionality theory and the social determinants of health framework, we examined the impact of marginalized identities and structural inequalities. Key questions included the association between disability status and vaccination uptake, differences among disability types moderated by sociodemographic factors, and the interaction between disability status and reasons for not vaccinating. We used Household Pulse Survey data from the U.S. Census …

[2025 Honorable Mention] Pedagogies In The Flesh And Recovery Of Historical Memory From The Perspective Of A Salvadoreña, Janelle I. Martinez

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

My submission is a praxis paper. First, I explore the concepts and theories I would like to put into praxis, which are pedagogies in the flesh and recovery of historical memory. I then explain how and why I put them into praxis.

[2025 Winner] Fear Is Knocking: No Abras La Puerta, Destiny Jimenez

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

This paper explores the impact of deportations and unauthorized immigration on the Mexican community. By focusing on the social, emotional, and economic challenges faced by Mexican immigrants due to their legal status, this paper examines how deportation policies disproportionately affect their lives. Drawing from my own family's experience, I reflect on my mother's journey as an immigrant and how her experiences shed light on the broader struggles of many in the community.

A Seat At The Schoolhouse Table: Reimagining Education Through Afrofuturist And Womanist Theory, Natasha M. Capers

Student Theses

“A Seat at the Schoolhouse Table: Reimagining Education Through Afrofuturist and Womanist Theory” critically examines how curriculum, even when well-intentioned, can perpetuate harm by excluding the lived experiences of marginalized communities—especially Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ students. Using a real middle school immigration assignment given to the author's son as a case study, this capstone deconstructs the structural biases embedded in curriculum design and proposes a radical reimagining through the liberatory lenses of Afrofuturism and Womanism. Blending scholarly inquiry, personal narrative, and community-based interviews, this project offers a restructured assignment that centers joy, identity, and speculative storytelling as tools for educational …

Advancing Equity In Financial Aid For Black Students: A Document Analysis Study Of Student Equity Plans In California Community Colleges, Edwina Williams

Dissertations

This study examined how California Community Colleges (CCCs) constructed financial aid discourse in Student Equity Plans (SEPs) and assessed whether these strategies mitigated or perpetuated racial disparities for Black students. Previous scholarship identified racial inequities in financial aid systems and explored how equity planning documents addressed race; yet, the influence of institutional discourse on financial aid access remained underexamined. This study contributed to the literature by applying critical race hermeneutics (CRH) to examine how SEPs outlined financial aid strategies, with particular attention to the framing of work–study opportunities and the extent to which the SEP intended to employ race-conscious approaches. …

Becoming A Beloved Community: A Restorative Reckoning For A Radical Conversion To Transform Discourse In Higher Education, Latasha Tomay Varlack-Butler

Dissertations

This dissertation critically examines the misappropriation of Restorative Justice Discourse (RJD) within three predominantly white institutions (PWIs), analyzing 59 institutional documents through Critical Discourse Analysis, Relational Critical Discourse Analysis, and Rhetorical Criticism (Fairclough, 1995; Vaandering, 2021; van Dijk, 2008). Tribal Colleges and Universities and South African institutions have emerged as exemplars of authentic RJD, countering co-optation within PWIs. The findings demonstrate that RJD as applied in PWIs is framed in ways that attenuate its transformative potential, perpetuating color-evasiveness (Bonilla-Silva, 2017) and obscuring the intersectional experiences of Black, Indigenous, and disabled communities (Crenshaw, 1991; Million, 2009).

Grounded in decolonial praxis (Smith, …

Culturally Affirming Independent School Board Governance: Centering The Experiences Of Independent School Board Members Of Color, Christopher S. Dennis Phd

Dissertations

As schools become more diverse, K–12 independent school boards benefit from diversity (Jernigan et al., 2010; Tolbert Smith, 2022). This study examined the narratives of independent school board members of color (BMOC) across the United States’ racialized history of education (Anderson, 1988; Omi & Winant, 2014). The study used a survey (n = 23) and interviews (n = 9) based on Helms’s (1996) racial identity theory and Booth-Bell et al.’s (2021) board governance theory. This multiple case study examined survey responses of BMOC from 17 schools governed by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS). Nine respondents were …

Exploring A Holistic Conceptualization Of Destructive Leadership: Perspectives From The Lived Experiences Of Latino Law Enforcement Command Staff Officers, Carmelin Rivera

Dissertations

Recently, there has been an increased interest in destructive leadership or what is characterized as the dark side of leadership. There is, in fact, no consensus in the literature about the definition of destructive leadership, and this murkiness has led to two somewhat different approaches to understanding this phenomenon: 1) a leader-centric approach that emphasizes the bad behaviors and traits of so-called toxic leaders and 2) a much broader, holistic approach, often discussed as the toxic triangle (Padilla et al., 2007), that focuses on how destructive leadership is co-created by a toxic system of bad leaders and susceptible followers …

Exploring The Experience Of Embodiment Of Diverse Leaders, Susan Lynn Flaming Yeats

Dissertations

The experience of embodiment is a complex phenomenon that spans a range of feelings: a sense of connection to one's physical body, a sense of capability to accomplish certain physical acts, an attunement to self-care behaviors, a connection to desire, and inhabiting the body as a subjective site (Piran, 2016). This can be a complicated experience for leaders who hold multiple intersecting identities (Hill et al., 2016). As new medical therapies promise radical weight loss possibilities, the experience of embodiment has taken on a new layer of complexity (Giorgis, 2024). For fat leaders who are also women of color, sexual …

Reimagining Pedagogies Of The Prison Yard: Using Ethnotheatre To Embody Transcarceral Conocimiento, Mabelle Reynoso

Dissertations

Latinxs make up 40% of California's population but account for 45% of the prison population and 47% of the jail population (Sawyer, 2023). Their overrepresentation in carceral custody not only impacts the individual but also affects families and communities by limiting access to social, political, and educational capital and agency. In response to gaps in research specific to the collateral impact, this interdisciplinary arts-based qualitative study highlights the experiences of five formerly incarcerated Latino men who participated in an Arts in Corrections playwriting class during their time in a California state prison. This study foregrounds their knowledge as cuentistas (storytellers), …

How We Show Up Matters: Transformative Adult Social Emotional Learning To Build Equity-Centered Schools, Samantha L. Rummage-Massey

Dissertations

Transformative Social Emotional Learning (tSEL) expands traditional SEL by integrating equity and social justice to cultivate student development and as a framework for educator growth and systemic change in education (Jagers et al., 2019). Unlike traditional SEL, which primarily targets students, tSEL emphasizes educators’ role in disrupting inequitable practices, making it a powerful tool for reimagining schools as justice-oriented spaces. This qualitative case study explores how tSEL professional development influences educators’ sense of identity, agency, and belonging, along with their reflections on systemic inequities and application of Critical Pedagogy (Freire, 1970) in personal and professional contexts. Data collection included semi-structured …

Latinas In Higher Education: Paving & Weaving Wholeheartedly, Ariela M. Canizal

Dissertations

The deficit model in research has often framed Latinas in higher education through a lens of barriers and challenges, reinforcing stereotypes that depict them as unlikely to succeed in academic spaces. However, Latinas are actively resisting these narratives, weaving their resilience into their stories as they navigate the complexities of higher education, culture, and identity. This study examines how Latina students incorporate cultural background, familial support, and personal agency to thrive academically while challenging systemic obstacles and societal expectations. The research question that guided this study is: In what ways do undergraduate Latina students navigate identity as they experience leadership …

Incorporating Specialized Courses On The Prevention Of Sexual Misconduct In Policing Academies, Nina Nguyen

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

A major problem within law enforcement is police sexual misconduct (PSM), where law enforcement officers commit sexual offenses while using the power of their position. Bonds of loyalty and trust between fellow officers are strong enough that offenders have no worries about being reported, even if they are caught. Studies have shown that most offending officers were new to the field or recently completed their training at a policing academy. Since many of the officers committing PSM were fresh out of their training, it indicates that the academy is not training its recruits properly on topics of sexual assault and …