Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

Denial: A Sociological Theory, Christina Nadler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops a theory of sociological denial through an investigation of contested social problems. I begin by reviewing the literature on denial, both sociological and psychological, in order to situate the project and exemplify the relevance and need for a sociological theory of denial. Then, through examining three scales of the social, I account for multiple layers of the social structure and denial’s place in each. These scales are the sites at which denial happens: geographic, cognitive, and unconscious. I explore five contested social problems through varied paradigms that allow me to analyze each scale of the structural. I …

Culture And Class In Marginalized Minority Educational Attainment, Alan R. Takeall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using a national sample of Black and Latino high school students, I ask: What is the relative impact of demographic factors, aspirations, adherence to an ideology of achievement, and sociocultural capital on future educational attainment? Additionally, how do poor students compare to their non-poor counterparts on these measures? Employing the Educational Longitudinal Study (2002 & 2012) and multivariate statistical techniques, this dissertation examines the role of cultural and other factors on the educational attainment of Black and Latino students and then explores the role of poverty on those outcomes.

In recent years educational reform efforts have placed considerable emphasis on …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

Pension Fund Evictions: Lessons For Housing And Labor, Marnie F. Brady

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze an institutional investor portfolio of over-leveraged multifamily rental housing in East Palo Alto, California to demonstrate how changing forms of landlordism produce both new and familiar targets for tenants organizing against displacement and for housing security. Venture capital investors in the first decade of the 2000s exploited the Silicon Valley regional conditions of racial exclusion, uneven development, and municipal rent control. I introduce the legacy of Black political organization in East Palo Alto as a way of contextualizing the tenants’ and the city leaders’ response to the monopoly investment purchase. The structure of this rental …

"Tough On Crime, Tough On The Causes Of Crime": Liberal Carceral Logics And The Reproduction Of Settler Colonial Violence In Winnipeg, Mb, Canada, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation illustrates how settler colonialism is reproduced in present-day Canada through the governance of crime, and how political struggles against policing, imprisonment, and colonialism are linked. It focuses on the politics of crime in the Province of Manitoba from 1999–2016, during which the left-of-center New Democratic Party (NDP) government engineered a significant expansion of the carceral state, overseeing unprecedented increases in policing and jail growth. In Manitoba, the vast majority of prisoners are Indigenous. This dissertation explores the logic through which the NDP integrated their support for policing and imprisonment into their “progressive” value system, packaging their carceral expansion …

Mónica Mayer: Translocality And The Development Of Feminist Art In Contemporary Mexico, Alberto Mckelligan Hernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Mónica Mayer (b. Mexico City, 1954), analyzing her work to understand the role played by the artistic and activist exchanges between feminists from Mexico City and Los Angeles in the development of feminist art in Mexico from the 1970s to the present. While scholars and curators are increasingly drawing attention to Mayer’s large body of work, which includes prints, drawings, installations, and public art interventions, the available literature emphasizes her connections to other artists working in her home country, positioning her artistic production within narratives of contemporary Mexican art.[1] In contrast, this dissertation foregrounds Mayer’s …

Local Immigration Enforcement Entrepreneurship In The Punishment Marketplace, Daniel L. Stageman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The contemporary neoliberal economic order plays a significant role in American social organization and policy-making. Most importantly, neoliberal ideology drives the creation and imposition of markets in public goods and services and the valorization of free market ideology in cultural life. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is in turn delimited and upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around mass incarceration, surveillance, and an unprecedented level of social control directed at the lowest strata of American society – a group that includes both the urban underclass, and unauthorized immigrants.

This study lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace …

Dominance & Survivance: Urban Latino Communities And Education In Racial Neoliberal Urbanism, Edwin Mayorga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

U.S. Latino youth are as undereducated and underprepared today as they were in the 1960s, leading some to declare that there is a national “Latino education crisis” that is affecting the lives of millions. While this problem is national in scope there are multiple narratives that underpin this story. Of particular interest in this study is the intersection of urban Latino core communities and public schools. This dissertation is based on the Education in our Barrios Project, #BarrioEdProj, which is a digital, critical participatory action research study of urbanism and urban education in the Latino core community of East Harlem …

Ethnic And National Identity Of Third Generation Koreans In Japan, Haruka Morooka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite Japan’s emphasis on its ethnic homogeneity, there actually are ethnic minorities in Japan. Most of foreign residents in Japan came recently, but a group of Koreans, which is called Zainichi, has been living in Japan before World War II. “Zainichi”, literally means “residing in Japan,” with a connotation of impermanence. It could be Zainichi Chinese or Zainichi Americans, but the term almost exclusively refers “to a population of colonial-era migrants from the Korean peninsula that settles in the Japanese archipelago and their descendants” (Lie, 2008, x). After decades of living in Japan, over 90% of the Zainichi population is …

Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy Of War And Medicine, Sandra Lee Trappen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy of War and Medicine undertakes study of how global conflict and violence shape the entire range of social production, from commodities and culture to social goods and social theory. The research presented in this work draws from cutting-edge theories in body and science studies, in addition to theories of affect and biopolitics to address how war became a problem solving paradigm in medicine. Combat casualties are shown to serve as a material nexus for medical knowledge production. Although the focus here is on medicine and medical innovation in particular, these developments are connected to …

(Dis)Entangling Gender Expression And Race In Antigay Discrimination: An Intersectional Approach, Steph M. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Current psychological definitions and operationalizations of antigay discrimination conceptualize negative treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) individuals as a response to their same-gender sexual orientations and not other factors. Because an individual’s sexual orientation is always understood through racialized hegemonic gender ideologies, however, attention to gender expression – how one “does” gender – and dynamics of race within antigay encounters is essential. Comprised of two mixed-method studies, this dissertation examines the role of gender expression and race in antigay discriminatory encounters from two perspectives: those who are targets of discrimination (i.e., cisgender and transgender LGBQ individuals) and those …

Understanding School And Interethnic Relations Of Mexican Immigrant Youth In A Post-Industrial Community, Roberto Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a dearth of literature on how immigrant groups understand minority groups in the United States, in particular, African-Americans. Increased technology and more rapid global movement in the 21st Century challenges 20th explanations of assimilation (Chicago School) and necessitates more research focused on how immigrant groups and racialized minorities interact to negotiate new worlds. This ethnographic research was conducted over thirteen months during 2012 and 2013 in a post-industrial neighborhood in the northeast that had been the site of 11 purported anti-bias attacks against Mexican immigrants during the summer of 2010. Research questions focused on: 1) Mexican immigrant youth …

Bilingual Latino Middle Schoolers On Languaging And Racialization In The Us, Sarah Hesson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores bilingual Latino middle schoolers’ articulated understandings of their language practices as well as the links between language practices and processes of racialization and discrimination in the US. The research was conducted in the context of an after-school program whose explicit aim was to not only document students’ experiences, but to use those experiences as a basis for generating individual and collective critical understandings among participants. The findings of this case study center on the ways youth understand processes of racialization, translanguaging, and translation in the context of an English-dominant society, and how these understandings are connected to …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

Ethnicity Matters: Implications For Understanding And Acting Upon Disparities In Health Affecting Black Men In The United States, Helen V. S. Cole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Compared to non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks have higher rates of mortality from heart disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and HIV/AIDS. Black men have a life expectancy approximately 4.7 years than the life expectancy of non-Hispanic white men, due in part to higher prevalence of chronic disease among black men. Many factors are hypothesized to contribute to disparities in health between races, including differences in socioeconomic status; culturally-linked behaviors such as diet, substance use, and physical activity; access to quality healthcare and other resources; and experiences of racism, both institutional and interpersonal. However, in public health research, race is usually treated as …

Race And Gender In The Advancement To Partnership: Perceptions Of Black Female Lawyers, Tsedale M. Melaku

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the barriers to recruitment, professional development and inclusivity, and advancement to partnership for black female lawyers in elite corporate law firms. Black female lawyers confront numerous obstacles as they seek to rise to partnership (e.g. lack of mentorship; sponsorship and substantive assignments; exclusion from social and professional networks; and limited exposure to quality training). All associates suffer from the demands of corporate law firms such as working long hours, exclusion from social activities, and limited family contact. These factors inevitably contribute to high attrition rates. However, the accounts of black female lawyers within this study are richly …

Empowerment From Within: Supporting Palestinian Women’S Struggle Against Violence, Ortal Bensky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent reports by the United Nations and local non-governmental organizations present a troubling increase in incidents of violence against Palestinian women in Palestine. These are cases of domestic violence, where the attackers are Palestinians, and political violence, where the attackers are Israeli settlers and soldiers. These violent incidents include attacks on body and property. Most incidents are neither dealt with by the Palestinian authorities nor by the Israeli government and judicial system. There is not sufficient international pressure to enforce justice. The purpose of this study is to offer alternative ways to prevent violent crimes, enforce relevant laws, and provide …

Exploring The Uses Of Cultural Funds Of Knowledge Among Ethnic Minority Immigrant College Students In Their Constructions Of Learning Identities Within A Collaborative Photovoice Project, Stacey Jennell Cooper

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Today’s college classrooms are distinguished by an increase in ethnic minority and immigrant student populations, yet there is little reflection of such diversity in the curriculum and teacher preparation and practice. Ethnic minority immigrant students bring with them into learning spaces much valuable cultural knowledge. If validated, this knowledge can become an essential resource from which these students can draw in creating their learning identities and goals.

This study explored how a group of ethnic minority immigrant community college students created potential identities in relation to learning by drawing on their culturally and historically informed funds of knowledge, including values, …

The Relationship Of Race And Social Integration On The Health Status Of Older Adults In An Urban City, Thomas T. Jordan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Durkheim argues that an individual is more vulnerable to self-destruction the more s/he is detached from the collective. This dissertation will explore the relative impact of social integration on older adults who have transitioned into their new roles in the social structure in relationship to their physical (obesity) and psychological (stress) health status. Additionally, the dissertation examines how social integration varies in its impact from one racial group to another, and how such variations influence the health status of the older adults who are members of these groups.

This dissertation employs data from the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging and …