Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

Harnessing The Power Of Cliftonstrengths®: How Multinational Corporations Can Use Deep-Level Diversity To Enhance Organizational Inclusion, Trapper Kay Pace

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research explicitly investigated how multinational corporations can enhance workplace inclusion through the novel use of the CliftonStrengths® assessment as a dimension of deep-level diversity. The study gleaned insights from employees’ perspectives, employing a constructivist grounded theory approach to explicate their experiences in rich qualitative narratives. Through open-ended surveys and intensive interviews, participants were selected using purposeful sampling to ensure meaningful data collection from the study organizations’ three global regions. The researcher conducted the analysis systematically through the constant comparison of data utilizing the NVivo14 software to assist in constructing codes, themes, and a theoretical schema. Results highlighted the significance …

For The Love Of Teaching: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experience Of Moral Education, Anne Marie Foley Ruiz

Doctoral Dissertations

Moral aspects of teaching arise each and every day, yet we lack information about how prepared teachers feel about this critical aspect of teaching. This multi-case study explores perceptions of five pre-service teachers in an elementary teacher education program in Western Massachusetts. A series of interviews explore their histories prior to the program and their experiences in the program as related to the pre-service teachers’ orientations to the moral work of teaching. Research questions address the awareness and self-efficacy of student teachers in implementing the moral aspects of teaching. Using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006), this study explores beliefs …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Seeing And Unlearning Whiteness: A Mindfulness Workshop For Racial Justice, Emily Haranas

Mindfulness Studies Theses

Racism is a deeply embedded, foundational aspect of American society. However, because the privilege of Whiteness insulates White individuals from the workings of systemic injustice and oppression and enables them to choose the conditions of their accountability in the movement for racial justice, many remain painfully blind to this fact. As such, there is a significant need for those who have been racialized White to develop a critical awareness of the powers and privileges ascribed to their racial identity. The working premise of this thesis is that mindfulness can assist White individuals in unlinking the socialized habits of mind that …

Dei Without Equity: Lab Coat Culture And Persistent Racism In Bioengineering Laboratories, Janet Canady

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From biased algorithms to discriminatory devices to medical racism, it is clear that biomedical products are created in ways that reproduce racial disparities in access and use. Yet the most common solutions recommended by biomedical research institutions emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that research has already proven ineffective and sometimes harmful. In fact, labs rarely scrutinize whether and how their research products reflect racial bias, assumptions, or ideals. In this paper, I shift the focus to consider how bioengineering laboratories function as a site in which racial processes contribute to product outcomes. I ask, what are the racial dynamics …

Slavery, Colonialism, And Other Ghosts: Presence And Absence In The Rise Of American Sociology, 1895-1905, Aaron Yates

Masters Theses

US sociology has historically denied slavery and colonialism as demanding of sociological study. The roots of this can be examined at the turn of the twentieth century in the early years of the institutionalization of the discipline in American universities. The inattention stems from a white supremacist racial ontology that underpins US sociology in general (embedded in the category of modernity and the category of sociology itself). There are traces or identifiable ‘moments of silencing’ during the first ten years of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS), the discipline’s first professional journal in the US, in which early (white) sociologists …

Healing Racial Injustice With Mindfulness Research, Training, & Practice, Danielle "Danae" Laura

Mindfulness Studies Theses

This thesis offers a collection of authors and studies in support of improved research, training, and practice connecting mindfulness with racial justice through intergroup applications. The paper identifies barriers at work (e.g., colorblindness, spiritual bypass, white fragility, and implicit bias) in contemplative science, Western Buddhist communities, and secular mindfulness centers, which block the sizeable contributions possible in studying the intergroup application of mindfulness practice—specifically Lovingkindness Meditation, among others—when used as an intervention with anti-racist aims. Through secondary qualitative research, I reviewed six key works from Black authors on mindfulness and race, as well as six sample studies on the prosocial …

Honor Thyself, Alonzo O. Williams

Dance (MFA) Theses

The black male experience and identity in America are filled with complexity. We struggle to know ourselves. We work to see the way of love and the peace of an unviolated free spirit. We want to engage with ourselves with the highest degree of freedom and comfort, not to continue to question our identity in a life-threatening white patriarchal masculinity ideal. Honoring oneself from the lenses of the Reconstruction era of the United States is essential. Reconceptualizing this history explores the significance of emphasizing Reconstruction in my life as a black male to go through a process of self-discovery and …

A Mixed Methods Study Of Undergraduate Research Motivations At The University Of Nebraska Omaha (Uno), Afrah F. Rasheed

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Undergraduate research provides unique experiences and skill sets that are applicable in various careers. However, there has been an increasing need for greater diversity among researchers, namely undergraduate researchers, and the motivations behind undergraduate research participation need to be further explored. The purpose of this study was to identify the demographic information of undergraduate students at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), and what motivations were the most prevalent in undergraduate research at UNO. A mixed-methods approach was utilized through a quantitative portion and a qualitative portion. The quantitative portion was a web-based survey which gauged for 22 independent …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Spirits In The Dark: Black Community Education And The Light It Bears, Sydoni A. Ellwood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Spirits in the Dark” is a digital space dedicated to the efforts of Black community education. It memorializes the commitment and strategies of spirits, light bearers like Mary McLeod Bethune and Huey Newton – people who devoted their lives to the fortification of their communities via education. This project also presents a variety of answers to one specific question: What lessons can school leaders and educators incorporate from community-controlled education programs to make learning spaces affirming and engaging for Black students? In totality, the digital space contributes to conversations in urban education and sociology, specifically the ones being held around …

Contextualizing Bipoc High School Students’ Racialized Experiences Under Trump, Christina Ung

Master's Theses

This thesis contextualizes public high school experiences of self-identified students of color during Trump’s presidency. The study features three recent high school graduates from the same campus, and their perspectives on a series of topics related to their racial identity. It was important that this research served as a space for marginalized voices to share their lived experiences, as they are frequently left out of American curriculum. More specifically in this case, the high school is located in a small, rural town where the population is majority white and politically conservative. Through the lens of critical race theory (CRT), data …

Criminal Injustice: Considering White Privilege And Colonization In The Examination Of Racial Bias In The United States Criminal Justice System, Jane E. Sanders

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Laws and institutions in the United States have consistently marginalized people of color throughout the country's history. This research examines the United States' criminal justice system while considering how the country’s past of oppression has resulted in a racially biased system. Through analysis of policies, literature, and quantitative data, the primary goal of this research is not only to exhibit that racial discrepancies exist within the criminal justice system, but also to question how they persist in order to determine a solution. By utilizing both qualitative data collected through existing social theory as well as quantitative data showing varying perceptions …

Fomo, Liquid Courage, And The Intoxicated Self, Lindsay Pressman

Senior Theses and Projects

“Binge-drinking” cannot simply be recognized as a feature of campus culture, but as the product of a profoundly alienating one, made strikingly evident by our creation of a separate world (“drunk world”). We have created a small world of impossible possibles that exists in the corners of the actual; a separate world, in which the imagining of the self, other, and the world, is not only permissible but promoted. At the heart of college students’ “partying hard” is a longing, hope, and dogged determination that the liberating and unifying aspects of this world can overwhelm the actual...and in the meantime …

Tracing Biometric Assemblages In India’S Surveillance State: Reproducing Colonial Logics, Reifying Caste Purity, And Quelling Dissent Through Aadhaar, Priya Prabhakar

Scripps Senior Theses

Tracing Biometric Assemblages in India’s Surveillance State seeks to understand the historical conditions that rendered the nation-state of India as having the world’s largest biometric surveillance system: Aadhaar. Surveillance practices used by the British Raj mirrors the current social order of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as they use surveillance to similar ends in today’s political economy, through the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and ethnonationalism. This thesis is an exploration into how India’s current surveillance regimes cultivate biometric surveillant assemblages through Aadhaar. Contrary to claims that Aadhaar was created to empower the poor, I argue that these surveillance regimes …

Examining Racial & Ethnic Disparities In The Reach Of The Medicare Shared Savings Program, Lindsey Arneson

Capstone Experience

It is important to understand the quality of health care for racial and ethnic minorities covered under the largest U.S. government-run insurance program, Medicare, because the demographics of the U.S. are becoming older and more diverse. A new value-based program under Medicare is the Shared Savings Program (MSSP), which creates incentives to improve care quality and health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with a specific focus on increasing the provision of preventive care services. This capstone project aims to understand the representation of racial/ethnic minority Medicare beneficiaries, namely African Americans/Blacks and Hispanics/Latinxs, that receive care from providers or facilities (i.e., Accountable …

Teacher Perceptions Of Environmental Science In Rural Northwestern New Mexico Public Schools, Marie Quiahuitl Julienne

Organization, Information and Learning Sciences ETDs

In this study, I explored what teachers perceive as the factors that impact their teaching of environmental science in rural secondary level schools in northwestern New Mexico. I adapted Bronfenbrenner’s (1994) ecological systems model, based on four environmental subsystem levels (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem), as the conceptual framework to address the major research question of this study, and developed 18 interview questions to explore teachers’ perceptions of factors that influence their teaching of environmental science. I investigated the perspectives science teachers have about environmental science topics and the influences they perceive that affect how they teach environmental science, and …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Preventing Prejudiced Psychological Practice: Social Justice Education In Undergraduate Psychology Programs, Rachel Roewer

Global Honors Theses

In order to provide sufficient mental health care services and produce ethical research, psychologists must be motivated to inhibit their personal biases. Bias in psychological research and mental health care settings can contribute to the perpetuation of oppression, preventing clients who identify with marginalized groups from receiving adequate mental health services. Prejudice amongst mental health care providers can influence misdiagnosis and wrongful prescription of medication. Psychological research informs clinical practices, thus biased research can lead to prejudiced mental health care practices. To ensure that members of marginalized groups receive effective health care, there is a global need for ethical, culturally …

Interethnic Marriages In The United States: An In-Depth Look At Marital Challenges, Spring C. Miles

Senior Theses

As ethnic diversity increases in the United States, interethnic marriages are becoming increasingly prevalent. Despite their increasing rates, interethnic unions experience lower levels of relationship quality and are at a higher risk of divorce than same-ethnic unions. Other factors that influence marital outcomes include age at marriage, education, religion, and parental divorce. However, factors that influence specifically interethnic marriages include internal stressors, such as conflicting values and relationship expectations, and external stressors, such as a lack of social support and/or legal barriers. The best theoretical framework for studying interethnic unions is interdependence theory because it analyzes these factors and their …

Electric Light: Automating The Carceral State During The Quantification Of Everything, R. Joshua Scannell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the rise of digitally-driven policing technologies in order to make sense of how prevailing logics of governance are transformed by ubiquitous computing technology. Beginning in the early 1990s, police departments and theorists began to rely on increasingly detailed sets of metrics to evaluate performance. The adoption of digital technology to streamline quantitative evaluation coincided with a steep decline in measured crime that served as a proof-of-concept for the effectivity of digital police surveillance and analytics systems. During the turbulent first two decades of the 21^st century, such digital technologies were increasingly associated with reform projects designed …

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 …

Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos

Doctoral Dissertations

This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …

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 …

Young, Urban, Professional, And Kenyan?: Conversations Surrounding Tribal Identity And Nationhood, Charlotte Achieng-Evensen

Educational Studies Dissertations

By asking the question “How do young, urban, professional Kenyans make connections between tribal identity, colonialism, and the lived experience of nationhood?,” the researcher engages with eight participants in exploring their relationships with their tribal groups. From this juncture the researcher, through a co-constructed process with participants, interrogates the idea of nationhood by querying their interpretations of the concepts of power and resistance within their multi-ethnic societies. The utility of KuPiga Hadithi as a cultural responsive methodology for data collection along with poetic analysis as part of the qualitative tools of examination allowed the researcher to identify five emergent and …

Sanctioned Silencing, Symbolic Resistance: Race, Space, And Dispossession In A Marginalized South African Community, Killian Richard Miller

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

My field work and the written portion of my ethnography work through issues of marginality, state apparatuses, illusions of freedom, and making meaning in a context of oppression. All these power dynamics are historically-situated within the cultural context and community of Hangberg, a place forged by the race-based forced removals of Apartheid. British and Dutch colonization, Apartheid's racial regime, and the post-Apartheid oligarchical state, are all historical and contemporary authoritative forces that are impacting the everyday lives of people in Hangberg. Perspectives of power also serve as examples …

Pushed Without Direction: Privileged Problems And The Configuration Of Class And Race. How Latent Class Differences, Supported Through Racial Inequities, Maintain The Achievement Gap For Upper Class Black Students, Jullian Harrison

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars for decades have studied the achievement gap and attempted to explain it in regards to race and class. Throughout the existing literature regarding the achievement gap between black and white students, however, there is a dearth of research exploring why the gap exists for upper-class black students; this population is largely ignored. This research seeks to explain why an achievement gap exists between white and black students who come from households of similar incomes. Ten students (five white and five black gradates) of a private, non-parochial school in Washington DC are interviewed about high school and post-high school experiences. …

Giving A Voice To The Powerless: Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation As A Tool For Inclusive Development Through Microfinance, Evan T. Burke

Capstone Collection

The greatest experts on the situation of the marginalized peoples of the world are the marginalized communities themselves. This paper explores how participatory monitoring & evaluation can be a powerful tool for giving voices to marginalized communities, ensuring that the voices of beneficiaries and local stakeholders are heard and inform sustainable project design. It analyzes a participatory monitoring and evaluation methodology implemented for women’s credit cooperatives in Gujarat, India by the Human Development & Research Centre, and examines lessons to be learned to design evaluations facilitating inclusive development.

Strategies for the monitoring and evaluation of microfinance have evolved along with …