Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons^™

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …

Canada’S Relationship With Women Migrant Sex Workers; Producing ‘Vulnerable Migrant Workers’ Through “Protecting Workers From Abuse And Exploitation”, Rachelle Daley

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Canada’s immigration regulations and policy instructions, collectively known as ‘Protecting Workers from Abuse and Exploitation’ (PWAE), instruct visa officials not to process temporary work permits when there is suspicion that migrants may be at risk of sexual abuse or exploitation in industries related to sex work. The regulations are part of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, located within an anti-trafficking initiative.

Stretching across disciplines and focusing on critical migration scholarship, this research uses a communications studies lens to unpack the power of categorization, and the dividing practices that produce, maintain and normalize inclusion and exclusion, through the conceptualization of the …

Hiperrealitas Relasi Dalam Sinetron Komedi "Tetangga Masa Gitu?", Eldo Eka Saputra

Informasi

Emergence of non-mainstream way of women representations in soap operas, where women are constructed as an independent individual, brought an impact to the patterns of relation between men and women. If we look at Indonesian soap operas, there are not many of them that can manage to present a non-mainstream construction of female characters. The shift on women representation is associated to how the men were represented in said soap operas, therefore this is a form of the role of the media in altering gender stigma in the society. However, in the process of construction there is a new reality …

Lgbt In Colombia: A War Within, Monica Espitia

Capstones

On the surface, Colombia appears to be at the vanguard of the gay rights movement, having extended legal rights to same-sex couples and transgender people in recent years. But for many of the nearly five million Colombians who are LGBT, these rights have been largely meaningless as a result of the deep-rooted prejudice that often results in violence.

Gay, lesbian and transgender Colombians have been actively persecuted by armed groups involved in Colombia’s decades-long civil war. Members of the LGBT community are four times more likely than the rest of the population to be threatened and abused by both legal …

The Last Gay Man On Earth -- Can The Mainstreaming Of A Culture Be Responsible For Its Demise?, Muri Assunção

Capstones

Social acceptance towards the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer community (LGBTQ) has seen incredible progress in the last few decades. Less than 50 years ago, an act of rebellion against a homophobic police raid at Stonewall, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, kicked off the gay liberation movement and the fight for LGBTQ rights. Today, the queer revolution has proved effective: same-sex unions in the U.S. are legally allowed, and gay parenting is socially accepted. But, at what cost? Are queer people conforming to a heteronormative way of life? Can such social advances be also responsible for the …

Doula Support As A Means To Improve Birth Outcomes For Minority Women, Christina Bao Ngoc Thich

Master's Projects and Capstones

Ethnic minorities such as African Americans, American Indians, Hispanics, Laotions, Hmongs, and Alaskan Natives have higher rates of cesarean delivery, pre-term birth, fetal demise, perinatal laceration, and congenital abnormalities than their white counterparts. Continuous labor support by way of doula care has been recommended for all pregnant women as a means to prevent adverse birth outcomes. Despite this, the population most in need of such support in unable to access doula services due to low socioeconomic status, availability of services, and cultural inaccessibility. This paper focuses on my capstone experience with UCSF and Roots of Labor Birth Collective as we …

The Role Of Liberian Community Organizations In The Integration Of Liberian Immigrants: A Case Study Of Immigrants In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Solomon M. Muin

Capstone Collection

Immigrants that settled in a dominant new culture face challenges during the process of acculturation. Though minority culture is always at the disadvantaged end of acculturation in most cases, most research done on acculturation in the West mostly focused on the impact of immigrants on their societies, or on ways of strengthening integration in the host countries. As this continues, the dominant culture role and importance of the majority culture is what influence most narratives and not much is seeing from the minority culture. Most research on acculturation in the United States, for example, placed more emphasis on the Hispanic …

Fortaleza's Immigrant Song: Portrait-Narratives And An Identity Needs Analysis Of Recent Immigrants' Lived Experiences, Carl Weitz-Santiago

Capstone Collection

This inquiry sheds light on the personal stories and lived experiences of a group of recent immigrants currently living in Fortaleza, the sprawling capital of the Northeastern state of Ceará, Brazil. Utilizing a theoretical framework guided by “Epistemologies of the South,” ethnographic principles, and constructivist grounded theory, this capstones presents five first person portrait-narratives highlighting intimate details of project participants’ lives prior to immigrating, and uncovers four persistent and recurrent themes expressed by project participants: (1) language and communication, (2) professional opportunity, (3) personal growth, and (4) “saudade” and belongingness.

Through the lens of Johan Galtung’s Basic Needs Approach, …

Parental Support For Newcomer Children’S Education In A Smaller Centre, Xuemei Li, Antoinette Doyle, Maureen Lymburner, Needal Yasin Ghadi

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

This study explored the issues around parental support for newcomer children’s transition to school in a smaller urban centre in Atlantic Canada where newcomer support is relatively limited. Data were drawn from semi-structured interviews with 11 newcomer parents, five children, and one settlement worker. The findings revealed newcomer parents’ difficulties in understanding the school system, limited engagement with the school community, isolation from other parents, and barriers to understanding and connecting with other parents. Among these newcomers, refugee parents are particularly challenged. We conclude that newcomer children’s parental involvement need to be viewed multi-dimensionally, and that the creation of a …

Introduction, Antonio Medina-Rivera, Lee F. Wilberschied Ph.D.

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

No abstract provided.

American Muslims: How The “American Creed” Fosters Assimilation And Pluralism, James R. Moore

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

This article examines the status of American Muslims in the United States in relationship to other cultural groups and some of the widespread stereotypes that plague Muslims in contemporary society. Much has been written about the discrimination faced by Muslims, particularly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, spawned by religious, racial, and ethnic bigotry. Some polls show many Americans harbor some prejudices against Muslims, but these prejudices have not resulted in widespread violence or discrimination; although there has been some violence and discrimination experienced by some Muslims, the empirical data show that the majority of American Muslims are very successful …

Table Of Contents, Antonio Medina-Rivera, Lee F. Wilberschied Ph.D.

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

No abstract provided.

Hannah Arendt And Natives As Extras: Towards An Ontology Of Palestinian Presence?, Francesco Melfi

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

The essay grew out of Hannah Arendt’s reflection on the roles and uses of the mask, a meditation on the ontology of the transient public figure or persona vs. one that restitutes the person to the unadulterated Selbstdenken dimension of the Epicurean philosopher-in-hiding. The author individuates in the resulting caesura between the donning and the taking off of the mask the primal source of that paradox in Hanna Arendt’s political behavior that alternately compelled her to confront the ontological presence of the Palestinian people, and made her withdraw into philosophical hiding without ever really coming to terms with it. In …

Teaching Secondary Mathematics And Science Contents Embedded In Historical And Cultural Contexts: Challenges And Possibilities, Roland Pourdavood

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Many preservice teachers come to understand that they must cross the boundaries of their own familiar cultural and historical contexts in order to meet the needs of diverse students. This qualitative and descriptive study examines the evolution of secondary preservice teachers’ views on teaching and learning mathematics and science in historical and cultural contexts. Data were collected throughout participants’ enrollment in a semester-long course entitled Perspectives on Science and Mathematics, which is taken in conjunction with student teaching. Data sources included university classroom observations, preservice teachers’ verbal and written responses to class discussions, reading assignments, and course activities. Common themes …

On Confucius’S Ideology Of Aesthetic Order, Li Wang

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Advocating order, order for all things, and taking order as beauty is the core element of Confucius’s aesthetic ideology. Confucius’s thought of aesthetic order is different from others of the “hundred schools of thoughts” in the pre-Qin period, and is also diverse from the Western value of aesthetic order. Confucius’s thought of aesthetic order has its own unique value system, which has become the mainstream value of aesthetic order in the Chinese society for 2000 years until today, after being integrated with the Chinese feudal imperial system in early Han Dynasty. This paper illustrates Confucius’s ideology of aesthetic order from …

The Captivity Of Opportunity: The Conversation Surrounding Church-Going Hispanic Immigrants, Nicolet Hopper Bell

Master's Theses

Immigration is a long-standing topic of discussion in the United States. Hispanic immigrants, or families of Hispanic immigrants, living in America face unique challenges. Through focus group interviews, participants from a predominantly Hispanic Protestant church narrated their experience of living in the United States. Guided grounded theory data analysis revealed three categories and 14 subcategories, or themes of conversation, surrounding this hot topic. Participants shed light on the distinctive challenges they faced, how these challenges affected them, and how they attempted to overcome these difficulties. By exploring these results through the lens of social stigma theory (Goffman, 2009) and intergroup …

Language And The Promised Land: Passage And Migration To A Spanish-Language ‘Third Place’, Kenya C. Dworkin Y Mendez

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

The Spanish-language anthology Caminos para la paz: Literatura israelí y árabe en castellano (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2007) [Paths towards/for Peace: Israeli and Arab literature in Castilian], compiled by Ignacio López-Calvo and Cristián Ricci, offers us a collection of over thirty reflections—some Jewish, others Muslim—about the millennial but also contemporary situation of two literally related and historic peoples in a language—Spanish—that seemingly allows them to inhabit the same, this time uncontested, space. Despite the potentially questionable title of the work, which couches the conflict as that of a nation-state versus a nation and/or two peoples contesting rights to one same land, …

Portrayal Of African Women In Nollywood Films Over A Five-Year Period: A Content Analysis Of Traits Applying The Stereotype Content Model, Olushola Aromona

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research shows that perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs are cultivated via media exposure. A content analysis of stereotypical traits in five Nollywood movies in a five-year span examines the prevalent portrayals of women in the Nigerian movie industry – Nollywood, and the effect of these portrayals on reinforcement of stereotypical norms and perpetuation of gender disparity. Cultivation and Objectification theories were the theoretical frameworks for this study. Findings revealed no significant change in the stereotypical portrayals of women in the past five years. From the movies analyzed, Nollywood movies appear to remain persistent in typically depicting women as unambitious domestic …

My Uber Driver Said "Xie Xie" To Me..., Jenny Li, Risd Archives

Racial Justice

他们不懂, tamenbudong, You Don't Understand campaign poster created by RISD alumni Jenny Li. Poster reads: My Uber driver said "Xie Xie" to me when I left the car, assuming I was Chinese.

Trans/Formations: A Photovoice Assessment Of Transgender People’S Wellness, E. Ricky Hill

Communication ETDs

The purpose of this study is to identify and understand ways transgender and gender non-conforming people living in Albuquerque, New Mexico are communicating about and understanding their health and wellness needs and the health and wellness needs of their community. Partnering with the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico, I used a community-based participatory approach to work on a Photovoice project that identified health and wellness related needs as defined by the community. Emergent themes identified by the participants highlighted various challenges and strengths to health and wellness for transgender and gender non-conforming people. I identify five core cultural premises …