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Title: "Being a good person in the system we already have will not save us" : interpreting how students embody and narrate the process of social change for sustainability using an agency/structure lens
Creator: Miller, Hannah K.
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: When undergraduates studying sustainability take action to make the change they want to see in their own lives, their communities, and the world, they often meet large, seemingly ossified systems that deflate their sense of efficacy. These students enter our classes and programs with a passion to effect change. The participants in this research, for example, dedicated a semester of their undergraduate careers to move to an ecological field station to study sustainability. During this semester...
Show moreWhen undergraduates studying sustainability take action to make the change they want to see in their own lives, their communities, and the world, they often meet large, seemingly ossified systems that deflate their sense of efficacy. These students enter our classes and programs with a passion to effect change. The participants in this research, for example, dedicated a semester of their undergraduate careers to move to an ecological field station to study sustainability. During this semester, participants worked to develop solutions to local environmental problems, but met various barriers to change during this process. How do students respond to these barriers? How do we, as educators, help construct opportunities for social transformation in the face of unsustainable, unjust, and inequitable systems? Using the agency/structure dialectic as a theoretical lens, this qualitative case study examined how students (a) narrate the process of social change for sustainability at various spatial scales, and (b) embody agency to work towards change for sustainability in their local contexts. Results suggest that students’ local experiences with sustainability work (e.g., classes, community problem-solving projects) are predictive of the way they then envision the process of social change for sustainability in abstract, leading to new and revised imagined futures. Results also suggest that not all students’ agency played a central role in shaping local systems, and therefore the ways they envision social change happening were constrained by their positionalities and experiences within their local communities.Implications for environmental and sustainability education programs include a call for long-term, collective action to (a) help our students examine their own narrated dialectics in time and space, (b) ensure our students have equitable opportunities to engage in local sustainability work, (c) develop a critical consciousness in predominantly White institutions about how local dialectics privilege White American narratives, (d) rethink what “local” means for racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in rural American spaces, and (e) consider how our students’ local experiences with sustainability and working for social change impacts their learning.
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Title: "Being in the center of the projects" : urban education, structural inequities, and provisional resistance
Creator: Gaines, Leah Tonnette
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Public education in Baltimore City, Maryland faces many structural inequities, several of which are due to the lingering remnants of historical factors. Interviewing some of the educational staff members of Baltimore City Elementary School (BCES), I found that this specific school experiences health and environmental, socioeconomic, and educational inequalities. Conscious of these concerns, school leaders, teachers, and community members have resisted such injustices. Ultimately, the data...
Show morePublic education in Baltimore City, Maryland faces many structural inequities, several of which are due to the lingering remnants of historical factors. Interviewing some of the educational staff members of Baltimore City Elementary School (BCES), I found that this specific school experiences health and environmental, socioeconomic, and educational inequalities. Conscious of these concerns, school leaders, teachers, and community members have resisted such injustices. Ultimately, the data yielded patterns of provisional resistance. While this resistance is empowering and meaningful, it remains a short-term fix, and fails to create long-term solutions to structural inequities. Provisional resistance is limited in its abilities to actually solve oppressions, and instead works as a Band-Aid to mask or cover the problem as a means of momentary survival. This form of resistance does not remove agency or power from marginalized groups of people, but instead refocuses accountability on outside forces, and calls for the dismantling of structures.
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Title: "Beur" culture as "metissage" in the works of Leila Sebbar
Creator: McCullough, Mary Elisabeth
Date: 2001
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Bold at the desk and the stove" : the re-imagining of American cuisine in the work of M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child
Creator: Parke, Michelle Kathleen
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Though often residing on the periphery of literary scholarship, the work of food studies and feminist scholars on the literatures of American domesticity and cookbooks, or collectively "domestic literacies," reveal a significant and too often ignored aspect of our nation's history--the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. While many of these scholars emphasize the intersection of labor, economics, and gender issues, culinary practice is an effective--and often overlooked--lens through which...
Show moreThough often residing on the periphery of literary scholarship, the work of food studies and feminist scholars on the literatures of American domesticity and cookbooks, or collectively "domestic literacies," reveal a significant and too often ignored aspect of our nation's history--the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. While many of these scholars emphasize the intersection of labor, economics, and gender issues, culinary practice is an effective--and often overlooked--lens through which we can examine how gender roles developed in a particular historical moment, how domesticity reflected the economic and sociopolitical discursive practices of the time, and how the nation's relationship to food evolved. Clearly arranging the multitude of discursive practices and domestic literacies involved in one historical period can be difficult; however, systems theory can serve as an effective method for organizing and comprehending how these discursive practices and texts are networked, how they inform and shape each other, how they co-evolve, and how they act recursively and reflexively.Examining domestic literacies from a specific historical moment, such as the immediate post-World War II era in which gender roles experienced scrutiny and American cuisine suffered an identity crisis, proves more productive than tackling a broad scope of texts. Authors M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child operate individually and collectively to create perturbations to the network of discursive practice systems that neighbor their texts. They work alongside and challenge texts, such as Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book that articulate problematic discourses about gender and domesticity, to reveal the complicated and multifarious relationship among domestic literacies, culinary practice, and this network. By examining these texts, we can further comprehend how the authors reshape the network of discursive practice systems and work to initiate the Good Food Movement that overhauls American cuisine and helps to construct the mid-century American national culinary identity.The iconic Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book serves as a representative text of the many domestic literacies in this period that functioned prescriptively and proffered conservative ideas of gender and domesticity. Though most often read simply as a cookbook, this text, when considered as part of the domestic literacies subsystem, reveals the multiple networked systems at work that shape the content of the text and how it is organized and structured. While Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book advocates a return to the kitchen for American women to serve their families, prolific food writer M.F.K. Fisher challenges such a linear and austere approach to culinary practice and gender in her text Map of Another Town. At the same time, in the early 1960s, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking debuted and changed the American culinary landscape; it also operated alongside Fisher's work to change and shape American culinary practice. Decades later, Child's memoir, My Life in France, centering on the time leading up to the publication of her groundbreaking text sets the stage for the fundamental components of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and the broader culinary practice-as-art. Together, these texts, as a networked representative microcosm of the domestic literacies subsystem, function interdependently with the neighboring discursive practice systems, such as gender, labor, and economics, to alter American cuisine, culinary practice, and gender roles connected with the kitchen.
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Title: "Bring the boys home" : demobilization of the United States armed forces after World War II
Creator: Sharp, Bert Marvin, 1925-
Date: 1976
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Britain at its worst" : the fictional milieu of Patrick Hamilton
Creator: Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Building up a house of Israel in a land of Christ" : Jewish women in the antebellum and Civil War south
Creator: Stollman, Jennifer Ann
Date: 2001
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Busie head" liberalism
Creator: Smallpage, Steven Michael
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Contemporary liberal theory has left us unable to generally understand and respond to the rise of political forces like populism, right-wing authoritarianism, and charismatic demagogues. I argue that the dangerousness of these movements is amplified by the inability of our liberal thinking to adequately grapple with messy "political" reality. My goal is to recast liberalism so as to tell us a more coherent story of our political life." -- Abstract.

Title: "But I'm not good at art" : preservice teachers' understanding of artistic response to children's and adolescent literature
Creator: Knezek, Suzanne M.
Date: 2007
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Can you help me?" : exploring the influence of a mentoring program on high school males' of color academic engagement and self-perception in school
Creator: Lewis, Curtis Levern
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The dissertation was guided by this major question: How do high school males of color describe and make sense of their academic engagement in school and self-perception while participating in an ecologically structured school-based mentoring program? For the ten high school males of color in this study I do an in-depth analysis using program observations, interviews, and data from journal writings to examine the meaning of their experiences in the program"--From abstract.

Title: "Cross-field" visual masking by tachistoscopic presentation of target and noise patterns to opposite cerebral hemispheres
Creator: Goff, David Paul, 1938-
Date: 1973
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Der Kommende Mensch" Georg Kaisers dramenform und intention
Creator: Bubser, Reinhold K.
Date: 1974
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Do what you can" : creating an institution, the Ladies' Library Associations in Michigan, 1852-1900
Creator: Jackson, Mildred Louise, 1960-
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Evangelical Christian college" : constituent understandings and perceptions
Creator: Piper, Everett Gale
Date: 2002
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Ever learning to dwell" : habitability in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature
Creator: Wilson, Christine Renee
Date: 2008
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Exile is hell" : Black internationalism and Robert F. Williams's activist network in the Cold War, 1950-1969
Creator: Mares, Richard M.
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The precarious positions of African American political exiles provide an instructive window into the fluctuations of international support for the black freedom struggle. Exile Is Hell examines the strategies used by Robert F. Williams's activist network to survive and maintain their involvement in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement from outside the United States. Expatriates such as Williams, Richard Gibson, Julian Mayfield, and others most plainly bore the vicissitudes of political...
Show moreThe precarious positions of African American political exiles provide an instructive window into the fluctuations of international support for the black freedom struggle. Exile Is Hell examines the strategies used by Robert F. Williams's activist network to survive and maintain their involvement in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement from outside the United States. Expatriates such as Williams, Richard Gibson, Julian Mayfield, and others most plainly bore the vicissitudes of political shifts occurring in the 1960s against the backdrop of the Cold War. Exile Is Hell tracks this ebb and flow by foregrounding the day-to-day experiences of Williams, Gibson, Mayfield, and others to reveal their methods of navigating an erratic political climate and capricious activist community. International rhetoric formed an integral component of the Black Power era, yet many activists struggled to forge lasting, transnational coalitions due to the variable politics of the Cold War. Using Williams as the central hub of this activist network, this project contributes a detailed narrative of exile through a collective biography that explores the daily work of expanding the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement to incorporate global ambitions. This research further establishes the impact of changes in international support upon an activist network in order to extrapolate the effects on the African American freedom struggle.
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Title: "Fan the flames" : the theories and activism of Chicana/o communists between 1968-1990
Creator: Bonilla, Eddie
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines the debates around Chicana/o nationalism, nationhood, and self-determination by using archival documents and oral histories to study the ideologies and actions of the August 29th Movement (ATM) and the League of Revolutionary Struggle that interpreted the Marxist canon based on their unique experiences as Chicana/os in the U.S to organize against oppression. I explore how these groups used a hybrid of nationalist ideologies with those around class to contribute to...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the debates around Chicana/o nationalism, nationhood, and self-determination by using archival documents and oral histories to study the ideologies and actions of the August 29th Movement (ATM) and the League of Revolutionary Struggle that interpreted the Marxist canon based on their unique experiences as Chicana/os in the U.S to organize against oppression. I explore how these groups used a hybrid of nationalist ideologies with those around class to contribute to both the intellectual tradition of Latina/o activism while diversifying our understanding of activists who utilized the Marxist canon. The activists in these organizations complicate the dominant narratives of identity politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to further enrich the legacy of the Chicana/o movement as one that was ideologically diverse, international, cross-racial, and cross-ethnic. The multi-and cross-racial framework in this research highlights the intersection of race, class, and gender by activists seeking equal citizenship and an end to U.S. capitalism and imperialism. This project is an intellectual, social, and institutional history of Chicana/o communists between the 1960s and 1990.The every-day lives of communist activists fighting for better citizenship and democratic rights during the global Cold War are at the center of this study. These groups and activists identified as some combination of Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, or Stalinists at a time when political surveillance was rampant and being affiliated with communism was seen as being anti-American. I explore how the organizations responded to this surveillance and how they continued to operate across various spheres of activism including in the labor sector, on college campuses, and in electoral politics by using a United Front approach.I show how the groups mobilized among lower stratum workers in the auto industry, cannery factories, and among hotel and restaurant workers because the point of production is where they believed they could be most effective. They also organized students on college campuses by participating in the fights for establishing and protecting Chicana/o and Ethnic studies, as well as affirmative action. These groups such as the League which was the result of the merger between Chicana/o, African American, and Asian American communists were critical because they created linkages between these various spheres of activism that at times were not speaking to one another in order to fight a restricting U.S. capitalist society during the 1970s and 1980s that was switching to neoliberal policies. I argue that this strategy allowed for the organizations to be effective in building support for the struggles they took up in the name of fighting for better democratic, social, and human rights.
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Title: "Fifty-cent sybils" : occult workers and the symbolic marketplace in the urban U.S., 1850-1930
Creator: Stone-Gordon, Tammy
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Fight the power" : an exploration of the Black Student Activist Scholar
Creator: Quinney, Dominick Nelson
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation explored the lived experiences of eight Black Student Activist Scholars on the campus of a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). Through the use of Critical Race Theory, and Sociopolitical Development, it was discovered that Black students understand their activist and civic engagement to be that of a 'duty of knowledge' wherein students expressed the importance of raising social awareness amongst their peers, colleagues, and the larger campus community. Furthermore, their...
Show moreThis dissertation explored the lived experiences of eight Black Student Activist Scholars on the campus of a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). Through the use of Critical Race Theory, and Sociopolitical Development, it was discovered that Black students understand their activist and civic engagement to be that of a 'duty of knowledge' wherein students expressed the importance of raising social awareness amongst their peers, colleagues, and the larger campus community. Furthermore, their lived experiences as scholar activists expanded their worldview of committing to social justice from a humanistic approach. Additionally, this dissertation is descriptive as well as prescriptive, as it highlights implications for Black Studies. -- Abstract.
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Title: "Flooding oil" : investigating poor health in vulnerable communities in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria
Creator: Barry, Fatoumata Binta
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Niger Delta region in Nigeria has been exploited for decades due to extensive oil and gas deposits that have led to devastating livelihood and health consequences. In addition to oil and gas industry impacts, floods are intensifying in Niger Delta communities that have annual flooding during the rainy season (April to October). In 2012, Nigeria experienced a severe flooding event that damaged infrastructure and livelihoods with virtually no studies completed about the health consequences....
Show moreThe Niger Delta region in Nigeria has been exploited for decades due to extensive oil and gas deposits that have led to devastating livelihood and health consequences. In addition to oil and gas industry impacts, floods are intensifying in Niger Delta communities that have annual flooding during the rainy season (April to October). In 2012, Nigeria experienced a severe flooding event that damaged infrastructure and livelihoods with virtually no studies completed about the health consequences. This dissertation research study aims to fill this scholarly gap by disentangling the emerging health concerns in Niger Delta oil communities with particular attention to women and children as they are sensitive indicators of population health. It utilizes a mixed-methods approach with the inclusion of Eco-Syndemics and African womanism theoretical perspectives. It was found that the Niger Delta has multiple pre-existing vulnerabilities that put the population at more risk during flooding events. Also, through an evaluation of airborne concentrations of chemicals released by gas flares and a retrospective, cross-sectional comparison, women and children in Uzere (oil community) have greater exposure levels to toxic chemicals released and more health concerns than similar women and children in Aviara (non-oil community), even though both communities are located in flood-prone areas in the Niger Delta. Overall, this dissertation research advances our understanding of the complexity of health hazards in communities close to oil and gas activities in the midst of more severe flooding. It also enriches scholarly and policy debates by providing an initial assessment of the link between climate variability and health in vulnerable communities. -- Abstract.
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