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Title: "Something like a blowing wind" : African conspiracy and the coordination of resistance to colonial rule in South Africa, 1876-1882
Creator: Cohen, Brett
Date: 2000
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Squatter settlements as a transitional adjustment phase in rural-urban migration : the case of Tabriz, Iran"
Creator: Aloochi, Housain Banifatemeh
Date: 1982
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Staying together" : kinship and community in Fiji
Creator: Turner, James West
Date: 1983
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Step up little homie, got something to say" : a study of hip-hop pedagogy in an out of school program
Creator: Newby, Ashley Luetisha
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Much of the existing Hip-Hop Pedagogy research focuses on the inclusion of Hip-Hop in formal classroom spaces, and the role that Hip-Hop culture plays in the lives of Black and Brown youth specifically. By investigating a Hip-Hop Academy that teaches Hip-Hop culture rather than merely using it as a bridge between academic goals and student realities, this project seeks to add to the existing literature on Hip-Hop Pedagogy in education. Through the use of observations and interviews over the...
Show moreMuch of the existing Hip-Hop Pedagogy research focuses on the inclusion of Hip-Hop in formal classroom spaces, and the role that Hip-Hop culture plays in the lives of Black and Brown youth specifically. By investigating a Hip-Hop Academy that teaches Hip-Hop culture rather than merely using it as a bridge between academic goals and student realities, this project seeks to add to the existing literature on Hip-Hop Pedagogy in education. Through the use of observations and interviews over the course of a school year, the voices of the participants at the Hip-Hop Academy are placed central and the ways that they conceptualize and navigate their Hip-Hop and Academic identities are explored. This study investigates how students who are being explicitly taught Hip-Hop see the connections between the culture and their academic lives in their own words. The research questions for this study are (1) What is the nature of a space grounded in Hip-Hop culture and constructed through critical theory? (2) What is the nature of student reflection on the world? And (3) What does student participation in spaces like the Hip-Hop Academy reveal about how students want to learn? Through the use of observations, ethnographic field notes, and individual interviews, the voices of the students at the Academy are centered in this study, and the voices of the instructors are incorporated in ways that both answer the research questions, and reveal the ways that the students view their academic and Hip-Hop identities operating in conjunction with one another. The findings reveal that not only does Hip-Hop Pedagogy resonate with student populations that are marginalized, but that it also resonates with some of the most privileged identities in ways that allows all students to recognize and use their voices to express who their multiple identities in ways that are empowering. Furthermore, the students in this study see the skills that they learn through the Hip-Hop Academy as applicable to the other areas of their lives in ways that reveal a student-identified difference between “knowledge” and “education.” The findings of this study reveal that students are not seeing their Hip-Hop goals as in opposition to their academic and career goals, rather they are using the skills that developed through Hip-Hop culture to pursue both Hip-Hop and academic goals simultaneously in ways that compliment each other. This offers implications not only for the power behind honoring student voices through Hip-Hop, but also for how our classrooms and learning spaces can be structured in ways that both make students want to be there and feel comfortable asserting their own voices.
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Title: "Stop killing my vibe" : a critical language pedagogy for speakers of African American Language
Creator: Baker-Bell, April
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Black and Brown students face an abysmal threat not only in classrooms but in the world because of how they have been trained to understand themselves in and through their language. Within communities and schools, students who communicate in African American Language (AAL) encounter negative messages that suggest that their language is deficient, inferior, wrong, and unintelligent. This study reveals the consequences AAL-speaking students faced when using their language in academic and non...
Show moreBlack and Brown students face an abysmal threat not only in classrooms but in the world because of how they have been trained to understand themselves in and through their language. Within communities and schools, students who communicate in African American Language (AAL) encounter negative messages that suggest that their language is deficient, inferior, wrong, and unintelligent. This study reveals the consequences AAL-speaking students faced when using their language in academic and non-academic contexts. It also reveals how these students responded to a critical language pedagogical innovation. In particular, I explored how AAL-speaking students in two ninth grade English Language Arts classrooms understood themselves linguistically across multiple contexts and to determine if their engagement with a Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP) could transform their unfavorable attitudes toward AAL. Based on findings from this study, I drew the following conclusions: (1) the students understood AAL to be a linguistic resource with associated consequences in their everyday lives, (2) the students resisted and held negative attitudes toward AAL before the CLP innovation, and (3) the students' responses following their engagement with the CLP suggested that the innovation impacted their attitudes in important and dramatic ways.
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Title: "Take action in the world!" : advocacy and reciprocity as research practices in technical communication
Creator: Turner, Heather Noel
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines how scholars in technical and professional communication conduct research related to social justice. I define social justice research, then identify and visualize disciplinary activity related to social justice over a 10 year (2006-2016) time span. Using data visualizations and critical computations as a methodological heuristic, I present the practices of four scholars conducting social justice research to offer thematic data narratives. I found that scholars can...
Show moreThis dissertation examines how scholars in technical and professional communication conduct research related to social justice. I define social justice research, then identify and visualize disciplinary activity related to social justice over a 10 year (2006-2016) time span. Using data visualizations and critical computations as a methodological heuristic, I present the practices of four scholars conducting social justice research to offer thematic data narratives. I found that scholars can enact social justice when they intentionally integrate principles of advocacy and reciprocity across the arcs of their research processes. Advocacy occurs when researchers negotiate, accommodate and facilitate justice across research settings, throughout research processes, and with research partners. Reciprocity occurs when researchers structure opportunities to exchange knowledge, labor, and resources with participants and related peoples, communities, organizations, and nonprofits. The data from 960 conference presentations and four semi-structured interviews with technical communication researchers reveals that technical communication as a field has commitments to inclusion, public action, and increasing individual agency. Social justice researchers enact these commitments through their research processes, across research contexts, and with various research partners.
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Title: "Taming the Intractable" : Chinese Migrants, Inter-Asian Interactions, and the Transformation of French Rule in Colonial Vietnam, 1862-1940
Creator: Le, Anh Sy Huy
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation explores the migration, settlement, and evolution of the Chinese communities—a largely forgotten diaspora—and their importance in the transformation of French colonial Vietnam. Drawing on three years of transnational archival research spanning Vietnam, China and Singapore in a variety of Vietnamese, Chinese, French, and English sources, I construct the first comprehensive social and political history of Chinese commercial networks, social organizations, and cultural...
Show moreThis dissertation explores the migration, settlement, and evolution of the Chinese communities—a largely forgotten diaspora—and their importance in the transformation of French colonial Vietnam. Drawing on three years of transnational archival research spanning Vietnam, China and Singapore in a variety of Vietnamese, Chinese, French, and English sources, I construct the first comprehensive social and political history of Chinese commercial networks, social organizations, and cultural institutions; their multi-level interactions with the French colonial regime and Vietnamese; and their relations to mobile communities in maritime Southeast Asia and a China in the middle of drastic political transformations. Focusing on four crucial sites of ethnic Chinese-colonial state interactions, notably the colonial rice trade, health and cultural institutions, immigration surveillance, and crime and informal economies, my dissertation resituates the Chinese in Vietnam at the center of a prominent Nanyang diasporic network connecting East and Southeast Asia by examining Chinese transnationalism and identities as evolving and flexible articulations that responded dialogically to French colonial control, to the gravity of the Chinese Revolution and nationalist movements, and to varying modes of interactions with the wider Chinese capital and migratory connections in Hong Kong and Singapore.The dissertation is organized into four main chapters, thematically and chronologically organized to highlight the evolution of Chinese identities, mobile practices, and relationships to colonialism against dominant narratives of modern Vietnamese history that tend to privilege revolutionary times and downplay inter-ethnic elements. Chapter 1 explores Chinese rice monopoly and the political struggles between transnational rice merchants, a hyper-regulatory colonial state, and a new generation of Francophile Vietnamese politicians who advocated anti-Chinese nationalism as the answer to Chinese “domination.” Chapter 2 focuses on Chinese participation in the global opium trade, gambling cercles, and inter-Asian relationships that fostered an informal economy while challenging the foundation of colonial legal structures, leading to Vietnamese contentious attitudes towards Chinese roles in the French civilizing mission. Chapter 3 investigates the establishment, bureaucratization, and innovation of the French service of immigration control seeking to police increasingly mobile Chinese economic, social, and “illicit” networks and Chinese deployment of flexible identities to resist colonial hegemonic regulations. And chapter 4 turns to examine the local and transnational tensions of ethnic co-existence between mobile Chinese communities and the colonial state as reflected in issues of Franco-Chinese education, repatriations of Chinese remains to Hong Kong and their hometowns, and Chinese-led hospitals and their interactions with colonial medical institutions. My dissertation advances four interrelated areas of studies: Chinese migrants in Vietnam in the history of Nanyang Chinese migration wherein Vietnam’s crucial Chinese communities have remained largely marginal; the studies of the Sinosphere and Chinese identities; Sino-European relations and postcolonialism; and the history of colonial and modern Vietnam at large. By destabilizing Chinese-ness through an examination of diasporic identities under French rule and their multiple manifestations, my dissertation gives southern Vietnam and its Chinese communities their rightful places in the broader history of global empires, Chinese migration, and Greater China.
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Title: "Taming the Sexual Tempest" : sexual education programs in Protestant youth groups, 1960-1980
Creator: McLean, Jaime Lynn
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACT "TAMING THE SEXUAL TEMPEST": SEXUAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN PROTESTANT YOUTH GROUPS, 1960-1980 By Jaime Lynn McLeanMy dissertation makes a contribution to four fields of historical scholarship: the history of youth ministry, baby boom generation, the social and cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of the sexual revolution. Set in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, I examine the formal and informal sexual education literature and programming designed...
Show moreABSTRACT "TAMING THE SEXUAL TEMPEST": SEXUAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN PROTESTANT YOUTH GROUPS, 1960-1980 By Jaime Lynn McLeanMy dissertation makes a contribution to four fields of historical scholarship: the history of youth ministry, baby boom generation, the social and cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of the sexual revolution. Set in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, I examine the formal and informal sexual education literature and programming designed and used by two Protestant youth groups during this period: Liberal Religious Youth, a youth run denominational group supported by the Unitarian Universalist Association and Youth For Christ an evangelical para-church organization for high school students. Protestant religious groups, evangelicals in particular, were at the center of debates over comprehensive sexual education in American high schools in the 1960s. However what often gets lost in the discussion of liberal support for and evangelical objections to sex education in schools are the alternative and/or supplemental programs designed and utilized by those working within the youth ministry. The content and the tone of these programs changed significantly between 1960 and 1980, coinciding with changes in youth culture happening among three cohorts of baby boomers. However, the strategies the groups used to reach teenagers were remarkably similar. The history of sexual education in YFC and LRY during the 1960s and 1970s indicates both conservative and liberal religious adults moved away from impersonal and overt efforts to control and monitor teen sexuality to a strategy which allowed them to manage teen sexuality by teaching teens to monitor themselves. I argue that the changing sexual culture in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s prompted Youth for Christ and Liberal Religious Youth to employ similar strategies to deliver very different messages about gender, love, relationships, and sexuality. Both groups employed three separate strategies over the course of these two decades each targeted at a specific wave of the baby boomer generation. I divide these strategies/cohorts into three rough periods. The first period encompasses 1960-1966. The second period runs from 1967-1972. The third period is from 1973 to 1980. I have divided the baby boomers into these cohorts because of the nature of the high school experience. Typically, scholarship focusing on youth culture privileges college students. In my study, I focus on high school students who have a much shorter and more contained youth experience.
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Title: "Thanks to Facebook, getting old isn't that bad and I am not all alone in this world" : an investigation of the effect of Facebook use on mattering and loneliness among elder orphans
Creator: Francis, Jessica
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The number of older adults at risk for social disconnectedness, loneliness, and the negative mental and physical health outcomes associated with each will reach unprecedented size in the next decade. Elder orphans, or adults aged 65+ who live alone and are unmarried and childless, are particularly at risk for social isolation. Prior research has shown that social media use, specifically Facebook use, can provide individuals with access to social resources that promote well-being. To date, the...
Show moreThe number of older adults at risk for social disconnectedness, loneliness, and the negative mental and physical health outcomes associated with each will reach unprecedented size in the next decade. Elder orphans, or adults aged 65+ who live alone and are unmarried and childless, are particularly at risk for social isolation. Prior research has shown that social media use, specifically Facebook use, can provide individuals with access to social resources that promote well-being. To date, the research regarding Facebook use and its impact on loneliness is somewhat inconclusive. There have been studies with young adults, however, that suggest that Facebook use might promote the perception of mattering – a protective resource against loneliness. It is the aim of this study to assess how the modalities of Facebook can be harnessed in order to address the threat of loneliness among elder orphans through the promotion of mattering. This study employed online survey methodology among a sample of elder orphan Facebook users (n = 517). Participants were asked to answer questions related to their perceptions of mattering, loneliness, depression, and social disconnectedness. Participants were also asked questions about their Facebook use such as experience, motivations for use, frequently performed activities, concern for privacy and level of intensity. Analyses performed in this study include frequencies, simple linear regressions, and the Hayes’ PROCESS model for mediation and moderation.Results of this study show that Facebook activities were significantly and positively related to mattering and significantly and negatively related to loneliness among elder orphans. Moreover, mattering was shown to fully mediate the relationship between Facebook activities and loneliness for elder orphans. Results further suggest that receiving “Likes” is the most frequent Facebook activity that elder orphans encounter, and that receiving “Likes” is also significantly related to the three sub-dimensions of mattering: attention/awareness, importance, and dependence/reliance. Further results, limitations, and implications of this research for elder orphans and the aging community at large are detailed herein.
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Title: "That's what it's all about, becoming mothers that can live a normal life and raise their children" : how a group of mothers navigate an alternative to incarceration intervention
Creator: Sutherby, Carolyn G.
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Introduction: Approximately 60% of all incarcerated women in the United States are mothers with minor children and most of them are single mothers (Glaze & Maruschak, 2009). When mothers with minor children are incarcerated, the disconnection and loss of relationship as well as tangible support can have a "traumatic" impact on families (Sadof, 2015, p. 1). Alternatives to incarceration (ATI) are a viable option to hold women accountable for their crimes while maintaining their significant...
Show moreIntroduction: Approximately 60% of all incarcerated women in the United States are mothers with minor children and most of them are single mothers (Glaze & Maruschak, 2009). When mothers with minor children are incarcerated, the disconnection and loss of relationship as well as tangible support can have a "traumatic" impact on families (Sadof, 2015, p. 1). Alternatives to incarceration (ATI) are a viable option to hold women accountable for their crimes while maintaining their significant relationships and providing them with necessary rehabilitation (Goshin, 2015). Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how a group of mothers reportedly navigated an alternative to incarceration intervention and how the ATI compared to any previous incarceration they experienced. Methods: An exploratory thematic analysis was conducted, and data were collected from eight focus groups involving mothers (N = 34) who were current participants or graduates of an alternative to incarceration program. The focus groups were audio taped, fully transcribed and reviewed with field notes prepared from the researcher and assistant. Data were coded and themes developed to answer the two research questions. Results: Analysis revealed ten salient themes: "reasons for criminal legal involvement", "an ideal ATI" ,"trust the process", "case-by-case", "support- they help with everything", "breaking the intergenerational cycle", "incarceration is not rehabilitation", "incarceration is easy, the program is hard", "I'm not the same person", "connection with children" Discussion & Implications: Findings suggest that mothers may successfully navigatean ATI that provides targeted rehabilitative services that include tangible and emotional support and prioritizes connection with children. Staff should understand the apprehension of mothers to engage in services, teach parenting and life skills and provide non-judgmental and hands-on services. Future research should evaluate current alternatives to incarceration interventions and outcomes for graduates of ATI should be studied. Studies involving women of color and ATI are needed, including the rate they are offered ATI and reasons they may decline the option. More qualitative studies must be conducted to continue hearing from mothers themselves regarding their experiences within the criminal legal system.
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Title: "The golden years" : reconstruction and reindustrialization in Soviet heavy industry, 1946-1950
Creator: Orsag, Mark A. (Mark Andrew)
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "The greatest single threat," : a study of the Black Panther Party 1966-1971
Creator: Thevenin, Rose Carine
Date: 2003
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "The lost generation" : black youth unemployment in Detroit and the formation of a segment of the modern "reserve army of labor" 1967-1980
Creator: White, Clark Eldridge
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "The magnificent fight" : civil rights litigation in South Carolina federal courts, 1940-1970
Creator: Lowe, Stephen Harold
Date: 1999
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "The music of [our] thoughts" : the Elizabeth Gaskell journal: digital edition
Creator: Klamer, Melissa J.
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Gaskell Journal Digital Edition is an online, openly accessible edition of a single Gaskell text, Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript journal, offering an annotated and newly transcribed text side-by-side with high-quality digital images of the manuscript pages. This new edition provides a digitally encoded version of the text. The digital markup embeds metadata and editorial notes and transcription directly into a single Edition file. Additionally, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal - Digital...
Show moreThe Gaskell Journal Digital Edition is an online, openly accessible edition of a single Gaskell text, Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript journal, offering an annotated and newly transcribed text side-by-side with high-quality digital images of the manuscript pages. This new edition provides a digitally encoded version of the text. The digital markup embeds metadata and editorial notes and transcription directly into a single Edition file. Additionally, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal - Digital Edition offers editorial headnotes contextualizing the journal as a text predominantly focused on motherhood, and a prosopography identifying important individuals, texts, and geographic locations that created the context within which Gaskell wrote. The journal simultaneously works as an intervention in dissertation practice, through modeling a digital dissertation deliverable which mobilizes current practices in textual encoding to create an online edition of the manuscript which capitalizes on available technologies.Gaskell's journal was written to record her motherhood. Gaskell gave birth to seven children, of whom four daughters survived childhood: Marianne (b. 1834), Margaret, called "Meta" (b. 1837), Florence (b. 1842) and Julia (b. 1846). The Gaskells also had a stillborn daughter (1833), and two sons who died in infancy (an unnamed son, born between 1838-1841, and William, born in 1845). Gaskell began her journal in 1834 to record the life of Marianne, then aged 6 months, and continued it until 1838, when Marianne was four and Meta was eighteen months old. Gaskell's daughters were her central focus and close companions for over half her life, and the beginnings of this relationship are chronicled in the journal, as are her own reflections on her role as a mother.Gaskell began her journal with the explicit intention of recording her memories of Marianne's childhood in the face of an uncertain future, but it later became a "paper mother" - a productive tool through which she mothered herself as well as her progeny. Beyond writing the journal to record and reflect on her daughters' development, Gaskell wrote in her journal in order to weigh Victorian norms and expectations for maternal practice, and mobilized it as a tool for emotional self-regulation as she sought to shape her own identity as a Victorian mother. In effect, Gaskell's journal exists as a text that demonstrates maternal life writing as a productive tool employed for shaping a socially acceptable selfhood for Victorian mothers and daughters alike.
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Title: "The pen and the pulpit" : Isaac Mayer Wise's fiction in The Israelite
Creator: Raphael, Lev
Date: 1986
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "The white man's burden" in Anglo-Indian fiction
Creator: Dulai, Surjit Singh
Date: 1965
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "The whole furshlugginer operation" : the Jewish comic book industry, 1933-1954
Creator: Mercier, Sebastian T.
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Over the course of the twentieth century, the comic book industry evolved from an amateur operation into a major institution of American popular culture. Comic books, once considered mere cultural ephemera or quite simply “junk,” became a major commodity business.The comic book industry emerged out of the pulp magazine industry. According to industry circulation data, new comic book releases increased from 22 in 1939 to 1125 titles by the end of 1945. Comic book scholars have yet to...
Show moreOver the course of the twentieth century, the comic book industry evolved from an amateur operation into a major institution of American popular culture. Comic books, once considered mere cultural ephemera or quite simply “junk,” became a major commodity business.The comic book industry emerged out of the pulp magazine industry. According to industry circulation data, new comic book releases increased from 22 in 1939 to 1125 titles by the end of 1945. Comic book scholars have yet to adequately explain the roots of this historical phenomenon, particularly its distinctly Jewish composition. Between the years of 1933 and 1954, the comic book industry operated as a successful distinct Jewish industry. The comic book industry emerged from the pulp magazine trade. Economic necessity, more than any other factor, attracted Jewish writers and artists to the nascent industry. Jewish publishers adopted many of the same business practices they inherited from the pulps. As second-generation Jews, these young men shared similar experiences growing up in New York City. Other creative industries actively practiced anti-Semitic hiring procedures. Many Jewish artists came to comic book work with very little professional experience in cartooning and scripting. The comic book industry allowed one to learn on the job. The cultural world comic books emerged out of was crucially important to the industry’s development. Comic strips, pulps, movies, and science fiction all inspired Jewish writers and artists. An exploration of the comic book industry’s working environment reveals how Jewish comic book writers, artists, editors, and publishers simultaneously created a space for themselves as Jews while developing successful comic book titles and characters. While many of them created an environment suitable to workplace camaraderie and collaboration, there were several areas of conflict. An investigation of these areas of conflict show how Jews responded to workplace disagreements, management exploitation, and battles over artistic credit. In particular, the practice of ghosting art remains a particularly contentious issue. Jewish writers and artists in the comic book industry did not form or join a labor union in order to protect their rights and interests. A consideration of this development shows that they stood in stark contrast to other industries with a large Jewish workforce. Finally, the examination of World War II through the comic book industry’s internal development provides a variety of different ways to unearth how the Jewish writers, artists, editors, and publishers shed their amateur roots and became a professionalized industry. This professional turn brought increased sales and increasingly mature content for an older readership. Many Jewish writers and artists feared being drafted into the military. However, those that were drafted came away from their experiences with a sense of pride and accomplishment. They could not foresee that their industry was coming under attack. Many comic book historians place the roots for the comic book industry’s cultural downfall in the 1950s. However, primary sources from the 1940s reveal that social critics and parents were already concerned about mature comic book content in the 1940s. Comic book publishers were slow to respond or outright ignored complaints from social critics and concerned parents.
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Title: "Theory begins with a story, too" : listening to the lived experiences of American Indian women
Creator: Riley-Mukavetz, Andrea
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTTHEORY BEGINS WITH A STORY, TOO: LISTENING TO THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF AMERICAN INDIAN WOMENByAndrea Riley-MukavetzThis dissertation argues that the stories American Indian women tell about their lived experiences are rhetorical theories used to survive institutional spaces like academia. One community-based study is central to this argument: my research with a group of multi-generational Odawa women who live and work in Lansing, Michigan. By listening to the stories from the Little...
Show moreABSTRACTTHEORY BEGINS WITH A STORY, TOO: LISTENING TO THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF AMERICAN INDIAN WOMENByAndrea Riley-MukavetzThis dissertation argues that the stories American Indian women tell about their lived experiences are rhetorical theories used to survive institutional spaces like academia. One community-based study is central to this argument: my research with a group of multi-generational Odawa women who live and work in Lansing, Michigan. By listening to the stories from the Little Traverse Bay Band women, I hear their stories as theories and use them as the primary framework for the dissertation project. Their theories draw attention to how Native women take deliberate positions that resist Euro-centric identities and practices. Yet, these positions affect how tribal and mainstream discourses acknowledge American Indian women's roles and responsibilities. I build a relational theory of visibility by weaving the theories from the Odawa women, the writing of indigenous feminists, and rhetorical histories written by or for American Indian women into each other. This theory examines how American Indian women negotiate the challenges of being visible in the community, at work, or while living and working in the university. This dissertation develops a cultural rhetorics methodology to continue to disassemble colonial rhetorics and cultivate a space to examine what practices should be used to rebuild our tribal communities inside and outside of the university. By drawing upon indigenous rhetorical practices, I show how researchers are complicit in using colonial rhetorics and provide a model to decolonize how we live and work in institutional spaces.
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Title: "There is something in all this very like democracy" : cultures of political discussion in the Victorian novel
Creator: Volkova, Inna Yevgenievna
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACT"THERE IS SOMETHING IN ALL THIS VERY LIKE DEMOCRACY": CULTURES OF POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN THE VICTORIAN NOVELByInna Yevgenievna VolkovaI examine a strain of Victorian novels that I call "novels of discussion" and their imaginings of various models of political discussion in the public sphere. In their aspiration for the liberal ideals of a "free and equal discussion (15)," to use John Stuart Mill's phrase, these novels articulate a variety of such blueprints that compete with and...
Show moreABSTRACT"THERE IS SOMETHING IN ALL THIS VERY LIKE DEMOCRACY": CULTURES OF POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN THE VICTORIAN NOVELByInna Yevgenievna VolkovaI examine a strain of Victorian novels that I call "novels of discussion" and their imaginings of various models of political discussion in the public sphere. In their aspiration for the liberal ideals of a "free and equal discussion (15)," to use John Stuart Mill's phrase, these novels articulate a variety of such blueprints that compete with and build on one another. Analyzing the potentialities and internal contradictions of these models, I intervene in three areas of scholarly interest: Victorian liberalism, the form of the novel, and public sphere theory. I focus on Victorian liberalism's investments in the formal organization of political discussion in the public sphere and suggest that the changeability and free play among discussion models lie at the heart of liberalism's project, calling for on an ongoing revision of how to discuss ideas and exchange opinions. I argue that Victorian liberal culture had high stakes in conceiving of the individual's agency in terms of an active discursive presence in the public arena and a collaborative pursuit of "truth" through face-to-face discussion. I seek to show the limitations of a commonly held view among Victorianists that nineteenth-century liberalism privileged privatized interiority and individuated reflection and conceived of social agency through the processes of inward cognition. In contrast, I show that novels often cultivated the argumentative energy and the intersubjective collaboration in discussion as a means to grapple with socio-economic and cultural issues. While I refrain from reading novels as instruments of disciplinary power, I also do not view them as texts that simply propagate a "free and equal discussion." Rather, my close-readings reveal how the novels showcase the progressive potentialities of various discussion models, while also exploring these models' dangers, impracticability, ambivalences, and internal tensions. In an attempt to strive for social justice and inclusion, the novels gesture specifically to face-to-face discussion as a process that facilitates a sincere exchange of opinions, ensures equality based on mutual respect and recognition, and so lays the foundation of democratic sociality. As an artifact of print culture that created a mediated relationship with its anonymous faceless readership, the novel becomes a seemingly paradoxical site of advocating for a face-to-face unmediated political discussion. I do not view this phenomenon as Victorians' nostalgia for the golden age before print. Rather, novelistic representation of face-to-face discussion was a way for Victorian novelists to bring it into full relief. They often self-consciously contrasted face-to-face discussion with the very medium through which it was represented. The project is arranged chronologically, spanning the late 1820's to the Edwardian period of the early twentieth century. The chapters focus on Harriet Martineau's tales of political economy, Benjamin Disraeli's novel Sybil, Charles Reade's Put Yourself in His Place, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, George Gissing's Demos, and Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. While these novels at one time enjoyed widespread popularity, they are no longer staples of Victorian literature today. However, these novels' past popularity suggests that their preoccupation with political discussion reflects crucial facets of Victorian culture. Similar preoccupations, perhaps in less explicit ways, surface in more canonical authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and others. In what Walter Bagehot called the "age of discussion," the novels operated as an experimental ground for Victorians' ideals, hopes, and competing views about the public sphere.
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