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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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Title: "There shall be no woman slackers" : the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense and social welfare activism as home defense, 1917-1919
Creator: Anthony VanOrsdal, Anita
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker organized the Council of National Defense, a group of civilian businessmen in essential industries, labor leaders, and transportation experts, to coordinate for wartime needs. President Wilson and Secretary Baker also created the Woman’s Committee as a semiautonomous branch of the Council of National Defense to represent and coordinate the nation’s women to organize and maintain...
Show moreWhen the United States entered the Great War in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker organized the Council of National Defense, a group of civilian businessmen in essential industries, labor leaders, and transportation experts, to coordinate for wartime needs. President Wilson and Secretary Baker also created the Woman’s Committee as a semiautonomous branch of the Council of National Defense to represent and coordinate the nation’s women to organize and maintain the home-front for the duration of the war. Under federal mandate, the Woman’s Committee defined “home-front defense” as the protection of the American family, most notably the nation’s women and children, from the social disruptions of World War I. The Woman’s Committee established coalitions with Progressive Era women’s clubs to assist the U.S. Food Administration with wartime food and nutritional needs, coordinated a massive child-savings campaign with the federal Children’s Bureau, and conducted sociological research to support demands from working-class women. The Woman’s Committee’s goals supported the war effort and expanded women’s domestic political power through social welfare activism. The American involvement in the war, however, steered women reformers into relationships with each other that remained loosely-defined during the war and ultimately created a false sense of political solidarity among women’s groups and federal agencies partnered with the Woman’s Committee. The war presented over 10 million American women with opportunities to become involved in local, state, and national politics through social welfare activism on behalf of children and women in their local communities and states. The social welfare activism of American women who joined in the Woman’s Committee’s wartime programs helped shape women’s political power in the early 1920s. Once the crisis of the war ended, the coalitions the Woman’s Committee helped foster splintered into warring camps that divided over the course of women’s post-war politics.
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Title: "They all came from someplace else" : Miami, Florida's immigrant communities, 1896-1970
Creator: Shell-Weiss, Melanie Rebecca
Date: 2002
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "They can't be patient. They can't wait. They have to fight." : How migrant youth experience identity, policy, and learning at a Michigan summer migrant program
Creator: Crandall, Kristina A.
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The children of migrant farmworkers are a population of young people with very unique lived experiences. They travel with their families multiple times a year in search of agricultural or fishing work opportunities. This consistent uprooting often causes interrupted educational experiences as their moving patterns do not necessarily align with the academic calendars of schools. The lack of curricular consistency between states, districts, and even schools often translates into a disjointed...
Show moreThe children of migrant farmworkers are a population of young people with very unique lived experiences. They travel with their families multiple times a year in search of agricultural or fishing work opportunities. This consistent uprooting often causes interrupted educational experiences as their moving patterns do not necessarily align with the academic calendars of schools. The lack of curricular consistency between states, districts, and even schools often translates into a disjointed education causing migrant youth to fall behind academically from their non-migrant peers. Without the assistance of supplementary support systems, it is no surprise that migrant youth are one of the most educationally deprived populations and has one of the highest high school drop out/push out rates in the United States. Due to their extreme marginalization from dominant society living in the campos and working in the fields for tremendously low wages, migrant farmworkers and their children often live in poverty and have high rates of malnutrition. Furthermore, a large percentage of migrant farmworkers are undocumented immigrants, leaving them in very vulnerable positions when it comes to work, education, and even access to health care. Migrant farmworkers are hard workers and dedicated people, and with the help of additional support systems, such as summer migrant programs, are able to provide their children with an aptitude for resiliency. This study explores how migrant youth make sense of their identity as Mexican and indigenous migrants in U.S. schools and society. Furthermore, the study addresses how Migrant Educational Policy is structured at the Federal level, interpreted and implemented at the State and local levels, and then how such policy is experienced by migrant youth in a summer migrant program called Van Buren Intermediate School District’s Project NOMAD in Michigan. It is a case study of emergent bilingual migrant youth as they experience and engage in education in a summer migrant program, how they experience policy as it reaches them at the local level, and how they identify themselves and understand their unique experiences as migrant youth.Based on findings from this study, I come to several conclusions: (1) migrant youth are unique individuals with unique needs and an incredible amount of strength and resilience; (2) migrant youth deserve powerful, excellent, and humanizing educational opportunities that help them not only overcome any academic gaps but also help them grow to be the critical thinking leaders they are capable of becoming; (3) programs like Project NOMAD provide a range of invaluable support for and empower migrant youth and their families; and (4) programs for migrants and educators of migrant youth must continue to reflect on how they can provide humanizing educational experiences within the constraints of educational policy.
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Title: "They look at your color" : children of Nigerian immigrants in the Republic of Ireland and their beliefs and expressions of being Irish
Creator: McClure, Donald Robison, II
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Since the 1990s, Ireland has experienced a significant increase in racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity due, in large part, to immigration. A major cause for immigration in Ireland has been economic growth, although other influences, such as social factors, have played a role, too. Perhaps one of the most visible effects immigration and increased diversity have had on Irish society appears in Ireland’s classrooms. Students from a variety of cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds now...
Show moreSince the 1990s, Ireland has experienced a significant increase in racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity due, in large part, to immigration. A major cause for immigration in Ireland has been economic growth, although other influences, such as social factors, have played a role, too. Perhaps one of the most visible effects immigration and increased diversity have had on Irish society appears in Ireland’s classrooms. Students from a variety of cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds now attend Irish schools and are beginning to reshape the overall demographics of Irish society. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how a group of four second-generation Nigerian youths born and raised in Ireland make sense of what it means to “be Irish” today. The dissertation is a case study that investigates how the four children—two girls and two boys in the fifth and sixth grades at an Irish primary school—perceive Irish citizenship and national identity, how they learn to be Irish, and how they express their Irish identities as youths of color. This dissertation’s research questions and methodological approach are rooted in two frameworks: Ogbu’s (1998) classification of minority groups, and Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation. The dissertation draws on five main data sources: 1) one-on-one interviews with students, teachers, and school administrators; 2) focus group interviews with students; 3) school observations; 4) school curricular materials; and 5) student schoolwork. Although there is a growing body of literature regarding diversity and schooling in the Republic of Ireland, there is a significant need for additional research to investigate the beliefs of students from diverse racial, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds in Irish schools, and how these students make sense of their identities as Irish citizens. This dissertation aims to help fill this gap and to inform policymakers, educators, and others in the Republic of Ireland to think more deeply about the way Irish schools are preparing all students for active citizenship, and how these schools can more precisely mirror the changing demographics in Irish society.The dissertation concludes that the four second-generation Nigerian students in Ireland developed racialized perceptions of what it means to be Irish based on their experiences of racism and other forms of discrimination they encountered both inside and outside school. As a result, the students often felt excluded from social groups. In addition, although the four students were born in Ireland, identified as Irish (to varying degrees), and were legal Irish citizens, the children claimed that they felt not fully Irish because of how they were treated. However, despite these challenging circumstances, the children demonstrated resilience as they accessed different forms of cultural capital in creative ways that allowed them to express their Irish identities. Ultimately, the students’ ingenuity helped them carve out a place for themselves as youths of color in Irish society. This dissertation’s findings enhance understanding about the way youths circumnavigate social challenges to create opportunities, as well as how second-generation youths develop conceptions of citizenship and national identity as active social agents in the world.
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Title: "They wasn't makin' my kinda music" : hip-hop, schooling, and music education
Creator: Kruse, Adam J.
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: With the ambition of informing place consciousness in music education by better understanding the social contexts of hip-hop music education and illuminating potential applications of hip-hop to school music settings, the purpose of this research is to explore the sociocultural aspects of hip-hop musicians' experiences in music education and music schooling. In particular, this study is informed by the following questions:1. How do sociocultural contexts (particularly issues of race, space,...
Show moreWith the ambition of informing place consciousness in music education by better understanding the social contexts of hip-hop music education and illuminating potential applications of hip-hop to school music settings, the purpose of this research is to explore the sociocultural aspects of hip-hop musicians' experiences in music education and music schooling. In particular, this study is informed by the following questions:1. How do sociocultural contexts (particularly issues of race, space, place, and class) impact hip-hop musicians and their music?2. What are hip-hop musicians' perceptions of school and schooling?3. Where, when, how, and with whom do hip-hop musicians develop and explore their musical skills and understandings?The use of an emergent design in this work allowed for the application of ethnographic techniques within the framework of a multiple case study. One case is an amateur hip-hop musician named Terrence (pseudonym), and the other is myself (previously inexperienced as a hip-hop musician) acting as participant observer.By placing Terrence and myself within our various contexts and exploring these contexts' influences on our roles as hip-hop musicians, it is possible to understand better who we are, where and when our musical experiences exist(ed), and the complex relationships between our contexts, our experiences, and our perceptions. Employingboth authenticity and identity as dynamic and performative concepts, findings demonstrate that these elements can have an important impact on musical experiences and perceptions.My history as a professional educator and Terrence's perspective as a high school dropout offer a valuable contrast of beliefs, values, and assumptions about school and education. Exploring Terrence's experiences with and perceptions of school provide additional material for placing him as a musician and learner and also allow for a criticalinvestigation of my own perspectives. Recognizing my privileged and assumption-laden perspectives offers valuable layers of nuance toward better understanding the relationships between schools, those who school, and those who are schooled.In addition to exploring Terrence's musical learning experiences, I participate in the study as a novice hip-hop beat producer under Terrence's mentorship. Investigating our musical teaching and learning delivers compelling findings toward better understanding music education as it exists outside of school. The relationships betweencollaborators, the spaces in which they work, and the backgrounds that inform their perspectives all perform important roles in the development of applicable music skills in a practice far more complicated and demanding than I had initially imagined.Terrence's experiences with and perceptions of music, school, and education challenge many of my preconceived notions and offer important considerations for music educators. My experiences as both researcher and case in this project reveal complex issues of privilege and provide opportunities to better understand and confront theseissues. I ultimately contend that hip-hop cultures possess the potential for critical improvements in some school music settings and that music educators might consider making a place for hip-hop within scholarship and practice.
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Title: "This land is good for this animal" : a methodology to see the knowledge dynamics communicated among Sardo-Modicana breeders in a time of scientific uncertainty and technological probabilities
Creator: Vagnetti, Cynthia
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: For this dissertation, I designed and conducted qualitative research adhering to an ethnographic approach that builds on the notion of culture as narrative. This study will contribute to the growing literature addressing how visual data can be applied in narrative inquiry. One of the challenges for researchers and practitioners in rural development is getting at sensory or embodied knowledge so that it can be made conscious and represented through language. Interdisciplinary investigations...
Show moreFor this dissertation, I designed and conducted qualitative research adhering to an ethnographic approach that builds on the notion of culture as narrative. This study will contribute to the growing literature addressing how visual data can be applied in narrative inquiry. One of the challenges for researchers and practitioners in rural development is getting at sensory or embodied knowledge so that it can be made conscious and represented through language. Interdisciplinary investigations that align rural conservation studies with language-based fields are gaining interest among policy makers and funding institutions. This dissertation provides evidence that a documentary video toolkit enlarges an emic perspective of situated practices, grounded in local knowledge, that necessarily serves the interests of scientific research.Specifically when focusing through the lens of a camera, attention can be directed towards tacit knowledge or specifically, "the practices that exists in people's hands and in their actions." For this dissertation, I am seeking the knowledge dynamics communicated among Sardo-Modicana breeders, whose livelihood depends on the well-being of this rare and endangeredbreed of cattle. From this study, a narrative account was crafted from the stories of six individuals that draw from a pool of knowledge that has been passed down over generations and has remained stable for nearly 150 years. A burgeoning market economy for grain was the exigency leading to innovation: the Sardo-Modicana was bred for traction in the 1880s, to cultivate wheat and carry it to the market-place. Today, men still draw the cow's milk by hand, while the women continue to produce an artisanal cheese for family and local consumption. The traditional production system maintained through intergenerational animal husbandry practices became the source of innovation for the breeders in the 21st century.In 2001 a "code of practice" indicating a formal discipline specifying new fattening procedures how the animal was drawn up in the document, "The Discipline of Production for the Protected Geographic Indicator (I.G.P. in Italian): Il Bue Rosso Del Montiferru." While this document acts as a network of communication that makes affordances for both "farmer know-how" and the "schooled knowledge" by technical or scientific experts, it necessarilyacts on the age-old livelihood practices of the Sardo-Modicana breeders. The protected geographical indications (P.G.I. in English)" is intended to fulfill the goal to conserve and to support traditional resources and protect farmers' rights and their impact on the preservation of indigenous species and traditional and local knowledge. This is a story of how each of thebreeders make sense of their world as they attempt to maintain or change cultural patterns, during a time of rapid changes in agriculture, the environment and market-driven demands.
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Title: "This most democratic province of the republic of letters" : autobiography and periodical publishing in turn-of-the-century America
Creator: Dykema-VanderArk, Anthony M.
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Thou shalt laughen al thy fille" : the comic body in medieval English and Scottish literature and culture
Creator: George, Michael W.
Date: 2000
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "To Be Termed Men" : Women's Representations of Men and Masculinity in Early Modern England
Creator: Bartholomew, Janet Lynn
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: As social gender dynamics require all sexes to define, critique, and police the boundaries of masculinity and femininity, the definition of “man” in early modern England remains incomplete if only men’s writing is consulted; women’s writing, therefore, is essential to our understanding of early modern definitions of manliness and manhood. To isolate men as a subject, a survey of writing by nine English women—Margaret Roper, Anne Clifford, Arbella Stuart, Elizabeth Cary, Elizabeth Grymeston,...
Show moreAs social gender dynamics require all sexes to define, critique, and police the boundaries of masculinity and femininity, the definition of “man” in early modern England remains incomplete if only men’s writing is consulted; women’s writing, therefore, is essential to our understanding of early modern definitions of manliness and manhood. To isolate men as a subject, a survey of writing by nine English women—Margaret Roper, Anne Clifford, Arbella Stuart, Elizabeth Cary, Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Jocelin, Rachel Speght, and Aemilia Lanyer—spanning from 1557 to 1676 was conducted across multiple genres such as letters, autobiographical writings, closet dramas, mothers’ advice manuals, poetry, and polemical tracts. By organizing the subject of men and masculinity through the lens of a woman’s experiences of patriarchy throughout her life, male experience was thus decentralized, ultimately placing an emphasis on women’s relationship with men throughout her life-cycle: daughters and fathers, wives and husbands, mothers and sons, and female citizens and larger patriarchal structures within the community. The results of the study indicate that women were both validating some manly characteristics defined by the dominant male-authored discourses, such as men being patriarchal heads of households in companionate and affectionate relationships toward their wives, as well as rejecting some dominant tropes as markers of manliness, such as martial bravery generally, and specific practices such dueling. Thus women were active participants—rather than passive recipients—in the discursive and cultural constructions of masculinity, critiquing, and policing of early modern definitions of men and manliness, as men were navigating their own struggle between masculine codes of moderation and dominance, evident in male writings.
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Title: "To better serve God and to save my soul" : marriage, gender & honor in Spanish New Mexico, 1681-1730
Creator: Gonzalez, Jennifer de la Coromoto
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Marriage in New Mexico, and indeed in all of colonial Spanish America, was significantly influenced by Spanish ideals of faith, honor, virtue and race. While it has long been argued that such ideals were handed down to the American colonies from the Iberian Peninsula unaltered, more recent scholarship asserts that the honor code, rather than a monolithic concept to be either accepted or rejected, was contextually determined and significantly influenced by socio-economic milieus and geo...
Show moreMarriage in New Mexico, and indeed in all of colonial Spanish America, was significantly influenced by Spanish ideals of faith, honor, virtue and race. While it has long been argued that such ideals were handed down to the American colonies from the Iberian Peninsula unaltered, more recent scholarship asserts that the honor code, rather than a monolithic concept to be either accepted or rejected, was contextually determined and significantly influenced by socio-economic milieus and geo-political circumstances. The contingent nature of the honor code and its influence on the institution of marriage clearly emerges in an investigation of colonial New Mexico, a region that for its peripheral position in the Viceroyalty of New Spain has suffered from a lack of deep historical analysis.Using prenuptial investigations, prenuptial disputes and deflowerment cases from the Archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe conducted between 1681 and 1730, as well as administrative records from the Archivo General de Indias, I challenge current assumptions regarding what constituted an appropriate marriage partner in this remote/distant area of the Spanish Borderlands. The "voices" I capture from these investigations allow me to analyze concerns regarding free will, sexuality, legitimacy, honor, and race, and how these informed marriage choice in colonial New Mexico fifty years after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Moreover, by examining the mechanisms Spanish colonists used to contract their preferred marriages-sometimes despite familial opposition-I challenge current assumptions regarding the importance of free will, what constituted an appropriate marriage partner in this remote area of the Spanish Empire, and detail the ways the inherent flexibility of the sistema de castas was manipulated in this region to buttress the cultural hegemony of the Spanish Empire.
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Title: "To find shelter she knows not where" : freedom, movement, and gendered violence among free people of color in Natchez, Mississippi, 1779-1865
Creator: Ribianszky, Nicole S.
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This thesis explicates how freedom, movement, and violence were inextricably linked for free people of color in Natchez, Mississippi from 1779-1865. It considers the relevance that violence or the implicit threat of it--in the form of sexual exploitation, re-enslavement, kidnapping, deportment, poverty, and racial discrimination--exerted on this population. This work centers itself within the field of violence studies.

Title: "To the editor" : ideological themes expressed by individualist and collectivist newspaper letter writers
Creator: Fox, Dennis Roy
Date: 1985
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Todo por mis hijos" (everything for my children) : exploring the parenting experiences and needs of Guatemalan mothers
Creator: Escobar-Chew, Ana Rocio
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Guatemalan women are exposed to various health and mental health disparities due to the scarcity of appropriate interventions aimed at responding to their life experiences and specific parenting needs. This investigation had two major goals: (a) To understand the life experiences of a group of Guatemalan mothers, particularly as it refers to being a woman in the Guatemalan context, and (b) to identify the participants' parenting experiences and needs. A series of focus groups were implemented...
Show moreGuatemalan women are exposed to various health and mental health disparities due to the scarcity of appropriate interventions aimed at responding to their life experiences and specific parenting needs. This investigation had two major goals: (a) To understand the life experiences of a group of Guatemalan mothers, particularly as it refers to being a woman in the Guatemalan context, and (b) to identify the participants' parenting experiences and needs. A series of focus groups were implemented with a total of 30 low-income Guatemalan mothers. Findings from this investigation clearly describe the multiple challenges that Guatemalan mothers experience in their daily lives, which also impact their parenting practices. Moreover, data show relevant individual and contextual variables associated with the participants' extraordinary sense of resilience. Finally, research findings describe the participants' high desire to participate in interventions aimed at improving their quality of life and parenting skills. This investigation constitutes the foundation of a long-term program of research aimed at culturally adapting and disseminating mental health and parenting interventions responsive to Guatemalan mothers and their families.
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Title: "True to the highest ideals of the university" Viewing conflict as a catalyst for reevaluating institutional standards and practices
Creator: Vizvary, Gina
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Conflict at institutions of higher education is not new. However, with the prevalence of the internet, disputes now capture the attention of national media outlets and can spread quickly to a large audience via social media sites and online publications. Over the last decade, conflicts over athletics, curricular changes, online classes, and special-interest research initiatives have pitted faculty against faculty and faculty against administration. At times whole campus communities may become...
Show moreConflict at institutions of higher education is not new. However, with the prevalence of the internet, disputes now capture the attention of national media outlets and can spread quickly to a large audience via social media sites and online publications. Over the last decade, conflicts over athletics, curricular changes, online classes, and special-interest research initiatives have pitted faculty against faculty and faculty against administration. At times whole campus communities may become involved in the fray, from students to staff to alumni. Organizational literature on colleges and universities tells us that higher education institutions have unique characteristics that distinguish them from the business or for-profit world. Universities must continuously innovate and adapt in order to stay relevant to society. Yet they are also decades or centuries old, with traditions, legacies, and unique cultures that pervade campus life. This tension between the old and the new, tradition and innovation, presents challenges to university leaders. When new decisions seem to contradict longstanding traditions, there is bound to be backlash. The focus of the current study was to understand the tensions that fuel university conflict. The study utilized a historical perspective to research the conflict over the planning and implementation of the Milton Friedman Institute (MFI) at the University of Chicago in 2008. Administrators and faculty involved provided their views on the conflict through interviews. Additional data came from news articles, op-ed pieces, meeting minutes, letters, and e-mails. Historical information on the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics was drawn on to provide institutional and biographical information, and well as to make connections between the 2008 conflict and past people or events that emerged in documents and interviews. Four primary factors were found to have influenced the nature of the MFI dispute: Reputation, Academic Freedom, Philanthropy, and Governance. The research data provide the opportunity for a discussion of conflict not as a negative, but as a chance to reevaluate institutional values, standards, and practices. Future directions of research and suggestions for practice are considered.
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Title: "Trying to succeed" : a descriptive study of perceptions of "success" in teaching/learning Spanish in a high school classroom
Creator: Roberts, Linda Pavian
Date: 1988
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Tumesahaulika" : Performing Development in Post-Conflict Mtwara
Creator: Elbin, Rachel E.
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Following the discovery of sizable offshore petroleum deposits off the southeastern coast of Mtwara Region in Tanzania, state and private-sector representatives assured Mtwara residents that they would see intensive government investment in local infrastructure and industry. In light of these pledges, Mtwara residents anticipated that gas refineries, processing plants, and new infrastructure would soon bring employment opportunities to the historically underdeveloped southeast. By 2012,...
Show moreFollowing the discovery of sizable offshore petroleum deposits off the southeastern coast of Mtwara Region in Tanzania, state and private-sector representatives assured Mtwara residents that they would see intensive government investment in local infrastructure and industry. In light of these pledges, Mtwara residents anticipated that gas refineries, processing plants, and new infrastructure would soon bring employment opportunities to the historically underdeveloped southeast. By 2012, however, state plans to transport the gas from Mtwara to metropolitan Dar es Salaam via a pipeline threatened expectations of regional revitalization. Following official state confirmation of the pipeline in May 2013, residents mounted a series of demonstrations to oppose the government plan from which they had largely been excluded. In response to the protest, the central government deployed the national guard in an unprecedented exercise of military power. In this dissertation, I argue that the 2013 protest reflect the existence and influence of two national development imaginaries that evoke conflicting understandings of development, citizenship, and the state. On one hand, many government workers and CSO officers promoted images of the state as unbeholden to citizen demands for widespread, enduring development as entailed within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In line with the social-development imaginary, however, Mtwara residents interpreted government promises of natural gas wealth as state recognition for Mtwara’s sustained underdevelopment and past nationalistic sacrifices. Through their protests, Mtwara residents challenged the central government’s vision for national development through state authorization of global capital investment in natural resource extraction. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and focus group sessions conducted from February 2015 to March 2016 in Mtwara and Dar es Salaam, I trace Mtwara residents’ invocations of the two development imaginaries across three critical settings: the development work of three Mtwara-based civil society organizations; the bureaucratic procedure and protocol of local government offices; and residents’ memorialization of the 2013 violence. According to literature (Ferguson 2005, 2006), concentrated areas of global capital investment in extractive projects form enclaves, dis-embedded from the historical and moral contexts of their host countries. Communities in Mtwara, however, sought to complicate the production of a dis-embedded mineral enclave by continuing to make development claims on the state.
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Title: "Type-C" : empowerment, blame, and gender in the creation of a carcinogenic personality
Creator: Pratt, Carolyn Maria
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The belief that mind-set and emotional well-being can improve cancer survival time has become something of a truism in the United States. Despite claims that this is a commonsense and consistent belief which stretches back to Galen, mind-body approaches to cancer have varied radically in response to changing social and cultural contexts. This dissertation tracks shifting meanings of this claim and the varying institutional acceptance of it from the rise of psychosomatic medicine in the 1930s...
Show more"The belief that mind-set and emotional well-being can improve cancer survival time has become something of a truism in the United States. Despite claims that this is a commonsense and consistent belief which stretches back to Galen, mind-body approaches to cancer have varied radically in response to changing social and cultural contexts. This dissertation tracks shifting meanings of this claim and the varying institutional acceptance of it from the rise of psychosomatic medicine in the 1930s and 40s to the embrace of Contemporary and Alternative Therapies (CAM) in the 1990s. Through the 1950s and 60s, claims of a connection between mind, carcinogenesis, and survival were shaped by psychoanalytic theory and case narratives which reinforced a restrictive view of femininity. However, by the 1970s, mind-body medicine reflected newer gender roles and more eclectic beliefs about psychology. Of the cancer patients depicted in these later case narratives, women were often seen as over-reliant on family for personal fulfillment and lacking in opportunities for personal growth. Men with cancer were often depicted as caught within pathological versions of masculinity. Fixed gender roles came to be seen as potentially carcinogenic. Despite the increasingly feminist tone of these case narratives, there were growing disagreements about whether or not mind-body approaches were empowering or blame-ridden which stretched from feminist collectives to medical journals. In order to show these shifts, I analyze debates within medical journals, the shifting claims in popular self-help books, news reports, the notes and drafts of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, the papers of the Office of Technology Assessment, tobacco industry documents, and Norman Cousins' papers. In these sources, it is possible to see the diverse motivations that encouraged people to advocate for mind-body cancer care. Many doctors were motivated by their insecurities about the growing interest in alternative medicine. Feminists adapted these ideas in ways that more closely matched their beliefs and goals. The tobacco industry had a clear financial incentive to find explanations for cancer that did not point to the carcinogens in cigarettes. Mind-body cancer literature is also an exceptionally useful lens for understanding changing ideas about emotional well-being, particularly as they tie to gender. Case narratives distill key beliefs about what it means to be healthy and well-adjusted, making it possible to see how gender roles change over time and what people believe the consequences might be for failing to conform. This literature also helps to show changing assumptions about the responsibility of the individual patient for healing, and changing beliefs about whether or not the natural world is inherently fair, just, or good."--Abstract.
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Title: "Union Democracy", a limited replication : the case of an Argentinian printing union
Creator: Jorrat, Jorge Raúl, 1940-
Date: 1974
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

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