UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item UNVEILING THE MULTIFACETED IDENTITY OF BLACK STUDENT ATHLETES: IMPLICATIONS FOR COACHING AND SPORT LEADERSHIP(2024) Harris, Tasha; De La Paz, Susan; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This qualitative study explores the multifaceted experiences of Black student-athletes in higher education. The landscape of higher education leadership is predominantly white, with a significant majority being white men. Over 80% of chancellors, presidents, athletic directors, faculty athletic representatives, and conference commissioners are white (Lapchick, 2023); meanwhile, Black student-athletes constitute 55% of the NCAA's highest revenue sports—men’s basketball and football (Achieving (Racial Equality, 2021; Harper, 2018). This disparity is particularly striking given the significant presence and contributions of Black student-athletes to college sports. It highlights the impact of external and internal factors, such as the lack of adequate support systems, that shape the identity and experiences of student-athletes, especially those from marginalized backgrounds.Utilizing Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) frameworks as analytical tools, this study highlights the importance of counter-storytelling to empower Black student-athletes and challenge dominant cultural narratives. Interviews were conducted with 10 student-athletes from both Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Adapting tools from Strauss and Goldberg (1999) and Cowan et al. (1978), this study focuses on student-athletes, and explores how racial, athletic, and academic identities intersect among Black student-athletes, illuminating their perceptions of past, present, and future selves. Findings reveal that HBCUs cultivate social capital opportunities, while PWI student-athletes need stronger navigational capital to maneuver through less supportive environments. Both institutions provide familial, aspirational, and resistance capital, but PWI student-athletes struggle more with discovering their true identities due to societal pressures and an overemphasis on athletic performance. Participant counter-stories emphasized the importance of holistic identity development, particularly regarding 'invisible identities,' where dominant athletic roles limit full identity exploration. Black student-athletes often navigate between Goffman’s (1959) concept of the frontstage and backstage self. Their frontstage self is the persona they present to society, shaped by impression management to counter stereotypes and biases, while the backstage self represents their true identity, which they struggle to develop due to the constant demands of frontstage performance. This performance aims to project an idealized version of self, challenging negative assumptions. Findings highlight how experiences at PWIs and HBCUs shape the identity development of Black student-athletes, emphasizing the need for comprehensive support systems encompassing social integration, leadership representation, and identity development programming beyond sports. As student-athletes navigate the transition out of college, the study emphasizes the importance of holistic identity development, especially in acknowledging unexplored facets of identity. Ultimately, this research fills a gap in understanding the role of CCW in navigating the complex landscape of athletic, academic, and racial experiences in higher education, offering insights for coaches and sport leaders on how to foster more inclusive and supportive environments.Item Reimagining Black Carceral Masculinities and Community Care Work: A Study of Credible Messengers in the Nation’s Capital(2024) Martinez, Rod; Ray, Rashawn; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following dissertation examines a group of community workers known as credible messengers in Washington, D.C. Credible messengers have lived experience surviving carceral systems such as prisons and environments and have transformed their lives to guide, relate to, and support others who share their backgrounds. Their credibility stems directly from their intimate knowledge of the communities they serve. This dissertation project draws on qualitative interviews with male credible messengers from a more considerable multi-year evaluation of a newly implemented credible messenger program housed in a youth agency. Sociologically, the project explores Black carceral masculinities and mentoring as civic engagement. The findings reveal how men resist and challenge prevailing notions around hegemonic and carceral masculinities through their racially gendered experiences, which shape how they approach their work with youth. The study also suggests that the men engage in credible messenger work for motivations other than redemption and in service of a larger mission to Black youth and their local communities. The dissertation project also includes a conversation with a formerly incarcerated public figure from Washington, D.C., as a call to action to researchers and others to uplift the experience of impacted people and communities. The dissertation project concludes with a set of recommendations aimed at policy and practice as it relates to criminalized Black men and boys.Item Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence(2024) Donnell, Dallas Taylor; Bruce, La Marr J; Avilez, GerShun; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence” is an interdisciplinary examination of the Black Nightmare Imaginary, a form of ideological common sense about the precarity of Black life and the necessity of various modes and maneuvers of contestation and escape needed to survive. I argue that Black Americans have shared access to a psychic repository of scenes and scenarios of antiblack violence that exist in vivid detail out of a collective awareness of the omnipresent violence foundational to Black life itself. Black musicians can tap into this shared terrain of terror through creative works that return us to these traumatic moments and perform perseverance in the face of that trauma. These scenes of violence include the horror of the auction block, the humiliation of the minstrel show, the degradation of the social services visit, the tension of a traffic stop, and more. This is the stuff of our nightmares—the full spectrum of antiblack violence that persists through what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlives of slavery.” Foregrounding these scenarios of violence, Black musicians create works that can be read as enacting tactics of resistance to that violence. These tactics include vigilantism, nihilism, opacity, and marronage. Incorporating sonic, visual, literary, and discursive methods, I use the theoretical lens of the Black Nightmare Imaginary to do interdisciplinary analyses of the songs, music videos, album covers, and journalistic representations of a set of post-Civil Rights era Black musicians—including Mary J. Blige, Prince, N.W.A, 2pac, and Sister Souljah. This work challenges prevailing attitudes that misunderstand and devalue Black creative works with simplistic binaries of good /bad, positive/negative, political/apolitical. To the contrary, these are complex works that reckon with both the life and death stakes of the violence foundational to Black American life and the irreducibility and irrepressibility of that life to its influence.Item Haptic Listening: Analyzing Black Women’s Witnessing, Fugitivity, and Refusal in the 1990s and Early 2000s(2024) Young, Dominique; Avilez, GerShun; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 90s through early 2000s was an era marked by vociferous noises. This noise included Black popular cultural expansions in art, sonic waves of resistance via protests against police brutality, the crackling of arson fire expressing the Black community’s rage in response to anti-Blackness, and calls for reproductive justice for poor Black women among other sounds. While this era maintained the loudness of both prosperity and protest, it also nurtured quiet resistances against the U.S. carceral State. Specifically, Black women’s and girls’ vociferous and less discernible practices of refusal situated within film, literature, and music videos also propelled narrative resistance against the atmospheric violence of the State. What were the quiet and less discernible ways that Black women and girls challenged the U.S. carceral State during the 90s and in the early 2000s? What are the lenses or methodologies that make this resistance legible? What Black feminist scholars have already practiced the method of listening to that which is illegible or does not exist? What do Black girls and women gain when we can see their quiet refusal in this way? What is at stake if we cannot see this refusal? These are some of the questions that underscore this dissertation. In my dissertation I argue Black women and girls vociferously and quietly challenge the 1990s and early 2000s U.S. carceral State in film, fiction, and music videos. I maintain that the excavation of their less discernible (or “quiet”) practices of refusal within these cultural texts require a focused attention to detail and a counterintuitive practice of listening to that which is illegible, indiscernible, or hidden. In this way, Black popular culture is a site for the emergence and existence of resistance that brings to the forefront the efforts of Black women and girls who are often marginalized in resistance discourses. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images at the intersection of Haptic Media Studies, I use a framework—haptic listening—for discerning and excavating their practices of refusal that are illegible to cursory analyses. Following my introduction chapter, in chapter two I center my analysis on Leslie Harris’ film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) and F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off (1996). Through haptic listening, I trace a cartography of witnessing informed by Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Dwight McBride’s Impossible Witnesses, and Angela Ards’ Words of Witness. I argue that specific instances of witnessing that reify Black women’s and girls’ subjection, fracture Black kinship, and disrupt Black futures are the catalysts for their resistance to the carceral State. In chapter three I examine protagonist Winter’s fugitive journey in Sister Souljah’s 1999 novel The Coldest Winter Ever. Drawing from Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, and Jennifer Nash’s “Black Maternal Aesthetics,” I argue that her fugitive journey begins and ends with her own vociferous haptic encounters—a process I call Circular Fugitivity. In the end, I trace a panoptic cartography that honors the emergence of her own political potential as she attempts to escape the grasp of the carceral State. And finally in chapter four I analyze the music video performances of Charli Baltimore in “Down Ass Chick” (2002) and Meagan Good in “21 Questions” (2003). Drawing from the work of Tina Campt in Listening to Images at the convergence of haptic media studies, I argue that their transformative practices of refusal are legible within and imbued by their identificatory photographs in each music video. These aesthetic practices of refusal, made obvious through haptic listening, appear throughout the music videos signaling the movement toward freedom. In the end, my project honors the less discernible practices of resistance by Black women and girls during the 1990s and early 2000s.Item A Black Gay Sensibility: Art, Affect, and Black Male Relationality(2024) Cherry Jr, Fredrick; Avilez, GerShun; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A Black Gay Sensibility: Art, Affect, and Black Male Relationality is a multi-genre, intragenerational, comparative study between the 1980/90s black gay anthologies In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986) and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1992) and the black gay male artistic production of the 21st century. The study focuses on affect, or feelings, and how black gay male authors deploy specific feelings methodologically that in the process develops a black gay understanding of feelings that rivals the affective turn. Chapter 1 begins by placing the anthologies within the tradition of the genre. Anthologies serve a particular function for minoritized groups: identifying the oppressions a group faces, establishing a group identity, and asserting a political or social agenda. The black gay anthologies of the 1980s/90s, which cite the writing by black women as their inspiration, follow that arc through their use of section headers and the texts that they contain, choices that highlight specific feelings. I closely read the section headers alongside a few exemplary texts from each anthology to theorize the feelings that section emphasizes. Loneliness, desire, and hope become my projects primary affective concerns. Loneliness functions as a social imposition on othered identities and develops as a weight, something to rid oneself of to be in community with others. Desire appears as the flourishing of sociality through friendships and romance; however, it is often interrupted by phenomena as varying as racial discrimination, health precarity, and loss. Hope, the final feeling, is about futurity, a cautious yearning for something beyond the present. The anthological generation demonstrates hope’s significance by writing on and through the AIDS epidemic. Contemporary writers respond to the affective foci of the anthologies and the rest of the dissertation tracks those responses. These writers take up the same feelings and either extend the theorizations found in the anthologies or undermine them towards a different end. In addition, by grounding my project in the anthologies of the 1980s and 90s, I extend the category of “black gay”, acknowledging the way that its usage consistently gestured towards the communal adhesion of black gender and sexual minorities, even if in its time, that gesturing was not always consummated. With that history in mind, my project reparatively centers the work of black trans and nonbinary writers within black gay. Chapter 2 considers Samuel Delaney’s Dark Reflections (2007) and Michael R. Jackson’s play A Strange Loop (2016) alongside the poetry of Cameron-Awkward Rich and theories of black transness to query the productivity found in purposefully residing in loneliness, a choice that presents a different relation to the social. Chapter 3 explores neo-slave narratives and mines the theoretical challenges texts like The Prophets (2021) and Insurrection: Holding History (1999) make with respect to theories of affect that regulate black feelings to the realm of the unthinkable through their centering of desire. And finally chapter 4 situates hope within the midst of discourses of afro-pessimism/optimism as well as the anti-relational turn in queer theory to consider how writers like Danez Smith in Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) and Jordan E. Cooper in Ain’t No Mo’ (2023) reconsider the feeling as an aesthetic through their focus on HIV/AIDS and black queer isolation. While centering black queer theory and writing alongside affect studies, A Black Gay Sensibility joins a cohort of scholarship that highlights the extent to which black feelings are rendered marginal or ignored by white structure most notably by way of Claudia Garcia-Rojas, Jenifer Nash, Tyrone Palmer, and William H. Mosely III. This lack of attention overlooks the way that black queer scholars and writers have theorized affect before and alongside the affective turn within queer studies. Thus, this project theorizes black queer feelings over a range of texts.Item “LIBERATING MY MIND... DECOLONIZING MY PHYSICAL BODY”: EXPLORING AFROLATINE/A/O ACTIVISTS’ CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS USING PLÁTICA METHODOLOGY(2024) Martinez-Benyarko, Marinel; Espino Lira, Michelle; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation, “Liberating my mind...decolonizing my physical body”: Exploring AfroLatine/a/o activists’ critical consciousness using plática methodology, aimed to understand the experiences of 11 AfroLatine/a/o activists in the United States. Scholars have studied AfroLatine/a/os racial/ethnic identity development and activism separately, but this dissertation highlighted the critical consciousness that both these identities possess. Through a “me-search” process, a form of critical consciousness, AfroLatine/a/os assert agency and resilience to make meaning and reflect upon their Blackness and Latinidad (García-Louis & Cortes, 2020). Additionally, those who identify as activists also engage with critical consciousness in understanding social inequities and oppression (Freire, 1970a). My dissertation explored the critical consciousness that AfroLatine/a/os activists possess using plática methodology. Using a plática methodology, I cocreated knowledge, fostered healing and vulnerability, offered collaborators validation, and incorporated life experiences and community building. Pláticas also “constitute a method that recognizes and values familial and cultural knowledge, and platicando becomes the process of drawing on that knowledge and making meaning across experiences” (González Ybarra, 2018, p. 511). Through pláticas, cuentos, chismes, charlas, regaños, and consejos are shared (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016; González Ybarra, 2018; M. Guajardo & Guajardo, 2007). To accomplish this work, I developed a conceptual framework titled, “Exploring AfroLatine/a/o activists critical consciousness,” that brings together (a) Latino critical race theory, (b) Daché et al.’s (2019) Black-imiento, and (c) Freire’s (1970a) conscientization to illuminate the experiences of AfroLatine/a/o activists in a way that highlights their embraced Blackness, heightened knowledge and critical action, and lived experiences. Data were collected via a survey (46 participants), a one-on-one plática (11 collaborators), and a community plática (11 collaborators). Data were analyzed first by collaborators during the community plática. Afterward, I conducted initial/open coding and focused coding strategies. The findings of this study showed that AfroLatine/a/o activists asserted agency and engaged in critical reflection through a continuous process of learning and unlearning to understand their own AfroLatine/a/o identity, country of origin history, colonization, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and internalized racism. The second finding described the racialideologies that AfroLatine/a/o activists created, which included (a) embracing Black identity by taking pride in their physical appearance, hair, and skin color; (b) centering their resistance in language; and (c) rejecting stereotypes and generalizations of Latine/a/o as a monolithic group. Additionally, this study found that AfroLatine/a/o activists defined their activism as community, advocacy, and compassion. Lastly, the collaborators shared how their AfroLatine/a/o identity was a form of existence as resistance, a form of activism. This study presents various contributions to higher education theory, praxis, research, policy, and AfroLatine/a/o activists. My dissertation makes the following contributions: (a) understanding how marginalized communities navigate and resist oppressive systems, (b) validating the experiences and knowledge of AfroLatine/a/o activists, and (c) challenging a monolithic perspective of Latinidad by showcasing how AfroLatine/a/os embrace their Blackness.Item The Clash between Race and Politics: Marion Barry, the District of Columbia Financial Control Board, and the Fight for Home Rule(2023) Horn, Dennis Marshall; Freund, David M.P.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACTTHE CLASH BETWEEN RACE AND POLITICS: MARION BARRY, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FINANCIAL CONTROL BOARD, AND THE FIGHT FOR HOME RULE Dennis Marshall Horn, Master of Arts 2023 Thesis Directed By: Associate Professor, David M. P. Freund, Department of History In 1995, the District of Columbia (DC) was insolvent. Marion Barry, who had just been elected mayor of Washington, DC for the fourth time was advised that D.C. faced a $722 million deficit which DC was unable to finance. In addition, DC residents were not getting adequate public services like police, schools, trash pick-up and street repair. In response, Congress suspended “Home Rule”, the law which granted DC citizens the right to be governed by a mayor and a thirteen-member citizen-elected council. Instead, Congress empaneled the District of Columbia (DC) Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority (Control Board), a five-member board appointed by the President to take control of the District’s governance. The Control Board stayed in place and Home Rule was suspended from 1995-2001. The Control Board rather than the elected officials had the authority to run the District’s government while leaving in place the mayor and the DC Council to implement the Control Board’s directives. The division between the authority to set policy and the executive function to implement that policy created a conflict of governing objectives between Marion Barry and the Control Board. In accordance with his Civil Rights background, Barry believed that the main purpose of DC government should be economic empowerment for DC’s Black citizens. The Control Board’s main objectives were to gain control of DC finances, cut unnecessary municipal costs and improve city services with the ultimate goal of attracting middle class residents to stabilize DC’s tax base. The resulting housing boom and population growth led to gentrification which priced the less affluent residents, including many Black residents, out of DC. These dueling policy objectives benefitted some to the detriment of others, and vestiges of these competing policies survive today. This thesis, which is largely based upon interviews with key officials in Congress, the Control Board, the Clinton Administration and the DC government, contributes to the scholarly literature by viewing Barry, the Control Board and the fight for Home Rule through the lens of social and racial politics. The thesis concludes that while the Control Board saved Home Rule by putting the DC government back on a sustainable course, it is at best a temporary solution to a broken government. An unelected Control Board does not have either the capacity or the public support to resolve problems that cannot be separated from group identity politics. On the other hand, when Congress determines to intervene in DC governance, DC’s citizens have little defense without voting representatives in Congress.Item "We Heard Healthcare": The Long Black Freedom Struggle as Health Justice(2023) Catchmark, Elizabeth; Enoch, Jessica; Fleming, Jr., Julius; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In her project, Elizabeth Catchmark traces the ways Black liberation organizers have positioned a guarantee of health as a prerequisite for citizenship since Emancipation. Their challenges to white supremacy named the violence of the state in making Black America sicker and organized communal acts of care to enable their survival in the wake of state neglect. By situating health justice as key to full participation in civic life, these activists refuted a disembodied interpretation of citizenship and offered instead an embodied, capacious vision of racial justice that acknowledges the entanglements of our environments, bodies, and minds. The genealogy Catchmark develops demonstrates that the right to health is a constituent feature of the Black political imagination across the long Black freedom struggle. Ultimately, she finds that Black liberation organizers, through their racial-justice informed theorizations of health and citizenship, illustrate that democracy and health are inextricable from the eradication of white supremacy while offering new ways forward for public policy, racial justice organizing, and interpersonal care.Item Racing Imaginaries: Limit and Resistance in Contemporary Black Women's Speculative Fiction(2023) Nunn, Alexandria Jochebed; Konstantinou, Lee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Speculative fiction is sometimes described as a genre of the future—a genre that celebrates technological and scientific progress and that envisions limitless possibilities. However, for persons already estranged by the reality manufactured for them, the apparent strangeness of dystopian futures, state surveillance, or reproductive and genetic engineering is not so distant nor so fictional. In this dissertation, Alexandria Nunn elucidates the consequences of writing and reading science fiction for authors of color at the intersection between realism and speculative modes. In this exploration of contemporary science fiction by Black women authors, Nunn examines the speculative literature of Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, and N.K. Jemisin as they challenge generic assumptions and reframe the stakes of science fiction and Black literary theory. “Racing Imaginaries: Limit and Resistance in Contemporary Black Women’s Speculative Fiction” specifically attends to a conversation between Black realist thought and history’s continuance into the present and future, which foregrounds histories of anti-blackness, alongside speculative fiction by Black imaginative authors which negotiates with the language of possibility even in repressive spaces where opportunity and expression are being silenced. Nunn maps a dialectic between Black realism and Black speculation in major works by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and N. K. Jemisin, three of the foremost authors of the late 20th and early 21st century in the realm of American science fiction. Each author showcases the limitations of perceiving futures apart from race, while likewise suggesting alternative possibilities for growth and thriving. The conversation between these writers provides a template for understanding how speculative forms uniquely impact writers and authors of color operating with and against real-world phenomena so outlandish and often horrifying one would think them fantastic. Ultimately, Nunn suggests that Black creators frame science fiction not as a "literature of the possible” but rather as a "literature of the limit,” reminding readers both of the limits of contemporary lived reality and of the opportunities that already exist at their fingertips.Item The Songs of Her Possibilities: Black Women-Authored Musicals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present(2023) Ealey, Jordan Alexandria; Chatard Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Songs of Her Possibilities: Black Women Authored Musicals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, examines Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Vinnette Carroll, Micki Grant, and Kirsten Childs as black women creators of music theatre and their use of the form for social, political, and creative interventions. In so doing, I argue that these creators employ the form of the musical as a site for black feminist intellectual production through dramaturgical strategies in playwriting, composition, and direction. My project is animated by these major questions: How do Hopkins, Hurston, Grant, Carroll, and Childs employ the form of the musical to significant sociopolitical ends? How do their respective musicals creatively shape how musical theatre is researched, taught, and circulated? And finally, how do the black women creators at the center of this study reject, remake, and revise musical forms to challenge, critique, and change the overdetermined boundaries of the artistry and scholarship of musical theatre?In musical theatre, there is often an adherence to a strict dramaturgy of integration; that is, the dialogue, music, choreography, and other elements of a given musical must be perfectly uniformed. Black women musical theatre creators, however, are not bound to this dramaturgy and challenge it. I contend that this is accomplished through what I call strategic dissonance—a black feminist dramaturgical strategy that makes use of disintegrated and disjointed elements as an artistic method. This method is drawn from their material realities as black women (and the multidirectional nature of navigating black womanhood) to reflect the realities of black life and propose new ways of living. The project uses a significant amount of research from different archival sites such as the Library of Congress, Fisk University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Currently, no manuscript exists that explores and examines this under-theorized and under-documented history; thus, my project intervenes in the invisibilization of these musicals from the historical narrative of American musical theatre. Therefore, The Songs of Her Possibilities simultaneously argues for the significance of black women’s musical theatre for black feminist worldmaking capabilities.