UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Performing Archives: How Central Americans Perform Race in the DMV(2024) Hernandez, Wanda Roselee; Guerrero, Perla M.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Performing Archives: How Central Americans Perform Race in the DMV examines the lives of Central Americans in the Washington metropolitan area, also known as the DMV, between 1960 and 2000. I explore how Central Americans were racialized and how their personal archives demonstrate quotidian performances of race and community formation in the region. To determine how Central Americans were racialized, I discursively analyze local newspapers, as well as letters, congressional proceedings, and reports sources, to make sense of the racial ideologies that circulated regionally. The racial meanings ascribed to Central Americans is significant because it shapes how others perceived them. These perceptions also had material impacts on their lives, informing where they live, where they work, their experiences in schools, and interactions with police. Local media, politicians, and bureaucrats used language and images to construct Central Americans as a racial Other. In their racialization, they also used African Americans as a comparative foil, resulting in an ideological binary between Blackness and Latinidad in the region. Central Americans were described as Spanish-speaking, brown, working-class, “illegals,” and delinquents. This homogenized Central Americans, a racially and ethnically diverse diaspora. As a method of self-documentation and self-preservation, Central Americans’ personal archives complicate and contest this dominant discourse. Reading personal archives performatively reveals the ways in which Central Americans navigated their racialization through quotidian performances of race. Racial performances refer to Central Americans’ embodied knowledges on race. These performances consisted of learning African American Vernacular English to find belonging, relying on kin networks to transgress the spatial constraints of illegality, or expressing solidarity through declarations and gestures, like head nods. Overall, my argument is twofold. First, I argue that Central Americans’ racialized experiences be understood through their personal archives because they provide insight into the interpersonal effects of, and quotidian responses to, racist structures. Second, I argue that Central Americans’ experiences navigating a region historically defined through a Black-and-white racial binary allows us to understand the processes of race-making more deeply by demonstrating that their racialization is informed by local and hemispheric racism that draw on a variety of signifiers to place others in shifting hierarchies.Item THE CONCORDANCE OF INFLUENZA VACCINATION BEHAVIORS AMONG ADULTS AND CHILDREN RESIDING WITHIN THE SAME HOUSEHOLD IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, MARYLAND, AND VIRGINIA(2014) Motley, Danielle Olon; Butler, III, James; Public and Community Health; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Background: The distinctive barking sound of whooping cough and rubella's birth defects highlight vaccinations' importance as a public health initiative and medical advancement of the twentieth century. However, little research examines concordance of influenza vaccination uptake between same-household adults and children. Methods: A secondary data analysis of CDC's 2009 National H1N1 Flu Survey (NHFS) examined concordance between adults' influenza vaccination behaviors and responses to NHFS questions representing HBM constructs with the influenza vaccination of same-household children from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV). Results: Concordance existed between influenza vaccination statuses of adults and same-household children. HBM constructs of perceived susceptibility, severity, and the cue to action of physician vaccine recommendation were associated with more vaccinated children. Conclusions: This research highlights adults' influenza vaccination status impact on same-household DMV children. Future research is needed to examine parental influenza vaccination effects on influenza vaccination status of their biological children.Item Private Lives and Glancing Blows: A Philosophy of Disconnection(2009) Davis, Katherine Ann; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following stories, letters, and novel excerpt explore the impossibility of reconnecting to the past. They examine moments in their characters' lives when the desire for such a connection is quite strong--it means wanting to have potential, wanting to belong somewhere, and wanting not to be lonely. Questions of truth in memory and perception also emerge. I explore this desire by situating characters at different points in their lives, so they are looking back across varying distances: for the narrator in "Reasons I Got Up This Morning, going back means a return to the day before, and in "Gustav Has Glancing Blow" it means a return to childhood. The boy in "My Collector" wants entire histories preserved so that they are alive forever and he can be part of them.