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.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
94 results
Search Results
Item NEWS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE: ASSESSING THE EFFICACY OF FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS ON JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES(2024) Mulupi, Dinfin Koyonjo; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation intervenes in news coverage of sexual violence by examining pathways to better journalistic practices from a feminist perspective. This is accomplished through a transnational multi-method approach combining qualitative data analyses and experimental surveys. The study begins by examining recommendations for better news coverage of sexual violence as articulated by feminist scholars, feminist NGOs and anti-gender violence activists. This is followed by analysis of feminist media coverage of sexual violence to determine to what extent they adhere to the best practices recommended by feminist scholars and activists. The dissertation then employs experimental surveys to test the effectiveness of feminist best practices in altering audiences’ attitudes toward victims and perpetrators. The data analyzed in this study include scientific/academic journal articles, book chapters and books grounded in feminist theories (N =42), institutional reports published by feminist NGOs and other anti-sexual violence collective groups (N =25), news and commentary of sexual violence (N = 122) published by five feminist media outlets (Jezebel, Ms., The 19th, New African Woman, and gal-dem), and surveys administered to participants in the US and South Africa (N =496). The study focuses on three feminist theories that prescribe alternatives to normative journalistic practices; advocates argue that intersectionality, feminist ethics of care, and Feminist Standpoint Epistemology (FSE) potential could reform news coverage of sexual violence and other important social issues. A fourth feminist concept, counterpublics, is used to theorize the journalism produced by feminist media outlets serving subaltern communities/audiences. This dissertation advances journalism theory and practice. The majority of extant literature has pointed at what is wrong in news accounts of sexual violence (Ndhlovu, 2020; Noetzel et al., 2023; Mulupi & Blumell, 2023, 2024). This study deviates from the norm by focusing on solutions and “highlighting steps toward improved coverage” (Cuklanz, 2022, p.322). By emphasizing on recommendations made by feminist scholarship/activism (as opposed to say everybody that has something to say about journalistic guidelines), the study crystallized a feminist vision of how to achieve better journalism on sexual violence. The best practices recommended by feminist scholars and anti-gender violence activists articulated an alternative model of journalism — a feminist, trauma-informed, decolonial, survivor-centered praxis committed to social justice goals. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to the theory and literature on feminist counterpublics by illuminating how feminist media offer discursive arenas to challenge dominant ideologies on sexual violence and gender norms. The study also contributes to feminist theorization of journalism by demonstrating the applicability of feminist theories in the everyday journalism practiced by feminist media. Furthermore, findings of the quasi-experimental surveys administered to participants in the US and South Africa support the effectiveness of applying feminist perspectives in news coverage of sexual violence: news coverage that includes feminist best practices (e.g., survivor centered framing, diverse sources, intersectionality, use of statistics etc) may indeed help audiences believe the complaints of victim-survivors, be less likely to victim-blame, and have greater levels of empathy toward the victim. This dissertation also offers practical contributions by compiling and presenting recommendations for news coverage to journalists, copy editors and editors. Overall, this study advances knowledge and theory about journalism practice, and demonstrates practical application and effectiveness of feminist theorizing in improving journalistic practices.Item GEOTECHNICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF BALTIMORE DREDGED SEDIMENTS AS AN INFILTRATION BERM MATERIAL ON HIGHWAY SLOPES(2024) Kaya, Eren; Aydilek, Ahmet H; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Baltimore Harbor dredged material has limited use in common geotechnical construction due to its soil composition. It has low shear strength for foundation applications and lack of plasticity makes it an undesirable material for seepage barrier applications. Vegetated infiltration berms, used for regulating stormwater discharge, can be suitable for beneficial reuse of the dredged materials. The scope of this research is to appropriateness of the dredged material for construction an infiltration berm that has sufficient slope stability and provides total infiltration in less than 72 hours. Unconfined compression tests, constant head permeameter tests and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity tests were conducted on the dredged material and its blends with straw, sand, and recycled glass aggregate. All amendments were chosen due to their potential of reducing infiltration time, increasing hydraulic conductivity and as well as increasing the available water content (AWC) to promote vegetation. The effects of different amendments on soil water characteristics curves were examined and related to the vegetation through percent green cover data. Results obtained through testing were implemented in finite element analysis programs, SLOPE/W and SEEP/W, to analyze slope stability and seepage behavior of the berm, respectively. Common berm geometries along with different subgrade conditions were considered during modeling. Straw amended dredged material provided adequate hydraulic conductivity, met the required minimum infiltration times, and acceptable AWC to promote vegetation, without experiencing any slope stability or piping failures.Item TONIGHT WE MAY WIN: CHALLENGING THE UNIVERSAL IN QUEER EMBODIMENT AND PERFORMANCE(2024) Steinberg, Rebecca Anne; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I sit in this chair how I always do, snug to the left side. I feel the warm hum of my laptop resting on my thighs. I feel the external rotation of my hips that allows my legs to casually cross with my feet cradled by the ottoman. I feel the spiral of my spine supporting a slightly forward head that looks down at the computer screen as I simultaneously sense the weight of chronic pain pooling heavy in my tired bones. I come to write words on this page through a commitment to embodiment as a state of profound possibility. As dance scholar Susan Foster suggests in her essay Choreographing History, “I am a body writing, I am a bodily writing.” I write through, with, and from embodiment. I define embodiment as a state where one has a heightened consciousness of their sensorium through acknowledged sensation. This state of awareness through sensation grounds the “self” in the body. Through this lens, embodiment is a mobilization that has the power to redefine how queerness is enacted and perceived through the medium of live performance. My dance thesis work, Tonight, we, may win, wields the social commentary of this position of audience privilege as farce. In this work, the dancers engage in what I’ve named “performing performativity.” Performing performativity makes transparent the exchange of currency between audience member and performer. Performing performativity functions in Tonight, we, may win as both a lens through which to view the performance and a performative state the dancers enact. The performers and the choreographer together have the power to enact possibility through this viable exchange. The potential of this enacted possibility is extensive, complex, nuanced, and political. It is an exchange that requires a book of its own to justly unpack. Although this is not the space for that unpacking, this is a space where I utilize my thesis choreography as a primary example where the power of possibility through embodiment is examined thoroughly through various theoretical lenses and multiple works of performance art. The epicenter of this physical and theoretical research revolves around the development and execution my thesis choreography, Tonight, we, may win, performed February 16-18, 2024 at University of Maryland, College Park. The enacted examples of a body first politic are constructed in this research through the vehicle of my choreographic work. I enact a body first politic in my work and I use the following chapters to bring in the choreographic voices of both my own work and dance makers and performers who succeed in challenging the impositions of the cisheteropartriarchy through queer embodiment. In the first chapter I provide an introduction the theoretical and chorographic groundwork of this world through the lens of queer embodied subjecthood. In Chapter 2, I use a solo work I created in 2022, titled Soft Caution, to activate choreography as feminist knowledge production through movement analysis and feminist theory. In the third chapter, I evoke failure as both a queer action and choreographic tool and argue for queerness as a technology in live performance. I bring in the choreographic works of Age & Beauty: Part 3 by Miguel Gutierrez and Black Hole by Shamel Pitts as examples of live performances that make queerness as a technology visibly tangible. In Chapter 4, I closely analyze the lyrics of “I Don’t Care Much” from the musical Cabaret through black feminism, performance studies, queer studies, and beyond to dissect the thin façade of queer apathy in its application to performance, queerness, communal grief, and more. In the final chapter, I excavate both the process and the product of my thesis choreography Tonight, we, may win. Through movement analysis and rehearsal reflections I endeavor to add depth and dimension to the ephemeral world created and left on stage during my thesis concert. This research privileges embodiment, communal care, and queerness through the vehicle of live performance to argue for the enactment of inclusive and equitable futures on the stage and beyond.Item They 'Boast of Dressing Like Gentlemen': Cross-Dressing, Print Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideology(2024) Hemphill, Julia Kay; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nineteenth-century gender roles were very strict but cross-dressing challenged these extremely binary roles, often being written about in different forms of print media. The press published stories about cross-dressing people in different ways depending on the actions they took in male attire. Soldier women cross-dressed and entered the military, but were not reprimanded for their decisions because their amount of time in male attire was perceived to be finite and because they were performing a service for their country. Women and male-presenting people who wore male attire and went into male workplaces, took wives, and became heads of household were highly reprimanded in the press in lengthy articles and short stories. Finally, women who wore the reform dress and liberated themselves from enslavement in male attire were spoken about in the press in two competing ways, with people supporting their transgressions and others not. Looking at the different ways that print media discussed these women and male-presenting people is important for looking at how gender roles were structured, and for understanding why powerful men were only threatened by certain cross-dressers.Item Towards a Classification of Almost Complex and Spin^h Manifolds(2024) Mills, Keith; Rosenberg, Jonathan; Mathematics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)We show that all homotopy CP^ns, smooth closed manifolds with the oriented homotopy type of CP^n, admit almost complex structures for 3 ≤ n ≤ 6, and classify these structures by their Chern classes for n=4, 6. Our methods provide a new proof of a result of Libgober and Wood on the classification of almost complex structures on homotopy CP^4s. We also show that all homotopy RP^(2k+1)s admit stably almost complex structures. Spin^h manifolds are the quaternionic analogue to spin^c manifolds. At the prime 2 we compute the spin^h bordism groups by proving a structure theorem for the cohomology of the spin^h bordism spectrum MSpin^h as a module over the mod 2 Steenrod algebra. This provides a 2-local splitting of MSpin^h as a wedge sum of familiar spectra. We also compute the decomposition of H^*(MSpin^h; Z/2Z) explicitly in degrees up through 30 via a counting process.Item The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care(2024) Hofmann, Anne Elizabeth; Guerrero, Perla; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care" is an institutional ethnography that investigates the personal, political, and economic costs to student caregivers seeking a college degree. Through a critical analysis of student interviews and a close examination of community college structures and histories, I deploy an interdisciplinary, qualitative methodology that seeks to topple and contest previous ways of researching two-year collegiate structures in the U.S. I argue that, internally, community colleges offer intermittent respites from the physical and emotional labor of caregiving by being locations of intellectual invigoration and professionalization for students; however, I also address how community colleges’ positioning within larger regional and global political economies ultimately renders them stations of stagnation for many students, especially those with the most overlapping needs and markers of difference. To analyze these concepts, I use an interpretive framework that threads theories of disinvestment, structural exclusion, and predatory inclusion, to explore the use of the term “care,” which is used flexibly across institutional and everyday life to recruit students and animate collegiate recruiting and retention initiatives. I trace the link between two-year schools’ reputation as both places of “opportunity” and “second chances,” and as a stigmatized alternative to “real college.” I do so by examining the language and visual arguments deployed by colleges’ public-facing websites, as situated within broader historical-political narratives about community colleges, and by conducting in-depth interviews with caregiving students. I find that political and popular beliefs regarding studenthood and care work are internalized by students, particularly those with the fewest financial and time resources. Additionally, the overlap between race, gender, and unpaid care work aligns with those students who are the least likely to graduate from college and the most likely to accrue significant debt and physical or mental distress due to their attempts. The study triangulates institutional histories, neoliberal rhetorics of education and success, and student caregiver testimony to conclude that unpaid care labor for biological or chosen family is simultaneously a primary barrier, a fundamental source of personal joy, and a possible location of subversive power for community college students seeking a post-secondary credential.Item Made Visible: Women Artists and the Performance of Femininity in Modern Japanese Art, 1900-1930(2024) Wies, Lillian T; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a new framework for understanding individual Japanese women artists’ work and the systems of gender oppression that characterized modern Japanese art. It does so by engaging with the visualization of Japanese women artists in the early twentieth century. In response to societal anxiety about the increase of women artists in the perceived male domain of the professional art world, women artists were pressured to conform to standards of normative femininity. Those standards, I argue, can be united under a single archetype, the “female artist,” which came to dominate the visual representation and social imagining of women artists. This study offers a nuanced investigation into the reciprocal relationship between women artists and the “female artist” by focusing on four establishment women painters: Kajiwara Hisako, Shima Seien, Yoshida Fujio, and Kametaka Fumiko. Chapter One establishes the ideological grounding that defined women artists by their gender and pressured them to perform hegemonic femininity, thereby creating the marginalized “female artist” archetype. Chapter Two explores the “female artist” as a visual type, established through photographic reproductions of women artists in women’s magazines and by a painted representation of the type by Kajiwara Hisako. The chapter evaluates the complex ways women artists participated in the construction of the visual type, arguing that women made micro-adjustments to the type that valorized women’s artistic skill even as they upheld oppressive gender ideals. Chapter Three details Shima Seien’s use of self-portraiture to protest the dehumanizing elements of the “female artist” archetype and assert an alternative vision of herself as an artist and individual. Chapter Four considers Yoshida Fujio’s embrace of the “female artist” as part of a journey towards personal and artistic self-determination. The Coda uses the case study of Kametaka Fumiko and the false attribution of her self-portrait, Hanare yuku kokoro, to her deceased husband, Watanabe Yohei, to reflect on how the “female artist” archetype continues to diminish women artists’ position within scholarship. The goal of this study is to make visible the diverse ways modern Japanese women artists negotiated systemic gender discrimination in an effort to recover a sense of their agency and individuality.Item A Healthy Relationship? The Entanglement of State, Corporate, and Labor Interests in Gender-based Violence Sport Policies(2023) Drafts-Johnson, Lilah; Jette, Shannon; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gender-based violence (GBV) within professional sports made headlines in 2014 following the Ray Rice domestic violence incident, prompting a Congressional hearing with the four major men’s sports leagues in the United States. This hearing resulted in the implementation of several sport industry-wide policies addressing off-field conduct for players and employees, including ones specifically focused on interpersonal relationships. Despite the cultural prominence of corporate sport entities such as the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball, in addition to the fervor for institutional accountability in the wake of the #MeToo movement, there has been limited academic scholarship examining the scope and efficacy of these policies (see Brown, 2016; Augelli & Kuennen, 2018) Drawing upon the findings of a thematic analysis of Senate Hearing 113-725: Addressing Domestic Violence in Professional Sports, this thesis utilized a governmentality analytic to critically analyze the motivations, assumptions, and tensions which underpinned the institutionalization of GBV policies in corporate sport. The findings demonstrate that while the parties present at the hearing problematized sport culture at large as a producer of GBV, their remarks characterized professional male athletes as perpetrators, reifying the idea of the “violent (Black) male athlete” and violence as an inherent trait in professional sport more generally. Instead of critically interrogating the structure of professional sport, legislators instead focused on expanding the governing capacity of sport leagues, and effectively the state, to discipline and punish perpetrators of GBV by encouraging the implementation of new extra-legal policies. I argue that this hearing reinforced the neoliberal entanglement of state, corporate, and non-profit actors in the movement to reduce GBV in society, strengthening the dependency that the state has on corporate social responsibility to solve leading public health issues, and compelling GBV advocates, activists, and scholars to engage with corporations in order to receive critical funding and legitimacy in their work. Meanwhile, suggested legislation to improve economic and workplace conditions for survivors was ignored as labor issues were positioned as oppositional to GBV accountability efforts. Through articulation and radical contextualism, this thesis sheds new insight into the origins and methods of corporate GBV policies in sport as well as the intricacies of contemporary neoliberal governance, and ultimately argues that the state response to GBV must shift from one of punishment and surveillance to one of preventative care through improved economic and labor conditions for all workers.Item NAME, IMAGE AND LIKENESS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF HOW WOMEN STUDENT ATHLETES SHARE THEIR STORIES AND LIVED EXPERIENCES ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE AGE OF NIL(2023) Scovel, Shannon Marie; Oates, Sarah A; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation assesses the self-representation and representation of ten elite collegiate women athletes during the first year of the NCAA’s new ‘name, image and likeness’ policies. Building on theories of representation, gender performance, self-presentation and intersectionality, this study explores how women athletes reproduce notions of feminism, femininity and athleticism on their public TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Each of the women in this study have at least 50,000 followers across their social media accounts, and the content they produced on these platforms over the 12-month period from July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022, serves to both reflect and reject hegemonic norms surrounding women in sport. Previous research has demonstrated that women athletes remain marginalized and underrepresented in sports. Scholars have also noted that women athletes typically represent themselves on social media in ways that highlight their personal lives, as opposed to their athletic experiences. This study explores these questions of self-representation through a content analysis of social media posts produced by ten collegiate women and addresses how these women navigated digital storytelling within the neoliberal, capitalist, patriarchal U.S. college sports media ecosystem. The ways in which athlete content was reproduced by journalists during this same period was also assessed. Findings show that journalists rarely engaged with women athletes’ posts during the first year of the NCAA’s new NIL policies and presented women’s success in the NIL era as surprising, unexpected and unrelated to athletic achievements. This dissertation adds to the larger body of research on women’s representation and self-representation in sports but adds a new dimension to this subject by exploring such representations in the collegiate environment, an arena in which athletes were previously denied the opportunity to earn money from their digital storytelling and online brands. The ways in which women challenge and reproduce hegemonic norms in their social media content during this period also contributes to the broader understanding of gender tensions in sports.Item WOMEN, LANGUAGE, AND WOMEN AS LANGUAGE: THE PARADOXICAL DOMESTICITY AND SEXUALITY OF MUSLIM WOMEN AND URDU IN POST-1857 INDIAN LITERATURE AND NATIONAL DISCOURSE(2023) Taha, Fatima; Ray, Sangeeta; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although, since the late 1980s, much attention has been paid to the woman/mother as nation trope in multicultural colonial and post-colonial scholarship, what remains largely unexplored is the concept of woman as language functioning as scaffold for a gendered, cultural-linguistic nationalism deployed by Hindu Indians in colonial India. These “language woman,” a term political scientist Asha Sarangi coined in 2009, are diametrically opposed: the feminine anthropomorphic dutiful, mother Hindi, fit to represent India, and the unruly, courtesan Urdu who has no place in the incipient nation. In the last decade, scholarly engagement with Begum Urdu has been limited to structuring this characterization as demeaning, with Indian Muslims failing to subvert the marginalized linguistic representation in the fundamentally Hindi-speaking, Hindu project of the Indian nation state. Such a gender essentialist reading of anthropomorphic Urdu perpetuates the very androcentric society-approved gender roles it seeks to denounce, aligning with colonial Indian nationalists’ and British imperialists’ myopic ideology of one appropriate type of woman. Why must the courtesan lack agency or respectability and require reformation? This project offers an alternative view of Begum Urdu, recasting the language courtesan as empowered through the application of, among others, Foucault’s theory on authorized forms of sexuality eventually rupturing societal norms combined with sociolinguist Robin Lakoff’s interpretations of authoritative woman’s language viewed from both inside and outside the socio-political frame encompassing it. Drawing on feminist, linguistic, and colonial studies and bridging them with the concept of metonymy through contiguity in prose realism, this work offer a new metaphorical reading of Muslim female characters as representing both the Indian Muslim woman and Urdu in seven Urdu prose realist works: Ratan Nath Sarshar’s Fasana-e-Azad; Abdul Halim Sharar’s Flora Florinda; Nazir Ahmed Dehlvi’s Mirat-ul Uroos, Banaat-ul Naash, Taubat-un Nasuh, and Fasana-e-Mubtala; and finally, Muhammad Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada and Junoon-e-Intezaar in which the metaphorical language woman is transformed into a real, round character and woman in the real world who functions with authority and agency as not only a character but an author. The Muslim and Urdu-language woman who emerges from these texts in the latter half of the 19th century gradually mesh the spheres of acceptable domestic sexuality and disreputable public sexuality to conceive a woman, who despite being untethered from societal norms, is a compelling representation of Muslim women and Urdu. In restructuring courtesan Urdu as reputable, this dissertation corrects scholarships’ sustainment of the linguistic hierarchy of Hindi over Urdu and the colonial symbolic Indian Hindu woman over her Muslim counterpart. Dismantling the British imperial and Indian colonial construction of a debased Urdu is imperative to redress the continued global devaluation of Urdu and even its speakers, including in Pakistan, where Urdu is the sole national and one of the two official languages. This dissertation answers Gyatri Spivak’s question of if the subaltern woman can speak with a resounding “yes, she can” and explores the various ways in which the marginalized and repressed can use language as a tool in an attempt to dismantle colonialism and subvert the authority of colonial oppressors while creating a singular identity, much in the way Aamir Mufti approaches the power of language.