Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item “THE FIGHT IS YOURS”: ALLY ADVOCACY, IDENTITY RECONFIGURATION, AND POLITICAL CHANGE(2019) Howell, William; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since at least 1990, scholars and activists have used the term “ally” to describe and theorize a distinct sociopolitical role: someone from a majority identity group working to end that group’s oppression of another identity group. While the term is recent, “allies” are present throughout America’s constant struggle to actualize equality and justice. The identity-rooted ideologies that empowered allies disempowered the groups for and with whom they sought justice and equality. But those empowering identities were pieces, more or less salient, of complex intersectional people. Given the shared nature of identity, this process also necessarily pitted allies against those with whom they shared an identity. In this project, I ask two questions about past ally advocacy—questions that are often asked about contemporary ally advocacy. First, in moments of major civil rights reform, how did allies engage their own intersecting identities—especially those ideologically-charged identities with accrued power from generations of marginalizing and oppressing? Second, how did allies engage other identities that were not theirs—especially identities on whose oppression their privilege was built? In asking these two questions—about self-identity and others’ identity—I assemble numerous rhetorical fragments into “ally advocacy.” This bricolage is in recognition of rhetoric’s fragmentary nature, and in response to Michael Calvin McGee’s call to assemble texts for criticism. I intend to demonstrate that ally advocacy is such a text, manifesting (among other contexts) around the women’s suffrage amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the marriage equality movement. I argue that allies rarely engaged the ideologies underlying identity-based inequality in any open, direct, or thorough manner, especially at these moments when those ideologies were optimally vulnerable. I conclude that allies must accept that they marginalize others through identity and its adjacent ideology, and allies must help identity-group peers reconstitute their shared identity in recognition of this. Such reconstituting is necessary for a healthy American democracy but especially so in the late-2010s, as Americans persistently grapple with a political system fractured along identity lines.Item Interest Representation as a Clash of Unequal Allies(2016) Parrott, Michael David; Lee, Frances E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Organized interests do not have direct control over the fate of their policy agendas in Congress. They cannot introduce bills, vote on legislation, or serve on House committees. If organized interests want to achieve virtually any of their legislative goals they must rely on and work through members of Congress. As an interest group seeks to move its policy agenda forward in Congress, then, one of the most important challenges it faces is the recruitment of effective legislative allies. Legislative allies are members of Congress who “share the same policy objective as the group” and who use their limited time and resources to advocate for the group’s policy needs (Hall and Deardorff 2006, 76). For all the financial resources that a group can bring to bear as it competes with other interests to win policy outcomes, it will be ineffective without the help of members of Congress that are willing to expend their time and effort to advocate for its policy positions (Bauer, Pool, and Dexter 1965; Baumgartner and Leech 1998b; Hall and Wayman 1990; Hall and Deardorff 2006; Hojnacki and Kimball 1998, 1999). Given the importance of legislative allies to interest group success, are some organized interests better able to recruit legislative allies than others? This question has received little attention in the literature. This dissertation offers an original theoretical framework describing both when we should expect some types of interests to generate more legislative allies than others and how interests vary in their effectiveness at mobilizing these allies toward effective legislative advocacy. It then tests these theoretical expectations on variation in group representation during the stage in the legislative process that many scholars have argued is crucial to policy influence, interest representation on legislative committees. The dissertation uncovers pervasive evidence that interests with a presence across more congressional districts stand a better chance of having legislative allies on their key committees. It also reveals that interests with greater amounts of leverage over jobs and economic investment will be better positioned to win more allies on key committees. In addition, interests with a policy agenda that closely overlaps with the jurisdiction of just one committee in Congress are more likely to have legislative allies on their key committees than are interests that have a policy agenda divided across many committee jurisdictions. In short, how groups are distributed across districts, the leverage that interests have over local jobs and economic investment, and how committee jurisdictions align with their policy goals affects their influence in Congress.Item WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978(2011) Chester, Robert Keith; Gerstle, Gary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation interrogates the meanings retrospectively imposed upon World War II in U.S. motion pictures released between 1945 and the mid-1970s. Focusing on combat films and images of veterans in postwar settings, I trace representations of World War II between war's end and the War in Vietnam, charting two distinct yet overlapping trajectories pivotal to the construction of U.S. identity in postwar cinema. The first is the connotations attached to U.S. ethnoracial relations - the presence and absence of a multiethnic, sometimes multiracial soldiery set against the hegemony of U.S. whiteness - in depictions of the war and its aftermath. The second is Hollywood's representation (and erasure) of the contributions of the wartime Allies and the ways in which such images engaged with and negotiated postwar international relations. Contrary to notions of a "good war" untainted by ambiguity or dissent, I argue that World War II gave rise to a conflicted cluster of postwar meanings. At times, notably in the early postwar period, the war served as a progressive summons to racial reform. At other times, the war was inscribed as a historical moment in which U.S. racism was either nonexistent or was laid permanently to rest. In regard to the Allies, I locate a Hollywood dialectic between internationalist and unilateralist remembrances. On one hand, narratives of the U.S. as the dominant wartime power affirmed the nation's benevolence and might, attesting to the United States' right to dictate the terms of postwar international politics. On the other, progressive filmmakers used images of the Allies to challenge postwar U.S.-centrism and bemoan the Cold War nation's military and economic mismanagement of international relations. Emphasizing the contested character of the war's cinematic image, the dissertation recuperates a tradition of dissent, complicating our understanding of World War II remembrance and postwar Hollywood history. The project also considers the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) Pictorial Division - the military's liaison with Hollywood - and the film industry. Drawing on DoD records, I show how the postwar state influenced representations of racial diversity, and how the military shaped images of the U.S. in interaction with its wartime Allies.