Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item "Get Dressed Up For The End Of The World!": The Reinvention of the Elder Goth Subculture During a Time of Crisis(2024) Bush, Leah J.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of relationships between subcultural identity and Gothic social worlds in the Elder Goth subculture in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Formed in Britain in the late 1970s, the Goth subculture is characterized by a distinct morbid aesthetic and an overwhelming emphasis on the color black. The subculture retains a relatively high number of Elder Goths who participate in the subculture beyond their youth. This interdisciplinary project draws from the lifespan perspective of age studies and aspects of performance studies and queer utopian theory. Individual identities and Gothic communities are built and sustained through subculturally specific fashion and embodied practices at nightclubs, outdoor gatherings, and the phenomenon of virtual streaming dance nights which emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project also considers how meaning is made in subcultural places. Elder Goths draw on the subculture’s embrace of dichotomies in life, commitment to adaptation, and deepen their investment with the subculture at transitional points in their lives. Subculture is thus a fluid process of worldmaking which unfolds over the life course. This dissertation underscores the power of agency in making new and better worlds.Item Mobilized Interests: How Interest Groups Influence Member Perceptions of Politics(2024) Meli, Amy D; Miler, Kristina; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this project, I investigate how interest group mobilizations influence their members’ perceptions of government and politics. I theorize that some groups – especially issue advocacy nonprofits whose issues have been incorporated into the Democratic or Republican party platforms – use partisan strategies focused on electing the leaders who can help them move their policy agendas in Congress. Other groups, especially trade and professional associations, choose not to affiliate with a pollical party and instead build relationships with policymakers on both sides of the aisle so that they can move their policy agendas regardless of who is in office. I find that these two different policy strategies lead interest groups to communicate differently with their members, with partisan groups and issue advocacy nonprofits using more partisan and conflict-oriented language, while nonpartisan groups and associations use more pragmatic language. I find that these messages have effects on the people who read them. In a survey experiment, I find that independents and weak partisans who read pragmatic and bipartisan messages have warmer feelings towards the other party, while strong partisans have warmer feelings towards the other party when they hear partisan messaging. Notably, I find that these different approaches lead to varying effects on interest group members, including differences in levels of affective polarization and political efficacy. As professionals join their professional society and get more involved in their association’s activities, they have more trust in government, higher levels of internal and external efficacy, and warmer feelings towards those in the out party. Through interview research, I find that members are influenced by a number of factors, including the public policy training they receive from their interest groups, interactions they have with members of Congress and others in the political system, and messages members receive about how groups use bipartisan strategies to accomplish member goals. All of these stimuli are contributing factors to these effects.Item The Purpose of a Labor Theatre: Industrial Democracy and the Union Theatre of Detroit, 1946-1949(2024) Lapinski, Margaret; Hildy, Franklin J.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1946, the Union Theatre of Detroit was established as a project to broadcast “labor’s” aims and achievements. Sponsored by the Educational and Recreational Departments of the UAW, the Union Theatre quickly became part of the UAW’s educational programming to help educate and politicize workers on social issues like racial discrimination. This thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which the Union Theatre labored on behalf of an industrial democratic political program that emphasized deploying both economic and political action to achieve the goals of “labor.” In addition to providing a brief history of the Union Theatre, I use methods from performance studies and theatre studies to analyze archival material and decipher the ways in which plays functioned as both recreational activities and educational opportunities for union members to rehearse the tactics and strategies of labor organizing. I argue that, post-WWII, theatre and theatricality (loosely defined as the conventions of theatre) were deployed as an organizing tool to agitate and educate union members during a period of theatre history that is characterized in theatre historiography as “politically apathetic.” In this thesis, I ask “What was the social link between the Union Theatre and institutions like the UAW?” and seek to uncover how cultural work labors in broader social and political movements like the American labor movement.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 SETTING THE TRANSPACIFIC KITCHEN TABLE: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF FOOD IN THE KOREAN AMERICAN DIASPORA(2024) Kim, Jung Min; Forson, Psyche W; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Setting the Transpacific Kitchen Table: The Cultural Politics of Food in the Korean American Diaspora” is a material culture analysis of key dishes and ingredients of the Korean American diaspora. The study begins in South Korea following the Armistice on July 27, 1953 and follows the movement of Korean people, foods, and ideas to the United States in the decades after the war to the present day with a specific focus on three dishes: Budae jjigae (Army Base Stew), kimchi (traditional fermented vegetable), and rice. This dissertation unpacks the recipes and some of the meanings of these dishes to understand and contextualize their importance in Korean and Korean American foodways historically and into the present moment. Central to this project is the material “afterlife” of these ingredients and dishes- some introduced by foreign powers, while others are the most Korean of dishes- the lingering impact on how Korean and Korean Americans create place and meaning from these dishes. How do these dishes come to be? How do they come together to become symbolic of the Korean diasporic experience? In answering these questions, I hope to document and interrogate the range of emotional, cultural, and material responses that budae jjigae, kimchi, and rice have engendered from artists, chefs, mothers, and everyday Koreans and Korean Americans. With the increase in visibility and popularity of Korean foods in the American food lexicon, the aim of this study is to help historicize and contextualize this rise through exploring the complex relationship between Korea and the United States through foodways. In doing so it will interrogate and analyze the “entanglements” of transpacific power and political economies through foodways to understand the dialectic between state power and community resilience and resistance.Item Queer Ecology of Monstrosity: Troubling the Human/Nature Binary(2023) Thomas, Alex Jazz; Steele, Catherine K; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a form of visual communication, monsters in popular culture represent and reinforce the changing thoughts and emotions cultures have toward the human/nature binary. This binary, historically supporting discrimination based on race, gender and sexuality, and the environment’s abuse, is often supported through monstrous representations of the Other, but this is a limited view of a monster’s potential. I argue that contemporary hybrid monsters that blend humans and nature together in one queer, boundary-defying body represent U.S. society’s changing relationship with nature while giving the audience a new form of connecting or identifying with the environment and Othered body that critiques the popular ideology of both being something to fear or use. In this study, I advance a monstrous splice of queer theory and ecocriticism that probes the plasticity and queerness of humans and the environment allowing for new narratives, forms of life, and discourses about naturalization and the environment. Through queer ecological theory and methodology, I examine visual and contextual media to study the monster’s potential to embody nature, people, and their conjoined discrimination. The plasmaticness and subversive culture of animation and comics let the monstrous thrive in their display of the plasticity of humans and the environment. I structure my analysis into three case studies focusing on the potential of monsters to critique evolutionary ideology, human exceptionalism, and ecological interaction in light of queer theory’s critique of what is ‘natural.’ Radford Sechrist’s television series Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts and K.I. Zachopoulos and Vincenzo Balzano’s graphic novel Run Wild oppose human exceptionalism by visually plasticizing humanity and giving animals culture and agency in a way that rejects anthropocentric thinking. The monsters of Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s independent film, Wolfwalkers and Morvan and Nesmo’s ecological detective novel Bramble critique the cultural separation of urban and green spaces that has excused racial and sexual violence by displaying humanity’s innate connection to nature. Finally, Marguerite Bennett’s erotic graphic novel Insexts and select episodes from Tim Miller’s Love, Death, & Robots challenge evolutionary ideology. In this last case, characters retain their femininity and humanity in their monstrous transformations, rejecting evolutionary and societal inferiority and ultimately showing they can still retain parts of themselves and be powerful and deadly. Taken together, these texts span genres, writing/drawing styles, intended age groups, and environmental messages. They provide a wide range of monster representations and give audiences new ways to view and understand the issues surrounding what we see as ‘human’ or ‘natural’, balancing empowerment, subversivism, and condemnation.Item Counter-Capital: Black Power, The New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994(2023) Kumfer, Timothy Daniel; Hanhardt, Christina B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Counter-Capital: Black Power, the New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994” traces how grassroots organizers in the nation’s capital fought for greater control over the city and its future between the War on Poverty and rise of neoliberal austerity, helping to shape its recent past and present. Comprising a set of linked case studies, it explores how a generation of activists forged in the crucibles of the Black freedom struggle and resistance to the Vietnam war responded locally to redevelopment schemes, planned inner-city freeways, nascent gentrification, and an exponential rise in homelessness from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The campaigns they waged brought them into confrontation with federal administrators, legislators, mayors, and even the president. They also led to moments of collaboration with the state, altering the course of urban and social policy locally and nationally and contributing to the growth of community development and direct service approaches. Going beyond the boundaries of policymaking, the radicals it follows fostered emancipatory and participatory visions for the District and urban life more generally rooted in their movement ideals, ones which remain instructive even as they encountered obstacles to their full realization. Drawing on a diverse array of archival materials including organizational newsletters, meeting minutes, event flyers, campaign brochures, and correspondence; underground press and community papers alongside mainstream news outlets; documentary film and preserved footage; and oral histories and personal interviews, “Counter-Capital” contributes to debates in the fields of African American, social movement, and urban history. The project is further animated by and participates in discussions taking place across the correlating interdisciplinary fields of African American studies, American studies, and urban studies, bringing aspects of these fields that don’t always speak to one another into closer conversation. Laboring at these intersections, it shows how sustained attention to space—and specific places—can reframe the historiography of Black Power and the New Left and how centering activists and their campaigns expands the literature on Washington while troubling conventions in the composite portrait of late 20th C. US cities.Item HOW THE PICTURE PRESS MADE AMERICA: NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION(2023) Yotova, Denitsa H; Moeller, Susan D.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation looks at the related ways in which two pioneering news photographicagencies depicted the American self and presented an “understanding” of America’s nationhood. First, this dissertation investigates Bain News Service between 1900 and 1920 and the concurrent industrialization and technological achievements that changed the nature of photography and mass communication. It considers Bain’s agency as an influential national institution and gatekeeper of visual information that, along with newspaper publishers, determined the flow of photographic representation both at home and abroad. Second, this dissertation examines in parallel terms the VII agency from its inception in 2001 to 2020––a period defined by globalization, digitalization, and media convergence. VII, as a decentralized global entity, competed with a multitude of producers and consumers to influence the social discourse. The findings of this dissertation illuminate the power, and recent loss thereof, of news photographs to make visible and to promote specific social discourses within the functions of news photo agencies. In investigating Bain News Service, the first commercial news photo service in the United States founded in 1895, and the VII Photo agency, one of the preeminent photo agencies in the digital era founded in 2001, the dissertation considers how changes in the news business and photographic technologies altered representational practices and the sharing of visual information globally. This dissertation traces the rapidly evolving economic and technological environment across the century — two trends which together have not only contributed to the diminishing authority of the news photographic agency as an institution, but have weakened news photography’s role in promoting and sustaining a national identity and a nation’s reputation. Centralized national news photographic agencies of the early twentieth century, such as Bain News Service, dominated visual representations in the press. The Bain agency provided images of the United States that promoted the sovereign national status quo and disseminated images of the nation aligned with the ideology of the country’s political elite. One hundred years later, photo agencies including VII, operate in a globally-oriented, citizen-driven public sphere. The photographs disseminated by VII serve to challenge the American national status quo; they were (and still are) taken and often published in the hopes that the images will (help) bring social change. Guided by Stuart Hall’s concept of the politics of representation, this dissertation traces the evolution of the news photo agency, as a journalistic institution, while specifically examining news images along with ideologies embedded in them. The dissertation also considers the news photo agency as an Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)–– a system separate from the government, but indirectly involved in the expression of dominant ideologies and the promotion of a particular social discourse. To assess the significance of the news photo agency as an institution, and the ways in which it represented “Americanness,” this dissertation uses several approaches, including discourse and historiographical analyses and a photo-thematic analysis of the archives of Bain News Service and VII Photo. In analyzing the construction of American social discourse, the following questions guided the research: How do news photographs and the news photo agencies as journalistic institutions help represent/promote social discourses? How have Bain News Service and VII represented “Americanness” in their news photographs? How are ideas and ideologies of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream visualized in these photographs? How does the representation of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream differ in twentieth-century images produced by Bain compared to the twenty-first-century images produced by VII? Through thematic and visual examinations of news photographs of the American nation, as produced by Bain News Service and VII Photo respectively, this dissertation also looks at representations of American exceptionalism, nationalism, and the American Dream over time to determine the visual dialogue within the United States and between the American nation and the rest of the world. This investigation finds photographic representations of America’s greatness took an important place in the news and for the news photo agencies of the early 1900s, creating a highly specific understanding of the American nation as a rising global power. The centralization of image production under the news photo agencies of the twentieth century also determined a specific meaning of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream in line with the nation’s leadership. With the advent of newer technologies in the twenty-first century, the public also began to take on an active role in the producing and distributing of representations of the American individual and nation, resulting in the waning authority of the news photo agency. The decentralization of image production that resulted from forces such as convergence, digitalization, globalization, and citizen (photo)journalism in the twenty-first century has, in turn, complicated and visually re-defined the meaning of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream. Moreover, news photographic representations of social inequalities, environmental issues, and political divisions that proliferate across the Internet and social media in the twenty-first century have altered the visual portrait of America’s reputation and the ways global audiences “see” the United States. The examination of the business, structure, and news photographs produced by the two innovative news photo agencies set a century apart illuminates the significance of the news photo agency at large. The investigations outlined in the chapters ahead clarify how photojournalistic institutions have shaped public knowledge about a nation and its ideological values.Item IN THE PURSUIT: BLACK WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES IN PWI DOCTORAL PROGRAMS & THE USAGE OF BLACK JOY AS PERSISTENCE(2022) Sessoms, Christina Simone; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Out of 104,953 doctoral degrees earned by women within the United States in 2019-2020, Black women obtained 10,576 PhDs across the span of academic disciplines, equating to 11.1%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (2021). However, research has not done its due diligence of parsing through the data to understand the stories of the women who make up those 10,576 PhDs granted. This dissertation study explores the lived experiences of Black women who specifically transitioned from their undergraduate institutions into doctoral programs at predominately white institutions (PWIs) and how Black joy may be employed as a persistence mechanism toward degree completion. Because no literature exists to understand this community of doctoral students, this groundbreaking study begins with the question of what are the lived experiences of Black women who transition directly from their undergraduate to doctorate at PWIs? The dissertation continues to push further to then question how Black women in doctoral programs understand, experience, and sustain their joy and in what ways does joy inform persistence and resistance amongst these sista scholars. Utilizing Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) Black Feminist Thought as a theoretical foundation and Black feminist-womanist storytelling as the chosen methodology, I argue that this specific transition is one that must be deeply explored because of unique components and that Black joy does, in fact, serve as a positive mechanism for persistence. Life stories were collected through two interlocking methods of semi-structured interviews and focus groups amongst 14 Black women spanning 12 different academic fields in PhD programs across the United States. By sharing life narratives of Black women in doctoral programs, in-depth insight is gathered concerning reasons for going to graduate school, academic and socialization transitions, three primary barriers to success - age being a salient identity, mental health challenges, and perceived & real pressure, and, lastly, understanding and experiencing joy through self, community, and work. Through this research project, Black women in doctoral programs created space to critique and disrupt the Ivory Tower while producing joy amongst each other.Item The Comedy Propaganda Machine: The Soldier Sketch Writing Contest of World War II(2022) Demmy, Tara Noelle; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1941, the U.S. military faced the challenge of preparing to fight a war on two fronts (thousands of miles away against formidable foes) and finding comedy scripts to entertain soldiers. Wait, what? It is true, “comedy” was on the country’s long and complicated to-do list for World War II, in addition to recruiting millions of people and producing ships, aircraft, artillery, tanks, food, and ammunition. The army’s soldier show program included contests, quizzes, one-act plays, musicals, vaudeville acts, minstrel shows, and radio comedy. Military manuals detailed how to act, direct, write, and build props and costumes. The goal was to provide soldiers with the skills to self-entertain, no matter the conditions. Soldier entertainment during World War II was expansive, including Entertainment Units and USO shows, but this study focuses on informal shows, performed for and by troops in combat zones overseas. Two organizations led this effort: the Special Service, a branch of the U.S. Army, which facilitated all leisure and recreation programs for GIs, including dances, camp newspapers, music, educational programs, and sports; and the Writers’ War Board, a propaganda agency run by celebrity writers. Funded administratively by the U.S. Government’s Office of War Information (OWI), the Writers’ War Board sought to rectify the mistakes of state-run propaganda campaigns of World War I, aiming to integrate pro-war sentiment into American’s daily entertainment streams. The Special Service made the argument to commanding officers that participation in comedy would make men into better soldiers. They believed that comedy would promote and maintain what they termed “combat morale,” or the will to kill / be killed on behalf of the organization and its objectives. Using comedy to convince men to risk their lives and take the lives of others, does indeed feel like an act of propaganda. Using research from five archival collections, this dissertation asks: How did sketch comedy promote and maintain combat morale during World War II? Or in other words, how did sketch comedy function as propaganda, convincing men to risk everything? Soldier shows improved the combat efficiency of the soldier through the development of individuality, development of leadership, development of esprit de corps, and provided a means of relaxation from mental stress. The 1944 sketch writing contest for the armed services, the pinnacle collaboration between the Writers’ War Board and the Special Service, serves as the through line of this dissertation. This contest, culminating in the published booklet titled GI Prize Winning Blackouts (1944), features short funny scenes about army life. Present-day military veterans participated in workshops where they read the World War II sketches aloud and discussed them in relation to their own service. Each chapter includes embedded audio files and direct quotes, centering their perspectives as credible experts. War, like comedy, often holds multiple, even contradictory meanings. Tensions are explored within each chapter, adding complexity to my understanding of the relationship between comedy, morale, propaganda. Comedy, despite its “entertaining” nature, needs to be critically engaged, especially during periods of crisis, when audiences are most vulnerable. As during a pandemic, or war, comedy audiences (of social media, performance, and everyday joking) must be aware of their desperate need for connection and therefore their vulnerability to consciously or unconsciously be convinced to join a group and act on behalf of it. The Special Service and Writers’ War Board worked together to turn a group of civilians into effective combat soldiers, willing to risk their lives in battle. This case study speaks to the power of comedy as propaganda at a time when the stakes were incredibly high.