Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give 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 Teaching Methods and Partnership Development Patterns for Non-University Archivists(2022) Keefer, Scott; Marsh, Diana E; Van Hyning, Victoria A; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teaching has become a more prevalent and rigorous part of the archival profession over the last two decades. While the majority of the established literature and case studies on the subject focus on university settings, this thesis examines the results of qualitative interviews with teaching archivists in institutions outside of university settings. The results show that the active learning methods of universities have largely been embraced by non-university archivists, but also show that the profession remains in flux in terms of training and transitioning away from more passive methods. This study can be used to implement or improve teaching programs in non-university institutions of all sizes and reflect a need for wider training in teaching and encouragement of pedagogical training in institutions and library science schools.Item Forensic Injustice: Human Rights, Archival Science and Racialized Feminicide in Guatemala(2016) Vargas, Maria Elena; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The call to access and preserve the state records that document crimes committed by the state during Guatemala’s civil war has become an archival imperative entangled with neoliberal human rights discourses of “truth, justice, and memory.” 200,000 people were killed and disappeared in Guatemala’s civil war including acts of genocide in which 85% of massacres involved sexual violence committed against Mayan women. This dissertation argues that in an attempt to tell the official story of the civil war, American Human Rights organizations and academic institutions have constructed a normative identity whose humanity is attached to a scientific and evidentiary value as well as an archival status representing the materiality and institutionality of the record. Consequently, Human Rights discourses grounded in Western knowledges, in particular archival science and law, which prioritize the appearance of truth erase the material and epistemological experience of indigenous women during wartimes. As a result, the subjectivity that has surfaced on the record as most legible has mostly pertained to non-indigenous, middle class, urban, leftist men who were victims of enforced disappearance not genocide. This dissertation investigates this conflicting narrative that remembers a non-indigenous revolutionary masculine hero and grants him justice in human rights courtrooms simply because of a document attesting to his death. A main research question addressed in this project is why the promise of "truth and justice" under the name of human rights becomes a contentious site for gendered indigenous bodies? I conduct a discursive and rhetorical analysis of documentary film, declassified Guatemalan police and military records such as Operation Sofia, a military log known for “documenting the genocide” during rural counterinsurgencies executed by the military. I interrogate the ways in which racialized feminicides or the hyper-sexualized racial violence that has historically dehumanized indigenous women falls outside of discourses of vision constructed by Western positivist knowledges to reinscribe the ideal human right subject. I argue for alternative epistemological frames that recognize genocide as sexualized and gendered structures that have simultaneously produced racialized feminicides in order to disrupt the colonial structures of capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Ironically, these structures of power remain untouched by the dominant human rights discourse and its academic, NGO, and state collaborators that seek "truth and justice" in post-conflict Guatemala.Item EXAMINATION OF THE MANAGEMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA RECORDS AT A FEDERAL EXECUTIVE AGENCY(2015) Doran, Chad; Bertot, John; Kurtz, Michael; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Maintaining and preserving records has long been regarded as essential to the functioning of federal government and to related open government initiatives in particular. However, the literature identifies specific technology and policy-related challenges of managing social media records. While there exists in the literature a limited examination regarding the management of social media content in the federal agencies, a close analysis is needed to identify how social media records are being managed in practice. As the nature of social media and electronic content are both rapidly evolving, it is important to ensure that current practice guidelines are applicable to new technology and continually re-aligned to policy as requirements and regulations change. In recent years, effective management of social media records has become relevant not only in terms of ongoing compliance but as an essential element of open government and transparency-related initiatives. Additionally, and perhaps even more important, all records management and archive practices, including social media preservation, serve a larger social function of maintaining and documenting our collective memory and experiences. This study provides an in-depth analysis of social media records management within a federal executive agency, utilizing a mixed-methods approach consisting of website review, document review, and follow-up interviews. This study presents theoretical as well as practical implications. On the theoretical level, the study contributes to records management theory, application of information models, and the definition of the record in the social media environment. On the practical level, this research provides recommendations to industry and federal agencies for the development of standards, guidance, and technologies for the management and preservation of social media records.Item Art comme archive dans (Archives du nord)(2012) Phair, Elise; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Archives du nord est l'histoire d'une humanité où la présence de l'auteur est évidente non dans la forme traditionnelle d'un personnage, mais dans les opinions et l'imagination insérées dans ses réflexions sur l'art et son analyse de l'art comme témoignage de l'Histoire et de la pensée humaine. Ce mémoire explore le discours sur l'art dans Archives du nord et montre en quoi il est un témoignage historique selon Yourcenar, ses perspectives sur l'Histoire de la pensée, et comment art reflet sa propre identité, liée aux cultures française, flamande, et européenne en général. Ces réflexions sont fondées sur des peintures, des sculptures, et dans quelques cas, des photographies. Yourcenar donne à l'art une place importante dans les archives qui forment la base de son oeuvre, car les tableaux et les portraits sont des témoignages visuels de l'identité individuelle et universelle, propre à ses personnages et générale à tout le monde à la fois. Archives du nord is a story of humanity where the author's presence is felt through the opinions and use of imagination included in her reflexions on art and her analysis of art as a testimony of human thought, rather than in the form of a traditional character. This thesis explores the discours on art in Archives du nord and reveals how Yourcenar considers it historical evidence, her perspectives on human thought, and how art reflects her own identity as it is linked to French, Flemish, and European culture in general. These reflexions are based on paintings, sculpture, and in some cases, photographs. Yourcenar gives art an important position among the archives that provide the basis of her work, for paintings and portraits are visual testimonies to both individual and universal identity, relating to her characters and to humanity in general.Item Odyssey of an Archives: What the History of the Gordon W. Prange Collection of Japanese Materials Teaches Us About Libraries, Censorship, and Keeping the Past Alive(2007-05-07) Snyder, Sara Christine; Mayo, Marlene; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1949, a professor of German history named Gordon W. Prange obtained a set of rare publications and censorship documents pertaining to the Allied Occupation of Japan. He shipped these materials to the University of Maryland, where for the next fifty years a parade of faculty and staff alternately neglected, protected, exploited, and cherished them. This Master's thesis traces that history, paralleling the rising fame of the Prange Collection with developments in East Asian Studies and Prange's interest in Pearl Harbor. It concludes with a discussion of applied concepts in archival science, arguing that the relatively late development of the American archival discipline coupled with the complicated format of Prange Collection materials meant that the archival qualities of the Collection took many years to recognize. Sources include original oral history interviews and archival research. This thesis contributes to the interdisciplinary field of archival history.