Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Women in White: Performing White Femininity from 1865-Present(2021) Walker, Jonelle; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how white woman character tropes on stage, page, and screen are both haunted by histories of post-Civil War racial terror and themselves haunt white women’s everyday embodiment. This spectral framework is undergirded by a less traditionally academic approach: a self-reflexive interrogation of a compulsion to endangerment, peril, fear, and self-destruction the author observes in representations of white women and in herself. The study of white femininity represented in theatre, literature, film, and social media is narrowed to focus on this predilection for danger and its political implications for racialized-gender embodiment. The dissertation attributes this phenomenon to a dialectic central to white femininity in an Anglophone context: being in/the danger, that is simultaneously being victim and instigator of violence, tragedy, and destruction. The project pursues being in/the danger within the context of theatre and performance studies by asking: How has the white woman been made and continuously remade through staging white woman character tropes? Which gestures, affects, and self-fashionings from these tropes haunt everyday white womanhood? Each chapter examines one trope and its implications in detail, including the damsel in distress, the girl crime victim, the suicidal authoress, the anorexic waif, among others. The dissertation examines how characterizations of melancholy, endangerment, and frailty in these characters shaped common and highly racialized understandings of white womanhood during the period studied. To illustrate this broad cultural phenomenon, the dissertation studies an appropriately broad set of objects including plays; films; literature; artist biographies; and social media communities.Item An Autoethnographic Account of Innovation at the US Department of Veterans Affairs(2020) Casertano, Andrew E; Marciano, Richard; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The history of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health information technology (HIT) has been characterized by both enormous successes and catastrophic failures. While the VA was once hailed as the way to the future of twenty-first-century health care, many programs have been mismanaged, delayed, or flawed, resulting in the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Since 2015 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has designated HIT at the VA as being susceptible to waste, fraud, and mismanagement. The timely central research question I ask in this study is, can healthcare IT at the VA be healed? To address this question, I investigate a HIT case study at the VA Center of Innovation (VACI), originally designed to be the flagship initiative of the open government transformation at the VA. The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) was designed to promote the open innovation ecosystem public-private-academic partnership. Based on my fifteen years of experience at the VA, I use an autoethnographic methodology to make a significant value-added contribution to understanding and modeling the VA’s approach to innovation. I use several theoretical information system framework models including People, Process, and Technology (PPT), Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE), and Technology Adaptive Model (TAM) and propose a new adaptive theory to understand the inability of VA HIT to innovate. From the perspective of people and culture, I study retaliation against whistleblowers, organization behavioral integrity, and lack of transparency in communications. I examine the VA processes, including the different software development methodologies used, the development and operations process (DevOps) of an open-source application developed at VACI, the Radiology Protocol Tool Recorder (RAPTOR), a Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) radiology workflow module. I find that the VA has chosen to migrate away from inhouse application software and buy commercial software. The impact of these People, Process, and Technology findings are representative of larger systemic failings and are appropriate examples to illustrate systemic issues associated with IT innovation at the VA. This autoethnographic account builds on first-hand project experience and literature-based insights.