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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    TONES IN BLACK: A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN BASS/BARITONES IN CLASSICAL MUSIC: IN THE ECHOES OF ANCESTORS, A PIONEER’S VOICE
    (2024) McIlwain-Lightfoot, VaShawn Savoy; Short, Kevin C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation project has three major foci: a) to trace the history of classically trained African American Bass/Baritone vocalists through performance, recordings, and narrative; b) to recognize the historical performances of African American Bass/Baritone vocal pioneers and the significant contributions they made to the accessibility of opportunities for other African Americans within these voice types; and c) to discuss how Bass/Baritone community performances can promote social connectedness and DEI in opera. In addressing these foci, the paper will emphasize how the performances of Bass/Baritone vocal artists, past and present, have a) made African Americans, in general, more acceptable to White audiences and b) changed the perceptions of White Americans about who African Americans are and what they are capable of. Methodology involved securing physical/digital historical data from newspapers, journals, and books; collecting photos, programs, and articles from the private library of a former University of Maryland professor; conducted oral history interviews of students and progeny of the first African American Baritone to sing with a major opera company in the U.S. (Todd Duncan); delivered community performances domestically and internationally as a current example of the legacy of African American classical vocal artists, specifically Bass/Baritones. This project’s accounting of historical performances can serve to recognize unknown or forgotten contemporaries and predecessors.
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    Emancipatory Hope: Reclaiming Black Social Movement Continuity
    (2019) Winstead, Kevin C; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    From the Freedom Songs to the Pullman Porters, African Americans have had to find ways to make collective use of the available means of communication for resistance, survival, and political organizing. The Movement for Black Lives carries on this tradition by using social media platforms, specifically Twitter. Accordingly, I asked: How do Black activists use Twitter to communicate ideas of hope and survival? Applying an adaption of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, I examined Black activists’ constructions and utilization of hope for political action through shared artifacts of engagement across Twitter. By engaging both the interface of Twitter, its uses, and significant cultural practices along with a content analysis of Black activists’ online discussion, I identified the technocultural political framing of the current movement for Black lives. I argued that hope becomes a vehicle by which African Americans pass along strategies and tactics for liberation through technocultural practice. I conceptualized these findings as emancipatory hope, a utopian expectation of the collective capacity for dismantling race, class, and gender dominance. This research has implications for how we understand social movement theorizing by including a technoculture lens to the abeyance formation of social movement continuity theory.
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    AN EXPLORATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH WORKER ENGAGEMENT WITH HEALTH-RELATED SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF #BLACKLIVESMATTER
    (2018) Bickford, Abigail Runa; Gold, Robert S; Public and Community Health; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Social movements fight for social justice by protesting systemic social inequities. The field of public health aims to eliminate these same disparities as they relate to health. Many social movements are not currently viewed as health social movements despite these movements addressing health disparities by challenging existing inequities related to social determinants of health. One example is the Black Lives Matter movement which has gained considerable attention in its efforts to address systemic racism, a known determinant of health. While the Black Lives Matter movement has evoked many academic and popular responses, there has been a lack of focus on this movement by the public health workforce. Therefore this work uses the Black Lives Matter movement as an example of a health-related social movement warranting engagement from the public health workforce. This study utilizes a novel approach to the use of social media data in the public health field. The first part of this work examines tweets containing #BlackLivesMatter and compares the online discourse to the stated mission and principles outlined by the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization. An analysis of the Twitter data was then presented in a Delphi study conducted with a panel of experts in public health. Delphi participants were tasked with developing ideas on how the public health workforce could best apply the information collected from #BlackLivesMatter Twitter data to aid in addressing the health-related issues highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement. More broadly, participants also generated ideas about what can be done to encourage the public health workforce to systematically engage with health-related social movements. Finally, one-on-one interviews were conducted with self-identified social activists. These activists were asked about their participation in social movements, their use of social media regarding their advocacy work, and for ideas about how the public health workforce could engage with their causes. Findings from each study are discussed along with recommendations for future work aimed at developing relationships between public health workers and social movements.
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    Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism
    (2017) Richardson, Allissa Verlyn; Steiner, Linda C; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Modern black citizen journalists have embraced the mobile phone as their storytelling tool of choice to produce raw reportage that challenges long-standing narratives of race, power and privilege in America. This dissertation investigates specifically how leading anti-police brutality activists—especially those affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Movement—leverage the affordances of mobile and social media to report original news within the contemporary social justice “beat.” Through semi-structured interviews and a descriptive analysis of the activists’ Twitter timelines, I explore the journalistic roles that these activists perform, the types of stories that they produce most often, and the relationships that they have formed with their audiences. I argue that the reportage from these black witnesses forms the vanguard of modern protest journalism, which functions from a positionality of sousveillance to watch powerful authorities from below. This evolving genre of protest journalism fills the editorial voids that the dying Black press has left behind, and invents ripe areas of inquiry for journalism studies.