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 Beyond the Beauty Salon: Sport, Women of Color and Their Hair(2011) Collins, Jennifer Elizabeth; Schultz, Jaime; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research concerning women of color in sport tends to center around several topics: barriers to participation, racial stereotyping, symbolic annihilation, and the intersecting axes of power that influence their involvement and representation. Furthermore, while there exists a rich body of literature that hair has inspired in black feminist scholarship, these works have overlooked the experiences of black female athletes. In this project I seek to bridge these two bodies of knowledge through focus groups and personal interviews with black female collegiate athletes. Specifically, I examine three issues related to hair in the context of black women's athletic experiences: 1) as a particular racialized, gendered, and sexualized expression of self; 2) as a signifier of "other" in sport and society; and 3) as a possible cultural barrier to specific athletic endeavors. By bridging the disconnect between the two fields, I will address the ways that hair is an embodied cultural form influencing the physical culture of women of color.Item Embracing mathematics identity in an African-centered school: Construction and interaction of racial and mathematical student identities(2010) Nyamekye, Farhaana; Chazan, Daniel; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: EMBRACING MATHEMATICS IDENTITY IN AN AFRICAN-CENTERED SCHOOL: CONSTRUCTION AND INTERACTION OF RACIAL AND MATHEMATICAL STUDENT IDENTITIES Farhaana Nyamekye, Ph.D, 2010 Directed By: Associate Professor of Mathematics Education, Daniel Chazan, Curriculum and Instruction This dissertation is a report of a multiple case study of eight seventh grade African American students attending an African-centered school. This African-centered school is attended solely by children of African descent and adheres to a system of African cultural values, focusing on culture, relationships, and academic excellence. The report provides in depth case analyses of two of these students as they navigate their multiple identities. The foci of the analyses are on the students' construction of their math learner identities and racial identities and on their construction of both of these identities taken together. Phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory illuminates the challenges and supports that these students encounter in constructing their identities. The mathematics and racial socialization practices within the school and within the students' home environments are documented within this report as support mechanisms that provide opportunities for the students to construct identities as African American mathematics learners. The findings suggest that academic spaces that reduce the stress of racism and help students to value their racial identity may be particularly important spaces for other African American mathematics learners. The findings also have positive implications for the implementation of African and African American cultural practices and programs that can help other African American learners to positively construct identities as both African Americans and math learners. The documented findings raise critical questions about whether other African American learners that share the historical legacy of enslavement with the students in this study would benefit from African-centered schooling, despite the heterogeneity within this population.Item Re-Visioning Violence: How Black Youth Advance Critical Understandings of Violence in Climates of Criminalization(2009) McCants, Johonna Rachelle; Struna, Nancy; Woods, Clyde A.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While Black youth are often framed as the perpetrators of violence in the mainstream media and other sites, they are rarely consulted for their views on violence. This dissertation examines how Black youth and other young people of color have used hip hop music and community organizing to publicly articulate their analysis of violence and shape public discourses, ideologies and policies. The project is principally framed by Black feminist theory and Critical Race Theory, and uses discourse analysis, cultural criticism, and historical analysis as its primary methods of analysis. I examine hip hop lyrics and materials produced during community organizing campaigns, alongside a range of sources that reflect dominant frameworks on youth and violence such as television programs and sociological scholarship. This study argues firstly, that there is a discourse of "youth violence"; secondly, that this discourse is central to the criminalization of young people of color; and thirdly, that criminalization facilitates epistemic violence, harm and injury that results from the production of hegemonic knowledge. Finally, I draw on youths' perspectives and social change practices to theorize the concept of epistemic resistance, and show how youth have engaged in epistemic resistance in various ways. Youth have used hip hop music to redefine what counts as violence, who is involved in violence, and why violence among youth occurs; conducted participatory action research projects to influence and change the content of mainstream media; and developed and promoted the discourse of a "war on youth" in organizing campaigns that challenge punitive policy proposals introduced as solutions to "youth violence." This dissertation provides a re-theorized framing of and knowledge about the intellect and agency of marginalized youth. It also provides youth studies scholars with conceptual and methodological approaches for future scholarship on youth, violence, and safety. Lastly, this dissertation informs urban youth policy and grassroots organizing for transformative justice, a vision and practice of attaining safety and justice through personal and social transformation, rather than reliance on the criminal legal system.Item Ghetto Proclivities: Race and Class in a Model Minority Memoir(2008-09-23) Sandosharaj, Alice; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationship between Model Minorities and Black Americans through the lens of memoir. Drawing on approaches in self-ethnography and cultural biography, the memoir details my experience growing up South Asian in Langley Park, a poor "inner ring" suburb of Washington, DC that had, at the time (1978-1995), a majority Black population. The memoir is supplemented by an introduction, three interlude essays and a conclusion that consider the social and cultural contexts in which my experience of shifting identifications took place. Blackness, both as a construct to define what is American, as well as a barometer for exclusion from America, is examined alongside the Model Minority Myth in terms of how each, in competing and often unequal measure, can affect South Asian identity construction in ways that can complicate conventional ethnic and class identity. The discourse of the myth, with its reliance on an "invisible" structurally based lineage, bequeaths entitlements to Asians akin to white privilege. This "presumptive capital" can manifest in real world byproducts even in the absence of economic privilege, even when said model minority shares class kinship, geography and aesthetic with historically disadvantaged Black Americans from low-income circumstances. This relationship--contested, mercurial and contingent--reveals the necessity of surveying the racialized American landscape with a panoramic lens that acknowledges the interrelated, dependent spaces upon which we all draw and to which we all contribute. This dissertation assesses some of the complex, multiple ways in which a single life within a specific community can be influenced by Black American, White American and Asian American racial and cultural constructions.Item Beyond Racial Stereotypes: Subversive Subtexts in Cabin in the Sky(2008-09-02) Weber, Kate Marie; King, Richard; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 1943 film Cabin in the Sky holds an important place in cinematic history as one of the first "all-Negro" pictures produced by a major Hollywood studio. The movie musical reflects a transitional period in American racial politics and popular culture, when long-established stereotypes and themes associated with blackness were still prevalent, but were shifting to reflect more progressive attitudes. On the surface, Cabin seems to reinforce reductive and conventional notions. It presents a folkloric story of Southern blacks, the corrupting influence of modern urbanity, and the redemptive power of marital devotion and religious piety--replete with the entire pantheon of Negro caricatures. Upon careful analysis, however, the film's stereotypical topics are rendered superficial by subversive undercurrents. In addition, Ethel Waters' appearance as herself exposes the story and characters as fictional constructs, and paves the way for a more liberal image of blackness to emerge.Item Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations(2007-09-19) Scott, Jesse James; Parks, Sheri L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations African Americans' pursuit of reparations began in the eighteenth century and continues in the present. At the twilight of the twentieth century, African American slavery and reparations for that experience became a controversial topic in popular and public discourse. Inevitably, the conversation turned to economics, specifically monetary compensation. Responding to this now-global controversy, Nigerian scholar Chinweizu observed that reparations are not primarily about money. Instead, he insists, reparations are about psychological repairs, institutional repairs, educational repairs, self-made repairs, repairs of all types. Drawing on Chinweizu's conception of reparations, "Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations" examines Toni Morrison's Beloved, Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying, Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, and Marc Forster's Monster's Ball as cultural narratives that illuminate the pitfalls of pursuing reparations that are restricted to the legal arena. While this dissertation responds to a historical-political project, I do not offer these cultural narratives as political instruction on how to pursue reparations. Rather, this project examines how individuals and communities within these cultural narratives pursue reparations outside of the legal arena. Despite popular representations of the pursuit of reparations as being primarily about money, I argue that the pursuit of reparations is also a narrative pursuit that disturbs the highly imagined peace of national unity. As such, investigating cultural narratives for the ways in which they engage and revise popular notions of reparations encourages a more expansive approach to identifying and repairing racial injuries for individuals and communities. Narrative does more than calculate debts; it reminds individuals of what they owe both to themselves and to the communities they inhabit, reminds them that their lives and their histories are more than notations in slave ledgers, and reminds them that they are, first and foremost, human beings. Against this legal history, the cultural narratives under consideration in "Disturbing the Peace" suggest, as does Chinweizu, that reparations depend on communities' willingness and/or ability to initiate self-made repairs.Item "Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond(2007-05-01) Drake, Simone; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women's writing. During what is now referred to as the Black Women's Literary Renaissance, Black women writers worked to center Black women's experiences in American and African American literary "traditions" that had theretofore excluded them. This project examines how more recent writing by Black women signifies on the issues and concerns that defined the Renaissance, particularly issues of historical recovery and Black male sexism. Despite the progressive nature of the Renaissance, Black women consistently found that their work was at odds with what Farah Jasmine Griffin calls, "the promise of protection," propagated by Black Nationalism. In response to this patriarchal promise, writers like Toni Morrison, for example, created characters, who like Sula Peace, chose a space of solitude over the patriarchal offer of "protection." I argue that contemporary Black women writers are re-thinking spaces of solitude, and instead proposing a "promise of partnership" that is grounded in a critical gender consciousness. "Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond" is an interdisciplinary study of reformed partnership in the cultural productions of four contemporary Black women writers. Appropriating Homi Bhabha's concept of "dwelling in the beyond," I discuss how these writers imagine a productive and secure space for intra-racial, heterosexual dialogue in Toni Morrison's, Paradise, Erna Brodber's, Louisiana, Kasi Lemmons' film, Eve's Bayou, and Danzy Senna's short story, "The Land of Beulah." Each of these texts suggest that not only do promises of protection leave characters needing "something more," but that previous narratives of kinship and family that were a hallmark of Black women's Renaissance era writing, leave the characters needing "something more," as well. As the texts interrogate familial and heterosexual relationships, they consistently conclude that "the more" is a reformed heterosexual partnership that is grounded in unmotivated respect.Item Reimagining Black Power: Prison Manifestos and the Strategies of Regeneration in the Rewriting of Black Identity, 1969-2002(2006-11-30) Corrigan, Lisa Marie; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study is predicated upon an analysis of the manifesto as a rhetorical centerpiece of both black resistance and revolution from slavery to the present in an attempt to build on an obviously significant, yet undertheorized, genre of persuasion. It examines the history of black manifestos and moves to study the utility ands strategies of prison autobiographies and life-writings in the Black Power movement to understand the typology of discourses produced under constant surveillance and violence from the state. To this end, the study examines the life writings or, manifestos, of three Black Power activists: Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal and H. Rap Brown (now Jamil Al-Amin). Rather than studying all of their rhetorical actions during the earliest phase of the Black Power movement of the mid- to late 1960s, this study instead features the regenerative strategies within the prison manifestos of Black Power leaders who have been compelled to revise notions of Black Power after many of its leaders and followers were either jailed or killed for their revolutionary actions and commitments during the 1960s. These chapters examine the rhetorical strategies within the autobiographical manifestos that continue Black Power agitation and trace how the writers continue to serve as celebrities and Black Power leaders in a new phase of Black Power agitation. Finally, the study looks at the potentially positive and negative contributions of regenerative Black Power strategies in the autobiographical manifestos of Shakur, Abu-Jamal, and Brown, and traces the circulation of their ideologies through hip-hop culture to see how these activists continue to inform the black public sphere of incarceration.Item Communication Behaviors, Perception of Criticism, Changes in Emotional State, and Relationship Satisfaction in African American and Caucasian Heterosexual Couples(2006-08-10) Galloway, Serena Christine; Werlinich, Carol; Epstein, Norman B; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among partners'communication behaviors, perception of criticism, emotional state, and relationship satisfaction among African American and Caucasian couples. Partners' perception of criticism was examined as a mediator of the relationship between communication behaviors and emotional state, as well as relationship satisfaction. The influence of partners' perception of criticism was expected to vary by culture/race. Secondary analyses were conducted for 29 Caucasian and 20 African American heterosexual couples presenting for therapy at a university-based clinic as part of the ongoing Couples Abuse Prevention Program. Couples completed self-report measures of perceived criticism and dyadic adjustment, as well as completing a 10-minute communication sample and reporting their moods before and after the discussion. Results supported perception of criticism as a mediator, and the association between negative communication behavior and partners' perception of criticism was stronger for Caucasian husbands than for African American husbands.Item Shadow Politics in the Rich Light of Day: Black Youth, Political Socialization, and one Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area High School(2006-06-14) Fishman, Darwin Ben; Walters, Ron; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: SHADOW POLITICS IN THE RICH LIGHT OF DAY: BLACK YOUTH, POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION, AND ONE WASHINGTON, D.C. METROPOLITAN AREA HIGH SCHOOL Darwin Ben Fishman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Ron Walters Department of Government and Politics There is still a lot that is not known about how we develop our political identity and why we retain certain parts of our political identity and shed other parts. Most of the research done in the last forty years was based on the assumption that political socialization occurred during youth and that youth learned some of their most important political lessons while in school. The current field of political socialization has expanded and changed greatly, but still retains youth identity formation as the foundation of most scholarly work. The racial and quantitative bias of this past research on political socialization has been neglected. These theoretical and methodological concerns have provided the basis for my research. To be able to address these issues and to delve more deeply into these issues, I have focused my work on the political socialization of Black youth. I decided to conduct an ethnographic research project to be able examine the political socialization process for Black youth and to be able address some of the larger questions about the field of political socialization and identity politics. This project was based on observations and interviews in one African American History elective class for Juniors and Seniors in a public high school. This high school was located in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area, and it was nestled in a poor working class suburban area. The research gave me insight into the lives of Black youth's political socialization from a unique perspective. Unlike past race neutral work and quantitative research, this ethnographic research illustrated how complicated and contradictory Black youth political socialization can be. I found the students' lack of knowledge about local, state, and national political affairs was not matched by an equally apparent lack of interest or enthusiasm for political issues or participation. Instead I found that the students were most passionate and well versed in a few, very specific political areas. This ethnographic approach did not produce a way to avoid these awkward points, but it instead created the space in which many of these contradictory trends could be re-stitched together in a more meaningful fashion.