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 (Im)Mobilizing Community College Youths' Digital Culture: Theorizing the Implications of Everyday Digital Practices, Perceptions, and Differences among Frederick Community College Youths(2014) Trigger, Kelly Lynn; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study complicates American youths' digital culture by analyzing the digital practices, perceptions, and experiences of students, ages 18 to 24, attending Frederick Community College in Frederick, Maryland, through an interdisciplinary lens that infuses intersectional theory with Bourdieu's triad of habitus, field, and capital. Mixed methods research combining data from the FCC Digital Practices Survey and focus group interviews indicated that community college youths engaged in a spectrum of practices to socialize and communicate, engage in entertainment and creative practices, and manage everyday life, information, school, and work. Community college youths actively participated in digital culture through social networking, listening to music, watching television, playing videogames, and engaging with other technology. Not only did they feel pressured to adapt digitally, they also intentionally disengaged from technology, managed their lives using digital tools, resolved communication conflicts, monitored their online identities and privacy, developed various forms of digital expertise, and observed the impacts of adults' struggles with technology at home and in the classroom. Data patterns, including differences between males and females, and among youths with different racial and ethnic identities, revealed contradictions among their everyday digital practices, their confidence with performing these practices, and their perceptions of practices' importance in college and in their future everyday lives and work. This study theorizes the impacts of these contradictions, proposing that as youths encounter shifts in the symbolic value of digital practices between their everyday digital culture and the field of education, they experience what Clarke et al. (2009) termed "digital dissonance," conflicts between their everyday digital practices and their digital engagement in education. Impacts of digital dissonance, which range from resolution and circumnavigation, to digital stagnation and immobilization, affect the uneven positions youths take up within the field of community college education and potentially result in the unintended reproduction of social inequity. To disrupt the reproduction of inequity, this study considers the material consequences of digital immobilization for community college youths and advocates for intentional reform and research that mobilizes their digital practices.Item Women as Producers and Consumers in 1950s America: An Analysis of Spatial Hysteresis(2006-02-20) Thorn, Elizabeth Kathleen; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bourdieu employs the concept of hysteresis to describe a temporal lag or mismatch between habitus and field. I expand on this concept to develop a theory of spatial hysteresis, in which multiple fields are included in the analysis. Spatial hysteresis may occur when one field undergoes change at a faster rate than another field, producing changes in capital holdings and habitus that affect the second field. Twelve in-depth interviews provide limited evidence of spatial hysteresis in women's positions in consumer society and the labor force in the postwar United States. Rapid changes in consumer society may have increased women's capital holdings and altered their habitus, paving the way for the changes that subsequently occurred in the labor force.