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

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2011 - 20183

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    DE LA LITTÉRATURE UNIVERSALISTE SENGHORIENNE AU TOUT-MONDE DE GLISSANT: MÉTISSAGE ET DIALOGUE DES CULTURES DANS L’ÉCRITURE DE FATOU DIOME, ALAIN MABANCKOU, GASTON KELMAN ET AMINATA SOW FALL
    (2018) DIENE, Khady; Orlando, Valérie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis focuses on how Senghorian universalism has influenced the world-views of contemporary mondial authors as well as Glissant’s concept of Tout-Monde. After reading the works of contemporary authors as Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Gaston Kelman and Aminata Sow Fall, we realized that their main themes as Métissage and Dialogue des cultures echo Senghor’s Civilisation de l’Universel. We also examine how le voyage, with its relation to globalization, influences or not these authors’ vision, as well as their writing and discourse about the universal ideas on the human condition. The objective of this thesis is to put in conversation Senghor’s Civilisation de l’Universel with contemporary works and to show through our literary and theorethical analysis that Senghorian universalism is atemporal.
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    Teaching Women's Studies: Exploring Student Engagement in Technology-Rich Classroom Learning Communities
    (2013) Staking, Kimberlee; Rosenfelt, Deborah; King, Katie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Although university students are key participants in knowledge-making processes, their insights about learning are sparsely documented, and too rarely considered in contemporary conversations in higher education. In centering the insights and experiences of students enrolled in two women's studies courses at the University of Maryland, this dissertation produces a substantive intervention that both democratizes and disrupts existing academic discourse. The research utilizes empirical data collected from students enrolled in three sections of Women's Studies 250: Women, Art and Culture, and from students enrolled in an online course, Women's Health and Well-Being, Transnational Perspectives, which was taught cross-institutionally at four universities in Africa, Israel and the United States. Qualitative analysis of empirical data facilitated the description of processes by which women's studies students were engaged in classroom knowledge-making. Student texts, interpretively stitched together within a crystallized presentation format, produce a poly-vocal narrative illuminating the robustly material and multi-sensory nature of processes in, through, and by which participants transacted their learning. Collectively, their shared stories affirm the value of a technology-rich classroom praxis, one that facilitated dialogic and peer-centered learning processes, to students' active and productive engagement in collaborative knowledge-making endeavors. Research findings also illuminate how such a praxis, scaffolded on dialogic engagement, and on the deployment of socio-constructivist pedagogies in a technology-rich learning environment, deepened participants' collaborations with one another as equally knowledgeable peers across difference, which simultaneously and materially facilitated their capabilities to critically and reflexively engage relevant knowledge frameworks. The strength of these findings attest to the benefits of focusing qualitative research on the nature of the transactional processes by and through which students are engaged in classroom learning. In explicitly asserting the value to learners of these material processes above others in facilitating collaborative knowledge-making transactions, this dissertation documents shared ownership in processes of classroom knowledge-making as an enabling factor in participants' abilities to capitalize on vital resources of peer diversity that, when mobilized, have the capacity to support potentially trangressive and tangibly transformative social justice outcomes for individuals and for the classroom learning community as a whole.
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    Seeking Personal Meaning in New Places: The Lived Experience of Religious Conversion
    (2011) Brimhall-Vargas, Mark G.; Hultgren, Francine; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This phenomenological study explores the lived experience of religious conversion. As a study concerned with the development of religious identity (often rooted in psycho-social research where identity development usually relies on linear processes of growth), this dissertation research suggests that religious identity development, in particular, cannot easily be mapped to these models. What insights about religious identity, and identity generally, can be drawn from the standpoint of religious conversion? How do people who have experienced this phenomenon make meaning of that experience? What implications does "fluid" identity hold for educational settings? This research is done in the tradition of phenomenology drawing on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Derrida, and Merleau-Ponty as foundational "grounding" for this study. Each of these philosophers raise key concepts used for the rendering and illumination of the phenomenon of religious conversion. Van Manen provides a detailed process by which phenomenological philosophy can be used to conduct this form of research. Initial exploration of the existential phenomenon suggests themes including the various pressures that make hiding a change in identity necessary, a deep questioning surrounding the nature of religion itself and the meaning it holds for people, and the rejection of certainty as a value in religious identity. Once themes of religious conversion had been explored, I recruited ten participants representing a wide array of identities related to religion, race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, age, and educational attainment for this study. My phenomenological data suggest that religious identity development can be deeply understood as a complex phenomenon often mirrored in the mythological "heroic journey" commonly found in cultures around the world. In this process, I develop the concept of phenomythology, a process of weaving myth and phenomenology together as an existential process to uncover and illustrate the seemingly universal search for ultimacy and liminality in life's small events as revelatory of larger significance and deeper inward meaning. Drawing from the insights I gained from my participants, I suggest that the lived experience of religious conversion can be linked to other social science theory (such as queer theory) to better prepare educators who encounter individuals who have complex religious identity. Specifically, I explore pedagogical possibilities for including insights from religiously queer identity as a way for understanding social difference. My first concern is helping educators understand how religiously queer people might "show up" in a classroom setting. Additionally, I offer a variety of ways to use this difference as a gift of perspective to learning, including a reconceptualization of identity within the setting of intergroup dialogue as phenomenological "cohabited space" to build solidarity and alliances for progressive social action.