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 The Capital of Diversity: Difference, Development, and Placemaking in Washington, D.C.(2011) Maher, Justin Thomas; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Diversity has long been a part of the urban landscape, both as a demographic fact and as a valuable commodity used to attract development. Both kinds of diversity move through Columbia Heights, the rapidly (re)developing neighborhood in Washington D.C. that serves as my case study. It is home to residents of varying racial, ethnic, sexuality and class-based identifications as well as the rhetoric that selectively values them. In this dissertation, I argue that a rhetorical commitment to diversity has been an integral part of uneven development in Columbia Heights. It is the cornerstone of neoliberal development, a process in which government subsidized, private development benefits middle and upper-middle class (often white) residents, while low-income residents of color are increasingly denied quality housing, employment, and education. This interdisciplinary project draws on urban, cultural, ethnic, and queer studies scholarship to illustrate how representations of difference affect material development. I argue that they create ideological "maps" of the neighborhood that value some markers of difference while erasing and policing others. In turn, these maps guide who invests in the neighborhood and who belongs where. I chart how representations have changed over time, from the appropriation of civil rights rhetoric in the mid to late 20th century, to more recent multicultural imagery and gay-led gentrification narratives used to sell a "new," upscale Columbia Heights. Using a mixed methodology of textual and ethnographic analysis, I examine different sites of discursive production: city planning documents, real estate marketing, and an online neighborhood listserv. I also interview longtime and incoming Columbia Heights residents with various social locations, illustrating how dominant narratives of difference and development are reinforced and/or challenged among residents. This project expands existing development, gentrification, and gay enclave scholarship. It challenges singular analyses of difference and examines how multiple markers of difference affect spaces. All middle-class newcomers are not white, nor are all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer residents middle-class. In addition to suggesting policy solutions, I suggest how "contact" between residents of different social locations has the potential to counteract uneven development and the discourse that reinforces it.Item Children's Music in the Southern Baptist Convention: An Ethnographic Study of Four Churches in Maryland Examining the Effects of Doctrine and Local Church Autonomy on Children's Music(2011) Diab, Melak Victoria; Provine, Robert C; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest Protestant denomination and the largest group of Baptists in the United States. Furthermore, LifeWay Christian Resources, the Southern Baptist publishing house, is the largest Christian publisher in the United States, producing various literature and media resources, including music material for children. However, the autonomous nature of the local Baptist church gives it absolute freedom to choose programs and materials apart from the Southern Baptist National Convention and LifeWay. This study examines the dynamics of the relationship between the National Convention and the local church as it pertains to children's music. The study looks at the theological and organizational framework on the national level and the local church level and how they affect children and children's music in an autonomous local church setting. The study reveals that all resources and programs related to children on the local church and national convention level, such as children's choir and Vacation Bible School, and Sunday school, are directed towards teaching the children about the two most fundamental concepts of the faith, these are conversion (how to become a Christian) and worship (how to commune with God). The SBC curriculum for children is undergirded by Howard Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences, and makes extensive use of creative movement and American Sign Language to capture children's attention. However, the nature of local church autonomy gives each church the freedom to tailor SBC curriculum to its specific needs or to choose a curriculum from another denomination altogether.Item SLAVE SHIPS, SHAMROCKS, AND SHACKLES: TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS IN BLACK AMERICAN AND NORTHERN IRISH WOMEN'S REVOLUTIONARY AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL WRITING, 1960S-1990S(2010) Washburn, Amy Leigh; Rosenfelt, Deborah S.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores revolutionary women's contributions to the anti-colonial civil rights movements of the United States and Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. I connect the work of Black American and Northern Irish revolutionary women leaders/writers involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black Panther Party (BPP), Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Republic for New Afrika (RNA), the Soledad Brothers' Defense Committee, the Communist Party-USA (Che Lumumba Club), the Jericho Movement, People's Democracy (PD), the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the National H-Block/ Armagh Committee, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Women Against Imperialism (WAI), and/or Sinn Féin (SF), among others by examining their leadership roles, individual voices, and cultural productions. This project analyses political communiqués/ petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs of revolutionary Black American and Northern Irish women, all of whom were targeted, arrested, and imprisoned for their political activities. I highlight the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key leaders/writers: Angela Y. Davis and Bernadette Devlin McAliskey; Assata Shakur and Margaretta D'Arcy; Ericka Huggins and Roseleen Walsh; Afeni Shakur-Davis, Joan Bird, Safiya Bukhari, and Martina Anderson, Ella O'Dwyer, and Mairéad Farrell. These women address similar themes in their work either through direct communication (i.e., political communiqués and personal correspondence) and/or indirect expression (i.e., news coverage and auto/biographical responses to it). I document moments of transatlantic solidarity among them. This project also draws on interviews with selected writers for supplemental data in interpreting their personal histories and writings. This dissertation is concerned with tracing and analyzing the politics and prose/ poetry of Black American and Northern Irish women. Their cultural expressions concern revolutionary struggle. I use their work as a source of data and an object of analysis. My work establishes links between several areas: nation and anti-colonialism, race and anti-racism, gender and feminism, literature and genre, content and analysis, and theory and praxis.Item LES VOIX DU VOLCAN : L'ECRITURE DU MAL-ETRE DANS LE ROMAN FEMININ DE L'ILE DE LA REUNION(2010) Rebourcet, Severine Marie-Francoise; Orlando, Valerie K.; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my dissertation I examine how Creole women in the Reunion Island confront problems of racial and social oppression in their novels from the 1970s to the 1990s. I focus on their particular preoccupations with the haunting persistence of colonial racism in the lives of Creole individuals. Their autobiographical accounts represent a sample of Reunionese postcolonial literature and the range of issues their novels address also reflects the tragic history of the island. In their testimonies, the authors especially stress the struggle against cultural censorship, self-denial, racial discriminations and, above all, against the destructuration of Creole identity. Even though I concentrate my study on three novels, Anne Cheynet's Les Muselés (1977) Rose-May Nicole's Laetitia (1986), and Monique Boyer's Métisse (1992), I draw parallels with other women writers' works from the French Caribbean, Mauritius and the United States. Thus I demonstrate that this inferiority feeling looms over any societies that suffered the cruelties of slavery and injustices of colonialism as the past suffering and traumas are passed from generations on.Item Re-mediating identities in the imagined homeland: Taiwanese migrants in China(2010) Huang, Shu-Ling; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the identity formation and transformation of Taiwanese migrants to China in light of globalization. Combining migrant studies and media studies, it explores how the identities of Taiwanese migrants are shaped and reshaped through the ongoing interactions of mediated communication and lived experience in the place of adoption. Against the linear model of assimilation, three discourses on transnationalism argue for the pluralization and deterritorialization of identities among contemporary migrants, including continuous home-country loyalty, diasporic hybrid identities, and cosmopolitan consciousness. However, this case study also encounters historical particularities, such as the opposition of Taiwanese and Chinese identities in Taiwan, Taiwanese migration to their imagined homeland, and China' authoritarian media system. While attending to these issues, I analyze the migration patterns of Taiwanese migrants, their use of the media in China, and the relations between mediation and identity. Primarily based on in-depth interviews with 68 Taiwanese migrants conducted in 2008, I found that Taiwanese migrants' spatial and upward mobility upon migration contributes to their class distinction and outsider mentality in China. Moreover, despite different settlement plans, migrants tend to see their migration as sojourning. Mental isolation from Chinese society, along with distrust of the Chinese news media, makes migrants heavily dependent on Taiwanese news media for information. They also utilize such communication tools as SMS and the Internet to forge and maintain Taiwanese-only social networks and interpersonal communications. As for entertainment media, migrants prefer foreign and Taiwanese media products to Chinese ones. Much of their transnational communication is sustained through the use of illegal means, such as satellite TV and pirated videos. Everyday experiences--lived or mediated, local or transnational--enable migrants to renegotiate their own similarities with and differences from the Chinese. A kind of Taiwanese consciousness based on pride develops among migrants. Nevertheless, as far as national identity is concerned, Taiwanese migrants remain divided, although they have also become less nationalistic and more realistic.Item The Changing Spatial Distribution of the Population of the Former Soviet Union(2009) Heleniak, Timothy Edmund; Geores, Martha E; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When it existed, the Soviet Union was a closed economic and migration space with tightly-controlled movement of goods, people, and ideas across its borders. It was also an ethnically complex region with 130 different nationalities, fifty-three with territorially-based ethnic homelands, of which fifteen became the successor states to the Soviet Union. The breakup of the Soviet Union, the transition towards market economies, and the liberalization of the societies have together greatly impacted the lives of people in the region. Many found themselves in countries or regions with dramatically shrunken economies or as ethnic minorities in newly independent states and many have chosen migration as a strategy of adaptation to the new circumstances in which they found themselves. Using established migration theory, this dissertation examines the causes of migration among the fifteen successor states since 1991. The main test was to compare the relative impact of economic factors versus ethnic factors driving migration movements in the post-Soviet space. The results showed that while some of the movements could be classified as people migrating to their ethnic homelands, a majority could be explained by neoclassical economic theories of migration and the large income differentials that have resulted from the economic transition. Other theories that have been found to explain migration in other world migration systems were found to also be applicable in the former Soviet Union.Item Psychosocial Dimensions of Fatherhood Readiness in Low-Income Young Men(2009) Waters, Damian M; Roy, Kevin; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Researchers have a limited understanding of how men become ready for fatherhood, especially among young, low-income men in the transition to fatherhood. The present study draws a diverse sample (n = 53) enrolled in fatherhood programs in Midwestern cities. Life history interviews were conducted with the participants and grounded theory was employed to identify common themes among the narratives. Four cognitive dimensions of fatherhood readiness were identified by the current investigation: presumptive paternity and acknowledged paternity that one is a father, fatherhood vision, maturity, and men's perceptions of their provisional capacity. These contributed to the construction of narratives that describe fatherhood--trial readiness and decided readiness. Implications for social policies and programming are discussed.Item Locational Attainment and Residential Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas(2009) Scopilliti, Melissa N.; Iceland, John; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Immigration of Asians and Hispanics has fueled recent growth in the non-White population in the United States. Using individual-level data from Census 2000, this dissertation examines the relationship between race/ethnicity, nativity, and socioeconomic characteristics with levels of neighborhood economic advantage, a process often termed residential or locational attainment. It also examines the effectiveness of spatial assimilation, place stratification, and segmented assimilation theories for understanding racial and ethnic stratification across metropolitan neighborhoods. Two sets of analyses are presented in this dissertation. The first examines differences in neighborhood residential attainment by race, nativity, and period of entry, and considers the role of individual socioeconomic and demographic characteristics for understanding disparities in neighborhood advantage. Results show that Whites and Asians, both native and foreign-born, reside in the most advantaged neighborhoods, whereas being Hispanic or Black is associated with residence in neighborhoods with lower median incomes and higher rates of poverty, net of model controls. The second set of analyses studies racial differences in neighborhood attainment among individuals residing in metropolitan areas with different levels of racial residential segregation. While little difference was found in neighborhood income and poverty between Hispanics and native Whites residing in metropolitan areas with low Hispanic-native White segregation net of differences in individual socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, substantial Hispanic-native White and Black-native White disparities were found among those residing in moderately and highly segregated metropolitan areas. Hispanics in moderately and highly segregated metropolitan areas experienced a similar gap in neighborhood advantage, relative to native Whites, as was experienced by Blacks. Consistent with spatial assimilation theory, individual differences in socioeconomic and acculturation characteristics such as education and English language proficiency explained some of the between-race differences in neighborhood advantage, and most of the within-race differences among immigrants by period of entry. However, the large and persistent Black-White and Hispanic-White gaps in locational attainment suggest that processes aside from individual attainment explain the lower residential attainment of Blacks and Hispanics, providing some supporting evidence for the place stratification framework. In addition, the high level of locational attainment among Asians and the variation in neighborhood advantage across metropolitan areas by level of residential segregation for Hispanics and Blacks support the importance of both individual and contextual factors, consistent with the main tenets of segmented assimilation theory.Item "What is a Black Man Without His Paranoia?" : Clinical Depression and the Politics of African American Anxieties Toward Emotional Vulnerability(2009) Stewart, Tyrone Anthony; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In an interview after his departure from television and a rumored "breakdown," the comedian Dave Chappelle asked Oprah Winfrey, "What is a black man without his paranoia?" This question forms the crux of a dissertation which addresses African Americans' attitudes toward clinical depression, in general, and black men's anxieties toward emotional vulnerability, in specific. Using the concept of "paranoia" as an indicator of a healthy skepticism toward medical authority, this dissertation deconstructs the concept of depression as a discursive construct and moves it out of the bounds of science and into the precincts of cultural emotion theory. Opting for theory over science, this dissertation argues against the erasure of social and cultural narratives and explores how race and gender can inform our interpretation of depression. Using textual readings, historical comparison, and ethnography, this dissertation examines the politics involved in addressing the emotionality of black men. It is concerned with how definitions of blackness, manhood, crisis, worth, and belonging impact black men's understandings of emotional wellness and inform African Americans' attitudes toward the emotional performances of black men. Two popular books on African American's mental health (Black Rage by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs (1968) and Black Pain by Terri Williams (2008)) are examined within their respective historical and social contexts to track the changing cultural discourse on African Americans' mental health and the role of gender in understanding narratives of wellness. And concepts family, labor, and responsibility are explored as implicit elements in black men's attainment of manhood in a comparative examination of the Sanitation Workers Strike (1968) and the Million Man March (1995).Item Words to the Wives: The Jewish Press, Immigrant Women, and Identity Construction, 1924-1925(2009) Shapiro, Shelby Alan; Kelly, R. Gordon; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how six publications sought to construct Jewish- American identities for Eastern European Jewish immigrant women between 1895 and 1925, beginning in 1895 with the world's first Jewish women's magazine, American Jewess (1895 - 1899), followed by a women's magazine in Yiddish, Di froyen-velt (1913 -1914), and ending with an another Yiddish women's magazine, Der idisher froyen zhurnal (1922-1923). Between 1914 and 1916, three mass circulation Yiddish daily newspapers, Dos yidishes tageblatt, Forverts, and Der tog, started printing women's pages. This study ends in 1925, after Congress passed legislation restricting immigration in 1924. These publications present a variety of viewpoints and identities, that were political, religious and class-based. The three magazines, all in the same genre, held different attitudes on everything from religion to suffrage. The three daily newspapers represented fundamentally different ideologies. Forverts was socialist. Der tog was nationalist-Zionist, and Dos yidishes tageblatt, the oldest publication examined, represented a conservative, traditionally religious viewpoint and supported Zionism. This study examines religious and political ideologies, celebrating religious and civic holidays, attitudes towards women working and learning, Jewish education, women's suffrage and exercising citizenship, as well as women in the public and private spheres of both the Jewish and American worlds. The central question asked is how those involved with these publications endeavored to create particular Jewish-American identities. Not being a reader- response study, I make no assumptions as to these publications' actual influence. The press represented only one institution involved in acculturation. Issues subsumed under the central question include how producers of these publications perceived Americanization and saw Jews in America; and what changes these journals advocated regarding religious practices, gender roles, and citizenship. "Acculturation" implies negotiation in the process of identity formation, as a blending of Old and New World customs, lifestyles, mores, economic and social conditions occurred. This dissertation takes a social constructionist view of ethnicity and identity formation. Based on translations relevant pieces from all issues of the publications under review, this study points to the diversity present on the American "Jewish Street" from 1895 to 1925.