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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Item 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.Item Talk Amongst Yourselves: Conceptions of “Community” in Transgender Counterpublic Discourse Online, 1990-2014(2017) Dame, Avery; King, Katie; Farman, Jason; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the mid-1990s, digital technologies have played a key role in major political actions and social movement organizations in the US and elsewhere. Newly widespread public internet access mitigated issues related to geographic limitations or cost-prohibitive print media, allowing otherwise-disparate groups to more quickly and easily communicate and organize. Transgender individuals were particularly well-positioned to benefit from the growth in digital technologies, which supported an active and growing transgender social movement throughout the 1990s. Both recent scholarship and popular media have focused on digital technologies as key sites of visibility, social support, and political organizing for transgender individuals. However, few scholars have also focused on the specific technological infrastructures that underlie these discussions. This dissertation remedies this gap through an analysis of digital communications’ impact on transgender social movement organizing from 1990 to the contemporary moment. Using critical and multi-modal discourse analysis, I analyze how users past and present develop their understanding of what “transgender community” should be, and the ways different platform-specific affordances shape these understandings. My approach is grounded in platform studies: focused on the interrelationships between platforms, platform design, and the discourse produced on these platforms, while also paying close attention to the social and cultural factors that influenced a platform’s design. I take a case study approach, with each chapter focused on a different platform or dataset, from 1990s transgender periodicals, archival data from Usenet newsgroups, ethnographic interviews, informational websites, to social media platform Tumblr. Throughout each of these chapters, I draw attention to how platform affordances inform users’ emergent understanding of “transgender community” as a homogenous entity—obscuring key differences, disconnects, and inequalities amongst users and within the identity category itself. Ultimately, I find that the possibilities for online political organizing are constrained by the digital platform’s modes of circulation and its encoded social norms, as power is channeled away from those who need it most.Item Digital (In)Humanities: Re-reading Digital Archives as a Form of Cultural Expression(2009) Dinin, Aaron; Nell Smith, Martha; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A 2007 PMLA article discussing the Walt Whitman Archive juxtaposed narrative and database as competing forms of cultural expression. This article incited a flurry of responses which continued to use the database and narrative comparison. Dinin, in his article "Digital (In)Humanities," reassesses the terms of the digital archive debate, arguing that the terms "narrative" and "database" are both constricting and misleading. The juxtaposition shouldn't be database versus narrative to see which one becomes the dominant form of cultural expression because narrative, he argues, is a form of database. The more proper juxtaposition, as presented by the paper, is one that places "digital archive" alongside "narrative" because both are products of database and both are forms of cultural expression. Dinin, in his article, then goes on to explore the potential of digital archives as a form of cultural expression.