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 Working Literacies: Gender, Labor, and Literacy in Early Modern England(2022) Griffin, Danielle; Enoch, Jessica; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Working Literacies” explores the literacy abilities and practices of early modern working women, paying attention to the ways that ideologies of patriarchy and labor as well as the institutionalization of poor relief mediated their engagements with literacy. By examining little-studied archival material such as administrative records, literary ephemera, and petitions, “Working Literacies” nuances assumptions about working women's (il)literacy in the period, showcasing the multiple layers of literate ability that women leveraged as available means in making arguments about their lives as economically precarious workers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In centering the reading and composing habits of pre-modern working women, this dissertation provides historical depth to intricate relationships of gender and class in histories of rhetorical education, economic systems, and labor activism.In my three major chapters, I analyze little-studied literacy artifacts of three sites: 1) curricular and administrative materials from charity schools and orphanages; 2) ephemeral reading materials such as popular chapbooks and ballads; and 3) petitions that address working conditions for women. Although these sites may seem disparate, they present compelling evidence about the literacy of working women at different points in their lives: learning literacy skills, reading as evidence of literacy, and the use of those literacies in the act of petitioning. Furthermore, “Working Literacies” illuminates that ideologies of gender, labor, and literacy were complexly interconnected: lower-class children learned literacy skills in ways that sought to make obedient and industrious workers and wives, yet working women made inventive use of those literacy skills to engage representations of and forward arguments about their lives as workers and their gendered workplaces. In demonstrating the intricate interrelationship between class and gender in theories and practices of literacy, “Working Literacies” enters into and energizes conversations about women and labor as well as histories of literacy and rhetorical education.Item Exploring complexity in well-being: A mixed methods examination of the Black women’s well-being paradox(2021) Ford, Tiffany N; Graham, Carol; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores the complexity of Black women’s well-being and policy experience along the income distribution. This dissertation consists of three separate but related essays. Chapter 1 argues for the active inclusion of intersectionality theory in social and economic policy work. I rely on the literature to draw clear links between the intersectionality theoretical framework, the study of subjective well-being, and the development of equitable public policy to support well-being. In chapter 2, I explore an intracategorical complexity approach to intersectionality, focusing on unpacking the layers of difference among Black middle-class women and investigating how they relate to well-being. Using qualitative focus group data, I uncover the key factors shaping well-being for 22 Black middle-class women in Wichita, KS and Las Vegas, NV and discuss what a policy agenda might look like to support their well-being. Results of this transformative exploratory sequential mixed methods design suggested health, money, and social support, like friendships, family, and romantic partnerships, were core determinants of well-being for Black middle-class women. Quantitatively, Black middle-class women’s well-being and determinants differed significantly by their level of education and by a combination of their parenthood and marital status. This work revealed that structural oppression may be influencing Black middle-class women’s well-being by the shaping of the distribution of their determinants of well-being. In chapter 3, I focus on subjective well-being at the intersection of race, gender, and class through an intentional focus on Black women in different income classes. Relying on Gallup Daily data from 2010-2016, I explore both intracategorical and intercategorical complexity, comparing well-being and its determinants within race-gender and across it. This work reveals a paradox of well-being for Black women: in every income class, Black women are more optimistic and less stressed than white people, despite having less of the objective factors known to contribute to that well-being. I offer potential explanations for this paradox. Through an intentional focus on Black women, this work takes an early step in unpacking the relationship between policy-relevant objective factors (like financial security surrounding food and healthcare access and relative health status) and subjective well-being in the lives of an American public imbued with racial and gender diversity. The overall results of this study illustrate the importance of qualitative and mixed methods inquiry into the economic, health, and social position of Black women in the U.S. in order to yield further lessons for policies that could benefit this group.Item Intersecting Inequalities in the Paid Care Work Sector Under Changing Social and Economic Contexts(2018) Sun, Shengwei; Chen, Feinian; Yu, Wei-hsin; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on the expanding paid care work sector as a key terrain for examining labor market inequalities in the United States and China, with three papers attending to different aspects of social stratification. In the U.S., men’s presence in care work jobs remains rare despite the fast job growth in education and health care and the decline in traditionally male-dominated manufacturing sectors. Despite growing public interest, little is known about the reasons and pathways of men’s transition into care work jobs. The popular discourse attributes men’s reluctance to a matter of gender identity, whereas scholars adopting a structural approach argue that men have little incentive to enter care work jobs mainly because those jobs are underpaid. The first paper examines how well the structural and cultural approaches, respectively, explain why men enter care work jobs or not. Moreover, care work jobs have been increasingly polarized in terms of pay and job security since the 1970s, and the polarizing pattern of care work job growth is characterized by racial disparity. Is such pattern driven by racial disparity in education and labor market experience, and/or by racial discrimination? The second paper addresses this question by examining the changing determinants of entering into low-paying versus middle-to-high-paying care work jobs between two cohorts of young men who joined the workforce under different labor market conditions. Findings suggest a persisting logic of a racialized “labor queue” underlying the changing patterns of racial inequality. In the context of urban China, the transformation from a centrally planned socialist economy to a profit-oriented market economy has ended welfare-based, life-long employment in the cities, and fundamentally changed the social organization of care. The third paper examines how care workers fared in terms of earnings relative to non-care workers since the early 2000s and the factors contributing to the earnings disadvantages of care workers. Taken together, this dissertation aims to provide a better understanding of intersecting inequalities by gender, race, and class in the paid care work sector under changing social and economic contexts.Item FEMINISTS TRANSFORMING THEIR WORLDS: A COLLECTIVE ORAL-HISTORY OF SALVADORAN PROTAGONISTS(2018) Patt, Yh; Stromquist, Nelly P.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Working from the premise that we cannot understand how feminism can transform societies without examining it as a multi-leveled project, this dissertation explores how a group of Salvadoran feminists were introduced to feminist ideas, became feminists, and are transforming themselves, communities, and nation. The object of study is how feminists in organizations became protagonists transforming their worlds. Using a collective oral-history approach, the dissertation examines 40 oral-histories with a two-pronged theoretical framework. The first prong is a theory of empowering feminism—which draws from Stromquist’s theory of empowerment (2014, 2015), definition of feminism (2015), and description of Latin America feminist organizations (2007). The second prong is Bourdieu’s theory of capital (1977). With that framework, the study examines the factors, dynamics, and actions of Salvadoran feminists transforming their worlds. The study found the following in the feminists’ trajectories to becoming protagonists: (1) being introduced to feminist ideas by other feminists, who had experienced patriarchal oppression; (2) becoming a feminist often involved either learning gender theory or a collective gender consciousness-raising process; (3) transforming their homes and workplaces by participating in groups where they read their lives with a feminist lens; (4) developing their own capital—knowledge, skills, networks, and collective feminist experiences; (5) increasing their levels of formal education, from high-school to graduate; (6) learning and teaching feminist topics—such as, gender as a social construction, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive rights, and symbolic violence against women; (7) intervening to change culture with tools—like murals, stencils, festivals, popular theatre, street demonstrations, cyber-feminism, and media; and (8) lobbying governments and pressuring corporations. A key finding is that these oral-histories suggest an association between the feminists who had leftist social movement capital and those who were most successful in their feminist work. Thus, this dissertation found that the Salvadoran feminists in this study transforming themselves into protagonists changing their worlds through feminist praxis exercised in feminist organizations that involves individual and collective empowerment, and entails producing knowledge. Finally, the study highlights the contention that there is exponential potential for feminist social change in communities with a culture of leftist social movement capital.Item OBAMA IN TIME AND LULA IN VEJA: A CASE STUDY OF PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN COVERAGE IN NEWS MAGAZINES OF THE UNITED STATES AND BRAZIL(2011) Pereira, Sonia Cristina Pedrosa; BEASLEY, MAURINE H.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Journalism and its links with nationhood and the ideologies that have built the nations (race, gender, and class, according to the historians) are the subjects of this study. They are researched through the analysis of the news coverage of two presidential elections which were remarkable in the both countries studied, the United States and Brazil. The elections of the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama, and of the first worker president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, are comparable for their symbolism and historical relevance. Textual and historical analyses are combined in this dissertation to investigate, in the narratives of each nation and its ideologies, the meanings that the news magazines analyzed produced during the coverage of those elections. A total of 24 cover stories published in Veja (Brazil) and Time magazine (United States) within a period of approximately eight months in the years of 2008 (Time) and 2002 (Veja) are analyzed. In this close textual reading, visual grammar is also taken in account, since journalism is a language that communicates with its readership by means of layouts (especially in the case of magazines). In this study of interpretive character, the critical discourse analysis approach is used to investigate meaning ranging from the layout of the news magazines (with pictures and so on) to the lexical choices in the written text. This is a study mainly of language and its relationship with the world, in which ideology occupies a special place. It is an international research, a cross-cultural examination of the news coverage of two important elections. In this comparative study, made possible due to the knowledge of the two native languages of the publications (English and Portuguese) by the researcher, the target language is in fact international journalistic language. The study found journalism both working for social change and at same time reproducing racist ideologies in the United States. In Brazil, the examination showed that journalism does not always nurture nationalistic sentiments, but that it can be used to keep the hegemony of one region over the rest of the country.Item Class Numbers of Real Cyclotomic Fields of Conductor pq(2009) Agathocleous, Eleni; Washington, Lawrence; Mathematics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The class numbers h+ of the real cyclotomic fields are very hard to compute. Methods based on discriminant bounds become useless as the conductor of the field grows and that is why other methods have been developed, which approach the problem from different angles. In this thesis we extend a method of Schoof that was designed for real cyclotomic fields of prime conductor to real cyclotomic fields of conductor equal to the product of two distinct odd primes. Our method calculates the index of a specific group of cyclotomic units in the full group of units of the field. This index has h+ as a factor. We then remove from the index the extra factor that does not come from h+ and so we have the order of h+. We apply our method to real cyclotomic fields of conductor < 2000 and we test the divisibility of h+ by all primes < 10000. Finally, we calculate the full order of the l-part of h+ for all odd primes l < 10000.Item Beyond Political Neutrality: Towards A Complex Theory of Rights in the Modern Democratic State(2006-10-23) Mason, Chataquoa Nicole; McIntosh, Wayne; Williams, Linda F; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As of late, women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and other similarly situated groups have begun to make right-claims that once again test liberal notions of neutrality and raise significant questions concerning whether or not full equality and autonomy is possible in modern democracies. This study focuses on the impact of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other markers of difference on the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. This dissertation uses three case studies, which separately and together demonstrate attempts to realize full freedom and autonomy through practices of direct democracy, the California Referendum Initiative; appeal to the courts, the issue of Gay Marriage; and the creation of public policies and landmark legislation, the Violence Against Women Act. The findings of my research suggest that at all levels of government, race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other markers of difference shape the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. In this study, I extend the insights offered by critical race scholars by proffering a complex theory of rights that is able to account for the impact of identity and culture to the realization of rights and rights-claims made by individuals and groups in the public sphere. Employing a complex theory of rights, the findings of this study confirm that there are a variety of factors that influence the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. Chief among them are: (1) A notion of the good operating in society that is connected to deeply entrenched societal values and norms and that privileges the dominant culture; (2) the structures and institutions that govern society are enmeshed in race, class, sexuality, and ethnic hierarchies; (3) the accumulated advantages gained through historic practices of exclusion, conquest, and enslavement; (4) the representation of the dominant group and subjugated groups in the public sphere through texts, the media, and discourse; and (5) whether or not individuals or groups are recognized as bearers of rights under the law.