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 Positioned to handle the "peaks and valleys": Narratives of Black and spiritual students attending PWIs(2021) Hall, Terra Nicole; Moore, Candace M.; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The interrelatedness of spirituality and race has been understudied in higher education (McGuire et al., 2017; Patton & McClure, 2009; Watson, 2006). Whereas existing scholarship has indicated religion and spirituality have been found to be important for Black college students (Chae et al., 2004), there is a need to distinguish between religion and spirituality (Paredes-Collins & Collins, 2011). Although religion may still be highly significant for some Black college students, growing evidence points to a shift in the general population away from formalized religion to one of individualized spirituality (Streib, 2008). Therefore, the current study sought to explore the intersection of racial and spiritual identities for Black undergraduate students and understand how self-identified Black and spiritual students experience support while attending predominantly white institutions (PWIs). A conceptual framework that included the radical healing framework (French et al., 2020) and Black liberation theology discourse (Cone, 1977) was used to frame the current study. In this critical constructivist narrative study, semistructured interviews and visual data served as data sources. The collected data from 13 Black and spiritual undergraduate students attending PWIs uncovered knowledge about the intersection of racial and spiritual identities. Specifically, findings illuminated Black and spiritual students’ definitions of spirituality, identification of on- and off-campus sources of support, and revelation into the emotions and feelings experienced by Black and spiritual students from encounters with people and spaces. Through an analytical approach of restorying, a parable was created to (re)present participants’ narratives. Findings from this study offer implications for student affairs’ practice and research. Student affairs practitioners are recommended to curate and maintain a list of on- and off-campus spaces, expand curricular and co-curricular opportunities to discuss race and spirituality, and increase agency for faculty and staff to address racial and spiritual identities with students. Future research should seek to study the intersection of racial and spiritual identities among graduate students, explore spirituality without a Christian lens, consider other institutional contexts outside of PWIs, probe into intersections of other marginalized social identities, and attend to these topics outside of an ongoing global health pandemic.Item Alan Pauls: Poéticas del anacronismo(2016) Charry, Luis F.; Demaría, Laura; Merediz, Eyda; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Alan Pauls (b. 1959) is an Argentine novelist and essayist. His works have barely been studied outside of Latin America; therefore, my work will be one of the first to focus critically and theoretically on his oeuvre and raise awareness of his importance to Contemporary Latin American Literature. The fundamental concept of my thesis is anachronism, which I develop by investigating the ways in which the present and the past are interconnected in the same temporal space. My dissertation has two interconnected parts. In the first, I propose an approach to Pauls’ literary work that emphasizes its engagement with literary and cultural theory. Specifically, I analyze how Pauls’ first novels –El pudor del pornógrafo (1984), El coloquio (1989), Wasabi (1994)– are strongly influenced by various theoretical discourses, especially the work of Roland Barthes. The guiding question of my dissertation’s first part is how one can narrate a fictional text without strictly appropriating narrative devices. Namely, I suggest that Pauls’ conception of literature is inevitably related to critical discourse. In the second part, I study a trilogy that Pauls wrote about the 1970s in Argentina: Historia del llanto (2007), Historia del pelo (2010), and Historia del dinero (2013). Here I focus on how Pauls uses the 1970s to propose a new conceptualization of the “political.” For Pauls, the “political” is not represented in the great events of a particular time but rather in the “effects” that these events produce; these effects are minor, almost imperceptible, and for that reason much more powerful as a literary event mechanism per se. From my point of view, this new conceptualization of the “political” contains in itself a problematic issue: the articulation between personal experience, history, and fiction. In conclusion, this interrelation between theory, politics, history, and fiction defines the path of my dissertation, which would have been just the “starting point” in my personal attempt to reconfigure the map of the Latin American literary contemporaneity.