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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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    THE PHYSICAL CULTURE OF DIVERSITY WORK: A CASE STUDY OF EMBODIED INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION WITHIN THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
    (2019) Cork, Stephanie Joan; Jette, Shannon; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Considering recent incidents of white nationalism and racial violence on college campuses, the efficacy of diversity and inclusion work within this context has garnered increased attention. What received less attention, however, the embodied experiences of university employees, specifically “diversity workers,” who are tasked by their institution to combat equity issues. Previous research has shown that experiences of exclusion and discrimination can negatively impact work, educational, and health outcomes.This study explores how these impacts are experienced by the diversity workers themselves, many of whom inhabit intersectionally marginalized identities. In examining the physicality of the diversity worker, this project merges scholarship from the field of public health and the sociology of work to investigate occupational health and wellness through the lens of critical theory. It builds on a long tradition of studying the working body in the field of kinesiology through the lens of occupational health, and in doing so also fills a gap in the area of Physical Cultural Studies given that bodies at work (outside the sporting context) have received little attention in this subfield.The aims of this study are to explore the social, political, and economic context of the diversity worker in contemporary American post-secondary education, and how this impacts health, wellness, and job performance. This study uses a critical qualitative approach drawing from theories of embodiment, radical contextualism, and intersectionality. Data collection entailed a survey (n = 48) and one-on-one semi-structured interviews with diversity workers (n = 8) at an anonymized site referred to here as “public four-year university.” Using thematic analysis and the radical contextual method of articulation, the data was coded and synthesized to construct the three empirical chapters. Through centering the embodied experiences of diversity workers within the context of the contemporary American university, this study contributes to existing scholarship in a variety of disciplines. Study findings point to how we might better support diversity work and workers through a more supportive and healthier workplace environment.
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    Phantom Futures: The Cultural Politics of Education-Related Debt
    (2017) Madden, Jaime; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines the cultural politics of education-related debt. In a time of spiraling higher education costs, I focus on students who face challenges repaying debts and participating productively in the market economy. Taking on debt in college orients students towards a supposedly “better future.” But what happens to those who are unable or unwilling to realize these better futures? This is the broad question that motivated my dissertation. The students I interviewed often complicated the familiar timeline of progress that posits education as leading to employment. I carried out field research in two sites: i) for-profit colleges; and ii) Gallaudet University, a historically deaf university. I also analyzed content in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I treated as a key archive of contemporary narratives about debt. The for-profit education networks where I conducted research were Virginia College, where I had taught in the general education program for one year, and the recently defunct ITT Technical Institute. I visited campuses in Austin, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; Richmond, Virginia; Los Angeles, California; and Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin. This regional breadth across the southwest, mid-Atlantic, west coast, and Midwest allowed me to reach more general conclusions. My interviews, visual ethnography, auto-ethnography, and narrative analysis led me to focus closely on how students experience and invoke time. The for-profit colleges constantly asked students to imagine better and more secure futures in ways that distracted them from their present struggles. Such an orientation pushed students to incur further debt. At Gallaudet, the temporalities are different. The university’s ability to privilege deafness makes it a site of security and refuge; some students are therefore risking educational debt in order to access deaf culture. Yet, funding issued through Vocational Rehabilitation programs are conditional on a student’s ability to achieve future employment. This mandate influences how students think about their futures and creates deep tensions in their relationship to debt. In sum, by exploring how students imagine time, my dissertation presents a range of orientations to debt that can serve as alternatives to dominant cultural narratives.
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    How teen girls and parents make meaning of a cervical cancer vaccine campaign: Toward a feminist, multicultural critique of health communication
    (2008-12-17) Vardeman, Jennifer Eileen; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this study was to understand how teen girls and parents of teen girls make meaning of an HPV/cervical cancer vaccine communication campaign. Factors that were considered in investigating meaning-making were personal, familial, educational, sociopolitical, and technological and media factors. Other cultural concepts explored were identity, difference, communication preferences, and medicalization. Using a cultural study approach and feminist, qualitative methods, 40 teens between the ages of 13- and 18-years old and 14 parents of teen girls were interviewed using focus groups, dyad interviews, and individual interviews. The study employed the grounded theory approach to data analysis. Overall, parents and teens hold resolute beliefs about the Gardasil vaccine and media about it, and participants are divided as to their favorability toward the vaccine and its promotion to them. More specifically, the data suggest that teen girls largely make meaning of the HPV/cervical cancer vaccine campaign through the sociopolitical and mediated relationships in their lives, and in particular, how the girls perceive and act around difference in their lives largely contribute to the ways they view communication about sexual health topics like HPV, cervical cancer, and the vaccine. Differently, parents largely make meaning of the campaign through the personal, familial, and educational aspects of their lives, for how they understand their roles as parents reflects a contradiction between their sexual lives growing up compared to their perceptions of how the media represent sexuality and health threats to their daughters. Overall, the data suggest that this campaign provides some empowering ideas and opportunities for teen girls and parents. However, the data also largely suggest that campaigns as such complicate not only decisions teen girls and parents must make about teen girls' health, but such campaigns also obscure how teen girls and parents know themselves individually, in relationship to one another, and in relationship with social and authoritative bodies outside their comfort zones. These data confirm previous studies findings in public relations, feminist media, and cervical cancer intervention research. The data also extend and combine extant research about culture, women's health topics, and communication campaigns in ways that suggest a feminist, cultural-centered health communication critique that encourages communicators to wholly reconsider traditional approaches to the origination, development, deployment, and involvement of communication campaigns involving women and teen girls and important health topics to them. Implications for health communication practice as well as feminist methodology are considered for similar future projects.
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    From Old Maids to Action Heroes: Librarians and the Meanings of Librarian Stereotypes
    (2005-05-31) Lutz, Christine; Struna, Nancy L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines the history of librarian stereotypes, the responses of librarians to them, and the resulting negotiations as librarians try to work beyond the stereotypes. Chapter One frames the study, which takes a cultural studies approach, and sets out research questions and methodology. Chapter Two looks at the history of librarian stereotypes, examines library literature on stereotypes, and analyses websites that feature representations of librarians. Chapters Three and Four present public librarians' discussions of stereotypes. By looking at librarian stereotypes through a combination of lenses, namely cultural studies, material and visual culture, and ethnography, I expand upon the ways in which librarian stereotypes have typically been examined. Chapter 5 concludes that librarians negotiate daily and in multiple ways with images and stereotypes of librarians that are maintained by society and culture and as well as by the library as institution.
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    Miss Schooled: American Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century
    (2005-04-20) Alves, Jaime Osterman; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation argues that the emergence of schoolgirl culture in nineteenth- century America presented significant challenges to subsequent constructions of normative femininity. Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected the century's debates over adolescent female education, I concentrate on fictional works and historical documents that feature descriptions of girls' formal educational experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s. In Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, selections from the Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds (a student-written school newspaper), S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, and other texts, I contend that the trope of the adolescent schoolgirl is a carrier of shifting cultural anxieties about how formal education would disrupt the customary maid-wife-mother cycle and turn young females off to prevailing gender roles. To assuage these anxieties and garner support for the controversial work of adolescent female education, schools incorporated into their curricula dominant ideals of femaleness from the contexts of family, the scientific-medical field, the press, and racial and community uplift movements, and delivered these ideals as "lessons" to girls from the white middle- and upper-classes, mixed racial and ethnic heritages, dispossessed Native American tribes, and working-class African-American families. In four chapters, I explore how nineteenth century Americans perceived of and represented the distinct life stage of female adolescence, and how they imagined the processes of institutional sex-role socialization that would involve schools and other organizations in the activity of molding adolescent girls into ideal American women. I have been most intrigued by narratives of female education that depict girls' exploitation of their opportunities at school to consider and respond to their cultures' idealizations of American womanhood. By tracing the figure of the schoolgirl at crossroads between educational and other institutions--in texts written by and about girls from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds-- my study joins an emerging critical project to transcend the limitations of "separate spheres" inquiry and enrich our understanding of how girls negotiated complex gender roles in the nineteenth century.