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 Migrant Teachers: A Case Study(2014) Edwards, David Harper; Klees, Steve J.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research uses a rights-based approach to interpret the global and local implications of increased teacher migration by: 1) surveying the literature regarding the linkages between uneven teacher distribution and the recruitment of "overseas trained teachers"(OTTs); 2) illustrating international experiences and initiatives that seek to address the status and treatment of OTTs with special attention to the organizations, structures and processes that determine these initiatives within a context of increased privatization of public services; 3) using case study methodology to describe and analyze the complexities of teacher migration by focusing on their perceptions of pedagogy, migration expectations and local union relationship experienced by a population of Philippine OTTs in an urban U.S. district known for high teacher turnover, and 4) using critical perspectives to problematize the purported "shortage area" reasons given for international teacher recruitment and propose alternatives. The research illuminates currents gaps in the literature and shows that while there are both push and pull factors that contribute to the increase in migration, and there are also new actors emerging to capitalize on the portability of teaching credentials. One such actor is recruiting agencies that seek to place overseas trained teachers in schools suffering high turnover and shortage. The research also considers initiatives for addressing exploitation of migrant teachers and the usefulness of national or international protocols that purport to balance individual rights to migrate against national needs for development and realizing the right to education for its people.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 Grounded Identities, Transient Lives: The Emergence of Student Voices in an Era of Globalization(2008-11-20) Gargano, Terra; Finkelstein, Barbara; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study offers a rare glimpse into the histories, images, and meanings that inform the experiences of six international degree-seeking undergraduate students at the University of Maryland College Park in the spring of 2007. Specifically, the design and content of this study centers around the recovery of student voices as a way to understand the limitations and possibilities of international education policies and practices. The experiences of these six students in many ways challenge the understanding and categorization of a traditional international student. Focusing almost exclusively on nationality as an organizing agent and bereft of significant and robust concepts that bring into view the content of international student sense-making, international education discourses neglect to explore the complexity and range of meanings students ascribe to educational sojourns, thereby resulting in a series of undocumented generalizations made about students. This study reveals that these twenty-first century students are experienced border crossers with very complex identities. These students engage in diverse constructions of meaning as they negotiate the boundaries of geography and mind that are inherent aspects of crossing borders. The perspectives of these contemporary students suggest the need for a foundational rethinking of the assumptions that ground the international education literature and a reconceptualization of the entire apparatus of thinking about educational sojourns. Through an analysis of how student participation in transnational spaces influenced pathways to the university, how students negotiated identities as international students, and how students envisioned futures, it becomes evident that a new kind of international student is emerging.Item The Impact of Globalization on Education Reform: A Case Study of Uganda(2008-05-14) Wood, Jane C. Millar; Lin, Jing; Klees, Steven J.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Abstract This case study examines the impact of globalization on education policies, structure and practice in Uganda during a 20-year period from 1987-2007. Post-primary education is the principal focus of this research as it is critical to preparing young people to participate in Uganda's socio-economic and political development process and thus position the country for participation in the global economy. However, given post- primary's pivotal position between primary and tertiary education, it has to be viewed in the context of the longer educational continuum. Thus, the "before" and "after" levels of education are also addressed. The dissertation explores an array of issues related to globalization and education. These include stakeholders' perceptions and understandings of globalization, the modalities of "transmitting" reform ideas and policies around the world, and specific educational reforms in Uganda at the sector and sub-sector levels. It also explores the impact of these educational reforms (a) on beneficiaries in terms of access, equity, relevance, and quality and (b) on Uganda in terms of positioning the country to respond to the opportunities and challenges of globalization. The study concluded that globalization has had an impact on education reform in Uganda in several ways. The reforms themselves have yielded some positive benefits for the beneficiaries but much remains to be done to ensure the expansion of access and equity as well as improvements in the relevance and quality of education. Uganda's experience in implementing these reforms has some lessons for other countries considering similar changes in education policy and practice.Item Learning From The Media: Perceptions of "America" From Chinese Students and Scholars(2008-02-16) Roberts, Quincy; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research examines the perceptions that international students and scholars from China form of the United States. This thesis tracks the participants' recollection of their beliefs about the U.S. before arriving and examines the transformations that occurred because of lived circumstances and experiences. The research participants eagerly took advantage of the opportunity to visit and study at American universities, believing that this country had the best there was to offer in terms of educational quality. This perceived superiority of the U.S. was believed to extend into other social and cultural categories as well. Through examining the participant's imagined ideals of life in the U.S. the objective is to understand the importance individuals and lived experiences play in the reception and interpretation of cultural images, as well as foreground the "individual" as the main site to examine the intersection of the "global" and the "local". This is meant to elevate the importance of the individual when studying the impact and influence of globalization in the lives of individuals. By using Appadurai's notion of mediascapes as a means to study popular culture the goal is to understand the local and the global in studying the connection between the imagination and globalization.Item The Maze of Gaze: The Color of Beauty in Transnational Indonesia(2007-05-25) Prasetyaningsih, Luh Ayu S.; Moses, Claire; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What are the effects of transnational circulations of people, objects, and ideas on our understanding of skin color, as it intersects with and complicates other categories of identity such as race, gender, nationality, and sexuality, in a transnational context? This dissertation addresses this question by providing evidence for the ways in which meanings of skin color, as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and nationality, are constructed transnationally through people, objects, and ideas that travel across national boundaries from pre- to postcolonial Indonesia. This dissertation uses "beauty" as an organizing trope to limit its analysis, ensuring analytical depth within each chapter. This analytical depth is further ensured by choosing specific sites of analysis to highlight particular historical periods and countries from which specific people, objects, and ideas travel. The sites I examine include Old Javanese adaptations of Indian epics (to understand the workings of "color" in precolonial times); beauty product advertisements that functioned as propaganda for Dutch and Japanese colonialism; skin-whitening ads published after 1998 in the Indonesian edition of American women's magazine Cosmopolitan; and an interpretive reading of the Buru Tetralogy novels (Bumi Manusia, Anak Semua Bangsa, Jejak Langkah, and Rumah Kaca) by Indonesia's best known author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Interviews with Indonesian women are also integrated in this dissertation. This dissertation aims to help us understand the semiotics of skin color: 1) as a transnational construction; 2) as a signifier for constructing distinctions and justifying gender discrimination; 3) as it is signified by (rather than a signifier for) race, gender, sexuality, and nation; 4) as a site where women articulate their resistance to or complicity with dominant racial, color, and gender ideology; and 5) as a "boundary object" that perpetuates racial and gender hierarchy in a global context.Item World Trade and Higher Education: The United States' Experience with Development of Trade Policy in Higher Education under the General Agreement on Trade in Services(2007-04-26) Messenger, Laura Christine; Malen, Betty; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This case study examined the United States' experience from April 1999 through January 2007 in development of its trade policy regarding inclusion of higher education in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). It examined how the key actors sought to influence the manner in which technical ambiguities, ideological differences and other points of contest were resolved. This study also examined how the actors' ability to influence these issues was conditioned by features of the decision making arenas and the broader sociocultural context. It utilized a combined political systems/power-influence model developed by Mazzoni (1991) to categorize the variables and to account for the findings. Data sources included publicly available information and interviews with individuals familar with the case (e.g., WTO officials, U.S. trade representatives, and nongovernmental organization officials). The study also outlined possibilities for future research in this ongoing policy making process. Findings underscored the importance of the domestic arena even with regard to agreements at the supranational level. The study identified four key players in the process, all of which were U.S.-based organizations. The WTO, although responsible for setting the overall rules of the game, was a hidden or background player in this issue. In addition, agricultural interests were important hidden players; their actions were not designed to influence U.S. higher education trade policy but, nevertheless, their ability to halt trade talks twice put the policy in jeopardy. The study also found that players' motivations and actions were tied closely to their stated organizational missions and affected when the players became involved in trying to influence the development of higher education trade policy. Professional expertise and direct channels to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative were important resources, facilitating access to the actor with the authority for developing U.S. higher education trade policy. Moreover, the study's findings underscore the subtle manner in which some issues are resolved: The use of voice through printed materials and face-to-face meetings, exercised in a collaborative rather than a confrontational manner, was an effective influence strategy for the players who were skeptical of GATS' inclusion of higher education.Item SPACE, IDENTITY AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: NEGOTIATING DECOLONIZATION IN THE UNITED NATIONS(2006-05-11) Patil, Vrushali; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden moments of trans-territorial contact, this research is interested in the relationship between gender, race, and shifting transnational power relationships. Bringing together work from Sociology, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, it is interested in the following questions. How are modern constructions of gender and race forged in transnational--colonial as well as 'postcolonial'--processes? How did they emerge in and contribute to such processes during the colonial era? Specifically, how did they shape colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community? How has this relationship shifted with legal decolonization? First, it offers a theory regarding these questions in the European colonial era, the theory of kinship. This theory posits that the colonialist construction of space, identity and international community historically relied on a trope of kinship, which operated by constructing the colonies as 'children' and the metropoles as 'parents.' Even more, kinship actually helped to constitute colonial notions of race (i.e., 'childlike natives') and gender (i.e., 'the lack of the nuclear household in African society as evidence of cultural immaturity'). In this manner, kinship helped to define colonized others as children, thereby to deny the subjectivity of these others (particularly their spatial and identity claims), and thus to ultimately build hierarchical structures of international community. Combining discourse and comparative historical methods of analysis, this work explores how colonialists and anti-colonialists renegotiate transnational power relationships within the debates on decolonization in the United Nations from 1946-1960. It argues that while colonialists continued to use the trope of kinship to legitimate the status quo, anti-colonialists insisted that the colonies had 'grown up' and that continuing colonialism was a humiliation that emasculated fully adult men. Thus, anti-colonialists attempted to reorder global power relationships by renegotiating the kinship trope. In other words, to the politics of paternalism, they responded with the politics of masculinity. Ultimately, then, the complex, shifting, politics of race relied on a politics of gender/sexuality, both of which were central to the changing contours of international community in the mid-20th century.Item Income Inequality and the capacity of the state in South Korea, 1965-2004(2006-05-15) Lee, Chang Won; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper focuses on the relationship between income inequality and state capacity in South Korea. Korea achieved rapid economic growth accompanied by equity from the 1960s to the mid 1990s. However, after the 1997 IMF financial crisis, income inequality in Korea increased dramatically. This change in income inequality is closely related to increases in unemployment and underemployment. I argue that such failures in the labor market are attributed to the rapid decline of the state's capacity after financial liberalization in 1993. During the developmental era, the state had been able to form institutions for low income inequality, due to its relative autonomy from business owners. After the financial liberalization no such autonomous capacity to build employment-protective institutions existed, as these reforms increased the influence of domestic and international capital. Further, the weakening of the state's capacity also reflects changes in the relationship of the Korean economy to the world system.Item World Music and International Development: Ethnography of Globalization(2006-05-11) Morgan, Melanie Josephine; Dueck, Jonathan; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How are theories of globalization understood and employed by individuals working in world music and international development? Using a world music CD and concert project created by a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, this paper explores power relationships in world music and international development through aesthetics, authenticity, and hegemony. An ethnographic approach emphasizes the roles of individuals, providing a "bottom-up" approach to studying globalization. The non-profit Sustainable Environments for Health and Shelter (SEH+S) combines recording industry concepts for world music with organizational goals to achieve a distinct and practical organizational identity. Power relationships with musicians are also determined through a combination of organizational goals and individual musicians' motivation and knowledge. SEH+S administrators, producers and musicians both challenge and validate theories of globalization in their interpretations of world music and international development.