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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2005 - 200912020 - 20211

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    From Oversharing to Sharenting: How Experts Govern Parents and Their Social Media Use
    (2021) Kumar, Priya; Vitak, Jessica; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A newborn swaddled in a parent’s arms. A kindergartner posing on the first day of school. Such images, commonly found in family photo collections, now regularly appear on social media. At the same time, public discourse asks if—or sometimes asserts that—posting images online might put children’s privacy, dignity, and autonomy at risk. Prior research has documented the pressure, scrutiny, and judgment that parents, especially mothers, endure. It seems that parents’ use of social media is yet another cause for concern. How did this happen? This dissertation examines how power, manifesting as expertise, works through three fields of discourse to govern parents’ social media conduct. Grounding this project in post-structuralist epistemology, I study this question using the analytical technique of governmentality, which is a means of tracing how authorities intervene in the lives of individuals. First, I illustrate how a specific site of social media expertise, the once-popular blog STFU, Parents, constructs the problem of “oversharing” as a form of inappropriate social media use. Second, I explain, how news media expertise constructs the problem of “sharenting,” a portmanteau of the words “share” and “parenting,” as a form of risk to children. Third, I discern how academic expertise obliges parents to govern their own social media conduct by appealing to their subjectivity. In each field of discourse, I observe how expertise frames parents’ social media conduct as a matter of individual responsibility, even though much of what happens to information online lies outside individual control. I use this analysis to suggest future directions for research on social media and privacy that goes beyond the gendered public/private boundary and engages with the world as a site of entangled relations rather than individual entities.
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    The Private Life of Public Health: Managing Chronic Disease in an Era of Neoliberal Governmentality
    (2005-04-11) Glasgow, Sara Mae; Pirages, Dennis C.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as heart disease and cancer account for over half of the global mortality burden, and are the leading cause of death in every region of the world except Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, they remain off the analytical radarscope in political science. This silence has been coupled with the tendency of public health researchers to frame NCDs as apolitical--largely a product of an individual's risk behaviors. Such an accounting depoliticizes NCDs, as well as public health approaches to their analysis and prevention. This project's central aim is to introduce a political analysis of chronic disease, demonstrating that public health approaches to NCDs exhibit political rationality. To that end, I explore several questions. How are NCDs accounted in behavioral terms, and how are their risks constructed as apolitical in the public health discourse? Additionally, if public health is presented as a domain of neutral science, how is it that its practices increasingly display market values, including a limited role for the state, a preoccupation with cost efficiency and choice, and the cultivation of the entrepreneurial self who sees her health as a site of investment? To answer these, I employ a discursive approach, specifically Foucault's framework of government rationality, or "governmentality." It is through the deployment of neoliberal governmentality in three spheres - knowledge, power, and subjectivity - that public health reveals itself not a neutral science, but rather one brimming with the values and logic of the private sector. I develop this argument through a critique of the discipline and practices of public health in three cases: the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden. Despite exhibiting historically different approaches to health and social welfare, all three show a marked manifestation of neoliberal rationality in public health approaches to chronic disease. The consistency of these findings, in addition to the more general features of the public health discourse, thus allow a conclusion that public health approaches to NCDs are not value-neutral, and are indeed a political phenomenon.