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.
Browse
5 results
Search Results
Item TALKING ABOUT JUSTICE: PREDICTING ACTOR ENGAGEMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA AFTER A GALVANIZING EVENT(2021) Glasgow, Kimberly Ann; Vitak, Jessica; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social media contributes to discourse around and framing of major societal issues, and enables community formation, social change, and activism. It provides opportunities to engage in discourse, gain and share knowledge, and form ties with others around an issue, topic, or cause. This dissertation explores how justice, an important concept underlying social systems, is expressed in Twitter data in the context of high-salience, galvanizing local events, and leverages that information to predict whether newcomers to the issue will continue their digital engagement on the topic over time. It also attempts to quantify whether, and how much, a set of factors or dimensions previously associated with engagement in the physical realm contribute to digital engagement. These dimensions—identity, emotion, effort, and social embeddedness—are informed by prior work on social movements, digital activism, and related fields. Rather than rely on hashtags, this dissertation uses machine learning to detect justice-related Twitter activity. This advance in methods provides a richer understanding of discourse around a complex, multifaceted topic like justice. It allows deeper insight into the social media activity of newcomers to the justice community, and the networks they are embedded in. The approach is developed and applied first to Twitter data from Baltimore around the 2015 death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained while in police custody, and the protests and riots that followed in Baltimore. To test for generalizability, the same approach is then applied to a second dataset, collected from Cleveland at the time of the death of Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by police in 2014. Findings show that digital engagement in justice discourse on social media can be predicted, based on aspects of social embeddedness, emotion, and effort. To the degree that committed individuals are at the heart of social movements and efforts to spur social and civic change, and forming and being embedded in appropriate network structures is critical for channeling commitment into action and eventual success, this work contributes to greater understanding of these phenomena. Findings from this research could contribute to the design of technology to support civic engagement through social media platforms.Item The Price of Reconciliation: West Germany, France and the Arc of Postwar Justice for the Crimes of Nazi Germany, 1944-1963(2020) Staedtler, Rene; Herf, Jeffrey C; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation links the arc of war crimes justice with the arc of reconciliation in Franco-German relations from 1944 to 1963. I argue that France initially created a retributive justice which aggressively targeted crimes committed by the German occupant from 1940 to 1944. By examining the internal debates within the French government and parliament regarding the legal foundation of Nazi war crimes trials in France, I show that the French polity dispensed with and even violated the French republican tradition in its effort to reckon with the Nazi past. In the second part, I demonstrate that the process of European integration and Franco-German reconciliation offered those in West Germany who resented the retributive justice in France the opportunity to influence, even manipulate the French government by initiating and sustaining a trajectory which bound reconciliation ever more tightly to the retreat from the goals of postwar justice. I contend that once French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman initiated the path towards reconciliation with Adenauer’s West Germany, a broad coalition centrally coordinated from Bonn utilized the desire for rapprochement to undermine French war crimes justice. By attacking French justice as a sign of its unforgiveness and its resolve to continue with the so-called “arch-enmity,” the West German diplomats and government officials argued that the war crimes trials were regarded as a symbol of a period of humiliation and injustice which needed to be eradicated in order to achieve a “veritable reconciliation.” I show how the reconciliation narrative shaped the transition from a French system of justice which was one of the most extensive and consequential ones in Western Europe in the late 1940s to the complete and premature release of all remaining war criminals in French custody. The West German view prevailed and imprinted on the landmark achievement of Franco-German reconciliation the stain of privileging the perpetrators over the victims of Nazi Germany in France.Item Violence against Women Policy and Practice in Uganda - Promoting Justice within the Context of Patriarchy(2016) Gardsbane, Diane; Freidenberg, Judith N.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this study was to understand how and whether policy and practice relating to violence against women in Uganda, especially Uganda’s Domestic Violence Act of 2010, have had an effect on women’s beliefs and practices, as well as on support and justice for women who experience abuse by their male partners. Research used multi-sited ethnography at transnational, national, and local levels to understand the context that affects what policies are developed, how they are implemented, and how, and whether, women benefit from these. Ethnography within a local community situated global and national dynamics within the lives of women. Women who experience VAW within their intimate partnerships in Uganda confront a political economy that undermines their access to justice, even as a women’s rights agenda is working to develop and implement laws, policies, and interventions that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. This dissertation provides insights into the daily struggles of women who try to utilize policy that challenges duty bearers, in part because it is a new law, but also because it conflicts with the structural patriarchy that is engrained in Ugandan society. Two explanatory models were developed. One explains factors relating to a woman’s decision to seek support or to report domestic violence. The second explains why women do and do not report DV. Among the findings is that a woman is most likely to report abuse under the following circumstances: 1) her own, or her children’s survival (physical or economic) is severely threatened; 2) she experiences severe physical abuse; or, 3) she needs financial support for her children. Research highlights three supportive factors for women who persist in reporting DV. These are: 1) the presence of an “advocate” or support 2) belief that reporting will be helpful; and, 3) lack of interest in returning to the relationship. This dissertation speaks to the role that anthropologists can play in a multi-disciplinary approach to a complex issue. This role is understanding – deeply and holistically; and, articulating knowledge generated locally that provides connections between what happens at global, national and local levels.Item Scripting Public Performance: The Representation of Officeholding in Early Modern Literature(2008) Hull, Helen Louise; Hamilton, Donna B.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study argues that early modern English dramatists and prose writers were reevaluating the subject's offices. Officeholders appear frequently on the early modern English stage, in roles ranging from lord mayors to constables to lord chancellors. Widely circulated prose tracts established officeholders' authority and defined their duties. Dramatists who staged officeholders, along with men who wrote officeholding manuals, drew on humanist and classical republican concepts of citizenship in depicting officeholders; they were also responsive to contemporary religious and political pressures. They were redefining the very parameters of office by redescribing officeholding as a site of political representation I begin by establishing the investment subjects had in officeholding as evidenced by the proliferation of contemporary officeholding manuals. My first chapter canvases the range of manuals as well as their socio-political context. I then focus on William Lambard's Eirenarcha (1581), a manual for justices of the peace. By emphasizing that the justice is duty-bound to God and to the common law as well as to the monarch, Lambard raises questions of obligation and representation for officeholders. In chapter two, I consider representations of justices of the peace in Anthony Munday's Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, William Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humor (all three c. 1597-98). By juxtaposing officeholding with quasi-feudal and chivalric models of service, these dramatists define what officeholding was not and what it could be. In my third chapter, I consider depictions of the lord chancellor in Anthony Munday's Play of Sir Thomas More (c. 1592-94) and in Henry VIII (1613), by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. I argue that these plays challenge the claims made by early modern magistrates to be ministers of justice. The last chapter considers scenes featuring London's lord mayor in Shakespeare's Richard III (c.1593), Thomas Heywood's Edward IV (1599), and Heywood's 1 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1604). I read these plays in the light of contemporary disputes over free speech in Parliament. By asking how freely the lord mayor can speak, these plays associate office itself with the representation of subjects.Item ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND INTERNAL COMMUNICATION AS ANTECEDENTS OF EMPLOYEE-ORGANIZATION RELATIONSHIPS IN THE CONTEXT OF ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS(2005-04-19) Kim, Hyo Sook; Grunig, James E.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One research direction that is needed but has not been fully exploited in studies of organization-public relationships is research on the antecedents of relationships. The antecedents of relationships are the first stage of the relationship framework, for they are what cause specific relationships between an organization and its publics to develop. The purpose of this study was to explore possible antecedents of internal relationships in organizations. I examined the direct and indirect influences of organizational structure and internal communication on employee-organization relationships using organizational justice as a mediating factor. Organizational justice is a relatively recently developed but widely used concept in organizational studies that refers to the extent to which people perceive organizational events as being fair. This study was a typical example of multilevel research in that it gathered and summarized individual-level data to operationalize organizational-level constructs such as organizational structure and internal communication. The multilevel nature of the main constructs of this study was addressed by using the multilevel analysis method. Data were collected by conducting a survey of about 1,200 employees in 31 Korean organizations. I used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), which is a type of random coefficient model and is specifically designed to accommodate nested or multilevel data structure, to test the cross-level hypotheses of this study. The findings suggested that organizational structure and the system of internal communication were associated with employee-organization relationships, playing the role of antecedents of internal relationships. More specifically, asymmetrical communication was negatively related to employees' commitment, trust, and satisfaction. Also it was shown that symmetrical communication was associated positively with communal relationships. Lastly, organic structure was negatively related to exchange relationships and positively related to trust and control mutuality. On the other hand, organizational justice was associated with organizational structure and internal communication as well as with employee-organization relationships. Organizational justice also mediated the effects of symmetrical communication and organizational structure on communal relationships and four relationship outcomes (control mutuality, trust, commitment, and satisfaction), implying that symmetrical communication and organic structure can contribute to building quality relationships when they are combined with fair behavior by management.