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 Working Literacies: Gender, Labor, and Literacy in Early Modern England(2022) Griffin, Danielle; Enoch, Jessica; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Working Literacies” explores the literacy abilities and practices of early modern working women, paying attention to the ways that ideologies of patriarchy and labor as well as the institutionalization of poor relief mediated their engagements with literacy. By examining little-studied archival material such as administrative records, literary ephemera, and petitions, “Working Literacies” nuances assumptions about working women's (il)literacy in the period, showcasing the multiple layers of literate ability that women leveraged as available means in making arguments about their lives as economically precarious workers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In centering the reading and composing habits of pre-modern working women, this dissertation provides historical depth to intricate relationships of gender and class in histories of rhetorical education, economic systems, and labor activism.In my three major chapters, I analyze little-studied literacy artifacts of three sites: 1) curricular and administrative materials from charity schools and orphanages; 2) ephemeral reading materials such as popular chapbooks and ballads; and 3) petitions that address working conditions for women. Although these sites may seem disparate, they present compelling evidence about the literacy of working women at different points in their lives: learning literacy skills, reading as evidence of literacy, and the use of those literacies in the act of petitioning. Furthermore, “Working Literacies” illuminates that ideologies of gender, labor, and literacy were complexly interconnected: lower-class children learned literacy skills in ways that sought to make obedient and industrious workers and wives, yet working women made inventive use of those literacy skills to engage representations of and forward arguments about their lives as workers and their gendered workplaces. In demonstrating the intricate interrelationship between class and gender in theories and practices of literacy, “Working Literacies” enters into and energizes conversations about women and labor as well as histories of literacy and rhetorical education.Item Resistance in the Digital Workplace: Call Center Workers in Bell Telephone Companies, 1965-2005(2021) Goldman, Debbie J; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Resistance in the Digital Workplace analyzes the ways in which a predominantly female unionized workforce contested the degradation of the labor process and downward pressure on living standards and job security in the automated call centers of two leading telecommunications companies, AT&T and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In their struggles with employers, the call center workers and their union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), fought for good, secure, humane jobs amidst the digital revolution, neoliberal policy regime, the financial turn in capitalism, and the decline of unions. The study argues that the very forces that were driving change in the call centers also shifted and frequently narrowed the terrain upon which these call center workers struggled with management for control and power. While CWA and its call center members scored impressive victories in placing limits on abusive surveillance, work speed-up, and some forms of outsourcing, the study also demonstrates the boundaries of collective worker power in the highly automated call center environment. Resistance in the Digital Workplace examines key questions of labor history: workers’ struggles for job control in automated workplaces; the opportunities and constraints of the U.S. enterprise-based collective bargaining system; the failure of U.S. labor law to protect workers when organizing; alternative organizing models such as CWA’s bargain to organize strategy; the impact of neoliberal regulatory and economic policies on the decline of union power; the rise and fall of labor-management partnerships in the 1990s; the financial turn in capitalism; the fissuring of employment systems; global outsourcing of service work; and the successful strike against the corporate giant Verizon in the year 2000. The contests of CWA and its call center members, operating in one of the most dynamic and important sectors of the U.S. and global economy, highlight the opportunities, challenges, and constraints that so many U.S. service workers face in their struggles for power in the post-industrial service economy.Item Sex Cam Modeling: Labor, Intimacy, and Prosumer Porn(2021) Patella-Rey, PJ; Ritzer, George; Korzeniewicz, Patricio; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation begins with the assumption that the porn industry has radically changed in ways we are yet to fully understand. Drawing on interviews and auto-ethnography, it attempts to offer three distinct theoretical lenses through which these changes can be observed. First, I examine what is bought and sold in cam rooms, concluding that the work of cam modeling (both on camera and behind the scenes) has many dimensions that are not captured by reductionist tropes about selling one’s body. Second, I argue that camming fits a broader pattern in online content, where clear divisions between producer and consumer begin to break down. I conclude that camming (and especially custom content/shows) can best understood as prosumer pornography (i.e., as a co-creation of model and viewer). Finally, I explore the ways in which sex cam models actively develop intimacy with clients in spite of the fact that the interactions are defined by social and spatial distance; technological mediation; asymmetry; gendered expectations; and commercial transaction.Item Of Flesh and Feathers: A Study of Artistic Labor and the Politics of the Sensuous in New York Neo-Burlesque(2020) Fallica, Elisabeth T.; Frederik, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents an ethnographic study of the neo-burlesque scene in New York City, a group of nightlife artists who perform theatrical striptease. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2015 to 2018, this study uses the lens of labor to explore issues of art making, aesthetics and materiality. Specifically, it focuses on the artistic labor of performers on and off the stage; how the concept of labor is evoked in performance; and the work of material objects on stage. Looking at labor in relationship to neo-burlesque hopes to advance discussions on costume and materiality, the artist’s relationship to concepts of work, and artistic process. In doing so, this project also seeks to broaden the scope of previous scholarship on burlesque and erotic performance that more often than not has read such performance as either oppressive or empowering. I begin by providing a contemporary history of the neo-burlesque scene in New York, a scene that emerged in the 1990s at late night parties and strip clubs, among performance artists and strippers. I then analyze the heated, emotional choreography in contemporary burlesque acts and consider its relationship to Post-Fordist work modes. In my discussion of neo-burlesque performance I also analyze the active role of costume, arguing that burlesque costumes are actants that cue performers choreographic choices. Finally, I offer an embodied approach to understanding the artistic practices of neo-burlesque in the classes offered through The New York School of Burlesque, illuminating the DIY ethos that undergirds the community.Item 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.Item Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing and the Origins of the New Economic Divide (1968-1985)(2015) Windham, Anna Lane; Greene, Julie M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: KNOCKING ON LABOR'S DOOR: UNION ORGANIZING AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW ECONOMIC DIVIDE (1968-1985) Anna Lane Windham, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Professor Julie Greene, Department of History The 1970s were a pivotal decade for the creation of twenty-first century economic inequality, and the loss of union power was one important driver away from shared U.S. prosperity. Yet why did U.S. labor grow so weak? Much recent scholarship shifts blame for labor's decline to unions and the working class, and asserts that private-sector workers were simply no longer trying to organize by the mid-1970s. The dissertation instead paints the 1970s as a decade of working-class promise and reveals a previously-unstudied wave of half a million workers a year who tried to form unions in the private sector. Many of these workers were the women and people of color who had long been excluded from the nation's best jobs and from some unions, yet who had recently gained new access through Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Once these workers got the coveted jobs, many went knocking on labor's door. This dissertation explains how after World War II union organizing became the narrow door through which workers could access the most secure tier of the U.S. employer-provided social welfare system: collective bargaining. Increased resistance to union organizing among employers by the 1970s, however, thwarted these workers' organizing attempts. When fewer workers could access unions, the stage was set for growing economic precarity and inequality. This dissertation features four case studies: the largest union election ever in the South which was among Newport News, Virginia shipyard workers in 1978; campaigns in 1974 and 1985 by Cannon Mills textile workers in Kannapolis, North Carolina; the 1979 campaign among 5300 department store at Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, DC; and the women office workers' group "9to5" in Boston who forged a new kind of labor organizing. Sources include government statistics, oral history, local and national union records, business organization archives, polling, periodicals and previously unexamined anti-union consultant records.Item `HE LOVES THE LITTLE ONES AND DOESN'T BEAT THEM': WORKING CLASS MASCULINITY IN MEXICO CITY, 1917-1929(2014) Gustafson, Reid Erec; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how Mexico City workers, workers' families, state officials, unions, employers, and others perceived, performed, and shaped masculinity during the period of the Mexican Revolution. I argue that Mexico City's workers, officials, and employers negotiated working-class gender beliefs in such a way as to express multiple, performed, and distinctly working-class masculinities and sexualities. Scholars who study gender in Mexico argue that during the 1930s a particular type of working-class masculinity became dominant: the idea of the male worker as a muscular breadwinner who controlled both machines and women. I agree with this claim, but the existing scholarship fails to explain how this "proletarian masculinity" developed prior to the 1930s. My dissertation studies the period right before this proletarian masculinity became dominant and explains the processes through which it gradually developed. During the 1920s, the state held a relatively unstable position of power and was consequently forced to negotiate terms of rule with popular classes. I demonstrate that the 1920s represent a period when no one form of masculinity predominated. A complex range of multiple masculine behaviors and beliefs developed through the everyday activities of the working class, employers, officials, and unions. A Catholic union might represent a rival union as possessing an irresponsible form of manhood, a young man might use bravado and voice pitch to enact a homosexual identity, and a single father might enact a nurturing, self-sacrificing form of manhood. My sources include labor arbitration board records, court records, newspapers, plays, poetry, and reports by social workers, police, doctors, labor inspectors, juvenile court judges, and Diversions Department inspectors. Each chapter in this dissertation analyzes a particular facet of workers' masculinity, including worker's masculine behaviors among youth, within the family, in the workplace, in popular entertainment venues, and within unions.Item A History of the International Labor Communications Association(2012) Bates, Matthew Clark; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: A HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION Matthew C. Bates, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Dissertation directed by: Professor Linda Steiner Philip Merrill College of Journalism Keywords: labor, unions, press, media, journalism, International Labor Press Association, ILCA, ILPA, AFL-CIO, social movements This dissertation examines post-World War II debates within U.S. unions over the role and character of the labor press. I use archival sources and interviews to construct a history of the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA). The AFL-CIO created the ILCA (originally, the International Labor Press Association) in 1956 to strengthen communications with union members and the public. Representing hundreds of publications, the ILCA remains the only national organization of journalists working on behalf of U.S. unions. The debates over the role and character of union media are put in the context of social movement and organization theory. Like most modern social movements, organized labor exists as both a set of bureaucratic institutions and as diffuse agglomerations of individuals struggling against dominant social actors. Policies and practices that prioritize the needs of union organizations and leaders (i.e. tendencies towards "business unionism") frequently conflict with the needs and impulses of rank-and-file workers ("social movement unionism"). The debates I examine--a campaign in the 1960s to win AFL-CIO support for community-based labor newspapers; divisions among union editors and leaders in the 1980s and 1990s over the use of electronic technologies for national public relations instead of local campaigns; a dispute in the late 1990s over editorial freedom for union journalists--express the underlying tensions between business and social-movement unionism. Movements use internal media to create member identities, define opponents, frame issues, and set goals. Debates over the content of movement media and who those media should mobilize are debates over the nature of the movement itself. U.S. unions are shrinking in size and influence. I conclude that union media will be indispensable in any successful effort to spark a new workers' movement. Given the constraints imposed by union leaders on the labor press, however, I conclude that the chances of igniting a new movement will be greatly enhanced if union journalists collaborate outside the current union structures. Digital media and networks of progressive media activists offer unprecedented opportunities for union journalists to communicate with vast numbers of wage earners rapidly, and at relatively low cost.Item Investigating the Global Productivity Effects of Highly Skilled Labor Migration: How Immigrant Athletes Impact Olympic Medal Counts(2011) Horowitz, Jonathan Joseph; McDaniel, Stephen R; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Labor migration is a defining attribute of today's global economy, as more people live outside their country of birth than ever before and workers have more opportunities beyond their local borders (GCIM, 2005). This has motivated scholars to better understand the mobility of human capital and its various effects. While data are available to track aggregate migration patterns between countries, it is much more difficult to determine its association with such metrics as gains or losses in productivity for specific sectors of industry (Asis & Piper, 2008). Athletes are among the few groups of workers (along with information technology specialists, senior academics, health professionals and teachers) who can seek employment on a global market level while most people have fewer opportunities based on national markets (GCIM, 2005). Moreover, given the availability of records and clear metrics of productivity, the sports entertainment industry provides a unique opportunity to investigate the movement of a highly skilled labor force (Kahn, 2000). Therefore, the current study will investigate 21st century labor migration patterns and their relationship to productivity in the context of arguably the largest, oldest and most global example of sports business, the Summer Olympics. The scholarly and practical implications and future directions for research will be discussed.Item Location Choice, Product Choice, and the Human Resource Practices of Firms(2007-05-10) Freedman, Matthew L.; Haltiwanger, John C; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first investigates the implications of industrial clustering for labor mobility and earnings dynamics. Motivated by a theoretical model in which geographically clustered firms compete for workers, I exploit establishment-level variation in agglomeration to explore the impact of clustering in the software publishing industry on labor market outcomes. The results show that clustering makes it easier for workers to job hop among establishments within the sector. Further, workers in clusters have relatively steep earnings-tenure profiles, accepting lower wages early in their careers in exchange for stronger earnings growth and higher wages later. These findings underscore the importance of geography in understanding labor market dynamics within industries. While the first chapter reveals striking relationships between the human resource practices and location decisions of high-technology establishments, the second chapter (joint with F. Andersson, J. Haltiwanger, J. Lane, and K. Shaw) draws key connections between the hiring and compensation policies of innovative firms and the nature of their product markets. We show that software firms that operate in product markets with highly skewed returns to innovation pay a premium to attract talented workers. Yet these same firms also reward loyalty; that is, highly skilled workers faithful to their employers enjoy higher earnings in firms with a greater variance in potential payoffs from innovation. These results not only contribute to our knowledge of firm human resource practices and product market strategies, but also shed light on patterns of income inequality within and between industries. Building on this final idea, the last chapter (joint with F. Andersson, E. Davis, J. Lane, B. McCall, and L. Sandusky) examines the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to within-industry changes in earnings inequality. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers and firms based on worker skills are key determinants of changes in industry earnings distributions over time. However, the importance of these and other factors in driving observed dynamics in earnings inequality varies across sectors, with aggregate shifts often disguising fundamental differences in the underlying forces effecting change.