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 How Rebels Get What They Want(2021) McWeeney, Margaret; Cunningham, Kathleen G; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the often-unseen nonviolent world of nonviolence in armed rebellion. Although states often act and react to violent rebellion, recent research has highlighted nonviolent, governance and service activities rebels take on for survival of their organization. However, little is known about the effects of these behaviors. Theorizing a new category of rebel activity called legitimacy-seeking nonviolence, I show the ways that rebels peacefully “get what they want.” Legitimacy-seeking nonviolence works by reducing concerns over information and commitment that keep rebels and states from reaching a mutually-beneficial bargain. In the following papers, I highlight three behaviors, diplomacy, local interdependence networks, and peace enforcement via gender inclusion, that rebels used that facilitate successful negotiations and durable peace with the state in Southeast Asia. In concluding, this dissertation asks scholars, academics, and policymakers to rethink traditional conceptions of rebels, violence, and conflict and outline scenarios where giving in to some demands would be preferable to continued violence.Item Mental Health Advocates as Cultural Intermediaries: A Sociocultural Perspective of Advocacy and Legitimacy(2021) Aghazadeh, Sarah Abigail; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study sought to understand how advocacy as a public relations activity can give voice to marginalized publics and how/if mental health advocates perceive their advocacy work as influencing culture as it relates to mental health. This study incorporated the theoretical frameworks of fully functioning society theory (FFST) and the circuit of culture. Additionally, this study investigated the concepts of advocacy, legitimacy, cultural intermediation and discourses as they entangle with and within FFST and the circuit of culture. The juxtaposition of these theories helped to uncover both culturally situated best practices of advocacy and interrogate the frames that underpin the rhetorical ideals of a fully functioning society. This study employed qualitative, in-depth interviews with 38 mental health advocates who communicated a variety of perspectives about mental health and illness. Some themes that emerged include: advocacy as both education and empowerment, legitimacy as authority that can derive from both lived and learned experience, the multiple subcultures within the field of mental health advocacy, and the variety of mental health discourses. Furthermore, two overlapping, but distinct missions of advocacy exist including 1) general mental health for all of society and 2) advocacy for people who have experienced significant challenges to daily life and/or harm (e.g., prejudice, discrimination) because of a psychiatric diagnosis. This dissertation extended FFST and the circuit of culture to present a culturally embedded conceptual model of advocacy and theoretical propositions to help guide future theory building. The theoretical propositions outline how advocacy is a vehicle for voice to change status quos, how dysfunction and marginality are parallel within FFST, and how legitimation and cultural intermediation align in the context of culturally situated responsible advocacy. The findings also contributed to the existing theories by applying those theories to a specific context of mental health advocacy, which illuminated the importance of questioning normalized values within FFST and approaching intermediation with reflectiveness. This research considers the consequences of advocacy for people with lived experiences and situates advocacy within social justice contexts to inch closer towards the ideals of FFST.Item The Institutionalization of Photojournalism Education: Bringing the Blue-Apron Ghetto to American Schools of Journalism(2017) Paddock, Stanton M.; Chinoy, Ira; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As journalism educators wrestle to keep programs up-to-date in an evolving news landscape, there is value in understanding how education in an early form of multimedia journalism — photography — came to be. Little attention has been paid to the intersection of journalism education and photojournalism. This subject furnishes a unique perspective on photojournalism’s professionalization. This dissertation examines the history of university-level photojournalism education in the early and mid 20th century by asking what influenced the creation, diffusion, and adoption of photojournalism pedagogy in American higher education and what the consequences were. Neo-institutional theory’s focus on legitimacy supports exploration of evolving organizational norms in photojournalism education. Contemporary writings on higher education, journalism education, and photojournalism reveal important environmental conditions. Shifting educational principles are tracked via records of journalism education groups. Analysis of textbooks elucidates evolving practices and opinions. Archival case studies of journalism programs at the University of Maryland and the University of Georgia provide detailed examples of evolving approaches to photojournalism education. Illuminated are deep-seated issues: the struggle for legitimacy, tension between practical skills and critical thinking, and the relationship between textual and visual journalism. Efforts to establish photojournalism education occurred well after the establishment of textual journalism education. Both faced similar challenges, including concerns about skill-based learning in higher education. But photojournalism education’s acceptance was initially hindered because it clashed with journalism education’s hard-won image as suitable in liberal arts institutions. Later, rapid expansion of interest in providing photojournalism courses promoted homogenization. The changing environment featured constant uncertainty. This perpetuated isomorphism in which the initial range of approaches narrowed and photojournalism offerings became more alike. This dissertation concludes that choices at both the local and national levels in photojournalism education were made to project outward legitimacy. The resulting curricula were not necessarily the best, most useful, efficient, or practical. Local factors — staffing, accreditation, location, mission, school type, and receptivity to innovation — were influential. Wider environmental factors also played a role as journalism education was institutionalized. Today, in facing the challenge of incorporating new reporting methods, journalism educators must recognize the wide variety of factors and influences that may be involved.Item OVERLY-GREAT EXPECTATIONS: WHY POLITICAL VOLUNTARISM IS IMPOSSIBLE, WHY PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM IS UNNECESSARY, AND WHY THAT'S NOT A PROBLEM(2012) Runnels, Jennifer Renee; Morris, Christopher W.; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)John Locke argued that legitimate state authority is created when free individuals lend their personal power via consent to the state's governors. Modern Lockean A. John Simmons extends Locke's argument to conclude that, since this does not happen in the real world, philosophical anarchism must be accepted. I argue that classical consent cannot happen in the individual/state relationship. Its requirements can be met in some private relationships because of their special background conditions. The individual/state relationship, however, is not like private relationships, and the nature of the relationship keep classical consent's requirements from being fulfilled. First, state authority must extend over a very large set of issues, from the military and economics to education and health care, in order to perform its functions of mutual protection and advancement. Given the considerable number of state realms of power, coordinating the meaningful consent of thousands, millions, or billions of citizens is downright impossible. Second, classical consent theory requires that the consenter have an adequate understanding of what he is submitting to if that consent is to ground an authority exchange, but given the complexity of the state's constitution and its numerous realms of power, even the most intelligent person could not sufficiently comprehend the terms of the power exchange. Third, the state's directives are fundamentally different from regular interpersonal directives; they are final, sovereign, apply over territory, and require compliance, which is contrary to the voluntaristic spirit. To counter Simmons's argument, I argue that a distinction must be made between object-level governance, what state agents do, and meta-political activity, a category of activities performed by individual citizens that create and maintain state authority. Through meta-political activities, citizens are able to indirectly add to the state's constitution, in ways congruent with their mental powers, practical abilities and nature as private citizens.Item THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEGITIMACY, TERRORIST ATTACKS AND POLICE(2011) Gibbs, Jennifer; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars often suggest that terrorism - "the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation" (LaFree & Dugan, 2007, 184) - is a battle of legitimacy. As the most ubiquitous representatives of the government's coercive force, the police should be most susceptible to terrorism stemming from perceptions of illegitimacy. Police are attractive symbolic and strategic targets, and they were victimized in over 12% of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1970. However, empirical research assessing the influence of legitimacy on terrorist attacks, generally, and scholarly attention to terrorist attacks on police are scant. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the influence of state and police legitimacy and alternative explanations on the proportion of all and only fatal terrorist attacks on police in 82 countries between 1999 and 2008. Data were drawn from several sources, including the Global Terrorism Database and the World Values Survey. Surprisingly, results of Tobit analyses indicate that police legitimacy, measured by the percentage of the population who have at least some confidence in police, is not significantly related to the proportion of all terrorist attacks on police or the proportion of fatal terrorist attacks on police. State legitimacy was measured by four indicators; only the percentage of the population who would never protest reached significance, lending limited support for this hypothesis. Greater societal schism, the presence of a foreign military and greater economic inequality were consistently significant predictors of higher proportions of terrorist attacks on police. Some measures of violence within a country also were influential, but they were not consistent across models or with expectations. The results of the Tobit analyses were confirmed with Negative Binomial Regression Models using the number of all and only fatal terrorist attacks targeting police as the outcome. While these results suggest alternative explanations for terrorist attacks targeting police, discounting legitimacy as an explanation for such attacks or terrorism, generally, is premature. Policy implications and avenues for future research are discussed.Item Microdynamics of Illegitimacy and Complex Urban Violence in Medellin, Colombia(2010) Lamb, Robert Dale; Steinbruner, John D; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For most of the past 25 years, Medellin, Colombia, has been an extreme case of complex, urban violence, involving not just drug cartels and state security forces, but also street gangs, urban guerrillas, community militias, paramilitaries, and other nonstate armed actors who have controlled micro-territories in the city's densely populated slums in ever-shifting alliances. Before 2002, Medellin's homicide rate was among the highest in the world, but after the guerrillas and militias were defeated in 2003, a major paramilitary alliance disarmed and a period of peace known as the "Medellin Miracle" began. Policy makers facing complex violence elsewhere were interested in finding out how that had happened so quickly. The research presented here is a case study of violence in Medellin over five periods since 1984 and at two levels of analysis: the city as a whole, and a sector called Caicedo La Sierra. The objectives were to describe and explain the patterns of violence, and determine whether legitimacy played any role, as the literature on social stability suggested it might. Multilevel, multidimensional frameworks for violence and legitimacy were developed to organize data collection and analysis. The study found that most decreases in violence at all levels of analysis were explained by increases in territorial control. Increases in collective (organized) violence resulted from a process of "illegitimation," in which an intolerably unpredictable living environment sparked internal opposition to local rulers and raised the costs of territorial control, increasing their vulnerability to rivals. As this violence weakened social order and the rule of law, interpersonal-communal (unorganized) violence increased. Over time, the "true believers" in armed political and social movements became marginalized or corrupted; most organized violence today is motivated by money. These findings imply that state actors, facing resurgent violence, can keep their tenuous control over the hillside slums (and other "ungoverned" areas) if they can avoid illegitimizing themselves. Their priority, therefore, should be to establish a tolerable, predictable daily living environment for local residents and businesses: other anti-violence programs will fail without strong, permanent, and respectful governance structures.