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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Item The Crown: Paradise Reclaimed(2018) Basch, Rebecca; Keener, Cy; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The story of my life and the story of my art are intrinsically connected. Through a personally authored story, that I identified as possessing the universal framework of the monomyth (as identified by Joseph Campbell), I became interested in the universal tendencies of humankind. My work synthesizes disparate topics into a new narrative space where parallels are drawn between the personal, extrapersonal, and the universal. In the project The Crown: Paradise Reclaimed, the quest for the ultimate boon, is examined through the stories of myself and others and centers around three locations: Baltimore, Utah, and Iceland.Item The Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Narrative Abilities in Primary Progressive Aphasia(2018) Colantuoni, Deborah Elise; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a neuromodulation technique that has recently been studied as an adjunct to speech-language therapy in persons with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Preliminary studies have shown improved language abilities with tDCS-supplemented therapy, primarily in naming, as well as improved generalization and maintenance of skills. However, the effects of tDCS on narrative abilities have not yet been well studied in this population. The present study examined whether the addition of tDCS to anomia therapy improved narrative language measures in 16 participants with PPA versus sham stimulation plus therapy. Results demonstrated that tDCS did not significantly improve narrative language measures in participants with PPA.Item Time and Form: Designing in the Fourth Dimension(2013) Petersen, Sasha Nicole; Lamprakos, Michele; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The human vision for the built environment is characterized by contradictory ideals. Society values buildings that are able to resist or at least mask the degradation that occurs over time so that they can continue to serve their intended purposes and yet, society also romanticizes the fragmentary and deeply evocative ruin that has been completely surrendered to the weathering effects of the environment. Would it be possible to design continually functioning buildings that make the natural and human forces of change manifest, thus developing a narrative that represents more honestly our own fundamental relationship with time? This thesis will investigate how architecture can serve as a record of change in our surroundings and extend our temporal awareness beyond the present condition. To this aim, interpretation center that addresses sea level rise will serve as a testing ground.Item British Modernist Narrative Middles(2013) Rosenberg, Michael Eli; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Middles play a key role in shaping narrative form. However, while Edward Said has shown how beginnings shape the novel and a wide range of intellectual endeavors in Beginnings: Intention and Method, and Frank Kermode has explored the pull of the ending on Western narrative in The Sense of an Ending, there has been no comparable study of the middle. Defining the narrative middle as a central piece of text that has a transitional or transformational function, British Modernist Narrative Middles draws attention to the ways narrative middles have been used to construct distinctly modernist narratives through transformations of narrative form and technique. The various techniques employed in modernist narrative middles are demonstrated through close readings of three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Henry James's The Golden Bowl, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; as well as three British neo-modernist texts: Rayner Heppenstall's Saturnine, B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, and Brigid Brophy's In Transit. While not all modernist texts employ prominent narrative middles, when they do, these middles can be crucial to our understanding both of these novels' narrative form and how they grapple with the major thematic and poetic concerns of modernism.Item Narratives of Human Agency Among Low Income Incarcerated Fathers(2012) Fang, Jennifer Jing; Roy, Kevin; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Prior literature has focused on studying low income or incarcerated fathers from a deficit perspective. For example, there is ample evidence showing that high risk behaviors are associated with children who have non-custodial fathers and about mothers' perspectives on father absence. However, there is still a lack of literature about how these fathers experience agency to take control and make change in their lives in spite of the barriers they face. I conduct a secondary analysis of life history interviews of 40 fathers in a work release program. The theoretical framework that guides this study is narrative inquiry, using sensitizing concepts from McAdams' (2001) four themes of agency: self mastery, status/victory, achievement/responsibility, and empowerment. Out of McAdams' four themes, self mastery and achievement/responsibility were the most prominent themes of agency. Additional emergent themes of agency are found in fathers' life history narratives.Item Positioning and Identity in the Academic Literacy Experiences of Elementary English Language Learners(2011) Hickey, Pamela J.; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigates the academic literacy experiences of elementary English Language Learners (ELLs) in first grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade. Participants included students as well as their reading/language arts mainstream teachers and their English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers. Informed by both cross-sectional cross-case study and narrative inquiry methodology, this study used positioning theory and identity theory as complementary analytic lenses. Students' positionings, both reflexive self-positioning and interactive positioning by others, were identified and named through analyses of their interactions in academic literacy events during reading/language arts. In order to consider the ways that students' positionings may afford or constrain their access to and engagement with academic literacy events, the researcher created an analytic framework naming student positions. Additionally, positions were considered in light of the ways that they mediated students' levels of engagement as literacy events unfolded. To investigate the construction of students' literate identities, the researcher examined students' patterns of positioning during literacy events and considered interview data from students and teachers as well as field notes that documented conversations with participants. The researcher also gathered two self-portraits from student participants, including one self-portrait showing the student engaged in an academic literacy task at school and one showing the student engaged in a fun activity outside of the school context. The study demonstrated that students' positionings, both positive and constraining, may work to construct and re-construct students' literate identities even as students' literate identities may inform the ways that students take on and negotiate positions in a recursive process. The study also found that students with strong literate identities bridging home and school contexts took on more positive positions thus engaging more deeply with academic literacy tasks than students with striving literate identities. Students with striving literate identities often took on positions of constraint in strategic moves that allowed them to get through literacy tasks without engaging deeply. Finally, this study demonstrated the powerful ways that teachers may support students' deep engagement with literacy tasks through positive positioning and following through on their lesson implementation by offering opportunities for re-positioning and the use of scaffolds.Item Beyond Scraps: Narrating Traumatic Health Experiences Through Scrapbooking(2010) Reynolds, Dawn M; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For centuries, women have served as the primary storytellers of domestic life. In volumes known as scrapbooks, women collect family snapshots and memorabilia for generations to enjoy. Traditional scrapbooking tends to highlight cheerful familial themes, such as weddings, births, and other life milestones. Contemporary online iterations of the age-old artform have begun publicly incorporating stories of traumatic health experiences. In this dissertation, I attend to the scrapbooking projects created by a selection of women who address personal health issues. I examine narrative and rhetorical strategies employed in health trauma scrapbooks, contending that women use the craft to preserve a sense of self while also publicly voicing social concerns. I combine feminist textual analysis and ethnographic-inspired observation to illustrate how scrapbooking comprises a form of knowledge production narrating women's collective wisdom about survival. The scrapbook projects I explore demonstrate techniques crafters use to manage cultural memories by reformulating their self-image as social change activists rather than as mere enthusiasts engaging in a trite hobby. This dissertation explores a selection of health concerns women raise through the craft, with a particular emphasis on breast-cancer themed scrapbooks. Applying breast cancer scrapbook pages as a case study, I illustrate how women deploy online scrapbooking in the service of health narration, thereby claiming a public voice about the illness experience. As I show in the final part of the dissertation, scrapbookers coalesce in activist communities, carving out a platform from which to press for social justice. I conclude by revealing ways that scrapbookers utilize the World Wide Web to facilitate health activism and public narration of traumatic health experiences. This dissertation is designed to elevate the place of contemporary scrapbooking in American Studies scholarship. Because the scrapbook has been both poorly preserved and grossly understudied, the earnest task of my project is to offer a useful model for analyzing women's trauma scrapbook pages that resonates for future scholars. I seek, above all, to raise awareness about the scrapbook as a relevant cultural artifact that contains richly contextual narratives of self and society.Item Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Constructing the Stories and Pathology of Madness/Mental Illness in the Contemporary U.S.(2009) Rector, Claudia; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Personal stories are always told in the context of broader cultural narratives. Thus, in the contemporary U.S., stories of personal experience of illness and disability are usually informed by Western notions of health and illness, and a binary classification system of normative/non-normative bodies and behaviors. The emerging field of disability studies represents a socially progressive attempt to interrogate and reconfigure discourses that pathologize and medicalize non-normative bodies, challenging medical discourses with an alternate framework of evidence that emphasizes the personal experiences of individuals who have experienced disability or illness and who conceive of these experiences in different ways. Whose Story Is It Anyway? is an interdisciplinary examination of how the cultural authority of medicine compresses a range of individual experiences into narrow, standardized narratives of the experience of depression, for instance, or other phenomena classified as illness. Specifically, my study makes a three-part argument: first, that biological psychiatry has eclipsed psychoanalysis and that medical definitions of mental illness have become the culturally dominant way of determining what kinds of physical or psychological phenomena are classified as bad, e.g., pathological. Second, these definitions then inform and shape stories of personal experience with such phenomena, enough so that standard narrative formats emerge for describing "individual" experiences of both physical disability and madness/mental illness. The personal stories of madness/mental illness then become, in essence, universalized narratives of illness and recovery that reinforce notions of pathology. Third, this standardization of the personal story often aligns with medical narratives in a way that reflects the storytellers' disempowered position in the medical industry, in that telling the "right" story positions them to receive the benefits of working within the medical system, and telling the "wrong" story becomes an act of political activism. Such de facto coercion has substantial implications for intellectual projects, such as disability studies, that rely heavily on the articulation of personal experience as evidence for the need for change. Finally, this study argues for a re-examination of experience-based, identity-focused activism, and for an invigorated humanities project in science studies.Item Strategic Nonnarration in Henry James(2006-11-13) Fetterhoff, Allyson; Auchard, John; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation coins strategic nonnarration as the literary device of withholding significant characters and events from a work's entire narrated text and, through repeated textual acknowledgement, calling attention to that withheld material. The aim of this study is to show how the withholding of direct presentation operates as a narrative strategy to foster interpretive freedom and to prompt the reader to assimilate the events that are not directly presented. There are several strategies by which the text prompts the incorporation of withheld material, including foregrounded reference, metonymy, vicariousness, mimesis, silence, temporal simulation, and doubling of character and reader. The following chapters explore Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Princess Casamassima, The Lesson of the Master, and The Ambassadors as well as James's criticism and several brief non-James examples in order to assemble diverse cases of strategic nonnarration and to illustrate its didactic and representational functions. Reader response criticism and narrative theory provide both context and contrast for the narrative gaps in presentation this study explores and the potential assimilation of that withheld material.Item Narrative and Selfhood in the Antidepressant Era(2006-05-30) Stepnisky, Jeffrey Nicholas; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a study of the relationship between antidepressant medications, self-understanding, and the narrative construction of self. The analysis relied upon two kinds of empirical data. First, advertisements for antidepressants in popular magazines, television, and online promotional websites were collected. Second, interviews were conducted with 23 people who were taking or had taken antidepressant medications. It is argued that antidepressants are components of the larger social processes of risk, biomedicalization, and individualization. In contrast to a narrative view, which conceives selfhood as a dialogical and embodied achievement, the antidepressants participate in a set of discourses that sustain atomistic conceptions of the self. The analysis emphasizes the personal agency that antidepressant users bring to bear upon their use of antidepressants. Chapter one is an introduction to theories of risk, individualization, and narrative as well as the ways in which narrative and selfhood are potentially transformed through the use of antidepressants. Chapter two offers an analysis of three theoretical conceptualizations of the relationship between biomedicine and selfhood: naturalism, poststructuralism and the narrative-hermeneutic perspective adopted in the dissertation. Chapter three analyzes the advertising materials emphasizing the manner in which relationships are constructed between selfhood, biology, and antidepressant medications. Chapters four, five, and six introduce interview materials in order to examine: a) how people learn to use antidepressants and in doing so come to split-off and manage unwanted elements of their selves, b) the ways in which the popular discourse of authenticity (being a "real" self) is transformed in the encounter with antidepressants, and c) the manner in which the antidepressants are taken up in social institutions such as the family. The dissertation concludes with a reflection upon the implications of a shift from a form of selfhood composed in narrative and relationship, to a form of post-social selfhood composed through the use of technologies such as antidepressants.