Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Civic nationalism in postcolonial states: A comparative analysis of civic nationalism in Mauritus, India and Sri Lanka(2014) Singh, Ila; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Civic Nationalism is the development of national identity for a state, rooted in egalitarian post enlightenment concepts emphasizing humanity and individual rights. Post colonialism, many developing states embarked on the path of civic nation creation, while implementing democracy in order to govern successfully. This dissertation, it is an extension of nationalism studies into the process of post-colonial nation-state building. The question is of why some post-colonial states developed civic nationalism while others developed ethnic or religious nationalism. Upon independence from Britain, former colonies Mauritius, India and Sri Lanka each had multinational populations, which they intended to govern with the creation of civic nationalism and liberal democratic principles. Instead, today each of the three states can clearly be placed in a progression from most civic to least civic. Mauritius is a liberal democracy bound by civic nationalism, India is working on civic nation creation, and Sri Lanka abandoned the civic nation creation project. This dissertation traces why these three nations evolved so differently when each started out in similar circumstances. Why was Mauritius successful in creating a civic nation, while India is still struggling and Sri Lanka devolved into ethnic nationalism? Addressing, whether an attempt was made during the process of nation-state building to create a civic nation and whether the founding fathers were successful in creating the desired civic nation bound by civic nationalism and a liberal democratic state. If a civic state was created by the founding fathers did subsequent political generations work to maintain and perpetuate the civic nation or did civic nationalism die, thus yielding way for illiberal nationalisms? The purpose of this dissertation is to draw out variables that are held in common across either success or failure in state consolidation of a common civic national identity. The dissertation has led to support for the following hypothesis that, the more committed to a civic nation the political and intellectual elite, and the better established the state’s civic, intellectual and educational institutions are at the time of independence and over subsequent generations; the more likely a liberal democratic state will be to establish and maintain civic nationalism.Item Promoting Citizenship in a Postcolonial Space: A Study of Teachers' Beliefs and Practices in Jamaica(2011) Williams, Dierdre Alicia; Klees, Steven J; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Evidence suggests that the values, attitudes and skills teachers emphasize in preparing students to participate as adult citizens in wider society are informed by the meanings teachers ascribe to citizenship and these meanings can in turn be traced to the contexts of teachers' lives. Given that teachers' practices are informed by their beliefs, these beliefs must first be understood. However, few studies have examined teachers' beliefs about citizenship or the underlying factors that inform those beliefs. This research examined the beliefs about citizenship espoused by a group of secondary teachers in the nation-state of Jamaica and the factors informing those beliefs. This qualitative case study utilized an analytic framework incorporating literature on conceptions of citizenship; and literature on teacher beliefs, including belief formation. The findings of the study highlight the ways in which the postcolonial context of Jamaica problematizes these teachers' understandings of citizenship and this in turn has implications for research and practice in the field of citizenship studies. The study illuminates the connections among: (i) teachers' beliefs about citizenship and about their students' needs, abilities, and life trajectories; (ii) teachers' lived experiences; and (iii) traditional race and class hierarchy in postcolonial Jamaican society.Item The Browning of the All Blacks: Pacific Peoples, Rugby, and the Cultural Politics of Identity in New Zealand(2008-05-07) Grainger, Andrew David; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I examine how the complex, and often contradictory, discourses of being a 'Pacific person' are played out in, and through, New Zealand rugby. In particular, I interrogate how these discourses--manifest in various forms of public expression--structure, regulate, and, potentially, challenge traditional notions of nationality. In the opening chapters I first explore how liberal values and the goals of inclusion and pluralism have been an important part of defining New Zealand identity. In this regard Pacific peoples are playing an ever-more important role. I suggest, however, that an emergent 'Pacific multiculturalism' actually reinforces white cultural power. It also masks the way national belonging has been racialized in New Zealand, and the role rugby has, and continues to, play in inscribing the Otherness of Pacific peoples. What I suggest is needed is alternative or resistant models of 'culture.' In the concluding chapters I turn to the notion of diaspora as one potential alternative. Rearticulating the insightful ideas of Paul Gilroy in my penultimate chapter, I argue that diaspora can be productively adapted as a model to comprehend the lives, travels, migrations, and significances of Pacific athletes. I suggest they provide important diasporic resources for rearticulating modes of belonging that exceed national boundaries. Methodologically, this project is a discursive analysis of the public discourses of Pacificness circulating in a diverse range of documentary, literary, and media sources. I suggest that this critical analysis of the performance, practice, and institutions of Pacific/New Zealand rugby provides a unique context within which to examine the ensemble of discourses and forces by which identity is understood and produced, and through which the Pacific subject in constituted. My hope is that, in accord with Gilroy (1993), this analysis both identifies and actively produces alternatives to divisive discourses of national and ethnic absolutism. That is, my goal is to produce a text which not only critiques, but offers strategies of resistance to, the practices, structures, and ideologies of exclusion.Item SPACE, IDENTITY AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: NEGOTIATING DECOLONIZATION IN THE UNITED NATIONS(2006-05-11) Patil, Vrushali; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden moments of trans-territorial contact, this research is interested in the relationship between gender, race, and shifting transnational power relationships. Bringing together work from Sociology, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, it is interested in the following questions. How are modern constructions of gender and race forged in transnational--colonial as well as 'postcolonial'--processes? How did they emerge in and contribute to such processes during the colonial era? Specifically, how did they shape colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community? How has this relationship shifted with legal decolonization? First, it offers a theory regarding these questions in the European colonial era, the theory of kinship. This theory posits that the colonialist construction of space, identity and international community historically relied on a trope of kinship, which operated by constructing the colonies as 'children' and the metropoles as 'parents.' Even more, kinship actually helped to constitute colonial notions of race (i.e., 'childlike natives') and gender (i.e., 'the lack of the nuclear household in African society as evidence of cultural immaturity'). In this manner, kinship helped to define colonized others as children, thereby to deny the subjectivity of these others (particularly their spatial and identity claims), and thus to ultimately build hierarchical structures of international community. Combining discourse and comparative historical methods of analysis, this work explores how colonialists and anti-colonialists renegotiate transnational power relationships within the debates on decolonization in the United Nations from 1946-1960. It argues that while colonialists continued to use the trope of kinship to legitimate the status quo, anti-colonialists insisted that the colonies had 'grown up' and that continuing colonialism was a humiliation that emasculated fully adult men. Thus, anti-colonialists attempted to reorder global power relationships by renegotiating the kinship trope. In other words, to the politics of paternalism, they responded with the politics of masculinity. Ultimately, then, the complex, shifting, politics of race relied on a politics of gender/sexuality, both of which were central to the changing contours of international community in the mid-20th century.