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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    AN EXPLORATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH WORKER ENGAGEMENT WITH HEALTH-RELATED SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF #BLACKLIVESMATTER
    (2018) Bickford, Abigail Runa; Gold, Robert S; Public and Community Health; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Social movements fight for social justice by protesting systemic social inequities. The field of public health aims to eliminate these same disparities as they relate to health. Many social movements are not currently viewed as health social movements despite these movements addressing health disparities by challenging existing inequities related to social determinants of health. One example is the Black Lives Matter movement which has gained considerable attention in its efforts to address systemic racism, a known determinant of health. While the Black Lives Matter movement has evoked many academic and popular responses, there has been a lack of focus on this movement by the public health workforce. Therefore this work uses the Black Lives Matter movement as an example of a health-related social movement warranting engagement from the public health workforce. This study utilizes a novel approach to the use of social media data in the public health field. The first part of this work examines tweets containing #BlackLivesMatter and compares the online discourse to the stated mission and principles outlined by the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization. An analysis of the Twitter data was then presented in a Delphi study conducted with a panel of experts in public health. Delphi participants were tasked with developing ideas on how the public health workforce could best apply the information collected from #BlackLivesMatter Twitter data to aid in addressing the health-related issues highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement. More broadly, participants also generated ideas about what can be done to encourage the public health workforce to systematically engage with health-related social movements. Finally, one-on-one interviews were conducted with self-identified social activists. These activists were asked about their participation in social movements, their use of social media regarding their advocacy work, and for ideas about how the public health workforce could engage with their causes. Findings from each study are discussed along with recommendations for future work aimed at developing relationships between public health workers and social movements.
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    An Archipelago of Thinkers: The Free School Movement as a Social Movement
    (2015) Biancolli, Dani Ellen; Hutt, Ethan; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The Free School Movement of the 1960s was a short educational reform effort that grew out of the anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian ideas of the counterculture. This group of radical thinkers included individuals like Jonathan Kozol, George Dennison, and John Holt and built upon the rich history of education reform in the United States. This study investigates whether the framework created by sociologist Charles Tilly to study social movements can be applied to education reform efforts like the Free School Movement. The goal of the study is twofold. First, it is to determine whether the Free School Movement can be termed a social movement using Tilly's framework and thus, if the framework can be used to create a common language for the study of educational reform efforts. Second, the study situates the Free School Movement within the larger stream of American educational history. Ultimately, the study concludes that the Free School Movement can be termed a social movement according to Tilly's definition. In determining this, the study also shows that Tilly's framework can, with a few modifications, be used to study education reform efforts and to provide a basis for comparison and analysis. In addition, the study is able to demonstrate that the Free School Movement wrestled with the same tensions common to many educational reform efforts in American history. While those who participated in the Free School Movement believed that they were attempting something new and different, this study shows that the Movement was part of a long struggle to determine if education should be viewed as a public or private good.
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    Crafting Queer Identity, Building Coalitions, and Envisioning Liberation at the Intersections: A Rhetorical Analysis of 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse
    (2012) Samek, Alyssa A.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines how lesbian-feminists navigated the competing pressures of identity politics and coalition politics and confronted compounding frustrations, divisions, and exclusionary practices throughout the 1970s. Specifically, the study attends to the ways lesbian-feminists rhetorically recalibrated their identities in and through coalitional relationships with such social movement communities as women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war activism. In the process, they were able to build coalitional relationships with activists from other movements while retaining a space for articulating and bolstering their lesbian-feminist identities. This study accordingly examines lesbian-feminist published writings and speeches given during conferences, marches, demonstrations, and political rallies between 1970 and 1980 to reveal how they crafted a space for lesbian-feminist politics, identity, and liberation from within coalitional relationships that also marginalized them. The project intersects the theories of public address, social movement rhetoric, intersectionality, identity politics, and coalition politics to examine the strategic interaction between coalition politics and identity politics in lesbian-feminist activism. In particular, recalibration allowed lesbian-feminists to strategically capitalize on intersectionality in order to negotiate the tension between identity creation and coalition formation. Using the rhetorical strategy of pivoting to feature certain aspects of their identities with the various coalitions in mind, lesbian-feminists increased their visibility. They did so not only for the sake of promoting shared political goals and legitimizing lesbian-feminism, but also to confront social movement members on issues of exclusion, homophobia, and sexism. As a result, lesbian-feminism came to hold a variety of meanings for women working in the second-wave women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war movements. At times, lesbian feminists upheld a separatist, vanguard ethic, which was defined in opposition to other identities and movements. Though empowering and celebrated by some as more ideologically pure, separatist identity formations remained highly contested at the margins of lesbian-feminist identity politics. With those margins clearly defined, lesbian-feminists strategically pivoted to enact political ideologies and preserve identity from within coalitional relationships. In the process, their discourse revealed a great deal about the relationship between identity politics and coalition politics in the context of U.S. social protest in the post-1960s era.
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    Traditional Values and Progressive Desires: Tensions of Identity in the Rhetoric of the Granger Movement in Illinois, 1870-1875
    (2008-11-21) Chambers, Michael Allen; Klumpp, James F; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the decade following the Civil War, Illinois Farmers suffered from a variety of economic problems such as deflated currency, increased agricultural production, international competition, high tariffs, expensive farm implements, high transportation rates, high taxes, and the occasional natural disaster. Scattered, powerless, and dependent, Illinois farmers were especially vulnerable to a political and economic system controlled by corporate monopolies, corrupt and unresponsive government, and an endless procession of middlemen waiting to take their share of the farmers' hard-earned profits. Farmers responded by forming the Granger movement, the first large-scale farmers' movement in the United States and the initial episode of a broader farmers' movement in the late nineteenth century. Granger movement rhetoric constituted Illinois farmers as powerful agents of change by transforming them from individual actors into the agricultural class, a powerful collective identity motivated for political and economic action. Movement rhetoric did so by drawing upon the motivational power of three strands of American public discourse--the agrarian myth, the rhetoric of class, and the legacy of the American Revolution--to create a narrative that empowered Midwestern farmers to see the dire consequences of their agrarian individualism and to constitute themselves as a class that could adequately respond to their material conditions in the late nineteenth century.