College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Reimagining Resilience: Exploring Black Early Adolescent Girls’ Experiences, Desires, and Needs While Growing Up In Baltimore City(2018) Akoumany, Stephanie Yvonne; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Reimagining Resilience: Exploring Black Early Adolescent Girls’ Experiences, Desires, and Needs While Growing Up In Baltimore City" asks the following research questions: What are black early adolescent girls’ resilience strategies while growing up in poor and working class communities in Baltimore City? What are the girls’ perceptions of their own life experiences, desires, needs, and the quality of their interpersonal relationships? This dissertation is informed by a three year longitudinal ethnographic and participant action research study, conducted from 2010-2013, at a Baltimore City public school. Eighty-five, hour-long, weekly and biweekly workshops were conducted with 55 black middle school girls between the ages of 11-14 years old, who were in three different grade-based cohorts, until their respective eighth grade graduations. The black early adolescent girls in this study shared that their major stressors were feeling misunderstood, increased domestic and academic responsibilities as they transitioned into adolescence, conflicts with peers and adults, cyberbullying on popular social media sites, race, gender, and class stigmatization and policing at school, a lack of social supports, pressure to engage in sexual activities, physical and sexual violation, navigating structurally decaying neighborhoods, and community violence. This dissertation argues that black early adolescent girls utilize resilience strategies, particularly, self-assertion, storytelling, creativity, play, and community building to cope with these daily stressors and other traumatic life events. This dissertation explores connections between adolescent development, relational aggression, adverse childhood experiences, emotional intelligence, neuroplasticity, and resilience. It suggests that holistic wellness approaches such as mindfulness and play based therapy, socioemotional learning opportunities, restorative justice, facilitated intergroup dialogue, story exchange, participant action research, and comprehensive and medically accurate sexual education interventions that listen to black girls’ perceptions of their own experiences and needs can help schools promote health equity among adolescents in Baltimore City, the United States, and the world.Item Forum Theatre as Theatre for Development in East Africa(2017) Warheit, Emily Jane; Frederik, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Theatre for development (TfD) includes a variety of performance practices that aim to communicate or foster dialogue in a development context. Forum Theatre, developed by Brazilian Director Augusto Boal as part of his Theatre of the Oppressed movement has become one of the most widely used forms in TfD. This dissertation looks at the use of Forum Theatre specifically in public health-focused programs funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Uganda and Kenya. The appeal of Forum Theatre for addressing development issues stems from its participatory nature, particularly as it aligns with current trends towards community involvement in development. However, power imbalances inherent in foreign-funded projects, public health communication theories modeled after advertising, and the realities of life- and livelihood-threatening conditions on the ground all work against the liberatory potential of the form. The focus of Forum Theatre is on identifying and combatting oppression; in developing communities, what oppressions can theatre projects initiated from the top down by USAID actually address in practice? This study is a multi-sited exploration of the organizations and individuals involved in the funding, planning, and executing of two forum theatre projects promoting global public health goals. Through interviews of stakeholders and organization publications including training manuals and project reports, I examine how the organizations involved implement, evaluate, and justify the effectiveness of the use of theatre in their work. Despite the popularity of theatre for development in Sub-Saharan Africa, many development professionals, particularly in the US, have limited knowledge of how to use theatre in their programs. This study has the potential to improve the understanding of the use of Forum Theatre for both development professionals and theatre artists, allowing for more effective application. It will also place theatre for development in its context in the complicated web of the development industry, illuminating how TfD projects are planned and funded for an audience of theatre scholars and practitioners.