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 CULTURAL DEPENDENCE OF EMOTION-REGULATION STRATEGIES(2022) Hundal, Savreen; Fink, Edward L.; Waks, Leah; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion-regulation strategies are attempts to impact emotions within oneself or others (McRae & Gross, 2020). Strategies such as mindfulness and reappraisal are associated with benefits to well-being and mental health. However, the influence of culture on mindfulness and reappraisal has not been established. Emotion-regulation strategies are culturally dependent. It is through cultural socialization that cultural values are transmitted. Cultural values give meaning to emotion and emotion-regulation strategies. This dissertation proposes a theoretical model in which (1) cultural values predict mindfulness and reappraisal emotion-regulation strategies, and (2) the effectiveness of both strategies is assessed using the emotional dimensions of valence, arousal, power, and surprise. Three pilot studies were conducted to test the validity of emotion-regulation instructional messaging, to create a negatively valenced emotion-eliciting video stimulus, and to assess the differences in mindfulness between American and Chinese students. For the main study, American and Chinese students completed an online experiment that tested the effects of emotion-regulation strategies. The findings suggest that emotion-regulation strategies differ both culturally and in their effects, either altering the emotions individuals feel (in the case of the reappraisal strategy) or the experience individuals associate with the emotions they feel (in the case of the mindfulness strategy). This study supports the need for further investigation into the relationship between cultural socialization’s impact on emotion-regulation strategies.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 No Tangle So Hopeless: Toward a Relational Cluster Analysis(2018) Nichols, Annie Laurie; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does a semi-nomadic shepherd people on the border of Russia and Azerbaijan place themselves? How do twitter users challenge and transform institutional versions of events? How can citizens resist then narrow confines of reductive algorithmic assumptions on the internet? Questions such as these are not readily answered with traditional rhetorical methods, yet they recommend a rhetorical approach to their focus on meaning-making, constitutive community, and identity creation. This project argues that Kenneth Burke’s method of cluster analysis can be profitably revived to meet rhetoric’s growing need for an approach that focuses on relationships, listens to vernacular voices, engages multiple texts, and considers the world from other viewpoints. The most commonly used approach to cluster analysis is a reductive equational form that is primarily concerned with the dissective, analytic half of cluster analysis. Reconstituting Burke’s more constructive, drawing-together form, this project develops a relational cluster analysis that centers in connections, community, and the relationships between words, people, and ideologies. Relational cluster analysis’ effectiveness is demonstrated by use with ethnographic fieldnotes, a database of 5 million tweets, and the algorithmic infrastructure of Web 2.0. These exemplars demonstrate that, when applied at several layers of meaning, such as individual, community, dominant culture, and cross-cultural, this relational method is particularly generative in working with vernacular voices, community meanings, networked arguments, and digital cultures. Inductively listening to meaning-making foregrounds the subject, leading to substantial insight into not just individual but also community and cultural values and orientations. The elastic nature of a relationally-focused, multilevel cluster analysis affords the opportunity to gaze, engrossed, from others’ points of view.Item SPINNING NARRATIVES ACROSS POLITICAL DIVIDES: HARNESSING THE CULTURAL POWER OF A STORY WELL-TOLD(2016) Glacel, Ashley; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how two American storytellers, considered by many in their to be exemplary in their craft, rely on narrative strategies to communicate to their audiences on divisive political topics in a way that both invokes feelings of pleasure and connection and transcends party identification and ideological divides. Anna Quindlen, through her political columns and op-eds, and Aaron Sorkin, through his television show The West Wing, have won over a politically diverse fan base in spite of the fact that their writing espouses liberal political viewpoints. By telling stories that entertain, first and foremost, Quindlen and Sorkin are able to have a material impact on their audiences on both dry and controversial topics, accomplishing that which 19th Century writer and activist Harriet Farley made her practice: writing in such a way to gain the access necessary to “do good by stealth.” This dissertation will argue that it is their skilled use of storytelling elements, which capitalize on the cultural relationship humans have with storytelling, that enables Quindlen and Sorkin to achieve this. The dissertation asks: How do stories shape the beliefs, perspectives, and cognitive functions of humans? How do stories construct culture and interact with cultural values? What is the media’s role in shaping society? What gives stories their power to unite as a medium? What is the significance of the experience of reading or hearing a well-told story, of how it feels? What are the effects of Quindlen’s and Sorkin’s writing on audience members and the political world at large? What is lost when a simplistic narrative structure is followed? Who is left out and what is overlooked? The literature that informs the answers to these questions will cross over and through several academic disciplines: American Studies, British Cultural Studies, Communication, Folklore, Journalism, Literature, Media Studies, Popular Culture, and Social Psychology. The chapters will also explore scholarship on the subjects of narratology and schema theory.Item The Rebel Cafe: America's Nightclub Underground and the Public Sphere, 1934-1963(2014) Duncan, Stephen Riley; Gilbert, James B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From 1934 through 1963, New York and San Francisco nightspots were community institutions and public forums for radical cultural producers, intellectuals, and political dissidents. This dissertation explores bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses in bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach as nodal points in alternative social networks connecting patrons and performers marginalized by their Left politics, race, gender, or sexual orientation. It traces unconventional ideas from subterranean domains through their dissemination by the mass media, examining how local political discourse and cultural diffusion informed social change in the twentieth-century United States. This study illuminates nightclubs' cultural function, shedding new light on familiar subjects such as the Beat Generation, jazz, civil rights, and social satire, and linking the Left's Cultural Front of the 1930s to 1950s dissident culture. Nightspots provide useful models to study identity formation and oppositional political consciousness, as patrons and performers challenged dominant social norms through cultural avant-gardism, explorations of sexuality and gender, and interracial alliances. Tourism, meanwhile, contributed to the extension of new social norms into the mainstream. Moreover, drinking establishments served a vital function within the public sphere as spaces of discussion and debate which both critiqued and contributed to mass-media content. As outspoken nonconformists clashed with conservative critics, the result was sometimes legal woes for oppositional figures, from the anarchist libertarians who met in urban cafes in the 1930s to gay-rights activists and the controversial comic Lenny Bruce. Yet the art, literature, music, and satire that emerged from the nightclub underground of the 1950s proved to be forces for social liberation, showing the relation between culture and politics. Subcultural networks provided psychological and material support to the budding gay liberation and feminist movements, as well as the Black Freedom Struggle. By examining the use of public space and built environments, and charting the confluence of culture, politics, and urban geography, "The Rebel Cafe" demonstrates how historical subjects transformed American society by investing nightspots with significance as sites of public discourse.Item Subjacent Culture, Orthogonal Community: An Ethnographic Analysis of an On-Line Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fan Community(2013) Ali, Asim; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents an ethnographic analysis of the community of fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer whose members frequented the online linear posting board known as The Bronze. Buffy originally aired from 1997 until 2003, but the community that formed at the official Buffy fan site in 1997 continues on in real life and on line, having survived the end of Buffy and the closure of all three of its official posting boards. This study uses an interdisciplinary combination of textual analysis and ethnographic techniques (interviews, participant observation, autoethnography, cyberethnography) to ascertain the importance, relevance, and meaning of The Bronze community to its members, known as Bronzers. I argue that the nature of the linear posting board allowed Bronzers to form a unique and long-lived community by using The Bronze in creative and imaginative ways. In particular, language--to some degree appropriated from Buffy--was used by Bronzers to write a better world for themselves on line. Hence, the community is built on (and maintained by) language that is used in an unusually postmodern manner. As a group, Bronzers tend to be highly educated, literary, and artistic. To Bronzers, much of Buffy's appeal was its emotional realism and imaginative depth. Unusually for television, these elements were combined with strong female leading roles, a cast of bookish and somewhat countercultural characters, and a foregrounding of emotionality and interpersonal relationships. Bronzers were drawn to these aspects of Buffy--which formed its "gothic aesthetic"--and in turn created their own somewhat countercultural community, one that came to reflect their own close ties and emotional attachments. I argue that The Bronze community exists subjacent to mainstream cultural formations, and orthogonal to real life communities. Using this framework, a number of implications emerge for computer-mediated communication in general, including an explanation for the prevalence of hostility in online communication. Furthermore, when situated in its broader context, The Bronze can be seen as a meager palliative to the damaging effects of contemporary post-industrial capitalism, one that nonetheless illumines the brightly stultifying commonplaces that lead people to seek shelter in dimly-lit imagined spaces.Item Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species(2010) Tsing, AnnaThis web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.Item Ron Eglash Offers a Reframing of Technophilia(2010) Eglash, RonThis web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.Item Pastpresents: Playing Cat's Cradle with Donna Haraway(2010) King, KatieThis web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.Item Modest Witness: A Painter's Collaboration with Donna Haraway(2010) Randolph, LynnThis web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.