College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Dissembling Diversities: On "Middled" Asian Pacific American Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication(2014) Ishii, Douglas S.; Hanhardt, Christina B; Wong, Janelle; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Dissembling Diversities: On Asian Pacific American Arts Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication interrogates how contemporary Asian Pacific American (APA) arts activism and representation has been shaped by the bureaucratic administration of "diversity" after 9/11/2001. Through close readings of texts, it specifically examines Asian American representation within scripted network television programming, graphic novels and comic strips, and indie rock as iterations of panethnic activism in media advocacy, graphical storytelling, and the independent media arts. It understands these cultural forms and diversity itself through the framework of middlebrow culture, which is constituted of texts disseminated through popular culture that normalize the accumulation of cultural capital - or non-financial embodiments of class status such as education and literacy - as cultural citizenship. Dissembling Diversities makes evident how the elevation of these texts through discourses of "Art" and "diversity" relies on the association of cultural capital with whiteness, particularly through the racial exclusivity of their representations and through how the forms' history of class elevation expresses a white/anti-Black divide. Because of its dependence on cultural capital, the visibility for issues facing Asian American communities as expressed through the creation of art participates in the racialization of sophistication. In other words, deployments by APA artists and activists of traits associated with cultural sophistication - such as artistry, learnedness, worldliness, and status - can both illustrate Asian Americans' contributions to a culture of diversity, while reinforcing other racial, sexual, and gender exclusions through class hierarchy and respectability. However, APA activisms that contest the exclusivity of cultural capital can challenge these white/anti-Black class schemes. As such, Dissembling Diversities not only critiques APA arts activism's complicities with the racialization of sophistication, but also examines how it can turn sophistication against itself in imagining past "diversity."Item The Capital of Diversity: Difference, Development, and Placemaking in Washington, D.C.(2011) Maher, Justin Thomas; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Diversity has long been a part of the urban landscape, both as a demographic fact and as a valuable commodity used to attract development. Both kinds of diversity move through Columbia Heights, the rapidly (re)developing neighborhood in Washington D.C. that serves as my case study. It is home to residents of varying racial, ethnic, sexuality and class-based identifications as well as the rhetoric that selectively values them. In this dissertation, I argue that a rhetorical commitment to diversity has been an integral part of uneven development in Columbia Heights. It is the cornerstone of neoliberal development, a process in which government subsidized, private development benefits middle and upper-middle class (often white) residents, while low-income residents of color are increasingly denied quality housing, employment, and education. This interdisciplinary project draws on urban, cultural, ethnic, and queer studies scholarship to illustrate how representations of difference affect material development. I argue that they create ideological "maps" of the neighborhood that value some markers of difference while erasing and policing others. In turn, these maps guide who invests in the neighborhood and who belongs where. I chart how representations have changed over time, from the appropriation of civil rights rhetoric in the mid to late 20th century, to more recent multicultural imagery and gay-led gentrification narratives used to sell a "new," upscale Columbia Heights. Using a mixed methodology of textual and ethnographic analysis, I examine different sites of discursive production: city planning documents, real estate marketing, and an online neighborhood listserv. I also interview longtime and incoming Columbia Heights residents with various social locations, illustrating how dominant narratives of difference and development are reinforced and/or challenged among residents. This project expands existing development, gentrification, and gay enclave scholarship. It challenges singular analyses of difference and examines how multiple markers of difference affect spaces. All middle-class newcomers are not white, nor are all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer residents middle-class. In addition to suggesting policy solutions, I suggest how "contact" between residents of different social locations has the potential to counteract uneven development and the discourse that reinforces it.Item Rhetorical Contingency and Affirmative Action: The Paths to Diversity in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke(2010) Carr, Martha Kelly; Parry-Giles, Trevor S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision addressing the constitutionality of university affirmative action policies. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. concluded that universities could consider race as a factor to achieve the goal of a diverse student body. This study situates Bakke within its broader rhetorical environment of public discourses about race, law, and education, examining the selection process by which Powell found “diversity” to be the most justifiable answer to the question of affirmative action's permissibility. Using materials retrieved from Powell's archives at Washington and Lee University, including memoranda, personal notes, and draft opinions, the project makes three interrelated arguments. First, this study asserts that the Supreme Court is a rhetorical institution, dependent upon rhetoric for its inventional needs and its credibility while simultaneously cloaking its reliance on rhetorical invention in a rhetoric of formalistic inevitability. As such, it attends to how the legal invention process, explicated by classical rhetorical theorists and manifest in contemporary legal practice, enhances understanding of Powell's decision. Second, the project examines how Powell pulled from far-reaching rhetorical and ideological environments for his “diversity” rationale. Here, the study traces public discourses about race and examines Bakke's legal briefs, outlining the appeals to multiculturalism, colorblindness, race consciousness, and individualism that comprised Powell's inventional warehouse. A critical scrutiny of Powell's opinion-writing process reveals an inventional program guided by an ideological negotiation of these competing and compelling rhetorics of race and education in the United States. Third, this project argues that Powell's opinion-writing process is a corporate, rather than individual, process. Examining the negotiations between Powell, his law clerks, and fellow justices further illuminates the rhetorical nature of the Court, as well as the ideological influences upon individual Court opinions. The study concludes by explicating how Bakke reflects the ways that the Supreme Court works as part of a broader rhetorical culture, constructing its decisions from the materials of public arguments and the architecture of jurisprudential norms. Finally, the study explores the ideological circulation of Powell's decision: divorcing the goal of diversity from the justification of past discrimination.Item Diversity, Modesty, Liberty: An Essay on State Neutrality(2008) Baltzly, Vaughn Bryan; Galston, William A; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Human beings have long disagreed about the best way to live. Of what significance is this fact for politics? In this dissertation, I argue that it is of the utmost significance, and that substantial theoretical conclusions follow from our decision to take it seriously. Arguing that few accounts of politics have given due consideration to the fact of persistent disagreement, among reasonable and well-intentioned individuals, as to what gives life meaning and value, I articulate what I hope to be the most defensible account of a politics that accommodates this fact. Citing a variety of possible inferences we might make in response to this `fact of diversity', I defend a humble assessment of our cognitive abilities in this regard as the most charitable inference on offer. Formulated from the perspective of those who would claim the right to exercise political power and authority, this epistemically-humble response to the fact of diversity issues in a principled refusal to endorse any particular account of the Good Life as authoritative for public purposes. The state manifests this principled refusal by adopting an attitude of `maximum feasible accommodation' with respect to its citizens' pursuits of their diverse conceptions of life's meaning and value. Such an attitude needs to be fleshed out in terms of policy, however, so in the final chapters I articulate and defend, as the best practical expression of a stance of maximum accommodation, a principle that restricts the use of the state's coercive power to only those measures needed to protect citizens' `expressive liberty' - that is, their right to live lives that express their cherished notions of life's meaning and value, free from coercive interference.Item Identity, power, and difference: The management of roles and self among public relations practitioners(2007-10-09) Tindall, Natalie T.J.; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Public relations is important to organizations because this function has boundary spanning roles and responsibilities. Public relations practitioners work between the organization and various publics to communicate messages in an effort to inform and influence the organization's leadership and dominant coalition and to inform and effect change among the organization's stakeholders. According to public relations theory, the communicators in the public relations department must match the diversity in the internal and external populations the organizations serve (e.g., L. A. Grunig, J. E. Grunig, & Dozier, 2000; Sha & Ford, 2007). However, public relations has been called a "lily-white profession" (Layton, 1981) and has been classified as "gay industry" (Woods & Lucas, 1993). Recent surveys about the field have indicated modest changes in the profession's demographic makeup (cf. 2005 PR Week Diversity Survey). The aim of this dissertation research is to examine and explore how power and identity merge and diverge in the everyday, professional lives of minority public relations practitioners. This research identified how these practitioners navigate through organizational networks, how they manage identity in their organizations, and how these practitioners interpret the concept of power. To recognize how practitioners interpret their experiences in organizations and to examine the meaning-making of practitioners, I needed the resulting product to be descriptive data that could be unraveled and clarified, then bracketed back to the Excellence Theory of public relations. Therefore, I utilized qualitative methodology. I conducted in-depth interviews with 51 public relations practitioners of various backgrounds--African American and Hispanic heterosexual practitioners; white lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) practitioners; and African American and Hispanic gay male practitioners. The findings revealed some particularly distinct themes. Black and Hispanic public relations practitioners and lesbian, gay male, and bisexual (LGB) public relations practitioners encountered heterosexism, racism, sexism, and occasionally all of these prejudices at the same time. As research participants encountered these barriers, they said they simultaneously resisted and enacted countermeasures to avoid those pitfalls. Power was perceived as having access to knowledge; access and control of financial resources; holding a seat in the dominant coalition; and having a high-ranking position in the organization. Participants achieved power and empowerment in their organizational roles through various avenues--avenues such as mentoring, seeking social support, and reaching out.