College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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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 Reimagining Black Carceral Masculinities and Community Care Work: A Study of Credible Messengers in the Nation’s Capital(2024) Martinez, Rod; Ray, Rashawn; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following dissertation examines a group of community workers known as credible messengers in Washington, D.C. Credible messengers have lived experience surviving carceral systems such as prisons and environments and have transformed their lives to guide, relate to, and support others who share their backgrounds. Their credibility stems directly from their intimate knowledge of the communities they serve. This dissertation project draws on qualitative interviews with male credible messengers from a more considerable multi-year evaluation of a newly implemented credible messenger program housed in a youth agency. Sociologically, the project explores Black carceral masculinities and mentoring as civic engagement. The findings reveal how men resist and challenge prevailing notions around hegemonic and carceral masculinities through their racially gendered experiences, which shape how they approach their work with youth. The study also suggests that the men engage in credible messenger work for motivations other than redemption and in service of a larger mission to Black youth and their local communities. The dissertation project also includes a conversation with a formerly incarcerated public figure from Washington, D.C., as a call to action to researchers and others to uplift the experience of impacted people and communities. The dissertation project concludes with a set of recommendations aimed at policy and practice as it relates to criminalized Black men and boys.Item DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF THE PERCEIVED CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE CLIMATE MEASURE FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS (PCRC)(2021) Daye, Alyssa Lauren; O'Neal, Colleen; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study makes the contribution of developing a measure that provides voice to African American students, offers a broader view of their school experiences than existing cultural responsivity measures, as well as consequences for their academic outcomes. The present study reports the development and initial validation of a measure of perceived culturally responsive climate for African American adolescents (PCRC). The study relies on the existing longitudinal Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS) dataset, a public use dataset collected from 1991-2000. The present study uses two waves of data from participants aged 13 to 18, and the subsample consists of 533 African American youths in Wave 3 (49.3% female; mean age of 14) and 399 African American youths in Wave 4 (51% female; mean age of 17). With the goal of creating a novel measure capturing youth perceptions of cultural responsiveness by both teachers and the school climate, this study combined student self-reported Wave 3 MADICS questionnaires of meaningful and culturally responsive curriculum, high academic expectations, teacher discrimination, peer discrimination, autonomy and self-advocacy, and school social support (i.e., teacher and peer support). Results indicated that a second order factor structure best fit the PCRC measure; the PCRC measure demonstrated adequate internal consistency and test-retest reliability; and the PCRC predicted later math and non-math subject academic ability self-concept for African American adolescents. The study holds implications for schools, educators, and school psychologists hoping to give voice to African American student perceptions of culturally responsive teaching practices and school climate.Item Seeing the Materiality of Race, Class, and Gender in Orange County, Virginia(2021) Woehlke, Stefan; Leone, Mark P.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores some of the ways the African American community in Western Orange County, Virginia adapted to life after emancipation. The interpretation relies upon intersectional materialism, which is rooted in the intellectual legacy of Black Left Feminists. Intersectional materialism rejects the dualities and dichotomies common in dialectical thinking and embraces a polylectical framework that has emerged following the influences of postmodern theorists in the mid to late 20th-century. Polylectical analysis requires the inclusion of a wide array of voices from people positioned across a complex matrix of domination to better understand the structure of that matrix and the possible futures that could be produced from it. This has enabled an understanding of African American material culture that links directly to the ideas of generations of Black intellectuals. This has resulted in an emphasis on the material culture of domestic architecture and literacy. It becomes possible to more accurately interpret material culture that may not have been directly addressed by people in the past after a more complete interpretation of the structure of social forces is accomplished. This includes the analysis and interpretation of the dynamic relationship between African American domestic sites and the visualscape.Item "To Dwell, I'm Determined, on That Happy Ground": An Archaeology of a Free African-American Community in Easton, Maryland, 1787-Present(2020) Jenkins, Tracy H.; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As early as 1787, free African Americans began making homes in the Easton, Maryland, neighborhood known as The Hill. Over successive generations, The Hill became the cultural and residential center of Easton’s African-American community. The families, businesses, institutions, social fabric, and cultural values that the first generations of free African Americans in Easton created on and around The Hill greatly influenced the development of African-American culture through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of family and household structure, childrearing, religious life, and the memory and meaning of military service. Tracing these developments, with a focus on how African Americans and some white supporters worked together to combat slavery, racism, and other oppressions, illustrates how the politics of the freedom struggle were coded into everyday life. This investigation has also supported local grassroots efforts to preserve the legacy of that struggle on The Hill through public scholarship and practice, historic preservation, and community revitalization.Item The Jezebel Speaks: Black Women's Erotic Labor in the Digital Age(2019) Brown, Melissa; Ray, Rashawn; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)According to contemporary scholars of sex work in the digital age, information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide sex workers various affordances. Some of these affordances include new ways of business or marketing; greater security; more autonomy; and better wages. Much of this scholarship centers young white women working in specific fields of sex work that cater to young white men clientele. Thus, several questions remain about the affordances and constraints of the internet for sex workers of color. Affordances refer to the functional and relational aspects of objects that create possibilities for human agency through interaction with them. In this present study I use existing theories of the mobile internet and Black feminist thought to intervene into the sociology of sex work and the internet to show how Black women sex workers negotiate controlling images of Black women's sexuality on the social networking application Instagram. This study seeks to address the following broad research questions with respect to embodiment and labor: 1) In what ways, if any, do controlling images of Black women’s sexuality emerge online? 2) How do power dynamics within the matrix of domination shape racial-sexual hierarchies of worthiness and desirability online? And finally, 3) What sexual politics, if any, do Black women exotic dancers use on social networking sites to negotiate controlling images? To answer these questions, I use a mixed methods approach to examine the affordances of digital technology for Black women sex workers. First, I used GIS mapping software to visualize the locations of where Black women exotic dancers based in the Memphis, Atlanta, and D.C. metropolitan areas perform. Second, I distributed an online survey among this group of women to create an exploratory profile. Finally, I conducted a content analysis to explore the erotic labor of Black women sex workers as a form of racial-sexual and gendered embodiment and performance of sexuality. My findings indicate Black women exotic dancers use social networking sites (SNS) and the mobile internet to leverage racialized erotic capital into various entrepreneurial pursuits and forms of self-eroticism beyond exotic dance. Nevertheless, controlling images of Black women’s sexuality popular within the discourse of contemporary rap music shape expectations around their erotic labor. As a result, the innovation of social networking sites on the mobile internet has done little to reshape the racially and economically marginalized landscape of strip clubs wherein Black women exotic dancers perform.Item The New Bottom Line: Black Women Cultural Entrepreneurs Re-Define Success in The Connected Economy(2016) Buford, Kathryn Buford; Hill Collins, Patricia; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black women cultural entrepreneurs are a group of entrepreneurs that merit further inquiry. Using qualitative interview and participant observation data, this dissertation investigates the ways in which black women cultural entrepreneurs define success. My findings reveal that black women cultural entrepreneurs are a particular interpretive community with values, perspectives and experiences, which are not wholly idiosyncratic, but shaped by collective experiences and larger social forces. Black women are not a monolith, but they are neither disconnected individuals completely devoid of group identity. The meaning they give to their businesses, professional experiences and understandings of success are influenced by their shared social position and identity as black women. For black women cultural entrepreneurs, the New Bottom Line goes beyond financial gain. This group, while not uniform in their understandings of success, largely understand the most meaningful accomplishments they can realize as social impact in the form of cultural intervention, black community uplift and professional/creative agency. These particular considerations represent a new paramount concern, and alternative understanding of what is typically understood as the bottom line. The structural, social and personal challenges that black women cultural entrepreneurs encounter have shaped their particular perspectives on success. I also explore the ways research participants articulated an oppositional consciousness to create an alternative means of defining and achieving success. I argue that this consciousness empowers them with resources, connections and meaning not readily conferred in traditional entrepreneurial settings. In this sense, the personal, social and structural challenges have been foundational to the formation of an alternative economy, which I refer to as The Connected Economy. Leading and participating in The Connected Economy, black women cultural entrepreneurs represent a black feminist and womanist critique of dominant understandings of success.Item MAKING SENSE OF THE FORT; CIVICALLY-ENGAGED SENSORY ARCHAEOLOGY AT FORT WARD AND DEFENSES OF WASHINGTON(2015) Minkoff, Mary Furlong; Shackel, Paul A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I ask the question, what is the best way to understand the history and archaeology of The Fort and other African American communities associated with the Defenses of Washington? The Fort is an African American community that settled on the grounds of Fort Ward in Alexandria, Virginia from the 1860s through the early 1960s. To answer this question, I adopted a civically-engaged, sensory approach to archaeology and established three project goals. First, I use sensory archaeology, historical research, and community memories to explore the origins of The Fort community, its relationship to Fort Ward, and the land surrounding it. Second, I incorporate the archaeology, memory, and history of The Fort community into a broader narrative of the local and national past through shared sensory experiences. Third, I conclude by describing how a sensory approach could be used to understand the experiences of African Americans at other Civil War Defenses of Washington sites. These goals have been developed with the consideration and input from The Fort Ward/Seminary African American Descendant Society (Descendant Society) and the National Park Service (NPS).Item New Wine Calls for New Wineskins: Black Megachurch Approaches to Racial Inequality(2015) Barber, Kendra Hadiya; Hill Collins, Patricia; Marsh, Kris; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The changing nature of racism in the post-Civil Rights period coincides with the decline in collective racial protest, or what some scholars consider the activist or prophetic wing, of black churches. As a result of the shift from the overt racism of the Civil Rights era to the hidden and often invisible forms of contemporary racism, the ways in which blacks address and resist racism might reflect similar shifts. In other words, I argue that black churches’ responses to contemporary racial inequality may be different from the actions taken by some churches before and during the pre-Civil Rights era. This study seeks to explore the explanations and solutions for contemporary racial inequality offered by black megachurch leaders and attendees. More specifically it also takes into account how religious culture may influence these explanations of and solutions to racial inequality. A case study approach is utilized to examine three black megachurches in Washington, D.C.—one Baptist, one Pentecostal, and one nondenominational. Data from semi-structured interviews with church leaders and congregants, content analysis of church documents, and participant observation of church worship services reveal three main findings. First, contrary to literature that states blacks tend to rely on structural rather than individual explanations of racial inequality, church leaders and congregants tend to rely on explanations that are simultaneously individual and structural. Second, the strategies used by the megachurches in this study do not reflect the direct action protesting strategies used by some black churches during the Civil Rights Movement. The strategies of the megachurches in this study to address racial inequality range from aiding in educational achievement to civic engagement to employment training to address racial inequality. Furthermore, each of the churches has developed nonprofit Community Development Corporations to provide social services such as transitional housing. Third, although the various religious cultures of megachurches in this study inform how they address racial inequality, other factors, such as declining membership and changing community demographics, also shape strategies to intervene in racial inequality.Item Double "Double Consciousness": An Archaeology of African American Class and Identity in Annapolis, Maryland, 1850 to 1930(2015) Deeley, Kathryn Hubsch; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the intersections of race and class within African American communities of the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to expand our understanding of the diversity within this group. By examining materials recovered from archaeological sites in Annapolis, Maryland, this dissertation uses choices in material culture to demonstrate that there were at least two classes present within the African American community in Annapolis between 1850 and 1930. These choices also show how different classes within this community applied the strategies advocated by prominent African American scholars, including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, as ways to negotiate the racism they encountered in daily lives. One class, the "inclusionist" class, within the community embraced the idea of presenting themselves as industrious, moral, clean, and prosperous to their White neighbors, a strategy promoted by scholars such as Booker T. Washington and Nannie Helen Burroughs. However, another group within the community, the "autonomist" class, wanted to maintain a distinct African American identity that reflected the independent worth of their community with an emphasis on a uniquely African American aesthetic, as scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois suggested. The implementation of different strategies for racial uplift in daily life is both indicative of the presence of multiple classes and an indication that these different classes negotiated racism in different ways. This dissertation explores the strategies of inclusion and exclusion African American scholars advocated; how African Americans in Annapolis, Maryland implemented these strategies in daily life during the 19th and early 20th centuries; and how debates over implementing these strategies are still occurring today.