American Studies

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    “LEARN AS WE LEAD”: LESSONS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN
    (2021) Hufnagel, Ashley Marie; Padios, Jan; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the spring of 1968, over six thousand poor people—black, chicano, white, Puerto Rican, and Native American from rural areas to urban centers—converged on Washington, D.C. to call attention to poverty and inequality in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. This six-week demonstration was part of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final and oft-forgotten Poor People’s Campaign. Fifty years later, thousands of people in over forty states have taken part in reviving this movement as the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC 2018+), co-chaired by Bishop William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. From low-wage workers’ fight for $15/hour minimum wage in the South to the Apache struggle to protect sacred land from copper mining in Oak Flat, Arizona; from the battle to stop emergency managers from poisoning and privatizing water services in Michigan to the urgent demands to abolish the criminalization of black, immigrant, and poor communities, “Learn as We Lead” investigates how local and national organizers are utilizing the vehicle of the campaign to build a broad-based movement across lines of identity, geography, and issue, while centering the leadership of the poor. Drawing on participant observation within the campaign, interviews with over forty grassroots leaders from twenty-seven states, and archival research, this dissertation uncovers how movement practitioners are reproducing and reformulating a long history of multiracial and multi-issue class politics—from the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the National Union of the Homeless of the 1980s and 1990s, from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) of the early 2000s to the Moral Mondays and low-wage worker movements of recent years. In a time of deepening political, economic, environmental and health crisis, leaders with the PPC 2018+ offer critical insights on forging class consciousness and solidarity across difference.
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    Trans Space As Cultural Landscape--Transgender Women of Color in Washington, D.C.
    (2019) Anthony, A S; Parks, Sheri; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Transgender civil rights and public displays of trans visibility have come to the fore of the American imagination. To date, however, little work has thoroughly examined Black and Latinx trans women’s central role as experts in LGBT community-caregiving practices. As a result, scholarship and popular culture concerned with “the transgender tipping point” (Time May 29, 2014) generally endorse a narrative that characterizes transgender women of color primarily as celebrities, victims of transphobic violence, or historic figures of the LGBT liberation movement, if they are mentioned at all, making their everyday lives marginal or non-existent at a time when their presence in popular culture is exploding. Without an adequate fieldwork model, we undervalue the everyday lives and landscapes of transgender women of color in the United States, ultimately leading to a two-dimensional conceptualization of identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. Trans Space as Cultural Landscape—Transgender Women of Color in Washington, D.C, remedies this gap by creating and applying Bodies in spaces—the trans cultural landscape analysis fieldwork model. The trans model extends the work of Americanist Jeremey Korr (2002) to reimagine the study of trans space, place, and gender transition. It is divided into the following components: detailed site description, aesthetics, language and material culture, and community research. At the heart of Trans Space is an ethnographic study of Casa Ruby, a bilingual social service nonprofit in Washington, D.C. (casaruby.org). The trans model allows me to addresses the queer and trans problematics of my particular site: addiction, prostitution, and homelessness. The model then expands to examine the work of trans celebrities such as Laverne Cox in order to trace the circuitous paths of daily transition and sisterhood. The evolution of the following inquiry guides my commitment to cross-discipline methodologies and community involvement. Space stages the expansive possibilities of gender transition. In extending gender transition narratives to functions that do not apply to space, how do we know a trans space when we see it? And what do these spatial transitions and pop culture representations tell us about an American investment in identity and its tipping points?
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    Place as Common and Un-Common Wealth: A Relational Ethnographic Analysis of the Conceptual Landscapes of Place Amidst the Shifting and Marginalized Grounds of Letcher County, Kentucky and Southeast Washington, D.C.
    (2014) Crase, Kirsten Lee; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation presents a relational ethnographic analysis of how people in two marginalized places that are undergoing significant disruptive change understand the idea of place. The rural eastern Kentucky coalfields community of Letcher County and the urban neighborhood of Southeast Washington, D.C. share in having been structurally and discursively marginalized, both historically and in the present; they also share in having residents who are disadvantaged through the interplay of race, class, geography, and other factors. Both places currently face significant shifts in their social, economic, and structural landscapes. The disruptive shift facing Letcher County is the intensification of mountaintop removal coal mining methods that threaten ecological well-being and inflame longstanding local tensions over livelihood, identity, and the future of the community. The disruptive shift facing Southeast D.C. is increasing levels of redevelopment, as associated with the beginnings of gentrification in the community, and the heightening of longstanding tendencies toward displacement among the community's most marginalized residents. This study uses interviewing and participant observation to bring the flexibility of ethnography to bear on the complexities and subtleties of how people understand place. The focus of my study is a series of in-depth interviews with four key research participant residents in each community, interpreting their articulations in terms of the relationship between place, marginalization, and change. This study also makes use of a relational approach, juxtaposing and interlacing explorations of both places. There are many differences in the disruptive changes facing these places and in their general characteristics as communities--Letcher County is a rural, overwhelmingly white community and Southeast D.C. is an urban, overwhelmingly African American community. I argue, however, that broad and foundational resemblances exist between how residents of the two communities think and feel about place in relation to marginalization and change. I conclude that my research participants in Letcher County and Southeast D.C. share broadly similar understandings of what constitutes local well-being, or common wealth, and I demonstrate those parallels by elucidating my participants' conceptual landscapes of place.
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    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.
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    Work and Social Activism in the Life Stories of Latina Domestic Workers
    (2012) Barreto Bebianno Simoes, Marcia; Freidenberg, Judith N; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Since the 1980s, social science research has emerged on gender and immigration to the United States as a result, in part, of the pronounced increase in immigration to the US. It has documented the way in which immigration is changing the social fabric of US society as well as how gender roles are being positioned within society. Scholarship on Latino immigration and gender has also evolved throughout the past decades, providing much needed insight about migration outcomes for Latina immigrants and their effects on these women's situated roles. Consequently, scholars have focused their work mainly on Latinas in their host communities, as workers, family members and community organizers. Transnationalist theories have contributed to understanding how Latinas organize their lives across borders; however, work is still needed to understand how the perspective of the immigrant life cycle (defined as life in the country of origin, the process of migration and life in the host country) informs migration outcomes for immigrant Latina women. In order to contribute to this understanding, this study, using an ethnographic approach, looks at the life stories of five low-income Latina immigrant domestic workers activists in Montgomery County, MD, to document their experience and to understand the factors that influence their civic mobilization for their collective rights. The central research question is: What are the factors conducive to female immigrants' collective mobilization for human rights? More specifically, what are the factors in the women's life course that account for mobilization and what are the structural factors in the host country that support this effort? This ethnographic study contributes to the literature on domestic work and migration by examining the subjective aspects of the Latinas' experience as they evolve as activists and mobilize for their rights as workers, particularly from the perspective of identity formation across the immigrant life cycle. The study also shows that domestic work conditions are determined by the specific relationship between poverty, human mobility and gender at a local and national level.