American Studies
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Item The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care(2024) Hofmann, Anne Elizabeth; Guerrero, Perla; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care" is an institutional ethnography that investigates the personal, political, and economic costs to student caregivers seeking a college degree. Through a critical analysis of student interviews and a close examination of community college structures and histories, I deploy an interdisciplinary, qualitative methodology that seeks to topple and contest previous ways of researching two-year collegiate structures in the U.S. I argue that, internally, community colleges offer intermittent respites from the physical and emotional labor of caregiving by being locations of intellectual invigoration and professionalization for students; however, I also address how community colleges’ positioning within larger regional and global political economies ultimately renders them stations of stagnation for many students, especially those with the most overlapping needs and markers of difference. To analyze these concepts, I use an interpretive framework that threads theories of disinvestment, structural exclusion, and predatory inclusion, to explore the use of the term “care,” which is used flexibly across institutional and everyday life to recruit students and animate collegiate recruiting and retention initiatives. I trace the link between two-year schools’ reputation as both places of “opportunity” and “second chances,” and as a stigmatized alternative to “real college.” I do so by examining the language and visual arguments deployed by colleges’ public-facing websites, as situated within broader historical-political narratives about community colleges, and by conducting in-depth interviews with caregiving students. I find that political and popular beliefs regarding studenthood and care work are internalized by students, particularly those with the fewest financial and time resources. Additionally, the overlap between race, gender, and unpaid care work aligns with those students who are the least likely to graduate from college and the most likely to accrue significant debt and physical or mental distress due to their attempts. The study triangulates institutional histories, neoliberal rhetorics of education and success, and student caregiver testimony to conclude that unpaid care labor for biological or chosen family is simultaneously a primary barrier, a fundamental source of personal joy, and a possible location of subversive power for community college students seeking a post-secondary credential.Item "Unfit for Family Life": How Regimes of Accumulation, Sexuality, and Antiblackness Have Built (and Rebuilt) West Baltimore(2020) Choflet, Robert Thomas; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“'Unfit for Family Life': How Regimes of Accumulation, Sexuality, and Antiblackness Built (and Rebuilt) West Baltimore,” is an historical study of West Baltimore housing transformation in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Derived from in-depth oral histories conducted over a number of years with fifty-three Baltimore residents who have lived in (or currently live in) public housing, this project drew from resident reflections and rigorous archival work, in order to investigate the demolition campaigns that reduced Baltimore's public housing stock by almost half and the privatization campaigns that have rebuilt these once public spaces. Policy makers, housing reformers, planners, and real estate interests constructed a shared cultural politics that imagined black women as imperiled actors, public housing as destabilizing to black family life, and demolition and privatization as a necessary, even moral, intervention. This process ignored black women's organizing efforts and specific political demands, while isolating them from one another and disrupting established political coalitions. In spite of this, oral histories reveal continued efforts by residents to organize for democratic redistribution of housing resources.Item 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.Item LANDSCAPES AND TRADITIONS OF MARATHONING IN THE USA, 2000-2008(2012) Park, Krista Marie; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation concludes that the symbiotic relationship between two competing cultural traditions of marathoning, Corrival and Pageant, simultaneous creates and eliminates barriers to marathoning participation. Using John Caughey's strategies for studying cultural traditions and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of capital to differentiate between and describe two different approaches to training for and participating in marathons among runners in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area (BWMA). Drawing on participant observation, interviews of runners in the BWMA, and an exploration of the geography of running in the BWMA, contextualized by discourse analysis of three prominent marathon training guides and the covers of the two most influential running magazines, this dissertation also explores the strategies individuals' use to overcome actual and potential obstacles to marathon participation, such as parenting or restrictive work schedules.