Phantom Futures: The Cultural Politics of Education-Related Debt

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorTambe, Ashwinien_US
dc.contributor.authorMadden, Jaimeen_US
dc.contributor.departmentWomen's Studiesen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2018-01-23T06:36:39Z
dc.date.available2018-01-23T06:36:39Z
dc.date.issued2017en_US
dc.description.abstractMy dissertation examines the cultural politics of education-related debt. In a time of spiraling higher education costs, I focus on students who face challenges repaying debts and participating productively in the market economy. Taking on debt in college orients students towards a supposedly “better future.” But what happens to those who are unable or unwilling to realize these better futures? This is the broad question that motivated my dissertation. The students I interviewed often complicated the familiar timeline of progress that posits education as leading to employment. I carried out field research in two sites: i) for-profit colleges; and ii) Gallaudet University, a historically deaf university. I also analyzed content in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I treated as a key archive of contemporary narratives about debt. The for-profit education networks where I conducted research were Virginia College, where I had taught in the general education program for one year, and the recently defunct ITT Technical Institute. I visited campuses in Austin, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; Richmond, Virginia; Los Angeles, California; and Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin. This regional breadth across the southwest, mid-Atlantic, west coast, and Midwest allowed me to reach more general conclusions. My interviews, visual ethnography, auto-ethnography, and narrative analysis led me to focus closely on how students experience and invoke time. The for-profit colleges constantly asked students to imagine better and more secure futures in ways that distracted them from their present struggles. Such an orientation pushed students to incur further debt. At Gallaudet, the temporalities are different. The university’s ability to privilege deafness makes it a site of security and refuge; some students are therefore risking educational debt in order to access deaf culture. Yet, funding issued through Vocational Rehabilitation programs are conditional on a student’s ability to achieve future employment. This mandate influences how students think about their futures and creates deep tensions in their relationship to debt. In sum, by exploring how students imagine time, my dissertation presents a range of orientations to debt that can serve as alternatives to dominant cultural narratives.en_US
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/M27D2Q88V
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/20316
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledWomen's studiesen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledAmerican studiesen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledDisability studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledcultural studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolleddeaf studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledfor-profit educationen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledfuturityen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledstudent debten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledtemporalityen_US
dc.titlePhantom Futures: The Cultural Politics of Education-Related Debten_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Madden_umd_0117E_18513.pdf
Size:
113.09 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download

Collections

UMD Theses and Dissertations
Women's Studies Theses and Dissertations