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Description
Farmers' markets are a growing trend both in Arizona and the broader U.S., as many recognize them as desirable alternatives to the conventional food system. As icons of sustainability, farmers' markets are touted as providing many environmental, social, and economic benefits, but evidence is mounting that local food systems primarily serve the urban elite, with relatively few low-income or minority customers. However, the economic needs of the market and its vendors often conflict with those of consumers. While consumers require affordable food, farmers need to make a profit. How farmers' markets are designed and governed can significantly influence the extent to which they can meet these needs. However, very little research explores farmers' market design and governance, much less its capacity to influence financial success and participation for underprivileged consumers. The present study examined this research gap by addressing the following research question: How can farmers' markets be institutionally designed to increase the participation of underprivileged consumers while maintaining a financially viable market for local farmers? Through a comparative case study of six markets, this research explored the extent to which farmers' markets in Central Arizona currently serve the needs of farmer-vendors and underprivileged consumers. The findings suggest that while the markets serve as a substantial source of income for some vendors, participation by low-income and minority consumers remains low, and that much of this appears to be due to cultural barriers to access. Management structures, site characteristics, market layout, community programs, and staffing policies are key institutional design features, and the study explores how these can be leveraged to better meet the needs of the diverse participants while improving the markets' financial success.
ContributorsTaylor, Carissa (Author) / Aggarwal, Rimjhim (Thesis advisor) / York, Abigail (Committee member) / Wharton, Christopher (Christopher Mack), 1977- (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
As schools across Arizona worked to meet NCLB's AYP requirement in 2010-2011, they were also labeled and sanctioned by AZ Learns. This phenomenological study focused on six effective high school principals in two Arizona school districts to ascertain how accountability policies impacted the principals' job responsibilities, autonomy, and ability to pursue social justice on their campuses. Interviews were conducted in three phases: superintendents, three principals from the superintendents' recommendations of effective school leaders, and three teachers from each school. In addition to analysis of individual principal leadership patterns, comparisons were made across districts, and from school to school within the same district. The goal of the study was to determine if and how principals were able to accomplish their goals for their school. The principals' leadership styles were examined through a Vortex Leadership Framework that posited principals at the center of a vortex of varying leadership roles, interests, and external forces, including accountability, autonomy, and limited resources. Key findings included (a) high school principals' responsibilities now include selling change to their staff, (b) principals' accountability is limited more by district constraints than by state or federal accountability, (c) principals must contend with rigid one-size fits all accountability standards that do not always meet the needs of their students, and (d) principals' autonomy is tied to their resources, including funding for staffing and programs.
ContributorsBatsell, Holly (Author) / Powers, Jeanne M. (Thesis advisor) / Mccarty, Teresa (Committee member) / Davey, Lynn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Oral history methodologies are used to conduct fifteen interviews with Martha Akesi Ndaarko Sennie-Tumi over the course of three months. Research responded to the following questions: How do African women defy master narratives? When do African women defy master narratives and move from the margins to the center? What roles do African women take on to defy master narratives and why? To what extent does the concept of malezile (women who stand firm) address human rights? Twelve stories of defiance (three of which are folktales) are analyzed for recurring themes, concepts and motifs. Research showed that African women defy master narratives when the system worked to their detriment through the Nana Esi archetype. The stories also showed that women adopt nontraditional roles during defiance by using whatever means available to them at the time of defiance.
ContributorsEssuman, Portia Nana (Author) / Anokye, Akua D (Thesis advisor) / Elenes, Alajandra C (Committee member) / Cuadraz, Gloria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
ABSTRACT As a response to the banning of Ethnic Studies in the Tucson Unified School district and other oppressing forces within the movement the students fighting HB 2281 created a Sacred Xicana Space. In this thesis I will examine the role that protest art has in the fight against HB2281. I will also analyze its role in cultural expression, identity and representation. The research question guiding this research is What role does protest art have in social justice? Specifically I will analyze the cultural production of protest art against HB 2281, the ethnic studies ban in Tucson Arizona, and its role in cultural expression, identity and representation.
ContributorsArmendariz, Martha (Author) / Elenes, Alejandara C (Thesis advisor) / Téllez, Michelle (Committee member) / Pope Duarte, Stella (Committee member) / Elenes, Alejandra C (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Through the disciplines of art education, anthropology and psychology the researcher examined research-based traits and characteristics of the creative process among a second year Title 1 urban high school art class. Within the theoretical framework of social justice, this micro-ethnographic study explored exactly what teaching and learning to be creative implies and proposes a potential resolution for art teachers learning how to enhance teaching children how to think creatively. The research proposition is that student creativity occurs as a function of a series of interrelated factors including a nurturing classroom context, strong teacher-student dialogue, strategic questioning, purposeful incorporation of visual culture, and manipulation of content in favor of student interests within the culturally situated context of the art classroom. Navigating teacher-student relationships at moments of creative origination produced results indicating that the art teacher alone is the single most influential factor for enhancing creative outcomes in a classroom. Through incorporation of a variety of collaborative activities and comparative analysis of dissimilar content-driven projects generated evidence that artistic skills and creativity do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. The study finds that the artworks produced evidence based nuances of the creative traits of originality, fluency, flexibility, and elaboration in which profoundly varied in character depending on the content and the context. The study concludes that creativity cannot be strictly taught or learned, but rather that it can be enhanced through teacher nurturing and manipulation of content to encompass a socially intelligent uptake in the culture of art-making. Broader implications are suggested focusing on the significance of creative education and the impact it can have for educational systems, schools and undergraduate programs in art education. The researcher proposes an art education curriculum model that fosters both creative thinking and the unique learning needs of Title 1 urban students. The curriculum suggests the art teacher begin initial instruction by teaching students about the traits, characteristics and obstructions of creativity prior to teaching artistic skills sets to serve as a foundation of creative awareness from the start.
ContributorsForeman, Angela (Author) / Young, Bernard (Thesis advisor) / Stokrocki, Mary (Committee member) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This study explores how grantmakers conceptualize their work with respect to issues of social justice. It seeks to answer two primary questions: What role, if any, does the philanthropic community ascribe to itself in not just ameliorating but helping solve our greatest social challenges? And if philanthropy does see itself as an agent of change, what are the barriers that limit its potential? After painting a portrait of contemporary American philanthropy, this paper applies Iris Marion Young's critique of distributive justice to philanthropy's dilemma between downstream charitable aid and upstream structural change. The thesis then turns to analysis of semi-structured interviews with eighteen of Arizona's foundation leaders to assess whether and how state-level philanthropic leaders see their work vis-á -vis social justice, and understand how external factors limit philanthropy's ability to effect maximum social change. Participants express a desire to engage in genuinely meaningful philanthropy which does more than just maintain the status quo, but identify multiple constraints, including legal barriers to fully utilizing advocacy as a tool, governmental infringement on philanthropic autonomy, the channeling of philanthropic resources toward basic needs as a result of the recession, and a grantmaking orientation that prioritizes short term programs that yield swift, measurable results as opposed to longer term efforts.
ContributorsLester, Eva Lorraine (Author) / Zatz, Marjorie S (Thesis advisor) / Haglund, LaDawn (Committee member) / Romero, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT For many years, difference scholars, such as Cornel West, Iris Marion Young, and Janet Atwill have been reminding humanities scholars that if social equity is ever to be realized, difference needs to be reconfigured and reframed. As Janet Atwill puts it, "difference can no longer be the anomaly, the enemy, or the problem to be solved. Difference is the condition" (212). While these scholars insightfully recognize that difference needs to be accepted, welcomed and loved rather than merely tolerated, they have not sufficiently addressed the perceptual change that must occur worldwide if difference as an intrinsic underlying condition of human existence is to be embraced. This project provides a point of departure for carrying out such a dramatic epistemic change by arguing that hierarchical thinking, not difference, is the real agent underwriting societal violence and discord. Hierarchical thinking delineates a more appropriate critical space than does difference for social justice inquiry, invention, and intervention. This project also rhetorically theorizes the realm of intersubjectivity and provides two novel contributions to contemporary rhetorical theory: 1) privilege as a rhetorical construct and 2) the untapped inventional potential of the postmodern understanding of intersubjectivity. To illustrate the embodied and performative aspects of hierarchical thinking, this work draws upon the writings of Lillian Smith, a white southerner (1897-1966) whose descriptive analyses of the Jim Crow South allude to large systems of privilege of which Jim Crow is merely representational. Illustrating the invidious nexus of privilege, Smith's writings describe the ways in which individuals embody and perform practices of exclusion and hate to perpetuate larger systems of privilege. Smith shows how privilege operates much as gender and power--fluidly and variously and dependent upon context. Viewing privilege as a rhetorical construct, operating dynamically, always in flux and at play, provides rhetoricians with a theoretically important move that un-yokes privilege from specific identities (e.g., white privilege). When viewed through this more dynamic and precise lens, we can readily perceive how privilege functions as a colonizing, ubiquitously learned, and variegated rhetorical practice of subordination and domination that, as a frame of analysis, offers a more fluid and accurate perspective than identity categories provide for discussions of oppression, social justice, and democratic engagement.
ContributorsHoliday, Judy (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The San Andreas Fault (SAF) is the primary structure within a system of faults accommodating motion between the North American and Pacific plates. Physical models of faulting and characterizations of seismic hazard are informed by investigations of paleoseismology, slip distribution, and slip rate. The impact of earthquakes on people is due in large part to social vulnerability. This dissertation contributes an analysis about the relationships between earthquake hazard and social vulnerability in Los Angeles, CA and investigations of paleoseismology and fault scarp array complexity on the central SAF. Analysis of fault scarp array geometry and morphology using 0.5 m digital elevation models along 122 km of the central SAF reveals significant variation in the complexity of SAF structure. Scarp trace complexity is measured by scarp separation, changes in strike, fault trace gaps, and scarp length per SAF kilometer. Geometrical complexity in fault scarp arrays indicates that the central SAF can be grouped into seven segments. Segment boundaries are controlled by interactions with subsidiary faults. Investigation of an offset channel at Parkfield, CA yields a late Holocene slip rate of 26.2 +6.4/- 4.3 mm/yr. This rate is lower than geologic measurements on the Carrizo section of the SAF and rates implied by far-field geodesy. However, it is consistent with historical observations of slip at Parkfield. Paleoseismology at Parkfield indicates that large earthquakes are absent from the stratigraphic record for at least a millennia. Together these observations imply that the amount of plate boundary slip accommodated by the main SAF varies along strike. Contrary to most environmental justice analyses showing that vulnerable populations are spatially-tied to environmental hazards, geospatial analyses relating social vulnerability and earthquake hazard in southern California show that these groups are not disproportionately exposed to the areas of greatest hazard. Instead, park and green space is linked to earthquake hazard through fault zone regulation. In Los Angeles, a parks poor city, the distribution of social vulnerability is strongly tied to a lack of park space. Thus, people with access to financial and political resources strive to live in neighborhoods with parks, even in the face of forewarned risk.
ContributorsToké, Nathan A (Author) / Arrowsmith, J R (Thesis advisor) / Boone, Christopher G (Committee member) / Heimsath, Arjun M (Committee member) / Shock, Everett L (Committee member) / Whipple, Kelin X (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
"White flight" is a sociological phenomenon where White members depart urban neighborhoods or schools predominantly populated by minorities, and move to places like suburbs or commuter towns. A huge limitation in White flight research does not account for communities in rural America. The rural community of Garden City, Kansas, is of particular interest because of its shift in demographics over the years. Garden City has transformed dramatically with the arrival of immigrants to staff meatpacking plants and their children who attend the Garden City Public School District. In the last eighteen years, the Garden City Public School District has experienced a 204% growth in Hispanic student enrollment while simultaneously experiencing a 54% decline in White student enrollment. The exodus of White students from the Garden City Public School District is the focus of this research. The findings of this study indicate that White flight exists in the Garden City Public School District primarily as a product of racism due to White community constituents' feelings of xenophobia and ethnophobia toward Garden City's minority populations.
ContributorsVolk, Michael J (Author) / Glass, Gene V (Thesis advisor) / Danzig, Arnold B. (Committee member) / Davey, Lynn M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT Controversies surrounding multilingual language programs, disparities on educational achievement measures, and tracking represent some of the conflicts concerning race that continue to take place in school districts around the country. These debates are especially significant today as schools experience shifts in demographics. Racial and ethnic minorities now account for at least one-third of the nation's population (United States Census Bureau, 2010), and schools are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). The continued importance of race in education serves as the impetus behind this dissertation's inquiries into race and language in the high school English classroom. This study explores how one group of students, attending a predominately White high school with growing racial and ethnic diversity, write and talk about race in the English classroom. I examine how explicitly or implicitly students engaged in everyday language, school talk, and school writing about racial and ethnic identity, as well as how students responded to an English language arts curriculum devoted to issues of race and equity. On a broader scale, this study seeks to understand the school, community, and larger social context of racial and ethnic division and unity, particularly the role language and literacy pedagogies can play in addressing these issues. Blending two qualitative methodologies, including ethnography and the design and implementation of a race-conscious English curriculum, I spent eight months in one high school classroom, resulting in an analysis of a series of field notes, student writing, and in-depth participant interview transcripts. Findings from this study may help complicate researchers' and teachers' notions of how racial and ethnic identity operates in classrooms with shifting demographics. This study also highlights the importance of bringing race-conscious literacy activities to the forefront of English classrooms where structured discussions and carefully crafted writing prompts can facilitate discourse on race that might otherwise be muted in the context of traditional English language arts curriculum. Finally, this dissertation calls for a greater focus on collaborative research and teaching teams comprised of classroom teachers and university researchers.
ContributorsDeCosta, Meredith (Author) / Roen, Duane (Thesis advisor) / Early, Jessica (Committee member) / Paris, Django (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012