Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Gender Studies
- All Subjects: Feminist Methodology
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Behl, Natasha
- Status: Published
Description
Madness is disruptive. It doesn't play by the rules. Madness is influenced, created, and caused by many different factors; it can be at different times disorienting, debilitating, or a space of radical potential. In this thesis, I argue for the empowering potential of narrative and rewriting identity in the face of painful disruptions. I argue that the way that we conceptualize madness and how we internalize trauma affects how we reconfigure identity as an ongoing process and therefore whether and how we are able to embrace creative, diverse and dynamically empowered futures. I argue against positivist traditions of categorization and concept formation when it comes to madness – whether medical or historic//cultural/social. I first use similar tools to “categorize the categorizers” and later break away from positivist tradition through feminist inquiry, pushing against static, linear, and inactive kind and family conceptual hierarchies with my own experience. I use active feminist frameworks and phenomenological ontologies to argue for a corrective epistemic justice exposing reductive gaps in the literature and highlighting the links between violence/oppression/trauma/agency and mental illness that positivist models minimize. I employ personal experiences of gender-based violence and my own changing and intersectional understanding and experience of depression and mental health as a lens through which different pathways can emerge. I use memoir as method to disturb the binary limitations of madness models, instead offering a conceptualization of madness as fluid, intersectional, changing, and deeply personal: an experience that cannot be reduced and compartmentalized. Finally, I explore the pain of trauma and madness as well as the possibility therein towards action as a way of reclaiming self-agency.
ContributorsTownsley, Rebecca (Author) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Muphy-Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Colbern, Allan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
ABSTRACT
As a graduate student earning both a Master of Arts in Social Justice and Human Rights and a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership Management, I have tried to bridge the theoretical and the empirical in a meaningful way. A problematic chasm between the nonprofit professional and the client being served existed, and I wanted to research this chasm. I wanted to understand what challenges a woman of color faced if she was both a client and a nonprofit professional, possessing dual identities and engaging in a sort of welfare system border crossing. There was a gap in the academic research on women in the nonprofit sector, more specifically the charitable, human services sector, and there was little to no research on women who have been both clients and caseworkers. Therefore, I conducted a series five of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women of color working at a local food bank. As an employee of the food bank, I recorded my own observations and field notes in order to write a feminist institutional ethnography. I employed interpretive, less conventional design methods, which were aligned with my commitment to social justice. The research highlighted many negative stories about oppression and exclusion women faced in the nonprofit sector. It also confronted the problematic stereotype welfare recipients, specifically women of color, are faced with as a result of the politics of disgust and dominant myth of the Welfare Queen. The research sought to explain how and why women of color transition in and out of the welfare state, and how they manage to work within a food bank, where they are constantly surrounded by inequalities.
As a graduate student earning both a Master of Arts in Social Justice and Human Rights and a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership Management, I have tried to bridge the theoretical and the empirical in a meaningful way. A problematic chasm between the nonprofit professional and the client being served existed, and I wanted to research this chasm. I wanted to understand what challenges a woman of color faced if she was both a client and a nonprofit professional, possessing dual identities and engaging in a sort of welfare system border crossing. There was a gap in the academic research on women in the nonprofit sector, more specifically the charitable, human services sector, and there was little to no research on women who have been both clients and caseworkers. Therefore, I conducted a series five of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women of color working at a local food bank. As an employee of the food bank, I recorded my own observations and field notes in order to write a feminist institutional ethnography. I employed interpretive, less conventional design methods, which were aligned with my commitment to social justice. The research highlighted many negative stories about oppression and exclusion women faced in the nonprofit sector. It also confronted the problematic stereotype welfare recipients, specifically women of color, are faced with as a result of the politics of disgust and dominant myth of the Welfare Queen. The research sought to explain how and why women of color transition in and out of the welfare state, and how they manage to work within a food bank, where they are constantly surrounded by inequalities.
ContributorsRoland, Kimberly (Author) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Murphy Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Elenes, C. Alejandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
When the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency recently declassified documents relating to the 1953 Coup in Iran, it was discovered that American involvement was much deeper than previously known. In fact, the CIA had orchestrated the coup against democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh. This action was sold to the United States public as being essential to democracy, which seems contradictory to its actual purpose. U.S. political leaders justified the coup by linking it to what Charles Mills calls “racial liberalism,” a longstanding ideological tradition in America that elevates the white citizen to a place of power and protection while making the racial noncitizens “others” in the political system. Political leaders in the United States relied on bribing the American media to portray the Shah as the white citizen and Mossadegh as a racial other, the white citizen was restored to power and the racial other was overthrown.
ContributorsAnderson, Kira C (Author) / Forrest, M. David (Thesis advisor) / Murphy Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Behl, Natasha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The thesis I have written aims to investigate the underlying reasons why France has considered Islam as unassimilable and why it has targeted Muslim women’s bodies to force assimilation. In the first section of the thesis, I examine the colonial relationship between France and Algeria. I conclude that Algeria’s independence from France significantly influenced the negative treatment towards immigrants in postcolonial France. I then study the racist discourse that dominated French politics in the 1980s; and clarify how this has laid the foundation for the first attempt to ban the headscarves in public schools during the 1980s. The final section explores the 2004 ban on conspicuous religious symbols, a ban that significantly targeted the headscarf. I conclude that the prohibition of the headscarf undermined the rights of Muslim women and symbolized France’s inability to accept Islam, since France feared Islam’s visibility weakened a dominant French identity.
ContributorsAhmed, Noura (Author) / Keahey, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Toth, Stephen (Committee member) / Behl, Natasha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The United States of America incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, with the rate of growth for the imprisonment for women being currently twice that of men. Despite these alarming numbers women are often deemed the forgotten population within the carceral system. Using feminist inquiry within an interpretivist framework, I employ an autoethnographic account to examine my experience as a volunteer educator within the American Prison system. The 'data' within the autoethnography include my thoughts, eventualities, and reflections that are analyzed through an iterative cycle. Due to the creative nature of this thesis, 'data' are represented through a series of concepts, including art, photographs, and shifting narratives that mediate the language between theory and the lived experiences of incarcerated women. The data within this thesis however are not mine alone, they are cogenerated with the women of the Perryville Correctional Facility. Using feminist-based practices the representations of incarcerated women come from the women themselves , thus serving as a method of survival, as a form of activism, and as a tool of healing and justice that is not linked to reform. This thesis serves to simultaneously challenge and contribute to the traditional scholarship surrounding female incarceration by centering the voices of incarcerated women, and in turn serving as a form of liberatory action.
ContributorsTrickey, Hayley Louise (Author) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Murphy Erfarni, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020