Matching Items (19)
Description
For many adolescents, high school is a critical period of self-awareness, peer-influence, and identity construction. During this volatile period, young people explore how to express themselves in ways that range from conformity to non-conformity and transgression. This is particularly true when it comes to young people's understanding and expression of gender identity. For some youth, their personal form(s) of gender expression align neatly with social expectations; for others, it does not. When gender expression does not align with social expectations, students may be vulnerable to bullying or harassment by peers or adults. Often, youth who are policed and regulated by their classmates through bullying (or harassment, depending upon the relevant or implemented policy) are targeted based on their perceived identity, be that racial, ethnic, citizenship, or, most frequently, gender and sexuality. This project advances the need for research done from a critical youth studies perspective (both methodologically and ethically) and provides new insight into the types of language and practices used by youth to express, perform and "do" gender. Utilizing qualitative methodology, including participant observation, focus group and individual interviews, surveys, and the collection and content analysis of school ephemera, this research investigated how high school students navigate gender identity amidst other intersecting identities. This project examined how youth both "do" and "perform" gender in their everyday lives as high school students. Their gender identity is frequently understood amidst other intersecting identities, particularly sexual orientation, religion and race. These youth also pointed to several important influences in how they understand their own gender, and the gender identity of those around them, including media and peer groups. Because this research took place at two charter art schools, the findings also provided a framework for understanding how these two schools, and charter art schools more generally, provide alternative spaces for young people to experiment and play with their identity construction. Findings indicate that youth are forced to navigate and construct their gender identity amidst many conflicting and contradictory ideologies. Schools, media, and peer groups all heavily influence the way young people understand themselves.
ContributorsPrior, Sarah (Author) / Cavender, Gray (Thesis advisor) / Adelman, Madelaine (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Beth Blue (Committee member) / Katsulis, Yasmina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Performance is a public speech act that can present the experience of difference and generate relations across lines of difference. In personal narrative performance, performers do not just tell stories, the stories they tell are strategic hailings that call attention to discourses that produce the conditions of their exclusion and form intimate relations in public. Personal narrative performance renders the private public. Performers take to the stage, the space of the public, to offer their stories, their bodies, and their relations to audiences for collective consideration. In turn, the act of performance generates further relations: among performers and audiences, and between performance and discourse. This study analyzes these two layers of relation in performance through looking at the ways neoliberalism and performance interanimate one another. Through looking at three sites of neoliberal relationality--same-sex marriage, family, and immigration and multiculturalism, it asks questions of how performers narrate and represent non-normative experiences within neoliberalism, the historical and cultural context through which they are living and narrating. In order to understand the cultural work, the resistive and relational potential, of the relations that occur in and through personal narrative performance, we also need to understand the political, cultural, and historical conditions under which narratives in performance are produced. My argument is that in and through performance intimacy is queered: it takes the private--the stuff of the personal presented as aesthetic communication--and renders that private very public. In public and through relations, performance can raise awareness and shift consciousness, reify orders of relation or generate alternate imaginaries. This is to say that a lot of different types of work are done in performance, and although performance is often seen as resistance, under the weight of neoliberalism, it is important to tend to what arguments performances are making and how in turn that shapes the relations that occur in the site of performance. Queer intimacy offers a way of engaging performance, an analytic that considers the text of performance as well as the relational context among performers and audiences, and turns back on larger cultural questions of belonging. The potential of performance, of the concept of queer intimacy, provides a lens to read performance, to tend to the conditions that give rise to and inform performance in the current historical moment. It brings together the critical impulse of intercultural communication and cultural studies with performance studies. From a critical cultural perspective, it tends to the structural in performance, and through performance emphasizes the lived experience as narrated and embodied as and through communication. Coupled with the impulses of queer theory, queer intimacy offers both resisting normativity and imagining beyond it. To consider queer intimacy in performance is not only to recognize that relations are made possible, but to tend closely to the belongings we are making.
ContributorsPérez, Kimberlee (Author) / Corey, Frederick C. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Honegger, Gitta (Committee member) / Langellier, Kristin M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
California's Proposition 8 revoked the right to marriage for that state's gay and lesbian population. Proposition 8 was a devastating defeat for gay marriage movements across the nation. The primary rhetorical strategy of the No on 8 campaign was a reliance on a Civil Rights analogy that constructed the gay and lesbian movement for marriage as a civil right akin to those fought for by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Analogizing the gay and lesbian struggle for gay marriage with the racial struggles of the Civil Rights Movement exposed a complicated relationship between communities of color and gay and lesbian communities. This project reads critical rhetoric and intersectionality together to craft a critical intersectional rhetoric to better understand the potentialities and pitfalls of analogizing the gay rights with Civil Rights. I analyze television ads, communiques of No on 8 leadership, as well as state level and national court decisions related to gay marriage to argue alternative frameworks that move away from analogizing and move towards coalition building.
ContributorsKelsey, Michelle L (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, A. Cheree (Committee member) / Milller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Assessment practices in U.S. schools have become a greatly debated topic since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. In response to these new guidelines, schools and teachers have made adjustments in the ways they implement assessment practice and utilize assessment data -- ultimately impacting the lives of students and their educational outcomes. Using elements of Bourdieu's Theory of Practice as a lens to consider both context and implications of assessment practices within this new legislative era, a case study is focused on the lives of teachers and students within a single U.S. middle school. This study synthesizes secondary data in the form of standardized test scores, teacher grades in math and reading, a student grit survey, along with student narratives and teacher observations to reveal the ways in which assessment practice structures the classroom field. Findings reveal the conflicting ways in which teachers and students navigate a system framed by bureaucratic legitimacy. For teachers, issues of assessment rules and time constraints lead to frustrations and bureaucratic slippage. Conversely, students implement strategies to resist and manage the routine assessment practices of teachers.
ContributorsBroberg, Gregory B (Author) / Jurik, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Cavender, Gray (Committee member) / Schneider, Anne L (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Here I explore three varieties of theatrical responses to the cultural amnesia brought about by what scholars have termed “post-AIDS” rhetoric. Specifically, I examine how AIDS history plays, AIDS comedies, and solo plays provide opportunities for theatregoers to participate in, or reflect on the absence of, what I call “AIDS mourning publics.” I understand these publics to be both the groupings of people that gather around a text, film screening, play performance, or event that was created in response to loss due to AIDS, and the text, screenplay, or play text itself when circulated. In these publics participants work through their grief, make political interventions, and negotiate the meanings of AIDS history for gay men whose sexual awakening occurred before and after the development of protease inhibitors. I join theories of grieving, affect in performance, and the public sphere to study these communal events. I use films, plays, and critical reviews to identify how mourning through performance can be therapeutic for cultural and social actors despite activists' and scholars' sole attention to the counterpublicity of these events. Still, counterpublicity remains an important concern because many in the dominant US public sphere consider AIDS to be a benign “manageable condition” in affluent countries like the US. As such, I also present a dramaturgy of mourning and counterpublicity in twenty-first century US AIDS drama and solo performance with attention focused upon how dramatists and solo performers are inviting spectators to engage with, and find new meaning within, this epidemic. For example, I investigate how pairing mourning with genres like comedy produces political interventions within the space between laughing and astonishment. My dramaturgy of mourning also examines recurring themes such as ghosts, the past, intergenerationalism, and AIDS amnesia to interpret how performers have framed individual and collective loss to challenge spectators' understanding of AIDS history. To support my claims I use sources from the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, gay and lesbian community newspapers, personal interviews, and my own experiences as a spectator viewing productions of The Normal Heart, thirtynothing, and The VOID.
ContributorsMorrison, Jayson Abraham (Author) / Underiner, Tamara L. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / McMahon, Jeff D (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
ContributorsFlores, Carlos A (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Hess, Aaron R (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This study examines the representation of Asian online brides by studying the images and profiles that are advertised on Asianonlinebrides.com. To do so, I combined the history and growth of the Human Trafficking industry, the idea of the Asian “exotic OTHER,” the power and structured/constrained agency, and social construction of gender theories. In particular, I utilized a mixed methods approach for data collection. The content and visual analysis in this study provided the two sides of the analytic coin: the written and the visual. I am particularly interested in the narrative comments offered by the prospective brides, e.g., what they state to be their preferences in their dream man/husband, and the personality traits, and characteristics that they write about themselves. The following were examined: the gender displays, picture frames, feminine touch, and the ritualization of subordination. For example, body language, clothing, skin, hair color, and texture, bone structure, posture, etc. I argue that this data alerts us to the whole host of ideas, assumptions, social, cultural, and gender constructions. The power relations that exceeds the text and inform us of these online brides. The findings have indicated that these women are vulnerable and caught within oppressive social structures. They have nevertheless utilized those structures to their advantage. By doing so, the brides have acted as assertive agents in that they have looked out for the interests of both themselves and their families. Moreover, a significant body of data was provided first hand through the written and visual narratives of the online brides. These brides have offered valuable insight into the field of Asian online brides. Their stories have presented a unique perspective to the online brides’ process that can only be captured through the narratives provided in this research.
ContributorsDai, Linh K (Author) / Cavender, Gray (Thesis advisor) / Jurik, Nancy (Committee member) / Swadener, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Tibbs, Donald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In this study, I used critical, qualitative methods to explore how the material and symbolic dynamics of milk banking complicate expectations of organizing and (in)effective lactation. Guided by theories of alternative organizing, in/voluntary membership, the structuration of d/Discourse, and corporeal commodification, I conducted document analysis, fieldwork, and interviews with hospital and milk bank staff and maternal donors and recipients. Results trace the (her)story and protocols of the milk banking industry and examine the circumstances of donation and receipt; the d/Discourses of filth, suspicion, and inadequacy that circulate the lactating, maternal body; and the presence or resistance of commodification within each organization.
Milk banking occurs when mothers provide excess breastmilk to parents with low supply or compromising medical conditions. “Milk banking” is used as an umbrella term for different ways of organizing donor milk; organizing evolved from wet-nursing to a continuum of in/formal markets. Formal markets include for-profit and non-profit milk banks that pasteurize and/or sterilize breastmilk for Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Informal markets involve self-organized exchanges online that are driven by monetary ads or donation. Both formal and informal markets elicit questions regarding flows of capital, labor, reproductive choice, and exploitation. However, current research resides in medicine, law, and popular press, so we know little about how milk banking happens in real time or how participation affects maternal identity.
My analysis makes four contributions to organizational communication theory: (1) alternative organizing punctuates the construction of and conflicts between in/formal markets and shows why such theories should be represented as cyclical, rather than linear; (2) membership in milk banking is unintentional and distinct from in/voluntary membership; (3) the obscured organization is a necessary alternative to Scott’s (2013) hidden organizations; and (4) d/Discourses of “safety” are used to discipline and indict, not just represent operational differences. Social-rhetorical implications reveal how milk banking operates as an affective economy (Ahmed, 2004) and mark where privileges and inequalities are present in the absence of data; practical implications suggest consideration of policy changes. Methodologically, this study also offers insight into crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) and participant witnessing (Tracy, forthcoming) and challenges the hegemonic underpinnings of fieldwork.
Milk banking occurs when mothers provide excess breastmilk to parents with low supply or compromising medical conditions. “Milk banking” is used as an umbrella term for different ways of organizing donor milk; organizing evolved from wet-nursing to a continuum of in/formal markets. Formal markets include for-profit and non-profit milk banks that pasteurize and/or sterilize breastmilk for Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Informal markets involve self-organized exchanges online that are driven by monetary ads or donation. Both formal and informal markets elicit questions regarding flows of capital, labor, reproductive choice, and exploitation. However, current research resides in medicine, law, and popular press, so we know little about how milk banking happens in real time or how participation affects maternal identity.
My analysis makes four contributions to organizational communication theory: (1) alternative organizing punctuates the construction of and conflicts between in/formal markets and shows why such theories should be represented as cyclical, rather than linear; (2) membership in milk banking is unintentional and distinct from in/voluntary membership; (3) the obscured organization is a necessary alternative to Scott’s (2013) hidden organizations; and (4) d/Discourses of “safety” are used to discipline and indict, not just represent operational differences. Social-rhetorical implications reveal how milk banking operates as an affective economy (Ahmed, 2004) and mark where privileges and inequalities are present in the absence of data; practical implications suggest consideration of policy changes. Methodologically, this study also offers insight into crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) and participant witnessing (Tracy, forthcoming) and challenges the hegemonic underpinnings of fieldwork.
ContributorsJones, Sarah E. (Author) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Ellingson, Laura L. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Despite equal opportunity legislation, female firefighters (3.4 percent) remain underrepresented compared to their male counter parts (97 percent) in the United States (NPFA, 2012). I question why there are so few women pursuing a firefighting career and if there are any organizational, cultural, or structural barriers which affect the retention and recruitment of women. My research entails observations and interviews with staff at three firefighting stations in my community; my data spanned both individual background and organizational dynamics. Across the firefighting occupation, my analysis focuses on understanding the recruitment process and early phases of firefighting careers to understand the ways in which women might be encouraged and discouraged into the occupation. In this paper, I begin with a literature review about the history and status of women in the field, comparisons with barriers faced by women in other traditionally male fields such as policing since there is limited literature on women in firefighting, efforts undertaken to increase the percentages of women in firefighting, and the organizational dynamics of firefighting highlighted in prior research. From this review I develop an analytic framework for my analysis. After a review of my research methodology, I turn to my analysis of recruitment and probationary stages in firefighting and how these stages affect recruitment and retention of women. First, I review how social networks facilitate pre-employment socialization which enhances candidate work opportunities in firefighting. Second, I examine the recruitment process and criteria for hiring and the ways in which the same social networks facilitate success in the probationary phases of employment. Third, I highlight issues of stereotypical masculine images associated with becoming a good firefighter. By focusing on the recruitment and hiring processes, training and probationary periods, and inherent masculinities prevalent in the fire organization, I am able to identify some key issues and apply them to the fire organization.
ContributorsMoser, Sarah Elizabeth (Author) / Jurik, Nancy (Thesis director) / Cavender, Gray (Committee member) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Father Daniel Berrigan once said that "writing about prisoners is a little like writing about the dead." I think what he meant is that we treat prisoners as ghosts. They're unseen and unheard. It's easy to simply ignore them and it's even easier when the government goes to great lengths to keep them hidden.
Supermax prisons are used to hold those prisoners whom prison authorities regard as the most problematic in the prison system. These facilities merge the 19th-century practice of long-term solitary confinement with 21st-century technology in ways that subject prisoners to unparalleled levels of isolation, surveillance, and control, usually for long duration, with the potential to inflict significant amounts of psychological harm. Despite a range of academic studies documenting the serious and potentially long-lasting psychological harm it may inflict, and several judicial opinions criticizing the risks it entails and significantly limiting its use, supermax prisons are still in full effect today.
Although there have been no successful cases brought to the Supreme Court alleging the use of supermax prisons being in violation of the inmate’s Eighth Amendment right, one can look at isolated factors that distinguish supermax prisons in which judges at the Supreme Court level have shown to be unconstitutional in general population prisons. This thesis examines the Eighth Amendment implications of cruel and unusual punishment within supermax prisons, through isolated factors through judicial intervention.
Supermax prisons are used to hold those prisoners whom prison authorities regard as the most problematic in the prison system. These facilities merge the 19th-century practice of long-term solitary confinement with 21st-century technology in ways that subject prisoners to unparalleled levels of isolation, surveillance, and control, usually for long duration, with the potential to inflict significant amounts of psychological harm. Despite a range of academic studies documenting the serious and potentially long-lasting psychological harm it may inflict, and several judicial opinions criticizing the risks it entails and significantly limiting its use, supermax prisons are still in full effect today.
Although there have been no successful cases brought to the Supreme Court alleging the use of supermax prisons being in violation of the inmate’s Eighth Amendment right, one can look at isolated factors that distinguish supermax prisons in which judges at the Supreme Court level have shown to be unconstitutional in general population prisons. This thesis examines the Eighth Amendment implications of cruel and unusual punishment within supermax prisons, through isolated factors through judicial intervention.
ContributorsLucca, Veronica Cristina (Author) / Stanford, Michael (Thesis director) / Cavender, Gray (Committee member) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05