Browsing by Subject "Agency"
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Item Authoritative discourse in the middle school mathematics classroom: a case study(Texas A&M University, 2005-11-01) Harbaugh, Adam PaulAccording to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standard of communication, ??Instructional programs from pre-kindergarten through grade 12 should enable all students to...communicate their mathematical thinking coherently and clearly to peers, teachers, and others?? and students need to learn ??what is acceptable as evidence in mathematics?? (NCTM, 2000, p. 60). But do teachers have a clear understanding of what is acceptable or do they believe that the only acceptable explanations are the ones that they themselves gave to the students? Can teachers accept alternative forms of explanation and methods of solution as mathematically accurate or do they want students to simply restate the teachers?? understandings of mathematics and the problem? The focus of this dissertation is the authoritative discourse practices of classroom teachers as they relate to individual students and large and small groups of students. In this case study, I examine the interactions in one eighth-grade mathematics classroom and the possible sharing of mathematical authority and development of mathematical agency that take place via the teacher??s uses of authoritative discourse. A guiding objective of this research was to examine the ways a teacher??s discursive practices were aligned with her pedagogical intentions. The teacher for this study was an experienced eighth-grade mathematics teacher at a rural Central Texas middle school. The teacher was a participant in the Middle School Mathematics Project at Texas A&M University. Results of an analysis of the discourse of six selected classes were combined with interview and observation data and curriculum materials to inform the research questions. I found that through the teacher??s regular use of authoritative discursive devices, mathematical authority was infrequently shared. Also the teacher??s uses of authoritative discourse helped create an environment where mathematical agency was not encouraged or supported. The teacher??s use of various discursive devices helped establish and maintain a hierarchy of mathematical authority with students at the lowest level reliant on others for various mathematical decisions.Item ?Doin? Whatever I Had to Do to Survive?: A Study of Resistance, Agency, and Transformation in the Lives of Incarcerated Women(2013-04-23) Sandoval, Carolyn LThe number of women who are incarcerated has increased significantly in the past few decades. Originally designed to manage male offenders, jails and prisons are ill-equipped to address the unique needs of women inmates whose paths to incarceration often include histories of trauma, abuse, and addiction. This qualitative study investigated the lives of 13 women who while incarcerated at Dallas County Jail, participated in an educational program, Resolana. The purpose of this study was to understand the women?s lives prior to incarceration, as well as the impact of the program and changes they experienced, if any, as a result of what they were learning. Data were collected using semi-structured, life history interviews, and by engaging in field observations as a volunteer for each class for a period of one week. An in-depth analysis through a critical lens, using a holistic-content narrative analysis method, was done with one participant?s life history. The findings are presented as an ethnodrama illuminating the cultural, social, personal, and legal systems of oppression that she survived and that contributed to her path to incarceration. Analyzed through a lens of agency and resistance, the findings that emerged from an analysis of all the participant?s life histories reveal that the women?s criminalized actions were often survival responses. The women employed various strategies, both legal and illegal, in response to people or situations involving control, power or domination over their lives. An analysis of the women?s experiences with Resolana through a transformative learning theoretical framework indicates that the women experience transformation in various ways and to varying degrees. The learning environment served as a container in which transformative learning could be cultivated through opportunities for interpersonal and intrapersonal engagement. The results of this study reveal the need for more and targeted advocacy and education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women. The results also indicate that the process and content of Resolana?s programming had a transformative impact on participants, and for some, the transformation was enduring. Finally, the results challenge definitions of criminal behavior in the context interlocking systems of oppression, and encourage thinking about alternatives to incarceration.Item Don't tell me who to blame : persuasive effects of implicit arguments in obesity messages on attributions of responsibility and policy support(2014-12) McGlynn, Joseph III; McGlone, Matthew S., 1966-; Bell, Robert A; Donovan, Erin E; Pennebaker, James W; Vangelisti, Anita LObesity is an epidemic that causes physical, emotional, and financial tolls for both individuals and communities. The United States experienced a dramatic increase in obesity rate from 1990-2010 (Flegal, Carroll, Ogden, & Curtin, 2010), with more than one-third of adults and 17% of children in the United States now considered obese (Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2012). Although most people agree obesity is a problem (Oliver & Lee, 2005), it is a disease with multiple causes (Wake & Reeves, 2012) and no straightforward solution (Phil & Heuer, 2009). Informed by theory and research on agency and attributions, the current study examined effects of explicit arguments and linguistic agency assignment on attributions of responsibility for obesity and support for public obesity policies. Participants (N = 211) were randomly assigned to read one of six versions of a health flyer defined by a 3 x 2 (Explicit Argument x Agency Assignment) factorial design and thereafter completed a questionnaire derived from previous research. Respondents across conditions agreed that obesity is a serious health threat, but differed in how they attributed responsibility for the illness. Those who read a message that consistently assigned agency to the disease (e.g., Obesity causes health problems) endorsed genetics as the cause to a greater degree than others who read a different version assigning agency to humans (e.g., Obese people develop health problems). In contrast, the human agency version prompted higher attributions of individual responsibility and greater support for upstream public policies aimed at reducing obesity (e.g., a snack tax on junk food, eliminating soft drinks from public schools, adding warning labels to foods with high sugar content). Results suggest explicit arguments are less effective in shifting perceptions of a stigmatized health threat than the implicit arguments created by linguistic agency assignment. The findings demonstrate specific message features that affect social attributions of illness (Heider, 1958; Weiner, 2006) and perceptions of responsibility for the onset and solution of health problems (Barry, Brescoll, Brownell, & Schlesigner, 2009; Niederdeppe, Shapiro, & Porticella, 2011). Theoretical implications, practical applications, and future research directions are discussed.Item An examination of temporal agency in courtship narratives(2012-05) Kurlak, Rebecca Mary; McGlone, Matthew S., 1966-; Vangelisti, Anita L.The reported study investigated temporal agency (i.e., the assignment of cause for temporal shift) in newlyweds’ courtship narratives. Transcripts of courtship narratives generated by each partner of 23 recently married couples (approximately 3 months) participating in the PAIR project (Huston, McHale, & Crouter, 1986) were analyzed for the presence of different linguistic strategies for encoding temporal shift. Statements were coded as “human agency assignments” when they assigned the cause of temporal shift to humans (e.g., we started seeing each other in June); statements that assigned temporal shift to abstract entities such as the events themselves (e.g., the summer started out well for us) or to the relationship (e.g., the relationship started to slow down) were coded as “abstract agency assignments.” The frequency with which narrators mentioned positiveand negative emotions was also coded to explore the possibility that emotional valence mediated agency assignments. The frequency of different agency assignments and emotion words were considered in the context of portions of the courtship accounts that narrators designated as describing “upturns” (episodes that increased the likelihood of marriage) or “downturns” (episodes that decreased marriage likelihood). Results indicated that the frequency of human agency assignments and positive emotion mention were higher in upturn than downturn narrative segments; in contrast, abstract agency assignments and negative emotion mention were more frequent in downturn than upturn segments. Subsequent analyses indicated that positive word mention partially mediated human agency assignments in upturns and that negative word mention partially mediated abstract agency assignments in downturns. These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating an association between the emotional valence of an event and temporal agency assignment: In general, people assign temporal agency to themselves when describing positive events, but prefer abstract agency assignments for negative events (McGlone & Pfiester, 2009).Item Examining ethnic identity and stereotypes of American-raised Chinese undergraduates in Texas(2010-05) Soon, Kokyung; Falbo, Toni; Richardson, Frank; Valencia, Richard; Suizzo, Marie-Anne; Urrieta, LuisAlthough there have been many studies focusing on Asian Americans’ ethnic identity and the stereotypes associated with them, little is known about how Asian Americans negotiate their multiple layers of ethnic identity and respond to the stereotypes imposed on them. The main goals of the current study were to examine American-Raised Chinese’ (i.e., Chinese who were born and/or raised in America) multiple layers of ethnic identity and their negotiation process of these multiple layers of ethnic identity, the relationship between their ethnic identity and stereotypes, and the creative ways American-Raised Chinese interpreted and responded to stereotypes. Another goal of this study was to examine the role of an ethnic student organization on campus and American-Raised Chinese’s participation in the organization. Through Chinese Cultural Association, I interviewed eighteen informants and observed their daily practices in public and private settings. The findings indicated that American-Raised Chinese undergraduates choosing to participate in an ethnic student organization over other organizations reflected their active negotiation of the multilayered ethnic identity. In addition, by meeting Chinese of different nationalities on campus and abroad, these undergraduates came to realize the diverse background of Chinese individuals, leading them to reexamine and reconstruct their ethnic identity. In particular, these undergraduates developed diasporic Chinese identity that not only acknowledged the diversity of Chinese community in America in terms of nationality, but also transformed their American identity into “ethnic” identity among Chinese of different nationalities. The findings also showed that American-Raised Chinese’ negotiation of their ethnic identity was closely related to their perception of the stereotypes. The informants came to recognize the changing nature of stereotypes and this realization led them to reconstrue their understanding of ethnic identity. Furthermore, using anecdotes of American-Raised Chinese undergraduates’ self impersonation, I argued that these undergraduates proactively responded to the stereotypes by making parody about themselves. Through self impersonation, these undergraduates achieved the double intents of performing themselves as Asian American and simultaneously challenged what the dominant American society expected them to be.Item Fostering Agency and Writing Self-Efficacy: The Making of a Writer(2011-08) Mascle, Deanna M.; Still, Brian; Kemp, Fred; Rickly, RebeccaWriting is an essential professional skill as well as important life skill. The goal of writing instruction is to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to successfully meet future writing challenges. However, despite years of writing instruction, many writers struggle to transfer skills and knowledge from one context to another. One reason for this struggle is that even after years of instruction most people are highly apprehensive about writing and do not consider themselves writers. In order to overcome the problem of transfer, we must improve our understanding about writing apprehension and the role it plays in the transformation to writer. Writing research and theory has brought us to the current understanding that writing is a set of complex skills that is contextually situated and socially influenced, and yet most writing instruction focuses on general, basic skills. As a result, instruction does little to lessen writing apprehension and foster the transformation to writer. This mixed methods study focused on the transformation into writers of 17 teachers attending a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute and addressed the impact of immersion in this learning community on writing apprehension. This research spanned a year and studied the writing apprehension of the participants before, during, and after their transformation by focusing on the role that agency and self-efficacy played in the transformation to writer. NWP’s mission is to improve the teaching of writing, and central to that goal is the belief that teachers who write are better writing teachers. This makes the transformation of teacher into writer the primary purpose of the NWP Summer Institute. The Summer Institute is organized as a learning community focused on professional development, research, and leadership as well as writing. Most of the 17 women involved in this learning community experienced a decrease in writing apprehension while undergoing the transformation to writer and maintained that confidence level during the following year. The writers’ reflection journals reveal that as apprehension decreases evidence of self-regulating activity, such as goal setting and metawriting, increases as does agency and self-efficacy. These findings contribute to our understanding of the transformation to writer and how this transformation connects with writing apprehension as well as how this transformation can be fostered in a learning community which attends to agency and writing self-efficacy.Item "Hips don't lie" : Mexican American female students' identity construction at The University of Texas at Austin(2012-08) Portillo, Juan Ramon; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Hogan, KristenWhile a university education is sold to students as something anyone can achieve, their particular social location influences who enters this space. Mexican American women, by virtue of their intersecting identities as racialized women in the US, have to adopt a particular identity if they are to succeed through the educational pipeline and into college. In this thesis, I explore the mechanics behind the construction of this identity at The University of Texas at Austin. To understand how this happens, I read the experiences of six Mexican American, female students through a Chicana feminist lens, particularly Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness. I discovered that if Mexicana/Chicana students are to “make it,” they have to adopt a “good student, nice Mexican woman” identity. In other words, to be considered good students, Mexican American women must also adopt a code of conduct that is acceptable to the white-centric and middle-class norms that dominate education, both at a K-12 level and at the university level. This behavior is uniquely tied to the social construction of Mexican American women as a threat to the United States because of their alleged hypersexuality and hyperfertility. Their ability to reproduce, biologically and culturally, means that young Mexican women must be able to show to white epistemic authorities that they have their sexuality and gender performance “under control.” However, even if they adopt this identity, their presence at the university is policed and regulated. As brown women, they are trespassers of a space that has historically been constructed as white and male. This results in students and faculty engaging in microaggressions that serve to Other the Mexican American women and erect new symbolic boundaries that maintain a racial and gender hierarchy in the university. While the students do not just accept these rules, adopting the identity of “good student, nice Mexican woman” limits how the students can defend themselves from microaggressions or challenge the racial and gender structure. Nevertheless, throughout this thesis I demonstrate that even within the constraints of the limited identity available to the students, they still resist dominant discourses and exercise agency to change their social situation.Item In search of "the cup of tea" : intersections of migration, gender, and marriage in transitional China(2012-05) Wang, Yu; Yu, Wei-Hsin; Roberts, ByranWidely considered the world’s largest migration, the ongoing rural-to-urban migration in China is unprecedented in terms of scale and impact. Millions of Chinese peasants flood to cities in waves to try their fortune. Among them, dagongmei, literally translated as “working sisters,” who are single, young, and undereducated rural women working in cities, are believed to be one of the most marginalized communities. Their segregation and discrimination in the labor market has been well documented. As a major life event, their marriages have also received academic attention, but the marriage of dagongmei in current literature is generally considered a means towards achieving social advancement, often terminating their migratory trajectory. Few studies address the question of how physical mobility and economic independence alter the social relations of dagongmei in their pursuit of dating and potential spouses across the rural-urban divide. The separations of dagongmei from patriarchal families empower them, but their legally classified rural citizenship and their lack of cultural and social capital constrain their aspirations. To closely examine how individual agency interacts with familial control and societal constraints, I conduct in-depth interviews with dagongmei, applying feminist standpoint theory, to hear their experiences concerning the social processes of mate selection. By situating marriage as a dynamic decision-making process, I identify three subgroups of women: independent seekers, resigned negotiators, and tradition reformers. My overall conclusion is that young rural women are empowered by their migration to pursue major life goals such as marriage, but traditional gender ideology still operates to confine their roles as daughters and wives in a transitional society with competing capitalist and socialist characteristics.Item Institutional owners and competitive rivalry(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Connelly, Brian LawrenceScholars have increasingly recognized the importance of institutional owners in the life of the firm and have sought to explain how and when these owners influence firm-level strategies. In spite of evidence that these owners can and do affect broad strategies, there is little empirical support for the extent to which institutional investors involve themselves at the level of strategic competitive actions that firms undertake. This raises the question: "How do different types of institutional investors affect strategic competitive activity between firms?" Further, owners have a unique bearing on competitive activity insofar as they can simultaneously influence firms that are competing with each other. Therefore another important question is: "How are the relationships between institutional investors and strategic competitive activity affected when those investors hold stakes in both the focal firm and their competitor?" Borrowing from the accounting literature, this dissertation classifies institutional owners into three groups based on their historical trading behavior: transient, dedicated, and quasi-indexer. Findings from examination of the ownership holdings and strategic competitive activity of thirty-six Fortune 500 rivalries over the years 1997-2006 provide insight into these questions. High levels of dedicated institutional ownership are associated with greater strategic competitive activity whereas high transient institutional ownership is associated with low strategic competitive activity. The relationship between dedicated ownership and strategic competitive activity is moderated by common ownership of a focal firm and its rival. As dedicated ownership of the focal firm and its rival increase together, strategic competitive activity is reduced. The results presented here change the way we apply agency theory to explain firm governance. For competitive dynamics researchers, this study points to a previously unexplored means by which firms are motivated to engage, or not engage, in competitive activity. This study also has broad implications for managers, investors, and policymakers.Item "It's like I can be myself here" : adolescent identity and agency in an arts-based out-of-school context(2011-05) Jefferson, Jennifer Elizabeth; Urrieta, Luis; Brown, Keffrelyn; DeLissovoy, Noah; Mayer, Melinda; Skerrett, AllisonMy dissertation, “‘It’s like I can be myself here’: Adolescent identity and agency in an arts-based out-of-school program” is a three-year post-critical ethnographic study (Noblit, Flores, and Murillo, 2004) of YouthArts, a free, out-of-school arts program for adolescents who self-identify as having a low socio-economic status. YouthArts, under the auspices of a non-profit art space, offers participants both a range of activities, such as field trips, artist-led workshops, and critique sessions, and materials, such as supplies and an electronic portfolio, to help foster artistic identity development. The program design demonstrates the complexity of artistic endeavors beyond technical prowess and highlights the role of collaboration, communication, inquiry, and curiosity in the process of art creation and consideration. I employ participant-observation methods, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection, as well as narrative analysis and content analysis, to create a dynamic representation of how adolescents engage in this program. My theoretical approach to this project brings together social production theories, such as figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998), social and cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2006), situated learning (Lave, 1990; Lave and Wenger, 1991) and the field of youth studies (James, Jenks, and Prout, 1998; Best, 2007) to explore learning, identity, and agency. I provide a thick description of the program’s professionalizing activities and offer detailed case studies of four focal participants in order to demonstrate the ways that the program helps participants transition from high school to post-secondary paths and from being students in high-school art classes to becoming practicing artists. I privilege youth voices to highlight the ways they see their identities as being informed by multiple communities, including their out-of-school activities, their schools, their families, and their friends and through intersecting classed, raced, gendered, and sexualized discourses, as well as to consider the ways that they enact agency in these multiple contexts. I highlight the need for more studies that research out-of-school learning from a place of positive youth development and explore the role of relationship building in learning environments.Item Language learning, identity, and agency : a multiple case study of adult Hispanic English language learners(2014-05) Sacchi, Fabiana Andrea; Urrieta, LuisFor the past 30 years, researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (Block, 2007; Lantolf and Pavlenko, 2001; Norton, 2000) have emphasized the need to integrate the language learner and the language learning context and to analyze relations of power and how they affect the language learner, the language learning processes, and the learner’s identities. Several researchers (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001; McKay & Wong, 1996; Skilton-Silverstein, 2002; Vitanova, 2005) have studied the connections between language learning, identity, and agency. The participants in these studies were immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa living in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Few studies (Menard-Warwick, 2004, 2009) have analyzed the experiences of adult Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. in relation to English learning and identity construction. This dissertation reports on a study exploring how five adult Hispanic immigrants learning English in a major city in Texas negotiated their identities as English speakers and exercised agency in contexts where English was spoken. The study also analyzed the learners’ investment in learning English. The sociocultural theory of self and identity developed by Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998) was the framework which helped conceptualize identity and agency. The work of Norton (2000) on language learning and identity and her notion of investment were used to understand the participants’ experiences learning and using English inside and outside the ESL classroom. A qualitative multiple-case study was conducted to understand the experiences of the participants who were learning English in a community-based ESL program, where the researcher became a participant observer during the six months of data collection. The findings of the study show the complex identity negotiations that the participants underwent in the different contexts where they interacted in English. Social class, immigrant status, and other social factors, such as lack of access to English-speaking contexts, high prevalence of Spanish in contexts where the participants interacted daily, and positioning of the participants (by others and by themselves) as limited English speakers strongly influenced how they negotiated their identities as English speakers. Despite these social factors, the participants exercised agency and were highly invested in learning English.Item Making a change : Aristotle on poiêsis, kinêsis and energeia(2011-05) Chen, Fei-Ting, 1974-; White, Stephen A. (Stephen Augustus); Hankinson, R. J.; Woodruff, Paul; Mourelatos, Alexander P. D.; Koons, RobertI examine the relation between the action of producing a change (kinêsis) in something else and the action of exercising one’s nature or craft (energeia). I call for the distinction between kinêsis and energeia by arguing that in Metaphysics IX.1-5 change should be construed as a transformational change that is still characterized in accordance with the categories, whereas in Met. IX.6-9 the action of exercising of one’s nature or craft should be construed as the presence of a state or an action that exhibits one’s nature or craft, which is meant to be a way of characterizing that-which-is (to on) that goes beyond the categories. Instead of the conventional patient-centered account of change, I argue that Phys. III.3 and V.4 suggest a non-patient-centered account of change and that the agent’s acting-upon (poiêsis) should also be construed as a non-self-contained change, just as the patient’s being-acted-upon (pathêsis), and therefore cannot be conflated with exercising one’s nature or craft. I also point out that a genuine Aristotelian event cannot be composed of the agent’s acting-upon and the patient’s being-acted-upon. I argue that Phys. VII.3 suggests a two-way relation between the action of producing a change in something else and the action of exhibiting one’s own nature, based on which I outline a hylomorphic proposal that a genuine Aristotelian event is composed of the action of producing a change in something else as the material part of the event and the action of exhibiting one’s own nature as the formal part of the event. While the former provides the material necessitation force from the bottom up to the occurrence of the event, the latter provides the formal constraint force from the top down to the occurrence of the event.Item Racial queer : multiracial college students at the intersection of identity, education and agency(2010-05) Chang-Ross, Aurora; Urrieta, Luis; Brown, Keffrelyn; Saenz, Victor; Cary, Lisa; Vincent, GregoryRacial Queer is a qualitative study of Multiracial college students with a critical ethnographic component. The design methods, grounded in Critical Race Methodology and Feminist Thought (both theories that inform Critical Ethnography), include: 1) 25 semi-structured interviews of Multiracial students, 2) of which 5 were expanded into case studies, 3) 3 focus groups, 4) observations of the sole registered student organization for Multiracial students on Central University’s campus, 5) field notes and 6) document analysis. The dissertation examines the following question: How do Multiracial students understand and experience their racialized identities within a large, public, tier-one research university in Texas? In addition, it addresses the following sub-questions: How do Multiracial students experience their racialized identities in their everyday interactions with others, in relation to their own self-perceptions and in response to the way others perceive them to be? How do Multiracial students’ positionalities, as they relate to power, privilege, phenotype and status, guide their behavior in different contexts and situations? Using Holland et al.’s (1998) social practice theory of self and identity, Chicana Feminist Theory, and tenets of Queer Theory, this study illustrates how Multiracial college students utilize agency as racial queers to construct and negotiate their identities within a context where identity is both self-constructed and produced for them. I introduce the term, racial queer, to frame the unconventional space of the Multiracial individual. I use this term not to convey sexuality, but to convey the parallels of queerness (both as a term of empowerment and derogation) as they pertain to being Multiracial. In other words, queerness denotes a unique individuality as well as a deviation from the norm (Sullivan, 2003; Warner, 1993; Gamson, 2000). The primary purpose of this study is to illustrate the agentic ways in which Multiracial college students come to understand and experience the complexity of their racialized identity production. Preliminary findings suggest the need to expand the scope of racial discourses to include Multiracial experiences and for further study of Multiracial students. Their counter-narratives access an otherwise invisible student population, providing an opportunity to broaden critical discourses around education and race.Item Refraining, agents, and causation(2013-05) Harrington, Chelsea-Anne Linzee; Dancy, JonathanI consider two versions of an argument against (so-called) negative action, both of which take it that causation is a defining feature of actions. The first asserts that when an agent refrains, her mental states do not cause the absence of an event; as such, the refraining does not qualify as an action. The second asserts that when an agent refrains, she does not cause the apparent results of her refraining, and so again, the refraining does not qualify as an action. The idea motivating the second argument appears to improve on the first, insofar as it allows for the agent to play a role in her actions. I argue that both accounts rely on a narrow conception of causation, framed in terms of a physical connection between cause and effect. This narrow conception does not appear to be justified, and the focus on physical connection causation leads both accounts to misconceive agency. Fortunately, there is available a broader conception of causation, which is both intuitively plausible and better able to capture the phenomenon.Item Resignifying resistance : transnational black feminism and performativity in the U.S. prison industrial complex(2010-05) Turner, Amber Denean, 1982-; Cloud, Dana L.; Jones, Joni L.The circumstance of mass incarceration in the U.S. has reached the point of social crisis. When the statistics on imprisonment are demographically disaggregated, they point to the overrepresentation of imprisoned men and women of color. Paying special attention to Black men and women, critical race, prison advocacy, and Black feminist research has been vital in theorizing the structural and ideological implications of this racial inequity. The insight that the U.S. prison system constitutes a prison industrial complex arose from such scholarship. More recently, transnational feminism has offered insight into the specific experience and socio-historical contextualization of raced women within a transnational prison industrial complex. Based on transnational and Black feminist precepts, this thesis will argue the need to reframe the discursive position of imprisoned Black women in liberatory discourse. Using the work of Homi K. Bhabha, I contend that Black women’s discursive positions should be understood as “culturally undecidable.” Dominant paradigms of mainstream feminism have assigned Black women the task of fulfilling the ideal of “true womanhood.” Black feminist scholars have argued that this model erases and marginalizes Black women’s resistance. I suggest the imposition of this ideal rhetorically fixes Black women as victims, pathologizes them, and ultimately pathologizes the Black community. In contrast, renaming Black women’s discursive position as “culturally undecidable” creates the possibility to decenter the transnational networks that underpin the transnational prison industrial complex. To proffer this argument, I will analyze performative resistances and reifications of criminalization within narratives of imprisoned Black women and suggest performance practices to encourage Black women’s sense of agency.Item Single and searching: how older and younger adults seek romantic partners online(2014-08) Davis, Eden Morris; Fingerman, Karen L.; Neff, Lisa HassigDespite a growing population of single older adults, past research and theory on romantic relationship formation has primarily focused on younger adults. Online dating has become an increasingly prevalent context for both older and younger adults to form romantic relationships. Nonetheless, adults of different ages may have different motivations for seeking dating partners. Using a framework of agency and communion to synthesize disparate literatures on personal goals, evolutionary motivations, and socioemotional motivations across the lifespan, the current research focuses on age differences in self-presentations in 4000 online dating profiles sampled from two popular online dating websites. Themes in these profiles were identified using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth & Francis, 2007). Regression analyses revealed significant associations between age and word use. Older adults were more likely to use first person plural pronouns (e.g. we, us, our), reflecting a focus on connectedness as well as words associated with health and positive emotion. Younger adults were more likely to emphasize the self, using more first person pronouns and were more likely to use words associated with work and achievement. Results suggest younger adults focus on enhancing the “self” when seeking romantic partnership. Consistent with theories of adult development, older adults are more positive in their profiles and appear to focus more on the “self” as embedded in relationships.Item The role of technology in addressing personalized learning(2016-05) Andra, Nishitha; Hughes, Joan E.; Newell, AngelaThe purpose of this report is to provide the findings of a literature review that investigated the role of technology in addressing personalized learning (PL) within the education contexts, middle and high school as well as the first two years of undergraduate studies. A diverse set of sources, including government reports, advocacy papers, and scholarly articles, were used for the literature review. A working definition for the personalized learning yielded the identification of five factors: the adjustment of pace and sequence of content, access to learning materials from anywhere, interest-driven student work and student having agency to determine their learning experiences. For each factor, the following information was provided: the definition, influence of the factor on learning, the use of technology to address the factor and associated considerations. The result of the literature review indicates to address PL factors, it is best for technology to provide access to information and tools, as well as, provide opportunities to learners to make choices about how to learn.Item The view from below : constructing agency under a neoliberal umbrella(2014-12) Thompson, John Robert; Brummett, Barry,1951-This dissertation starts from the proposition that globalization is a process of integration aided and abetted over centuries by technologies (e.g. transportation and today’s electronic communications) that have collapsed time and space among individuals and enabled the projection of power. This dissertation excavates and analyzes what are termed discourses of globalism, the rhetorical construction of a social order that transcends the nation-state. The primary form of globalism at this juncture is neoliberal globalism, an elite discourse that is hostile to the nation-state and promotes a world that organizes individuals into global markets as producers and consumers. One of the defining tenets of neoliberal globalism is the assertion that “there is no alternative” to organizing society, a phrase made (in)famous by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s. The project is framed as a search for the emerging rhetorical strategies that might reconstruct agency (the capacity for individuals to affect the world) at a grassroots level under that umbrella of neoliberal globalism and at least contemplate an alternative organization of a more integrated global society. Methodologically, the dissertation employs Kenneth Burke’s (1937) theory of discursive history as an interplay of acceptance and rejection frames over time. Using food talk, primarily Internet content concerning food and agriculture, as a corpus of texts the dissertation charts neoliberal globalism as an acceptance frame and its impact on agency and equipment for living, the embedded social rules and roles for living in a social order. Using the concept of the rejection frame, the dissertation then argues that a grassroots globalism is nascent as seen in food talk and is attempting to counter neoliberal globalism through constructing a theory of rights that transcends the nation-state and provides a new form of equipment for living in a globally organized world. The dissertation concludes by theorizing this emerging rhetoric of rights as a step toward a rhetoric of global personal sovereignty that might unite people in all locales in a balancing of neoliberal globalism.Item The virtual observing agent in music: a theory of agential perspective as implied by indexical gesture(2015-08) Gerg, Ian Wyatt; Hatten, Robert S.; Almén, Byron; Drott, Eric; Pearsall, Edward; Erk, KatrinThe human body is inseparable from our understanding of music. Through embodied cognition, listeners conceptualize music as performed action. We find evidence of this in our most fundamental musical language. “High” pitches resonate high in a singer’s head, while “fast” rhythms resemble fast bodily movement. Scholars have followed the entailments of these metaphors in recent decades, developing theories of bodily gesture (Hatten 2004, Lidov 2005) and physical mimesis (Cox 2011). These hold that the bodily movement that we hear in music can imitate the physical gestures that we use in everyday communication (e.g., waving, nodding, bowing, or sighing). This has its own entailments; most fundamentally, it implies the presence of a virtual, human-like agent within music that is similar to the “virtual persona” theorized by Edward T. Cone (1974). In other words, in perceiving musical sounds as imitative of physical movement and gesture, we infer the presence of a virtual agent who enacts them. This dissertation extends these theories, demonstrating that musical gestures can be mimetic of indexical somatic movements—that is, bodily movements of pointing, looking, striving, and reaching. These indexical gestures suggest the presence of a virtual observing agent. The virtual observing agent acts a lens through which we, the listener, can experience the interior world (diegesis) of a work. This leads us to embody a single and more individualized perspective on the musical representation. I explore the implications of indexical gesture and perspective with an examination of music from the common practice period. Moreover, I bring the theory of virtual observing agency together with theories of musical narrative and emotion.