Browsing by Subject "Critical Theory"
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Item Academe Maid Possible: The Lived Experiences of Six Women Employed as Custodial Workers at a Research Extensive University Located in the Southwest(2013-03-14) Petitt, BeckyThis qualitative study sought to understand the ways classism, as it intersects with racism and sexism, affects how low wage-earning women negotiate their work world in the academy and the way the academy functions to create, maintain, and reproduce the context within which oppression is able to emerge. Field research took place at State University, a pseudonym for a Land Grant, Research Extensive institution located in the Southwest. Through the lenses of critical theory and critical feminist theory the stories of six women employed as custodial workers, nine administrators employed at State University, and two State University employees involved in the community's Living Wage initiative, were analyzed. The lives of women employed as custodial workers are largely unremarked and undocumented, and the ways in which their work serves to make the academy possible have been unacknowledged. This study found that the job of cleaning in the traditional higher education environment is laced with challenges. The nature of the academy, the ethos and operation of State University, and the interlocking systems of classism, racism and sexism fuse together arrangements of power that simultaneously obliterate and render these women agonizingly visible through systems of oppression. In an environment where honor is conferred upon "the educated," the custodial participants, whose opportunities were limited due to their social locations, exist on the border of the academy. Their marginality is reinforced daily, as they are in constant contact with higher-status individuals who perform raced, classed, and gendered behaviors that are woven into the fabric of our society. The study also found that the custodial participants and the university administrators are locked in a relationship of mutual distrust. State University administrators do not trust the custodians and the custodians do not trust State University administrators. Furthermore, existing at both the literal and metaphorical "bottom" of the organization, custodians are among the first to feel the impact of major institutional shifts, such as increases in student and faculty bodies, and large-scale economic recovery initiatives. Additionally, I reconceptualize the notion of "borrowed power" to name the impermanence of the authority which Black custodial supervisors, and people of color in general, hold in our racialized society. Finally, the data decidedly point to White male students as primary actors and architects of the overtly hostile work environment within which the women work. The custodial participants negotiate these challenges with facility. They find creative ways to resist and to negotiate the obstacles they face. Unfortunately, they also occasionally internalize negative messages and are complicit in their marginality. Administrators who participated in the study were aware of these conditions, but remained silent on the issue of resolution. Through various intentional (if unconscious) State University policies, practices, rules, norms, behaviors, and structures that sometimes act in insidious, hidden ways, the dominant groups? interests continue to be pursued while the interests, needs, and even the very presence of marginal members is ignored. Thus, systems of domination and subordination are produced, reproduced, validated, and institutionalized in the academy. This process is presented in a Conceptual Map of How Systems of Oppression Flourish and are Re/produced in the Academy. The findings of this study contribute to existing bodies of knowledge that discuss racial, gender, and economic inequality. Yet it opens new lines of inquiry into the overlapping conditions of gender, racial, and economic marginality as they impact the lives of women custodial workers in the academy. The findings issue a clarion call for institutions of higher education, one of our nation?s longstanding and respected foci of social change, to tap into its available expertise to end oppression, beginning in its own "backyard."Item Poor Talk: Surveying Social Science Discourse on Urban Poverty(2012-10-19) Farias, RubenUnderstanding the dynamic relationship between culture and structure is a fundamental sociological question. Since the founding of the social sciences -- when Marx explored the connection between the 'macrostructure' and popular culture or Weber studied the development of the 'protestant ethic' -- to the present, the structure-culture dynamic has motivated and puzzled researchers. This thesis joins this longstanding conversation by focusing on social science research on poverty, or what is also called poverty knowledge. Despite the tremendous size and breadth of poverty research, historians of poverty suggest that poverty knowledge demonstrates a frame. That is, a coherent, consistent understanding (and thereby study) of poverty. Building on prior research, the thesis seeks to: (1) verify whether poverty knowledge indeed does demonstrate a frame; (2) and if a frame is present, map the contours and shape of a poverty frame. I do so by focusing on social science research focused on urban poverty published from 1960 to 2010. Conducting a content-frame analysis of 50 journal articles randomly sampled from a universe of 781 eligible articles reveals that poverty knowledge does demonstrate elements of a frame. In particular, the sampled articles understand urban poverty as primarily an individual issue, and moreover, demonstrate an ambivalent evaluation of the urban poor's behavior and culture. The pressing question that arises from this research, and which has continued to drive research on the structure-culture dynamic, is: how do existing social practices ('society') - especially systems of inequality such as racism and patriarchy -- influence our cultural understanding of urban poverty specifically and inequality generally. This is an important question for the social sciences in general, but especially for the areas of critical theory, framing research, poststructuralist discourse studies, the sociology of knowledge, and status construction theory.Item The Modernist Imagination: Education of the Senses in Woolf, Mann and Joyce(2012-07-16) Lee, SunJooThis dissertation examines literary modernism as foremost an endeavor that concerns the imagination. Gaston Bachelard, whose studies on material and dynamic imagination provide the theoretical underpinning for the dissertation, defined the imagination as "nothing other than the subject transported inside the things." Reformulation of subject-object relations, clearly suggested in that definition, is indeed an important element in the aesthetics of Bachelard and that of Adorno, another thinker whose thought informs the dissertation. As the principle behind modernist responses to the crisis of the modern world, the crisis Georg Luk?cs captured in the phrase "transcendental homelessness," reformulation of subject-object relations impels the mobilization of creative energies in the way that may very well be called "the modernist imagination." I first state the premise for the dissertation and situates it in the present landscape of modernist scholarship. Then I examine Adorno and Bachelard at the intersections of their thoughts, in preparation for a theory of the modernist imagination. Next I consider Mrs. Dalloway as a modernist probing of the sensual, in which familiar dualisms ? subject vs. object, the external vs. internal, life vs. death, mind vs. body ? collapse. Following this, I examine The Magic Mountain as an attempt at what Adorno calls materialist metaphysics. The novel's preoccupation with death in all its aspects, its problematizing of the human body and the imagination of cold are examined in light of Adorno's view on reviving metaphysics in modernity. Then I read in Ulysses water's lyricism, a lyricism learned from water, into which important modernist themes (not least the ones considered previously in the dissertation) converge. Lastly I look at a film ? Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris ? and a science fiction novel from the 1950s ? Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 ? in light of what may be called the "philosophy" of modernism. The spirit of modernism ? the primacy of the object as a modernist dictum, modernism?s resistance to identity thinking and its dismantling of dualisms ? is shown to continue in genres other than literature and in the period now called "post"-modern.