Browsing by Subject "Marginalization"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Electricity, Marginalization, and Empowerment: For Whom? And Who Decides? Evaluating Participatory Mapping in Río Negro, Honduras
    (2015-08) DeGrave, Jeff
    Participatory mapping's ability to empower its users has come under severe reproach by many scholars. Drawing on these critiques, this ex-post mapping study of the mountain village of Rio Negro, Honduras that employed participatory mapping to prioritize access to electricity through hydro-microturbines echoes and extends these critiques. However, prevailing power structures within the community impacted the decision-making processes, affecting the outcomes of the participatory mapping project. Through various political and social interventions, village elites were able to influence the distribution of the microturbines, further enhancing differences in marginalization and empowerment within the community. Elites successfully directed the participatory mapping exercise toward their interests and continue today to reap the multiple benefits of electrical access. This dissertation assesses how participatory mapping in this exemplary case reinforced existing conditions of marginalization and empowerment over the long term.
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    From Mainstream to East African Charter: East African Muslim Students’ Experiences in U.S. Schools
    (2008-07) Basford, Letitia Elizabeth
    It is in schools where immigrant and refugee youth most directly encounter the dominant and competing cultures of their new society. As youth interface with these cultures, schools become central places for youth to explore the meaning of their own identity and who they are in relation to others. In this study, I explore how East African Muslim immigrant youth experience and become shaped by the environments of U.S. mainstream schools as compared to a charter high school designed by an East African community and intended specifically for East African students. Describing their former experiences in mainstream schools through a lens that is altered by their current experiences attending the charter school, these youth present a failing relationship between mainstream schools and East African Muslim immigrant students. Students report feeling invisible and unwelcome in mainstream schools, experiencing academic discrimination, religious and cultural hostility, and racism. As a response to these difficult experiences and in an effort to maintain their religious and cultural identity, immigrant communities have begun to create specialized schools, like the culturally specific charter school central to this study, which better accommodate their culture, religion, language, and history. At the East African charter school, youth reported no longer feeling marginalized. The once-overwhelming process of trying to “fit in” and “belong” with either dominant society or their home community was ameliorated. Youth became empowered to resist, contest, and/or embrace the dominant and competing cultures of their host society. While not all participants experienced the same degree of academic success or complete satisfaction with the learning milieu of the charter school, ultimately the school environment promoted a positive learning environment where students’ academic and social identities were positively affected. For some participants, the school experience also appeared to repair previously damaged student identities—damage that occurred from prior mainstream school experiences. Results from this study highlight how East African Muslim immigrant youth are affected by academic, racial, cultural and religious discrimination in schools and reveal how differing school contexts serve to affect the overall school experience and identity construction of these youth. Implications are discussed for how schools can decrease the barriers these students face in schools and demonstrate inclusive and necessary ways to accommodate and respect the academic, racial, cultural and religious identity of East African Muslim immigrant youth.
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    Stereotypes and Prototypes: The Causes and Consequences of Intersectional Invisibility
    (2018-06) Williams, Allison
    Although sociologists and legal scholars have posited that the marginalization of Black women stems from disadvantage that emerges at the intersection of race and gender (Crenshaw, 1989), psychologists have only recently begun to generate individual-level theories to help explain this phenomenon. One such theory is the intersectional invisibility model (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), which suggests that the non-prototypicality of Black women, in terms of both race and gender, leads to invisibility and subsequent marginalization. Newer research, however, suggests that non-prototypicality should be considered not only with respect to race or gender, but in terms of the relationship between these two social categories, as Black individuals are considered more masculine than—and Asian individuals more feminine than—White individuals (Galinsky, Hall, & Cuddy, 2013). Indeed, studies have found support for the invisibility of Black women, who are non-prototypical in terms of their gendered-race prototype (Sesko & Biernat, 2010) and for the invisibility of Asian men, who are similarly non-prototypical (Schug, Alt, & Klauer, 2015). The proposed studies are an attempt to reconcile the intersectional invisibility model with gendered race theory by examining whether it is the perceptions of non-prototypicality that lead to invisibility (Study 1), identifying possible mechanisms for this relation (Study 2), and finally, examining whether non-prototypicality and subsequent invisibility indeed lead to marginalization as predicted by the model (Study 3).