Browsing by Subject "Racism"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    Exhibiting Racism: How collections of difficult cultural heritage are (not) being presented at two universities in the Midwest United States
    (2022-12) Hammer, Jennifer K.
    This paper is about the study and practice of presenting cultural heritage material remains of systemic racism, a form of "difficult cultural heritage" that challenges the "dominant culture narrative" with a "negative self-history". A literature review defines terms, situates the subject within museum history and trends, shows how it is relevant to current scholarship, and connects it to contemporary U.S. cultural debates and museum practices; thus revealing an industry-standard framework that can be used in the exhibition of difficult cultural heritages. This framework is then applied to current exhibition practices at two Midwest university organizations -- the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan -- concluding with recommendations for the organizations, followed by discussion and reflection.
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    Hmoobness: Hmoob (Hmong) Youth And Their Perceptions Of Hmoob Language In A Small Town In The Midwest
    (2018-04) Xiong, Xong
    For thousands of years, Hmoob culture and traditional knowledge survived by being passed down orally from one generation to the next through sacred ceremonial songs, poetry, gatherings, and folklore. For oral cultures, languages becomes an important vehicles in the passing of one’s culture, especially from the Elders to the youth (Thao, 2006). This phenomenological study draws upon Indigenous methodologies and adaptation of grounded theory (Smith, 1999; Creswell, 2013; Kovack, 2010). The research seeks to understand 1) the perceptions of Hmoob youth of their language; 2) the relationship Hmoob youth have to their language, and 3) what they believe are barriers to Hmoob language acquisition. The research found that Hmoob youth cared deeply about their language and culture and believe barriers to language acquisition includes racism, bias curriculum, and the pressures to assimilate and conform. The research also found that Hmoob youth have many questions, and concerns regarding the survival, revitalization, and maintenance of their language. The recommendations are for the Hmoob community, cultural workers, practitioners of Hmoob language and schools.
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    The Melancholy of Schooling: A Critical Ethnographic Study of Race, Trauma, and Learning in a High School English Classroom
    (2017-06) Grinage, Justin
    This year-long critical ethnographic study discusses the difficulties that arose when a multiracial class of 12th grade high school English students engaged in learning surrounding the reality of racism in the United States amid public displays of police brutality. Most notably, three high-profile cases of racial violence committed against black males, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, took place within five months of each other and coincided with the school year that I conducted my fieldwork for this study. Using the psychoanalytic concept of racial melancholia (Cheng, 2001) as a theoretical framework, I demonstrate how repressed forms of racial trauma and grief are experienced through the process of teaching and learning and how these processes are connected to larger formations of American racialization. My analyses focuses on the psycho-social (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008) construction, production, and transmission of trauma in the context of learning about race in the classroom. I place racial melancholia in conversation with theories of history (Benjamin, 1969), mourning (Freud, 1917), emotion (Ahmed, 2004), haunting (Frosh, 2013), whiteness (Thandeka, 1999) and affect (Massumi, 2015) to document the various ways that both the students and the classroom teacher struggled to learn and teach about racism. I argue that melancholic trauma and racial loss permeates American identities as a result of the nation’s extensive history of denying its racial transgressions. The implications of the study emphasize that we must learn to identify and work through unresolved racial grief if we are to improve our comprehension of race and engender anti-racist agency in the face of persistent systemic and individual acts of racial subjugation. This dissertation makes a distinct contribution to social justice approaches to education by underscoring the generative and productive possibilities for designing curriculum and employing critical pedagogies that center on understanding racial trauma.
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    Our bikes in the middle of the street: community-building, racism and gentrification in urban bicycle advocacy
    (2013-06) Hoffmann, Melody Lynn
    It is no surprise to people living in U.S. urban spaces that bicycling continues its ascent into popularity. Neighborhoods and cities across the country are now committed to making their spaces welcoming to bicyclists which include bicycling events, bicycle lanes, and businesses that cater to cyclists. In my time as an urban bicycle commuter, I have noticed that a particular bicyclist is being hailed by neighborhoods and cities--one that has both racial and class privilege. Through my ethnographic research in three U.S. cities I have confirmed my suspicion that the bicycle signifies different values and meanings to different bicycling demographics. In this dissertation I ultimately argue that the "rolling signification" of the bicycle contributes to its ability to build community, influence gentrifying urban planning, and reify and obscure systemic race and class barriers. I begin my dissertation with a case study on the Riverwest 24, a 24-hour bicycle race, and how its organizers and participants build community but I complicate this understanding of community building by exploring the neighborhood's long history of activism and its spatial connection to a major segregation line. The importance of a neighborhood's history as it intersects with bicycle advocacy is made clear in my second case study in Portland, Oregon where neighbors clashed, along racial lines, about renovating a specific bicycle lane. And thus I argue that the Black residents and history rooted in Black culture in Portland's Albina neighborhood produce a haunting (Gordon, 1997) within the reconstruction of that bicycle lane. In my final case study I explore whether the theory that bicycle lanes can lead to gentrification holds any merit. In Minneapolis I have found evidence that the local government is coopting bicycle infrastructure to recruit educated, upwardly mobile people--with little regard to its impact on residents who fall outside of that demographic. This cooptation is wrapped up in power relations that allow the city government and "creative class" to define what a sustainable and livable city looks like. This dissertation makes a rather large intervention in Communication Studies as it illustrates the importance of rich description, spatial analysis, and ethnography in our scholarship.
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    The Paradoxical Twenty-Fifth: Performance, Race, and Conditional Belonging on the American Imperial Frontier, 1882-1918
    (2024) Dollison, Natalie
    The Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regimental Band was part of only four segregated Black Army regiments assembled from the Union’s Black volunteer units in the aftermath of the Civil War. Through nearly eight decades of public entertainment, the Band’s performances were both carefully circumscribed as well as spontaneous, choreographed but with room for improvisation. The Band not only acted as military public relations. It was instrumental in the production of a historical consciousness that bound the expanding settler citizenry of new U.S. territories to the idea of nationhood and to the places to which these settlers felt newly entitled. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, I examine performance as both discourse and ritual mediated by the standards of the Department of War, making the Band’s performances a valuable tool of the ideological state apparatus. The Band’s performances were in support of the ideology of the United States but were also a site of struggle over its terms. That struggle took place in the medium of performance. This dissertation analyzes these performances and how the Band adapted to the changing boundaries of American geography and cultural memory through a variety of frameworks focusing on the visual, aural, and kinesthetic qualities of each type of performance. The musicians’ performative dynamic with a given audience was necessarily reconfigured each time the regiment was assigned to a new location. With each move, the Band contended with novel intersections of the U.S. settler and imperial project and the myriad social relations—interethnic, interracial, and international—that undergirded them.
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    The place of race in cultural nursing education: the experience of white BSN nursing faculty
    (2011-01) Holland, Ann Elizabeth
    The growing cultural diversity in the United States confronts human service professions such as nursing with challenges to fundamental values of social justice and caring. Non-White individuals have experienced long-documented and persistent disparities in health outcomes and receipt of health care services when compared to whites. Medical evidence suggests that health care disparities experienced by non-Whites in the U.S. are perpetuated, in part, by bias, discrimination, and stereotyping by health care providers. National experts recommend cultural competence education to fix this problem. The cultural competence focus in nursing education programs has been criticized by some nursing scholars for essentializing culture and failing to examine the dynamics of race and racism in U.S. society. Yet, the call for an explicit focus on race and racism raises the question, "Are nursing faculty, of whom 93% are White, prepared to teach students about race and racism?" This study investigated what White nursing faculty members who teach cultural nursing education think, believe, and teach about race, racism, and anti-racism. The study resulted in four conclusions that are of interest not only to nursing faculty who teach cultural topics, but to any nursing faculty who wish to prepare students to work for justice in a culturally and racially diverse society. First, the findings suggest that the Whiteness of the participants' personal and professional experiences and contexts obscured their understanding and teaching of race, racism, and anti-racism. Second, learning about race, racism, and anti-racism was best understood as a lifelong developmental process and warrants developmental learning goals. Third, teaching about race, racism, and anti-racism was most effective when grounded in relational, holistic pedagogies. Finally, the findings of the study suggest that the White faculty participants were not well prepared to teach about race, racism, and anti-racism, in most cases lacking the intention and academic knowledge to incorporate these topics into their culture courses. This study has implications for White nursing educators and administrators and offers recommendations to assist them in taking individual and systemic actions that may facilitate teaching and learning about race, racism, and anti-racism.
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    Renaming Campus Buildings: A Step Towards Reparations at the University of Minnesota
    (2019-04) Holly, Lauren
    Most of the buildings that make up the University of Minnesota campus have been around since the university was founded in 1851. Many of these buildings have remained permanent fixtures on campus and each holds with it a history, and, of course, a name. However, four of these buildings–Coffey Hall, Coffman Memorial Union, Middlebrook Hall, and Nicholson Hall–are named after individuals who held a vision for the University of Minnesota much different from the U we see today. The men whom the buildings are named after were claimed to uphold racist ideals and promote discrimination during their time on campus. I set out to learn about the history behind these buildings and to explore the current efforts to have them renamed. I also wanted to learn more about individuals who resisted oppression at the university at this time.
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    Review of Circle of Fire by Evelyn Coleman
    (Voices from the Gaps, 2005) Thompson, Ross
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    Staging Race in a "Post-Racial" age: contemporary collaborations between mainstream and culturally specific theatres in the United States
    (2014-12) Lein Walseth, Stephanie
    This dissertation examines the ways in which artists and administrators from mainstream and culturally specific theater companies in the United States negotiate vexed racial histories, complex racial representations, and material inequalities in contemporary partnerships. Though these collaborations mark a progressive step towards increasing racial inclusion on prominent American stages and subsequently within the national imaginary, they simultaneously constrain the transformative, social justice oriented goals that culturally specific theaters aim to achieve. Thus, I contend that these partnerships do not herald the definitive achievement of racial equality in the field of theater. Instead, they involve constant negotiation between companies' competing aesthetic, philosophical, and political missions, and their differing economic realities. In these sites, companies enter into delicate and contested territory, navigating between inclusion and imperialism, neighborliness and benevolent patriarchy: race is both celebrated and ignored, hyper-visible and repressed, the underpinning motivator for the collaboration and the not-to-be-discussed specter haunting every decision. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that these sites of cross-cultural engagement are not simply victories in the long march of civil rights progress, as they are often framed for the public, but rather are dynamic and contentious "contact zones" - sites of conflict, tension, collision, and compromise - that reveal the persistence of racism in limiting equality in the field. When the celebratory multicultural and post-racial rhetorics of "good stories" and "visibility" frame these partnerships, the consequence is that culturally specific artists must conform to liberal humanist standards (as commonly human or distinctly other) and aesthetic norms (through Western, Aristotelian dramatic structures) in order to be recognized. As such, culturally specific theater companies are looking to other venues, relationships, and interracial coalitions to ensure their long-term sustainability.
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    "What's the big deal?": recognition of racism and impairment of cognitive functioning.
    (2012-08) Tran, Giac-Thao (Alisia) Thanh
    Resource depletion theories posit that cognitive resources exist in a limited pool. Thus, stressful stimuli can produce impairment on subsequent cognitive tasks, as limited resources (e.g., attentional or regulatory processes) are directed toward managing this initial stressor or task. Using experimental methodology, the study applied resource depletion theories to examine the effects of recognizing the existence of racism in American society in a White American undergraduate sample. The investigation examined impairments in cognitive functioning (i.e., executive functioning in Study 1 and creative mental processes in Study 2) and psychological functioning that were presumed to occur because racism acts as a stressor with the potential to arouse strong emotional responses and deplete resources. Study results suggested recognition of racism had some effects on cognitive and psychological functioning, but the results were limited and inconsistent. Of primary interest, recognizing racism only had a marginal effect on creativity in the form of ideational fluency, whereas recognizing discrimination resulted in fewer errors on a computerized Stroop task in one experimental procedure, thus contradicting predictions and a resource depletion perspective.