Browsing by Subject "critical race theory"
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Item A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of Black Professionals in Employee Networks: Critically Exploring Social Interests and Participatory Learning at Work(2019-02) Sisco, StephanieAlthough there are human resources policies, federal legislation, and workforce protection agencies that seek to minimize racial issues in the workplace, social issues are still a part of the lived experience of all employees, whether they are victims, oppressors, or bystanders of the social imperfections around them. Through the application of a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this study explores the complexities of this time in American history by looking at how Black professionals experience and witness the enigma of racial tension outside of the workplace, as they work in a predominantly White corporate environment and maintain an affiliation to a Black employee network. When examining this phenomenon, Black professional development emerged as an overarching concept that is informed by Black-consciousness, social and participatory learning, and social networks. Additionally, critical race theory (CRT) was used as the primary framework during the data collection and analysis process, which helped to identify the lack of Black representation in leadership as a chief concern and issue in corporate America. Implications from these findings are discussed to challenge human resource development (HRD) and similar fields to be more inclusive and responsive to the needs of social groups, social interests, and alternative learning approaches in organizations.Item Living Enfleshment Otherwise:" Articulating Embodiment Across Transatlantic Modernisms"(2021-06) Rodine, ZoeThis dissertation traces the language authors employ to describe visceral experience in the literature of the past century and asks: how does the way we articulate embodiment reveal the ways we push against our received notions about the body, and how does our language in turn shape the reality of the human body and even shift our definitions of the human? Through an examination of a variety of interdisciplinary texts—novels, poetry, songs, film, live performance, archival documents—I discover a particular resonance between Afrofuturist and modernist models for embodiment that suggest an alternate genealogy of modernist authorship based on a shared aesthetic and ethical project of revisioning the human. The texts this project examines reveal the degree to which the concept of the human body is in no way essentially or naturally true, and has historically been a racializing, exclusionary construct; this dissertation does the essential work of teasing out just how bodies are constructed, identifying three structures that materialize modernist bodies anew. The first chapter describes the undulatory body, tracing the way that waves structure embodiment in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Sun Ra’s music and poetry. The second chapter, which links Mina Loy’s poetry, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and Douglas Kearney’s verse and nonfiction, focuses on the possibilities and limitations of our increasing enmeshment with machines. The final chapter theorizes the horrified body through Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, positing that horror has the potential to productively erode boundaries between bodies. Re-centering the body as a foundational critical concern for modernism and literary studies more broadly reveals the sinews that animate texts by Black and white authors alike, illuminates the long history of resistance to the hegemonic constructions of the body, and provides building blocks for negotiating a twenty-first century subjectivity that goes beyond the previously established boundaries of the human.Item Race Critical Action Research: 8th Grade Global Studies Teachers Move Beyond the Status Quo to Address Issues of Race and Racism in Our Classrooms(2018-05) Andrews van Horne, KateResearch has shown that despite a recent emphasis on issues of race and racism in US society, White teachers struggle to construct adequate learning environments for their students of Color (Epstein, 2009; Martell, 2013; Sleeter, 2017). Further, Milner (2006) posits that when White teachers lose themselves in the “having of good intentions,” their failure to act enshrines the status quo in classrooms. Using race-critical action research, the author presents the work of a group of White female teacher partners (n=6) who collaborated over two years to critically examine the role of race and racism in their teaching practice. Data included transcripts of group meetings, reflective journals and interviews. Building on a framework of sociocultural and race-critical theories, the author explores the role that resistance and appropriation played as the teacher partners worked to improve their anti-racist teaching practice. Specifically, the teacher partners sought to defy deficit-thinking paradigms, redefine power in the classroom, and create a caring classroom climate. Through sociocultural and race-critical analyses, the author finds evidence of what Lensmire (2010) terms an “ambivalent” White racial identity; one that reveals itself to be both race-evasive and race-visible (Jupp and Lensmire, 2016) when enacting anti-racist teacher practice. The author concludes that collaboration and critical reflection are essential conditions for surfacing these paradoxes and deepening anti-racist teacher practice.Item These Are Stories About Our Bodies: Collective Memory Work and the Pedagogical Imaginaries of Our Teacher Bodies(2016-06) Stutelberg, ErinMuch of the current work on bodies in schools and classrooms is, appropriately, focused on a critical examination of the docile bodies (Foucault, 1995) of students and the violence inflicted on them. But teachers’ bodies are also subjected to surveillance, management, and control by larger systems of power, and thus get marked, erased, and constructed in precarious and oppressive ways. These systems harness teachers’ bodies to normalizing narratives of individualism, the hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, and the Cartesian mind/body binary. As a result, teachers are left feeling disembodied, and yet, our teacher bodies—discursively and materially—still “come up” in the classroom, often in unsettling, painful, or surprising ways. Our memories of our teacher bodies become stories that we use to tell ourselves into existence and they continually shape our pedagogies, practices, and relationships with students. In this study, eight beginning women English teachers and I took up a feminist post-structuralist methodology called collective memory work (Haug, 1987, 1999; Davies & Gannon, 2006) to access, analyze, theorize, and challenge our memories of our teacher bodies. Through our analyses of these memories we critically engaged with theories of teaching and learning and identified and (de)constructed narratives of race, gender, sexuality, and age that are reproduced in our classrooms every day. This study reveals how, if teachers are asked to engage in research that is collective, critical, and participatory, we build new pedagogical imaginaries through which we can learn from our own bodies and the bodies of our students.Item What Matters for Black Students? A Question of Sense of Belonging, Campus Climate, Perceived Discrimination, Gender, and Institutional Satisfaction(2015-07) Dade, ShariIn an effort to understand what matters for Black students attending predominately White educational institutions, the purpose of this study was to predict relationships among psychosocial factors, person factors, and environmental factors, and institutional satisfaction within this population. I hypothesized that Black students' sense of belonging, perceptions of campus climate for diversity and diverse perceptions, witnessed discrimination, experienced discrimination, and gender would be predictive of their institutional satisfaction. Additionally, I hypothesized there would be significant differences in Black students' sense of belonging, perceptions of campus climate, witnessed discrimination, experienced discrimination, and institutional satisfaction as a function of gender. Participants in this study were comprised of 228 Black undergraduate students who were representative of students at various stages of their undergraduate careers ranging from 1st semester (incoming) first year to 2nd semester (graduating) senior, from a Midwestern public research university. Of the participants, 43.8% (n = 74) were male, and 56.2% (n = 95) were female, with ages ranging from 18-54, and with a mean age of 21.22. Data consisted of a secondary analysis of an archival dataset. Procedures used to collect the data that were analyzed are described in this section. Data regarding social belonging, perceptions of campus climate, students' witnessed discrimination, students' experience of discrimination, and students' institutional satisfaction were measured by scales from the Diverse Learning Environments (DLE) Core Survey created by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI; http://www.heri.ucla.edu/dleoverview.php) at the University of California, Los Angeles (Hurtado & Guillermo-Wann, 2013). Results of a standard multiple regression suggested that 55% of the variance in institutional satisfaction was predicted by sense of belonging, perceptions of campus climate, witnessed discrimination, experienced discrimination, and gender; with campus climate shown to have the strongest relationship to institutional satisfaction. Results of a one-way multivariate analysis of variance revealed no significant differences in sense of belonging, perceptions of campus climate, witnessed discrimination, experienced discrimination, and institutional satisfaction by gender. In discussing and describing needed interventions, critical race theory was utilized to highlight the role race and racism plays in the experiences and perceptions of Black college students within the educational system. Limitations, implications, and recommendations for future research and practice are also outlined.