Browsing by Subject "race"
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Item Adoption and American Empire: Migration, Race-making, and the Child, 1845-1988(2017-02) Condit-Shrestha, KellyIn the United States, between 1854 and 1929, more than 150,000 working class youth were transported by “orphan trains” from their urban eastern city homes to live with families in the (primarily) rural American West. Since 1953, more than 150,000 adopted Korean children have migrated into U.S. families. Both during and in-between these orphan trains and Korean adoptions, Americans have also experimented with such child placement practices linked to nineteenth century black codes and boarding schools, twentieth century child welfare movements (at home and abroad), and postwar international adoptions. As patterns of mobility and migration have changed alongside technology and transportation modernization, imperial expansion, and the growth and consolidation of nation-states, child placement practices have also changed. Reflecting the specificity of each time and place, adoption and child placement discourse has historically been rife with tensions between sentiment and economics, exploitation and humanitarianism. While adoption implies the permanent transfer of a child away from the biological parent(s) to another person, the reasons, motivations, social practices, as well as the legal and cultural parameters of adoption have changed dramatically and unevenly in the modern era of nation-states. My dissertation utilizes “child placement” as its central frame of analysis to more accurately document the wide array of practices in U.S history that have historically involved the separation of children from their birth parents, to live under the authority of other adults. Adoption and American Empire examines the relationship between migration, race-making, and child placement as central and strategic components in America’s consolidation as a nation-state and expansion as a global empire, between 1845 and 1988. In three parts that transverse the historical periods of U.S. Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, interwar years, and post-World War II, I document continuity and transformation between older forms of child placement undertaken for child labor needs (such as with African American children during Reconstruction) and modern forms of adoption for humanitarian or sentimental reasons (including refugee and “orphan” children from West Germany). By linking these histories, I demonstrate that child placement is always inextricably tied to United States’ practices and discourses of empire and race. Few scholars have explored the linkages between these different forms of child placement. By employing the methods of social and cultural history, as well as multiple scales of analysis (comparative, regional, national, transnational) across an expansive archive of source material (state, immigration, and U.S. military government law, regional and national newspapers, the ethnic press, government reports, the U.S. congressional record, and archival documents), I illuminate the historic continuities and structures of power embedded in these seemingly disconnected practices. Ultimately, my dissertation contends that Americans’ practices of child placement and adoption have served as powerful tools of U.S. empire, employed widely when their implementation would assist the nation’s larger geopolitical and economic objectives. Always undergirded by nationalist racial logics, the children themselves would be increasingly valued as they came to encompass both the real and symbolic vision of how the United States imagined itself, or wished to be imagined, by its global peers.Item Applicability of Emerging Adulthood Theory to Ethnically and Educationally Diverse Young Adults(2015-05) Mitchell, LaurenEmerging adulthood (EA) theory proposes that youth are increasingly postponing adult role transitions such as marriage, parenthood, and committing to long-term careers, and instead experiencing age 18-30 as a time of instability, open possibilities, and identity exploration (Arnett, 2004). However, critics suggest that EA theory applies only to White, college-educated youth (e.g., Hendry & Kloep, 2007; Arnett et al., 2011). The present study addresses this critique by comparing White, college-educated young adults to youth from other racial/ethnic and educational groups. Using data from the Add Health national sample, we compare these groups on outcomes relevant to EA theory: employment, career acquisition, marriage, desire for marriage, and parenthood. Findings suggest that White college graduates youth generally fit Arnett's (2004) description of emerging adulthood, but White youth with only some college experience do not fit the EA pattern well. Furthermore, youth with no college experience frequently diverged from the EA pattern as well. Many groups seemed like emerging adults in some domains but not others. Implications for EA theory and the study of non-students are discussed.Item Atomic Hospitality: Asian Migrant Scientists Meet the U.S. South(2013-12) Tang, JasmineThis multidisciplinary project concerns the racialization of Asian Americans in the U.S. South, especially in the wake of the 1965 immigration act that recruited scientists to the U.S. nation-state. Specifically, the Asian American presence in east Tennessee involves regional, national, and international discourses surrounding two primary sites of tension: the constructs of national security and of spoken accent. Now home of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the "secret city" of Oak Ridge was created in the 1940s to aid the construction of the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima. Drawing from interviews with over thirty individuals, I argue that the post-1965 Asian migrant scientists at ORNL are part of what I call "national security migration," which involves individuals recruited to work on projects of interest to the national security of a nation-state not of their birth. Asian national security migrants inherit a particular history in which race, migration, citizenship, and science are inextricably tied, reproducing and complicating the narrative of Asians as perpetual foreigners particularly in the context of the U.S. national security state. HASH(0x7f93a252ca38) This project also features an historical analysis of a controversy in east Tennessee about a public monument, the Oak Ridge International Friendship Bell. Revolving around memory and the bomb, the debate was highly racialized, with anti-Asian (particularly anti-Japanese) sentiment front and center. Thus, I contend that discourses of "yellow peril" and national security are historically perpetuated and infused in the South. The second site of tension involves language and accent. If Asian migrants are often perceived to be speaking with a foreign accent, then southerners are marked by their southern accents, too: analyzing the interplay of these accents reveals the way Asian Americans disrupt traditional understandings of the South as a region. This disruption emerges in the experiences of Asian migrant scientists (at work and in the surrounding community) and also in the experiences of the U.S.-born second generation, as seen through my close reading of a performance by comedian Henry Cho, a Korean American Tennessean. HASH(0x7f93a31951d0) Finally, questions around language emerge methodologically as well. Interrupting the organizational writing structure of this project, I insert an extended discussion of the possibility of a feminist, Asian Americanist transcription methodology to be employed when researching multilingual Asian migrant communities in the U.S. nation-state. Taken together, these sites of tension speak to the nuances of the contemporary Asian American South.Item "Climate-Smart" Seeds: Race, Science, and Security in the Global Green Revolution(2019-06) Eddens, AaronThis dissertation connects the racial logics and transnational ties of the Green Revolution—Cold War-era American-led agricultural development projects across the Global South—to a range of contemporary Western development projects seeking to cultivate a “Green Revolution for Africa.” Scholars have critiqued the Green Revolution’s links to U.S. foreign policy, exacerbation of rural inequalities, and environmental impacts. Yet, for the world’s most powerful development institutions, it remains a “success story” that guides policy and practice. Understanding this staying power, I argue, demands asking how the prevailing knowledge about the Green Revolution is inextricable from racial logics. Combining archival research from the records of the earliest Green Revolution projects with in-depth interviews with agricultural scientists working on development projects in East Africa, I show how Green Revolution projects are rooted in racialized thinking about poverty, security, and development. Drawing on history, geography, critical race studies, and indigenous studies, the dissertation’s chapters provide an intellectual genealogy of the key ideas that have shaped the global Green Revolution. Chapter one compares the Green Revolution’s central figure, Nobel Prize-winning plant breeder Norman Borlaug, to the Green Revolution for Africa’s most recognizable backer: Bill Gates. Both figures, I argue, share racialized framings of poverty as a security threat and Africa as a “frontier.” Chapter two shows how American scientists working in Mexico in the 1940s used ideas about the racial inferiority of indigenous people to justify their efforts to collect indigenous varieties of maize from throughout the country. Chapter three examines a contemporary effort to bring genetically modified maize to smallholder farmers in East Africa. I argue that the project’s mission to improve the plight of smallholder farmers with biotech crops reproduces racialized narratives that yoke improvement and the expansion of private property. Finally, chapter four traces parallel logics across U.S. Global Food security strategy, national security strategy, and new crop insurance schemes in East Africa, connecting this intersection to histories of racialized finance and U.S. Empire. Ultimately, the dissertation insists on the need to foreground discussions of race and racialization in debates about agricultural development in an era of climate change.Item The ‘Coloured Question’ and the University of Pretoria: Separate Development, Trusteeship and Self Reliance, 1933-2012(2018-12) Thumbran, JanekeThis dissertation is about a historically white university’s engagement with what is called the ‘coloured question.’ It explores how the University of Pretoria (UP) grappled with the question of where ‘coloureds’ belonged politically, socially and economically in apartheid South Africa – specifically through the disciplines of sociology and social work. In doing so, this institution produced knowledge that would shape and inform this racial category – not only through writing, teaching and curriculum development – but also by appropriating the segregated and local township of Eersterust as a site of disciplinary intervention, from the time of this coloured community’s creation during apartheid in 1962, to the post-apartheid and neoliberal present. In the post-apartheid period, these forms of knowledge have re-emerged through the university’s recently established mandate of community engagement, which was accompanied by a disciplinary shift away from the social sciences, towards the material discipline of architecture. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the various ways in which the disciplinary reason of the university informed, shaped and converged with the instrumental reason of the apartheid state to produce forms of racialized subjection, using the University of Pretoria’s appropriation of Eersterust as a particular example. In addition, the purpose is to problematize and historicize the persistence of apartheid’s racial categories – like the ‘coloured’ category – and forms of knowledge production in post-apartheid universities. This project’s purpose not only ties in with widespread calls to decolonize the university made through recent student protests in South Africa, but asks how we might begin to envision a university ‘after’ apartheid, by calling attention to a form of subjection that lies at the heart of apartheid’s racial premises: that of the ‘coloured’ subject and its instrumentalization in the practices of university disciplinesItem Community Development Efforts in Central St Paul.(2004) Krebs, ThomasItem Community Housing Review: Greater Longfellow Community 2002.(2003) Sjogren, MerrieItem Directory of Nonprofit Organizations of Color in Minnesota, Third Edition, February 1997.(Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1997) Smith, Frederick W.Item Directory of Nonprofit Organizations of Color in Minnesota.(Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1992) Smith, Frederick W.Item Directory of Nonprofit Organizations of Color in Minnesota. Second Edition.(Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1993) Smith, Frederick W.Item Empathy at the Intersection(2015-09) Rodriguez, TanyaOne of the ways that art contributes to society is by preventing anesthesia of the heart. The aesthetic experience characteristically makes us more alive, vibrant, and open to possibilities. Aesthetic experience need not be limited to the “fine arts,” of course. In this project, I consider a broad variety of media, including jokes, modernist poetry, Greek tragedy, literature, film, and conversation. What these forms of aesthetic communication have in common is their ability to tell stories. I will argue certain features of narrative that (typically set aside as ethical considerations) have aesthetic relevance insofar as they affect our engagement with the story. I do not intend to minimize the differences between racist jokes and Anna Karenina nor blur the distinction mundane conversation and the poetry of Robert Frost. I invite the reader to indulge my choice of examples, as I am mainly interested in a particular aspect these art forms share—narrative structure and aesthetic affect. My terminology (empathy/sympathy/etc) is not constructed as an end, but only as a means; insofar as they clarify these shared aspects for my defense of ethicism. There are three ways one might understand ethicism with respect to jokes: 1. Moral defects detract from aesthetic value (humor). 2. Aesthetic defects have moral impact. 3. Certain moral defects have a structure that is aesthetically flawed. Although, I do not disagree with the first two claims, it is my intent to argue for the third claim.Item From what made the “Red Man Red” to Moana: Exploring how BIPOC members of Generation Z interpret Disney’s corporate history.(2023-05) Harisiadis, ChristinaThis thesis investigated how BIPOC members of Generation Z understand corporate racial diversity statements and how their understanding is informed by organizational history. Focus groups were conducted at a large Midwestern university with questions exploring participant sentiments surrounding corporate racial diversity statements and organizational history, broadly as well as looking Disney’s initiatives specifically. Findings demonstrate that people hold a critical but understanding attitude towards racial diversity statements and organizational history. Furthermore, people are still willing to engage with companies if it suits their needs.Item “I’ll Let You Know How It Goes”: Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach in an Urban Partnership High School(2016-06) Beaton Zirps, JehanneDrawing heavily from narrative inquiry, arts-based research, portraiture, and fiction-based research methodologies (Barone, 2008, 2010; Barone & Eisner, 1997, 2006, 2012; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1977; Leavy, 2013; Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Rolling, 2013), the author has written a postmodern dissertation, told from multiple points of view, about the intersections of learning to teach, preparing urban teachers, and working between and within the worlds of theory- and research-driven teacher education and practice-based public schools. The collection combines first- and third-person narrative, poetry, fiction, and portraiture to examine complex questions about racism and urban teacher preparation, who and what makes a good teacher, and ways in which success is measured when it comes to learning to teach, teaching, and learning.Item Liberty, Guns, And Pocket Constitutions: Constructing A White Nation Through Legal Discourse In The Pacific Northwest(2022-04) Wright, RobinThis dissertation investigates the mainstreaming of far-right politics by examining the production of a right-wing discourse focused on the radical defense of the U.S. Constitution in the Pacific Northwest. Despite its progressive image, The Pacific Northwest is a compelling site for analysis, as Euro-American settlers have long sought to render the region as a place reserved for white residents. Through a series of case studies exploring campaigns ranging from gun ownership to First Amendment rights, I argue that activists mobilize a conservative constitutional discourse to re-establish white territorial control at the local and regional level. Examining the circulation of this conservative constitutional discourse, I demonstrate the extent to which activists use constitutionally coded-appeals to position white able-bodied men as the legitimate representatives of “the people.” I show that in doing so, activists engage a constitutional discourse that reproduces the legal, political, and cultural conditions of possibility for white supremacist systems while disavowing an explicit logic of racial superiority. My research demonstrates how right-wing movements use a constitutional discourse to channel regional concerns about changing demographics and shifting representation into white nationalist demands. I thus contend that this constitutional discourse enables a paradoxical turn to extra-legal and sometimes violent actions, as right-wing activists disrupt and delegitimize state action while asserting their own popular authority as the sovereign. My dissertation makes an important contribution to geography, critical race studies, and legal studies by showing how a socio-spatial analysis of law must be mobilized in order to understand the shifting ideologies of race shaping contemporary right-wing movements.Item A New Direction for Race Relations in America(2016-09-07) Cunningham, GaryItem Nonprofit Organizations of Color in Minnesota: An Overview and Directory.(Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1992) Smith, Frederick W.Item Nonprofit Organizations of Color in Minnesota: An Overview and Directory.(Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1991) Smith, Frederick W.Item Over-Medicated Boys and Girls Down the Well: The Politically Awkward ‘Imaginaries’ of Education Liaisons in the U.S. and Pakistan(2016-03) Miric, SuzanneThis study explores the lived experiences of education liaisons in Minnesota and Pakistan in the context of cultural myths of modern educational progress, as envisioned in world society theory. Using a multi-sited ethnographic and narrative inquiry approach with 10 core participants over a discontinuous, more than five-year time period, it finds that an important aspect of education liaisons’ work is re-interpreting and re-working dominate social imaginaries of the meaning of mass education, such as those involving urban Black communities in the U.S. and rural, Pashto-speaking communities in Pakistan. This study both supported and challenged aspects of world society theory, resulting in four core analytical themes emerging from the work of liaisons: The social construction of marginality and its imaginations as an institutionalized expertise; the importance of ‘awkward’ political social imaginaries in relation to educational myth-making as everyday liaison work; understanding institutionalized manifestations of power and silence as enduring practices of bewitchment, and the tensions of engaging with particular legacies of racial and gender oppression, while constructing imaginative possibilities and social identities in institutional contexts. This study contains practical recommendations for educational policy and practice.Item Race Talk In The Classroom: Whiteness, Emotionality, And Antiracism(2020-05) Lally, KevinLike many classroom teachers, I long understood antiracist pedagogy as white privilege pedagogy (McIntosh, 1988), where students must confess to their privilege to embrace antiracism. By leaving young white people with untenable models of understanding themselves as raced beings, this work has, to put it generously, come up short. Using critical ethnographic methods, I seek to make better sense of these sincere shortcomings by locating them in historical (Allen, 2012; Roediger, 1991) and emotional (Boler, 1999; Trainor, 2008; Zembylas, 2006) contexts. I worked with ten white high school students over the final five months of their senior year. We attempted to work through the constrained and paradoxical ways they understood race and race talk. We worked through their struggles with the languages and patterns of race talk, their inadequate schooling on race, and their inability to manifest their antiracist values. I find that the discourses available to them, in particular white privilege pedagogy, limit their capacity to both imagine themselves as antiracist actors and take up antiracist actions. I suggest that by examining and unpacking the discursive binds attendant to their race talk (Pollock, 2004), and by making visible the historical and emotional contexts of their understandings of themselves as raced beings, educators can more effectively guide young white people toward antiracism.Item Repairing trust: How newspapers responded to diversity, equity and inclusion discourse in the summer of 2020(2022-07) Ganguli, TaniaAfter George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, the transnational conversation about racism and anti-blackness caused the newspaper industry to consider its past behavior with respect to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). This thesis uses a textual analysis of DEI statements published by top U.S. newspapers, which include metajournalistic discourse about race, and case studies of two U.S. newspapers to analyze how U.S. newspapers responded to calls for improved DEI in the summer of 2020. Newspapers often attempted to defend their past behavior even as they communicated a desire to build trust with marginalized audiences. Although the amount of metajournalistic discourse about a newspaper’s DEI initiatives was not predictive of DEI actions, public discussions of a newspaper’s failings might serve as a precursor to real, concrete change.