This qualitative multiple participant case study examined Mexican American womens experiences at the intersection of race and gender in public high school. Mexican American womens experiences cannot be isolated and described independently in terms of either race or gender. The intersection of race and gender for Mexican American women has not been investigated fully. The few studies that include Mexican American females focus on dropouts and emphasize at risk factors such as gender, race, socioeconomic status, and language. Consequently, the gaps in the empirical literature are caused in part by the shortage of research on Mexican American women and the propensity toward examining Mexican American women from the deficit perspective. Critical Race Theory was the framework for the analysis and the interpretation in this study. The significant findings of this research support CRT, in that racism is prevalent and ordinary in the daily the lives of Mexican American females. The findings of the study included: First, racism is endemic and pervasive in public education. Second, colorblindness is the notion from which many educational entities operate. Third, the participants perceive social justice as the solution to ending all forms of racism and oppression. Finally, navigating the system is necessary to learn to be academically successful. The results contribute to the limited research on Mexican American women at the intersection of race and gender and the racism experienced in public high school to the overall CRT research in education, and in particular, to LatCrit research.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon announced the “Vietnamization” of the Vietnam War, a handover of responsibility for winning the war from the U.S. to its allies, the South Vietnamese. Vietnamization articulated the challenges of achieving political freedom and historical agency for South Vietnamese people. Conceptualizing this term in the early 21st century, I seek to address the ways the war and its subjects) is called into the present to speak about the representability and addressability of the South Vietnamese now. My chapters examine different figurations of South Vietnamese as subjects of modern discourse in the U.S., Vietnam and the diaspora showing how they are resignified and reimagined not simply as the “lost” side of history but those phantoms of the past that must be recognized and reconciled in a post-millennial moment characterized by the “Vietnam Syndrome.” I argue that the South Vietnamese historical experience remains the inassimilable trace of war and product of geo)political history that poses challenges to how the war is traditionally remembered and for whom. Employing a cultural studies and Foucaultean genealogical approach, I analyze contemporary efforts to reconfigure and incorporate South Vietnamese historicity. The first chapter on a U.S.-based Vietnam War archive examines how American recent efforts to represent and include Vietnamese American refugees in their memory work and historical preservation is another instance of Vietnamization that tries to give “voice” to the South Vietnamese without contending with the political contradictions such inclusion entails. The second chapter on the 2006 film Living in Fear depicts postwar struggles of a South Vietnamese soldier trying to survive in post-reunification Vietnam clearing landmines left by Americans—the enduring consequence of Vietnamization. I end with an examination of a protest over a Vietnamese American art exhibit in Orange County and how the issue of anticommunism that emerged from it revives the unassimilable memories and politicized histories of former refugees from South Vietnam. This last chapter illustrates how the South Vietnamese war memory is not a matter for assimilation into contemporary discourse but provides the grounds for endless conflict in negotiating the terms of a war that for many never truly ended.

This dissertation examines the historical, institutional, and interactional dimensions of Taino activism in Puerto Rico. Particularly, I consider how the presumed extinction of the Taino in Puerto Rico has served to limit their claims to indigeneity as well as the role that they can play in public policy debates concerning the management of indigenous human remains and sacred sites. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, I argue that Taino activists address and reconfigure widespread historical narratives within everyday interactions. I propose that Taino activists seek to reposition the histories that erase them by focusing particularly on three factors: (1) the incongruity between the life stories and documents that inform prevalent historical narratives premised on the Taino extinction and the personal and filial trajectories that inform current claims to being Taino, (2) the ensuing discrepant interpretations of ambiguous terms in historical documents, and (3) the repair of Taino erasure through the active reclamation of Taino identity in cultural and linguistic terms. I examine how these incongruities, ambiguities and repairs materialize at various levels of social action: within discursive and interactional realignments, through recruitment encounters, in the socialization of novices, in the course of creating a Taino script, throughout the manufacture of Taino speech forms, and in bureaucratic encounters. The dissertation shows how these social dimensions have been involved in the recent public emergence of Taino as an increasingly visible social identification in Puerto Rico.

My dissertation argues that many Victorians mediated their ambivalent relationships with their imperial subjects through interracial romances in literature, and that these narratives flourished even when British colonial authorities discouraged actual interracial romances. I contend that most of these works do not function as transgressive challenges to Victorian racial ideology, but are ways to acknowledge British desires and fears for their colonial subjects. The interracial narratives manipulate Victorian romantic conventions–especially female sexual agency and male display–in order to heighten or dampen their sexual allure. The free choice of the imperial hero by an attractive native in these narratives validates the superiority of the hero, while sexual coercion by the imperial antihero shows his or her fall into savagery. Not only did interracial romances offer an avenue for Victorians to express their desires and fears, I contend that the complexity of interracial relationships allowed British authors to explore the complexity of local colonial politics. My project examines a range of canonical and non-canonical authors including Aleph Bey, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Meadows Taylor, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose settings for their interracial relationships span India, the South Seas, Jamaica, and Africa. Specific cultural practices–like the taboo traditions in the South Seas, widow abuse in India, and racism in Britain–became ways for the Victorians to acknowledge, and sometimes tame, colonized culture. The varied nature of these relationships reflects changes in attitudes toward the colonies during the nineteenth century and changes in their relationships with different colonized peoples and cultures. The flexibility of these narratives allowed the Victorians to express their divergent and contradictory impressions of indigenous people. I contend that this diversity suggests that Victorians did not have a single racial ideology or belief in “the Other,” but a variety of “racisms” and “others.”

Tracing the genre from its nineteenth-century antecedents to its present-day incarnations, my dissertation argues that the rise of the short-story cycle constitutes one of the most influential and generative developments in US literary history. Although usually divided among disparate genres and periods, short-story cycles by Caroline Matilda Kirkland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and other so-called regionalists, modernists such as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, postmodernists such as Louise Erdrich and Julia Alvarez, and writers whose works fall outside of these categorizations such as Jhumpa Lahiri in fact constitute a long, expansive history which includes the most influential writers and texts in American literature. The recurrence of stylistic conventions demonstrates a generic compulsion that erodes the ground upon which rigid periodization is built. The consistency of theme, structure, and style among cycles from disparate periods illuminates the extent to which one periods concerns persist and get reinvented in another: short-story cycles are realist in description, modernist in their fragmentation, and postmodernist in their experimentation with the reader/text relationship. The short-story cycle has been central to US literary production precisely because the form troubles expectations of unity and re-imagines narrative, like human identity itself, as contingent. As such seemingly firm supports of selfhood as place, time, group memory, ethnicity, and family progressively destabilize, they also become the fraught devices through which fictional narrative remakes its engagement with expectations of formal unity. Using these motifs as linking devices that provisionally work but cannot ultimately hold, American authors have repeatedly rejuvenated fictional narrative in general. The history exposes the frequency with which writers turn to the form at critical junctures in their careers: as they begin writing, come to a crossroads in their aesthetics, seek a form that liberates them to proliferate points of view, investigate the breadth and depth of a locality, or break free from the shackles of novelistic temporality.

The purpose of this dissertation is to offer strategies for the integration of culture in the secondary Italian curriculum, while maintaining the assertion that all competent language instruction is rooted in sound cultural objectives. As illustrated in the subsequent review of pedagogical literature, there are two essential components to the philosophy behind this study: the efficacy of employing cultural concepts in the classroom in order to enhance interpersonal communicative instruction, and the vital role that cultural awareness and sensitivity play in todays world. Since their inception in 1996, the ACTFL American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language) National Standards, with their strong emphasis on culture in the World Language classroom, have brought about a necessary change in the discourse concerning the challenges teachers face with regard to incorporating culture into their lessons. There continues to be, for example, a lack of consensus among language instructors on what culture to teach and how to assess it. This academic work addresses these questions, as well as offers potential solutions. In addition to the aforementioned concepts, I discuss the need to confront negative stereotypes and ethnocentric behavior in the classroom. In terms of secondary Italian classes in the United States, much of the work lies in addressing the depiction of Italian-Americans, by the mass media, as either criminals or half-witted narcissists. Furthermore, I have considered a number of issues regarding linguistic sensitivity and, in particular, the dichotomy of language versus dialects within the Italian paradigm. Film, music and visual art serve as the backdrop for the practical portion of this dissertation. In these final sections, I provide strategies for the integration of culture into the secondary Italian curriculum by means of communicative activities. It is the underlying conviction of this study, that these strategies will enable the student of Italian to simultaneously improve proficiency in the language, and attain greater cultural awareness and sensitivity.

This exploratory study examined the situational influences in the Protection Action Decision Model PAMD) on the proactive action of African Americans in New Orleans. Seven research questions guided the project: 1) How does the level of family involvement and community involvement relate to the protective action of African Americans? 2) Which sources of information are more likely to impact protective action of African Americans? 3) What channels of information are more utilized among African Americans during a hurricane? 4) What warning message components are more important to African Americans during a hurricane? 5) How does the level of fatalism among African Americans relate to protective action response? 6) How does the level of place attachment among African Americans relate to protective action response? 7) What is the role of social networks on the protective action decisions of African Americans? Surveys were distributed to 100 respondents, and two focus groups with 21 participants were conducted to examine the research questions. Multiple regression, correlations, frequencies, chi square tests, and thematic analysis were done to explore the proposed research questions. Results indicate that family and community involvement were not found to be predictors of willingness to evacuate. Police, firefighters, family and friends, and faith leaders, Emergency Management Technicians, National Weather Service, local and state government officials were sources positively correlated with evacuation decisions. National broadcast news, radio, cable news, Internet, local newspaper, and face to face were channels most utilized by respondents. Participants rated all eight warning message components as “Very Important”. Fatalism was not found to have a relationship with evacuation decisions. Two items comprising the Place Attachment Scale indicated inverse relationships with willingness to evacuate. Thematic analysis revealed that social networks serve three main functions during a natural disaster: Sources of Information and Resources, Confirmation of Warning and Information, and as a catalyst to Incite Action . Results have considerable implications for risk communicators utilizing the PAMD as a framework to aid in devising educational and outreach campaigns with regard to identifying sources, channels, composing messages, and psychocultural factors.

This research explores selected cultural traditions and histories associated with the Pomaks, a community inhabiting the Rhodope Mountains of southwestern Bulgaria. They speak Bulgarian as a mother tongue, but profess Islam as their religion unlike the countrys Orthodox Christian majority. Based on this linguistic unity, the Pomaks have been subjected to recurring forced assimilation since Bulgarias independence from Ottoman rule in 1878. Today, taking advantage of Bulgarias democratic rule, they are beginning to assert a heritage of their own making. Still, remnants of entrenched totalitarian mentality in the official cultural domain prevent any formal undertaking to that effect. With the Pomaks as my case study, this research links the concept of heritage to identity and the way dissenting voices negotiate a niche for themselves in public spaces already claimed by rigid master narratives. I advocate pluralistic interpretation of heritage in the public domain, where master and vernacular narratives exist and often collide. Insofar as cultural diversity serves to enrich the heritage discourse, heritage professionals ought to serve as educators in society, not as creators of exclusionary master narratives. Using fieldwork, archival research, and available literature to support a relevant theoretical framework, I strive for understanding of what constitutes Pomak) heritage and what ways there are to promote and preserve alternative narratives. Five stories regarding Pomak identity serve as my analytical frame of reference and constitute a premeditated effort to identify, formulate, and preserve in writing fundamental aspects of a highly contested and threatened heritage. A striking example of a Pomak tradition which merits preservation is the elaborate wedding of Ribnovo, a small village in the western Rhodope. The weddings most visible manifestation today is the elaborate and colorful mask of the bride, a ritual long gone extinct outside of Ribnovo. Four other case studies examine prominent aspects of Pomak heritage, including forced assimilation, nationalism, and historical narratives.

The collapse of the Soviet Union provides several situations where the presence of Russian-speaking minorities produces a potential challenge to the consolidation of former Soviet Republics as independent democracies. My dissertation examines ethnic relations in two former Soviet Republics: Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The goal of this dissertation is to answer the question of how different degrees of institutionalization of ethnically defined territorial minorities—i.e. when provided with institutions of political and cultural autonomy—create stimulus for elites to engage in ethno-political mobilization. My research question is the following: What explains variation in the degree of ethno-political mobilization by Russian-speaking minorities, in newly emerged states that were once former Soviet republics, especially Ukraine and Kazakhstan? My dependent variable, consequently, is a qualitatively evaluated degree of ethnopolitical mobilization by Russian minorities. I hypothesize that if an ethnic minority is a regional majority in an ethno-federal or autonomous territorial unit, the institutional and ethno-demographic structure of this situation will create a stimulus for elites and political entrepreneurs (regional government officials, labor unions leaders, etc.) to present ethno-political claims—as opposed to non-ethnic, civic, socio-economic appeals for support—that are both electoral and non-electoral. This hypothesis is narrowed to the conditions of the nationalizing newly emerged states, and the following case studies are proposed to be tested in the dissertation: the Crimea and the Donbas region in Ukraine (two similar regions where different levels of ethnic mobilization of Russian-speakers took place during the early 1990s), and the Qaraghandy in Northern Kazakhstan, the region where Russian-speakers were successfully integrated into the dominant Kazakh nation. The dissertation, after examining these three mentioned case studies, will test a hypothesis that the institutionalization of ethnically defined territorial structures and the provision of minorities with autonomous institutions may intensify ethnic mobilization under certain conditions and produce conditions leading to ethnic mobilization. This hypothesis is consistent with already existing institutionalist theories, arguing that demographic factors determine the ability to use institutions of autonomy as mobilizing tools. Consequently, ethno-demographic differences between Russian-speakers in the three cases within two different former Soviet Republics are defined by their institutions’ different types and arrangements. This theoretical argument, if proved, will also have a practical meaning: once the conditions under which autonomy produces ethnic mobilization are identified, it will be suggested not to implement autonomy in such cases where the potential for ethnic mobilization exists.

With nearly 42% of children below age five nutritionally stunted, child malnutrition is a social, economic, and public health issue in Nepal. Even more disheartening is the wide variation of malnutrition across sub-regions within country, which seems to disproportionately disadvantage children in certain regions as opposed to others. This dissertation aims to understand the extent and causes of child stunting from a regional inequality perspective. Household data from the Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys NDHS) 1996, 2001, and 2006 are used to analyze national and regional trends of stunting of children age 6-59 months. Various data sources including the Nepal Census and the Health Management and Information System are used for regional level data. Both household and regional data are then analyzed using two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling HLM). The results show that stunting is declining albeit very slowly in Nepal and across all thirteen regions. But there are significant and consistent disparities across regions that are not decreasing over time. HLM analyses show that the regional variance in child stunting is due to both household and regional i.e. contextual) factors. Specifically, womens literacy at the regional level is found to have a profound impact as it explains 60% of the regional variance in stunting. Among other factors, road accessibility and food production also appear to have important roles but not as large as womens literacy. Together, these three contextual factors explain 75% of the regional variance. Adding household compositional factors—socioeconomics in particular—reduces the residual regional variance only by few additional points. One important finding from the household-level analysis is that the so-called lower caste children are disproportionately stunted compared to other caste groups. Regional womens literacy remains a strong factor influencing child stunting above and beyond mothers education at the household level. Hence, womens literacy at the contextual level should comprise the most important policy agenda against malnutrition in Nepal which is not the case now. Moreover, a special emphasis on the disadvantaged castes is of utmost important so that potential inter-generational transfer of malnutrition could be reduced.