This thesis examines the convergence of neoliberal rhetoric across popular media, academic, and institutional discourses, and draws connections between contemporary women's travel literature and common scripts in study abroad promotion. Finding such narratives to be freighted with ethnocentric constructs and tacit endorsements of market-based globalization, I critique the mainstreaming of...
This study employs interdisciplinary methods to make transnational feminist sense of the microfinance phenomenon. Drawing upon a combination of discourse approach, textual analysis, political economics and critical theory construction, I fused a feminist critical discourse approach to excavate microfinance from neoliberalism. I designed an economic justice framework and executed an...
This research examines women's magazine editors' perspectives of the relationship between editorial and advertising content in women's magazines. It specifically investigates how this relationship affects both general editorial content and more specifically, social topic stories. Mainstream women's beauty/fashion magazine editors—including editors-in-chief—were queried as to the nature of these relationships. Interviews...
Since 2005, the United States has experienced a significant influx of international students from Saudi Arabia, particularly women (Bollang, 2006). The American educational structure is something Saudi women have never experienced due to the vast differences between both cultures in all facets. There is very little to no research conducted...
The increasingly corporatized and privatized public university has resulted in significant role changes for students and faculty. Among these changes includes the development of online education and its proliferation among various disciplines to not only increase educational access, but to sustain budgetary program needs. Such processes are occurring in women's...
Within the U.S. there is a growing interest in the case of female adolescents being coerced into the sex industry (Bernstein, 2010; Estes & Weiner, 2001; Soderlund, 2010; Williams and Frederick, 2009). This interest, which emerged due to U.S. involvement in the international trafficking phenomena and grassroots organizing, has resulted...
Research shows that women's lives are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change. While the topic of women is largely absent from climate discourse overall, the representations of women that occur reveal underlying structures of power rooted in imperialism and colonial dominance. This thesis presents an analysis of the...
Social discourse presents teenage childbearing as a “serious problem” that results in significant harm and expense to teenage mothers, their children, and society. Although the discourse of teenage childbearing has been multiple, overlapping, and contested, it has resulted in negative stereotyping and stigmatization of teenage mothers. Much of these stereotypes...
Virginia Woolf was a self-proclaimed atheist, yet her fictional and personal writing
reveal her ecstatic consciousness. Characters in Woolf s novels experience ecstasy, and
her letters and diaries support the theory that she herself had experienced ecstatic
consciousness. Major figures in the philosophy of religion assert that ecstatic
consciousness is...
This research explores and aligns a postmodern method in line with a theoretical lens of "strategic political queer/feminism" to understand the construction and positioning of the issue/ problem of same-sex marriage. The method takes shape through a theoretical framework that leads to a political maneuver opening access to the rights...