Chronic disease is costly to treat and burdensome for those living with its impacts. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2017), 117 million Americans currently live with chronic disease, and one in four adults live with two or more chronic diseases. The burden placed on the U.S....
This dissertation draws on ethnographic data and political ecological theory to analyze the experience of residents living in the IBM-Endicott Superfund site in Endicott, New York. Combining in-depth narratives and quantitative measures from a household survey, it highlights residents' perceptions of 1) environmental health risk, 2) risk mitigation, 3) deindustrialization...
While a number of scholars in the field of Rhetoric and Composition continue to reassert the importance of whiteness as an object of study, a sense of anxiety about the effectiveness of extant antiracist rhetorical practices permeate recent scholarship. This thesis engages with thinking from black studies, afropessimism, and transnational...
This project examines the portrayal of the life and times of Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) in the popular Austrian musical "Elisabeth das Musical" (Elisabeth the Musical), written by Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay. "Elisabeth" was first performed in Vienna in 1992 and has since become the...
Over two million people experience homelessness in the United States, but homeless people are often marginalized by invisibility and stigmas surrounding poverty within their local communities. This research seeks to amplify the voices of Corvallis area homeless women as a means to understand their everyday lived experiences. Six women residing...
This dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive portrayal of doula care in the lives of pregnant and parenting adolescent mothers. The purpose of this research was to examine the relationships between psychosocial stress, social support, institutionalized constraints, and their impacts on health and well-being among adolescent mothers in the Northwestern...
This research is an exploration of empathy in the classroom from the standpoint of how instructors experience it and understand themselves to communicate it to their students, particularly students from different cultural backgrounds. The research method used was ethnographic analysis of a classroom observation and a one-hour semi-structured interview with...
School is a hostile environment for many LGBTQ youth. Teachers participate, consciously or unconsciously, in perpetuating oppressive heteronormative expectations in the classroom both through the overt and covert curriculum. Yet, pre-service teachers are under-trained about questions related to gender and sexuality during their teacher preparation. This qualitative study explores the...
Using a quasi-experimental design, 118 Latina girls, ages 13-18, viewed five color photographs of White women. Girls viewed either images of sexualized women or images of non-sexualized women. After viewing the images, girls were asked to complete the sentence stem, “I am…” 20 times. Thirty percent of girls spontaneously described...
This thesis examines two cultural productions of the Harlem Renaissance: Aaron Douglas's mural series, Aspects of Negro Life, and Nella Larsen's novel Passing. I read these works together because, more than their shared time period, they showcase an attention to the visual. Both Larsen and Douglas's works are concerned with...