Haiti's political and economy history has led to a maternity care system that lies out of reach, geographically and financially, of most Haitians, resulting in excessively high maternal and infant mortality. The most common birth practitioners are homebirth midwives (matwòns), who attend roughly three-fourths of all births in Haiti (UNICEF),...
In her 2016 article “Beyond Rights as Recognition, Black Twitter and Posthuman Coalitional Possibilities,” Pritha Prasad argues that the hashtag, one of the decade’s most omnipresent features of digital communication, functions as “a performative composing medium that not only demands relationality” and “call[s] for the recognition of both the Black...
This thesis examines the characterization of the femme fatale and the implications of this trope for late-Victorian gender and sexuality in the ghost stories of female aesthete Vernon Lee. In her treatment of the femme fatale figure, Lee both reinforces and complicates the image of the sexualized, often bestialized woman...
Entrepreneurship is regarded as a viable way for women to enter the economy and improve their quality of life (Morris et al., 2018). However, little attention has been paid to understanding how women, and specifically women of color, utilize their ways of knowing to learn entrepreneurship. Grounded in Chicana/Latina feminism...
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...
Human development researchers consider adolescence a rich time for interest development and identity exploration. A relatively new movement in the Free-Choice Learning (FCL) arena, the Maker movement, offers learners interest-driven, experiential, often collaborative, and process-oriented activities ranging from game design (computer-based and otherwise) and robotics, to sewing LEDs into clothing...
This thesis examines depictions of medievalism in three central texts: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Each of these texts provides an entry point for exploring the ways in which English and American writers have...
This thesis focuses on performances of masculinity by British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) airmen in the charged landscape of the First World War prisoner of war (POW) camp. I examine how captive airmen coped with imprisonment by reasserting the familiar homosocial communities of pre-capture squadron life, particularly through practices associated...
Recent changes in the historiography of American Transcendentalism
have inspired a reappraisal of the relationship between the Transcendentalist
movement in New England and the pietistic wing of the Unitarian church. This
thesis explores this reappraisal through a close reading of selected writings by
Henry Ware Jr. in juxtaposition to the...