This thesis is arranged in three main chapters, each of which focuses on a particular type of Anaїs Nin text, and each of which is intended to enlarge Nin's complexities through distinct but overlapping perspectives. The idea connecting these three chapters is that Nin, who has been radically misrepresented by...
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...
In the months preceding the 2016 presidential election and during the Trump presidency, rhetoric, composition, and communications scholars expressed an urgent concern about the threat that Trump and his political affiliates posed to the status of truth in political life (McComiskey; Rice; Harsin; Cloud). However, the conversations surrounding the discipline’s...
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...
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 study examined the social and contextual factors that lead to differences in
the way biracial adolescents interpret their racial identity. Using 11 interviews with a sample of biracial youth between the ages of 14 and 17-years-old, this study also explores
the strategies these individuals use to achieve social validation...
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...
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...
Music performance and education faced unique barriers during the COVID-19 global pandemic which made it nearly impossible to effectively implement online learning. To better understand these barriers and what improvements might be made during future pandemics that entail periods of isolation, I collected the oral histories of eight Oregon State...
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...