PHD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies

Following the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a number of national peacebuilding strategies were employed to establish basic security and cultivate social cohesion. Among a multi-sector peacebuilding and development strategy is Rwanda's Peace and Values Education Curriculum, which has been implemented in the formal education system. The aim of this investigation was to analyze Rwanda's peace education initiative using a critical postcolonial approach. I used this approach in my examination of the Peace and Values Education Curriculum to better understand the curricular, pedagogical, and training implications, as well as policy motivations. In this study, I employed a methodological framework consistent with critical social research, guided by the following questions: • How is postcolonial rationality embedded in the national peace education curriculum of Rwanda? • How do curriculum and pedagogy reflect or undermine the three key areas of exploration: postcolonialism, peace theory, and critical theory? • To what extent does teacher training develop content knowledge in the three key areas of exploration: postcolonialism, peace theory, and critical theory? • What are the motivations among stakeholders to implement a Peace and Values Education Program? • How does this program reflect the rationality of the post-genocide home-grown solutions, if at all? • How does the Peace and Values Education Program critically address hegemonic norms in education? This qualitative study included content analysis and interviews with both educators and policy stakeholders. Following a postcolonial analysis, I found that the Peace and Values curriculum, in multiple ways, reflected postcolonial rationality. Most indications of postcolonial rationality were embedded implicitly in the curriculum, while explicit assertions of postcoloniality were not identified. Through both content and pedagogy, teachers are trained to include localized content that threads indigenous k (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tricia Niesz (Advisor) Subjects: Education; Educational Theory; Peace Studies; Pedagogy

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2021, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis studies the relationships between sport and migration in Baru's comics. Examining sport as a pull factor of migration in these comics leads us to the close analysis of individual experiences, trajectories, and motivations. Respectively set in the colonial and the postcolonial era, Le Chemin de l'Amerique and Fais peter les basses, Bruno! reveal similar patterns used to account for Said Boudiaf's and Slimane's journeys from Africa to France, with America being the ultimate destination for Said. Analyzed comparatively, these two comics enable us not only to codify Baru's unique style, but also to unravel a tradition of discourses and imaginaries that make the connection between sport and migration trendy and complex. At the level of the form, this thesis seeks to analyze how Baru uses similar techniques, resources, and strategies in these two comics to account for individual migration narratives, with an emphasis on the aesthetics of the image over the text. At the level of content, this thesis will analyze how sport, in tracing migration roads, unveils political, economic, and social imaginaries that connect Africa to France.

Committee: Mark McKinney (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges (Committee Member); Jonathan Strauss (Committee Member) Subjects: African History; African Literature; African Studies; Art Criticism; Literature

Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2021, Religious Studies

This thesis seeks to bring together three separate, yet ever-communicating entities -- the healthcare (HC) patient, the healthcare system (HCS), and the HC chaplain. Utilizing wisdom from feminist, postcolonial, and affect theorists, this thesis seeks to conceptualize and visualize this triad dynamic. The format is non-traditional in that concepts are expressed and developed through both an art installation and in written form. Largely diagnostic, this work highlights what it is like to be “other” concerning something as personal as bodily illness, how the HCS and its' relationship to capitalist society contributes to the “othering” of chronically ill patients, and how the HC chaplain may also be an “other” who can potentially mediate the relationship between the HCS and the patient.

Committee: Timothy Beal PhD (Committee Chair); Brian Clites PhD (Committee Member); William Deal PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Religion

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Educational Studies

This dissertation explored how Black graduate womxn (BGW) who are matriculating or who have matriculated through The Ohio State University's (Ohio State or OSU) College of Education and Human Ecology (EHE) are located in both organizational sites with regards to professional socialization. The study is concerned with the relationship among BGW's locations, socialization, and abilities to access desired career pipelines upon degree completion. It is also concerned with BGW's locations in “epistemological third spaces” (Seremani & Clegg, 2016), as “outsiders within” (Collins, 2000) the academy who must create knowledge about academe in order to navigate it and attain career success. I conducted the study as a bricolage (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018), borrowing from constructivist case study (Merriam; 1998; Stake, 1995, 2000), and narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Kim, 2019). Although the study examined BGW's socialization at specific organizational sites, it has broad implications for BGW with regards to their organizations as possible pathways into their desired professional fields. Embodiment was the epistemic frame that underpinned data collection and analysis. Data collection took place through interviews and focus groups via Zoom, because of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. I conducted thematic narrative analysis with the assistance of broadening and restorying processes (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Black Critical Race Theory (BlackCrit; Dumas & ross, 2016) and postcolonialism (e.g., Said, 1978; Bhabha, 1994) supported analysis as frameworks through which to understand exercises of anti-Black and colonial power during BGW's professional socialization while matriculating through EHE. I also presented findings as composite narratives (Orbach, 2000; Willis, 2019) to capture participants' responses to protocol questions in ways that supported answering the dissertation's study questions. Amid discussions about the lack of diversity in the profess (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Marc Johnston-Guerrero PhD (Advisor); Lori Patton Davis PhD (Committee Member); Tatiana Suspitsyna PhD (Committee Member); Tracy Dumas PhD (Other) Subjects: Black Studies; Epistemology; Higher Education; Multicultural Education; Organizational Behavior; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Mass Communication (Communication)

This research examines how Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants in Columbus, Ohio, have employed social media to retain and reinforce their cultural identity and community, and how their migration experiences have been mediated on these platforms. This study seeks to explore how migrants use social media in their daily interactions as a tool for personal communication. In particular, how it contributes to individual and collective memory, retention of their culture, survival, resilience and wellbeing, identity formation in relation to the question of integration, and survival. This study also explores how the application of various social media has improved their lives. The epistemological assumption is that for far too long migrant voices have been neglected and relegated to the background as they are often not given the platform to tell their own lived experiences. As a result, pertinent issues concerning migrants' lives have been muted, their stories have not been told, and their voices have not been heard and this impacts them and society at large. The argument is that social media have provided migrants the platform to express their voice, including their memories, joys, shared information, anxieties, and even trauma. The hope is that my work gives migrants the opportunity to tell their own stories as they have experienced them against a set of key theories, notably, communication, postcolonial and decolonial theories as they pertain to social media. The research used an ethnographic approach to delve into the conditions and the migrants' everyday life, what I refer to as quotidian. In this research, the participants used the word “everyday” a great deal. They talked about the rituals, memories and actions as everyday things, both in the past and in the present, like drinking coffee, or eating injera, remembering their loved ones, re-living their horror, going to church, or calling or sending texts to their loved ones, in the USA or elsewhere. I used a qualitative (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steve Howard (Committee Chair); Devika Chawla (Committee Member); Laeeq Khan (Committee Member); Assan Sarr (Committee Member) Subjects: Mass Communications

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, Anthropology

In 2011, the World Health Organization added the drug misoprostol to its Essential Medicines List in order to treat postpartum hemorrhage, which is the leading cause of maternal mortality in the world. While global health agencies and planners have cited this as a revolution for maternal health, studies in Pakistan are beginning to highlight inconsistent use of the drug, paradoxically exacerbating issues of maternal health within the nation. In this thesis, I contextualize the misoprostol programs in Pakistan within the larger colonial context of global health to elucidate why it continues to be promoted despite these risks. Ultimately, we are shown how the power ascribed to Western-based global health agencies has allowed them to reshape local maternal health landscapes to reproduce their authority and expand the use of misoprostol, at the expense of the wellbeing and safety of women.

Committee: Barbara Piperata (Advisor); Mytheli Sreenivas (Committee Member); Anna Willow (Committee Member); Erin Moore (Advisor) Subjects: Alternative Medicine; Biomedical Research; Cultural Anthropology; Gender Studies; Health; Health Care; Obstetrics; Pharmaceuticals; Public Health; South Asian Studies

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2020, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Critics have debated the use of post-colonial analysis to treat travel texts prior to the colonial period, often categorizing such representations of peoples and cultures through either intellectual curiosity or material necessity, with necessity as the deciding factor in whether or not a text 'others' in its representation. An investigation of medieval and early modern English travel narratives challenges this idea, as writers from the fourteenth through the early seventeenth century establish a discourse of superiority regardless of whether their texts depict curiosity or necessity. Recognizing that negative representations of others are not exclusive to travel texts that favor necessity over curiosity, I explore three travel texts: Mandeville's Travels (c. 1357), Hakluyt's Voyages (or The Principal Navigations) (1589, 1599-1600), and Coryat's Crudities (1611), whose representations of cultures and peoples certainly differ; yet these works are also profoundly similar. These texts, which span nearly four centuries of English literary history, reflect the English representation of a non-English Other during an era when the nation's own identity was coalescing. Moreover, they demonstrate that, curiosity or necessity aside, this representation of cultural others promotes the development of a discourse of superiority. Furthermore, these writers' depictions illustrate how early the ideas and attitudes of English superiority began to develop and how travel narratives contributed to this rise. The representation of difference gleaned from these texts illuminates future attitudes toward the colonization and exploitation that mark English history in the centuries that follow.

Committee: Brooke Conti Ph.D. (Advisor); Rachel Carnell Ph.D. (Committee Member); James Marino Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Communication Studies (Communication)

This project is concerned with the historical legacy of settler colonialism on indigenous-occupied lands and the ways in which land rights are rhetorically constructed and enacted across transnational geopolitical terrain. I utilize pan-historiography to develop Michael McGee's theorization of the ideograph towards what I term an “ideomap” – a place-based approach to comparative ideology that recognizes the rhetorical agency of subaltern collectives. In exploring four indigenous communities, I analyze the ways in which land is not only reflective of ideology but also produces culturally distinct possibilities for decolonization: first, the Standing Rock Sioux's Dakota Access Pipeline protest as a case for land as economy; second, Aboriginal Australia's Stolen Generations campaign as a case for land as family; third, Palestine's Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as a case for land as law; and fourth, Brazil's Terra Livre camp as a case for land as environment. The connective thread among these cases explores the spatial rhetorics of indigenous land and the practice of place-making as one that ideologically disrupts settler invasion and physically exercises anticolonial resistance on physical, digital, and hybrid spaces. In particular, I argue these four movements speak to the possibility of collapsing colonial structures and redefining civil societies that not only acknowledge but actively build upon indigenous perspectives.

Committee: Devika Chawla (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Native Studies; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This study focuses on Japan's Korean minority, known variously as “Zainichi” or “resident” Koreans, and examines their literary and political activity from 1945-1950, immediately after Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule. With the end of World War II, Kim Tal-su (1920-1997) and a number of other Korean intellectuals educated in imperial Japan, formed a literary coterie affiliated with the “League of Koreans in Japan,” a new political support organization advancing Koreans' repatriation and the improvement of their living conditions. Kim's coterie created a Korean-centered news magazine-cum-literary journal written entirely in Japanese: Minshu Chosen (“Democratic Korea”), which ran monthly until the outbreak of the Korean War. The fiction, poetry, drama, editorials, histories, and interviews found in the magazine reveal major currents in the political thought of this postcolonial community and also comprise a rebuttal to the dominant Japanese discourse surrounding Korea and its people. In the first half of my study I explore the figures behind Minshu Chosen and the appearance of their Marxist politics in the magazine's depictions of colonial history and contemporary developments in Asia. Next my focus shifts to a broad overview of the coterie's literary activity, situating the postwar development of Zainichi Korean literature within the context of its imperial era forerunners, as well as the subsequent emergence of this genre within the mainstream of Japanese literature. The latter half of the study focuses on differing modes of resistance, in particular violence versus non-violence, as they appear in works by two coterie members whose politics would diverge drastically after this period. Finally, my conclusion takes up the Occupation government's suppression of the League as a terrorist organization, and the rebuttal offered by one of Minshu Chosen's main editors.

Committee: Richard Torrance PhD (Advisor); Pil Ho Kim PhD (Committee Member); Naomi Fukumori PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Modern History; Modern Literature; World History

PHD, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Beginning in 1169 with the Anglo-Norman Invasion, the colonization of the Irish resulted in centuries of violence, the confiscation of lands, resources, and sovereignty, and the near total destruction of Ireland's native culture and language. While many Irish continually fought against this occupation, most rebellions ended in nothing more than failure and stricter colonial rule until the early twentieth century when an organized and determined national effort for independence took hold. During this time Irish authors sought to give Ireland a literary culture that would serve as counterpart to its political, economic, and military campaigns for freedom from English rule. This dissertation examines the ways in which W.B. Yeats and James Joyce consciously participated in creating a national identity to inspire decolonization by engaging in revisionist myth-making in order to create new Irish culture heroes. In Yeats's five Cuchulain plays and Joyce's Ulysses each author manipulated mythic heroes from Irish and Greek tradition in an attempt to define Irish identity during the nation's struggle against colonial rule. Yeats and Joyce shaped their individual culture heroes with the deliberate goal of representing the Irish experience from the Irish perspective with the hope of inspiring and uniting the Irish to reclaim their right to rule their own nation. The Cuchulain plays and Ulysses challenged the colonial narrative that the Irish had no culture to speak of, while also confronting and correcting colonial stereotypes perpetuated and spread by the English. Although Yeats and Joyce are often considered incompatible in terms of their involvement with Ireland's anti-colonial movement, their shared use of revisionist myth and culture heroes suggests something different. This dissertation shows that, despite their opposing beliefs, both authors worked on the same cultural project to promote Irish nationalism in the service of Ireland's fight for independence.

Committee: Claire Culleton (Advisor); Kevin Floyd (Committee Member); Tammy Clewell (Committee Member); Patrick Coy (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2016, Music Ethnomusicology

Japanese popular music, particularly the video-sharing website Nico Nico, represents a site of creation and production that encompasses a complex interplay between vocality, expression of identity, and capitalistic ventures. In this thesis, I will explore how expressions of gender and sexuality are articulated through both vocality and the (digital) body, or the visual aspect of music videos on Nico Nico, and the dialogic relationship between business models and the articulation of these modes of identity. In terms of both gender and sexuality, contemporary Japan is composed of interweaving histories, ideologies, and traits characteristic of the transculturalism experienced by many nation-states of an increasingly globalized world. How Japanese popular music - utilizing the internet as a space for dialogic interchange - transforms these gender ideologies within frameworks of commercialization and global discourses is a topic that significantly informs current notions of gender. Additionally, music culture, not only a source of empowerment or power for a group of people, has become a commercialized product, one that has become an integral part of global commercial exchange. Given the significant influence that Japanese popular culture has on global popular culture, J-pop should be further interrogated as a linguistic imaginary riddled with contestations of gender norms, sexual binaries, and power, all of which operate under the auspices of global capitalism. The ryouseirui, a Nico Nico term designated for a singer that utilizes both “male” and “female” voices, contributes a substantial part of Nico Nico content, with ryouseirui music videos present on the website. By investigating vocality, the business model of video-sharing websites, and various ryouseirui and their respective music videos, I will describe how economic practices may form and inform resistance and change of gender on the video-sharing website Nico Nico. Considering a diverse range of literatur (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Katherine Meizel PhD (Advisor); Sidra Lawrence PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; Gender Studies; Music

Bachelor of Science of Journalism (BSJ), Ohio University, 2016, Journalism

Using the lens of postcolonial theory, this study explores parachute journalism through a textual analysis of regional and national coverage of the civil unrest that transpired in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 as compared to coverage by smaller, local news outlets that had routinely reported on the communities affected by the turmoil. This study specifically focuses on how those different levels of news outlets covered black cultures in Ferguson and the parachute journalists themselves. Suggestions for ways to integrate more context and local knowledge into reporting published in elite news media outlets also are included.

Committee: Bill Reader (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Journalism

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, Communication Studies (Communication)

In this dissertation, I interrogated the claims to origin and cure of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the economics of Antiretroviral Drugs (ARVs) in the rhetoric of the Gambian President, Yahya Jammeh. This study was motivated by two research questions: (1) How does Jammeh's claims fit into or depart from the known HIV/AIDS and ARVs discourses; and (2) to what extent can Kenneth Burke's terministic screens, in conjunction with the dramatistic pentad, be applied to Jammeh's claims to distill the values embedded in them for Jammeh's motives and their articulation? Regarding the origin of the HIV virus, I unearthed three competing theories—the natural transfer, the conspiratorial, and the Congo-jungle accident. Concerning the therapeutic landscape of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, I unraveled four predominant treatment models—the biomedical, Christian, Islamic, and traditional. For the economic views on ARVs, I synthesized four paradigms—the postcolonial, the avant-garde, the humanitarian, and the activist—for the explication of ARVs. I distilled five pentadic acts from Jammeh's claims. The first pentadic act is dominated by agency with pragmatism as its philosophical mooring. This is followed by two pentadic acts dominated by purpose with mystical philosophical inclinations, while another two of the pentadic acts are dominated by agent with idealistic philosophical outlook. The pentadic mapping of Jammeh's claims revealed that, with regard to the origin of the HIV virus, Jammeh—Allah's agency—speaks from a conspiratorial terministic screen. For the therapeutic map, it revealed Jammeh speaks from the Islamic-prophetic terministic screen; while for the economic map, it points to Jammeh's claims as postcolonial terministic constructions, whereby a purposeful neocolonial West employs ARVs to exploit and dominate Black African bodies. For the most part, Jammeh's claims lack evidence in the known scientific (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Benjamin Bates PhD (Committee Chair); Babrow Austin PhD (Committee Member); Chen Yea-Wen PhD (Committee Member); Wangui Edna PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Health

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2015, Educational Leadership

Malawian primary schools are challenged by very low student performance. Despite the unsatisfactory student achievement, teacher continuous professional development (CPD), an important strategy in improving student achievement, faces challenges in implementation. This dissertation study investigated the experiences of teachers in Malawian primary schools with CPD programs. The goal was to get a deeper understanding of the nature and meaning of lived experiences of teachers participating in CPD programs. Through such meanings we get the opportunity to understand what is preventing CPD programs from changing the way teachers teach and manage their classrooms, thereby failing to improve students achievement. I used postcolonial theory that provides a unique lens to understand challenges that the Malawian education system is facing as it places this issue in a historical and sociocultural context. This is a phenomenological study that explored experiences of teachers with CPD programs. Phenomenology was chosen to enable the researcher understand the meaning that teachers attach to the CPD programs. Following the tenets of phenomenology, I had in-depth interviews with 10 teachers from Dowa education district. Each of these teachers was interviewed twice. Teachers were carefully selected to ensure that they had experienced CPD. As part of triangulation I observed CPD sessions that my research participants participated in; this informed interviews I had with the teachers just as the interviews informed the observations. The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. I presented and discussed data in the form of tropes and cultural narratives that were part of the way the participants explained their experiences with CPDs. Tropes and cultural narratives provided rich information in the experiences of teachers with CPD programs. The findings indicated that teachers were dissatisfied with the nature of CPDs available to them. The common themes shared among teac (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dennis Carlson PhD (Committee Chair); Lisa Weems PhD (Committee Member); Denise Baszile PhD (Committee Member); William Boone PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Educational Leadership

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, French/History (dual)

Empire has traditionally been viewed as a masculine endeavor. Only in the past few decades, along with the rise of gender history, have scholars to a meaningful extent taken up the study of women and gender in the context of empire. This thesis examines the complexity of French women's intellectual thought about the colonies during the time period of 1900-1962, which includes both the climax and the breakdown of the French colonial empire. Many other studies of colonial fiction have prevailed in this field, addressing cultural history in particular, but women's nonfiction remains to be examined in detail and in relation to intellectual history. This study thus consists of three chapters, each a case study of a different French woman's nonfictional work. Through the lenses of gender and postcolonial theory, along with the aid of the literary theory of narratology, these women's navigations between complicity and resistance with regard to colonial ideology in their writings can be articulated in a more detailed way. Grace Corneau, author of La femme aux colonies, published in 1900, is the first writer to be profiled. An American who married a French nobleman, she was a journalist and author who published this work after living in Indochina and Africa. Although Corneau was writing to recruit women to the colonies, she displays strategies of resistance related to her own gender ideology. Clotilde-Chivas Baron, wife of a colonial administrator who lived en brousse in Indochina, is the second case study. A successful and award-winning fictional author, she also authored a comprehensive history of women in the colonies titled La femme francaise aux colonies. Written in 1929, her work demonstrates a retreat into bourgeois gender roles even as she has a more polemic purpose in writing— to correct misconceptions about the role of women in the colonies. The third case study centers around Germaine Tillion, by far the most well-known and studied woman referenced in this thes (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Beatrice Guenther (Committee Co-Chair); Beth Griech-Polelle (Committee Co-Chair); Michael Brooks (Committee Member); Opportune Zongo (Committee Member) Subjects: African History; Ethnic Studies; European Studies; Foreign Language; Gender; Gender Studies; History; Middle Eastern Studies; Modern History; Modern Language; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Art Education

This study is a critical analysis of the context of image examples for the multicultural art education portion in a Fine Art textbook, which is currently used in South Korea for 5th and 6th graders. The purpose of this research is to evaluate how multiculturalism is represented in the text. To this end, this research focuses on ethnicity construction: how politico-economic contexts and cultural representation of ethnic arts have influenced the content of the textbook. Postcolonial multiculturalism is designated as a theoretical framework and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a methodological framework for this research. Through CDA, I understand invisible beliefs and cultural identities that people share by paying attention to power, ideology, and intertextuality that are infiltrated in language. The findings revealed that inside/outside the Fine Art textbook promotes the pedagogy of South Korean ethnicity construction through postcolonial multiculturalism, which disrupts the idea of multiculturalism. The government is involved in narrating South Korean ethnicity and its visual art forms in a traditional artistic format. This seems to be a response to the political context where this competitive particular culture is desired and promoted to engage and respond to both opportunity and crisis in the global economy. The top-down narrative affects the image examples in the book, a national curriculum, and the entire process of the textbook production system. Recommendations are provided, including ways in which educators can encourage their students in deconstructing the myths of South Koreanness.

Committee: Christine Ballengee-Morris (Advisor) Subjects: Art Education

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Communication Studies

This dissertation is a critical ethnography of the Roma ethnic minority in post-communist Romania within the socio-economic and political context of the country's post-accession to the European Union. The focus broadly is on the identity negotiation of the Roma minority in Romanian urban space. To this end, I explore Roma communicative practices in capital city of Bucharest. I examine the urban intercultural contact zones that represent Roma-non Roma relations and interactions. I draw on the productive "travelling" postcolonial theories and translate them into an examination of the Roma minority in Romanian physical space. My ethnography is informed by postcolonial theoretical frameworks that challenge the seemingly dichotomous colonizer/colonized relation. I look at discursive practices among Roma individuals suggesting alternative epistemes to allow for a nuanced understanding of the Roma-non Roma encounter. My methods include in-depth interviews, participant observation, and direct observation. The personal narratives of the 35 participants involved in this study emphasize a range of identity negotiation patterns. These reveal in turn complex, interrelated configurations of internalized oppression, passing, and hybridity that make possible both resistance and conformity to the dominant cultural production of the Gypsy Other. This research is an attempt to produce a constructive impact on policy and practice and therefore addresses the urgent need for critical, responsible inquiry that explores the diversity of Romani experience.

Committee: Radhika Gajjala Dr. (Committee Chair); Lara Martin Lengel Dr. (Committee Member); Lynda Dixon Dr. (Committee Member); Karen Kakas Dr. (Other) Subjects: Communication

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Arts and Sciences: Romance Languages and Literatures

Abstract This work is a comparative analysis of four postcolonial novels by Caribbean writers that resist Western power domination and dictatorships: Texaco (1992) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Le cri des oiseaux fous (2000) by Dany Laferri¿¿¿¿re, El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (1998) by Da¿¿¿¿na Chaviano, and Nuestra se¿¿¿¿ora de la noche (2006) by Mayra Santos-Febres. My study incorporates authors from both the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean, signaling a shared intense critique in literature that links these authors directly to their nations' political control. My principal task in this dissertation is the examination of characters' creation of non-violent strategies of resistance. I argue that, even though their maneuvers do not alter the course of history in each society, they question, destabilize, and undermine the autocratic governments in which they evolve. My theoretical framework draws from a wide, trans-regional variety of critics in Spanish, French, and English. Using in particular the critical thinking developed by Michel De Certeau and ¿¿¿¿¿douard Glissant, the study explores how characters are subjects always “in motion”—in both the literal and figurative sense—who simply do not accept the physical and mental limitations imposed by the autocratic regimes, and take rebellious detours that allow them to produce their own rules that seem troublesome for some, but inspiring for others, who decide to imitate them. As a result, characters become the opposite of what their dominants had in mind: they become dynamic, flexible, and complex subjects. Even though the literary works were written at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century, the past moment of narrativization allows me to demonstrate how political oppression is represented through situational constraints, such as racial discrimination, class distinction, and gender inequality in four distinct historical eras: The French departmentalization of Martinique in 1946, th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patricia Valladares-Ruiz PhD (Committee Chair); Therese Migraine-George PhD (Committee Member); Michele Vialet PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Caribbean Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Arts and Sciences: Classics

This dissertation elaborates on previous interpretations of cultural change in Ptolemaic (294-58 B.C.E.) and Roman (58 B.C.E.-293 C.E.) Cyprus by presenting a postcolonial archaeology of cultural identity that comparatively analyzes coins, sculptures, and architecture. Although these artifacts all betray the cultural influence of Alexandria or Rome, this study shows that both local and imperial agents played a role in determining how material culture might express one's socially recognized sense of belonging, i.e., their identity. Furthermore, by contextualizing such interactions in relation to each empire's strategic agenda and Cyprus' geographical and cultural values, this thesis illustrates how different empires can affect the same region in diverse ways and emphasizes the significance of geohistorical factors within colonial encounters. An analysis of Ptolemaic motives and strategies indicates that the empire valued Cyprus for its strategic location and resources. Thus Cyprus was militarily occupied and Cypriots lost their political autonomy. Yet, because local and imperial agents shared cultural values, new identities could be interactively constructed. Ptolemaic officials dominated coin production, but used designs that linked imperial and local religious and linguistic affinities. The dialogue between imperial and local statues reveals how Cypriots manipulated Alexandrian styles within traditional contexts. Ptolemaic architecture expressed imperial power locally, but had little effect on Cypriot buildings. Alternatively, an examination of Rome's attitude towards Cyprus shows that the empire viewed the island as strategically insignificant. This factor resulted in the increased participation of Cypriot elites in local affairs. Hence, Roman Cypriot coins reveal a dialogue between imperial and local symbols, whereas sculpture and architecture demonstrate that local elites emulated imperial types because they communicated a sense humanitas that reinforced one's s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kathleen Lynch PhD (Committee Chair); Derek Brittain Counts PhD (Committee Member); Getzel Cohen PhD (Committee Member); Steven Ellis PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies

MS ARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning : Architecture

This research argues that the Art Deco style in the Philippines can be understood both as the imposition of power by the colonizer and the demonstration of resistance of the colonized. The study also proposes that the style can never be neutral, innocent or inert, rather can be embedded within intricacies of ideological practices and political processes. Scholarship on Art Deco architecture outside Europe and the Americas, especially in the Philippines, has remained uncritical as these were often limited to formalistic analysis. Using postcolonial theory, the critical historiography on Philippine Art Deco is to be investigated in terms of three critical categories of mode of production, representation and power. First, mode of production, shows how Art Deco was connected and dependent on the relationship between producers and consumers of the style. The interaction of materials, technologies of construction, patronage, institutions and cultural agents were highlighted in this chapter. Second, representation, explores how Art Deco became the technology of refashioning and re-presenting the different realities. The form, typologies, variants of the architectural style are dissected and problematized according to the politics of representation; Third focuses on power, or the dynamics between the dominated-subjugated and colonizer-colonized. This section established the linkage between the political, economic and social colonial programs and its manifestations in the built form of that period. Furthermore, modes of resistances and empowerment were identified and probed in relation to the power dynamics.

Committee: Patrick Snadon (Advisor) Subjects: Architecture