Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2025, Higher Education Administration

In this study I focused on the intersection of higher education and identity formation by exploring the experiences of racially minoritized doctoral students in humanities programs at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). I examined how social and cultural norms at PWIs influenced the development of professional doctoral identities for racially minoritized doctoral students. Existing research emphasizes resilience and mentorship but there is little that centered racially minoritized doctoral students' voices and narratives in the development of their own professional doctoral identity, or explored how these students integrated their personal, cultural, and academic identities while facing cultural and linguistic exclusion, and tokenism, exacerbated by predominantly White academic environments. My study attempted to address this gap by centering their voices in their narratives. Using narrative inquiry, I gathered these stories, explored the lived experiences of racially minoritized doctoral students in the humanites, and discussed how the social, cultural, and institutional contexts influenced their professional doctoral identity development. Findings revealed connections between participants' professional doctoral identities and their personal, cultural, and academic experiences. Participants showed resilience by leveraging their cultural identities, relational networks, and self-advocacy strategies. In addition to resilience, peer and faculty mentorship provided validation, fostered belonging, and enabled participants to navigate systemic barriers while asserting their scholarly voices. Findings also underscored the need to move beyond performative inclusion. Recommendations included implementing proactive mentorship programs, adopting culturally responsive pedagogies that validated and centered non-Eurocentric and diverse perspectives.

Committee: Ellen Broido Ph.D (Committee Chair); Karen Eboch Ph.D (Other); Patrick Pauken Ph.D., J.D. (Committee Member); Julia Matuga Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Education

PHD, Kent State University, 2024, College of Communication and Information

Music venues are meaningful cultural spaces where people come together to experience culture (Williams, 2011). The most communally interconnected (Bennett & Rogers, 2016) of these venues are independent music venues (IMVs), which notably operate without corporate control or sponsorship (Whiting, 2021). While these spaces are important hubs for fan and musician stories as well as community connections (Straw, 1991), disruptions over the past several years, like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (Mims, 2022), threaten their continued existence. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine extra-organizational storytelling from an emic, insider perspective to trace how IMVs in the Midwestern U.S. promote and perceive of their stories, and place that communication within a larger context of societal norms and expectations. This dissertation used two lenses to guide an exploration of IMV promotional narrative: extra-organizational storytelling and master narrative. Extra-organizational storytelling is a hybrid conceptual framework which draws from organizational, advertising, public relations, and semiotics literature to situate and investigate how IMVs conceptualized and constructed their promotional communication. Master narrative provided a macro-level theoretical framework to understand how IMV promotional personnel co-create and tap into shared society-wide narratives which influence their work. I conducted and analyzed 28 in-depth informant interviews (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019) with promotional personnel from 26 different IMVs from across the Midwest. I found that organizational structures provided powerful context which shaped how participants communicated about and perceived of their venue's story. Storytelling and promotion were complex concepts participants connected to differently, with unique tensions associated with independence and extra-organizational storytelling. When considering their IMV stories, participants alternately highlighted characters, setti (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cristin Compton (Advisor); Cheryl Ann Lambert (Committee Member); Téwodros Workneh (Committee Member); Mary Gallagher (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Media and Communication

While scholars from a wide range of disciplines have analyzed thematic development, iconography, narrative, characterization, and animation style of Japanese anime, the music of anime programs is largely ignored or trivialized. This dissertation fills the gap in critical intercultural communication and media studies research by examining original anime soundtracks and their roles as narrative devices. Anime is explored as a site of global cultural resistance, while maintaining articulations of gender and cultural ideals in their stories and reflected in the lyrics of their theme songs. Employing critical intercultural communication, critical media studies, Affect Theory, with textual analysis and rhetorical criticism, this dissertation analyzes how music is intrinsic to the narrative and an expression of cultural values in anime. Analysis focuses on Hibike! Euphonium (2015-present) by Tatsuya Ishihara and Naoko Yamada, from the studio of Kyoto Animation, a slice-of-life drama involving the coming-of-age stories of high schoolers in a competitive concert band, and Vivi -Furoraito Aizu Songu- (2021) by Tappei Nagatsuki and Eiji Umehara, produced by Wit Studio, which follows an autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmed to entertain humans with her voice, and who discovers her humanity through music while trying to save the world from destruction. Each anime illustrates how musical scores, lyrics, and instrumentation are incorporated into narratives of gender, agency, culture, and humanity. The dissertation also analyzes compositional style, structure, instrumentation, and lyrics encoded with hegemonic messages and constructions of gendered, raced, and cultural distinctions. It provides a critical analysis of how music is used as a narrative tool in media and communication studies involving anime and how the rhetorical messages encoded in texts, via lyrics and instrumentation, are forms of intercultural communication of Japanese anime viewed by a Western aud (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lara Lengel Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Alberto González Ph.D. (Committee Member); Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Committee Member); Wendy Watson Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: American Studies; Asian Studies; Communication; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Music; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2024, Educational Administration

The topic for this dissertation research centers on the retention of student affairs professionals amidst The Great Resignation, specifically within three functional areas in higher education student affairs, cultural centers, student organization advising, and academic advising and their experiences of secondary traumatic stress. Figley (1995) defined STS as “the natural consequent behaviors and emotions resulting from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other⎯the stress of wanting to help a traumatized or suffering person” (p. 7). In order to identify why higher education student affairs professionals in the three functional areas remain in the field, a constructivist narrative approach will be used.

Committee: R. Jason Lynch Ph.D. (Committee Member); Scott Hall Ph.D. (Committee Member); Pamela Young Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mary Ziskin Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Educational Leadership

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2023, Leadership and Change

There are systematic barriers to educational equity in the U.S. higher education system, and the system overwhelmingly fails Latinx undergraduates more often than other students. It is crucial that evidence-based methods be used to reduce the existing postsecondary student success inequities. Scholars have linked specific educational practices to positive learning effects. A growing body of evidence has suggested these educational practices, coined high-impact practices (HIPs), provide amplified benefits to historically underserved students (HUS) and may be an effective tool for advancing equity and closing achievement gaps. The extant literature has neither adequately explained the reason(s) that HIPs provide an academic boost to HUS nor described their lived experience. Such qualitative research is important for understanding how HIPs contribute to HUS' learning and engagement, better support student success, and address inequities. Through narrative inquiry and inductive/emergent analysis, this study explored the lived experience of Latinx in HIPs at a 4-year public university. Deductive/a priori analysis drew from two theoretical frameworks: validation theory and cultural capital. This study investigated several guiding questions: In which curricular experiences do Latinx undergraduates experience the deepest learning and engagement? To what elements or aspects of the experiences do Latinx undergraduates attribute the learning and engagement? What are the key validating experiences or experiences that recognize/reward cultural capital? Findings revealed five major course elements as associated with deep learning and engagement: professor behaviors or traits, real-world and relevant content, preparation for future or career, relationships with peers, and diverse perspectives. A key implication for practice is that faculty are central to student success and through the application of teaching and curricular elements, every academic course can ensure deep learning (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Laurien Alexandre PhD (Committee Chair); Jon Wergin PhD (Committee Member); Marisol Clark-Ibáñez PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Educational Leadership; Higher Education; Higher Education Administration; Hispanic Americans; Teaching

MA, Kent State University, 2022, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

The goal of this thesis is to understand shifts in United States history curriculum over time by examining the Advanced Placement US History curriculum. Despite large changes in historical scholarship between 1958 and 2015, the American historical narrative represented in AP US History only changed gradually. This thesis uses yearly AP US History Course Guides from 1958 to 2015 and oral histories of committee members in charge of test development to illuminate the structural limitations that preserve the status quo in American history. The narrative presented through the Course Guides is evaluated through the metrics of type of history (political, social/cultural, economic, religious), gender, and race. The story of the narrative of United States history over these years is one of minor revisions in a field that needs major transformation. By improving our understanding of curriculum construction, not only will historical scholarship integrate more effectively into classrooms, but the American historical narrative will change from a focus on political players to a focus on all types of people who form and shape America.

Committee: Elaine Frantz (Advisor); Todd Hawley (Committee Member); Shane Strate (Committee Member); Ann Heiss (Committee Member) Subjects: Curricula; Curriculum Development; Education History; History

PHD, Kent State University, 2020, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

JEFFERSON, THOMAS A., Ph.D., August 2020 Higher Education Administration ADVANCING BLACK MEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY ON PERCEIVED SUCCESS IN DOCTORAL EDUCATION (252 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Christa J. Porter, Ph.D. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand Black men's' perceptions of their success in persisting and completing their doctoral degree within a higher education administration and/or student affairs related program. The conceptual framework that guided this study was Harper's (2012) anti-deficit model, critical race theory, and Yosso's (2005) community cultural wealth model. All three were woven together to best answer the research questions. Focusing on doctoral completion helped to gain insights regarding supports and other factors that helped Black men defy the statistics and systemic policies, procedures, and institutions that kept historically oppressed persons of Color from exceeding at the highest academic level. In this narrative inquiry study, I collected data through 13 semi-structured interviews and seven written reflections of Black men who graduated with their doctorate from a higher education administration and/or student affairs related program in the last 10 years. Utilizing a three-dimensional framework, participants shared their perceptions of academic success in their doctoral journey. Data analysis was completed using Fraser's (2004) seven-phase narrative analysis technique. I interpreted nine themes to represent experiences of the Black men doctoral graduates: (1) Pre-Enrollment Information; (2) Faculty/Committee; (3) Family & Community Support; (4) Academic/Research Environment; (5) Financial Concerns; (6) Self-Awareness; (7) Understand Your Why; (8) Challenges/Barriers; and (9) Goals. The experiences and themes of participants resulted in the creation of a theoretical model focused on Black men doctoral success. INDEX WORDS: Community Cultural Wealth, Black, Men, Male, Graduate, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christa Porter (Committee Chair) Subjects: Higher Education Administration

MDES, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Design

The digital age has affected the whole music industry and has become a part of cultural evolution. The music industry has continued to transform over time and we are currently in a major shift due to technology and digital music. There are many aspects that can be evaluated, however, this thesis will investigate music album cover design. Through the design of music album covers, designers help brand musicians and the cover introduce musicians name, the album name and set the tone for the listeners. Music listeners are now mostly seeing music covers as small icons if they see any music covers at all. Currently, people aren't getting to experience cover design as they did in the past, therefore, they're losing the story aspect of album visuals. The question being asked: Are graphic design principles still being applied in digital album cover design to create a visual narrative? This thesis analyzed what graphic design principles play a role in the visual narrative that is seen on music cover design. Research methods conducted were surveying, card sorting, era mapping, narrowing down of music genre and album cover analysis to gain insights. The study will determine if music cover design still conveys a visual narrative, is still important, and relevant in the digital age.

Committee: Renee Seward Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Yoshiko Burke M.F.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

BA, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / School of Peace and Conflict Studies

Recent political polarization in the United States has added new energy and attention to discourses on race, immigration, and identity. As previously silenced voices gain influence and immigrants bring increased cultural and racial diversity to the United States, the narratives that define how people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds interact must be renegotiated within communities. Narratives emerge from collective experiences and place present lived experiences in context of one's understanding of the past, necessarily influencing the perceptions and expectations of others' behavior. While narratives take shape from history, they are also a function of dominant values, biases, and institutions of power. The North Hill Community in Akron, Ohio has historically been home to a diverse U.S.-born population and a multitude of immigrant populations, creating a microcosm of changing American diversity. Interviews from the North Hill Listening Project provide insight into community relations as long-established American racial narratives extend into relations with new refugee and immigrant groups. The analysis finds that U.S. racial narratives, have been maintained despite the changing demographics of North Hill, and are incorporated into immigrant populations. However, contact leading to consistent relationships between ethnic groups provides counter narrative that assert the humanity and membership in the community across ethnic lines.

Committee: Johanna Solomon PhD (Advisor); Patrick Coy PhD (Committee Member); Angela Neal-Barnett PhD (Committee Member); Ashley Nickels PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Peace Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, EDU Teaching and Learning

This study is a text-based analysis of the use of the diary form in young adult literature about young women. Drawing upon rhetorical narrative theory, which views narrative as an action in which an author makes particular choices concerning various narrative resources in order to communicate to a reader for a particular purpose, I analyze how authors draw upon the form of the diary as one such narrative resource. My work focuses on various commercially successful and/or critically acclaimed works of YA literature from across time: Go Ask Alice (1971), Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging (1999), Becoming Me (2000), Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014), and Popular, A Memoir (2014). In my study, I identify how understandings of the diary as a literary form and a cultural phenomenon inform how it is used to structure works of YA literature. One such understanding of the diary—that it is a form associated with adolescent girls—leads to a second focus within my research. Informed by an understanding of adolescence and of girlhood as culturally constructed concepts, I interrogate how adolescent girlhood is portrayed in the books within my study through their content, their conceptualization of the diarist-narrator, and their construction of the implied youth reader. In each of my chapters, I identify one use of the diary form—as didactic tool, as regulatory device, as form of counter-storytelling, and as neutral vehicle for truth—and consider how that use connects to a larger conceptualization of adolescent girlhood. Across my chapters, I attend to the ways in which young women are frequently positioned as protagonists and as readers as less capable than adults, reifying traditional understandings of power and adolescence. In so doing, this research not only adds to the growing body of work that critically examines literary form in youth literature but also builds upon and extends cross-disciplinary scholarship on how young people are positioned in literature and cultur (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Ann Abate (Advisor); Caroline Clark (Advisor); James Phelan (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Education; Gender; Language Arts; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

Within this dissertation, I pay exclusive attention to methodologies of cross-cultural communication in post–World War II Anglophone Arab literature. Hitherto critical accounts discussing cross-cultural communication in this kind of literary tradition focused special attention on the use of English to reach a wide audience and on the process of cultural representation. Most accounts examine methods of delivery as an expected consequence of more complex representations without devoting much space for theorizing cross-cultural communication. Much of post-1960 Anglophone Arab literary production in the diaspora addresses the problem of cross-cultural communication differently. As cultural translators, interpreters, and mediators, Anglophone Arab writers insist on reframing current misconceptions about themselves. Negative depictions manifested in representing a collective Arabic identity stand in contrast to the actual heterogeneous identities of Arabic-speaking individuals and their descendants. In addition to these superficial representations, dramatic events such the Arab-Israeli conflict (1948–present), the Six-Day War (1967), the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), the Persian Gulf War (1990–1991), the Iraq War (2003–present), and 9/11 and the consequent War on Terror enlarged divisions between “East” and “West,” which resulted in conflating Arabic and Arab diasporic identities with global politics. In order to overcome this dilemma of conflation and association, Arab writers produced literary pieces that depict more complicated representations of themselves as individuals who exhibit cultural and political diversity. This self-appropriation is not only limited to producing more complicated and heterogeneous representations via Arab diasporic writing, but also extends to posing major challenges to approaches about expressing the Self. Nowhere are these challenges more keenly evident than in contemporary Anglophone Arab writers' literary production. My disserta (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Adeleke Adeeko (Advisor); Pranav Jani (Committee Member); Frederick Aldama (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Asian American Studies; Australian Literature; Bilingual Education; British and Irish Literature; Canadian Literature; Communication; Comparative Literature; Ethnic Studies; Foreign Language; Language; Literature; Middle Eastern History; Middle Eastern Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Near Eastern Studies; Personality Psychology; Rhetoric

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Comparative Literature

Across the world, capitalist and neoliberal economic policies have trapped communities in chaotic cycles of boom and bust. bell hooks writes about this chaos of connected systems of economic and social domination, “this is what the worship of death looks like.” The aim of this project is to explore points of formal association between popular horror media, or narratives of fear, and the politically unconscious beliefs, dreams, and knowledges of subaltern classes that live and tell stories under a social order that demands either complicity or silence. These narratives of fear demonstrate how certain political discourses are, and have been, culturally unspeakable as collective experiences of trauma and violence. From Argentina, to South Korea, to Japan, studying narratives of fear gives us a point of access to the cultural process of integrating and narrating the previously unspeakable. These examples foreshadow dynamics discernible in modern Western narratives of fear, and thus I propose that the deeply traumatic class violence that underlies neoliberal order is emerging from a condition of unspeakability on a massive scale. To support these claims, I focus my analysis on conventions and tropes of modern horror media, in both narrative and formal terms. Works discussed include Halloween, the Scream franchise, World War Z (the novel), Get Out, Train to Busan and more. Bringing these works, in conversation with ideas from Jameson, Ranciere, and Gramsci, into a Crenshawian intersectional framework, this project presents a hopeful vision of class consciousness by reading horror in a new way.

Committee: Claire Solomon (Advisor); Patrick O'Connor (Advisor); Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Literature; Political Science

MDES, University of Cincinnati, 2017, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Design

This thesis employs arts-based, narrative inquiry to develop design tools that awaken empathy and trust-building in complex, cross-cultural, relationships. While applicable to multiple domains, the thesis focuses specifically on relationships among low-income, African-American, single mothers and their social service workers. This relationship is of particular interest because this population of women are statistically predisposed for negative health outcomes and they interact with social service workers in a range of non-traditional settings. Since social service workers are often overloaded with cases, they can neglect to employ empathic understanding when interacting with each client. The tools developed in this project can be used prescriptively or as a guide by the social worker during their interactions with clients to pursue the following outcomes: To awaken empathy within the social workers, themselves; and, to encourage young mothers to trust the social service worker at a time of life when they are vulnerable and in need of guidance.

Committee: Vittoria Daiello Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Todd Timney M.F.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Leadership and Change

The purpose of this study is to examine the lived experiences of 18 African American women who went to Kenya, East Africa as part of a Cultural Reconnection delegation. A qualitative narrative inquiry method was used for data collection. This was an optimal approach to honoring the authentic voices of African American women. Eighteen African American women shared their stories, revelations, feelings and thoughts on reconnecting in their ancestral homeland of Africa. The literature discussed includes diasporic returns as a subject of study, barriers to the return including the causes of historic trauma, and how Black women as culture bearers have practiced overcoming these barriers by returning to the ancestral homeland. The data revealed that Cultural Reconnection delegations created an enhanced sense of purpose and a greater understanding of their roots and themselves. Participants further experienced a need to give back, participated in womanism, and gained a greater spiritual connection to their ancestors. Stereotypes and myths were dispelled. Leadership skills were improved. Participants gained a clear vision of the next step in their personal lives, an overall greater understanding of themselves. This dissertation offers significant insights into the nature and benefit of ancestral returns, and the cultural components of leadership and change, especially for diasporas who were involuntarily stolen from their native lands. The electronic version of this dissertation is available in open access at AURA, Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ , and OhioLINK ETD Center, http://etd.ohiolink.edu

Committee: Philomena Essed Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Laura Morgan Roberts Ph.D. (Committee Member); W. Joye Hardiman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Filomina Steady Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: Adult Education; African American Studies; African Studies; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Educational Leadership; Multicultural Education; Sociology; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures

This dissertation is an examination of how St. Petersburg punks create and sustain their culture through social practice and talk-in-interaction. This study examines how punks in the scene build (both literally and metaphorically) communities of svoi [one's own] that support positive ideologies like mutual-support, mutual-respect and openness. Yet, while this dissertation discusses the positive ways that the community impacts those within the scene, this work also brings to the fore practices of gender inequality within the scene that perpetuate patriarchal social norms. As such, this dissertation represents the first detailed, long-term examination of punk in Russia. Punk in Russia gained international notoriety with Pussy Riot's rise to prominence in 2009; however, their ascendance also exposed our limited understanding of what punk is and is not in the Russian scene. This dissertation aims to address this gap and explore precisely what Russian punk is and is not from the vantage point of Russian punks themselves. In order to do so, I conducted nearly two years of fieldwork, interviewed 32 punks and analyzed over 6 hours of spontaneously occurring talk-in-interaction. This holistic approach helped facilitate a description and analysis of punk culture in Russia that presents a detailed account of my informants' full lives. My findings show that the primary punk ideologies operating within the St. Petersburg punk scene are: mutual-respect, mutual-help and a focus on action and agency through Do-It-Yourself (DIY) enterprises. Yet at the same time as I draw on interview data for explicit characterizations of punk ideology, I also examine and analyze punk practice and discourse. This approach helps to elucidate not only the `point of punk', but also helps to connect interview data to actual discursive practices. Exploring the connection between interview data and real-life practice reveals a contradiction between explicit ideologies of equality within the punk scene (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jennifer Suchland Dr. (Advisor); Gabriella Modan Dr. (Advisor); Galina Bolden Dr. (Committee Member); Yana Hashamova Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Linguistics; Russian History; Slavic Studies; Social Research

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation treats how tradition has been deconstructed, reconstructed, contradicted, negotiated, and practiced by competing and shifting actors after 1949, as both a cultural construct and a tool of power struggle in contemporary China. Instead of investigating the general usage and intellectual construction of the term “tradition,” I focus on how rural people in northern China conceptualize and practice local traditions in both rituals and daily lives. The dissertation is based on six months of recent fieldwork (2012 and 2013), and site visits that began in 2007. My ethnographic case study observes living beliefs and vernacular representations of the ancient Chinese sage kings Yao and Shun, as well as Yao's two daughters (and Shun's two wives) Ehuang and Nuying, in several villages in Hongdong County, Shanxi Province. I explore how various local actors construct Chinese pre-history and worship mythical figures as their ancestors in both discourse and practice, and how they compete and negotiate with each other in transmitting and reproducing local traditions. In particular, I highlight the role of contemporary “folk literati” in the process of continuing and representing local traditions, especially during politically disastrous periods. I employ the term “folk literati” to describe a group of people who were trained in classical Chinese literature, knowledgeable about local history, legends, and beliefs, and are capable of representing them in writing. Furthermore, I analyze contentious relationships among folk literati and shifting power balances between the key folk groups that sponsor local temple fairs and ritual processions (she), temple reconstruction associations, and the state in the promotion and safeguarding of local traditions as China's Intangible Cultural Heritage in the late 2000s. I combine ethnography with history in my research, for history is crucial to the communities that I study, and it also makes my ethnographic observations in the pre (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mark Bender (Advisor) Subjects: Folklore; Foreign Language; Religion

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2014, Leadership and Change

A group of diverse women from various ethnic, religious, socio-economic and generations were brought together over the course of four months to determine if the Immunity to Change (ITC) process (Kegan & Lahey, 2009) would create bridging social capital as well as individual change. The group sessions included a process of assigned readings, discussions, and completion of ITC maps allowing women to reveal their identities and journeys through the sharing of their personal narratives. As a result, many experienced perception transformation regarding issues of gender, leadership, race, and class. The dissertation explores topics of power and privilege, relational leadership, and relational cultural theory in women. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Committee: Jon Wergin PhD (Committee Chair); Laurien Alexandre PhD (Committee Member); Richard McGuigan PhD (Committee Member); Judith Jordan PhD (Other) Subjects: Gender Studies; Organization Theory; Psychology; Sociology

Doctor of Education (EdD), Ohio University, 2013, Educational Administration (Education)

This study is a narrative inquiry that explores the understandings of elementary principals in schools where the racial and cultural makeup of the student body differs markedly from the racial and cultural makeup of the teaching staff. I purposefully selected principals who work in majority-Black schools staffed with majority-White teachers. I conducted in-depth interviews with ten Midwest elementary principals, five White and five Black, in three different urban areas. I transcribed these interviews and used the resulting transcript data as well as my field notes as the primary data sources from which to draw conclusions. My data analysis surfaced three themes that describe how principals collectively understand such schools and their leadership in them. First, the principals' own biography seemingly influenced how they understood, experienced, and engaged race and racism in their schools. Second, principals envisioned their leadership role as moral agents and used their moral power to assuage the perceived social injustices experienced by students. Third, principals understood that they functioned in a culture of fear where teachers were afraid of Black students, their parents, and the Black community surrounding the schools.

Committee: Craig Howley (Committee Chair) Subjects: Educational Leadership; School Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, English

This dissertation traces the cultural history of American automobility as revealed in narrative back to its inception in order to shed light on the construction of America's automobile geography. Examining multiple genres of narrative I argue that narratives representing road travel established new relationships to national space so that the civil and industrial infrastructures that make automobility possible could be built. The construction of America's highway infrastructure depended upon the production of narrative rhetoric that formulates new possibilities of relating to and experiencing America's physical space. Thus, building on Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope of the open road, and defining narrative broadly, I analyze poetry, novels, travel memoir, prescriptive travel writing, and promotional literature to show how narratives about road travel propelled sweeping changes in the production of national space in the early century. Chapter one traces the beginning of automobility in America to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and analyzes geographic narratives in architect Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building, Colonel Albert Pope's rhetoric of the Good Roads Movement, and Frederick Jackson Turner's “Frontier Thesis” of American institutions. Chapter two demonstrates the spectrum of nineteenth-century conceptions of geography reflected in Walt Whitman's romantic worldview and outlines the points on which Whitman became a touchstone for the national geographic concepts of later American road writers. Chapter three analyzes numerous promotional texts that depict road travel to demonstrate how promotional literature popularized automobility for a reluctant, reactionary nation. Chapter four examines prescriptive travel books by Effie Gladding Price, Emily Post, and A. L. Westgard, revealing the fantasies and desires with which these texts imbue automobility such that it can be represented as more rewarding than alternative modes of travel. Chapt (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian McHale (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2012, Educational Leadership

There are hegemonic commonsense narratives about urban life in the United States. A lack of critique of these narratives undermines the possibility of transforming urban education to better serve the interests of urban students and their families, an example of what Freire (2000/1970) calls “narration sickness” (p. 71). According to Banks (2006), schools face a demographic imperative, a claim that as the student composition of American schools becomes more diverse that teacher education programs must begin to change how they prepare teachers so they can meet this imperative. Nowhere is the demographic imperative more evident than in urban schools in the U. S. In accord with the demographic imperative, teacher education programs must do more to subvert the narration sickness that currently defines urban education. As a curriculum inquiry, this study illuminates the narrative curriculum of students in a pre-service urban teaching cohort program. Using the methodology of educational criticism (Eisner, 2002), this study investigates students' use of particular cultural narratives to talk about urban life and education. Cultural narratives constitute a particular form of dialogic speech act (Volosinov, 1986) that may be read and analyzed as a cultural text. Critical education theory grounds the study, which investigates the dialectical relationship between the narratives pre-service urban teacher education cohort students use to talk about urban life and schooling and the material realities of urban schooling in American society. Throughout this dissertation, I unfold some of the commonsense narratives about urban life as they circulate in American culture but especially as they are reproduced, mediated, and contested by pre-service teachers in the Urban Teaching Cohort at Miami University. I claim that students' narrations have begun to account for the material realities of urban life, counter-narrations that subvert many dominant narratives of urban pathology. They (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Quantz PhD (Committee Chair); Dennis Carlson PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Poetter PhD (Committee Member); Sheri Leafgren PhD (Committee Member); Tammy Schwartz EdD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Educational Theory; Secondary Education; Teacher Education