Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Applied Statistics (Math)

In this thesis, statistical methods are used to examine developments in ethnic identity and changes in ethnic/racial self-classification at a school district in North Central Ohio. Factor analysis and polychoric correlations are used to create a reliable scale measure of ethnic identity. Parametric and non-parametric analyses of variance and multiple comparison procedures are utilized to examine differences in the strength of ethnic identity among groups of students. In addition, a repeated measures analysis of variance model is utilized to examine developments in ethnic identity over time. Results show discrepancies in the strength of ethnic identity among gender/ethnicity groups in the district but minimal longitudinal changes in ethnic identity. Changes in ethnic/racial self-classification are examined through logistic and ordinal logistic regression, estimations of the proportion of change each semester, and a two-way table analysis. Certain groups of students are found to be highly likely to change ethnic/racial self-classification. In addition, interesting flow patterns between ethnic group classifications are discovered.

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2018, History

Through the analysis of the primary sources of Saint Patrick, Gildas, and Bede I will show how the different communities living within the British Isles utilized Christianity, as well as their Roman pasts, to formulate ethnic and cultural identities during the early Middle Ages for the purposes of differentiation and unification.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2025, Media and Communication

The thesis interrogates socio-religio-political marginalization by analyzing the hijab ban imposed by Udupi Pre-University College authorities in Udupi, Karnataka, India. The Karnataka State High Court upheld the ban, ruling that the hijab was not an essential religious practice under Indian constitutional law. This ruling, along with Indian Supreme Court's later split verdict, fueled national and international debates on secularism, religious freedom, and women's rights. As the first study to extend Co-Cultural Theory to Indian contexts, the thesis investigates how judicial rulings, activist responses, media framings, and school-level implementation of the ban reinforce exclusionary narratives. Interviews with schoolteachers, analyzed through a methodological approach using Critical Discourse Analysis, highlight the ban's chilling effect on student agency, forcing self-censorship, alienation, or withdrawal from education. Analysis of Indian teachers' perspectives reveals negotiations of assimilation (removing the hijab), accommodation (institutional negotiations), and resistance (legal action, protests) as strategies adopted by affected individuals. Findings reveal the Karnataka hijab ban is a mechanism of institutionalized Islamophobia and gendered exclusion, where state policies, legal rulings, media narratives, and educational institutions converge to regulate Muslim women's visibility and autonomy. Analysis of Karnataka State High Court and Indian Supreme Court rulings reveals that secularism is strategically reinterpreted to justify religious restrictions, redefining minority identity as incompatible with national values. Analysis of activist responses, including petitions and open letters, exposes how legal contestations and feminist resistance challenge state-imposed exclusions. Media discourse analysis identifies dominant framings that construct hijabi women as either oppressed victims needing rescue or security threats, reinforcing Islamophobic stereotyp (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

This dissertation connects the recent DEIB movement within organizations to larger social justice movements, specifically those that impact workers and the workplace. Critical human resource development (CHRD) professionals, who serve as “insider activists”, are highlighted due to their work to continue movement objectives within organizations. Through testimonios and critical platicas, this study explores how Black and Latino/x LGBTQ+ CHRD professionals, in particular, are experiencing the workplace, especially as it relates to their engagement with how DEIB is practiced within organizations. Through this study, these professionals provide insights into the ways that workplaces can be redesigned and reimagined to be more critically conscious and equitable spaces, especially for those from marginalized backgrounds. Their reflections can work to enhance the ways that DEIB is practiced within organizations. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

PHD, Kent State University, 2021, College of Public Health

The current growth of the proportion of the U.S. population comprised of adults aged 65 and older is unprecedented and presents multiple public health challenges. Although older adult refugees represent a small sector of the U.S. refugee population, refugee admissions have contributed to the growth of the aging U.S. population. In recent years, Somalis have been one of the largest refugee groups admitted to the U.S. As a result of extreme circumstances associated with forced migration, the plight of older and aging refugees is unique, and their challenges may be more complex than those of other older adult populations. When immigration is aptly viewed as a social determinant of health, it is clear that the stressors of aging, coupled with traumatic pre-and post-migration experiences and the challenges of resettlement in an unfamiliar context, increase the likelihood of poor health outcomes among older refugee populations and threaten their health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Consistent with World Health Organization (WHO) objectives, healthy aging encompasses quality of life and not just absence of disease. However, as the priorities that define HRQoL vary across cultures, there remains an unmet need for additional research to explore relevant perceptions among refugees, including the large number of Somali individuals aging out of place. The purpose of this Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study is to illuminate how older resettled ethnic Somalis transculturally aging in the Midwest U.S. perceive and make meaning related to their HRQoL. Participants included 16 purposively selected Somali immigrants, aged 60 years and older, who engaged in one-to-one, in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with the assistance of an interpreter. Translators performed the WHO prescribed forward and backward translation of the interview guide and helped reconcile the translated Somali to English transcriptions with the English only transcriptions. Analysis co (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2021, Psychology

This study investigated the influence of socio-demographics on emerging adults': (a) conceptions toward transitioning to adulthood; (b) sense of ethnic identity; (c) social emotional competence; and (d) coping strategies. A sample of N = 494 emerging adult college students (ages 18-30) completed a battery of measures to assess their approaches and attitudes toward adulthood and life functioning. This information was used to compare differences in emerging adult experiences across ethnic groups. It was hypothesized that there would be response differences between ethnic minority (African American, Asian American, and Latinx) and White emerging adults due to differences in cultural framework and socio-demographics. Frequencies and analysis of covariance were run to explore differences based on ethnic group, gender, and ethnic group x gender, controlling for socioeconomic status (SES). A bivariate correlational analysis was also conducted to establish a relationship between social emotional competence, coping strategies, and ethnic identity. Results showed that these variables were positively correlated with each other. There were also significant response differences found between ethnic groups regarding their: views on adulthood, ethnic identity, intra- and interpersonal skills, and dispositional coping tendencies when dealing with stress. Specifically, ethnic minorities reported an overall higher sense of ethnic identity and were more social-emotionally competent than Whites. They were also less likely to feel they had reached adulthood and reported higher tendency to engage in problem-focused coping than Whites. This study provides a nuanced approach to understanding how culture impacts emerging adults' experiences transitioning to adulthood. In turn, it builds a foundation for future research to investigate how social emotional competence and coping approaches may manifest differently for specific subgroups of emerging adults. Such research is especially (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2021, American Culture Studies

Ethnic Studies (ES) is the study of history, practices, and contributions of people of color and their descendants. Ethnic Studies has emerged as an academic discipline resulting from social activist groups of the late 1950s, and, subsequent student activism of the 1960s. In ways that were planned and improvised, Black scholar activists along with the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) fashioned the need for the development of curricula that provided an alternative to the traditional Eurocentric focus in many academic fields. An inquiry into the origin of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) qualifies in general some African Americans' responses to education in the U.S. and specifically at the first school to have ES in the state of Ohio. Alliances between activist student groups and individuals of diverse backgrounds led to the formation and development of a new academic discipline, Ethnic Studies at BGSU beginning in May 1970. The development of Ethnic Studies programming and curricula at BGSU emerged from a coalition of student activists advocating for Black Studies. BGSU's department is among the oldest in the nation focusing on interdisciplinary studies of race. African Americans organizing and sustaining Ethnic Studies at BGSU brought academic and artistic value and distinction to them and to the institution.

Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.), Xavier University, 2021, Psychology

The prevalence of transracial adoptions of Black children by White parents in the United States is rapidly increasing, and currently the adoption of Black children by White parents is the most frequent transracial adoptee-parent combination (Lee, 2003; Marr, 2017). With the increase of transracial adoptions in the U.S., questions arise about White transracial adoptive parents' capability to promote the racial-ethnic identity of their adopted Black child(ren), specifically with regard to their knowledge about how to promote the healthy racial-ethnic identity of racially diverse youth. The current study examined if White transracial adoptive parents' knowledge of how racial-ethnic identity develops impacts their intentions to promote their adopted Black children's racial-ethnic identity in the context of the theory of planned behavior. Caucasian parents (both mothers and fathers) who have adopted, or were in the process of adopting, Black or African American child(ren) (n = 199) completed measures examining their factual knowledge of normative racial-ethnic identity development and their attitudes, perceived subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and intentions related to engaging in the racial-ethnic socialization process. Results revealed that parents' knowledge of normative racial-ethnic identity development was negatively correlated with their intentions to engage in the racial-ethnic socialization of their Black child; however, parents' intentions were positively correlated with their attitudes toward, subjective norms for, and perceived behavioral control of the racial-ethnic socialization of their adopted Black child(ren). Further, knowledge was not an incremental predictor of parents' intentions to engage in the racial-ethnic socialization process beyond the components of the theory of planned behavior. Finally, results revealed that parents who perceived greater subjective norms for and greater behavioral control of racial-ethnic socialization report (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Music

This dissertation explores the relationship between music, ethnicity, and violence in Gambella, a region in western Ethiopia that borders South Sudan. Ethnic identity in Ethiopia and South Sudan has become increasingly politicized in recent decades and is cited as a cause of protests and conflicts in both countries. The multi-ethnic region of Gambella particularly struggles with ethnic tensions and cycles of violence, especially between the two majority ethnic groups in the region, the Anywaa and Nuer. The present study focuses on these two ethnic groups, exploring how local music-making and interpretive frameworks of listening reflect, shape, and produce Anywaa and Nuer ethnicity in the context of the Ethio-South Sudanese border. As scholars now recognize, ethnicity is not a self-evident category but is socially constructed, produced in encounters with perceived Others. Ethnic differences also tend to arise under circumstances of inequality, as ethnicity is a mode of identification by which marginalized social groups can organize themselves and vie for recognition, political representation, and access to resources. Gambella is one of the most underdeveloped and neglected regions of Ethiopia, and its populations are the targets of cultural denigration in Ethiopia's national imaginary. The marginalization of peoples has played a role in the rise of politicized ethnicity in Gambella. Cycles of state-sponsored and ethnically-based violence on both sides of the border further sharpen ethnic divisions, a heightened need to defend the ethnic Self against threatening Others. Communities on the Ethio-South Sudanese border utilize music to define a cultural identity and history, cultivate a shared ethnic consciousness, and delimit ethnic boundaries. In Ethiopia, traditional musical styles are frequently linked with ethno-cultural identities, and song lyrics overtly or covertly appeal to ethnic identification and affiliation. In Gambella and South Sudan, music-making (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2019, International and Comparative Politics

This study examines the role of ethnic inclusion as a factor of regime stability in Afghanistan through an historical case analysis from 1880 until 2009. By utilizing case study research methods, the goal of the study is to examine all the past regimes in order to show whether there is a relationship between the dependent variable regime stability and the independent variable ethnic inclusion. The study assumes the hypothesis that an ethnically inclusive regime will be stable while an ethnically exclusive regime will be unstable. Five indicators are used to measure each variable respectively. Each indicator is assigned a score of 1 or 0, with a total possible score of 0 or 5. The differences of the combined scores on each variable are utilized to test the hypotheses, where a lower denominator indicates robustness and a higher denominator indicates weakness.

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, Musicology

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cleveland, Ohio became an increasingly important destination for European immigrants and African American migrants from the rural South. The blossoming industrial metropolis promised newcomers job opportunities, upward social and economic mobility, and a thriving arts culture. By 1920, the city was checkered with ethnic neighborhoods that tempered local and national assimilation efforts with vibrant cultural institutions, including parochial schools, churches, ethnic newspapers, and sites of entertainment. For new arrivals, the music and drama of neighborhood theaters aided in their negotiation of individual, communal, and national identities at a time when assimilatory pressures were increasingly prevalent. In this dissertation, I examine Cleveland's diasporic music theater traditions— namely German, Yiddish, African American, and Slovenian—and their connection to issues of ethnicity and immigration. As a diverse, multi-ethnic city, Cleveland hosted a variety of theatrical traditions, but these four stand out due to their ties to prominent communities in the city and their rise in popularity in the early twentieth century. Surveying the commercial culture of these groups, their texts and practices, I offer evidence of how the theater constructed, represented, and reflected the identities of its audience. As I argue, the theater afforded immigrants and migrants the opportunity to witness and even participate in the construction of an ethnic-American identity. While the ethnic groups I study used the theater as a way to celebrate, preserve, and instruct—and, of course, entertain—they each navigated issues of identity in unique ways. For Slovenians facing the disappearance of their homeland after the 1918 formation of Yugoslavia, they sought to maintain cultural distinctiveness; peasant Jews from Eastern Europe worked to adopt American customs and adapt to their new urban environment; African Americans in the (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Adolescence has always been a cultural construction. The designation of a separate space apart from the presumed innocence of childhood and the myths of autonomy and responsibility that come to define adulthood is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. As such, adolescence bears the traces of the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation that attend so much of the period that calls itself “modernity.” My dissertation asks how writers and artists of color imagine themselves into the archive of coming of age narratives in post-1960s US literature and culture. In thinking about the importance of identity in the period following the advent of nominal civil rights, I offer the “long(er) civil rights movement” as a way of resisting the move to periodize the struggles through which difference has historically accrued meaning in the US nation-state. Each chapter centers around a “technology,” the academy, the body, the entertainment industry, and the internet, which is essential to the formation of adolescent identity in the post-war era, alongside a key term in the lexicon of American culture that accrues added meanings when filtered through the experience of difference. Ultimately, I argue for understanding the liminal space of adolescence as a dynamic metaphor for writers and artists of color to work out questions about the meaning of difference and the concept of progress. My first chapter, “Becoming Excellent,” places Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Rigoberto Gonzalez's Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa side by side to unpack the racialized valences of “excellence” inside the American academy. I read these two memoirs as overlapping, and at times competing, accounts of the fraught and often invisible labor involved in becoming “one of the good ones.” The second, “Becoming Trans,” considers the advent of trans identity in the context of questions about desire, and metamorphosis. I turn to Octavia Butler's sci-f (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2014, Geography (Arts and Sciences)

The geographic literature has shown that there is a connection between ethnic spaces and ethnic identity formation and persistence. However, by focusing on the Hmong population of Minneapolis, and St. Paul, Minnesota, this qualitative research will demonstrate that different types of ethnic spaces play different roles when it comes to these complicated formulations. Ethnic identities are complex, socially constructed phenomena that shift with changing contexts, and are in fact not mutually exclusive; any individual person could identify as a member of multiple ethnic groups. These intricate identities are displayed in ethnic spaces where Hmong individuals showcase, in a variety of ways, embodiments of these identities that are symbolic, commemorative, artistic, bodily, and performative. Ethnic spaces become not only producers and re-producers of identity, but outlets for the expression of identity in all its complicated forms.

Artium Baccalaureus (AB), Ohio University, 2010, Political Science

This article examines the increased frequency of ethnic violence between the Han majority and the Uyghur ethnic minority in the People's Republic of China (PRC), specifically in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Beginning with the most recent July 2009 Urumqi protests, the article then delves into past periods of Uyghur-Han hostility and violence. To understand these incidents, I first look at the XUAR's history with the PRC. I examine factors that have allowed the Uyghur population to mobilize around the time of each particular incident, with regard to PRC minority policy, Islam, and international influences. Because the PRC has modeled many of its policies after former Soviet Union policies, I look at Soviet Union minority policies and their implications. I also look at the issue of secession with regard to Tibet since it has received much more press than Xinjiang, and since it could set the precedent for PRC policy toward Xinjiang. This article ultimately argues that the violent outbreaks in the XUAR are the result of fluctuations in PRC ethnic minority policy.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, East Asian Languages and Literatures

The Chaoxianzu (Joseonjok or Chosonjok in Korean) are an ethnic minority group associated with the Yanbian Chaoxianzu Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China. As a part of Korea's historically displaced people – the Korean diaspora – the Chaoxianzu have evolved an identity that is tagged with the term “contested,” as their historical narratives, the history of their autonomous prefecture and other areas in northeast China, and their identity as “Koreans” all feature contested complexities, controversies and multiplicities. This dissertation explores the construction of the Chaoxianzu's contested ethnic identity, as reflected primarily in Chaoxianzu oral traditions, and in part through early 20th century Manchuria Chaoxian writers and contemporary Chaoxianzu return migration literature. This dissertation examines the construction of Chaoxianzu identity through personal narratives, songs, and stories collected during fieldwork conducted from 2000 to 2004. This collected material has been transcribed and translated into English, and is presented as examples of constructed Chaoxianzu identity as both ethno-culturally Korean and ethno-nationally Chinese. In Chapter 1, the contested historical and territorial narratives of Chaoxianzu and the early Chaoxian migrants in Manchuria are discussed to provide a contextual background for understanding the formation of the Chaoxianzu Korean ethnic minority group in China. This chapter also includes selected Chaoxianzu literary works on return migration to South Korea. Chapter 2 presents translated transcripts of a Chaoxianzu storyteller's personal narrative and one of his favorite stories that establish a basis for discussing the definition of what constitutes a Chaoxianzu story and Chaoxianzu identity. Chapter 3 presents an oral history of Chaoxianzu oral tradition collection projects, as told by a Chaoxianzu folklorist who participated in pre- and post-Cultural Revolution period collection and preservation efforts. Chapter 4 p (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Sociology

Researchers, organizations, and activists advocate increased political representation for both women and minority groups. But looking around the world, we know little about how politics at the intersection of these identities impacts the legislative representation of minority women. In this dissertation I collect data on the political representation of men and women from 461 racial, ethnic, and religious groups in 81 democratic and semi-democratic countries around the world. For each of the countries in my sample, I researched majority/minority dynamics and selected social groups that reflect the most salient divisions or social cleavages in each context. The data I collect indicate that minority women are underrepresented in politics to a greater degree than both their male minority and majority female counterparts. I also move beyond descriptive analysis to conduct the first large-scale, cross-national investigation of the factors that explain minority women's political representation across different cultural, structural, and political contexts. Using hierarchical linear modeling, I predict variation in absolute and relative measures of minority women's representation. I test the effects of traditional variables employed in women in politics models as well as new measures expected to influence the legislative success of racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups across countries. I consider how gender and minority quotas, both as single policies and in combination, affect the composition of national legislatures. And, in the final empirical analyses, I investigate the political representation of Muslim women both in the West and around the World. Throughout the dissertation, I supplement quantitative models with brief illustrative case studies of Lebanon, Romania, Burundi, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Overall, I find that minority women face substantial barriers to political representation. In many countries in the world, both majority women and minority men (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Sociology

One assumption that is often implicit yet widely held in the conflict literature is the existence of "identity-based (ethnic)" conflicts. While this type of conflict is presumed to be conceptually and empirically distinct from "non-identity" conflicts, few close examinations have been undertaken regarding the validity of this assumption. By using the conditional risk model, a Cox proportional hazard model that allows for multiple failures, this dissertation investigates whether or not the two war "types" evince different causal explanations in ways that can justify the oft-mentioned distinction. Results suggest that while the different "types" of war share many causes, economic exclusion seems more applicable to non-identity civil war (e.g., class-based warfare) while political exclusion better explains identity-based civil war overall, suggesting that there may be some truth to the argument that political recognition plays an important role in identity-based war. First, socioeconomic development and international economic integration seem generally important for war prevention, yet other aspects of modernization show different patterns across the "types" of civil war. Population growth increases the risk of identity-based war. Economic differentials encourage non-identity wars, whereas political differentials seem to pose a greater danger of identity-based warfare. Second, as for political environments, inclusive political systems exhibit generally beneficial effects, while exclusive ones are the most dangerous, particularly regarding identity-based conflicts. Also, systematic denial of political opportunities, whether through discriminatory policies or deprivation of autonomy, increases the risk of identity war. In contrast, economic discrimination increases the risk of non-identity warfare. Third, the group size/numbers and identity attributes in combination differently affect the risk of the two war "types." Religious diversity reduces the risk of non-identity w (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Psychology

The nature of Jewish identity was investigated in this study. It was suggested that Jewish identity is an ethnic identity, which is different from Jewish identification. It was also suggested that Jewish ethnic identity is related to measures of well-being and religiosity and spirituality. The instruments of this study included the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure, the Collective Self-Esteem Scale, the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale, the National Jewish Population Survey Identification Scale, the Global Spirituality Assessment Inventory, the Religious Orientation Scale, and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and a demographic questionnaire. Two samples of participants completed these measures on the internet. The first sample consisted of college students recruited from the Research Experience Program at The Ohio State University. The second sample was recruited from various organizations in the community. The findings of this study indicate that Jewish identity is an ethnic identity. Jewish ethnic identity was positively correlated with Jewish Identification, lower rates of depression, higher self-esteem, and higher rates of satisfaction with life. Jewish ethnic identity was also found to be related to measures of religiosity and spirituality, and this relationship was moderated by Jewish identification.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Psychology

This study explored the underlying meaning of performance ratings to determine whether ratings may reflect different constructs across ethnic groups. Specifically, it was suggested that supervisors may emphasize a different set of factors across groups in arriving at an overall evaluation which would reflect different implicit theories of performance for different ethnic groups. Operationally, these differences were predicted to be reflected in two ways: 1) group differences in the interrelationships among performance ratings, and 2) differences across groups in the factors cited by supervisors in justifying their performance ratings of subordinates. Both hypotheses received partial support. Using a sample of bank staff, performance ratings were analyzed for potential group differences in terms of means and correlational relationships. Supervisors' written summaries of subordinate performance were content analyzed to identify the types of comments made across groups. The results are interpreted in light of the literature on group differences in performance ratings, and implications for future research and practice are discussed.

PHD, Kent State University, 2009, College of Education, Health, and Human Services / Department of Educational Foundations and Special Services

Previous research attempted to explain the “model minority” phenomenon through conventional cultural theories, and attributed the success of the Chinese immigrant and Chinese American (CICA) students to the Chinese cultural values or to individual families. Such arguments are de-contextualized and do not take into account the social context that the immigrants are embedded. This dissertation argues that cultural values per se are inadequate to explain the success of Chinese immigrants unless such values are reinforced through the ethnic community, and thus become a form of social capital that the immigrants can draw on. Building on the conceptual framework of social capital theory, this qualitative case study is designed to investigate the role that a Chinese language school, as the center of the ethnic Chinese community, plays in (re)producing social capital in the post-Chinatown era. This study focuses on how social capital within the Chinese language school influences the school adaptation and the academic performance of the CICA children. It further explores how the CICA children identify themselves in terms of ethnicity, and how they position the Chinese language school in their understanding and crafting of their ethnic identity. The participants in this study are fifteen Chinese immigrant and Chinese American students aged 10-16, and thirteen Chinese immigrant parents, who come to the Chinese language school regularly. Data are collected through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and document analyses. The findings of this dissertation suggest that the Chinese language school plays multiples roles in the lives of Chinese immigrants. Social capital embedded in the ethnic community, in forms of friendship with co-ethnic peers, social norms and social control, influences school adaptation and academic achievement of the CICA children. Finally, the Chinese language school provides the CICA children an “affinity” group and a sense of belonging (open full item for complete abstract)