Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Linguistics

As a result of migration starting in 1990 Albanians constitute the largest ethnic minority and a considerable part of the population of Greece today. This work examines how Albanianness is constructed in Greece through various avenues. First, a linguistic and thematic analysis of internet memes that target the Greek of Albanians shows that the stigmatization of Albanians is still present in the Greek society as it was when they first arrived albeit is less direct. The analysis also shows the enregisterment of a Mock Albanian Greek or a Pan-foreign L2 Greek that is evident and is disseminated through the internet memes. Second, an analysis of semi-structured interviews with Albanian migrants in Greece shows the strategies Albanians have developed in order to navigate this hostile environment in which they live. One of them is to reject ethnic labels such as Αλβανος [alvanos] ‘Albanian.MASC' and Αλβανεζα [alvaneza] ‘Albanian.FEM' that have come to be ethnoracial slurs in Greek along with being used as labels of ethnicity. These are replaced by high register forms that do not carry the slur potential such as Αλβανη [alvani] ‘Albanian.FEM' or have been reclaimed and imbued with positive meanings that express ethnic solidarity. Others reject ethnic labels altogether and show preference for periphrastic constructions centering nationality such as απο την Αλβανια ‘from Albania'. Periphrasis allows them to make a cautious claim to Albanianness but not the negative indexicality of Albanianness, as well as to cautiously suggest a claim to Greekness. While Greekness is not something the second-generation can openly claim despite most of them holding Greek citizenships and spending their formative years in Greece, they feel that Greekness describes part of their identities. Another strategy by which Albanians navigate xenophobia is family and personal name changes and Hellenizations which deracialize them, removing the indexical link to their Albanianness, and reracialize them (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Joseph (Advisor); Anna Babel (Committee Member); Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Doctor of Education, Ashland University, 2022, College of Education

The purpose of this study was to examine the phenomenon of implicit bias in the referral process for special education. The study explored the relationship between independent variables such as student and teacher race/ethnicity, gender of teacher, teachers' years of teaching experience, and how likely teachers would refer a male student for special education and if there are significant differences in teacher rating of severity based on a student's race/ethnicity in Ohio's eight large urban school districts. This qualitative, correlational study used a survey methodology that included pictures to examine if student and teacher demographic variables predicted how likely a teacher would refer Black and Latino male students for special education evaluation. Critical race theory and social exclusion theory guided this research. Results from a Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression, and ANOVA revealed that years of teaching experience was associated with a higher likelihood to refer, and an increase in level of severity was also associated with a higher likelihood to refer. The findings showed a direct correlation between years of experience, likelihood to refer, and severity of behavior rating. Frequencies and percentages were used to describe the trends in the nominal-level variables. Means and standard deviations were used to summarize the continuous-level variables.

Committee: Judy Alston (Committee Chair) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Education; Special Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Comparative Studies

My project, Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11, interrogates the enduring notion of America as the promised land of freedom and social mobility in the narratives of Muslim immigrant women. Informed by the critical theories of minority discourse, U.S. borders studies, and postcolonial scholarship, I argue that autobiography and fiction by Muslim American women writers indicate an ideological flexibility, demonstrating a spectrum of discursive negotiations and stances that strategically claim secular, religious, modern, feminist, capitalist, transnational, and multiracial identities that altogether challenge the hegemonic and binary configurations of the figure of “the Muslim” and reformulate the terms of citizenship and belonging in the U.S. I read these strategies in three different writings: Selma Ekrem's autobiography Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (1930), Mohja Kahf's novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), and Leila Halaby's novel Once in A Promised Land (2007). Collectively, these texts articulate and address anxieties about the presumed “incommensurability” of Muslim/Middle Eastern identity with the imaginary ideal of normative Anglo-American modern society, and they offer a unique ethnic, religious, and cross-racial perspective that challenges dominant U.S. conceptions of the minority difference and exclusion. My project contributes to the theorizing of transnational minority literature in a context that goes beyond the simplistic framework of minor to major anti-hegemonic discourse. While I discuss these texts as counternarratives to hegemonic articulations of citizenship and exclusionary discourses of American identity, I also focus on minor-to-minor sensibilities, paying attention to the ways in which literature offers a space for articulations of cross-ethnic alliances, solidarities, and tensions amongst immigrants and other (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nina Berman (Committee Co-Chair); Pranav Jani (Committee Co-Chair); Theresa Delgadillo (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Comparative Literature; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Islamic Studies; Literature; Middle Eastern Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Near Eastern Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

This dissertation explores how the first generation of white and Somali youth coming of age together in the context of a historically white Maine town—and its everyday commitment to a post-racial and multicultural life in the midst of active racist differentiation—make meaning of their past, present, and future selves. The analysis is based upon six months of research with youth in Lewiston, Maine, a predominantly white town with no prior enduring Black population, nor visible or cohesive racial minority population, until the arrival of ethnic Somali secondary migrants in 2001 and Somali Bantus in 2005. I examine youth narratives about their own and others' everyday social practices to ask: What role do gender and sexuality play in the formation and negotiation of racialized Muslim identities for black youth of African-origin families, and how are gender and sexuality central to the maintenance of dominant whiteness, racial segregation, and racialized ethnic distinctions in the non-metro U.S.? This project contextualizes the dynamics of youth racialization and identity formation through a focus on the enduring white liberal response, particularly the fantasy of multiculturalism, to rapid racial change in the still overwhelmingly white Lewiston. Integrating insights from feminist and queer of color scholars who have enumerated the complex ways that racial-ethnic and religious formations are not only expressed through gendered and sexualized practices, but are idealized through normative scripts of gender and sexuality, I explore how contemporary racializations of Muslim youth influence shifting black racial formations in the U.S. That is, I argue that Somali youth in Lewiston must reckon with dominant gender and sexual discourses that continually (re)produce the abnormally repressed and failed (hetero)sexuality of the (hyper)patriarchal Muslim male and the sexually oppressed Muslim female, figures that run up against hyper(hetero)sexualized blackness in the U.S. T (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Thomas (Advisor); Shannon Winnubst (Committee Member); Juno Salazar Parreñas (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Black Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Religion; Womens Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon Church) in Hawai'i presents a specific context to studyLDS Church doctrine and Native members. In this thesis, I undertake an interdisciplinary analysis of LDS Church doctrine, practice, and ritual in Hawai'i alongside exploration of Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) belief and participation in the Church. The history of Mormon interaction with and doctrine on Native people leads to their focus on Hawai'i, with religious ingenuity and missionary work at the forefront of Mormon efforts to convert Native Hawaiians. I examine the histories that lead to and informed Mormon presence and activity in Hawai'i, and the subsequent success in conversion and establishment of a presence through land, institutions, and economic development. A study of the LDS Church in Hawai'i offers a site of exploration to make connections between theology, body, racialization, and settler colonialism. While scholars such as Hokulani Aikau, Simon Southerton, and W. Paul Reeve reveal the LDS Church's racialization and inclusion of Native/Indigenous peoples, I add to their work by focusing on doctrine, practice, and the body. I claim that ritual of baptism serves as an embodied practice with theological implications for Mormon material and spiritual bodies. Using Catherine Bell's theory of ritual, I analyze Mormon baptismal ritual and doctrine to magnify the centrality of bodies, racialization, and settler colonialism in LDS Church doctrine. The focus on baptism also points to the importance of Bell's concept of redemptive hegemony as an important part of how institutions and individuals interact and negotiate their power. I argue that Native Hawaiians engage with the Church through baptism as a means of claiming power through claims to the Lamanite identity while the Church also actively racializes them as a settler colonial institution.

Committee: Cynthia Burack PhD. (Advisor); Thomas Mary PhD. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Native Studies; Religion

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

This dissertation traces the shifts in queer figures of life and death over the past three and a half decades in the United States, with particular attention to the dynamics of racialization in these transformations. It places the passage of the HIV ban on immigration (and its subsequent removal) as well as the intensification of post 9/11 national security practices in the context of neoliberal biopolitics. The dissertation argues that the formation of racialized abject figures, such as that of the transgender detainee and the immigrant female living with AIDS, predicates the shift within gay white men from being figures of death into figures of life. This dissertation assembles an unruly archive of queer politics in the US in order to delineate the ways in which certain kinds of bodies come to be marked as queer subjects of life while many others are relegated to death. I trace two crucial moments within which neoliberal biopolitics intensifies its grip over queer lives in the US. First, I situate the emergence of the AIDS epidemic as a kind of social trauma that operates as a form of melancholia within gay white men dealing with AIDS. The loss of lovers as well as sexual cultures is internalized within the ego formation of gay white men. I situate these as psychic processes through which white gay white men are disciplined as responsible subjects deserving of life within the gates of the nation-state. This respectable good life is signified through inclusion within institutions such as marriage and the US army. Contrary to the shifts within white gay men from figures of death into figures of life, the figure of the immigrant living with AIDS emerges as an absolute limit to life within the US. The passage of the HIV ban on immigration operates as a technology of regulation and institutes a certain kind of biopolitical racism. Secondly, then, the dissertation traces the figure of the transgender detainee as a figure of death in relation with the intensification o (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Shannon Winnubst (Committee Chair); Mary Thomas (Committee Member); Lynn Itagaki (Committee Co-Chair); Jennifer Suchland (Committee Member) Subjects: Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

This dissertation examines how contemporary popular texts produced by Muslim Americans present the binary between good and bad Muslim. By representing the lives of “ordinary Muslims,” these texts reveal the complexities at work in the contemporary negotiation of diversity and inclusion. I argue that while Muslim Americans' ethnicities vary widely, this is of little consequence in U.S. culture and politics, which highlight Muslim religious affiliation over any other identity category. By unraveling this as a complex process of racialization, I argue that these Muslim American representations construct gender and sexuality to uphold constricted understandings of ethnic minority American identity, or what I term “empty diversity.” Utilizing the lessons of comparative race theory and queer of color critique, I examine a wide range of cultural texts in my work, including fiction, autobiography, websites, and film. First, reading Umm Juwayriyah's Urban Islamic Fiction novel The Size of a Mustard Seed and Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi's autobiographical collection Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, I argue that Muslim Americans seek to prove themselves tolerable by reconfiguring the lines of the dominant paradigm of race in the United States: the black/white binary. The problem of depicting the Muslim American plight along racial lines is that many Muslims do not have a definable race: their most significant characteristic, religious identification, transcends the color of their skin. I argue that by emphasizing the benign nature of race in the Muslim American community, while also depicting gender roles and sexuality in ways that complement normative American ideals, these texts trivialize the divide between Muslim Americans and the broader U.S. body politic. Muslim Americans thereby exemplify “empty diversity,” or difference made benign through racialized religious identity, constructed as such through gender and sexuality. In the sec (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Shannon Winnubst (Advisor); Amna Akbar (Committee Member); Lynn Itagaki (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Comparative Literature; Ethnic Studies; Gender Studies; Islamic Studies; Modern Literature; Religion; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Media and Communication

This study explored the lived experiences of international students, particularly Chinese students from mainland China, Taiwan, and Malaysia, who participated in the Summer Work Travel Program in a city in the United States. Drawing from the theoretical framework of postcolonial studies, this project situated the international labor flow in historical contexts. This study adopted in-depth interviews, participant observation, and autoethnography to collect data. I interviewed 12 Chinese student workers, 1 supervisor, 2 local Christians, and 3 local workers, and wrote down about 43,000 words of fieldnotes. Employing a grounded theory approach, I identified five major themes from the data: racialization, racism, internalized racism, personal transformation, and religious assimilation. This study revealed that the Chinese students had racial encounters with other ethnic groups, witnessed racism against other ethnic groups, and experienced racism against themselves. They endured pain, pressure and hardships, and harvested friendships and personal growth. Local Christians played an important role in providing practical assistance to the international students and engaging them in cultural exchange. This study also found violations of labor laws and inhumane treatment of the student workers by the employers. In addition, not every employer or sponsor made efforts in creating cultural exchange opportunities for the international student workers, which was required by the federal regulations on the Summer Work Travel Program. Lessons that can be learned from this project, and proposed suggestions to improve the operation of this program are presented at the end of this manuscript.

Committee: Radhika Gajjala Dr. (Advisor); Lisa Hanasono Dr. (Committee Member); Sue McComas Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2014, English

This dissertation examines transnational formation of race, gender, and empire through immigrant women writers' engagements with the dominant trope of "women of empire", a trope central to popular imaginations of the British and the U.S. empires during the period of 1850 and WWI. It analyzes ways in which narratives of migration and immigration could generate multiple and alternative forms of interracial relationship and cultural belonging. Rather than situating their works within one national tradition, it considers transnationalism as both an analytic frame and a cultural practice, thereby seeking to unravel how immigrant writers' individual and cultural expressions were articulated through a series of complex negotiation and disarticulation with the empire. It traces the emergence of Asian and Caribbean immigrants as transnational mixed-race subjects, who borrowed, contested, and attempted to redefine imperialist conceptions of the home and the colony, and domesticity and otherness. Tracing immigrant writers' non-essentialist articulation of subjectivity, it foregrounds their capacity to disrupt Anglo-American imperialism and coherence of whiteness in works including Mary Seacole's The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Anna Leonowens's English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem, Edith Maude Eaton's (Sui Sin Far's) Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, and Winnifred Eaton's (Onoto Watanna's) "A Half Caste"; and Other Writings. It thus conceptualizes Asian Americans and the Caribbean as a kind of migratory position that appropriated and simultaneously undercut imperial cultures. As a transnational project, this dissertation contends that immigrant writers evoked and reworked the norms of white domesticity and womanhood in their attempt to imagine the possibility of transnational subjectivity and community building across the nations. The norms include women's discourses on maternity, sympathy, kinshi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Yu-Fang Cho (Committee Chair); Susan Morgan (Committee Member); LuMing Mao (Committee Member); Stefanie Dunning (Committee Member); Anita Mannur (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian American Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2013, Arts and Sciences: Sociology

Motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood are often treated as universal constructs. This is especially true in the construction of good and bad motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood. However, as previous research such as that by Collins (2009), Glenn (1994), and Risman (1998) all demonstrate, parenting is affected by both race and gender. In this dissertation, I show that the social construction of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood are gendered and racialized. Specifically, I focused on media portrayals of the crime of filicide, or the murder of a child by its parents, to show the gendering and racialization of parenthood. I chose media portrayals of filicide as the focal site for this research precisely because it is divergent from "normal" parenting activities. I examined twenty-five cases of filicide that were committed by thirty-three parents. I conducted a qualitative content analysis of 372 stories about these thirty-three parents from stories that I collected from local television news affiliate websites. Cases were limited to those in which it was reported that the parent(s) had been convicted of a charge in relation to the death of their child between June 10, 2010 and June 10, 2012.

Committee: Annulla Linders Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Erynn Casanova Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jeffrey Timberlake Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2013, English

This thesis project examines the notion of "consumer citizenship" as defined by cultural theorist Nestor Garcia Canclini and the ways in which it is illustrated or enacted within the cultural products (texts, music, etc.) of Asian Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first century. More specifically, this project explores the ways in which Asian Americans create a space for themselves in contemporary society through the production and consumption of material and cultural goods. This analysis demonstrates how this "consumer citizenship" can be limiting for minority groups, while at the same time enabling them to craft alternative subjectivities in reaction to conventional consumer culture. In addition, this project analyzes Asian American texts in conjunction with those produced by members of other minority groups, such as Latino/as, in order to demonstrate moments of coalitional possibility within the realm of consumer citizenship.

Committee: Yu-Fang Cho (Committee Chair); Julie Minich (Committee Member); Anita Mannur (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian American Studies; Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 2012, Comparative American Studies

In this paper, I argue that while public health discourse on tuberculosis may reveal existent epidemiological trends in and among particular social groups, the discursive framing of this data unnecessarily racializes the disease. More specifically, public health discourse uses frameworks of "othering" and an imagined transnationalism to reflect but also refine and reinforce historicized stigmas of Asian Americans as non-normative, perpetual outsiders, and disease carriers. I assert that this discursive raciliazation of TB superficially constructs a causal link between Asian Americans and the incidence of TB in America and consequently results in significant social and political costs for many Asian Americans. Ultimately, I propose alternative frameworks for public health discourse on TB that might more effectively address the epidemiological problem and better avoid the structural costs experienced by Asian Americans and other marginalized groups.

Committee: Shelley Lee PhD (Committee Chair); Meredith Raimondo PhD (Committee Member); Mary Garvin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Studies; Asian American Studies; Asian Studies; Epidemiology; Health; Health Sciences; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Public Health; Social Structure