Transnational adoption from Asia to the U.S. was institutionalized in the 1950s, when the Korean War left an estimated 100,000 Korean children orphaned or displaced. At the time, the practice was situated as a form of emergency rescue, an act of win-win humanitarianism in which average Americans could take part...
ABSTRACT In the past two decades, the number of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants arriving in the U.S. has been increasing. Black immigrants (36% of whom migrated from Africa and 50% from the Caribbean since 2000) now account for nearly 10% of the Black population in the U.S. This growing demographic...
This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did...
The U.S. population is rapidly changing with recent projections showing that soon whites will no longer be the majority. This information, when shown to white Americans, can generate a sense of threat. Across the three studies of this dissertation, I frame this group threat (i.e., a change in the demographic...
The purpose of this multiple-case study was to examine the lived experiences of current collegiate music education majors, both students from under-represented minorities and their well-represented peers, with attention to racial/ethnic identity and social class. Dyads of current music education students at 8 separate colleges/universities—a student from an under-represented racial...
This dissertation analyses the ways in which football, known as soccer in the United States, has historically served as a diasporic space for the articulation of black politics in the second half of the twentieth century. While modern sport is characterized as an apolitical cultural practice, I am interested in...
This dissertation aims to understand the ways that the social, specifically race, ethnicity, and neighborhood, intersects with the religious identity, beliefs, and practices of early-generation Americans in Chicago. This dissertation asks at the most general level: What is the relationship of race, ethnicity, and religion for early-generation Americans? More specifically,...
This dissertation provides a study of local Black media development in Detroit in the decade following the 1967 Rebellion, as Detroit became a majority Black city. I argue that Black Detroiters not only produced documentaries that challenged local white discourse within what George Lipsitz terms “a Black spatial imaginary,†but...
Children come to understand race within a historically-established racial hierarchy, but they have the agency to accommodate or resist this establishment as they form their own racial identities. Previous research identified distinct narrative types that either reinforce existing societal structures (Master Narratives) or disrupt them (Alternative Narratives). The Counternarrative...
This project examines how early modern writers mobilize race as a vehicle for investigating far-reaching epistemological questions about the limits and parameters of human knowledge. While dominant trends in early modern race studies have focused on racial knowledges or particular identifications or formulations of human difference, I break new ground...
>"Surprising Metamorphoses: Transformations of Race in Early American Literatures," analyzes early American literary representations of race within the context of contemporaneous belief systems. Contrasting sharply with subsequent periods, much late eighteenth-century thought conceptualized race as an external, mutable bodily condition that could change over time. Identifying how this thinking informs...
Over the last 35 years, discourse on "diversity" has become commonplace in many U.S. institutions. My research interrogates diversity as a racialized political project, focusing on the organizational uses of diversity discourse. I base my analysis on case studies of a public university, a Fortune 500 company, and a city...
This dissertation examines the history of Mexicans' changing racial status in the Chicago metropolitan region, a place where race has traditionally been understood in strictly black and white terms. From World War I through the 1930's whites violently resisted Mexicans moving into their neighborhoods in Chicago, East Chicago, and Gary,...
In the Old Northwest, networks of activists across dispersed communities took controversial direct action against prejudice and slavery. By largely eschewing the growing cities that disproved the Old Northwest rule, this is a study of reform as it would have impacted most people, at the local level in the smaller...
Each successive wave of immigrants to America has faced prejudice founded in fear and uncertainty. Immigrants from Italy were particularly discriminated against in the early years of their arrival, from 1880 through 1920. They faced violence, racial slurs, and media attacks based on an unsubstantiated stereotype of criminality. This project...
Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the "hybridity" of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed "binary" relationship between "city" and "nature" that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated...
This dissertation explores the relationship between dance cultures and media cultures in the United States between the 1940s and the 1960s, when both were experiencing a period of multiplicity and flux in their forms. Bringing together theories and methodologies from dance studies, media studies, and cultural history, it considers how...
We investigated the racial content of perceivers’ mental images of different socioeconomic categories. We selected participants who were either high or low in prejudice toward the poor. These participants saw 400 pairs of visually noisy face images. Depending on condition, participants chose the face that looked like a poor person,...