Cuteness is a popular aesthetic in product design, yet there is a lack of understanding of who is most likely to engage in cute consumption and, more importantly, why. In this dissertation, I consider the role of sex and gender identity in cute consumption, proposing a strong mental association between...
Millions of people freelance in the growing online gig economy, making it important to advance pay equity and support freelancers in earning their livelihoods online. Compared to offline employment, freelancing introduces at least two challenges that threaten freelancers’ ability to secure work and the equitability of the gig economy: 1)...
This dissertation documents the centrality of emotion to Americans’ understanding of, participation in, and critiques of the expanding economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. By then, many people viscerally understood that white men’s attempts to procure credit and escape debt could produce fear, anger, guilt, and sadness....
Sleep is affected by social relationships and institutions, but much research has studied sleep within an individualized framework. In this dissertation, I analyze sleep in a series of specific social contexts to examine how these contexts shape gender and socioeconomic differences in sleep. Given prior findings suggesting the importance of...
This dissertation adopts a jointly ethnographic and historical approach to study shifting racial formations and configurations of inequality in the metropolitan U.S. South. Specifically, it analyzes how immigrants and working poor populations are reshaping the social life, privatized spaces, and conservative politics of Atlanta’s white suburbs. It focuses on Sandy...
Public memory studies in rhetoric have typically neglected how we use shared memories to form, maintain, and pass down social norms through the objects we encounter and the practices we participate in during our everyday lives. This is especially true for children’s toys, because they are understood as essential objects...
This dissertation focuses on the topic of pseudowords and how speakers pseudoword processing relates to that of real words. Three main lines of inquiry are pursued with respect to pseudowords and real words: mechanisms of gradient well-formedness, theories of morphological decomposition, and indexical associations for morphemes in complex words. It...
Penelopian Figures: Narratives of Work and Resistance in American Literature, 1840-1900” examines literary representations of workers who engage in covert opposition to their circumstances. In chapters on The Lowell Offering textile magazine, Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, Louisa May Alcott’s “How I Went Out to Service” and...
Using interviews and friendship mapping with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally (LGBTQ+) community members as well as ethnographic observations, this dissertation analyzes post-gay LGBTQ community in River City, a small, Midwestern city. My findings reveal a formation I call ambivalent community: even as participants express a desire for...
"I Love You": Coercion and Consent in Sexual Relations in Postapartheid South Africa Judith L. Singleton This dissertation is an ethnographic study which explores and documents several discourses and practices surrounding sexual coercion and consent in the black South African township of Mpophomeni. I trace and examine discourses and practices...