In Race Matters: Race, Telenovela Representation, and Discourse in Contemporary Brazil I investigate the primetime telenovela Duas Caras (2008), examining how different factors such as narrative, audience reaction, as well as media criticism and commentary played a dynamic role in creating a meta-discourse about race in contemporary Brazil. In a larger sense, I examine how the social discourse about contemporary race relations and racism in that country were circulated, constructed and reconstructed during the time the program aired. Additionally, I explore the role of the media, particularly the telenovela, in debunking the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy. Secondly, the research incorporates the Brazilian notion that telenovelas are "open texts", meaning they are co-authored by a variety of industrial, creative, cultural and social actors, into a methodological approach that expands the traditional idea of textual analysis. In addition to reading the telenovela text itself, this study investigates the production process, audience responses and broader media coverage. Thus, the public discourse about the telenovelas is a key part of the text itself.

This dissertation seeks to further understand the relationship between nativism, the opinion that the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence, and the immigration policy preferences of the American public. It is argued that nativism is theoretically distinct from immigration policy preferences and should be operationalized and modeled accordingly. Disentangling nativism from its related policy preferences is essential for better understanding the role of nativism in driving immigration policy attitudes in comparison to other important factors such as economic threat, racism, and ideological conservatism. A variety of methods are employed in this analysis, including cross-sectional survey data analyses, an implicit association test, and a nation-wide survey list experiment. Using these methods, this project examines the determinants of nativism (including psychological factors), the nature of the relationship between nativism and immigration policy preferences, and how nativism might distinctly affect immigration policy preferences among Latinos and African-Americans. The conclusion discusses the implication of these results for the current public debate regarding the degree and effect of foreign influence on American society.

My dissertation reevaluates medieval concepts of body and identity by analyzing literary depictions of metamorphosis in romance. Focusing on examples such as the hag-turned-damsel in the Wife of Bath's Tale, the lump-turned-boy in The King of Tars and the demon-saint of Sir Gowther, I take as my starting point the fact that while those texts pivot on instances of physical transformation, they refrain from representing such change. This pattern of undescribed physical metamorphosis has broad implications for recent work on evolving notions of change and identity beginning in the high Middle Ages. While Caroline Walker Bynum has read the medieval outpouring of tales about werewolves and hybrids as imaginative responses to social upheavals, I consider why such medieval writings ironically focused on shape-shifters but avoided metamorphosis itself. I argue that we can understand why Chaucer and other writers resisted imagining bodies in the process of transforming by examining the history of ideas regarding metamorphosis in the medieval west. While the foremost classical writer on transformation, Ovid, reveled in depictions of metamorphosis, by the late Middle Ages a new religious discourse on change enjoyed prominence, the doctrine of transubstantiation. In its effort to separate substance and accidents, Eucharistic theory strove to detach identity from physical change and exhibited a certain level of repugnance over images of physical transformation. I argue that medieval secular writings address that anxiety over bread-turned-God in moments such as the close of the Wife of Bath's Tale. In a scene that recalls the place of veiling in Eucharistic ritual, the hag uses the bed curtain first to cloak then reveal her newly young and beautiful physique. Ultimately, the corpus of medieval literature on change--a body of work that engages both Ovidian and Eucharistic writings--suggests that identity intertwines with physical metamorphosis in a productive, if problematically unstable, manner.

This dissertation is a feminist study of conceptualizations of race on one Midwestern university campus. It was inspired by biomedical and population genetic research that seemed to suggest that the consensus that race is a social construction was unravelling in the face of the avalanche of data unleashed by the mapping of the human genome. It draws from feminist theory, science studies, critical race theory, and, importantly, on my many years of teaching to investigate how and for what purposes race is being reconfigured in genetic terms as it is envisioned in research and taught to students. This study deploys a number of methodological approaches, including participant observation, face-to-face interviews with biologists, biological anthropologists and sociologists, discourse analysis and a student survey. I also situate the perspectives I describe on race in the historical context of the particular discipline and paradigm within which they arose. What I ultimately conclude is that race emerges from a deep and abiding belief that despite living in the same country, sharing a common set of traditions, and participating in what to an outsider is a recognizably American culture, black and white Americans are fundamentally different. Whether that difference is framed in terms of biology or culture, the legacy of slavery and segregation is a deep and unbridgeable gulf that in the minds of many white Americans separates them from their black countrymen. More specifically, I argue that the thick concept of culture that was circulating in the US around the middle of the twentieth century and which intellectuals of all stripes hoped could banish racism from American life has mostly disappeared. Culture no longer has the deep, holistic and relativistic meaning given to it in the middle of the last century, and still held by anthropologists today. This is why, contrary to the hopes of the founders of the modern evolutionary synthesis who held a more anthropological concept of culture, the population genetics framework, with its language of ancestry, populations and alleles, cannot contain race in the way that contemporary biologists would like. It involves references to statistical means, averages and variations that blur race at the edges and shift the categories around but ultimately leave them intact. What wins out in translations of statistical thinking, in other words, is the relevance of difference and the importance of averages, and this is as true for discussions of racism and inequality in the social sciences as it is for discussions of the biological basis of race. Unsurprisingly, race and gender continue to be deeply entangled. The bearing, raising and teaching of children is still primarily the province of women and so the politics of race is always also a politics of gender. What is perhaps more surprising is that most approaches to teaching about race or gender, even in the social sciences, continue try to keep them separate. This is despite years of work by feminists, particularly black feminists, that demonstrates this is not possible.

This thesis is based on three different focus groups held in the summer of 2018 with a total of twelve Black students. It examines a group of Black students’ experiences of racist microaggressions on the campus of a large comprehensive Canadian university situated in an urban setting. Using Critical Race Theory it analyzes how seemingly neutral comments, slights, snubs or representations by white students and professors contributes to a culture of anti-Black racism on this campus. Key to this analysis is the shift from traditional forms of racism to more subtle forms of racism in contemporary society, and the role that institutions play in reproducing racism. Microaggressions thus characterise the subtle way in which racism is perpetuated in contemporary society. The experiences described by the twelve students in this research study demonstrate the prevalence of microaggressions in the lives of Black students in this Canadian university. Furthermore, the four broad themes emerge from the focus group discussions: the lack of diversity in the student population and faculty, the invalidation of Black experiences, stereotypical representations of Black people and cultures, and gendered racism, give further nuance to the types of messages that Black students are exposed to at this university. This analysis produces a deeper understanding of how these micro-level interactions contribute to the broader culture of racism on campuses.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / Condragulations, fierce, realness, werk or «Shante, you stay» are only some of the expressions from the contestants’ lexicon of RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR), a popular reality television show that started airing in 2009 in the USA. Through an academic lens, the study of this type of expression was anecdotally called “lavender linguistics,” during the first explorations of the sexual minorities’ ways of talking. Since then and till now, concepts related to gender, sexuality, and the works of representation have influenced both linguistics and Translation Studies, which in turn has led to critical perspectives on translation, identity transfer, acculturation and, of course, the way language works. This paper begins by briefly referring to drag queens living in Lima, Peru, and how they have changed the way they talk to each other and about themselves. As will be argued, a cultural product such as RPDR and the necessary interlingual subtitling into Spanish –commercial or fan-made– have been influencing their linguistic engagement. Further on, the concepts of camp and camp talk will be presented as they were first introduced to Translation Studies with the work of Keith Harvey during the late 1990’s. Camp representations will be then analyzed in commercial and fan-made subtitles to reveal the semiotic and pragmatic constraints resulting from cultural-specific gay identities. From this first approach, new inquiries on audiovisual translations in general and identity acculturation in particular will be proposed. / Revisión por pares

This research is a story about the author’s Murri family. It is about rebirthing the author’s identity, history and culture, and concerns the history and consequences that colonisation has rendered on her family. The story divulges the secrets and problems from the past that continue to affect the author and her family today. Aboriginal history concerns each and every person in Australia. Non-indigenous people need to understand that Aborigines’ spirits belong to this land, that they are a part of it. They need to understand what colonisation has done to Aboriginal families. It is only through understanding and accepting the history of what has happened to thousands of Murri families that their identities and place within their environment can become reality in the minds of non-Aboriginal people. Because a written discourse is alien to the Aboriginal culture and to the author’s psyche, she has rebirthed her family’s stories in both visual and oral language, and combined this with the written. The author’s art is a healing vehicle through which she and her family reconnect with their culture. It is connected with the author’s identity, her heritage. She has created images/objects that reflect what she has discovered of herself and her family. Her creations are imbued with all that is natural, her palette is the land and its produce, thus reconnecting herself with her heritage, the land – mother earth. / Master of Science (Hons) Social Ecology

This research project critically engages with Maori social workers in order to develop an understanding of their practice methods and to ascertain whether they have changed since the 1980's. This will include a particular focus on the influences of the Puao-te-Ata-tu report (1986) on Maori practice methods and the perspectives of Maori social workers within social service organisations. Kaupapa Maori research and Qualitative methods inform this research project. Eight Maori social workers are interviewed and their discourses are examined in relation to the changing cultural, political and economic enviroment in the 1980's. The findings show that Maori social work methods are underpinned by tikanga Maori and that these have not changed significantly since the 1980's. The Puao-te-Ata-tu report was also found to be highly influential to Maori social work in general, however it did not have a direct effect on the practice methods of Maori social workers. The research project concludes with recommendations from both the participants and the researcher. These recommendations lay emphasis on the importance of educational institutions and social service organisations implementing the Puao-te-Ata-tu report and tikanga as a means of improving services for Maori.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Economics, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Harding Graduate School of Religion, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-214).