This dissertation outlines findings from a critical ethnographic research study that attempted to document young Latinas engaging in critical mathematics education, with implications for shifting dominant ideas about the form and goals of education. As Latina youth are marginalized from classrooms and in society where their language, culture, practices, and community are seen as "problems," and particularly in mathematics classrooms where a dominant culture is said to further exclude girls, there is an exigency to understand how in fact Latina students could experience education as transformative. Critical race and feminist theories further argue for centralizing the experiences of women or girls of color as essential to understanding where change can happen in society because of the role that racism and sexism play in structuring educational experiences. Therefore, this study foregrounds the experiences of young Latinas as they engage in critical mathematics.A critical educational paradigm has been put forth whose purpose is to develop critical literacy in students where they investigate, make apparent and challenge oppressive societal structures. This critical ethnographic research study seeks to gain a more nuanced understanding of how young Latinas experience a social justice mathematics learning environment through the facilitation and research of an after-school, all girls mathematics club. More specifically, data in the form of field notes, videotaped sessions, classroom observations, student work and interviews offers a rich source for analysis of their practices in the learning environment, their perceptions of mathematics, themselves as learners of mathematics and as people who can make changes in their lives, communities and in the world. The construct of critical mathematical agency is employed in attempting to understand how the participants' actions expressed a sense of being able to use mathematics to critique and change their worlds. Analysis revealed they engaged in resistance, research and (re)authoring, as ways of expressing critical mathematical agency. In addition, their insight into critical mathematics education highlights the importance of incorporating critical funds of knowledge, fostering collectivity, and centering the experiences in authentic, community contexts. This understanding will inform arguments for seeking social justice through mathematics education and educational research, particularly for Latina youth.

The Path of Good Citizenship illuminates the role of public schools in attempts by white Americans to organize republican citizenship and labor along lines of race and ethnicity during a time of anxiety over immigration and the emergence of the U.S. as a global power. By considering U.S. schools as both national and imperial institutions, it presupposes that the formal education of children served as multilayered exchanges of power through which myriad actors constructed, debated, and contested parameters of citizenship and visions of belonging in the United States. Using the discursive narratives of American exceptionalism, scientific racialism, and patriotism, authors of school curricula imagined a uniform Americanness rooted in Anglo‐Saxon institutions and racial character. Schools not only became mechanisms of the U.S. imperial state in order to control belonging and access supposedly afforded by citizenship, but simultaneously created opportunities for foreigners and “foreigners within” to shape their own relationships with the nation. Ideological attempts to construct a nation that excluded and included on the basis of race and foreignness had very real implications. Using comparative case studies of Atlanta’s African‐Americans, San Francisco’s Japanese, and New York’s European immigrants, this dissertation shows how policies of segregation, exclusion, and Americanization both complicated and sustained designs for a national body of citizens and workers. Schools trained many of these students for citizenship that included subordinate labor roles, limited social mobility, and marginalized national identity rooted in racial difference. These localized analysis reveal the contested power dynamics that involved challenges from immigrant and non‐white communities to a racial nationalism that often slotted them into subordinate economic and social categories. Taken together, curricula and policy reveal schools to be integral to the mutually sustaining projects of nation‐building and empire‐building.

The Path of Good Citizenship illuminates the role of public schools in attempts by white Americans to organize republican citizenship and labor along lines of race and ethnicity during a time of anxiety over immigration and the emergence of the U.S. as a global power. By considering U.S. schools as both national and imperial institutions, it presupposes that the formal education of children served as multilayered exchanges of power through which myriad actors constructed, debated, and contested parameters of citizenship and visions of belonging in the United States. Using the discursive narratives of American exceptionalism, scientific racialism, and patriotism, authors of school curricula imagined a uniform Americanness rooted in Anglo‐Saxon institutions and racial character. Schools not only became mechanisms of the U.S. imperial state in order to control belonging and access supposedly afforded by citizenship, but simultaneously created opportunities for foreigners and “foreigners within” to shape their own relationships with the nation. Ideological attempts to construct a nation that excluded and included on the basis of race and foreignness had very real implications. Using comparative case studies of Atlanta’s African‐Americans, San Francisco’s Japanese, and New York’s European immigrants, this dissertation shows how policies of segregation, exclusion, and Americanization both complicated and sustained designs for a national body of citizens and workers. Schools trained many of these students for citizenship that included subordinate labor roles, limited social mobility, and marginalized national identity rooted in racial difference. These localized analysis reveal the contested power dynamics that involved challenges from immigrant and non‐white communities to a racial nationalism that often slotted them into subordinate economic and social categories. Taken together, curricula and policy reveal schools to be integral to the mutually sustaining projects of nation‐building and empire‐building.

This paper explores several narratives of race and racialized music production in postwar American popular musics, to study the ways in which race has played an intrinsic role in structuring not only contemporary expectations of popular music-making, but also the frameworks by which we continue to study American popular musics today. The essay discusses two case studies from Detroit's music cultures of the 1960s – black pop star Marvin Gaye and the white hard rock group the MC5 – to illustrate how entrenched expectations of racialized performance served to inform contemporary and still-current critiques of these groups; these case studies also reveal the inadequacy of some standard musico-racial narratives in interpreting the racialized dimensions of these artists' performances.

Recently, a division of legal scholarship, Critical Race Theory, began examining the law from a new perspective: creative literature. Within the legal community, CRT legal storytelling has received mixed reception; yet literary scholars have largely ignored this genre. This thesis aims to fill the research gap surrounding legal storytelling, examining the stories not only as works of legal scholarship, but as works of literature as well. Through application of literary theory and close-reading techniques, I argue for the value of literary works to legal scholarship, particularly civil rights. My research concerns four findings. First, literature broadens the scope of legal scholarship to examine how the law operates and our relationship to the law. Second, fiction allows for critique of the law and legal scholarship. Third, counterstories provide alternative strategies for the civil rights community. Finally, Derrick Bell’s science fiction contains elements of fantasy well-suited to judicial critique of racial inequality.

This dissertation examines the racial identities of middleclass Mexican Americans, and provides a focus on how racial oppression plays a significant role in the formation, negotiation, and organization of these identities. Providing theoretical, analytic, and conceptual balance between structure and agency, this dissertation addresses how these Mexican Americans continue to experience racism despite being middleclass and achieving socioeconomic parity with many middleclass whites. Drawing on 67 semistructured open ended interviews (1-3 hours each), 10 months of ethnography in Phoenix and San Antonio, as well as a descriptive analysis of the Alamo monument website and Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office 2011 press releases this dissertation examines how middleclass Latinos/as negotiate racialized identities and racial oppression. This research concludes that these respondents experience significant amounts of racism in the cities of Phoenix and San Antonio. The racial climates of these cities impose racist discourse about Latinos/as and ultimately reinforce and reinscribe existing racial hierarchies of the United States. Middleclass Mexican Americans utilize different identity practices to navigate the racism of these discourse by providing various negotiation, deflection, and resistance practices. Ultimately this dissertation recognizes that middleclass Mexican American identities are a constant negotiation of imposed racial identities and their own understandings of their racial self.

Executive function, the cognitive processes that allow the voluntary control of goal-directed behaviour, can be studied through the examination of inhibition of action. The countermanding paradigm has been shown to be a powerful tool to examine a subject’s ability to withhold responses to a go stimulus when a stop signal is presented occasionally. Logan and Cowan (1984) developed a race model to account for countermanding performance in humans, proposing that independent go and stop process initiated by the go and stop signals respectively, race toward a finish line whereby the first process to cross its finish line determines the behavioural outcome. The model allows estimation of the stop signal response time, a variable that is not directly observable. The race model has yet to be validated for countermanding performance in rats. Using a new rodent countermanding task inspired directly from human studies, male Wistar rats were trained to respond to a visual stimulus (go signal) by pressing a lever below an illuminated light for food reward, but to countermand lever the press (25% of trials) subsequent to an auditory tone (stop signal) presented after a variable delay. The ability to cancel a response decreased as stop signal delay increased. The stop signal response time for rats was estimated to be 157 ms, a value within the range of human estimates. Predictions of countermanding performance made by the race model were generally respected. Response times of movements that escape inhibition: 1) were shorter than those of movements made in the absence of a stop signal; 2) gradually lengthened with increasing stop signal delay; and most importantly, 3) were predicted by the race model. These findings demonstrate that the countermanding performance of rodents can be accounted for by a simple race model, which has been applied successfully in human studies and nonhuman primate models. This new animal model will permit complementary invasive investigations of brain mechanisms underlying inhibitory control and refine the existing rodent models of neurological disease and impulsivity. / Thesis (Master, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-30 11:35:44.713

Recent analyses of creativity in the North American economy have underscored the importance of city-regions in the generation of economic dynamism. These studies have been concerned with at least two principal assertions. The first assertion is that the social dynamics of city-regions constitute the foundations of economic success. The second assertion is that the distribution of human capital (talent) is a crucial element in regional economic prosperity; yet the distribution of human capital across cities is uneven. Therefore, the question emerges: what factors influence the locational choices of talented individuals? In recent years, this question has received considerable scholarly attention. This thesis has identified two existing gaps within this field of inquiry. Conspicuously absent from studies in this area are theoretical insights offered by cultural geographers in the field of whiteness and race. Economic geographers have created an essentialized reading of racial diversity in the economic performance of city-regions. Moreover, work in this area has been constrained by a quantitative focus and a lack of empirical evidence. Accordingly, the purpose of this thesis is to develop a more nuanced understanding of how social processes and institutions underlie and are shaped by the economic performance of city-regions. This is achieved by drawing on insights from an empirical study of 44 semi-structured interviews with academic talent in the City of Kingston, Ontario and 12 interviews with community insiders. The results on the one hand reveal complex dynamics linked to why academics live in particular places, but on the other hand point to one overriding explanation for why academics locate where they do: namely, academics are attracted to Kingston, first and foremost, because of academic jobs, not urban amenities or other characteristics of place. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2009-07-22 11:33:21.839

Strong group affiliations based on race have been found in children at a very young age (Aboud, 1988) and may lead to a higher risk of involvement in bullying for certain racial groups. Little research, however, has addressed the relationship among bullying, race, and immigrant status in a Canadian sample. As well, few studies have directly examined racial bullying and victimization. Thus, the two studies in the current project aim to examine race and immigrant status as individual risk factors for bullying involvement, while also examining the individual- and school-level factors associated with racial bullying. In Chapter Two, an empirical examination of the relationship among race, immigrant status, and bullying and victimization in adolescence reveals that racial minority adolescents experience racial bullying. Immigrant status, however, does not appear to predict victimization, but it may be a risk factor for bullying others. In Chapter Three, a multilevel investigation of racial bullying and victimization at the individual and school levels indicates that African-Canadian students are at risk of engaging in both racial bullying and victimization, and that being male is also associated with participation in this type of bullying. At the school level, school climate is not found to account for the differences in racial bullying and victimization across schools, but increased school support is associated with decreased racial bullying in schools with more teacher diversity. Together, the results of the current research clarify the roles of race and immigrant status in bullying and victimization, but these results also raise important concerns and further questions regarding possible interventions in schools for students who engage in racial bullying and racial victimization. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-16 12:29:46.885

The thesis suggests the toy-like mask of a white man, ‘Hello, Mr. Gaijin,’ as a site of analysis where the culture of racisms is (re)produced in the specific context of contemporary Japan. Sold as a gig gift in Japan, the mask, consisting of two stickers for blue-eyes and a prominent plastic nose, embodies the popularized image of whiteness in Japan, and presents it as a source of fascination as well as ridicule and mockery. Approaching this mask as an analytical text, I ask: How is race manifested in the Japanese culture? C. W. Mills (1997) suggests that there exists a global system that privileges whites and normalizes their beneficial racial position. This trend is certainly omnipresent in contemporary Japan, where one observes the sense of superiority being affixed to the white body in the frequent use of white models in the media (Creighton, 1997). Yet, how is this theory of white supremacy significantly complicated by the particular representations of whiteness seen in the ‘Hello, Mr. Gaijin’ mask? Through mimicry, the power of whiteness is mocked and commodified into a sleazy toy mask. Critically engaging with these primary questions, the thesis situates the analysis of the ‘Hello, Mr. Gaijin’ mask within the particular history of racialization developed in Japan where the culture of whiteness holds its unique complexity and significance in the society. Drawing largely on the idea of ‘the culture of racisms’ that Goldberg (1993) suggests, the thesis argues that the seemingly contradictory sentiment towards whiteness embodied in the mask presents the key to the holistic understanding of Japan’s particular culture of racisms. Specifically, it analyzes three levels of transformation that the mask presents in embodying the particular culture of racisms: the discursive transformation of whites into gaijin; the temporal physical transformation of the user into Mr. Gaijin; the visual and material transformation of whites into the toy-mask. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-15 23:36:21.157