Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Kevin Steinmetz / At year end 2016 over 3.7 million Americans were under probationary supervision. In response to institutional overcrowding, the U.S. has been increasingly reliant on community corrections. Though there has been extensive research into various aspects of the criminal justice system, the area of community corrections, specifically probation, has seen relatively little scrutiny. Through quantitative analysis of probationary data, this study examined a Midwestern population of closed probationary cases. Through a framework of intersectionality, various intersectional identities are examined for likelihood of failure. Focusing on the prevalence of negative outcomes for not only racial and ethnic minorities, but also intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender. Utilizing logistic regression analysis, each model examines race, ethnicity, and sex against probation failure. After an initial baseline model, intersections of race/ethnicity were run. Using probation success as a control outcome in each of the models. Across all models, race and ethnicity were found to be significantly and positively associated with probation failure. Additionally, standardized coefficients indicate Black and Black/Hispanic categories to represent strong effect on negative probation outcome. Of note, sex though unreliable in numerous models, was found only to be a significant and strong predictor in the model examining Black probationers. Possible explanations, study limitation, future research, and policy implication are offered in the discussion and conclusion section.

Research into the health needs of Asian elders has been scarce, that which does exist has lacked a theoretical framework. A first attempt is made in the present research study to relate the literature on race and ethnicity to theory and practice in gerontology. A stress and coping model from the gerontological literature was adapted to account for outcomes of physical/psychological health and well-being amongst south Asian elders. In order to test the applicability of this model the first aim of the study was to gain an insight into the circumstances and situations of Asian elders on a range of demographic, support, health and well-being factors. And then-secondly, to see how these factors may interrelate according to the stress and coping model. A range of specific hypotheses were formulated on the basis of this model. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews conducted with a community sample of 70 South Asian elders who were 55 years and over. The interview schedule consisted of both standardised measures of health, stress and coping as well as structured questions on the use of formal/informal support, satisfaction with life and attitudes towards old age. Data were analysed in two phases. The results from the first phase which were largely descriptive, suggest that a significant number of Asian elders were living either alone or with their spouse. In general Asian elders were living in circumstances of material disadvantage, suffering from poor health and chronic illnesses, reporting high levels of psychological distress with little formal and informal support. Awareness and receipt of specialist support services for older adults was low. The results from the second phase involving analyses of correlations and regressions, indicate significant correlations between outcome measures of health/mental health and satisfaction with life with measures of coping, appraisals and to some extent resource variables. There were also significant correlations between positive/negative outcomes of health and well-being with positive/negative ways of coping, appraisal and some resource variables. The factor associated most strongly with outcome variables was social support (resource) rather than coping. Overall, the stress and coping model appears to account well for most of the research findings. The results were discussed in relation to previous research literature and implications for future research and clinical practice were discussed.

No description available.

This thesis examines the ways in which the interwar global order came to be theorised by African writers, and those of African descent, in specific territories bordering the Atlantic. It asks how those views can inform a richer understanding of the construction of our contemporary world. In particular, it seeks to understand the centrality of race to the imperial order and to many of the oppositional projects that emerged in relation to the order. A global order perspective can, it is argued, help to explain the salience of race to the interwar world as well as its enduring power beyond that period. Using as its primary sources the vibrant black print cultures and circuits of the interwar period, the thesis examines the close concomitance of national and transnational thinking during the 'Belle Époque'; the global vision of Marcus Garvey's black nationalism in the United States; the emergence of critical theorisations of colonialism across British-controlled West Africa; the languages of race and whiteness in interwar France, from the black press of Paris to the early texts of Négritude; and the role played by Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia - the only independent states of the period governed by Africans or African-descended people - as instantiations of the racialised nature of interwar sovereignty, targets of both imperial designs and anticolonial activism. Interrogating the conceptual boundaries between race, nationalism, and pan-nationalism, the thesis suggests that such affinities are best understood not as abstractly-definable and opposing doctrines, but as political projects that have emerged historically in relation to global order as a whole and out of specifically enabling material conditions. As well as assessing diverse bodies of writing in terms of their contribution to international theory, the thesis explores how changes in material conditions and imperial infrastructures - particularly the spread of newspapers - facilitated a range of counter-readings of dominant discourses, imaginative acts of traversal, and other practices of oppositional power, whose consequences reach far beyond the interwar period.

abstract: In recent decades, the United States has experienced a wave of immigration, an economic recession, and several terroristic attacks. In response, the government has scapegoated and blamed undocumented immigrants of color for recent social ills. As a result, a large share of government resources has been allocated to the enforcement and processing of immigration violations. Consequently, the number of immigration cases processed in U.S. federal courts has spiraled to nearly 50% of bookings and 34% of federal sentencing cases. Yet, immigration offenses have received little empirical attention in the courts and sentencing literature due in part to differences in the way immigration offenses are processed compared to other federal offense types, and relatedly, the empirical difficulties immigration offenses pose for analysis. Nevertheless, the increased representation of immigration offenses in federal courts, along with the punitive rhetoric and heightened social control targeting undocumented immigrants of color, warrants a comprehensive assessment of how immigration cases are processed in U.S. federal courts. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to identify inequality in the processing of immigration cases by examining: 1) cumulative disadvantage within immigration cases; 2) contextual disparity and how social context interacts with ethnicity to influence multiple federal court outcomes within immigration cases; and 3) ethnic disparity within immigration cases over time. Data come from the Federal Justice Statistics Program Data Series, the U.S. Census, the Uniform Crime Reports, Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, the National Judicial Center, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The quantitative analysis addresses the first question by employing a cumulative disadvantage approach where multiple decision points are considered and the effects of prior stages on subsequent outcomes. The quantitative analysis proceeds to address the second question by using multilevel modeling for multiple court outcomes. The longitudinal analysis is separately conducted on sentence length for 18-year data, from 1994 through 2012, to assess racial and ethnic disparity over time. The results indicate that cumulative disadvantage is present within immigration cases, that social context influences certain decision points, and that ethnic disparity has diminished over time in some districts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Criminology and Criminal Justice 2018

This study helps us understand the complexities of transnational abandonment, and transnational abandonment in the context of Saudi heritage in particular. Based on a textual analysis of narratives on a blog by individuals abandoned by their Saudi fathers, my findings suggest that they discursively construct their identity in three ways: a) by negotiating their illegitimate status as perceived by many Saudis, and the validity of their search; b) by making sense of the absence of father and the cultural knowledge of the paternal side, while negotiating the inevitable presence of the father in many other ways and their ethnic difference; c) by navigating the tensions of continuing with the search and anticipating the consequences. These themes highlight how conditions of father absence, particularly where the father has a national origin different from one's own has dynamic and conflicting implications socially and culturally, and for production of identities for their children. In sum, this study challenges uncritical celebration of multiculturalism in the US, and broadens the understanding of the complexities of hybrid identities.

Submitted by Pedro Henrique Rodrigues (pedro.henriquer@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-05T18:45:35Z No. of bitstreams: 2 jpso-master_rabbit_complete.pdf: 1450168 bytes, checksum: 081b9f94c19c494561e97105eb417001 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T18:45:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 jpso-master_rabbit_complete.pdf: 1450168 bytes, checksum: 081b9f94c19c494561e97105eb417001 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-08-30 / Data-races are an important kind of error in concurrent shared-memory programs. Software model checking is a popular approach to find them. This research proposes a novel approach to find races that complements model-checking by efficiently reporting precise warnings during state-space exploration (SSE): Rabbit. It uses information obtained across different paths explored during SSE to predict likely racy memory accesses. We evaluated Rabbit on 33 different scenarios of race, involving a total of 21 distinct application subjects of various sources and sizes. Results indicate that Rabbit reports race warnings very soon compared to the time the model checker detects the race (for 84.8% of the cases it reports a true warning of race in <5s) and that the warnings it reports include very few false alarms. We also observed that the model checker finds the actual race quickly when it uses a guided-search that builds on Rabbit’s output (for 74.2% of the cases it reports the race in <20s).

Recently, the diversity rates at universities in the United States have been increasing (Ortiz-Frontera 2013). With more minorities enrolling into predominantly white institutions (PWIs), one might infer that this signals a major step of progression for the United States. However, it is essential to understand the experiences and challenges that minorities may face when attending these institutions. Understanding these challenges are important because they are often minimized and ignored due to the ambiguity of microaggressions. This can be harmful for Black students psychologically and may impact their self confidence in many ways. In many instances, Black students face many forms of subtle racism, such as, microaggressions. Microaggressions can be defined as the subtle and dismissible insults that whites tend to inflict on people of color unconsciously and sometimes consciously (Pierce, 1974). Through conducting 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews with a sample of Black students attending a southeastern university. I aimed to answer the following questions: 1) What types of microaggressions do Black students face while attending a more racially diverse university? and 2) To what extent, and in what ways do students manage their emotions in response to microaggressions? Ultimately, I have found that students experience many forms of microaggressions. The main types of microaggressions that were experienced included: feelings of exclusion, tokenism, being stereotyped, and institutional neglect. Lastly, I found that students employ a combination of emotion work strategies in order to protect themselves from these insults, and to stay productive and successful. Policy implications to support students of color and future directions for research are discussed.

Using ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, this project explores the extent to which race, class, and gender shape the socialization that Black women receive about their emotions and attitudes in a college bridge program. It unpacks the ways that dominant emotion cultures can inform the emotional socialization practices of a college bridge program in ways that resist and reproduce larger cultural narratives about Black women. To operationalize this emotional socialization, I introduce a concept called emotional respectability, which suggests that emotional reactions and demeanor must always align with the larger emotion cultures and goals of institutions such as family and education. The data presented in this project suggests that through vehicles of family, emotional respectability, and discipline, the program provides academic preparation alongside a more invisible curriculum related to emotional socialization which encourages the resistance and reproduction of larger cultural narratives about Black women, especially with regard to emotion.

Although there is a good foundation of feminist research at the intersection of performative labor, pornography, and sexuality, there are few (if any) published studies that examine race in porn content intended for gay men’s consumption. What’s more, existing research samples solely from corporatized porn, which is expressly produced, scripted, and directed. Bound by the conventions of the market, however, corporate pornography must abide by a consumer demand that reflects white machinations of black sexuality rather than the self-proclaimed sexual identity of African American men. Instead, I employ an exploratory content analysis of pornographic videos categorized as “ebony” on a popular user-submitted porn database. I am interested in 1) the character of pornographic representations of queer black masculinity and 2) how these representations vary between corporate and non-corporate producers. I find that representations of black men in gay porn rely on stereotypes of black masculinity to arouse consumers, especially those which characterize black men as “missing links” or focus excessively on their “dark phalluses.” Moreover, these depictions consistently separate gay black and white men’s sexuality into bifurcated discursive spaces, thereby essentializing sexual aspects of racial identity. Lastly, though such depictions are less prevalent in user-submitted videos, overall, both user-submitted and corporate content reify stereotypes about black masculinity.