<p> This research seeks to understand the experiences of African American female undergraduates in STEM. It investigates how familial factors and science identity formation characteristics influence persistence in STEM while considering the duality of African American women's status in society. This phenomenological study was designed using critical race feminism as the theoretical framework to answer the following questions: 1) What role does family play in the experiences of African American women undergraduate STEM majors who attended two universities in the UNC system? 2) What factors impact the formation of science identity for African American women undergraduate STEM majors who attended two universities in the UNC system?</p><p> Purposive sampling was used to select the participants for this study. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with 10 African American female undergraduate STEM major from a predominantly White and a historically Black institution with the state of North Carolina public university system. Findings suggest that African American families and science identity formation influence the STEM experiences of the African American females interviewed in this study. The following five themes emerged from the findings: (1) independence, (2) support, (3) pressure to succeed, (4) adaptations, and (5) race and gender. </p><p> This study contributes to the literature on African American female students in STEM higher education. The findings of this study produced knowledge regarding policies and practices that can lead to greater academic success and persistence of African American females in higher education in general, and STEM majors in particular. Colleges and universities may benefit from the findings of this study in a way that allows them to develop and sustain programs and policies that attend to the particular concerns and needs of African American women on their campuses. Finally, this research informs both current and future African American female STEM students so that they might benefit from the knowledge of the experiences of others in STEM-related fields. As a result, other African American female students might be enlightened by these stories and have the confidence to pursue a STEM degree of their own.</p>

<p>"Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century" explores the socioeconomic worlds of free women of means. I find that they owned slaves, engaged in cross-caste relations, managed their estates, maintained profitable social networks with other regional elites, and attempted to secure the economic futures of their children. Through an examination of notarial, ecclesiastical, and viceregal sources, I highlight the significant role this group played in the local economy and social landscape. My work demonstrates that free women of African descent engaged in specific types of economic endeavors that spoke to their investments in particular kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that allowed them greater visibility and social legitimacy than previously documented. This dissertation, further, challenges a historiography that has over-emphasized the roles of race and gender in determining the lives of all people of African descent in colonial Latin America.</p> / Dissertation

<p>"Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism" considers are the aesthetic practices found in BlackPentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that began in Los Angeles, California in 1906 to argue that the aesthetic practices are the condition of possibility for a performative assessment and antiphonal criticism of normative theology and philosophy. Indeed, the history of these performances is an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the grain of liberal logics of subjectivity. By showing that theology and philosophy were abstractions of thought that produced the conceptual body as the target of racialization, the atheological-aphilosophical couplet indexes modes of intellectual practice that engulf and exceed such reductivism. BlackPentecostalism is a social, musical, intellectual form of new life, predicated upon the necessity of ongoing new beginnings. The religious practices I analyze produce a range of common sensual experiences: of "shouting" as dance; "testimony" and "tarry service" as song and praise noise; "whooping" (ecstatic, eclipsed breath) that occurs in praying and preaching; as well as, finally, "speaking in tongues." I ultimately argue that these aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture. </p><p>During the antebellum era, both clergy and scholars alike levied incessant injunctions against loud singing and frenzied dancing in religion and popular culture. Calling for the relinquishment of these sensual spiritual experiences, I argue that these framing injunctions led to a condition where BlackPentecostal aesthetics, even in the much later institutional Black Studies, were and are thought as excessive performances. "Black Sacred Breath" investigates how discourses that emerged within the cauldron of spatiotemporal triangular trades in coffee, tea, sugar and human flesh of Transatlantic slavery necessitated a theology and philosophy of race, and consequently, the racializing of aesthetic practices. Over and against this discursive theology-philosophy were the performance practices of BlackPentecostalism, an atheology-aphilosophy. These sensual experiences were not merely performed through duress but were the instantiation and sign of love, of life. As love and life, these performative dances, songs, noises and tongues illustrate how enjoyment, desire and joy are important for the historicity - the theory of history found in these practices - that antiphonally speaks back against aversion, embarrassment and abandonment, against the debasement and denigration of blackness. Fundamentally, "Black Sacred Breath" is about the possibility for Black Study (as opposed to and differentiated from university institutional Black Studies), about the capacity for aesthetic practices typically deemed excessive can be constitutive, can provide new models for collective intellectual practice.</p> / Dissertation

<p>"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions," writes Thoreau: "Let us spend our lives in conceiving then." This dissertation depicts how Thoreau's fellow antebellum antislavery writers discerned the power of concepts to shape "the universe." Wishing for a new universe, one free of slavery, they spent their lives crafting new concepts. "Ground Plans" argues that antebellum antislavery writers confiscated the concept of nature from proslavery forces and fundamentally redefined it. Advocates of slavery routinely rationalized slave society by referencing a particular conception of nature--as static, transhistorical, and hierarchical--claiming that slavery simply mirrored the natural, permanent racial order. This dissertation demonstrates that to combat slavery's claim to naturalness, antislavery writers reconceptualized nature as composed of dynamic species and races, evolving in relation to one another. In four chapters on David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Gerrit Smith, it shows that this theory of nature enabled these writers to argue for the complete transformation of society to bring it into line with what they characterized as nature's true principles. This dissertation thus restores the concept of nature as a crucial intellectual battleground for abolitionism. Moreover, it shows these politically-charged antebellum debates over nature's meaning to be crucial to the story of natural science, showing that abolitionists speculated on the natural principles that would eventually constitute the founding insights of ecology.</p> / Dissertation

<p>At the Vanguard of Vinyl investigates the jazz industry's adoption of the long-playing record (LP), 1948-1960. The technological advancements of the LP, along with the incipient use of magnetic tape recording, made it feasible to commercially issue recordings running beyond the three-minute restrictions of the 78-rpm record. LPs began to feature extended improvisations, musical mistakes, musicians' voices, and other moments of informal music making, revolutionizing the standard recording and production methods of the previous recording era. As the visual and sonic modes of representation shifted, so too did jazz's relationship to white mainstream culture, Western European musical aesthetics, US political structures, and streams of Afro-modernism. Jazz, as an African American social and musical practice, became a form of resistance against the violent structures of institutional racism within the United States in the 1950s. </p><p>Using the records of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cannonball Adderley, this study outlines the diverse approaches to record making that characterized the transitional years as the LP became the standard recording format. Through archival research, close listening, and detailed discographical analyses of the era's most influential record labels, I show how jazz practices and musical "mistakes" caught on record provided opportunities for recording experimentation. I examine choices made during the record production process, such as tape edits, microphone placement, overdubbing, and other sound processing effects, connecting such choices to the visual and tactile attributes of these discs. Drawing on scholarship that considers how sound reproduction technologies mediate constructions of race and ethnicity, I argue that the history of jazz in the 1950s is one of social engagement by means of and through technology. At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a cultural history of the jazz LP that underscores the ways in which record making is a vital process to music and its circulation.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Open and sincere communication produces an atmosphere that allows family members to articulate love and respect for one another. Results make it obvious that family communication is an important untapped resource when discussing increasing rates of HIV/AIDS infections. This study examines family communication, African Americans and HIV/AIDS prevention.</p><p> With 32% of the reported cases of AIDS are African Americans and only 12 % of American population is African American. It is essential to find new preventative measure to suppress HIV rates in African American communities. By assessing the communication orientation(s) that work best when providing sex education to teenagers it can establish a foundation for further research on communication about sex education, HIV and STD prevention. With the findings of what communication style(s) work best it can alter the stigmas of homosexuality tied to HIV in the African American community, delineating the discouragement of homosexual sex education lowering the rate of HIV and STD transmission. </p><p> Using semi-structured interviewing with open-ended questions made interviews more informal and easy for participants to divulge specific information. Participants were African American men and women, between the age of 18-25, residing in Southern Maryland and had a younger sibling. With the use of spiral of silence theory the study found that mass opinion given by the black church of abstinence and the lack of education on HIV/AIDS prevention due to biblical text has created a moral divide for those within the congregation that would like to speak out for preventative provisions.</p>

<p> The cry continues with A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, and now the Common Core State Standards. There are groups of students who are finding success within public education and groups who are not. The groups who are not finding this success continue to be minority students who continue to run into the public education system rather than running with it. African American males seem to experience running into the system at greater number than other racial and gender groups. However, there are African American males that are finding success in public education. This study looks at the schooling and educational perspectives of twenty-four African American male K-12 public education students. Using grades and standardized assessments as a criterion, fifteen of the students were considered academically successful and nine were not. Twenty-two of the males were 18 years of age and two were 12 years old. Nineteen participants were high school seniors, one was a sophomore, and two were in middle school. Looking through the lenses of Critical Race Theory and Resiliency Theory using qualitative inquiry and data derived from interviews, data was collected to determine what contributed to the success of some participants. First both successful and non-successful groups were able to speak about having goals for the future and the importance of working hard in school. Secondly, relationships were also seen as essential to academic success, whether these relationships were with parents, teachers, or mentors for academic success to occur. Racial stereotypes were seen as something to overcome by the academically success. Race was viewed as a road block difficult to overcome by less successful participants. Having a father and mother or frequent access to more than one caring adult increased an African American male&rsquo;s ability to be academically successful. Even having two parents that may not have been supportive of the African American male appeared to be more beneficial than having supportive friends.</p><p> Recommendations to help African American males to be academically successful include starting early with relationship support and mentoring, life skills courses, and increased interaction with successful African American males. </p>

The impact of Black Power rhetoric and ideology in Louisville, Kentucky in 1967-1970 is explored. The role of Black Power in shaping the discourse of Louisville’s black counter-public and civil rights counter-public is analyzed in the context of the 1967 open housing demonstrations, the May, 1968 riot, and the trial of the ‘Black Six’. Black Power played a vital role in community organizing and in displays of black national and cultural pride. It actively challenged the city’s mystique of Southern white paternalism embraced by the mayoral administration of Kenneth Schmied. Despite that administrations allegations, Black power rhetoric in the West End did not play a significant role in the riot that left two African American youth dead.

<p> Empirical evidence shows that successful marriages among African Americans are often more egalitarian than hierarchical; however, there was no known research that explored how curricula developers depict non-conventional gender roles in relationship education designed for African Americans. This content analysis involved exploration of nonconventional gender roles in three relationship education curricula developed for African Americans. Analyses included both the manifest (explicit) and latent (implicit) messages of the curricula to determine whether portrayals of gender roles were conventional or non-conventional. The PIES (Political/Intercultural/Economic/Social) model of marital dimensions allowed analysis of marital gender roles using an organizational analysis model that included the political (power structures and decision-making), intercultural (values and beliefs about manhood and womanhood), economic (employment and education of the couple), and social (domestic roles and responsibilities) dimensions of marriage. Results of the study revealed that the intercultural dimension tended toward conventional characteristics, even when the political, economic, and social dimensions were non-conventional. The results suggested that curricula developers design curricula based on conventional contexts of marriage that do not include African Americans&rsquo; historical context of marital gender roles in the United States. Two of the curricula described titular type leadership that combines aspects of conventional and nonconventional gender roles in the PIES model and is most effective when husbands practice servant leadership. Explicit instruction about gender roles through the PIES model was a suggestion to help resolve the cognitive dissonance created by conflicting ontological perspectives, especially in Biblical contexts. </p>

<p>The rapid growth of the retail economy has created an abundance of low wage work. The retail sector often employs black and Latina women in low middle management and part-time positions while, white men and women hold top managerial and human resource positions. Consequently, a distinctive pattern of inequality emerges for women of color in retail work. Utilizing data from 20 in-depth interviews, I find black and Latina women's raises and promotions are stifled by the surveillance and bodily control they encounter on the retail floor. This study explores the simultaneous ways race, gender, class and body type intersect to place women of color in subordinate positions within the workforce. Moreover, this research provides insight into how the "white racial frame" is used to exploit women of color by both white management and the self-surveillance women of color conduct onto their own bodies. </p>