<p> This research study evaluated the modified gap analysis of knowledge and skills, motivation, and organization on how low socioeconomic status (SES) Black male students who were exposed to community violence and participated in Our Kids, a pseudonym for a non-profit community based organization that provides extracurricular programs to at-risk males. The purpose of this study is to understand how the in-school violent behavior of low SES Black males affects these students&rsquo; abilities to realize future goals. Using the Clark and Estes (2008) gap analysis, the collection of data from interviews and documents identified and validated the source of the students&rsquo; performance gaps. Findings revealed that the urban school district had positive and negative aspects in its current program that addressed students&rsquo; in-school violent behavior. Overall, the findings exposed that the students in the study had procedural knowledge, knowledge of self-regulation and support their increase in knowledge of self-identity even though the documents exposed that Black male students may lack self-regulation. The students had self-efficacy and students&rsquo; emotions influence their motivation. The students believe that there is racial equities and opportunities to build trusting relationships but urban school district created a threatening environment. Yet, the documents show racial inequities. This research study recommends research-based solutions to assist organizations in decreasing in-school violent behavior. Finally, Our Kids can utilize the modified gap analysis model to identify and validate causes of performance gaps and recommend solutions.</p><p>

<p> This study explores stories Black adolescent girls living in urban public housing tell about themselves and their community, the narratives the girls believed outsiders hold thereof, and the ways they theorize about, respond to, and counter mainstream representations of inner-city youth and communities. </p><p> The study was conducted through a Critical Literacy class held in a local community center, using a general interpretive design with ethnographic/observational methods. The data were interpreted through a Counterstory theoretical and analytic lens. The participants&rsquo; stories are explored through a Freirean Critical Pedagogy framework derived from a critical epistemology. Study data was collected through photo journals, interviews, video and audio recordings of sessions of a Critical Literacy class taking place over 11 weeks, and artistic works produced by participants. Data were coded through three levels, with first level codes including both etic and emic codes to aid in data organization and retrieval, second level emic codes identified during data collection, and, finally, third level emic codes were used to name patterns emerging from the data to support larger themes.</p><p> Findings suggest that the participants perceive that outsiders view girls from their community and their neighborhood as undesirable. Participants saw the people and relationships they have in their community as deeply valuable, but they are cognizant of and discuss their neighborhood&rsquo;s circumstances, like undesirable conditions caused by lack of material resources, and assert that storytelling can serve a pedagogical purpose in reflecting a more complete picture. Participants told stories about themselves as kind, joyful, intelligent, desiring safety, hopeful, and strong. The girls express that adults often read the joy and playfulness of girlhood as disrespect or a lack of seriousness about present and future goals. They assert that challenging false narratives is important, difficult work. They theorize that one can engage in the process of dismantling others&rsquo; assumptions by actively creating learning opportunities that lead people toward encounters with someone they may have misjudged, and by telling Counterstories. Such methods could assist teachers in discerning and addressing how assumptions about young people may be reflected in their practice and/or curriculum.</p><p>

<p> Colleges and universities have experienced student activism against campus racial climate. This study examined the concerns and protests of Black students related to racial climate and determined how the administration responded on three private campuses. Qualitative content analysis of videos, images, and social media was used to analyze by individual institutions and across the institutions to determine similarities and differences. Data across the institutions was discussed by context, students&rsquo; protests, and response. Students&rsquo; climate concerns were in terms of the support they did or did not have and a lack of diverse faculty, staff, and students. The Black students&rsquo; protests were to disrupt the norms of the institutions. Using social media to organize, students conducted sit-ins, occupied buildings, and blocked streets. In response, the administration met with protesters, allowed them space to protest, and published statements. The recommendations include changes in diversity policies and support of interventions for the administration.</p>

Mobile Bodies is a dance ethnography about the interface of arts performance, sociality and labor migration. Based on intensive apprenticeship in Mande Dance undertaken in Bamako, Mali this dissertation considers the creative ways in which professional and aspiring Malian dancers garner social recognition as they perform in local, national, and transnational arenas. How do bodies in motion - while dancing and migrating internationally - serve as strategic sites for re-negotiating social capital at home? Elaborating on Sheller’s “embodied theory of citizenship” (2012), this dissertation brings to light the work of Malian performance artists as they negotiate and articulate their social belonging through their dancing, music-making and acting. Trained by the State but (thanks to neoliberal reforms) left to their own devices to make work, find patrons, and make a living, Malian artists creatively and strategically shift the focus of their skills from nation-building to self-making. What sorts of possibilities for social belonging emerge as artists dance off of national stages and onto transnational ones? Can the work of Malian migrant dancers offer insights into modes of social belonging that are largely performatively (rather than discursively) constituted? Moreover, as a project methodologically focused on distilling ethnographic insights from rigorous dance training, this work brings together academic analyses of the sociality of dancing with on-the-ground lessons about the mechanics and aesthetics of performance. As a result, this project highlights the incisive ways in which scholarly practice is informed by performance practice. / Anthropology

Abstract not available.

This thesis is intended to further the critical race theory goal of documenting the narratives of racially subjugated populations, particularly Blacks. It presents and critically engages with the subject of race and its relationship to imprisonment and reintegration by putting forward the stories of Black male ex-prisoners who have experienced a term of incarceration in a Canadian federal penitentiary. The author uses a critical race lens in order to examine the role of race in the lives of Black ex-prisoners. In addition, she puts forward a plea for academic and institutional discourses to place the experiential knowledge of these individuals at the forefront of criminological research. Critical criminology theories that emphasize the importance of ethnographic data and epistemological assumptions that have challenged Eurocentric scholarship, which overlooks the consequences of racial inequality, guide the author's findings. As such, the primary goal of this research is to provide an arena for Black male ex-prisoners to express their realities as a racialized group who have historically been excluded from Canadian academe.

This project examines neglected African American urban narratives produced by male writers from the mid-1960s to mid 1970s, in order to document and interrogate how the production of subjectivities and masculinities are shown to intersect, in these works, with vectors of mobility and modalities of spatial occupation. The study begins with the mobile culture of the Blues, and highlights sophisticated Blues stylings to trace the operation of a language of vagrancy---a discourse of malleability that opens the masculine subject to multiplicity and detachment. It then examines the spectacular, transient, and materialistic player of the urban "barbershop books," and details, in Robert Beck's Pimp: The Story of My Life, and in Donald Goines's Whoreson and Daddy Cool, the exhausting, destructive experiments that permit display and re-invention on the "street." This vision is supplemented with urban texts that address the subject's inhabitation of densely peopled space and the enigma of fleshly occupation in urban arrangements of troubling proximity. The work examines Chester Himes's Blind Man With a Pistol, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Down these Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas, in order to consider the excessive traces of bodily inhabitation and the provocative yet repulsive closeness of an enigmatic neighbour. It then turns to George Cain's poetic Blueschild Baby and Robert Beck's Mama Black Widow, to interrogate how these texts address the death drive and delineate the possibility of inhabiting the ruined ghetto with an insistent impulse to endure and resist. Finally, the work considers two texts, Robert Deane Pharr's S.R.O. and Herbert Simmons's Man Walking on Eggshells, in which segmented space, proliferating multiplicities, and emergent subjects invite a reading informed by the vocabularies of Gilles Deleuze. The project ends by reading the urban subject as a stylish, agile principle of released motion, creative doubt and active engagement with differences and potentialities.

The goal of this study is threefold. At first, it aims at describing the development of Francophone Negro-African Theater from a dynamic point of view by delineating the different phases of its development. Next, the study investigates the different functions assigned to the dramatic art in francophone Africa. Finally, it opens up new avenues for research in the field of African theater. The development of African Francophone Theater has not been a harmonious process. The colonization of Africa by the Europeans interrupted its growth and introduced new forms of drama that were in blatant contrast with local theater. These new forms of drama threatened even the mere existence of indigenous theater. The introduction of French education and the subsequent influences of the teacher training schools, William Ponty in Senegal and Bingerville in Ivory Coast, are of paramount importance to the creation of literary drama and its development in Francophone Africa that will play a pivotal role in the process of decolonization and nation building. After the Second World War, playwrights divorced themselves from the William Ponty ideology and began questioning the legitimacy of the colonial order. In the euphoria of independences, they celebrate the African resistants and praise the new political leaders. But disappointment soon put an end to the euphoria when they realize that the new African leaders were not living up to their promises. The playwrights commit themselves to denounce and combat injustice wherever it manifests itself even at the highest level of government. However the role of theater as agent of change is limited by its elitist characteristics. Plays are written and performed in French, a language unknown to the majority of the illiterate masses who end up creating their own theater in indigenous dialects. This indigenous drama becomes very popular in inner cities where it voices the concerns of the urban masses. At the same time a revolutionary form of theater addresses the development issues of the people in rural areas. This study acknowledges its own limitations and hopes to encourage new avenues for more research into the field of Francophone African drama.

Perceptions of discrimination have been linked to a variety of negative academic and social outcomes for adolescents. Relatively few studies have investigated school characteristics that may serve as antecedents of perceived discrimination toward Black students. Even less is known about how individual differences may interact with school characteristics to influence Black students’ perceptions of discrimination. The current study examined the role of individual student and school variables as predictors of Black middle school students’ perceived discrimination experiences, defined as racial hassles. The moderating role of racial identity processes was also examined. Analyses for the current study focused on 135 Black adolescents, who were recruited for the Temple University Adolescent Cognition and Emotion (ACE) Project at approximately 12 years of age, and for whom school-level data were available. Correlational and linear regression analyses indicated that school characteristics were unrelated to perceptions of discrimination. Racial identity processes did not moderate the relationship between school racial composition and perceived discrimination. Male and female students reported no differences in either perceived discrimination or reported bothersomeness. Most participants, regardless of school context, reported some discrimination. In conclusion, this study suggests that Black early adolescents perceived racial discrimination irrespective of school racial composition, school quality, and school size. Directions for future research are discussed. / School Psychology

<p>This study was to determine if any difference exists in the rates of cesarean birth, emergency room visits and preterm birth in African-American women who participated in CenteringPregnancy^&reg; group prenatal care in comparison with those in traditional prenatal care. Prenatal care under this model emphasizes risk assessment, health promotion, social support and education in a group setting of between eight and twelve patients. The effectiveness of CenteringPregnancy has had favorable clinical and behavioral outcomes, as well as high patient and provider satisfaction. Since few studies have researched outcome variables, this study was to answer if CenteringPregnancy prenatal care is related to improved birth outcomes than traditional prenatal care. Leininger&rsquo;s Transcultural Nursing Theory guided this study to provide a comprehensive and culturally sensitive nursing approach in caring for pregnant African-American women. The population was a convenience sample of African-American women between the ages of 15 and 38 years of age. A retrospective chart review was utilized for data collection and a total of 61 CenteringPregnancy charts and 62 traditional prenatal care charts were reviewed looking at the rates of preterm births, cesarean births and emergency room utilization between the two groups of women. A bivariate statistical analysis using the <i> t</i>-Test was utilized to describe any differences between the patients in the two different types of prenatal care and a chi-square was used to analyze any difference in frequency of preterm births and cesarean births between the two types of prenatal care. The results indicated that African-American women receiving CenteringPregnancy prenatal care had fewer preterm births than African-American women in traditional prenatal care (1.6% vs 11.3%). However, there was no evidence found that African-American women receiving CenteringPregnancy prenatal care had less cesarean births or utilized the emergency room during their pregnancies less frequently. </p>