Institutions of higher education in the United States are becoming more and more diverse and nationwide efforts to provide educational access and equity to underrepresented groups of people will only help to increase that diversity. Increased diversity combined with the need for institutions to produce graduates who are capable of living and working in a global society, has created the need for students to possess a set of cognitive and behavioral skills to aide in successful intercultural interactions. Using the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity and the theory of Cultural Intelligence as frameworks, this research attempts to assess the effect of domestic experiences on intercultural competency and cultural intelligence of first year students at the University of the Pacific. Interview participants were chosen from a sample of eighty-seven students who took the Intercultural Development Inventory and were selected for displaying a great deal or lacked of intercultural sensitivity and cultural intelligence. From these interviews, key lines of thought and experiences were determined to have had positive or negative influences on competency. These results are presented in the form of biographical sketches and supplemented with a discussion of the skills essential to developing greater competency in intercultural sensitivity and cultural intelligence through the curriculum and co-curricular involvements.

Mistakes and betrayals can cause developing interpersonal trust between parties to be broken, and damaged trust can have serious negative impacts on relationships, such as withdrawal from group interaction or the enactment of revenge. Research has suggested that the use of apologies helps to repair damaged trust. However, this research is almost exclusively based in westernized populations and has not begun to explore any cross-cultural differences. Therefore, the primary goal of this comparative cross-national laboratory study was to examine if, and how, the effectiveness of trust repair efforts differs across cultures. The effectiveness of three manipulated trust repair strategies (no response, apology, and account) was tested using students from universities in the United States (U.S.) and in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The results of the study indicate that fatalism, or the belief that events in life are meant to occur, was negatively related to initial trust and positively related to initial distrust toward one’s collaborative partner. It was also found that higher levels of fatalism were associated with more severe trust damage after a trust violation. Regarding the trust repair strategies, accounts were more effective at repairing trust than no response for high fatalism participants whereas apologies were more effective than accounts at reducing distrust after a violation for low fatalism participants, providing partial support for the idea that trust repair strategies are more effective when matched to the cultural self-construal of the victim. Finally, initial distrust and trust directly after the violation were predictive of taking revenge on the other player. Implications are discussed along with the study limitations and suggestions for future research.

Au sein de la culture lettrée qui est la nôtre, il semble que la littérature soit d'emblée associée à l'écrit. Aussi, les manifestations contemporaines de la littérature orale sont-elles souvent laissées pour compte par les études littéraires, voire dévaluées par l'institution. Or, à une époque où l'on observe une importante résurgence de l'oralité en littérature, il apparaît d'autant plus pertinent de se pencher sur ses nouvelles formes, qui relèvent tout autant de la tradition que d'une modernité caractérisée par l'interdisciplinarité et l'évolution technologique. Dans la mesure où le développement des cultural studies, à la lumière d'une définition extensive de la culture, nous permet de nous intéresser à des pratiques qui n'appartiennent pas à la"haute culture", nous avons pris pour objet le mouvement de slam, qui participe précisément de cette résurgence contemporaine de l'oralité et qui émane, de surcroît, d'une culture"d'en bas". C'est, plus particulièrement, son actualisation québécoise qui constitue le coeur de ce mémoire, bien qu'il ait semblé nécessaire d'en dresser un portrait plus large, vu la méconnaissance relative du phénomène. C'est en 2006 que le mouvement - qui a pris racine au milieu des années 80 aux États-Unis - s'est installé dans la culture francophone du Québec, notamment sous l'impulsion de sa popularisation en France. Il y acquiert rapidement un visage pluriel, fondé sur une ambiguïté quant à la définition même du terme"slam" : s'il désigne à la base un mouvement poétique et social, de même qu'un cadre particulier structurant la pratique de la poésie performée (le slam de poésie), il en vient rapidement à être assimilé à un style, du fait de sa récupération par la culture de masse. Dans un premier chapitre, nous nous attardons à l'histoire du mouvement, ainsi qu'à son évolution aux États-Unis et en France. Dans un deuxième chapitre, nous en retraçons la brève histoire au Québec, avant de dégager les caractéristiques propres de son ancrage québécois. Dans un troisième chapitre, nous analysons la couverture journalistique du slam au Québec, ainsi que sa relation complexe avec l'institution littéraire, et terminons par l'analyse de quatre oeuvres québécoises qui se réclament du slam sans pourtant en adopter le cadre original, afin de cerner leur positionnement en regard du mouvement, de même que les enjeux de la diffusion de l'oralité qu'elles mettent au jour, à l'époque de sa reproductibilité technique.

Discourses about pornography have grown since the diffusion of print communication and the first erotic representations. In the 80s, the so-called sex wars involved intense debates about pornography s liberating or objectifying nature, while in the 90s, the emergence of porn studies offered a more balanced and contextualized analysis of pornography, highlighting the need for researchers to also focus on the audience s understanding of the experience. Although the majority of research in this field has focused on adults, much of the concern relates to children. To date, however, most of the research relating to children has focused on effects and on potential harm. Audience researchers in Cultural Studies have examined how children understand representations of sex, love and romance, but only in relation to mainstream media. Yet when it comes to pornography in particular, the discussion is to a great extent based on adults assumptions about what is potentially harmful for children. My aim is to approach children s use and interpretation of sexual content in the media through an audience reception approach. In a sense, this brackets off the question of possible risk or harm, in favour of focusing on the nature of the experience itself. My research is based on interviews conducted with young adults (18-22 years old) thinking retrospectively about their experiences with sexual content in childhood and early teenage life. Despite the number of disadvantages this approach may have, this thesis aims to focus on how participants themselves report and account for their actual experiences. Using a basic thematic coding, I consider the self-reported nature and context of young people s experiences. Next, I focus on the discourses used to interpret and contextualize their experiences. Finally, through a narrative approach I examine their constructions of identities in talking about sexuality. In these ways, this thesis wishes to offer new insights into the topic through an audience reception approach that until now has been largely missing from the academic agenda.

published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

I argue that the ways in which members of the youth generation in Cairo, Egypt consume Arabic-language popular music, and the aesthetic criteria by which they evaluate the worth of various songs and singers, constitute a key component, along with corresponding criteria of political, racial, gendered, and cultural authenticity of Egyptian subjectivity, of a new form of Egyptian gendered national subjectivity in postcolonial modernity. These aesthetic and authenticating criteria are fundamentally interrelated, as one’s consumer preferences within genres of Egyptian popular music are often taken as indicative of the nature of one’s Egyptian subjectivity. For previous generations in postcolonial Egypt, discriminating taste for high modernist aesthetics in popular music, especially the singer Umm Kulthūm, comprised an aspect of desirable cultural modernity and authenticity. This aesthetic has been superseded among contemporary youth by an emphasis on direct emotional evocation as an index of authenticity. Correspondingly, youth in Cairo have come to judge the authenticity of their Egyptian subjectivity against the political subjectivity of their elders’ generations, and the authenticity of their gendered, racial, and cultural subjectivities against those of the West and those of other Arab countries, most particularly Lebanon. / text

The rapid telescoping of the need to communicate cross-culturally in an ever widening range of contexts sets the basic circumstances for this study. Private and public sector interviewing become more important as cultural and cross-cultural factors emerge in coventuring enterprises. Standard interviewing programs and procedures do not usually focus on cross-cultural variables. A model is necessary through which to orchestrate the interview in a generic form and into which substantive illustrations for cross-cultural interviews can be placed. The Cube model designed by Dr. T. Frank Saunders, in his Double Think book, was adapted to this purpose and provides a comprehensive and exhaustive format for this study. The advent of CD ROM, high storage and easy retrieval computer technology, makes the design presented here an effective and efficient system for the collection and collation of demographic and ethnographic data. The Cube model and procedures set forth in this study should facilitate the data collection and development of an interview manual for cross-cultural interviewing.

This dissertation examines the intersections among discourses of feminism, transgender studies, queer theory, film studies, and social activist practice. I address the question of how transphobia as a set of beliefs and behaviors is illustrated in four late-twentieth-century films, three produced in America and one originally released in Australia but later acquiring a significant following in this country. I define transphobia as the "fear of a transgendered person and the hatred, discrimination, intolerance, and prejudice that this fear brings" (Laframboise 2002) and transgender as a broad term that can apply to persons, behaviors, and filmic images, a "self-conscious politicization of identity that activates an investigation of gender relations within different s socio-spatial regimes" (Brooks 1) and "clearly disrupt[s] hegemonic notions of a stable trinity between sex, gender and sexuality" (Jennings and Lomine 146).I provide brief histories of feminist and queer theories to illustrate these fields' insufficiency in accounting for transgender experience and trace the establishment of transgender studies as an explicit field of study. Then, I examine works by transgender studies theorists and activists to explain the progression of thought that led to these writers' call for abolition of the binary gender system. In the following chapter, I trace the theoretical moves from a feminist theory of film to a queer theory approach to film, again pointing out the limited perspective that explicitly feminist analysis of film has frequently offered. Finally, I demonstrate the ways in which each film conforms to and/or defies heteronormative ideals of gender and sexuality and upholds the binary gender system. I suggest that ongoing efforts in transgender and other kinds of social activism might eventually bring about a postgenderist society wherein gender "roles" are no longer forced upon individuals, but may be adopted (or refused) by choice. To this end, I outline six criteria of what I term a positive film portrayal of transgender and explain how each film either meets or fails to meet these criteria, which generally focus on the degree to which the films allow their protagonists to maintain a gender identity that violates binary norms on a continual basis.

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