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In this study, I conducted ethnographic participant observations and semi-structured interviews at two evangelical congregations in central Florida, Free Baptist Church (FBC) and Cornerstone Church (CC), to explore how Christian nationalist ideas (CN) are negotiated, embraced, and/or rejected in church messaging and among congregants. I collected notes from eight sermons at each church and interviewed a total of 14 congregants regarding their concerns and lived experiences as Christians in the U.S. and their opinions on racial injustice. Expanding on previous research on CN, I incorporated Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytical framework to understand CN as inextricably connected to White evangelicalism, White supremacy, settler colonialism, and other systems of oppression. According to my findings, both FBC and CC operated as White heteropatriarchal institutional spaces being led exclusively by White men and adhering to complementarian doctrine which favors male headship, heteronormative marriage, and the subjugation of women and children to men's authority. The messaging in Sunday sermons at FBC and CC also contributed to the fostering of White, heteropatriarchal hegemonic ideals among congregants. Main themes included topics like boundary-making, the spiritual warfare, transcendence of social problems through a future global Christian Kingdom, "law and order" based on Christian principles, support for border control, and opposition to reproductive rights, affirmation of LGBTQ+ people, and racial justice initiatives such as Black Lives Matter and CRT (particularly among White participants). Ultimately, such messaging contributed to CN views among the majority of congregants I interviewed. This study is significant as it applies a CRT lens to provide a foundation for future research on CN that will extend beyond understanding CN as a distinct cultural framework and point scholars back to the White, heteropatriarchal social structure that sustains it.

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This thesis investigates testimonies of three female authors from Latin America and the Middle East through scriptotherapy narratives which "give voice to previously repressed memories," defined by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Through the genre of autobiography, women have an opportunity to showcase acts of resistance towards the inner turmoil of colonial trauma that has been brought upon their existence. Decoloniality re-integrates the roots of colonial power into re-invigorated narratives that will become lineage. The only way that they can create their own identity is through "legending," Gilles Deleuze's conceptualized theoretical framework, which does not offer an escape from colonialism but utilizes its power to offer narratives of healing. As "scriptotherapy" narratives, these female authors are displaying resistance by circulating their stories to the global public and bringing communities together to understand that it is possible to stop the cycle of trauma and abuse that exists to keep the women of their culture repressed. I argue that Julia Alvarez and Azar Nafisi's scriptotherapy narratives encode trauma as acts of resistance in relation to turbulent political situations in their home countries. Julia Alvarez's Something to Declare: Essays (1998) details her experiences as a Latin American woman who has been displaced, bodily, from the Dominican Republic during its revolutionary period from April to September of 1965. Azar Nafisi's Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (2008) paints a historical portrait of her Iranian family life during the Islamic Revolution of 1978–1979 and the toll the colonial powers had on cultivating her journey into womanhood. Adriana Páramo's My Mother's Funeral (2013) showcases writing as trauma reintegrated into a narrative in which personal ideologies and native Spanish language construct an intersectional space. Through storytelling, women are advocated for globally and consciously brought into the major Western culture to instigate change.

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This dissertation expands scholarship that posits circulation as rhetoric with ethical implications. From November 2019 to Spring 2020, more than 33 white supremacist crimes occurred at Syracuse University. In response, NotAgainSU, a Black-led student organization formed, demanding accountability and transparency. Protesters built counterpublics with their hashtag activism through #NotAgainSU on Twitter and Instagram. I tracked #NotAgainSU across Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube using digital tools from November 11, 2019 to June 28, 2020; I explored how the hashtag intersected with news by collecting articles; and I conducted surveys and interviews to find out about the experiences of people who saw and circulated #NotAgainSU online. Protesters put counterpublic work into circulating the hashtag that enabled it to accrue collective affective and political value. The hashtag circulated to politicized audiences who joined protesters in what I am calling counterpublic circulation. However, people could appropriate that affective and social value and re-invest it in individual values that were not morally equivalent. This appropriation occurred through an overlapping and necessary kind of circulation that I am calling public circulation, by which I mean circulation that brings content to audiences who depoliticize the content and maintain their positions. The false equation of values is possible through the fictions of an equitable public sphere and a free market that are built into social media company's circulatory systems. News articles used a both-sides model and falsely positioned #NotAgainSU social media posts on equal terms with Syracuse University's arguments. Finally, in reactionary circulation, people could use the same means by which the protesters circulated #NotAgainSU to circulate the hashtag to oppositionally politicized audiences, who re-invested the work of the hashtag into reactionary affective and social capital. Reactionary circulation enabled people to form antifan reactionary identifications to the hashtag and ultimately reinscribed the fiction of white group identity.

The digital space has offered fertile new territory to connect with like-minded individuals and discuss anything and everything. This has resulted in the creation of the Manosphere, a collection of men concerned about the state of men and masculinity and how society views and treats men. One of the places online this community has found a home is the popular website Reddit, which offers the ability to create individual pages in which communities can form around and discuss and share information on almost any topic they desire. This study aimed to investigate the ways in which one community on Reddit, The Red Pill, views and discusses gender, sex, and consent through the use of thematic and linguistic analysis of popular content posts. Results found that this community does not have unique or novel views of any of the topics, but taken these views to their inevitable extremes. Seeing men as stoic, rational, and concerned with increasing their success in life as well as their number of sexual partners and encounters. Women, on the other hand, are seen as emotional, child-like, manipulative, and concerned with leeching off of men's financial and social success. This study represents one of the first examinations of the Manosphere and the emerging views of masculinity, femininity, and sex therein which have been ideologically connected to violent acts committed by young men within these groups. This study provides need detail and examples of how these online groups view gender and sex, and the ways in which they apply those views day-to-day out in the real world.

For much of human existence identity was ascribed based on the group one was born into. In such cultures all aspects of social life were fused into one incontrovertible identity: group identity. However as modern mindsets took root individuals began to shift the foundation of meaning and identity away from the fixed focal point of the group to one of personal preference. In response to this modern trend many groups began to intensify the maintenance of group identity as paramount in the lives of group members. Hammond and Warner (1993) assert that a powerful mechanism for sustaining group identity is a pattern known as ethnic fusion, where the boundaries of the religion and the ethnicity are essentially nonexistent. Mormonism was identified as a prime example of ethnic fusion. This study seeks to understand the role that religion and ethnicity play in identity creation for individuals raised within an ethnic fusion pattern but who, at some point, experience a break with the culture. In addition to being a case study, the current study seeks to understand the historical development of ethnic identity from early conceptualization to contemporary use. To accomplish this, this study draws on a wide range of literature and approaches that have been undertaken in different fields. Specifically, this is a case study that examines the lives of individuals raised in Utah as participating members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly known as “LDS” or “Mormons”) who at some point opted to remain in Utah and no longer participate with the dominant religious aspect of the culture. Such individuals are commonly referred to as “Jack Mormons,” a term which, in the contemporary usage, is a derogatory label for those who are perceived as lax in their practices of Mormonism. This study will show that religious and ethnic identity exist along a spectrum that can be described as thick – indicating high adherence to the orthodox beliefs and practices – and thin – indicating low levels of orthodoxy, and “Jack Mormons” will help to illustrate specific points along this spectrum.

The phenomenon of entrepreneurship has become increasingly important to civic and private leaders all over the world. In response to calls by scholars to develop theory on entrepreneurship by conducting systematic analyses of how specific institutions shape the entrepreneurial process, the current study explores how Muslim and Mormon religious institutions shape entrepreneurship for their adherents. Through observation and in-depth interviews with Muslim and Mormon entrepreneurs, the study found that religious institutions from both faiths shaped several important entrepreneurial phenomena: decision making, confidence and support, opportunity creation, and opportunity recognition, as well as management and other entrepreneurial skills. The study shows the contribution of institutional theory to understanding entrepreneurship, and proposes several contributions to theory on entrepreneurship. First, the study contributes to theory on the relationship between religion and entrepreneurship by proposing additional theoretical logic for the relationship. Second, the study contributes to understanding why certain individuals are able to bypass the shame inherent in the social deviance that can accompany entrepreneurship by proposing the concept of extra-social legitimacy.

Increasingly defined by my status as a Nonimmigrant Alien, I have lived longer in the United States than in my native Venezuela. Knowing my stay in this country will be temporary, I examine feelings of uncertainty about my future by deconstructing communication—both visual and verbal. Through ambiguity I express anxieties on my personal circumstances and retain objectivity in regard to my process through intellectual inquiry. I layer words, images, and sound to mirror my frustrations, and project the conflict of my internal dialogue.