This dissertation aims to enrich understanding of issues affecting the care and protection of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in sub-Saharan Africa. The social risks and resources of OVC in selected contexts is examined using both quantitative and qualitative data and multiple datasets. Results pertaining to OVC's sexual risk, marginalization, available social support and reasons for limited support are presented. Chapter 1 investigates the onset of sexual behavior and sexual risk among orphans and non-orphans in South Africa. The sample for this analysis consists of 1694 Black African youth age 14-18. The analyses found both male and female orphans significantly more likely to have engaged in sex as compared to non-orphans (49% vs. 39%). Among sexually active youth, orphans reported younger age of sexual intercourse with 23% of orphans having had sex by age 13 or younger compared to 15% of non-orphans. Chapter 2 focuses on a sample of 692 youth-headed households (YHH) in Rwanda age 13-24 and describes their degree of marginalization and available social support. Most youth reported significant caring relationships: 73% reported access to trusted adult who offers them advice and guidance, and most indicated close peer relationships. However, many youth also perceived a lack of community support, with 86% feeling rejected by the community and 57% feeling the community would rather hurt them than help them. Chapter 3 expands upon the results presented in Chapter 2 to gain further insight into the marginalization and limited community support reported by YHH. The socio-cultural factors that influence the level of support Rwandan communities provide to OVC is explored through a triangulation of multiple methods and perspectives. The analyses cast light on the importance of three factors affecting community support and marginalization: stigma, NGO assistance and community discord. Overall, this dissertation enriches understanding of how OVC's vulnerability and social networks impact their care and protection. Data such as this should be used to inform efforts to support OVC. In hopes of achieving this aim, discussion throughout lends particular attention to the programmatic implications of these results / acase@tulane.edu

During the Jim Crow era, streetcar and bus rides in southern cities provided relatively intimate, everyday experiences between blacks and whites. Among the many symbols of black subordination, urban transit segregation stands out as the most participatory form of racial apartheid. Brief depictions of racial confrontations on streetcars and busses appear frequently in most general studies of the Jim Crow era. However, no scholarly work had yet addressed continuity and change in segregated transit in one city over an extended period of time. This study surveys racial practices before, during and after the Jim Crow period in order to explain how race relations on the transit system functioned and changed in one city. New Orleans is an important city in which to base a longitudinal study of transit segregation, especially given the complexity of its tripartite racial structure In surveying such a long period, one gains insight into the more mundane and complex realities associated with urban transit segregation. Following the successful effort to end 19th century segregation, white passengers mainly waged rhetorical violence against black passengers, who rode with whites from 1867 to 1902. Letters and articles published in the daily newspapers recounted individual offenses taken by white passengers against black passengers, who were mainly female. Physical violence increased markedly following the re-introduction of racial segregation in 1902; however, verbal disputes stemming from the mobility of the 'race screens' designating compartments predominated. This study argues that white and black passengers exercised much more agency in racial segregation of public transit than most scholars have acknowledged. White passengers played a greater role in enforcing segregated transit than did the transit employees. Black riders both acquiesced to and challenged racial segregation throughout the Jim Crow period. Black passengers, when traveling on lines with a majority of black riders, often controlled the space. Two radical breaks from tradition receive special attention. A brief experiment in industrial unionism brought track gang workers and other black employees into the street carmen's union. Also, the employment of women operators as well as rural-born males during World War II exacerbated long extant racial conflict / acase@tulane.edu

Existing research in the field of marriage report that African-American marriages are less happy, less stable and different from other marriages. These findings are based on correlates of marital satisfaction that are culturally irrelevant for some African-American couples. The present research explores a conceptualization of marriage from an African-American perspective utilizing successful couples as direct sources of data. More specifically, this study sought to ascertain a definition of a successful marriage according to successful African-American couples as well as factors they attribute to the success of their marriage. It further explored the influence of socio-economic status and level of acculturation on the conceptualization of marriage and the marital experiences of the couples. / To achieve this end the African Self-Consciousness Scale (ASC) was used to attain level of acculturation, a basic demographic scale was used to attain socio-economic status, and an intensive interview utilizing the narrative discourse method was used to explore the conceptualization of a successful marriage and factors contributing to the success of the marriage. Data obtained via the ASC and demographic scale were used to develop a profile of each couple. Data obtained via narrative discourse were subjected to discourse analysis in an effort to identify concepts, themes and trends in the relationships that impacted on the success of the marriage. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0949. / Major Professor: Stanley L. Witkin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

When older Americans face a need for long term care, they face a crisis that is all but unresolvable. Long term care is specifically excluded under Medicare policy, and few insurance packages adequately protect the elderly from catastrophic long term care costs. Only Medicaid, the means-tested health care program for all ages, provides coverage of long term care. By default then, we have a poverty-based long term care system in the United States. / What are the effects of a poverty-based long term care system? Class-based theories of the welfare state suggest that targeted benefits stratify society along class lines. This study suggests that the effects of targeted benefits can be devastating to the elderly and their families, and that the negative side-effects fall disproportionately on women and nonwhites. Targeted benefits do create class cleavages, but they also divide society along dimensions that transcend class lines, namely race and gender. / This dissertation examines Medicare and Medicaid policy, as well as the National Nursing Home Survey of 1985 and the National Long Term Care Survey of 1982-1984. Specific topics analyzed include spenddown, Medicaid use in nursing homes and in the community, the uncovered poor, the Medicaid gap, Medicaid's revolving door, spousal impoverishment and informal caregiving. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 3096. / Major Professor: Jill Quadagno. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

This study examines the relationship between ethnic consumers' reactions to advertising appeals and their acculturation mode. A model of acculturation was tested that proposes the existence of four acculturation modes based on combinations of American and ethnic cultural identification levels. An experiment was conducted using a two (advertising appeals: American and ethnic) X four (acculturation modes: assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization) X two repeated measures (products: beverage and phone) design. Subjects' ad affect and ad cue recognition responses were analyzed. The hypotheses predicted that subjects' responses to the American and ethnic appeals would vary by acculturation orientation. / The sample consisted of 220 African-American college students. The sample's distribution of American and ethnic cultural identification scores represented two of the four possible acculturation modes--the Integration-oriented (HI-American, HI-Ethnic ID) and the Separation-oriented (LO-American, HI-Ethnic ID) modes. The MANCOVA and ANOVA results indicated significant product effects. Overall, the findings showed that both acculturation groups had higher ad affect and correctly recognized more cues for the ethnic ads than for the American ads. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3224. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

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This research explores selected cultural traditions and histories associated with the Pomaks, a community inhabiting the Rhodope Mountains of southwestern Bulgaria. They speak Bulgarian as a mother tongue, but profess Islam as their religion unlike the country's Orthodox Christian majority. Based on this linguistic unity, the Pomaks have been subjected to recurring forced assimilation since Bulgaria's independence from Ottoman rule in 1878. Today, taking advantage of Bulgaria's democratic rule, they are beginning to assert a heritage of their own making. Still, remnants of entrenched totalitarian mentality in the official cultural domain prevent any formal undertaking to that effect. / With the Pomaks as my case study, this research links the concept of heritage to identity and the way dissenting voices negotiate a niche for themselves in public spaces already claimed by rigid master narratives. I advocate pluralistic interpretation of heritage in the public domain, where master and vernacular narratives exist and often collide. Insofar as cultural diversity serves to enrich the heritage discourse, heritage professionals ought to serve as educators in society, not as creators of exclusionary master narratives. Using fieldwork, archival research, and available literature to support a relevant theoretical framework, I strive for understanding of what constitutes (Pomak) heritage and what ways there are to promote and preserve alternative narratives. Five stories regarding Pomak identity serve as my analytical frame of reference and constitute a premeditated effort to identify, formulate, and preserve in writing fundamental aspects of a highly contested and threatened heritage. / A striking example of a Pomak tradition which merits preservation is the elaborate wedding of Ribnovo, a small village in the western Rhodope. The wedding's most visible manifestation today is the elaborate and colorful mask of the bride, a ritual long gone extinct outside of Ribnovo. Four other case studies examine prominent aspects of Pomak heritage, including forced assimilation, nationalism, and historical narratives.

This thesis explores how the standardization of language in China has been used, historically and contemporarily, as a means to unify the empire and restructure relations between citizens and the state through processes of identification. Looking in particular at the case of China's minzu (ethnic groups), I argue that the current trend instituted through policies at the top-level is to eliminate linguistic and cultural diversities through the promotion of Putonghua as the lingua franca and to eventually amalgamate all minzu of the multi-minzu state into a mono-minzu, Zhonghua Minzu (citizens of the Chinese nation). Beginning with an overview of the historical practices of language standardization, I show how the ideological nature of politically influenced terminologies in the Chinese language has contributed to this restructuring of identity. With identity tied closely to language, recently enacted laws in mainland China have brought the government a step closer to achieving its ultimate goal of creating a mono-minzu state.

As a project located in the academic field of the study of African American religion, this dissertation examines the black body in four critical moments of the Nation of Islam (NOI), represented by the ministries of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan. Defined as the material locus of the self and the site of the symbolization of a given collective culture and cosmology, the project argues that the body was the central concern in all four moments in their religious efforts to re-imagine, reform, and re-present bodies that they perceived had been distorted, disfigured, and devalued by racist violence, discourses, and oppression in America. The research contends that the NOI was only partially "successful" in its reformative efforts to reconstitute and valorize black bodies. Utilizing the hermeneutical frameworks of critical social theory, which includes psychoanalysis, philosophy of embodiment (phenomenology) and race, and a theory and method based approach to the study of religion in its analysis and interpretation, the project suggests that the NOI may have internalized many of the dynamics and values of white supremacy and, as a consequence, re-produced and re-deployed its own system of intra-"race" marginalization and hierarchical classification within the NOI and in the greater African American community. Such discrimination was predicated upon an ideal black bodily economy that ranked bodies based on indicators such as gender, sexuality, and skin complexion. As a result of having co-opted middle-class American and African American values and practices, the research concludes that the NOI converted problematic issues of "race" into an ambiguous and indeterminate class system in their response to the exigencies of the conditions of existence for African Americans. The research suggests both the need for greater attention to the body in African American religious studies, analyses of the co-constitutive elements of class, gender, race, and sexuality, and for reflexive consideration of the ways in which systems of domination may be socially reproduced and/or disrupted by marginalized collectivities.