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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology / Stephen L. Benton; Adrienne Leslie-Toogood / There is growing concern over the academic performance of student athletes in today’s institutions of higher education. Across all media, the public is constantly reminded that the success rate of student athletes is not what it should be. One hypothesis for this poor performance is that athletes are not as well prepared to go to college as their non-athletic counterparts. This could be attributed to low high school academic standards, or high school teachers allowing athletes to underperform due to their status as an athlete, or a lack of time for studying due to sport participation. The NCAA mandates certain academic standards for entrance into college, yet athletes still struggle to maintain passing grades, with some failing to graduate. Most college students are admitted to college based on their potential to benefit from an institution’s programs and educational opportunities. In many institutions, especially at the Division I level, student athletes are admitted for their potential to provide benefits for the institutions. This study compared the college graduating GPA of athletes and nonathletes relative to ACT score to determine if athletes were underperforming in college. Additionally the effect of gender, ethnicity and type of sport was examined. This study used hierarchical regression equations to examine these effects. When looking at athletes only, type of sport, gender, and ethnicity had very little influence on graduating GPA. When examining all students, ACT test scores were significantly related to college graduating GPA.

Yes / This article explores the implications for identity through presenting a detailed analysis of how three British Pakistani women narrated their involvement in higher education. The increased participation of British South Asian women in higher education has been hailed a major success story and is said to have enabled them to forge alternative, more empowering gender identities in comparison to previous generations. Drawing on generative narrative interviews conducted with three young women, we explore the under-researched area of Pakistani Muslim women in higher education. The central plotlines for their stories are respectively higher education as an escape from conforming to the ‘good Muslim woman’; becoming an educated mother; and Muslim women can ‘have it all’. Although the women narrated freedom to choose, their stories were complex. Through analysis of personal ‘I’ and social ‘We’ self-narration, we discuss the different ways in which they drew on agency and fashioned it within social and structural constraints of gender, class and religion. Thus higher education is a context that both enables and constrains negotiations of identity.

Computer Vision researchers are constantly challenged with questions that are motivated by real applications. One of these questions is whether a computer program could distinguish groups of people based on their geographical ancestry, using only frontal images of their faces. The advances in this research area in the last ten years show that the answer to that question is affirmative. Several papers address this problem by applying methods such as Local Binary Patterns (LBP), raw pixel values, Principal or Independent Component Analysis (PCA/ICA), Gabor filters, Biologically Inspired Features (BIF), and more recently, Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). In this work we propose to combine the Bag-of-Visual-Words model with new dictionary learning techniques and a new spatial structure approach for image features. An extensive set of experiments has been performed using two of the largest face image databases available (MORPH-II and FERET), reaching very competitive results for gender and ethnicity recognition, while using a considerable small set of images for training. / Pesquisadores de visão computacional são constantemente desafiados com perguntas motivadas por aplicações reais. Uma dessas questões é se um programa de computador poderia distinguir grupos de pessoas com base em sua ascendência geográfica, usando apenas imagens frontais de seus rostos. Os avanços nesta área de pesquisa nos últimos dez anos mostram que a resposta a essa pergunta é afirmativa. Vários artigos abordam esse problema aplicando métodos como Padrões Binários Locais (LBP), valores de pixels brutos, Análise de Componentes Principais ou Independentes (PCA/ICA), filtros de Gabor, Características Biologicamente Inspiradas (BIF) e, mais recentemente, Redes Neurais Convolucionais (CNN). Neste trabalho propomos combinar o modelo \"bag-of-words\" visual com novas técnicas de aprendizagem por dicionário e uma nova abordagem de estrutura espacial para características da imagem. Um extenso conjunto de experimentos foi realizado usando dois dos maiores bancos de dados de imagens faciais disponíveis (MORPH-II e FERET), alcançando resultados muito competitivos para reconhecimento de gênero e etnia, ao passo que utiliza um conjunto consideravelmente pequeno de imagens para treinamento.

Una investigación sobre los trabajadores agrícolas en las regiones del sur no implica un ejercicio de detección de figuras sociales arcaicas que persisten a pesar de la modernización. Muy al contrario. Las realidades socio laborales presentes en el campo murciano son sustancialmente nuevas en el paisaje agrario. La transformación habida en la agricultura hacia formas de producción más industrializadas, globales e informacionales, y los cambios sociales que han reformulado la ruralidad, sitúan a las relaciones de trabajo jornaleras en otras coordenadas espacio-temporales radicalmente diferentes a las del pasado. La tesis doctoral trata de explorar el cambio organizacional y tecnológico en marcha en los actuales complejos agroindustriales, y las relaciones de trabajo que en el mismo se definen. El género y la etnia aparecen como relaciones sociales que definen sujetos vulnerables altamente atractivos para las estrategias empresariales de valorización, y por tanto, se presentan como elementos indispensables para entender la organización social del trabajo en la agricultura industrial murciana. El fenómeno de las migraciones internacionales tiene su función también en este complejo productivo al haber conformado un importante suministro de mano de obra disponible. / Research on agricultural workers in Southem Europe is not some kina of search for archaic social actors who continue to survive in spite of modernization. Rather, in many ways, the work and employment conditions existing in the sector in the Spanish province of Murcia represent an essentially new situation in agricultural production. The shift towards more industrialized, global, and scientific forms of farming, and the social changes these have brought in the countryside, have radically reshaped the work of farm workers. This doctoral thesis explores the ongoing organizational and technological changes taking place in the region' s agribusinesses and the way these have affected employment relations in the sector. This analysis identifies gender and ethnicity as key social relations which give rise to vulnerable actors who are have proved highly beneficial to employers' interests. Consequently, gender and ethnicity are key dimensions of any analysis of the social organization of agricultural work in Murcia. Finally, the thesis reveals the existence of a specific regime of marginalization, segregation and exploitation of inmigrant workers employed in Mediterranean agriculture.

In this essay I analyse how three Swedish companies with different types of governance carry out work aimed at promoting inclusion with focus on gender and ethnicity. There are three study questions: How does the type of governance affect the inclusion work in terms of national and international law? How do the companies operate within the framework of social sustainability in order to combat a homogeneous composition in relation to promotion to higher positions? Do the implementation strategies of the studied companies differ? The conclusions are that the implementation strategies differ between the studied companies and that the type of governance exerts has significant influence on the implementation strategies to promote and enhance inclusion to higher positions. Successful implementation strategies are guided by the principal’s intentions as well as the agenda of the company management. / I uppsatsen analyserar jag hur tre svenska företag med skilda bolagsformer, inom ramen för sitt sociala ansvarstagande, bedriver inkluderingsarbete med fokus på kön och etnicitet. Studien har tre frågeställningar: Hur påverkar bolagsformen inkluderingsarbetet i förhållande till nationell rätt och folkrätt? Hur arbetar företagen inom ramen för sitt sociala hållbarhetsarbete i sitt försök att motverka eventuell homogen sammansättning vid befordran till högre positioner? Finns det skillnader mellan de studerade företagens implementeringsstrategier? Denna studie visar att bolagsformen och ägarstrukturen har en signifikant påverkan av val på implementeringsstrategier för att främja en ökad inkludering bland anställda i ledande positioner. Framgången med implementeringsstrategier styrs av såväl uppdragsgivares intentioner som bolagsledningens agenda.

This is an ethnographic study of discourses and experiences concerning sexual exchanges among kin “who are too closely related to marry each other” (OED), or what in lay language is called “incest”. I investigate the ways in which a certain kind of incest, that between older men and younger women, primarily from different generations, is experienced by women of predominantly rural origin, who have been hospitalized in the major public psychiatric hospital in Bolivia, in Sucre. In this sense, this research is as much a study of incest as it is of psychiatric institutionalization. These experiences will be considered in the context of a wider field of ethnic, class and gender discourses that are produced by medical staff, community organizations, as well as national judicial institutions. The category of 'incest' is problematized in terms of how kinship is constructed, not only as a series of dynamic discourses (as practices whose effect is the production of events) but also as mobile experiences, however socially regulated. With this in mind, I present an account of Andean concepts and treatment of incest, as well as of legal and medical categories. Specifically, I focus on the play between discourses in the context of the psychiatric hospital, the judicial court and the communities of selected inmates. I show how the inmates' experiences of intergenerational incest and sexual violence in general are related to the dominant ethnic, class and gender narratives produced by medical staff, community organizations, and judicial institutions.

En este trabajo se analizan las representaciónes de dos categorías sociales, las mujeres y los indígenas en dos novelas latinoamericanas cuyas tramas acontecen en la primera mitad del siglo XX en Perú y México, respectivamente: La casa verde (1965) del escritor peruano Mario Vargas Llosa y Oficio de tinieblas (1962) de la escritora mexicana Rosario Castellanos. Nos proponemos analizar cómo diferentes formas de discriminación (referidas a clase social, género sexual y etnicidad) se entrecruzan en las novelas. Para ello vamos a realizar un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de una selección de diálogos de ambas novelas. Para llevar a cabo el análisis cuantitativo vamos a valernos del test de Bechdel. Mediante el cual podremos comprobar si hay una escasa cantidad de diálogos entre mujeres e indígenas en comparación con otros grupos sociales, lo cual nos permitirá visualizar posibles desigualdades en las representaciones de ambos grupos sociales en las novelas. En nuestra parte cualitativa, a través de un análisis crítico del discurso y utilizando una perspectiva interseccional, analizamos los diálogos directos en los que se habla sobre estos dos grupos sociales, las mujeres y los indígenas, para poder estudiar su representación en las novelas y para ver si encontramos elementos que puedan considerarse discriminatorios con respecto a estos grupos sociales. Finalmente, se compara el resultado cuantitativo con el resultado cualitativo para así poder también probar la conveniencia del test de Bechdel para analizar desigualdades en los medios de ficción. / The aim of this paper is to analyse the representation of two social categories, women and natives, in two Latin American novels, whose plot takes place in the first half of the twentieth century in Peru and Mexico, respectively: The green house/La casa verde (1965) by Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa and The book of lamentation/Oficio de tinieblas (1962) by Mexican author Rosario Castellanos. In this study, we will analyse how different forms of discrimination (regarding social class, gender and ethnicity) intersect in both novels. We will use a quantitative and qualitative analysis of selected dialogues of both novels. To perform the quantitative analysis, we will make use of the Bechdeltest. Through this test we can study a small amount of dialogues between women and natives compared to other social groups, allowing us to visualize possible inequalities in the representation of both social groups in the novels. In our qualitative part we will study the dialogues in which the interlocutors talk about these two social groups, women and natives, to interpret their representation in the novels and to find out if there are elements that may be considered discriminatory with respect to these social groups, through a critical discourse analysis and an intersectional perspective. Finally, the quantitative result is compared with the qualitative results so that we can test the suitability of Bechdel test to analyse inequalities in the media fiction.