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<p dir="ltr">Eating disorders are severe mental health concerns that need to be studied further to gain more knowledge about how to treat them. This quantitative study aimed to explore the relationship between disordered eating, self-esteem, and sexual satisfaction in cisgender women ages 18-40 years old. No previous literature had found a relationship between all three factors. The research was conceptualized through a feminist theory perspective. It was hypothesized that disordered eating would have a negative relationship with self-esteem and sexual satisfaction. Another hypothesis was that self-esteem would have a negative relationship with sexual satisfaction and disordered eating. Both of the hypotheses were supported. Lower self-esteem was found to have a negative relationship with disordered eating and sexual satisfaction. Clinicians are encouraged to keep these results in mind when working with individuals with eating disorders to ensure they are providing the best care for clients.</p>

<p>My dissertation is a Black feminist inquiry into how Black women writers employ soul food imagery to equally assert their characters’ Blackness and sexual agency in post-Black Arts texts. These include Gayl Jones’ <em>Eva’s Man </em>(1976), Ntozake Shange’s <em>Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo</em> (1982), Gloria Naylor’s <em>Bailey’s Café</em> (1992), and TT Bridgeman’s <em>Pound Cake for Sweet Pea </em>(2004). These novelists tell complex stories of Black women’s grappling with respectability, trauma, and erotic and sexual agency. In each novel, these Black women share a common reliance upon soul food that is often underexamined in critical scholarship. I argue that soul food is essential to how Black women cope with the duality of pleasure and pain by helping them assert liberated senses-of-self amidst sexism and its attendant emotional and physical violence. I also conceptualize this coping as a vibrational reprieve. </p>

This study examines ways in which African and Afro-Caribbean refugee girls and young women negotiate and perform identity in varied social contexts. Designed as youth-centered participatory action research, the study draws from three years of engagement with a group of refugee girls, ages 11-23, from Somalia, Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and Sudan. The research occurred in the broader context of The Imani Nailah Project, a program I initiated for refugee middle and high school girls in May 2008. Through in-depth interviews, youth-led focus groups, and arts-based research, Imani researchers (study participants) and I explored experiences and expressions of gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, age, religion and citizenship status, as well as the intersections among these multiply-located identities. This study spans a wide range of identity negotiations and performances, from micro-level interactions to macro-level impacts of dominant culture. Three interrelated chapters focus on programmatic, methodological, and theoretical components of the dissertation research: (a) how refugee girls and university volunteers pursue mutual learning within a service context; (b) how girl-centered participatory action research can serve as a vehicle towards relational activism, and (c) how broader discourses of othering shape the salience of refugee and citizen identities in the lives of refugee girls. Combined, these articles expand our understanding of how refugee girls narrate self as they participate in and contribute to multiple social worlds. / Ph. D.

<p>  </p> <p>We cannot fully assess the normative and epistemic implications of online discourse, especially political discourse, without recognizing how it is being systematically leveraged to undermine the credibility and autonomy of those with marginalized identities. In the following chapters, I supplement social/feminist epistemological methodologies with norm theory to argue that online discourse entrenches the mechanisms of political dominance and cultural hegemony by ignoring and devaluing the experiences and struggles of marginalized individuals. Each chapter investigates a different, concrete manifestation of this dynamic. In Chapter 1, I argue that digital capitalist enterprises like Facebook facilitate the targeting of minoritized users with disproportionate instances of abuse, misinformation, and silencing. This is exemplified by the practice of using racial microtargeting to engage in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) voter suppression. I contend in Chapter 2 that, given the exploitative nature of racially-microtargeted political advertising campaigns, these social media companies are ultimately morally responsible for initiating and sustaining a burgeoning digital voter suppression industry. In Chapter 3, I argue that the presence of online disinformation, in tandem with key party figures’ explicit endorsement of vicious group epistemic norms like close-mindedness and dogmatism, have directly contributed to the formation and epistemic isolation of conservative political factions in the US. Finally, I argue in Chapter 4 that social media and hostile media bias rhetoric directly reinforce sexist and racist credibility norms, effectively creating a toxic environment of misogynistic online discourse that hurts the perceived credibility of women journalists.</p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation is a Black feminist qualitative inquiry of the interconnections between Black women, literary activity, community, activism, and restoration and healing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and the Black feminist movement converged to create one of the richest periods in Black women’s history. Black women came together in community, through the text, and through various literary spaces–often despite or even because of their differences–to build an archive that articulates a multivocal Black women’s standpoint which many believed to be monotonously singular. During this period, for example, Black women writer-activists wrote more novels, plays, and poetry in these two decades than in any period prior while also establishing new literary traditions. These traditions included the recovery of previously published yet out of print Black women writers, the development of the Black Women Anthology era, the creation of Black women writer-activist collectives, the founding of bookstores, as well as the development of Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist literary criticism in the academy. In the dissertation, these traditions are intrinsically tied to the articulation and definition of the theoretical concept of literary kinship. Conceptually, relationally, and materially literary kinship is the connection generated by the intergenerational literary activity between Black women and girls. In the dissertation, I use literary activity in slightly different ways including to denote community-engaged oral practices, publication, relationships defined around literary sites, and the practice of reading. Literary kinship provides access to community based on and derived from a connection to the literary that is often marked by intergenerational activity. I argue that Black women writer-activists during the period of the BWLR articulate and define literary kinship as a practice of communal restoration and healing for individuals and the collective.</p><p dir="ltr">Literary kinship is explored in four interrelated, yet distinct ways in the dissertation. In chapter two, literary kinship is located in and operationalized through Black women’s literary kinship “networks” founded during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance. In chapter three, the focus is on the Black Women’s Anthology era that begins in 1970 and becomes a pipeline for the development of the interdisciplinary field of Black Women’s Studies in the 1980s. The fourth and fifth chapters shift the impact of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to the 21st century and examines how literary kinship is rearticulated or re-visioned a generation later. The fourth chapter, in this vein, uses autoethnography and literary analysis to illuminate the interconnections between Black girlhood, geography, and my concept of literary kinship. The chapter explores my experience of literary kinship at the kitchen table, in public libraries, and in secondary and higher education as transformative opportunities that fostered my love for reading, engaging in literary community, and developing reading as a restorative and healing practice. In the final chapter, the rapid reemergence of Black women booksellers and their bookstores in the last five years (2018-2023) become integral to a contemporary rearticulation of literary kinship.</p><p dir="ltr">The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance is a significant period of literary output by Black women writer-activists that has had intergenerational impact in the lives of Black women. During the Renaissance, Black women writer-activists were catalysts for critical and necessary literary interventions, strategies, and methods that supported their sociopolitical activism, the development of a rich Black feminist and literary archive, and that manifested community functional practices of restoration and healing. Black women’s articulation, definition, and utilization of literary kinship in the 20th and 21st centuries has supported their literary labors as activists, as intellectuals, and as community members, and is therefore a practice of community restoration and healing.</p>