This project explores the career paths to date of seven graduates of the University of Waterloo’s Mechanical Engineering program, and examines the influences that led them to choose their university program. I particularly considered the participants’ status as members of underrepresented or overrepresented groups, using the contexts of the history of the profession of Mechanical Engineering and prior research on underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields. I used semi-structured interviews and an intersectionality framework to investigate aspects of identity, interests, and career influences. I found three key themes among the participants: human influences, including information sources, role models, and mentors; influences of educational and outreach activities; and personal interests and aptitudes. I use the uncovered themes to recommend a combination of future studies and outreach programs.

This project explores the career paths to date of seven graduates of the University of Waterloo’s Mechanical Engineering program, and examines the influences that led them to choose their university program. I particularly considered the participants’ status as members of underrepresented or overrepresented groups, using the contexts of the history of the profession of Mechanical Engineering and prior research on underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields. I used semi-structured interviews and an intersectionality framework to investigate aspects of identity, interests, and career influences. I found three key themes among the participants: human influences, including information sources, role models, and mentors; influences of educational and outreach activities; and personal interests and aptitudes. I use the uncovered themes to recommend a combination of future studies and outreach programs.

During the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the fear of being denounced and subsequently punished contributed to the social silence that became the norm during Franco´s dictatorship. This was then reinforced during democracy through an implicit pact of oblivion. After the death of Franco, as an attempt to avoid reopening wounds, successive democratic governments decided not to agitate the ghost of the civil war, due to its traumatic nature. The consequence of such a pact of oblivion is the lack of information about the past, continually suffered by subsequent generations. Furthermore, Francoism legally imposed the subordination of women to men in all spheres of life, denying the most basic rights to women as well as their autonomy as individuals. This political and gendered repression resulted in a lack of agency and reinforcement of a patriarchal structure. Memory Studies has assumed major importance due to the memory boom that has affected Spain since the end of the twentieth century. Twenty-first century literature offers new representations of women which need to be fully studied. This dissertation analyzes four novels that describe, question and expand on different roles for women during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and its aftermath from an interdisciplinary perspective. The main theoretical concepts through which the novels/themes are examined include intersections of gender and power, intersectionality, gendered empowerment, identity, victimization, agency, genocide, gendered punishments, and the deconstruction of the normative gender role through the re-signification of domestic chores. In the selected literary works, female characters are depicted in uncommon scenarios, such as prisons, anti-Francoist guerrilla, exile, and also on the winning Francoist side. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks including sociology, literature, and history, my analysis reveals the silenced story of the defeated and its repercussions in the democratic Spain of today.

This research utilizes an intersectionality framework to examine the complexity of social location and its effects on women's health. By examining connections among the state, processes of globalization, and the production of health inequalities for poor women in a rural community in southern Veracruz, Mexico, the research highlights the nexus of nationality, class, and gender. Four interconnected contexts are explored: (1) women's increasing paid and unpaid labor in the context of a poverty of resources brought on by sustained economic crisis; (2) the maintenance of reproductive labor as the responsibility of women; (3) the development of migrant "illegality" and its consequences for the well being of women who are consistently anxious about the lives of their migrant family members and the stability of remittances that sustain the household, and (4) the increasing neoliberalization of public health care that includes the heightened surveillance of women's hygienic activities and chronic underfunding of public health resources. Using an ethnographic methodology including interviews, case studies, and participant observation, the research explores the daily lives of wives and mothers of transnational migrants as well as those women who, although they do not have migrant family members, live within the context of transnationalism because it pervades the community. In addition, all women in the research confront the inadequacy of public health services because most never have the resources to utilize private health services. The research makes three important contributions to medical anthropology and the social sciences. First, it contributes to ongoing debates concerning the potential uses of the intersectionality framework in anthropology and related social sciences. Second, it contributes to border studies by elaborating an example of productive ways that the border can be theoretically extended to include examinations of the lives of migrant family members living far from the border. Third, it critically examines a public health insurance program that has the potential to fulfill Mexico's constitutional right to health care for all citizens and to be a model for global health care policy. By doing so, it provides a basis for future study and development of progressive health care policy in Mexico and beyond.

This ethnographic research examines the daily life and institutional conditions under which low-income Black women in urban North Carolina perceived and attended to HIV health-related needs. I focus specifically on the interplay among women’s living conditions, programmatic service needs, and their strategies for navigating the local system of care to explore and refine the categorical label “low income.” I found that there were significant differences among study participants in terms of their monthly incomes and financial resources, housing quality and status, and personal experiences with incarceration and substance abuse. The economic differences among women translated into social differences within the context of federally-funded AIDS care programs. Social differences were realized as the differential ability to transform programmatic services enrollment into beneficial social networks. Ultimately, financially stable women were better positioned than their more economically vulnerable counterparts to reap the economic and social benefits of programmatic services eligibility and enrollment. It is in this context that I explore federally-funded AIDS care services as one social field through which processes of class unfold and articulate with processes of race and gender.

Previous literature has evidenced that young African American males are experiencing less academic success than their Caucasian male and African American female counterparts (Davis, Williams, & Williams, 2004; Flores, 2007). The deceleration of achievement in this population has spawned some inquiry into the struggles of African American students. However, investigators have primarily examined differences in sex, school attributes, socioeconomic status, family structure, and other external factors. Previous research has also highlighted the unique obstacles young African American men face in education settings. While researchers have identified several external predictors of academic achievement among African American males, scant information relates to identity factors outside of racial identity that correlate to and help predict academic achievement. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the influence of identity components (racial identity, masculinity, and academic self-concept) on the academic achievement of young African American male high school students. The data used for this study were archival and obtained from an umbrella project entitled the African American Males in Education Project A.A.M.P.E.D. Participants were recruited from a predominately African American High School located in the Southeastern U.S. There were 156 participants, all of which were African American males between the ages of 13-19. The findings from the current study can be summarized in three key points (a) the independent variables (academic self-concept, racial identity, and masculinity) were each significantly correlated to GPA, (b) the combination of the aforementioned identity factors significantly predicted GPA, and (c) no moderation or mediation effects were present in regards to the relationship between racial identity and GPA. Specifically, the findings suggested that following the control variable of parental education level, masculinity is the largest contributor in predicting GPA. Results also highlighted new findings regarding the unique and changing relationship of young African American males and academic self-concept. The current findings raised crucial questions about the inclusion of this population in research and future study. In conclusion, results from this study support the need for further research using identity factors in reference to the academic outcomes of young African American male students.

This study is constructed upon narratives of fourteen young women, who have been working in prostitution since they were street children in central Lima, and acknowledges their stigmatization in the Peruvian society, and how they challenge their socially constructed position. By combining narrative method with an intersectional analysis I have, through a multi-layered loupe, interpreted the young women’s interpretation of themselves and their social world. I will bring forward how these young women view their subordinate and stigmatized position through their narratives surrounding their bodies as shameful, culpable, sexual and fixed. This stigmatization is intersectional as it surrounds all parts of their lives and situatedness within the Peruvian society. This situatedness is complex, involving hierarchical structures that have been present in Peru since colonization and imperialism (cf. Wade 2009). In addition, I will bring forward how the young women engage in strategies to challenge this stigmatization by applying measures to increase their respectability (cf. Skeggs).

During the last decades, scholars have discussed the changes of Swedish alcohol culture. Among other things, it has been suggested that parallel with increased consumption levels men’s and women’s drinking is becoming more similar. In connection with this discussion, the purpose of this thesis is to examine Swedish alcohol culture(s) by analysing the meanings that focus groups from different generations ascribe to drinking in relation to different life periods: childhood, adolescence and adulthood. More specifically, it aims to analyse how the interviewees specify and negotiate normative boundaries and self-presentations in relation to norms and discourses of gender and age. An essential part of the analysis is to examine differences within gender and age-groups, as well as the similarities between them. The findings suggest that even though drinking patterns are changing in terms of quantity and choice of beverage, meanings, motives and norms seem to be rather stable – especially in regard to gender. Overall, a distinction is being made between men and women: Femininity is constructed in terms of control, responsibility and caring, and masculinity in terms of fearlessness, breaking of boundaries, and loss of control. Men’s and women’s drinking are also accounted for in different ways. While men’s drinking behaviours are excused with arguments about biology and hormones, women’s (anticipated) responsibility is explained with their connection to motherhood. However; these norms vary in strength and are expressed in different ways, depending on the drinking norms of different life-periods; mainly moderate in childhood and adulthood, and mainly orientated to binge-drinking in adolescence. With regard to positive meanings ascribed to drinking, similarities between age and gender groups are also generally greater than the differences between them. Thus, gendered differences are mainly constructed in relation to behaviours that are perceived as risky or problematic.

Every employee embodies manifestations of every demographic that attach to him or her different minority and majority statuses at the same time. As these statuses are often related to organizational hierarchies, employees frequently hold positions of dominance and subordination at the same time. Thus, a given individual's coping strategies (or coping behavior) in terms of minority stress due to organizational processes of hierarchization, marginalization and discrimination, are very often a simultaneous coping in terms of more than one demographic. Research on minority stress mostly focuses on single demographics representing only single facets of workforce diversity. By integrating the demographics of age, disability status, nationality, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and religion into one framework, the intersectional model proposed in this article broadens the perspective on minorities and related minority stress in the workplace. It is shown that coping with minority stress because of one demographic must always be interpreted in relation to the other demographics. The manifestation of one demographic can limit or broaden one's coping resources for coping with minority stress because of another dimension. Thus the manifestation of one demographic can determine the coping opportunities and coping behavior one applies to situations because of the minority status of another demographic. This coping behavior can include disclosure decisions about invisible demographics. Therefore organizational interventions aiming to create a supportive workplace environment and equal opportunities for every employee (e.g. diversity management approaches) should include more demographics instead of focusing only on few. (author's abstract)

Considers Bolivian Andean indigenous forms of democracy and resistance to neoliberal water privatization in Cochabamba. Incorporates environmental identity into the intersectional theoretical framework with principles rooted in Indigenous grass roots theory, Marxist critiques on capitalism, Latin American Neomarxist scholars, and Environmental Justice. Focuses on intersections of ethnicity, gender and class identities with environmental identity to understand the extent to which environmental injustices cannot be addressed in isolation from other sources of inequality.