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Health and behavior risks among homeless Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer youth, are now part of nation wide conversation however, evidenced based practices and strategies for working with the youth remain very limited. This explorative study examined housing services, environments, and therapeutic interventions needed to help decrease high-risk behaviors among homeless Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer youth. In order to examine and distinguish the services needed to assist youth, the presenting study conducted an open-ended qualitative survey where nine social services providers delivered their expertise on the issues found among homeless Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer youth. The presenting study found that homeless Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer youth had experiences that were distinct and complex so as a result, needed cultural competent services and environments to better suit their needs. The participants of the study provided concrete details of encounters between social service providers and homeless Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer youth. From responses given, important insight was obtained on how to create safe and welcoming environments for at-risk or currently homeless Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer youth.

Thesis advisor: Paul Poteat / Research examining the health of sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth has expanded recently from a focus on how social contexts are linked to health risk to ways they promote wellbeing. The positive youth development (PYD) framework has been increasingly used to conceptualize how various social contexts may promote SGM youth wellbeing, as well as help them engage in community-level change through contribution efforts. There is limited research examining how the family context may promote PYD outcomes and contribution for SGM youth, despite the setting’s association with positive development for heterosexual/cisgender youth. Furthermore, there is a paucity of literature contextualizing family support for SGM identities alongside other measures of family relationships.Parent-child attachment and family cohesion are two measures of family-child relationships that have historically been linked to positive development in youth. They have been linked to various markers of positive development in youth, including confidence, care for others, hope, and gratitude, which in turn may promote greater advocacy and community engagement. This study examined a structural model testing the role of several measures of family relationships in predicting PYD qualities and contribution behaviors for SGM youth. Among 270 SGM youth, structural equation modeling analyses tested the relationship between family relationships with SGM youth (parent-child attachment, family cohesion, and SGM-specific support) and PYD qualities (confidence, care for others, hope, and gratitude) as well as contribution behaviors (advocacy beliefs and community engagement), as mediated by PYD qualities over a six month period. Results indicated that each measure of family relationships was uniquely associated with various PYD qualities and contribution in participants. Furthermore, care for others acted as an indirect pathway through which parent-child attachment was associated with greater advocacy and community engagement for participants. These findings position families as having a role in promoting SGM youth wellbeing within the larger community and contextualize how various markers of family relationships promote select PYD qualities and behaviors. Future research should continue to investigate the longitudinal role of positive family relationships in SGM youth development and how a more nuanced understanding of these relationships may have clinical applications for practitioners and youth wellbeing. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students are at-risk for high rates of bullying and harassment in the school setting. School counselors are uniquely positioned to provide support to LGBTQ youth and work alongside building principals to create safe and welcoming school environments. To build on existing literature, this researcher set out to examine how demographic factors and the school counselor-principal relationship influenced school counselor advocacy for LGBTQ youth. By examining these factors, school counselors are better informed about the roadblocks or barriers that might influence their advocacy efforts. In addition, this information helps counselor educators to better prepare school counselors as advocates and change agents. An anonymous survey with questions about demographics, attitudes, knowledge, and advocacy activity was completed by 169 practicing school counselors in the United States. Results revealed that sexual orientation of the counselor, the state in which the counselor works, the community setting, state and local policies influence a school counselor’s advocacy activity. Additionally, the number of years school counselors and building principals work together and the perceived collaborative working relationship are predictors of school counselor advocacy activity. Using a systems perspective can help school counselors identify how to advocate for LGBTQ students at the individual level, at the school, district, and community level, to the public arena.

This exploratory study will examine how the Internet is used by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) youth to cope with homelessness. It will also examine what the potential risks and benefits of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness using the Internet for support. Many marginalized groups, including homeless people, use the Internet as a resource, as well as a means of finding social acceptance (Berg 2012, ASA 2012). LGBTQ youth also use the Internet to connect with peers (Lever, Grove, Royce and Gillespie 2008). Using an extended case study research design, this work examines how homelessness is navigated by LGBTQ youth, primarily through the Internet, and how traditional means of support (i.e. shelters) can better meet the special needs of this population.

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Thesis advisor: Jon M. Wargo / Thesis advisor: Patrick Proctor / Book banning has exploded in recent years. Conflicts over what texts belong in schools have caused rifts in communities around the nation. Within English language arts (ELA) classrooms specifically, many teachers have been under scrutiny with local groups and national organizations demanding that some teachers be monitored, fired, or even arrested. Backdropped by this socio-historical moment wherein calls for book censorship and attacks against school teachers are commonplace, this three-article dissertation joins the growing scholarship that explores the challenges that arise when teachers and students dare to address topics of race, racism, gender, and sexuality in the ELA classroom. Designed as an ethnographic case study, this dissertation explores how one White ELA teacher and her sixth-grade students engaged with two regularly banned novels in a racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse classroom. The first paper employs critical Whiteness theory to examine the challenges, opportunities, and contextual factors that one White novice teacher encountered as she employed an antiracist approach to literature instruction. It offers a structural understanding of why so many White teachers attempt but fall short of delivering antiracist pedagogy effectively. The second paper traces how three students of Color in the class negotiated their emotions during conversations about race as it emerged within a literature unit. Using critical discourse analysis, I examine how language was mobilized to invite some emotions (e.g., surprise) and inhibit others (e.g., anger), manifesting as “emotional rules” that regulated students' responses to texts. The third paper examines how two LGBTQ+ youths engaged in literacy not only as a medium for identity work, but as a way to speak back to the social, political, and institutional contexts of their schooling. Placing the theatrical performances that queer youth wrote and directed at the center of my analysis, I submit that these literacy activities are a means of understanding how youth see themselves in the world. Taken together, these articles extend the scholarship on how teachers engage their students on issues of difference through literature, raising important questions about how sociopolitical tensions take shape through moments of silence and cheer in the ELA classroom. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teaching, Curriculum, and Society.

abstract: At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large. In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication Studies 2018

As social media has become more entwined with society, parents are facing fears around how their children use them, and who they connect with. As a result, some resort to parental control technologies that enable them to surveil their children’s online activities. However, for LGBTQ+ youth this can have large consequences, since the access to like-minded community is important for these peoples’ abilities to cope with their minority status. The study therefore explores in what ways LGBTQ+ youth (ages 18-27) experience of using social media is shaped by experiences of living under surveillance and control enabled by design and practices used by parents. This includes both general surveillance practices on social media, rather than focusing on explicit parental control technologies. The research employs a qualitative case study approach, combining self-reporting diary entries and semi-structures one-to-one interviews with six participants. The data was analyzed through a thematic analysis. We took great caution in how we conducted the study, since it can be a sensitive topic for the participants, and as a part of this examined our relation to the setting and how that could affect the research. We found that surveillance was far more diffuse than expected, consisting by an ever-shifting landscape of methods and counter-methods by parents and children respectively. However, we found that the less control the participants have over the audience of what they share, the less free they are to share their lives. This ends up alienating them as users, and risking isolating them from the possibilities of alternative support networks that could escape control and surveillance. These alternative support structures are necessary for the participants, because the reason they can’t escape the control is often due to dependency on their parents, often economic. The participants experiences underscore the lack of prioritization for minority groups such as the ones in the LGBTQ+ in platform design, something that we think must change.

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