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Diversity training programs are increasingly being incorporated into organizations as a strategy to meet moral standards and legal challenges. Unfortunately, little research as been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of these programs. This study describes an effective diversity training program as one that changes a member of the organization's negative attitude about racial differences toward a positive attitude.

This dissertation explores contemporary literary representations of the Haitian Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986), by authors Nadine Magloire, Kettly Mars, Evelyne Trouillot, and Marie-Célie Agnant. The questions that I explore through my dissertation research are: How do these authors represent the instrumentalization of sex during this time, both as a weapon of oppression and a means of resistance? How might Haitian women view their potential for agency in the context of this regime? The theoretical approach to this dissertation combines scholarship on postcolonial feminism and sexuality studies in a Haitian context in order to understand the implications and dynamics of power imbalance, agency, and heteronormative discourse in the works in question. Within the field of Haitian studies, I consider the work of little-studied authors and question a tendency to focus on the 2010 earthquake as the defining break between current and past literature. Rather, I suggest that cyclical trauma--of which the Duvalier dictatorships represent an important period--constantly informs the aesthetics of Haitian literature. More broadly, I respond to questions of agency and subjectivity, and demonstrate how these authors experiment with sexuality as a way to simultaneously reclaim agency and delineate the limits of such agency. Ultimately, I argue that these authors create a sort of literary dialogue between Haiti and the diaspora. These women imagine strategies involving feminine geolibertinism, homosexuality, self-sacrifice, prostitution, and abstinence as means of surviving and coping with the legacy of the Duvalier era. In fact, I argue that writing gender and sexuality outside of heteronormativity is one way in which 21st-century female Haitian novelists remember the Duvalier regime and create a space for potential resistance. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / March 27, 2015. / Duvalier, Gender, Haiti, Sexuality / Includes bibliographical references. / Martin Munro, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jerrilyn McGregory, University Representative; Lori Walters, Committee Member; Reinier Leushuis, Committee Member; José Gomariz, Committee Member.

A more diverse population in the United States calls for the inclusion of REC minority populations in research to improve treatment and clinician cultural awareness. A content analysis is proposed to analyze the inclusion level of REC minority groups in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Five questions are explored to organize and present the findings of the content analysis. Results demonstrate the low level of inclusion of REC minority groups as well as congruence between most studied topics and each REC minority group in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. These results should encourage researchers and clinicians to push for more inclusion of REC minority groups in research to accommodate the increasingly diverse population of the United States. This study should be used as evidence that demonstrates the low level of inclusion of REC minorities among research and clinical treatment. Additionally, this study should demonstrate the importance of REC inclusion among both research and treatment.

At the crossroads of Italian studies; film studies; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, my dissertation investigates a group of films by Italian women filmmakers whose narratives center on women and unfold in constrained spaces. Confinement is generally considered antithetical to feminist projects that imagine emancipation to be synonymous with freedom of movement. Why would women filmmakers, then, making films in the new millennium choose to stage their narratives in cloistered spaces? I find that the spatial restrictions are not responding to familiar dialectics. First feature films Benzina (Gasoline, Monica Stambrini 2001), Aprimi il cuore (Aprimi il cuore, Giada Colagrande 2002), and Via Castellana Bandiera (A Street in Palermo, Emma Dante 2013) find ways to place us snugly inside a familiar space, a space that comes with a standardized set of expectations and associations: the apartment with the nuclear family; Rome’s GRA (grande-raccordo anulare; Rome’s ring road) with travel around the capital; the narrow street as a classically Italian impasse. But when the films have us “overstay our welcome,” these spaces no longer align with our original understanding, instead, we begin to see the kinds of exclusions that have come to define those standardized narratives. And so, the films queer space, and by queering space we might come to see that the world we inhabit is much more dynamic than our traditional narratives might have us believe. I begin by analyzing the only documentary in my project, Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, Alina Marazzi, 2007). This film is a launching pad from which to establish a more robust backdrop of feminist history, philosophies, and concepts that re-emerge in subsequent chapters. Vis-à-vis the historiography I provide, I argue that each of the films’ restricted spatial configurations incite tense interpersonal dynamics within female pairings that dramatize both local and global political tensions within real feminist and lesbian collectives. Allusions to these long-lasting tensions in women’s political history provide not only an image of its past but also of its present, and perhaps its future. In other words, the films are a hard mirror to look into for feminist and lesbian activists and for women whose lives are affected by their (in)decisions, inclusions, and exclusions.

This study describes and explains purposefully selected university and community college administrators' perceptions of the Florida statewide articulation agreement and the resulting institutional practices as they pertain to underrepresented transfer students. The theoretical framework that undergirds this dissertation is three-fold: social constructivism, philosophical hermeneutics, and interpretive policy analysis (Yanow, 2000). In particular, the local level knowledge consisting of six university and six community college administrators (also referred to as policy implementers), was assessed through face-to-face interviews, document analysis, and field notes. The researcher reflective journal (Janesick, 2004) is asserted as a crucial link to analyzing the three frames as way to record the history of the project and integrate the ever-present voice of the researcher while lending credibility to the research findings. All three cases were examined for themes and subthemes using cross-case analysis guided by the study's research questions. Three types of policy implementers were apparent: policy experts, technocrats, and generalists. Three categories also emerged: policy proximity, policy fluency, and perceptions of underrepresented students. An administrator's policy proximity was found to be reasonably congruent with his or her policy fluency. This held true across all implementer types. Perceptions of underrepresented students, however, varied greatly; some administrators saw no differences, while others perceived major differences for underrepresented transfer students. A major finding of this study-that all administrators perceive no differences in the state articulation agreement for low-income, first generation in college, and racial and ethnic minority groups-ran counter to a recent study by Dowd, Chase; Bordoloi Pazich, and Bensimon (2009) which found seven state transfer policies to be mostly colorblind. Future studies on the transfer process incorporating more community college and university administrators both in Florida and in other states could continue to explore how different policy actors interpret and understand state and institutional policy; especially for the growing populations of underrepresented minority groups. The researcher reflective journal may be a useful tool for policy analysts to record more intensive micro-rich views of how policy knowledge is generated, perceived, and perpetuated (or not) from the inside.

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Les écoles immersives Diwan ont trente-huit ans. Elles ont d'une part, contribué à la revitalisation de la langue bretonne et d'autre part, permis un essor culturel et artistique en breton. Alors que les études précédentes analysent la chute vertigineuse du nombre de locuteurs et l'extrême fragilité de l'avenir de la langue, cette thèse montre comment la créativité des acteurs de Diwan a permis de surmonter les difficultés idéologiques et financières, et a réussi à toucher, par lamusique, l'audiovisuel, le théâtre et la littérature, un public beaucoup plus large que celui des bretonnants.Quel breton est parlé à Diwan ? Qui sont ces élèves représentant 1 % de la population scolaire bretonne, et quelles sont leurs pratiques artistiques ? Qui sont les enseignants-artistes et quelle évolution suit Diwan depuis les pionniers ? La créativité développée par les enseignants, les bénévoles, les parents d'élèves et les élèves sera-t-elle suffisante pour permettre un avenir à la langue ? En prenant appui sur les études des sociolinguistes et des psycholinguistes, sur des études menées en classe et dans le domaine extra-scolaire, mais aussi dans les écoles immersives basques Seaska et d'autres minorités linguistiques européennes, l'auteure montre que Diwan est une « machine à créer » fragile, qui ne peut continuer à se développer sans un regard critique sur elle même, une recherche pédagogique structurée et sans un soutien plus important de la société bretonne dans son ensemble. / Diwan immersive schools are thirty-eight years old. On the one hand, they have contributed to the revitalisation of the Breton language and on the other hand, served as a catalyst for cultural and artistic development in Breton. While previous studies analyse the precipitous decline in the number of speakers and the extreme fragility of the future of the language, thisthesis shows how the creativity of people associated with Diwan has overcome ideological and financial difficulties, and reaches through music , theatre and dance, a much wider audience than Breton-speakers alone.What sort of Breton is spoken at Diwan ? Who are these students who represent 1% of the Breton school population, and what are their artistic practices ? Who are the artists and teachers and what has been the evolution since the pioneers of the late 70s ? Creativity developed by teachers, volunteers, parents and students is all very well, but will it be sufficient to ensure a future for the language ? Drawing on studies by sociolinguists and Psycholinguists on numerous studies in Britain in the classroom and in extra-curricular field, but also in the Basque immersion schools Seaska , and european minority immersive schools too , the author shows that Diwan is a fragile "creativity machine" , which can not continue without a critical look at itself, a structured research, but also without more support from Breton society.

This study aims to investigate how the mechanisms of discrimination, othering, prejudice and enemy imaging work in conflict and non-conflict zones. The study further explored if the informants stories differ when in conflict zones. Enemy images theories were used as the theoretical base to investigate how the Somali majorities construct the enemy image of the Somali minorities (The Somali Bantusand the occupational groups). The aim and research questions are answered through a comparative case study that focuses on interviewing two Somali minority groups (occupational groups and the Bantu Somalis) who have the experience and lived both in Somalia (conflict context) and Somaliland (non conflict context). The result sof the study show that the majority of Somali clans use the delimitation between “them and us” a set of values that separate the two groups and characterize the minority groups as slaves and people of low social, economic, and political status. The majority groups perceive the minority groups as a threat to their assets and corevalues. This is what has been described as "our" and "their" essence, and the final aim, which is to legitimize violence, is clear in the data. While on the other hand, the majority groups referred to themselves as superior. The results indicated that there were no differences and only similarities in the narratives of the minority groups living in both conflict and non-conflict zones. This was an interesting discovery which was against the known and expected ideal. This thesis also suggests other ways of looking at the concept of enemy images suggesting further areas of research where deemed necessary.

Ethnic minority research in the U.S. is important to study because of the increase of ethnic minorities over the past several decades. Content analyses help to track the progress of ethnic minority research and guide researchers to future areas of study. Journals of adolescence have been analyzed and coded in the following areas of methodology of the article: article topic, article funding by topic, funding agencies, geographic location of sample, and measures used. A steady increase in ethnic minority research by article topic, funding, and measures was found for some groups.