Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-51).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Notre Dame, 2003. / Thesis directed by Antonette Irving for the Department of English. "September 2003." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-37).

The purpose of this study was to determine differences in the use of mental state references by typically developing 9- and 11-year-old children. Following a priming task that emphasized distinctions between physical and mental acts, children watched an 11-minute textless video and then were asked to generate an oral and a written story that focused on the mental states of the multiple characters. Narratives were transcribed, and all mental state references were classified into motivational, experiential, and belief categories. Specific mental state references were also analyzed to determine levels of semantic complexity. The study attempted to answer: 1) whether 9- and 11-year-old typically developing children differed in their ability to use more complex mental state references and 2) whether this ability varied as a function of the oral versus the written modality.The sample consisted of 26 children, ages 9;0-9;11 (15 females, 11 males), and 24 children, ages 11;00-11;11 (14 females, 10 males). The total sample (N=50) consisted of 32 Caucasian children, 15 African-American children, 2 Hispanic children, and 1 Asian-American. All children were selected from one urban elementary school located in West Central Florida, were from monolingual, English-speaking homes, and were speakers of Standard American English. A statistical analysis was conducted via a 3-way MANOVA, specifically, 2 (age 9 vs. age 11) x 4 (mental state categories) x 2 (oral versus written modality).

The reported study investigated temporal agency (i.e., the assignment of cause for temporal shift) in newlyweds’ courtship narratives. Transcripts of courtship narratives generated by each partner of 23 recently married couples (approximately 3 months) participating in the PAIR project (Huston, McHale, & Crouter, 1986) were analyzed for the presence of different linguistic strategies for encoding temporal shift. Statements were coded as “human agency assignments” when they assigned the cause of temporal shift to humans (e.g., we started seeing each other in June); statements that assigned temporal shift to abstract entities such as the events themselves (e.g., the summer started out well for us) or to the relationship (e.g., the relationship started to slow down) were coded as “abstract agency assignments.” The frequency with which narrators mentioned positiveand negative emotions was also coded to explore the possibility that emotional valence mediated agency assignments. The frequency of different agency assignments and emotion words were considered in the context of portions of the courtship accounts that narrators designated as describing “upturns” (episodes that increased the likelihood of marriage) or “downturns” (episodes that decreased marriage likelihood). Results indicated that the frequency of human agency assignments and positive emotion mention were higher in upturn than downturn narrative segments; in contrast, abstract agency assignments and negative emotion mention were more frequent in downturn than upturn segments. Subsequent analyses indicated that positive word mention partially mediated human agency assignments in upturns and that negative word mention partially mediated abstract agency assignments in downturns. These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating an association between the emotional valence of an event and temporal agency assignment: In general, people assign temporal agency to themselves when describing positive events, but prefer abstract agency assignments for negative events (McGlone & Pfiester, 2009). / text

This thesis examines the activity of pleasure reading as conducted within three kinds of virtual environments: role-playing and adventure video games, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft, and graphical online social worlds such as Second Life. I ask how and to what extent different types of virtual environments are able to provide immersive reading experiences. This analysis relies upon the concepts of telic (purpose-driven) and paratelic (pleasure-driven) modes of reading, and I examine how virtual environments provide affordances for one or the other mode. How they do so usually has to do with how their situate reading materials in relation to the environment’s diegetic world, as well as whether the diegetic world is coherent and bounded. I conclude that while paratelic reading is encouraged in all virtual environments, role-playing and adventure video games are conducive to partially telic reading experiences, with players reading in order to better understand the diegetic world in which they act. MMOGs feature largely immutable diegetic worlds lacking normal relations of causality, but they still manage to some degree to encourage telic reading by circumscribing and enriching the world with lore. Virtual social worlds are generally unable to provide this sort of telic reading experience due to their lack of coherent diegetic worlds, and their effectiveness for paratelic reading is currently hampered by unwieldy interfaces and lack of innovation in the format of virtual books. Although MMOGs and social virtual worlds both feature synchronous collaboration between players with the potential for emergent narratives, neither has been able to leverage this advantage for the creation of immersive reading experiences. Finally, all three forms of virtual environment have inspired innovative user-created narratives and interfaces, but they have done so outside the contexts of their diegetic game worlds, in the sphere of participant culture. / text

Although the Mexican population continues to be the largest Hispanic group in the United States, educational attainment is not increasing at a proportionate rate. First generation, Mexican-American students continue to have low enrollment in higher education institutions and high levels of attrition. Socioeconomic variables and ethnicity have correlated highly with these outcomes for thirty years, and programs have proliferated to address them, without much impact. Perhaps we need new approaches. This study investigates the lived experience of students attempting a university education. The goal of this research was to take the topic of educational achievement one step further by exploring identity development factors for first generation, Mexican-American college students via personal narratives. Researchers have long observed that people come to make sense of life via stories (Bruner, 1990; McAdams, 1985; Sarbin, 1986). Personal stories help to make sense of the past as well as foresee the future while helping to define current identity via recalling and/or retelling stories, particularly for emerging adults. Identity creation and negation was explored via McAdams’ life story model of identity: identity is an ever changing life story that strives for psychosocial unity and seeks purpose in relation to the world. The data collected from sixteen first generation, Mexican-American students at one university revealed that factors such as familial connections, cultural capital, generational immigration status, and self-discovery opportunities contribute to the ongoing creation and negotiation of identity. The outcome was the development of an identity soundboard which provides a visual representation of identity factors, each with its own control button, which is constantly adjusted according to individual experiences and narratives. The significance of these results is two-fold. One, it provides students and educators with a new perspective on identity development which can translate into new ways to address academic retention, attrition, and success. And two, it provides identity researchers with a new, customizable model with which to explore a variety of identity development processes, adaptable to specific research interests. The Hispanic community is a key player to the nation’s economic future, making efforts to foster a well-educated workforce a priority. Colleges and universities stand to benefit from a tailored approach to outreach and retention of students. It is by obtaining a glimpse of students’ reality that we can, as faculty, staff, and administrators, make changes that can positively affect their educational experience and outcome. / text

Social entrepreneurship is a phenomenon of increasing economic and cultural importance. A key challenge for social enterprises is resource acquisition. However, how social entrepreneurs acquire the resources needed to grow their ventures is not clear. Moreover, social enterprises differ from traditional ventures in several key ways which suggest that research developed from studying traditional entrepreneurs does not fully apply to social entrepreneurs. The focus of this dissertation is how social entrepreneurs use narratives to gather resources. This topic is examined using a multi-study, inductive, theory-building design based on 121 interviews, observation, and archival data. In Study 1, I interview 75 entrepreneurs, investors, and ancillary participants in the social enterprise sector. In Study 2, I construct case studies of eight technology-focused social ventures. The result is a framework explaining how differences in entrepreneurs' narrative tactics and characteristics are associated with differences in their resource acquisition success. Specifically, from Study 1 I develop a typology of social enterprise narratives, identify three narrative-types (personal, social-good, and business), and show that they possess unique elements. Findings from Study 2 demonstrate that the three narrative-types serve as the building blocks for communication with external stakeholders, particularly investors and the media. I find that successful social entrepreneurs used narratives to engage in two tactics -- tailoring and linking -- and constructed narratives with a unique characteristic: multiplexity. These findings contribute to three literatures that formed the basis of the study -- social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial resource acquisition, and organizational narrative theory -- and have implications for work on competing institutional logics and emotion in stakeholder evaluations. / text

My thesis analyzes the role of narratives in the consolidation of a Dreamer identity and movement for undocumented youth. The Dream movement, which initially pushed for the DREAM Act, a bill that would grant undocumented youth a pathway to residency and citizenship, has evolved into a collective effort to protect and fight for rights-enabling legislation for the entire undocumented population. This investigation uses narratives to promote an understanding of the Dream movement, taking into account a long-standing strategy of Dreamers: Stories of self lead to a collective story of us that celebrates individual experiences of a common struggle to belong in spite of a lack of papers. This story of us, in turn, leads to a story of now, a narrative of mobilization and advocacy that speaks to Dreamers’ public quest for legal recognition. The articulation of narratives allows for a sense of belonging among Dreamers who, because they are not conferred citizenship, have struggled to find acceptance and recognition as members of the United States. In spite of not having citizenship, Dreamers have been conferred benefits, such as the right to a free K-12 public school education under the 1982 Supreme Court Plyler v. Doe decision and the right to work and remain in the country for a renewable two years under President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) directive. These benefits, utilized by Dreamers to show that they are important members of the national polity, are important elements of their narrative. By adopting a Dreamer identity, undocumented youth have realized that lack of papers is not an impediment to civic and political engagement, even if they are not given the right to vote. Dreamers, in mobilizing and advocating, exercise rights such as the ability to testify and lobby that oftentimes the average citizen does not utilize. By becoming so engaged, undocumented youth have made an important claim to citizenship that has given them a newfound visibility and recognition as rights- bearing individuals. / text

This dissertation is a study of how slave rebellions continue to exert a profound political, affective and cultural influence on postcolonial writers. These writers claim histories and memories of such rebellions as strategic allegories, which enable both articulations of contemporary concerns about neocolonial and neoliberal forms of governmentality, as well as the resistances to such. Through an examination of texts by Ghanaian playwright Mohammed Ben Abdallah, Haitian poet and novelist Évelyne Trouillot, Canadian-Caribbean writer Dionne Brand, and Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, I argue that these narratives demonstrate that our present moment of globalized capital and its accompanying forms of expropriation, though seemingly disembodied and all-pervasive, bear suggestive resemblances to the ethical and political questions raised by the global machinery of slavery. Memories of slave rebellions operate as vital forms of oppositional narratives in these texts, providing writers with an imaginary of a foundational class struggle which threatens the existing status quo. While such narrativizations remobilize the cultural memories of earlier radicalisms, they also point out the failures of such radical imaginaries to move beyond a privileging of certain forms of heroic and heteronormative revolutionary black masculinity. By foregrounding women within the spaces of the slave rebellions, these texts de-masculinize the dominant masculinisms of slave rebellion narratives of previous eras. In doing so, they complicate the notion of racialized class struggles as theaters of supremacy between two classes of men, and challenges the reduction of enslaved women into passive allegories of family, community and nation. / text

This dissertation explores four narrative texts written about AIDS/HIV and evaluates each one by applying Kenneth Burke's redemption drama, consisting of guilt, purification, and redemption. The methodology is a close textual analysis using rhetorical analysis as a way to highlight the use of the redemption drama in language. The first chapter explores the history of AIDS/HIV and makes the argument for using Burke's rhetorical approach. The second chapter briefly highlights the plot of the four narratives and provides background information and context for each book. The third chapter applies the concept of guilt to all four narratives. The fourth chapter uses purification, breaking it down into mortification and victimage. Chapter five explains the way each protagonist and reader has found redemption. Chapter six concludes the research and offers limits and possible areas for future study. This research shows that with illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV/AIDS, those ill often feel the need to defend themselves and their mode of infection to others. Using Burke's redemption drama, an analyst can study language use to show how these individuals defend their medical status to others, and how this allows them to redefine both themselves and their ailments.