Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) report decreased sense of belonging compared to White students (Hunn, 2014; Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Museus et al., 2018; Strayhorn, 2019). The study aimed to answer, "What are the daily lived experiences of BIPOC students at a PWI?" and "How do BIPOC students at a PWI describe feelings of belonging (if at all)?" The study was conducted at a private, religiously affiliated, PWI, in the Western United States. The University Belonging Questionnaire (Slaten et al., 2018) was used to sort students' feelings of belonging. Female participants who endorsed high belonging and low belonging were invited to focus group interviews. A total of 10 participants comprised of graduate and undergraduate students of varying ethnicities and races participated. A focused multiperspective interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) design was employed for this study. In total, there are five context-related themes describing how students navigate their experiences: Cultural Worlds, Support System, Religion, Academics, and Classmates. Both focus groups felt similarly about the importance of friends/family as a support system. The high belonging versus low belonging focus groups felt differently about belonging, discrimination, being a spokesperson, being a chameleon, religion, professors, and their classmates. Those in the HBG reported feeling connected to peers and faculty. The LBG reported feelings of isolation related to feeling othered by peers and faculty. Based on this study's findings, several recommendations are offered. Educators should strive to create environments where mentor-student relationships are fostered, microaggressions are lessened, and the larger community campus values BIPOC students. These efforts will better support BIPOC female students as they navigate their experiences in higher education settings, particularly in PWIs.

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Efforts to effectively combat discrimination require an understanding of how groups in power think about those experiencing prejudice and discrimination. To study how White individuals think about the discrimination faced by different racial groups (Non-Hispanic White, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, Native and Indigenous, Latinx and Hispanic, and Mixed-Race men and women), 304 White participants completed an edited version of the Everyday Discrimination Scale and the Hypervigilance scale for each of these 14 groups to assess participants’ perceptions that these targets experience discrimination. Further, explicit attitudes towards each group were assessed with feelings thermometers. Results of our within subjects ANOVAs found that all racial groups were perceived to experience different levels of discrimination from one another, with Black targets perceived as experiencing the most discrimination and White targets the least. When analyzing intersectionally, we found Black men were perceived as experiencing the most discrimination, followed by Black women, White men perceived as experiencing the least discrimination with White women the second lowest group. Additionally, Asian women and Hispanic Latino men were perceived as facing more than their same race counterparts. Overall, these data indicate that White individuals perceive differences in the group levels of discrimination faced by racial-gender groups, and highlights the importance of an intersectional approach when studying race and gender discrimination.

Education is one key to economic prosperity and a predictor of overall life satisfaction. The further one progresses through the educational pipeline, the more likely it is that she may prosper. However, in a society bolstered by patriarchal systems, economic and educational inequalities exist among the genders. Educational aspirations are influenced by students' socialization experiences. Faculty teach students about their discipline. Families influence educational pursuits. Peers serve as reinforcements or challenges to academic progress. All three groups are socialization agents to students pursuing higher education. Research indicates that various socialization agents influence whether students pursue an undergraduate degree. However, there is little literature specifically focused on women and less on the relationship between women's undergraduate socialization experiences and their decision to enroll in graduate studies. The purpose of this study was to determine whether certain collegiate experiences (with family, faculty and peers) predict undergraduate women's expectation to enroll in graduate study and to determine if the experiences influence expectation to enroll by race. The sample included women who completed the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) Fourth edition. The study employed logistic regression to explore the relationship between undergraduate women's educational aspirations and family, faculty and peer influences. In addition, I examined whether the associations between family, faculty and peers differed by race/ethnicity. The results of the logistic regression revealed that academic ability (GPA) and peer experiences influenced advanced degree aspirations. In addition, race/ethnicity does matter, i.e., being of African-American or Latina decent is associated with a higher level of advanced degree aspiration. Also, as frequency of interactions between faculty and African-American women increase — aspiration decreases. These findings suggest that it is important to consider the various factors that influence advanced degree aspiration. This is especially important since advanced degrees can be elemental to economic prosperity. / Ph. D.

<p>From what <em>specific </em>socio-cultural “positionality” are African-Canadian Muslim females living their realities? What methods do they employ to locate, (re)claim, and/or assert selfhood from these peripheral spaces within the white nation? How does their shared socio-religio-racial and gendered marginality, potentially, act as a site for inciting a sense of camaraderie towards one another? Such queries frame the content of this thesis which commissions qualitative research methods to unearth answers that rely upon the “particular”--by intimately gazing at 13 Black Muslim women’s gendered-racialized experiences in Toronto. Dividing analysis by religious status this work examines the dynamics distinct to 1. convert and 2.“life-long” Muslim participants’ cultivation of a religious/racial identity. The anti-Black <em>and</em> anti-Islamic discrimination punctuating “multicultural” Canada later collapses investigation into a unified survey of the ways African-Canadian Muslim women in general, contend with the oppressive socio-cultural forces attempting to infringe on their humanity. Research concludes that the adverse <em>or</em> hospitable responses of surrounding communities (these are: the ethnic-majority Muslim community; the non-Muslim Black population; Eurocentric secular society at large) to these women, influences how they both place themselves in their environments <em>and </em>interact with their Black-Muslim female fellows. This thesis argues that the persistent ostrasization of African-Canadian Islamic women within the religious and secular-public spheres of society establishes a necessary, defensive solidarity amongst these individuals; specifically, their communions can erect a nurturing platform to challenge or minimize the impact of oppressive forces--particularly protecting against the mental and social violence inflicted by <em>racist-sexist Islamophobic white supremacist powers</em>.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This dissertation gives a number of answers to the following two research questions: given the storied nature of faith and displacement, what does literary studies have to offer church-based refugee activists in religious diasporas? And what might church-based activists, who are involved in daily struggles to interpret cultural, ethnic, and religious stories for the sake of cultural transformation, have to offer literary studies of displacement? The analysis of this thesis uses literary and cultural theory (diaspora studies, postcolonial theorizations of the exotic, discursive analysis, formalist textual examination, and more) to understand interethnic church-based refugee activism taking place within a specific religious diaspora, the Christian Reformed Church in Canada. The formation of diasporas and faith groups through shared allegiances to communal stories makes literary studies a fitting vantage point from which to examine a religious diaspora. Because religious diasporas have explicitly storied identities, their discourses are open to the potential of stories to effect communal change. Refugee novels and other cultural texts that are valued in diaspora and refugee studies can have a part in shaping the storied identity out of which church-based refugee activism is done, helping religious diasporas to more deeply understand the experiences specific to refugee-ed people and to more closely align their activism with the stated desires of refugee-ed people.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology / Doris J. Carroll / This study investigated the differences in own behavior and perception of peer behavior among undergraduates among gender, age, race/ethnicity and major. The participants were part of a census of undergraduate students at a Midwestern land grant university. There were 2,759 useable responses to a survey using McCabe’s Academic Integrity Scale. The findings found significant differences between age and gender comparisons. Younger women reported the most behavior in academic dishonesty, and older women reported the lowest behavior in academic dishonesty. The race/ethnicity and major comparisons yielded no differences. Finally, the findings suggest the need for further systematic research on academic dishonesty.

While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s fear of the racial and ethnic other at the edges of the empire. James’s earliest ghost stories address to the legacy of American colonialism, staging narratives of indigenous erasure and land seizure by centering hauntings around property disputes. The later ghost stories—written after James had emigrated to Britain— engage in a critique of the imperial British military and colonial power structures that systematically oppress indigenous groups in the name of the empire. These ghost stories all focus on the figure of the Western settler-colonizer and his guilt in creating hauntings; James’s living characters often realize they have been complicit in the wrongdoings that result in revenge-seeking ghosts, and this realization is more terrifying than the ghosts themselves. In this way, James's ghost stories present a means of questioning the validityof colonizer identity, and thus a means of deconstructing the binary of the Western “self” and the indigenous “other.”