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Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / John A. Hortin / Secondary adolescents with disabilities (AWD) have been mandated participants in their Individual Education Plan (IEP) and Individual Transition Plan (ITP) meetings since 1990, yet overprotective and well-meaning adults have assumed their advocacy role (Janiga & Costenbader, 2002). This has weakened their (secondary AWD) ability to become self-determined. Secondary AWD should be involved with the development, implementation and execution of services and supports in their IEP/ITP in order to benefit from their participation in general education as well as develop self-determination skills. To improve transition outcomes, this study examined self-determination and socio-cultural factors (race/ethnic and gender groups) among secondary adolescents with disabilities by differentiating baseline skills among race and gender groups. The two independent variables were race/ethnicity and gender. The dependent variables were the self-determination total score and each of four domain total scores (Autonomy, Self-Regulation, Psychological Empowerment, and Self-Realization) of the Arc’s Self-Determination Scale. The literature revealed that there was not a standard for self-determination training programs for students with disabilities and teachers (Brunello-Prudencio, 2001). However, empirical data has emphasized that socio-cultural development (i.e. gender and race) could impact self-determination. Understanding the socio-cultural perspective of race/ethnicity and gender on self-determination has the potential to improve transition practices as well as highlight the importance for self-determination (Trainor, 2005). This study utilized information from the Arc’s Self-Determination Scale (Wehmeyer & Kelchner, 1995) score of secondary adolescents with disabilities to determine whether differences existed among race/ethnic and gender groups. Research findings from this study indicated significant differences in total scores among race/ethnic groups for: (1) the autonomy domain (the ability to express personal preferences or beliefs); (2) self-determination; and (3) there was no significant difference for gender on either domain score or self-determination total scores. This research revealed that a self-determination assessment instrument could be used to isolate essential abilities and behaviors by gender and race for secondary adolescents with disabilities. To promote positive outcomes among deficit areas of self-determination for secondary adolescents with disabilities, this researcher recommended differentiated strategies for educational practitioners. Differentiated strategies could focus on collaborative learning communities, experiential learning options, and reduced emphasis on competitive learning environments.

Anchored in analysis of in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 23 Black women in Britain, this research explores how media and online content-sharing is implicated in the development of Black women’s diasporic identities. Such matters are unpacked via an interpretive analytic lens, with Black feminist and social constructionist underpinnings. Shaped by critical studies of marketing, media, race, and gender, this research addresses issues concerning identity, ideology and inclusion, amidst media and digital culture. This thesis analyses media-based coping mechanisms concerning experiences of marginalisation and searches for a sense of belonging, related to intersecting issues of race, ethnicity and gender. There is analysis of how content generated by Black online users is entangled in processes of cultural transmission, counter-cultural resistance, and the construction of a digitally-mediated collective Black consciousness. As such, there is discussion of the notion of Black digital diaspora, in relation to analysis of the online media experiences of Black women in Britain. As part of this thesis, the concept of Black British diasporic literacy is also outlined, to further understand the particularities of Black identity development in Britain and how it is influenced by media content. Whilst the narratives of interview participants are emphasised in this thesis, it expands upon research that embraces a self-reflexive quality, by including reflections on the author’s own experiences as a Black and mixed-race woman.

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My dissertation research is interdisciplinary in nature, at the nexus of three areas of scholarly work and actual practices: union renewal and non-unionized workers-rights organizing in Canada and the US; feminist, anti-racist Marxian approaches to class relations as being racialized, gendered and bureaucratic; and, the institutional ethnographic method of inquiry into social reality. My empirical focus is on the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC). The OMWC was a Toronto-based labour-community project to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. It was started in 2001 by Justice for Workers (J4W), was carried on by the Ontario Needs a Raise coalition (ONR) from 2003 to 2006, and was re-launched in 2007 by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) in association with some community groups. The OMWC brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies and labour organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials and staff were the agents and/or targets of the campaign. The apparent victory of the OMWC is quite contested. Local campaign realities were compartmentalized in numerous ways and OMWC involvement met different institutionally specific and coordinated needs. And while coalitions generally arise as vehicles to transcend such institutional separation, the campaign was challenged to materially bridge such compartmentalization. The fragmentation of reality amongst institutions and how it was managed in practice affected how collaboration, participation, and decision-making happened and appeared to have happened in organizing and educational activities. While there were at times transformative intentions, there was generally a pragmatic anti-racist organizing practice and effect. I contend that the complexity of contemporary society poses great challenges for the possibilities for human-agency based labour-community workers-rights organizing with a broad-based, political capacity for movement building orientation. I suggest that this is largely so because the social coordination of what we do and what we understand about what we do turns on at least three components of social reality: an institution-based organization of multi-layered social relations that is generally locally circumscribed but extralocally driven; a conditioned individually-driven orientation to meeting human needs; and an ideological orientation to both the content of ideas and thought, and the process of that reasoning.

My dissertation research is interdisciplinary in nature, at the nexus of three areas of scholarly work and actual practices: union renewal and non-unionized workers-rights organizing in Canada and the US; feminist, anti-racist Marxian approaches to class relations as being racialized, gendered and bureaucratic; and, the institutional ethnographic method of inquiry into social reality. My empirical focus is on the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC). The OMWC was a Toronto-based labour-community project to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. It was started in 2001 by Justice for Workers (J4W), was carried on by the Ontario Needs a Raise coalition (ONR) from 2003 to 2006, and was re-launched in 2007 by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) in association with some community groups. The OMWC brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies and labour organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials and staff were the agents and/or targets of the campaign. The apparent victory of the OMWC is quite contested. Local campaign realities were compartmentalized in numerous ways and OMWC involvement met different institutionally specific and coordinated needs. And while coalitions generally arise as vehicles to transcend such institutional separation, the campaign was challenged to materially bridge such compartmentalization. The fragmentation of reality amongst institutions and how it was managed in practice affected how collaboration, participation, and decision-making happened and appeared to have happened in organizing and educational activities. While there were at times transformative intentions, there was generally a pragmatic anti-racist organizing practice and effect. I contend that the complexity of contemporary society poses great challenges for the possibilities for human-agency based labour-community workers-rights organizing with a broad-based, political capacity for movement building orientation. I suggest that this is largely so because the social coordination of what we do and what we understand about what we do turns on at least three components of social reality: an institution-based organization of multi-layered social relations that is generally locally circumscribed but extralocally driven; a conditioned individually-driven orientation to meeting human needs; and an ideological orientation to both the content of ideas and thought, and the process of that reasoning.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. / "August, 2008." Includes bibliographical references. Online version available on the World Wide Web.

This thesis attends to recent calls and decades of demands to de-whiten and de-colonise the discipline of Geography and higher education more broadly. This manuscript contributes unique empirical research and analysis on race, gender, sexuality and everyday life to geographies of intersectionality, visceral geographies of (micro)aggressions, and toxic geographies. Intersectionality is a Black Feminist framework that centres the entanglement of race and gender, (micro)aggressions are often unconscious and subtle insults experienced at the scale of the body by marginalized people, and toxic geographies are spaces with high concentrations of (micro)aggressions. The main objectives are to explore the co-constitutive nature of (micro)aggressions and space, engage intersectionality in practice through Participatory Action Research (PAR), and to centre the lives and promote the agency of students of colour, women, queer, transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) students in US higher education. The empirical research of this thesis is a PAR project and team composed of eleven people, myself included, on race, gender, and sexuality based (micro)aggressions at an elite US residential institution of higher education. The PAR team collectively curated a public art event where the university community was invited to share stories of (micro)aggressions experienced, witnessed, and produced. The PAR team’s efforts resulted in a powerful encounter that led to changes in policy and practice to mitigate toxicity in one particular place. The analysis of the empirical research involves an exploration of the fluidity, fixity, and spatiality of toxic geographies along the axes of race, gender and sexuality and within the context of the academic-military-prison industrial complex (AMPIC), a framework of structural violence. In addition, this thesis applies the higher-level analytic of intersectionality to the empirical research, connecting the micro level of (micro)aggressions, the meso level of the PAR team, and the macro level of the AMPIC to provide an empirical example of the complexity of toxic geographies, and an avenue for future research, by highlighting the material impact of the neoliberal university on the mental health of students of colour, women, queer, and TGNC students.