Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: B, page: 3809. Advisers: Karl S. Rosengren; Peggy J. Miller. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 263-271) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 5, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-04, Section: B, page: 2590. Adviser: John E. Bates.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Advisers: Carol Skalnik Leff; Dianne M. Pinderhughes. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 275-280) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> This dissertation presents two participatory action research case studies focusing upon how students viewed the influence of the pedagogy and curriculum of the Chican@ Literature, Art and Social Studies (CLASS) program upon their personal, ethnic, and academic identities. In addition, these studies examined the various ways that youth perceive their role in addressing critical issues in their lives. I conducted this study as a teacher researcher in collaboration with my students. The first study focuses upon eight of the students in the CLASS program as a collective, and the second study is concentrated upon the only student in CLASS who was not of Chican@/Latin@ descent. </p><p> Both case studies were ten months in duration where I used ethnographic research methods for data collection, which included transcripts from one-on one interviews with the students, as well as artifacts they produced during CLASS. The eight students in this study were an average age of 18.5 years old and all but one had experience in the now defunct Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in Tucson; a program that produced positive educational outcomes in terms of graduation rates and state standardized tests through culturally responsive and critical pedagogy rooted in Indigenous epistemologies (Cabrera, Milem, Jacquette, &amp; Marx, 2014). CLASS was a similar in structure and practice to MAS since I was a teacher in both programs. However, due to unprecedented legislation in Arizona banning Mexican American Studies, CLASS became the last vestiges of the former program outside of public school spaces in order to adhere to the law (Acosta, 2014a; 2014b). </p><p> Implications include the impact of Indigenous epistemologies, decolonizing and humanizing methodologies and theoretical frameworks upon teaching practices for Chican@ students and other students of color. Furthermore, culturally sustaining pedagogies and critical multicultural and responsive curriculum can increase student engagement and the formation of a positive academic identity (Banks, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Paris &amp; Alim, 2014; Valenzuela, 1999). Finally, counter narratives (Delgado &amp; Stefancic, 2001), ethnic studies, and social justice curricula (Sleeter, 2011) coupled with Indigenous epistemologies can assist in the development of critical consciousness in students, and serve as a guide to taking collective action in their community and lives.</p>

The dissertation focuses on the WoDaaBe Fulani in Niger, seeking to understand identity in a global context, analyzing streams of power and desire that have characterized the life of the WoDaaBe. The first part of the dissertation discusses expressions of WoDaaBe identities and desires in the contemporary world, as well as identifying the present situation of the WoDaaBe as one of great marginality. The WoDaaBe ethnic identity is created through processes of exclusion and inclusion within social and natural environments. The WoDaaBe perceive themselves as both separated from and a part of nature, depending on the context in which their identification is placed. They maintain strong boundaries from other ethnic groups in Niger, through specific visual markers of identity and by identifying WoDaaBe-ness as attached to certain moral qualifies that are combined with various social practices. The ideas of herding and control of one's feelings and desires remain key symbols in WoDaaBe social and ethnic identity. Many young WoDaaBe work in cities because they lack animals for basic subsistence in the bush, thus negotiating their identity in these new circumstances. The second part of the dissertation traces the history of WoDaaBe involvement in an interconnected world, showing that WoDaaBe have been connected to State and global processes for a long time. Various factors have led to an expansion of cultivated land, pushing herding communities further north and reducing available grazing land. While the WoDaaBe are becoming increasingly marginalized within the national economy of Niger, they have become popular in the West as symbols of the "native." Similarities can be observed between the dominant development ideology's conception of the typical herder and of the popular imagination of the WoDaaBe, characterizing them as unproductive, traditional and simple. The WoDaaBe representation is placed in a broad historical context of images of the Other, demonstrating that the encounters between WoDaaBe and Westerners take place within fields of unequal power relations.

Since earliest contact, Europeans have projected myriad qualities onto the being they erroneously named "Indian." Through text representations, Euramericans have constructed and reproduced profound distortions of indigenous peoples that have shaped political and material realities for Native Americans by reducing them to delimiting "types." Simultaneously, Native writers have a parallel history of representing whites as the embodiment of confusing and "uncivilized" strangeness. In writing which resists colonial definitions of externally imposed "Indianness," contemporary Native writers have increasingly recast historically racist representations by asserting authentic self-descriptions while depicting whiteness as "Other." This thesis examines the ways in which two contemporary Native writers---Simon Ortiz, Acoma, and Carter Revard, Osage---use humor as a literary strategy to subvert the Euramerican stereotypes of the "Indian" as "noble" or "wild savage" and "unscientific primitive" in order to reconstruct authentic Native identity from the true center, that lived by Native people themselves.

Secondary prevention activities are used to decrease the incidence of complications to an already present disease process, through ongoing monitoring, patient education and early treatment This research was a descriptive ethnography that studied the Mexican-American's perspective (N = 6) on the use of early secondary intervention of health care services. The theoretical framework used was Leininger's (1991) conceptual model of Cultural Care and Diversity. The dimensions used in the Sunrise Model were religious and philosophical, kinship and social factors, and cultural values and lifeways, A semi structured interview guide was used for the interviews. The taxonomies that were identified were: (a) illness related beliefs; (b) health related behaviors; (c) health promoting support or nonsupport; and (d) cultural values and lifeways related to health promotion/prevention. There were three cultural themes that emerged from the data: (a) Support comes from multiple sources in the Mexican-American family and is very important in their lives when dealing with illness; (b) a strong faith in God's Will help the Mexican-American family deal with whatever results/consequences come from the illness; and (c) in the Mexican-American in particularly, knowledge about a disease does not necessarily cause a change in behaviors; a change only occurs when symptoms create consequences that negatively affect a personal sense of well being. Nursing implications from this study include understanding the importance of support for the Mexican-American individual and the strong faith in God's will which could explain the delay in seeking treatment. The title Si Dios Quiere (if God wills) signifies the strong belief of the Mexican-American in their way of dealing with their lives.

The purpose of this research was to determine whether Native American and Hispanic women can preserve cultural identity in interracial marriages. Four women participated in this research: A Native American woman married to an Anglo; two Hispanic women married to Anglos; and a woman of Hispanic and Native American ancestry married to a Native American. Each participant provided information regarding the level of knowledge of family history, ancestry, language, traditions and practices. Primary research found social identity was another indicator, as the social setting in an environment affects stability and permanence of a cultural identity. The findings indicate preservation of cultural identity in future generations from interracial marriages depends upon a community that can articulate and pass on a level of knowledge of family history, ancestry, language, traditions and practices. Such a community will consist of one or both parents, family members, members of the community, and the children themselves.

This study examines Mexican American popular culture, including seasonal festivals, professional stage plays, journal essays, and ritual narratives in early Arizona. Through these various cultural forms, Mexican American residents negotiated and countered prevalent notions of U.S. national identity aligned with nineteenth-century ideas about Western modernity and Mexican antiquity articulated at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, that presented Mexican America as an 'Orient,' an internal Orient named Aztlan. Civic rhetoric in the early twentieth-century Spanish-language press created an intimate cultural landscape that casts light and shadow upon prior histories of Mexican America in Arizona. In addition to social criticism in local journals, scripted plays in print and on stage extending beyond Iberia and Mexico into the Southwest affirmed local forms of Mexican American popular culture. Staged narratives of class relations within border space defined by international economic and labor interests are also noteworthy registers of allegorical formulations of cultural identity. In addition to frontier drama and border journals, personal correspondence and candid images of rural and urban parishes also demonstrate processes by which religious farms became unfolding and inclusive demonstrations of public devotion and civic rhetoric. Popular Catholicism nurtured by an early generation of Spanish Discalced Carmelite priests in Arizona created devotional societies, public processions in religious precincts, Spanish plays in parish halls, and festival parades in commercial districts that embodied local demonstrations of Mexican American culture of Aztlan in Arizona.

"A book," write Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , is "an assemblage," one that is connected to "other assemblages." Once it is understood as such, literary interpretation becomes less a quest for meanings in the form of fixed destinations as an investigation into what the book under consideration "functions with." What, in other words, is the relation of "this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.---and an abstract machine that sweeps [it] along?". Specifically, this dissertation examines the production of ethnicity in various North American literary works from the Twentieth Century. Each section juxtaposes "State apparatus-books" with "war machine" ones. The first posit the ethnic group as a minority, as an "objectively definable state", whether of language, ethnicity, or sex, as a subsystem of a Majority, and give emphasis to such strategies as centering, unification, totalization, integration, interiority, hierarchization, and finalization as the means to affirmation. The second posit the ethnic group as "minoritarian" in nature, as a "potential, creative and created," as a becoming "over which they do not have ownership" and "into which they themselves must enter". It attempts to make its reader cognizant of the various strategies by which ethnic groups both empower and delimit themselves in the process of self-affirmation.