This thesis is based on 31 interviews and one focus group conducted with Jewish bisexual women and men in the San Francisco Bay Area. While there is much academic discussion and theory about interlocking oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, I explore the complex ways that these systems weave together with religious and ethnic identification in the lives and speech of study participants. Interviewees discuss their multiple and shifting identities, difficulties that they encounter in conceptualizing the intersection of their ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation, and demonstrate the ways that these identifications intermingle in their speech and stories in spite of these difficulties. They compare the liminal status of both Jewish and bisexual identifications on the boundary of privilege, and their decisions about passing or acting in solidarity with the oppressed. Participants' experience and practice of both Jewishness and bisexuality are changed and influenced by each other.

Throughout the history of United States' policy towards Native people, the strongest underlying methodology for effectuating conquest has had its roots in the control of the tribal identity. Because the United States Census counts people and categorizes them into racial groups, the relationship of the identity of Native people to the Census and Federal Indian policy would seem to be closely associated. When analyzing the process of the United States Census as it applies to Native Americans, a greater understanding develops regarding the ultimate control of Indian identity and the resultant effects of that control upon tribal people. By understanding this relationship, tribes may choose to further strengthen the meaning of self determination and demand that they be the ones to count their own people. By taking control of the tribal identity, tribes are taking control of the disposition of rights and resources within the federal-tribal structure.

Turn of the century Native American women's published writing is examined for the elements which presage contemporary Native American women's writing. In particular, three writers' works and biographies are examined in order to determine why they wrote, how they wrote and what they wrote. Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Sa and Mourning Dove made early contributions to the field of Native American women's literature.

Western political thought is Eurocentric in world view. Since Western thought has been accepted as universal, there is the need to respond to this situation. This thesis will examine egalitarianism from a perspective of North American tribal society. It is my hypothesis that since the discovery of the Americas, indigenous people continue to have a contradictory experience of egalitarianism. Although certain elements of equality were common to the thinking of indigenous people and Western man, Western nations oppressed indigenous people through egalitarian policies.

<p> John Taylor was an ex-slave and Civil War veteran who settled in Southwest Colorado in the early 1870s. Taylor claimed that he was "the first white man to settle the Pine River Valley." Taylor was not passing for white and his claim was never a rejection of his African American self. Taylor's claim emerged out of a unique racial niche available to a handful of African Americans who appeared in the Southwest borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study, using family oral histories and archival documents, looks at two historically situated social forces operating in the formation of his identity. The first includes what Omi and Winant describe as "racial projects." A number of the racial projects of the "frontier" created in some cases a racial divide, which buffered the oppression of African Americans because whiteness was based on not being regarded as an American Indian, "Mexican" or Asian. This racial dynamic was one of the social forces informing the logic of Taylor's claim. Indigenous culture and language constituted a second influence on Taylor's identity, particularly indigenous articulations of whiteness and the concept of the black white man. In previous studies focusing on the African American experience in the West, the concept of the black white man received little attention by historians. Even the history concentrating on the interaction between American Indians with the African Diaspora have not fully explored this concept, nor has it been considered in looking at the formation of white identity in North America. One of the unique contributions of this study is to seriously consider indigenous voices from a variety of sources, which include oral history and tribal languages, in the construction of identity. John Taylor's claim that he was a black white man remains a prime example of how one's identity takes form, changes and persists within the context of social historical structures.</p>

<p> This research was conducted in collaboration with rural Yup'ik residents of the Yukon River delta region of Alaska. The thesis explores traditional knowledge and conservation ethics among rural Yup'ik residents who continue to maintain active subsistence lifestyles. From the end of July through August of 2012, ethnographic field research was conducted primarily through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, documenting Yup'ik subsistence hunting and fishing practices. Research participants invited me beluga whale hunting, seal hunting, moose hunting, commercial and subsistence fishing, gathering berries, and a variety of other activities that highlights local Yup'ik environmental knowledge, practices, and ethics. Through firsthand examples of these experiences, this thesis attempts to explore what conservation means through a Yup'ik cultural lens. Documenting Yup'ik traditional knowledge offers an opportunity to shine a light on the stewardship of local people's relationship with their traditional lands. The importance of maintaining direct relationships with the natural world, eating Native foods, and passing on hunting and gathering skills to future generations help develop the narrative of my analysis. In many ways, the cultural heritage of the Yup'ik people are embodied in such practices, providing a direct link between nature and culture.</p>

As Canada, and particularly metropolitan cities like Montreal, becomes increasingly diverse, it is important to explore and understand the culture and needs of immigrant communities. This Masters thesis focuses on the mental health of South Asian immigrant women in Montreal, Quebec. This original research is a qualitative descriptive study based on in-depth interviews with nine women from India and Pakistan. The interviews focus on the intersection of gender and culture with post-migration experiences, help-seeking patterns and coping strategies for distress in South Asian women. The women's narratives provide pertinent information for researchers and practitioners that could be applicable to the design of future research, outreach, health promotion, and models of care on mental health. The following four chapters provide a thorough discussion of the methodology, findings and conclusions.

"Contrasting Portraits" is the history of Rodriguez, the Texas school finance case from 1968 to 1973. The thesis places the case within three contexts: Texas education, Mexican-American rights, and equal protection. Rodriguez concluded one stream of Supreme Court equal protection analysis and launched another interpretation, reflective of societal change. An analysis of the Rodriguez briefs and court opinions revealed two conflicting ideals: equality and liberty. School finance cases pit constituencies representing these ideals against each other: advocates of equal educational opportunity and advocates of local control, each searching to provide the best education for America's children. The study, which includes a chronology chart of Rodriguez from 1968 to 1995, suggests that school finance reformers should continue to search for new, simple, moderate standards that will both foster equality and liberty and still strengthen all schools.

<p>The United States is an increasingly diverse society. The recent Supreme Court hearings on Affirmative Action have reiterated the need to study the impacts of changing demographics on organizations. Race-based policymaking fundamentally rests on a "diversity is good for the organization" ideology, yet there is relatively little research that directly measures the institutional effects of racial/ethnic diversity. Diversity within organizations (also known as structural diversity or organizational heterogeneity) is overdue for a broader range of scholarly attention. Building on an organizational demography framework, this study investigates whether or not there are relationships between diversity and outcomes at higher education institutions (HEIs) nationwide. It adopts a new theoretical approach, the &ldquo;Critical Mass in Context&rdquo; perspective, which includes not only demographic factors, but culturally-related, or <i>contextual</i> factors in estimating the effects of diversity on two organizational outcomes: student retention and the diversity of degree completers. The results of these comparative tests are mixed, and show that the effects of demographic diversity may be <i>either</i> positive or negative (or have no effect), and that these results are highly <i> context dependent</i>. In other words, diversity did not have wholly negative nor positive effects on the outcomes included in this study, and the type of institution played a role in determining these how these results varied. For instance, although student gender and racial/ethnic diversity had negative effects in models that measured student retention rates, faculty gender contributed positively to predicting this outcome. Contextual factors, such as the MSDI 4 (or very high diversity elements in an HEI&rsquo;s mission statement) and an HEI&rsquo;s urban index (or suburban locale) contributed positively. In models that used the racial/ethnic diversity of degree completers as the tested outcome, the race/ethnicity of <i>overall students</i> was the most important (indeed, nearly the only) predictor. So, not only do the research results depend on what <i>types</i> of organizational outcomes are considered, but also in what <i>context</i> and <i> how</i> they are measured. This study therefore adds new levels of understanding to what effects diversity may have on institutions and the importance that culturally related factors may have on these effects. </p>

<p> The effects of a six-week mindfulness class on racial stereotype bias, attention, and working memory was measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT), Attention Network Task (ANT), and Automated Operation Span Task, respectively. Explicit racism (Modern Racism Scale, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation), mindfulness (Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire), depression, anxiety, and stress (Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale) were also examined. Sixty traditional-aged undergraduate women participated in this study (20 completed the mindfulness course and the remaining completed a non-MBSR physical education course). The results revealed that training was not associated with decreased racial stereotype bias on the IAT. Training was associated with increased performance in attention-switching on the ANT. In both groups, explicit racism and working memory predicted racial bias at time 1, and explicit racism predicted change in racial bias between times 1 and 2. Unexpectedly, increase in mindfulness (FFMQ) approached prediction of an increase in racial bias across both groups. In summary, the findings contradict the hypothesis that participation in a six-week mindfulness course will reduce stereotype application and activation.</p>