Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Telecommunications and American Studies, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 12, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 2926. Advisers: Michael McGregor; Jennifer A. Bryant.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1644. Adviser: Scott Johnson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-123) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Instructional Systems Technology, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-03, Section: A, page: 1062. Adviser: Thomas M. Schwen. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 30, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Communication and Culture, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 24, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4187. Adviser: Robert L. Ivie.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Michael Pratt. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-186) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Colorado at Boulder, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-07, Section: A, page: 2523. Adviser: Bryan C. Taylor.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4162. Advisers: Andrea Golato; Douglas Kibbee. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 287-294) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (M.BIE)--Unitec New Zealand, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 165-173).

Who decides which neighborhoods receive affordable housing, community gardens, or job centers? How do these organizations and agencies get a seat at the decision-making table? And what can urban redevelopment politics tell us about larger links between governance and inequality in American cities? This dissertation, based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Boston, addresses these questions and significantly advances our understanding of urban governance and neighborhood inequality. First, I argue that influence over community development plans depends on organizational legitimacy, not unequal access to resources. Second, I illustrate a consequential realignment of political representation, showing how private community-based organizations (CBOs)—not elected politicians—represent poor neighborhoods in community development decision-making. Finally, I reveal how subtle cultural processes—not overt elite domination—undermine resident power in public participatory processes. By focusing on the day-to-day grind of governance, this dissertation reveals overlooked actors and new political processes. It is a unique urban ethnography that takes readers off of the street corner and into the conference rooms of government agencies and private development organizations—a move forcing social scientists to rethink dynamics of power, political representation, and inequality in poor neighborhoods. / Sociology

U.S. suburbia is rapidly changing, becoming home to increasing numbers of poor families and immigrants. However, traditionally disadvantaged students who attend well-resourced middle-class suburban schools have been largely neglected in educational inequality research. In this study, I spotlight this overlooked population and find that class background takes on heterogeneous meanings and significance, as it is situated in contextualized hierarchies, systems of meaning, and boundaries that are forged within everyday school interactions. I illuminate the heterogeneity in the effect of class among youth who share demographic background characteristics but attend diverse suburban schools. These racial and contextual contingencies in the effects of class background—or how class “works”—shape the experiences and outcomes of traditionally disadvantaged students so that two students who share the same demographic background but attend different schools have different social and academic outcomes. The power of social background and school-level forces in shaping educational outcomes are among the most robust findings in the sociology of education literature. What is missing from this quintessential portrait of American educational inequality, however, is a nuanced understanding of a race-class-context interaction that abandons the assumption that race and class intersect to produce uniform effects, and that school contextual effects are uniform for all students. Through mixed methods, I show that race, class, and context interact in a two-stage process whereby (1) race and class interact with each other, and then (2) jointly interact with school context, to exert non-uniform effects on how traditionally disadvantaged students integrate into suburban schools. In this context, what it means and how it feels to be an economically disadvantaged student varies greatly depending on who you are and where you are. For immigrant students, who are an important subset of this population, these dynamics further shape incorporation processes and pathways into the minority middle class. Through studying how social background and school-level forces interact in complex ways to impact how immigrants forge identities vis-à-vis natives and coethnics, I complicate the assumptions underlying segmented assimilation theory and the predictions that follow from it. In doing so, I highlight the need for an updated understanding of immigrant incorporation that reflects the heterogeneity of 21st century immigrants. Finally, in studying school-level forces, I expand on traditional school-level forces and foreground campus spatial layout as an overlooked yet agentic force that regulates group dynamics. Specifically, I argue that spatial layout and organizational practices like tracking interact to structure social relations, differentially predisposing some schools to more unequal group relations than others. This research has broad implications for theories of educational inequality and immigrant incorporation, as well as for the contours of social inequality amidst a rapidly changing social landscape. / Social Policy