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The purpose of this paper was to examine multicultural education, and clarify misconceptions about it. Particularly, those misconceptions that have resulted in House Bill 2281 ( i.e. multicultural education “promotes the overthrow of the United States government”), and the misconception that multicultural education solely involves content integration. In addition, this paper examines the possible benefits of having a multicultural education. These benefits include combating the negative effects of acculturation and assimilation, reducing prejudice and the effects of stereotypes, enhancing other-group orientation, and promoting critical analysis and empowerment.

<p> This study focuses on the rise of one of the most publicized policies related to U.S. immigration: The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would create a path to legal residency for young undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Following the 1982 <i> Plyler v. Doe</i> Supreme Court decision, undocumented children gained the right to a free public K-12 education in the United States (Olivas, 2012), but their immigration status and access to institutions of higher education were left largely unaddressed (L&oacute;pez, 2004; Yates, 2004). In response to the uncertainty faced by thousands of undocumented students upon high school graduation in this country each year, the DREAM Act was first introduced to Congress in 2001 (Olivas, 2004). In this multi-method study, I examined the DREAM Act versions presented to Congress during President Barack Obama&rsquo;s first term in office&mdash;a time when the DREAM Act was expected to pass for the first time since its inception in 2001. First, through a content analysis of DREAM Act policy documents, I explored how this policy was framed and how DREAMers were legally constructed (Johnson, 1996). Following this, I conducted a multimodal (Kress, 2011) critical discourse analysis (CDA; Luke, 1996; van Dijk, 2002, 2003) of national television news coverage of the DREAM Act of 2010, the version that came closest to passing, and highlighted the role news media played in communicating this policy issue. Considering Haas&rsquo;s (2004) argument that news media play a large part in how education policy issues come to be understood by the public, I explored how framing (Hand, Penuel, &amp; Guti&eacute;rrez, 2012) was used to portray the DREAM Act and DREAMers. My theoretical framework centers on understanding immigration in the United States as a racial issue (P&eacute;rez Huber, 2009) by using Omi and Winant&rsquo;s (1994) theories of racial formation as well as Bonilla-Silva&rsquo;s (2014) frames of color-blind racism.</p>

<p>This qualitative study provides information on the experiences and perceptions of women who immigrated to the U.S. after the 1979 Iran Islamic Revolution to pursue higher education and professional careers. The study offers new understanding of strategies used to overcome obstacles in completing academic goals in the U.S., pursuing professional careers, and negotiating balance between home-life and career. The study focused on 3 research questions: 1. How did family expectations and Iranian culture influence Iranian women&rsquo;s academic goals and family-life balance decisions? 2. What experiences (motivations and drives) shaped the life course of high-achieving Iranian women, and how did these experiences impact their professional careers and family-life-balance decisions? 3. What strategies were utilized to support their professional careers while still creating a balance between their work- and home-life obligations? </p><p> The study was patterned after the Giele (2008) research that used the life story method, which focused on 5 periods in the lives of study participants: childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, current life, and future plans. A semi-structured survey instrument elicited open-ended responses grouped into 4 sections: Identity, drive and motivation, relational style, and adaptive style. The data was provided by 21 women who met the selection criteria of the study and agreed to participate in face-to-face interviews. </p><p> The findings centered on the participants&rsquo; need to find a meaningful balance between work- and home life. Family was a key priority of all of the respondents, an influence that mirrored Iranian society values. The women who made the choice to immigrate felt pressure to succeed in all of their endeavors. Additional findings highlighted the importance of the participants&rsquo; self-efficacy and expectations of high achievements instilled in their early years, along with their strong aspirations to excel in professional careers. Having one or more mentors and accommodations made by immediate and extended family members supported the participants in meeting their work-life balance goals. The findings can be useful to other women immigrants to the U.S. who seek work-life balance as they adhere to the traditional female roles of their home countries and adapt to the demands of professional careers in the U.S. </p>

<p>The dominant cartography of post-Revolutionary Mexico has relied upon strategic constructions of a unified and homogenized national and cultural consciousness (mexicanidad), in order to invent and map a coherent image of imagined community. These strategic boundaries of mexicanidad have also relied upon the mapping of specific codes of being and belonging onto the Mexican geo-body. I argue that these codes have been intimately linked to the discourse of mestizaje, which, in its articulation and operation, has been fashioned as a cosmic tool with which to dissolve and solve the ethno-racial and social divisions following the Revolution, and to usher a unified mestizo nation onto a trajectory towards modernity. </p><p>However, despite its rhetoric of salvation and seemingly race-less/positivistic articulation, the discourse of mestizaje has propagated an uneven configuration of mexicanidad in which the belonging of certain elements have been coded as inferior, primitive, problematic, and invisible. More precisely, in the case of Mexicans of African descent, this segment of the population has also been silenced and dis-placed from this dominant cartography.</p><p>This dissertation examines the coding of blackness and its relationship with mexicanidad in specific sites and spaces of knowledge production and cultural production in the contemporary era. I first present an analysis of this production immediately in the period following the Revolution, especially from the 1930's to the 1950's, a period labeled as the "cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution." This time period was strategic in manufacturing and disseminating a precise politics of culture that was used to reflect this dominant configuration and cartography of mexicanidad. That is, the knowledge and culture produced during this time imbedded and displayed codes of being and belonging, which resonated State projects and narratives that were used to define and secure the boundaries of a unified, mestizo imaginary of mexicanidad. And, it is within this context that I suggest that blackness has been framed as invisible, problematic, and foreign. For example, cultural texts such as film and comics have served as sites that have facilitated the production and reflection of this uneasy relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. Moreover, this strained and estranged relationship has been further sustained by the nationalization and institutionalization of knowledge and culture related to the black presence and history in Mexico. From the foundational text La raza cósmica, written in 1925 by José Vasconcelos, to highly influential corpuses produced by Mexican anthropologists during this post-Revolutionary period, the production of knowledge and the production of culture have been intimately tied together within an uneven structure of power that has formalized racialized frames of reference and operated on a logic of coloniality. As a result, today it is common to be met with the notion that "no hay negros en México (there are no blacks in Mexico). </p><p>Yet, on the contrary, contemporary Afro-Mexican artists and community organizations within the Costa Chica region have been engaging a different cultural politics that has been serving as a tool of place-making and as a decolonization of codes of being and belonging. In this regard, I present an analysis of contemporary Afro-Mexican cultural production, specifically visual arts and radio, that present a counter-cartography of the relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. More specifically, in their engagement of the discourse of cimarronaje (maroonage), I propose that these sites of cultural production also challenge, re-think, re-imagine, and re-configure this relationship. I also suggest that this is an alternative discourse of cimarronaje that functions as a decolonial project in terms of the reification and re-articulation of afromexicanidad (Afro-Mexican-ness) as a dynamic and pluri-versal construction of being and belonging. And, thus, in their link to community programs and social action initiatives, this contemporary cultural production also strives to combat the historical silence, dis-placement, and discrimination of the Afro-Mexican presence in and contributions to the nation. In turn, this dissertation offers an intervention in the making of and the relationships between race, space and place, and presents an interrogation of the geo-politics and bio-politics of being and belonging in contemporary Mexico.</p> / Dissertation

<p> English phonological abilities of Spanish- and English-speaking bilingual children were compared to those of monolingual children at 30 months of age and at five years. Measures of language abilities and language experience at 30 months were included in order to determine the impact that these variables have on English phonological ability. We hypothesized that early phonological abilities will be predictive of later phonological abilities for both monolingual and bilingual children. We also hypothesized that early language abilities and experience with each language will be predictive of concurrent and later phonological abilities, but we expected the relationship to be stronger between English language abilities and phonological abilities than Spanish language abilities and English phonological abilities. Phonology measures were collected for 10 monolingual and 47 bilingual participants at 30 months and at five years of age. Results indicate that early English phonological abilities are not predictive of later phonological abilities for monolingual or bilingual children. Although language experience was related to language ability (vocabulary size), relative exposure to English was not directly related to English phonological abilities. Although monolingual children had significantly poorer English phonological abilities at 30 months than monolingual English speaking children, their English phonological abilities were commensurate with those of the monolingual group at five years. These findings suggest that bilingual children are learning properties of English phonology at a faster rate than their monolingual peers between 30 months and five years of age.</p>

This study is a qualitative, blended methods, online ethnography that seeks to explore how youth (re)negotiate what it means to be Asian through their participation in online, user-created, racialized groups within the popular social network site Facebook. What are the relationships and social processes between their online and offline interactions that contribute to the construction of a singular or multiple Asian identities? Through face-to-face and online interviews with youth participants in Vancouver, three broad themes emerged around: 1) the negotiation of Asian as a process of negotiating authenticity, 2) the use of humour and jokes as a means of resistance and reproduction of Asian stereotypes and 3) how the performance of one or multiple Asian identities are dependent on dramaturgical concepts of audience and stage. The data from this study highlight the complexity of racialized youth’s identity negotiations in an increasingly growing online world and the relevance and need for further research in this specific niche area. / Graduate

After shifting to an all-volunteer force (AVF) in 1973, the U.S. military was forced to expand recruiting efforts beyond the ideal figure of the white male soldier in order to meet personnel needs. Shaped by the economic realities of the AVF, such recruiting efforts sought to show individuals historically excluded from military service, namely women and people of color, that there was a place for them in the military. The presence of women and people of color in recruitment materials contributes to ideals of citizenship and articulates understanding of gender, race, sexuality, and class in relation to military inclusion. Focusing on recruitment advertisements published in three consumer magazines—Sports Illustrated, Ebony, and Cosmopolitan—from January 1973 to December 2014, this dissertation argues that the project of military inclusion is driven by a need to recruit bodies in maintenance of the military institution and obfuscates class inequalities critical to recruiting, reconfigures ideas about military masculinity, promotes ideologies of colorblindness, and regulates ideas about gender and sexuality.

abstract: "The Globalization of Indigenous Women's Movements and The United Nations System (1992-2012)" is a comprehensive study of the globalization of indigenous women's movements that materialized in the early 1990s. These movements flourished parallel to other transnational social movements, such as International Zapatismo, the World Social Forum, and Gender as Human Rights Movement, yet they are omitted and remain invisible within transnational and global social movement literature. This study is an inscription of these processes, through the construct of a textual space that exposes a global decolonial feminist imaginary grounded in the oral histories of thirty-one international indigenous women leaders. The primary site for this study is the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), a venue where contact amongst indigenous women worldwide occurs annually at the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York City. This qualitative study uses decolonial and feminist methodology to examine in-depth semi-structured interviews, transcriptions of key speeches, plenaries and interventions made by indigenous women at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and other relevant international forums, and field notes compiled from my full-participant and participant-observation in international forums. My dissertation makes two claims. First, I argue that indigenous women have made formal gains within the UN System via an unprecedented process of simultaneously accepting, contesting and altering the structural opportunities and constraints present within the UN. These processes made it possible for UNPFII's actors and their key claims to be effectively integrated within the multiple agencies that make up the UN. I identify key Indigenous actors and trace their claims for social justice, which have transcended the domestic sphere to the global political arena. Second, I argue that, globalization has reconfigured transnational political spaces for indigenous women activists and that these UN advocates frame their claims for rights in a unique way, in a process that combines individual human rights as well as collective indigenous peoples rights. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Justice Studies 2012

<p> This grounded theory study explored the competing cultural expectations and cultural approaches by women from Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries living in the United States. The study explored the following questions: In what ways do women from Latin America living in the United States establish priorities among potentially conflicting cultural expectations or roles? What internal conflicts result out of living between two cultures? What does the process for making sense of cultural expectations look like? How do Latin American women living in the United States make sense of this process? Using a constructivist grounded methodology, the research reflects the insights of 20 female participants from various Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries. The data analysis resulted in five major findings, illuminating a framework for understanding the process for making sense of conflicting cultural norms, expectations, and cultural approaches. This is presented in four stages, (1) confronting the new norm/expectation, (2) recognition/acknowledgment of the conflicting cultural value/norm/expectation, (3) adapting to the new context/situation and (4) managing from a cultural standpoint. The main decision-making process related to cultural expectations was tied to: (a) what it meant to be a woman from their native country in the United States and (b) what this means when they return to their country of origin. Concluding with &ldquo;creating a new norm/dynamic,&rdquo; this becomes the &ldquo;balancing act&rdquo; or &ldquo;the dance between cultures.&rdquo;</p><p>