In this dissertation, I conceptualize common sense racism as the material basis for the unconscious rhetorical processes that shape and normalize unsympathetic and uncritical public responses to racialized violence against black communities, and which thereby perpetuate racial structures of power and foment white innocence and indifference. This form of common sense is comprised of a set of deeply embedded logics and rationalities—fragmented forms of prepropositional knowledge—that have evolved over time through the shapeshifting ideologies of white supremacy and anti-blackness to partly determine how civil society understands and interprets ongoing legacies of violence. Rather than just thinking of common sense in how we discuss it in everyday talk, I conceptualize and critique it with regard to how it animates and informs some of the fundamental cultural constructs, such as language, time, and humanity, that "we" as a nation rely upon to orient ourselves to and make sense of the world around us. Through these frameworks, common sense racism structures rhetorically how civil society's institutions make meaning in moments of racial crisis, tension, and transformation, and how its dominant publics relate to ongoing histories of racial oppression and abuse, or rather, how they do not relate to them at all. Through three case studies, a theoretical chapter, and an introduction and conclusion, I offer a critical vocabulary for understanding the nation's inability to confront racialized violence while considering the means by which these systems of meaning-making can be disrupted by black vernacular rhetorical practices.

Higher education has been linked to upward mobility in recent decades. Higher education has particularly served as a road to upward mobility for disadvantaged racial and gender groups. While United States colleges and universities strive to make their institutions, programs, and departments more diverse, students who are racial minorities still experience racism and those who are women still experience sexism. Colleges and universities are often considered bastions of progressive liberalism that will challenge racism and sexism; however, the seeds of American racism and sexism that were planted at the country's inception and that were sustained by the blatant subjugation of people of color and women continue to generate race and sex based oppression within present-day American society and within America's academic institutions. Therefore, residual racism and sexism are important to explore, since their presence in educational institutions serves to reify racial and gender based boundaries in achievement and well-being. To this end, research has inadequately determined the prevalence of overt and covert oppression within academic institutions. Using a sample of college students at a predominately white institution in a Midwestern college town and a diverse institution in a large urban area I will: 1) examine the prevalence of covert and overt racist and sexist experiences among college students and develop models of their occurrence by gender and race; 2) test double jeopardy and multiple jeopardy theory by finding out if women of color experience more racism and sexism than other groups; 3) examine the prevalence of racist, post- racist, sexist and post-sexist beliefs among college students and develop models of their origins by race and gender, 4) examine how environmental context impacts student's experiences and beliefs by comparing college students at a predominately white institution and at a diverse institution; and 5) conduct a path analysis in order to test the causal relationships between demographic factors (race, gender and institution type), experiences (racist and sexist victimization) and attitudes/outlook (racist, post-racist, sexist, post-sexist, campus climate and stress).

Teacher educators need to develop better teaching methods in order to, ultimately, serve future students in classrooms that are increasing in diversity. It is vital that education majors do more than hear and read about social justice issues facing their prospective students; for them to both understand it and retain it, they need deeper interaction with the issues and alternative strategies for resolving them. This model for using teaching cases may enable teacher educators to demonstrate the relevance of their coursework to their midlevel education students, ultimately enhancing learning gains. Of equal importance to their professional development, prospective teachers need to not only be prepared, but to know they are prepared. The model developed from this research may provide the venue to increasing their teacher efficacy. The model engages all four efficacy-building elements (Bandura, 1995), mastery, verbal, physiological and vicarious. Efficacy is developed verbally as participants discuss possible alternative solutions to the teaching cases. This discussion also affords both physiological development when responses enter Bakhtin's (1983) interstitial spaces, spaces of disagreement, argument, discomfort, and vicarious development of efficacy as students experience the teaching dilemmas of experienced teachers but experiences they realize are likely to be in their own futures. Perhaps the most challenging developer of efficacy through this model is mastery. Mastery can be developed during the "rehearsals" of seminar discussions of teaching cases (Cambourne, 1995), or it may develop within the internship-assigned classroom; for some it may require extensive classroom experience to achieve. This study's participants were a midlevel preservice teacher cohort divided between urban and suburban settings for their field-based internships. Intrinsic to the study was critical literacy and the recursive use of teaching cases focused on underlying social justice issues. Pretest and posttest scores from the Ohio State Teacher Efficacy Scale confirmed significant gains in teacher efficacy but could not validate the teaching cases as the causality. Qualitative data, however, did confirm the validity of using teaching cases with this specific study.

There has been considerable progress in women's sport participation opportunities since the enactment of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. These opportunities have allowed women and girls to participate in sports at the primary and secondary school level, as well as at the collegiate level in considerable numbers. Institutions have been adding new, emerging, or growth sports to their sports lineup. Despite this progress, much remains to be done to achieve true equity in women's access to sports. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that women of color may not have benefited from the array of new sports and athletic opportunities as much as white women. To examine this issue, we compare Post-Title IX trends in black and white females' sports participation and directly examine the effect of race on participation opportunities. Quantitative analysis based on multiple national data sets, including the National Longitudinal Study (NLS), the High School and Beyond Survey (HSB), the National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS), and the Educational Longitudinal Survey (ELS), reveal that compared to white females, black females have indeed lost ground since Title IX, and that public schools attended by black females offer fewer sport participation opportunities to girls. Qualitative analysis is presented through a detailed, critical examination of the history of white and black women and sports, followed by an assessment of the legal challenges to gender inequality involving Title IX. Although Title IX is supposed to provide greater sports participation and athletic opportunities for women, oftentimes, women of color are disproportionately excluded from participation. As a policy, Title IX is designed to promote gender equity and equality in education, including sports. However, interscholastic athletic access and participation opportunities for females are unevenly distributed along racial lines. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

Drawing on a collection of interviews with Canadian feminists, this thesis explores the emergence of a ‘second wave’ of feminist organizing in Canada from 1965 to 1975. Using insights from poststructural feminism and critical race theory, I deconstruct the notion of ‘hegemonic feminism’ and examine how certain women came to inhabit a position of hegemony during the movement’s early years. I focus on key events in feminist organizing during the 1960s-1970s: The Royal Commission on the Status of Women and the founding of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Drawing on oral history interviews and a close reading of the report on the RCSW, I suggest that more nuanced approaches are needed to move beyond the binary thinking that inflects accounts of Canadian feminist history. I conclude with a series of feminist narratives which aim to complicate linear histories and offer an alternative reading of this movement.

It has been argued, albeit with some degree of success, that the challenges facing the 21st century Canadian classroom are highly complex. A troubled economy riddled with cutbacks to the education system, ongoing enrolment decline and challenges in embracing a growth in the diversity of students are among the changes that have made classrooms increasingly difficult to navigate. Though the last assertion may be true, disciplinary policies and the tools used to address unwanted student behaviour have remained relatively unchanged within the education system. Using Critical Race Theory, the author examines the implications of school suspension and expulsion programs on students and provides an analysis of current literature on alternative disciplinary methods in public schools. Findings suggest that a mixture of strategies within various disciplinary programs can benefit some students, but more work must be done to address socioeconomic disparities plaguing the majority of students found in these programs.

Drawing on a collection of interviews with Canadian feminists, this thesis explores the emergence of a ‘second wave’ of feminist organizing in Canada from 1965 to 1975. Using insights from poststructural feminism and critical race theory, I deconstruct the notion of ‘hegemonic feminism’ and examine how certain women came to inhabit a position of hegemony during the movement’s early years. I focus on key events in feminist organizing during the 1960s-1970s: The Royal Commission on the Status of Women and the founding of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Drawing on oral history interviews and a close reading of the report on the RCSW, I suggest that more nuanced approaches are needed to move beyond the binary thinking that inflects accounts of Canadian feminist history. I conclude with a series of feminist narratives which aim to complicate linear histories and offer an alternative reading of this movement.

It has been argued, albeit with some degree of success, that the challenges facing the 21st century Canadian classroom are highly complex. A troubled economy riddled with cutbacks to the education system, ongoing enrolment decline and challenges in embracing a growth in the diversity of students are among the changes that have made classrooms increasingly difficult to navigate. Though the last assertion may be true, disciplinary policies and the tools used to address unwanted student behaviour have remained relatively unchanged within the education system. Using Critical Race Theory, the author examines the implications of school suspension and expulsion programs on students and provides an analysis of current literature on alternative disciplinary methods in public schools. Findings suggest that a mixture of strategies within various disciplinary programs can benefit some students, but more work must be done to address socioeconomic disparities plaguing the majority of students found in these programs.

The primary objective of this thesis is to advocate for Black Nationalism's full inclusion in the academic field of political philosophy. By bringing the thinkers in the Black Nationalist tradition into this discourse, the field of philosophy stands to gain important insight into the prejudices and unexamined assumptions that plague academia. I will flesh out the nature of these assumptions using the works of Black Nationalists like Angela Davis, George Jackson and Joy James. This will show that reading Black Nationalists as social theorists enables philosophers to unveil sources of knowledge about political economies by looking at the history of imperialism in a comprehensive manner. The second section is devoted to an examination of how the Black Panther Party's relationship to the state reveals the role of white violence in maintaining racial hierarchies. That the Black Panthers were targeted so systematically by the state indicates that they were perceived to be a threat to the white power structure, which gives us insight into how challenging state terror is a revolutionary act in intellectual and concrete ways. I show that the mainstream academic discourse on racism in American society assigns higher credibility to white philosophers even when Black thinkers have been producing relevant scholarship for centuries on the subject in question. The third section examines the philosophy of the Enlightenment in terms of how it relates to the domestic colonization of African Americans and to the abuse of people of color around the globe by European and American imperialists. The purpose of this section is to show how scholars' confidence in white canonized philosophers predisposes them to overlook Enlightenment philosophy's structurally racist approach to political societies. The fourth section provides a detailed overview of the key principles in Anti-Colonial and Critical Race Theory as they intersect with Black Nationalism. Important issues addressed in this section include the role of prisons in keeping African Americans in a state of neo-slavery. In order to situate Black Nationalist thought within a broader intellectual history, I will discuss how Black Nationalism represents the culmination of radical American and Anti-Colonial political theory.

This study is a qualitative examination of my lived experiences and the lived experiences of my immediate family in sport. Using critical race theory (CRT) as my guiding theoretical framework, this research project answers Denzin’s (2003) call to advance “a radical performative social science” that “confront[s] and transcend[s] the problems surrounding the colour line in the 21st century” (p.5). As such, the purpose of this project was to explore issues of race, culture and power within our lived sport experiences and to present these experiences in such way so as to unpack the tensions associated with being an Aboriginal person living in today’s Canadian society.