2024-03-28T17:15:10Zhttps://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/oai/requestoai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/69802023-02-27T22:54:25Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Boxing the Boundaries: Prize Fighting, Masculinities, and Shifting Social and Cultural Boundaries in the United State, 1882-1913
Kim, Jeonguk
Tucker, Sherrie
Katzman, David M.
Yetman, Norman R.
Rodriguez, Robert
Joslyn, Mark
American studies
United States--History
America--History
Cultural history
Gender
Sports
Leisure and sports are recently developed research topics. My dissertation illuminates the social meaning of prize fighting between 1882 and 1913 considering interactions between culture and power relations. My dissertation understands prize fighting as a cultural text, structured in conjunction with social relations and power struggles. In so doing, the dissertation details how agents used a sport to construct, reinforce, blur, multiply, and shift social and cultural boundaries for the construction of group identities and how their signifying practices affected the ways in which power was distributed in American society. Accordingly, my dissertation examines how cultural autonomy affected the socially organized forms of power. As an intersectional study of prize fighting, my dissertation also criticizes the reductionist, structuralist, and binary conception of culture, power, and social relations and stresses interconnections between social history and cultural history.
2011-01-03
2011-01-03
2010-07-28
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11077
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6980
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/278732020-10-13T13:44:03Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Community of Counter-Conduct: Politics and Practices of LGBTQ Christian Activism in Evangelicalism
Burrow-Branine, Jonathan
Chappell, Ben
Tucker, Sherrie
Bial, Henry
Davidman, Lynn
Tell, Dave
Religion
LGBTQ studies
activism
ethnography
evangelicalism
gender and sexuality
identity
power
Scholars working at the intersections of American religious studies and gender and sexuality studies have broadened our understanding of the overlapping histories of faith communities and LGBTQ social movements in the US. Despite recent contributions to the history of LGBTQ activism in American religious traditions, this scholarship tends to overlook LGBTQ Christian identity work and activism in conservative Christian communities. Based on participant observation fieldwork with a faith-based nonprofit called The Reformation Project (TRP), this dissertation is an ethnography of how some LGBTQ Christians negotiate identity and difference and seek to create change within evangelicalism. TRP is a national parachurch organization with Kansas roots working to change, through grassroots organizing and theological training, mainly conservative evangelical attitudes and teaching about LGBTQ people. The material for the project is drawn from fieldwork with TRP at church services, conferences, organizing meetings, and other places over a twelve-month period beginning in late 2014. While mostly about the strategies and conversations specific to TRP's efforts to foster change, I also use TRP as a window into broader conversations underway in evangelicalism about what it means to be LGBTQ and Christian. I make two main arguments throughout the dissertation. First, I argue that the LGBTQ Christian activism I studied can be understood as constituting a community of counter-conduct. Drawing on a concept proposed by Michel Foucault to describe movements of resistance that arise within regimes of power, I show how LGBTQ Christian activism in conservative evangelical spaces is productive of new ethical and political possibilities and ways of being. Second, I describe how the LGBTQ and ally Christians I met attempt to create meaningful inclusivity, while wrestling with not only the exclusionary politics of conservative evangelicalism but also their own assumptions about what it means to be LGBTQ and a Christian. By doing so, this project provides fuller accounts of the overlapping relationship between evangelical and LGBTQ social movements and the everyday negotiation of identity, politics, and democratic values in religious spaces.
2019-05-12
2019-05-12
2018-05-31
2018
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:15766
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/27873
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3232
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/53282020-06-24T20:48:51Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
"One Hundred Per Cent American": Nationalism, Masculinity and American Legion Baseball in the 1920s
Bustad, Jacob J.
Tucker, Sherrie
Chappell, Ben
Donovan, Brian
American studies
United States--History
Recreation
American legion
Baseball
Masculinity
Nationalism
"'One Hundred Per Cent American': Nationalism, Masculinity and American Legion Baseball in the 1920s," provides a sociohistorical analysis of baseball and social attitudes and ideologies of the pre- and post-World War I period, specifically focusing on the joining of nationalism and masculinity through the playing of sport. My work explores amateur baseball in the context of the post-World War I period (1920-1930), focusing on the American Legion's baseball program started during that same era. By incorporating the theorization of "hegemonic masculinity," first popularized by sociologist R.W. Connell and a major theme in the sociology of sport, I argue that amateur baseball constituted a distinct form of nationalist American masculinity that figured prominently in both the status of the sport and the understanding of gender within post-war American culture. By focusing on the instruction of these amateur players, I demonstrate how nationalism and masculinity converged through the kinesthetic "play"ing of baseball by young American males.
2009-07-30
2009-07-30
2009-04-14
2009
Thesis
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10247
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/5328
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/78422020-08-12T13:41:30Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Understanding 'It': Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene
Yeager, Elizabeth Anne
Tucker, Sherrie
Chappell, Ben
Bial, Henry
Weisbard, Eric
Hodges Persley, Nicole
American studies
Cultural anthropology
Music
Cultural studies
Ethnography
Grateful Dead
Phish
Popular music studies
Scene
"Understanding It: Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene" is an ethnographic study of "scene identity" around the contemporary rock band Phish. Utilizing data generated from six years of ethnographic fieldwork, including over one hundred and fifty interviews with Phish scene participants, this project explores how the production of space at Phish shows works to form a Phish scene identity. I contend that the identity of the Phish scene, what the band members and fans refer to as "it" and I call a spatial articulation of affective authenticity, is produced and formed by scene members themselves, drawing from the interrelations between the production of space (practices that create a specific environment) at shows and a white, middle and upper-middle class cultural memory of the Grateful Dead scene. I situate this process amidst a cultural backdrop of 1980s and 1990s identity politics and in particular, multiculturalism and suggest that Phish scene identity be analyzed as a middle class performance of resistance that achieves community and meaning without resisting class privilege. Following many American, cultural, and performance studies scholars as well as numerous anthropologists, sociologists, and both musicologists and ethnomusicologists, I treat performance as a ritual and posit Phish scene participants can be seen to achieve a social efficacy in their performance of resistance that although heightened from everyday life ultimately serves to replicate the structures of such life. Research regarding the affective nature of "it" and its relationship to the process of cultural memory, collective remembering and forgetting, can be seen as an insightful and powerful theoretical and methodological tool in cultural studies, for it exposes information pertaining not only to subject identity, but also to the discourses and contexts which help articulate such identities. This dissertation begins to examine what interdisciplinary scholars are to make of textual and spatial connections. How does one work to understand these affiliated, and oftentimes, affective relationships? And, in the case of Phish scene identity, how can one understand "it"?
2011-08-02
2011-08-02
2011-04-26
2011
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11492
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7842
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/80412020-08-14T14:54:19Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
Steeped in Rhetoric: Digital Populism and the Tea Party Movement
Branson, Tyler S.
Jelks, Randal M.
Earle, Jonathan
Childers, Jay
American studies
History
Language
Rhetoric and composition
Democracy
New media
Populism
Rhetoric
Tea party
Technology
Though politically disparate and hard to quantify, one of the binding elements of the Tea Party Movement is Internet Communication Technology, or new media. Social media, online discussion boards, blogs, and other forms of new media constitute a veritable component of the discourse among its members. From the whispering confederation of conservative bloggers in its beginning stages, to the relatively quick transition into a social media powerhouse, the Tea Party fits into the category of dissident social movements in a new way than movements past, in that web-based communication is a staple of the movement. Also, the Tea Party's "Web 2.0" identity intersects with a tradition of populism, combining new media communication with rhetoric depicting the Tea Party as "common" people pitted against "elitist" enemies of the country. The populist sentiments within the Tea Party reflect a wider understanding about the role of technology in fostering democracy, and "restoring" the republic back to its "core values." Tea Partiers, then, could be described as "Digital Populists," historically situated among the histories of other American populist moments, but understanding new media technology as a new way to shape political discourse. Throughout this project, then, my aim is to link populist rhetoric with technological determinism, using the Tea Party's new media ecology as a case study. The first chapter provides historical examples of populist rhetorical frameworks informing the relationship between technology and society; Chapter 2 is a case study of three Tea Party websites; and Chapter 3 is a theoretical reflection on the data that analyzes how the Tea Party's engagement with new media fits into broader conversations about technology and democracy. At the core of this project is an inquiry into how technology works in our everyday lives. My analysis questions the presumption that new media communication technology fosters a more democratic society. Specifically, I argue that, while steeped in rhetoric of technological liberation, revolution, and democracy, the Tea Party's approach to new media contributes less to a vibrant culture of democratic engagement, and more to a peculiar and unstable technological mythology in American culture.
2011-09-22
2011-09-22
2011-04-26
2011
Thesis
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11464
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/8041
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/103172020-09-14T14:52:33Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Performing Lena: Race, Representation, and the Postwar Autobiographical Performances of Lena Horne
Williams, Megan E.
Tucker, Sherrie
Bial, Henry
Hodges Persley, Nicole
Jelks, Randal M.
Katzman, David M.
American studies
African American studies
Women's studies
Horne
Lena
As a hypervisible black woman, whose overdetermined image was evoked by blacks and whites to represent racialized political interests on both sides of the color line throughout the long civil rights era, singer–actress Lena Horne was burdened with the requirement to perform blackness. In this dissertation, I explore Horne’s attempts to negotiate these performance expectations during the postwar, McCarthy, and civil rights eras. I contend that Horne self–fashioned a series of politicized black female personas that negotiated, challenged, and appropriated, with varied and often conflicting results, her Hollywood–manufactured glamour girl image in an effort to talk back to the dominant society and talk to her black audiences. Moreover, I argue that Horne’s autobiographical performances of politicized blackness reflect and shape the changing, always contested, definitions of black “authenticity” and radical protest politics between 1945 and 1965.
2012-10-28
2012-10-28
2012-05-31
2012
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:12157
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/10317
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/280032020-10-13T15:06:44Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
“An Organ of the Irish Race on the Continent”: The Pilot, Irish Immigration, and Irish-American Identity, 1851-66
KATI GUMUS, GAMZE
Lester, Cheryl B.
Roediger, David
Graham, Maryemma
Perreira, Christopher M.
Mielke, Laura
American studies
American history
American literature
Archive
Citizenship
Irish-American Identity
Labor
Nationalism
The Boston Pilot
This dissertation analyzes the history of the Pilot, an ethnic newspaper for the Irish Catholic, and its fictional and non-fictional printed material from the period between 1851 and 1866. The Great Famine (1845-1851) and the Civil War (1861-1865) act as milestones for this study, as its aim is to understand the evolution of the Famine immigrant into a naturalized citizen fighting in the ranks of the Union. The Pilot assumed a prominent place within the immigrant guidance tradition of the mid-nineteenth century as it aimed to construct Irish-American citizens out of immigrants. The transformation of the Irish immigrant into an Irish-American citizen mirrors the simultaneous transformation of the Pilot from an immigrant newspaper into an ethnic newspaper, and highlights the value of the Pilot as an institution working to elevate the standards and representation of the Irish race in the States. In order to break down the transformation of the immigrant, this study focuses on three questions in relation to the immigrant’s identity: how to be an ideal immigrant on the way to assimilation and naturalization; how to be an ideal laborer elevating the representation of the Irish race as a whole; finally, how to be an ideal Irish-American citizen proving the national belonging of the Irish to the Union. In an attempt to answer these questions and understand how the Irish acquired their white identity and racially charged discourse through print culture, this study derives greatly from whiteness studies, and examines the Pilot in order to understand how it situates the black man as the nemesis of the Irish. This dissertation examines the guidance offered by the Pilot to Irish immigrants on their way to becoming ideal immigrants, an ideal labor force, and ideal citizens; and it studies the paper’s role as the platform of an imagined community for Irish-Americans where they could come together under shared values of Catholicism, Irishness, Americanness, and whiteness.
2019-05-18
2019-05-18
2018-08-31
2018
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:16060
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/28003
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6416-3218
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/70152020-07-28T15:05:11Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
LITERARY DESTINATIONS: MARK TWAIN'S HOUSES AND LITERARY TOURISM
Lowe, Hilary Iris
Lester, Cheryl B.
Harris, Susan K.
Schofield, Ann
Earle, Susan
Pultz, John
American studies
American literature
United States--History
House museums
Literary relics
Literary shrines
Literary tourism
Twain, Mark
Memory
Mark Twain has been commemorated for more than eighty-five years at his various houses. His birthplace in Florida, Missouri, his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, his adult home in Hartford, Connecticut, and his summer retreat at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York have all come to celebrate very different versions of the most iconic of American writers. This study examines the history of these four houses to illustrate how our memory of Twain has been shaped by sites of literary tourism. At each house, museum staffs have struggled to balance Samuel Clemens's biography with his literature and mythic persona. Though these literary house museums provide access to the famous homes that are associated with Clemens, they are mediated objects. The houses cannot display Clemens's domestic life without managerial interpretation. Clemens's birthplace, for example, has long been the subject of disputed authenticity. His boyhood home has, until very recently, substituted Hannibal's past for Tom Sawyer's story. His adult home is a Gilded Age museum that so perfectly recreated the "Mark Twain period," it sometimes overlooked Twain's literary contributions. Quarry Farm is a Twain scholar's paradise that actually allows visitors to write and live where Clemens did. Mark Twain's houses are places where local people have contributed to his popular canonization through preservation efforts and tourism. Clemens's place in the American canon was uncertain at the founding of three of these four sites. These house museums, in the end, may have done as much for Clemens as he did for them. However, to remain viable literary houses have to explain compellingly how they are central to understanding a writer's literary creativity. They have to articulate a connection to a literary text, to a specific writerly space, or to an atmosphere that was particular to the writer's literary production. They mediate a relationship between author, text, and tourists. This study contributes to literary studies and Mark Twain studies by explaining how visitation to and preservation of literary places influence the way we remember Mark Twain.
2011-01-03
2011-01-03
2009-12-10
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10686
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7015
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/102522020-06-24T21:15:45Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
"We Shouldn't Be Forgotten": Korean Military Brides and Koreans in Kansas
Kim, Sang Jo
Lester, Cheryl B.
Tucker, Sherrie
Chong, Kelly
Hart, Tanya
Weis, Andrea
American studies
Asian American studies
Korean diaspora in Kansas
Korean immigration to Kansas
Korean military brides
This dissertation goes beyond the West/East Coast paradigm of Korean immigration to the United States by focusing on the Korean diaspora in Kansas. The dissertation argues that the Korean diaspora in Kansas is unique in a number of respects. Most importantly, Korean women have dominated the makeup of the migrants by gender and continue to play the major role in this expanding diaspora. Not only highly gendered, the Korean diaspora in Kansas is also relatively young and scattered across the state. The dissertation illuminates the dynamics within the Korean diaspora where race, class, gender, and certain Korean attitudes and behaviors have created new Korean/American identities, which are never complete but still in production over time. It explains how and why Koreans ended up in Kansas. It also demonstrates what is unique about the acculturation and community formation of Koreans in Kansas with the involvement of internationally married Korean women and chain migration of their family members to rural parts of Kansas and, later, to larger cities such as Kansas City and Wichita.
2012-10-28
2012-10-28
2012-08-31
2012
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:12209
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/10252
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/106962020-09-01T13:29:15Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Race, Place, and Family: Narratives of the Civil Rights Movement in Brownsville, Tennessee, and the Nation
Bond, Jo Zanice
Tuttle, Bill
Tucker, Sherrie
Jelks, Randal M.
Warren, Kim
O'Brien, Sharon
African American studies
American studies
America--History
African American history
Civil rights movement
Community studies
Women's studies
This dissertation examines the Civil Rights Movement through the experiences of primarily two African American families with roots in Brownsville, Tennessee. This study, based on archival research and oral histories, chronicles three generations of citizens affiliated with the NAACP whose translocal civil rights struggles include both the South and urban North. It highlights various tactics individuals used to secure their rights and identifies African American entrepreneurship as a form of non-violent protest, focusing on the African American funeral home as a gateway enterprise which contributed to the establishment of other businesses or "staple institutions" that helped to sustain the Black community during segregation.
2013-01-20
2013-01-20
2011-12-31
2011
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11855
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/10696
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/69832020-08-05T15:41:31Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots: An Inquiry into American Genealogy Discourse
Sweeney, Michael S.
Lester, Cheryl B.
Antonio, Robert J.
Barnard, Philip
Hoopes, John W.
Kent, James R.
American studies
United States--History
Sociology
Daughters of the American Revolution
Eugenics
Family history
Genealogy
Latter-day saints
The monograph is an inquiry into the genealogical assumption, the cultural notion that "who you are" is tied to who your ancestors were and that genealogy and family history will provide knowledge of that bond. The assumption is problematized by an examination of American genealogy discourse during two broad periods of heightened interest in ancestry: from the 1890s through 1930s and from the late 1960s through the present. The material is organized into six case studies of genealogy discourse, which are interpreted through textual and historical analysis. When the various formulations of the assumption uncovered in the case studies are placed side-by-side, the genealogical assumption is "opened-up" and its surface essentialism is brought into question as differing interpretations are exposed. The study concludes that the genealogical assumption is neither a completely satisfactory nor unsatisfactory way to articulate the consequences of social bonds between a person and his or her ancestors.
2011-01-03
2011-01-03
2010-07-20
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11049
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6983
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/129372020-10-19T15:06:37Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
CRAFTING A NEW SELF IN DIASPORA: A STUDY OF THE 1.5 GENERATION OF VIETNAMESE AMERICANS
Cao, Thanh Hai Le
Tucker, Sherrie
Davidman, Lynn
Chappell, Ben
Ngo, Fiona
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta
American studies
Asian American studies
1.5 generation
Diaspora
Identity construction
Narrative
Strategies
Vietnamese Americans
This dissertation is a study on the identity construction process of members of the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese Americans by examining their personal narratives. With a focus on strategies used by informants when crafting their narratives instead of looking at narratives as evidence of experience, this project has significant contribution to migration studies, transnational studies, and Asian American Studies because it provides a different approach to narratives and narrative analysis in studying identity and identity formation. The findings show that to members of the 1.5 generation narratives serve as sites where they can make sense of their disrupted and chaotic life, and where they highlight their struggles to survive in a new homeland with a haunting past. Narrative is a process of identity formation. To members of the 1.5 generation, it is an especially important site for making sense of disrupted and chaotic lives, in order to survive in a new homeland with a haunting past.
2014-02-05
2014-02-05
2013-12-31
2013
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13073
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/12937
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/194832018-01-31T20:07:50Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
TRANSFORMATION AND RESILIENCE AT SHURI-JO: DEFINING A GENOME OF PLACE
Shreve, John Patrick
Lester, Cheryl
Domer, Dennis
Esch, Elizabeth
Hofstra, Phillip
Krishtalka, Leonard
Lang, Clarence
Soberon, Jorge
American studies
Military studies
Environmental studies
Cold War
Futenma
Okinawa
Ryudai
Shuri
USCAR
The 1970s is widely regarded as the decade of environmental awakening in America. But many of the critical variables that later informed this ongoing conversation were mobilized in the faraway island of Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture that became a new territory of the United States by virtue of their victory in World War II (WWII). The same powerful military machine that destroyed much of Japan reorganized itself into a nation-building enterprise focused on restoring and reorienting the country into a model democracy. This dissertation will construct an interactive design framework that focuses on the creation of Okinawa's new university as a microcosm of the exchanges that redefined the island's most important cultural icon. In addition to the military government, I will illustrate how visiting professors from Michigan State University interacted with Okinawan educators to shape the University of the Ryukyus (Ryudai), a new land-grant university that produced transformative changes that reached far beyond the campus boundaries. I will demonstrate that Ryudai's post-war redevelopment period, however, takes on more profound implications of sustainability if contextualized within a "genome of place" that explores biotic, abiotic, social, and economic influences across space and time. Built on the sacred grounds of Shuri-jo, the destroyed 14th century castle, the Ryudai campus was eventually dismantled and relocated to a larger site when Okinawa reverted to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. This dissertation argues that the resilience of post-war Okinawa was symbolized by the radical transformation of the Shuri-jo site and that by disentangling the many layers of this palimpsest, its meaning may transcend its short timeframe. A critical inquiry of textual and visual materials will articulate how Shuri-jo became an iconic Cold War site where Eastern and Western cultures intersected, modernism and traditionalism converged, and natural and human systems collided. By locating the mid-century university experiment within a centuries-old context, I will also illustrate how its successes and failures may inform Okinawa's political future as it inherits several decommissioned military sites from the U.S. government.
2016-01-02
2016-01-02
2015-05-31
2015
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13888
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/19483
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/52402018-01-31T20:08:02Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Florence Knoll, Design and the Modern American Office Workplace
Hofstra, Phillip G.
Lester, Cheryl B.
Yetman, Norman R.
Domer, Dennis
Stone, Denise
Bryan, Maurice
American studies
Architecture
Design and decorative arts
Introduction In every human community, certain built forms are physical expressions of ways in which people think about their lives together. These forms express beliefs that people share about the world around them; what they expect from each other; what they hope to achieve; the standards to which they hold others responsible and the standards for which they are willing to be responsible themselves; and what they want their peers in certain endeavors and the community at large to believe about them. While homes may make these kinds of statements about individuals, the buildings that will be examined in this study are public buildings. That is, they are intended for use by people who go there regularly or periodically for purposes that they have in common - as opposed to residential buildings, which meet the private needs of individuals or families. These buildings may have occasional use for a larger number of people: a stadium or an opera house, for example. Or they may be institutions central to the way people establish and maintain a community, such as workplaces, hospitals, government facilities, and schools. Public buildings reveal a kind of consensus about what is acceptable in a building to the people who use it. Therefore, these structures - their architecture and, to an even greater extent, their interiors - are a tangible record of who the people were and what was important to them. They are also a record of how such buildings come to be built - who envisions them, who actually designs and builds them, and why. Studying a category of these kinds of public-use built environments - for instance, workplaces - is a layered inquiry that can illuminate not only building and builders, but also the society that desired the outcome and supported the effort to achieve it. In particular, examining processes and technologies as well as materials can reveal aspects of cultural systems, as Joan Vastokas observes, cultural ways - including moral and aesthetic values, art forms, social and ritual performances, as well as social structural patterns and relationships - are affected to a high degree by the dominant . . . system. The revolution in material culture studies since the 1960s has resulted in the recognition that artifacts are culturally expressive, symbolic objects. While most attention these past three decades has been paid to the meaning of the artifact in itself, there is increasing recognition that the dynamics of the technical processes in themselves play an important cognitive role in the social and ideational life of cultural systems (Vastokas 343). The flourishing of public interest in the late twentieth century in all aspects of design is testament to the way that some aspects of the technical processes of built forms can take hold in the social and ideational life of a society. In the middle of the nineteenth century in America, only a small percentage of the population could name a designer of anything, except perhaps some luxurious items, such as Sheraton furniture or Revere silver. By the close of the century, some designer names were household words, and a plethora of magazines - not only for the trade, but aimed at the general public - showcased the work of architects and interior and industrial designers. Some aspects of understanding the evolution of workplace design are more profoundly cultural recognitions, desirable to achieve simply because they help us know who we are at every level from individual to societal. In an introduction to the catalog of the National Building Museum's exhibition, On the Job: Design and the American Office, Donald Albrecht and Chrysanthe B. Broikos point out that: The office is a microcosm of American social transformation and a yardstick of cultural progress. National dialogs between freedom and control, the individual and the crowd, private agendas and public concerns, personal mobility and communal connection are played out in the office. The shifting interaction between building design, technology, finance, and employees has yielded a dynamic environment whose significance extends beyond its physical boundaries. The office has figured in American life as architecture, but it has also been on the job as an incubator of radical change (16). The beginning of the twenty-first century has permitted a useful evaluation point, looking back over a century during which work changed dramatically, putting about 60 percent of Americans at desk jobs (Jones 9) and looking ahead to work environments made increasingly fluid by the demands and opportunities of emerging technologies. The office as a dominant form in the American workplace is, as Susan Henshaw James notes, "not disappearing, but merely transforming itself, as it has always done . . . making a resurgence, retooling itself to be a place of creative interaction" (16). This period of retooling makes understanding the material culture of the office important. Understanding how and why workplaces were designed as they were can help us make judgments useful to our communities today, and they can show us continuities with the past, as well as breaks from it. Ideally, these studies can help us interpret, and perhaps even guide, human behavior. Vastokas points to these possibilities, regarding elements of theory within the method of examining "artifacts" (which, in this study, include elements of workplace interiors): Five essential points of theory arise from a consideration of artifacts in a social-semiotic perspective: (1) the meaning of artifacts, including works of visual "art," is constituted in the life of the objects themselves, not in words or texts about them; (2) the artifact is not an inert, passive object, but an interactive agent in sociocultural life and cognition; (3) the signification of the artifact resides in both the object as a self-enclosed material fact and in its performative, "gestural" patterns of behavior in relation to space, time, and society; (4) the processes, materials, and products of technology, especially those of a society's dominant technology, function as cultural metaphors at many levels and in many socio-cultural domains; and (5) theoretical insights derive, not from theorizing in the abstract, but from direct observation and experience of the phenomenal world of nature and culture (337) Because people are producers of our own built environment, studying aspects of that environment can show us a great deal about where we have been, collectively, and how we might determine where we are going. If, for example, we understand how the American workplace has evolved to its present building forms, both outside and in, when we begin to accommodate the growth of today's entrepreneurial companies into larger workplaces, those places may be more effectively designed - and the people who work there happier and more productive. Different social sectors provide examples, as well. If a house of worship helped make physical and spiritual sense of the experience of people in the prairie homesteading communities of our forebears, perhaps understanding how and why the buildings were designed as they were can help us make judgments useful to our communities today. Can they show us continuities with the past, as well as breaks from it? Can they help us interpret, and perhaps even guide, human behavior? Indeed, they can. Analyzing certain building types to these ends is often complex and difficult of course. An example that establishes this as clearly as a house of worship is a sports stadium. It's easy to see in the trends of some types of built forms the desire to recapture some elements of the past (i.e. neo-classic structures express the desire for an imagined order) or reject others (the way the clean lines of "contemporary furniture" rejected the applied decoration of furniture from earlier periods). Arguably, all built forms can be examined from this perspective, but the scope of this study focuses on interior design of the workplace in the United States after 1940, especially the work of Florence Schust Knoll Bassett and her substantial influence in two important dimensions: (1) on workplace design that had and still has the capacity to change the way occupants work; and (2) on the professional status of the people who design contemporary commercial interior spaces in America. The impact of the professional life and work of Florence Schust Knoll Bassett on the process of the professionalization of interior design is critical because that process encapsulates two other areas of inquiry that are important to understanding workplace design: one is the nature of the education of a designer, and the other is the role of gender in the design professions. Knoll Bassett's influence on the content of design education and the model she provided women in design are still observable, though rarely highlighted, today. The education of designers (in this case architects and interior designers, although the broad question of how designers are educated applies to many fields) is important because it defines the disciplines that produce built forms. And gender issues are important because interior design provides an interesting and disturbing example of what happens when gender and the process of professionalization in a discipline intersect. These areas of inquiry lead directly to the impact that professionalized interior design has had on the character of the information/service office as a workplace in America after 1945, and, thereby, its effect on contemporary American culture. Throughout this study, workplace will be taken to mean the general corporate business office environment, as differentiated from industrial production, warehousing, agricultural, institutional, retail, and hospitality-related workplaces, each of which often utilize interior design services. In 1930, architect Charles Loring reflected on the previous sixty years and remarked that "the offices of our grandfathers were without steel frames and files, without elevators and radiators, without telephones - and without skirts" (Strom 34). His contrast used material items - elevators, telephones, skirts - to describe a complex period of transition during which the skills, experience, and meaning of office work were changed forever. Loring's explanation of differences between one world and another reveals a connection in those work spheres of material culture and gender. His combination of elevators and women was deliberate and appropriate: technological changes in the office environment and the introduction of women office workers were two of the most important and obvious forces in the creation of the modern office workplace (Kwolek-Folland 157). In an effort to understand the modern office workplace and the role of interior designers in creating that space at its best, this study focuses on a seismic change that occurred in American design, a change summarized as the "Knoll Look" by designers and design historians, but really a change far more substantial than a look; it was a change that affected organizations, the people in them, and the work that resulted from their coming together. The scope and development of this study include: A description of the occupational, educational, and professional developments necessary to provide an overview familiarity with the field of interior design; A contextual discussion of the background of social, economic, technological, and demographic circumstances bearing on the major issues surrounding the process of professionalization in interior design; A consideration of interior design as material culture, resonant with expressions of human behavior and belief given shape in built form; A discussion of the issue of gender in interior design and the effect of the process of professionalization on a discipline that has attracted women without protecting them from gender-based inequities; And, central to the study as a whole, an examination of the workplace-changing Knoll Planning Unit and subsequent "Knoll Look," created by Florence Schust Knoll Bassett, whose professional life and career provides a singular example of the issues regarding both professionalization and gender in American design. Note: Over the course of her educational and professional working life and after, in her retirement, the subject of this study used several names, which the author has tried to keep chronologically consistent. Thus, "Florence Schust" is used for the time up to her marriage; "Florence Schust Knoll" is used for the period from 1946, when she married Hans Knoll, until 1958, when she married Harry Hood Bassett. From 1958 forward she was publically called "Mrs. Bassett." From her days at Cranbrook forward (The Cranbrook community was established in 1904 by publishing mogul George Booth. Cranbrook Schools is part of the Cranbrook Educational Community (CEC), which includes the Cranbrook Institute of Science, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Cranbrook House and Gardens), Florence Schust Knoll Bassett has said "the people who really knew me called me Shu" (Makovsky, Shu U 80), a nickname only used in context in this study.
2009-05-31
2009-05-31
2008-01-01
2008
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10035
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/5240
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/106852020-08-28T13:43:24Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Kansas Grows the Best Wheat and the Best Race Women: Black Women's Club Movement in Kansas 1900-30
Williams, Doretha
Katzman, David M.
Jelks, Randal M.
Graham, Maryemma
Dandridge, Deborah
Hart, Tanya
Dorsey, Allison
American studies
African American studies
African American women
Central plains
Kansas
The rise of club women in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries challenged established definitions of true womanhood, redefined leadership roles in Black communities, and questioned the complexities of economic class status. According to Deborah Gray White's analysis, Black women "with full knowledge of the ravages being wrought, proclaimed the advent of the `woman's era' and came forth with a plan that made Black women the primary leaders of the race, a plan based on the promise of equality between Black men and women." Although club women's histories abound, most take concern with women in southern states, northern cities, and east coast urban centers who were battling urbanization, Jim Crow, and economic blight, all while ushering in a new middle class generation. Unlike the well represented areas of the nation, there is no book-length discussion examining club women in Kansas. Nevertheless, I argue that the women participating in the greater Kansas club movement tailored their programs to strengthen their communities. Out-migration became a constant problem for Black communities in Kansas, causing leaders to search for ways to attract and retain potential citizens. Neighborhoods struggled to bridge rural life and an emerging urban society. Finally, Blacks worked to bring about the reality of full citizenship within the state and the region. Monitoring the ebb and flow of unstable migration patterns, addressing the needs of rural women, and re-visioning the failed and unfulfilled promises of the state, Kansas women accomplished more than just incorporated art clubs; they strengthened a community in transition, setting in motion the construction of a Black middle class. The significance of my work lies in its exploration of the wide-ranging work of the little known women's club phenomenon in the Central Plains, but perhaps more importantly in the inclusion of resources that document this history in order to map a more complex picture of the intersections of race, class, gender, and region. My research is a significant contribution to the study of the Great Migration, examining movement patterns of African Americans in and out of the Central Plains beyond the Exodusters saga or narratives of the western frontier. Often neglected for southern, northern or western studies, Black populations in the Central Plains in the early twentieth century tell of a people in search of full citizenship, land and opportunity. Analyzing African Americans in the Central Plains illustrates the agricultural roots of the region and how the process of urbanization influenced their communities, a transition repeated throughout the nation during a time of migration and industrialization. While many African Americans left Kansas for points farther west, Oklahoma or even northeast, studying those who remained in the region is important to the complexity of the larger narrative of African American history. Interdisciplinary in nature, my research engages historical scholarship, archival collections, Black feminist theory, literary studies and material culture to provide a rich source of information to better understand the role of "women's work" in the development African American communities in Kansas.
2013-01-20
2013-01-20
2011-12-31
2011
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11540
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/10685
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/41772020-07-22T12:29:27Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
Suburban Place? Constructing Place in Overland Park, Kansas
Carey, Daniel
Lester, Cheryl B.
Mayo, James M.
Palos, Dean
American studies
Urban and regional planning
Geography
Place
Placelessness
Suburbs
Overland Park, Kansas
Glenwood Theatre
Business improvement district
Downtown Overland Park
Do suburbs like Overland Park, Kansas possess a "sense of place?" This thesis not only attempts to transcend the misrepresentations of suburbs as "placelessness," it also attempts to examine suburbs as places, thus examining people's experience with "place," its functions, and its symbolic meanings. This thesis examines the early development of the built environment in downtown Overland Park, the attempt to preserve that same landscape as a vital economic and social environment by organizing a Business Improvement District, and the evidence through the attachment to some symbolic buildings, such as the Glenwood Theatre, that some residents of Overland Park have developed a "sense of place."
2008-09-15
2008-09-15
2008-08-21
2008
Thesis
http://dissertations2.umi.com/ku:2683
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4177
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/145722018-01-31T20:07:56Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Firing the Canon: Multiple Insularities in Jazz Criticism
Robinson, Christopher
Tucker, Sherrie
Jelks, Randal
Gennari, John
Bolden, Tony
Harris, William
American studies
Music
Jazz
Jazz criticism
Whereas many jazz scholars focus on jazz criticism's construction and implications of a single, or insular, jazz canon, this dissertation argues that what many jazz critics do is precisely the opposite. These critics disrupt the sense of a singular and insular jazz canon by challenging it through the creation of what I call an insularity, which is a bounded collection of artists and music with a definable tradition, values and established criteria which regulates what is suitable for inclusion. This dissertation argues that jazz does not consist of a single canon and music that exists beyond the canon's boundaries; rather, jazz contains multiple insularities that challenge the canon and vie for the opportunity to overthrow the canon in order to reach canonical status. This dissertation conceptualizes jazz critics as cultural authorities who create or deconstruct insularities through a variety of race, gender and nation projects. It examines the criticism of Leonard Feather, Val Wilmer and Nathaniel Mackey to highlight the numerous ways in which critics engage with multiple insularities. Feather believed that jazz was university and that it transcended social difference. As such, he worked to create an insularity where female musicians deserved acceptance by the jazz world. Wilmer emphasizes that jazz is a social practice and that it belongs to those who created it. Working to counter the marginalization of African American musicians, she constructed an insularity that showed musicians as real people as opposed to mythological figures. Mackey rejects the concept of insularities and this dissertation shows how his novel Bedouin Hornbook works to deconstruct insularities. Feather's, Wilmer's and Mackey's criticism attempts to solve perceived social exclusion marginalization wrought by the jazz canon. Multiple insularities in jazz criticism exist as a byproduct of the complexity of jazz's cultural space, the problems which exist in that space, and the multitude of ways in which critics attempt to address these problems. A heterodox practice involving innumerable methods and strategies to address social problems, jazz criticism, itself a diverse practice involving people of many social backgrounds and experiences, manifests itself in the construction and challenging of multiple insularities.
2014-07-05
2014-07-05
2014-05-31
2014
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13329
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/14572
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/74132018-01-31T20:08:09Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
"The Merest Novice": The Snapshot, Gender, and the Museum, 1888-2008
Collins, Perry M.
Pultz, John
Swann, Marjorie
Hart, Tanya
American studies
Museum studies
Art history
Gender
Museums
Photography
Snapshot
Women
This work explores the cultural role of the snapshot photograph and the evolution of its integration into the art museum. Situated at the interstices of art history, gender studies, and museum studies, the thesis considers how the perception of the snapshot as a "feminine" object developed over time and how this characterization has shaped the exhibition of this ubiquitous creative medium. The first chapter briefly lays out the history of the snapshot and its introduction as a mass medium, including ways early advertising and exhibitions struggled to define "kodakery" for multiple users. The second chapter further considers three snapshot exhibitions of the twentieth century and how each reveals ambivalence about snapshots' value and the agency of snapshooters. The third chapter considers two other exhibits of the past decade and how they recontextualize the snapshot, including both its past as a tangible, vernacular object and its digital future.
2011-04-26
2011-04-26
2010-07-27
2010
Thesis
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11089
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7413
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/55522020-07-27T14:41:35Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
How Japanese is Wii? The Reception and Localization of Japanese Video Games in America
Huang, Xiangyi
Tsutsui, William M.
Tucker, Sherrie
Baskett, Michael
American studies
With control over both store shelves and consumers' consciousness, Japanese video games have dominated the U.S. and global game markets over the past two decades and continue to prosper today. This thesis positions Japanese video games' popularity in America in the global flows of pop culture, and argues that the "Japanization" of pop culture, represented by the "Japanization" of video games, has challenged the cultural globalization process that is taken for granted as hegemonized by the Western, especially American, cultural imperialism. In this thesis I examine the cultural localization process (beyond technical and linguistic localization) of Japanese video games for the U.S. releases, to further demonstrate the transnationality of Japanese pop culture. Meanwhile, I investigate the American fan base for Japanese video games and identify the differences between American and Japanese game players, in terms of cultural preferences of game genres and game play.
2009-10-23
2009-10-23
2009-06-12
2009
Thesis
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10429
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/5552
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/42002020-07-22T12:10:38Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
Yoko Ono: Transnational Artist in a World of Stickiness
La Bash, Heather
Smith Fischer, Iris
Reece Hardy, Saralyn
Salami, Gitti
American studies
Art history
Fluxus
Ono, Yoko
Transnationalism
Communitas
Zen
Identity
This thesis examines Yoko Ono and her work in relation to Fluxus from 1958 to 1964. Using theories of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and performance to analyze discourse, I argue that Ono's hybrid Japanese and American identity as well as the Zen Buddhist elements of her work played into her acceptance in Fluxus and affected the reception of her work both by American and Japanese audiences. While Ono's membership reinforced American Fluxus members view of Fluxus as a transnational group, I argue that the group is better understood as cosmopolitan and operated in a geo-politically bound westernized, industrialized set of countries. Finally, I examine Ono and Fluxus in relation to the 1960's cold war environment, showing how some works were meant to create communitas, in response to that political climate.
2008-09-15
2008-09-15
2008-08-21
2008
Thesis
http://dissertations2.umi.com/ku:2688
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4200
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/77382020-06-24T21:02:05Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
"Pray Not for this People for Their Good": Westboro Baptist Church, the Religious Right, and American Nationalism
Barrett-Fox, Rebecca
Yetman, Norman R.
Miller, Tim
Jelks, Randal M.
Chappell, Ben
Donovan, Brian
American studies
Religion
Sociology
Calvinism
Citizen-soldiers
Phelps, Fred
Funeral
Homophobia
Westboro Baptist church
Westboro Baptist Church, a small Topeka, Kansas-based church pastored by Fred Phelps, came to national attention for members' pickets of the funerals of gay people but has prompted continued public outrage because of pickets at the funerals of deceased military servicemen and women and at scenes of national tragedy, where they preach a message that God is destroying America because of the nation's sexual sins. Drawing from extensive field research at Westboro Baptist Church services and pickets, this dissertation provides an ethnography and history of the church. Rhetorical and visual analyses of church-produced artifacts, including sermons, signs, websites, and reports, provide data for an explanation of church theology and a timeline of anti-gay activism. The dissertation places the theology and activism of Westboro Baptist Church in the context of American religious history and suggests that Westboro Baptist Church's message of national doom that reflects a strand of thought that has always been present in American religion. Using radical flank theory, the dissertation examines Westboro Baptist Church in the context of the contemporary Religious Right, noting how the offensive message and in-your-face tactics of Westboro Baptist Church serve as a foil to the "compassion" of the Religious Right, centering and softening the Religious Right's anti-gay theology, which similarly argues that sexual sins damn a nation, and its anti-gay political activism. The dissertation concludes by examining legal aspects of Westboro Baptist Church funeral pickets and argues that public outrage in response to pickets at the funerals of fallen servicemen and women reveals a willingness to trade civil liberties for civility, an impulse to celebrate all fallen servicemen and women as straight and Christian, and a valuing of the lives of presumably straight servicemen and women as more deserving of dignity than the lives of gay men and women, trends that are more threatening to democracy, the dissertation, argues, than are the uncivil pickets of Westboro Baptists.
2011-07-04
2011-07-04
2010-12-17
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11255
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7738
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/66272020-07-21T13:02:47Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
News from Now/here: Ed Dorn, Lawrence, Kansas, & the Poetics of Migration - 1965-1970
Waugh, Kyle Skully
Irby, Kenneth L.
Lester, Cheryl B
Valk, Michael
American literature
American studies
Modern literature
Dorn
Black mountain poetry
Kansas
Centrality
Migration
Anti-war poetics
The stylistic variety of Edward Dorn's poetic career, from the 1950s through the 1990s, has been criticized as lacking cohesion, and deemed his work's fundamental shortcoming. The earlier poetry's somber lyricism has been pitted against the caustic epigrams of the later writing, and these modes are set on either side of Gunslinger, Dorn's mock-epic of the "sicksties," which has received disproportionate scholarly attention, to the detriment of Dorn's manifold, contemporaneous work. While formal experimentation and the development of a multi-voiced perspective might provide a context for approaching Dorn's stylistic diversity, instead those objectives have been critically cemented to an embittered tendentiousness, a resistance, insufficient to address either the biography or the writing. Due to the fragmentary displacements of these assumptions, this thesis seeks an integrated reading that celebrates, rather than condemns, discrepancies in Dorn's unmoored political/poetic identity. Through unpublished archival materials, it reexamines the Gunslinger era--part of which Dorn spent among the countercultural tumult in Lawrence, Kansas--when Dorn's interest in geography expanded to address both "the landscape of the imagination," and the inevitable constraints of an ideologically-infused language.
2010-09-03
2010-09-03
2008-08-06
2008
Thesis
http://dissertations2.umi.com/ku:2695
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6627
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/315152023-03-04T07:07:25Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
WHITE LIBERALISM IN BLACK COMICS: METAPHORICAL MARGINALIZATION AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF AMERICA
Stucky, Alex
Flores, Ruben
Anatol, Giselle
Chappell, Ben
Kim, Joo Ok
Roediger, David
Literature
African American studies
American literature
Black Superheroes
Comic Books
DC Comics
Marvel Comics
White Liberalism
In the wake of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, Marvel and DC Comics introduced black superheroes into their comic book series. While the comic book editors wanted to reach black audiences, they scrupulously avoided mentioning the Civil Rights Movement. To avoid the perceived controversy that accompanied movements for equal rights, they removed their new black characters from any connection to racial liberation movements. American literature has long constructed the black body as the opposite of white autonomy, authority, and power. Yet, the American superhero also embodies these same qualities. Rather than explore these contradictory identities in a black superhero, comic companies attempted to reconcile them. These reconciliation attempts reflected white fears about Black Power and led to the displacement of black superheroes from an American context through a complex construction of non-human characterizations. This study examines how white liberal comic book authors’ creation of black characters impacted racial hierarchy, exclusion, and vulnerability and how the inclusion of black identities in superhero comics reified the complex constructions of power and race in American culture. Textual and visual analysis of black comics from the 1960s and 1970s comprises a bulk of the research. Textual and visual analysis of the comics from the 60s and 70s shows not only how white authors imagined black identities following the Civil Rights Movement, but also how these writers thought white readers understood black identities. This methodology is bolstered by the inclusion of interviews with writers, artists, and editors, quantitative sales data, and fan feedback provided in each comics’ letters-to-the-editor column, which tell how the public reacted to these new heroes. Paradoxically, white writers’ displacement of black superheroes from a contemporary American context helped these comics to become popular in black communities. While the decision to remove African American superheroes from an American context was made to sanitize comics of potentially controversial political messages, the plot lines still involved the restructuring of identity for the black superhero—which mirrored the renegotiation of identity that was underway following the Civil Rights Movement.
2021-02-27
2021-02-27
2019-12-31
2019
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:16935
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/31515
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/67622020-08-05T13:57:24Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
The Forgotten Children: African American Children and Child Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 1890-1930
Thirlkel, Thomas E.
Hiner, Ray
Lester, Cheryl B.
Katzman, David M.
Spano, Rick
Kent, Bob
American studies
Public policy
African American children
Child welfare reform
Racial ideology
Social work
Abstract Forgotten Children examines the influence of racial ideology on the trajectory of child welfare reform in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century St. Louis. The modern American child welfare system emerged in this time period. It was also a period where racial assignments were unstable. Whiteness, in particular became unstable as a marker for racial privilege. In the first chapters, this dissertation examines how scientific racism became an official story through which child welfare reform became connected to the larger theme of modernizing whiteness for the twentieth century. This dissertation plays close attention to the role that the emerging profession of social work played in disseminating the findings of scientific racism. It examines how racial ideology affected the way in which the city's white child savers created a child welfare system. Specifically, how scientifically supported racial beliefs allowed them to adhere to the St. Louis's system of segregation. In the middle chapters, Forgotten Children looks at the way in which St. Louis's African American children's institutions coped with a modernizing child welfare system that was in part predicated on racial exclusion. It examines the history of three institutions: The St. Louis Colored Orphans Home, St Francis Home, and The Missouri State Industrial School for Negro Girls. Each of these institutions experienced segregation if a different way. Their ability to navigate St. Louis's racially segregated child welfare system highlights the importance of white social capital to these institutions. Their access to white patrons had an important influence on the quality of care these institutions could provide. An examination of the history of these institutions also demonstrates the degree to which these institutions were able to use the space created by segregation to produce their own version of child welfare reform. The final chapter of this dissertation examines how the St. Louis Juvenile Court incorporated racial ideology into its work with black children. It looks at the differences in disposition in court cases for white and black children, and then critiques these differences in light of the conservative racial ideology of the period. An analysis of juvenile court dispositions shows how racial beliefs became a naturalized part of court decisions.
2010-10-03
2010-10-03
2010-05-07
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10735
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6762
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/69792020-08-05T15:55:02Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
DEMOCRATIZING BEAUTY: AVON'S GLOBAL BEAUTY AMBASSADORS AND THE TRANSNATIONAL MARKETING OF FEMININITY, 1954-2010
Feitz, Lindsey
Nagel, Joane
Chappell, Ben
Schofield, Ann
Tsutsui, William
Tucker, Sherrie
American studies
Women's studies
Avon
Cosmetics
Gender
Globalization
Transnationalism
Using the records from Avon Product's, Inc. corporate archive housed at the Hagley Museum and Library, this dissertation explores the migration of the Avon Lady from the suburbs of the United States in the 1950s to today's global marketplace. Rather than merely selling lipsticks and perfumes, I argue that Avon's direct selling system is a geopolitical project that has - and continues to- capitalize on national differences by presenting Western beauty practices as key to modernity; ideal femininity as something achieved by consumption of beauty aids; and the work of an Avon Lady as a gateway to "civilized" society. To better isolate key moments in Avon's global expansion, each chapter examines specific discourses over the last fifty years that have helped produce and sustain Avon's far flung geographic reach and influence. Some examine these moments within the geographic and cultural/political/social context of the United States, while the others examine how they operated outside the United States, especially in Latin and South America. Together, they document the strategies Avon developed to harness the power of women's social networks to facilitate the global sale and appeal of its products. A critical examination of Avon's transnational history presents new ways to discuss the gendered dimensions of globalization and transnationalism; the emergence and global influence of U.S. and Western commercial beauty practices; the geopolitical dimensions of selling beauty; and the impact of popular social and political movements on corporate branding enterprises.
2011-01-03
2011-01-03
2010-06-12
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10992
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6979
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/41522020-07-22T12:32:44Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
Feminism, Socialism, and Pragmatism in the Life of Marcet Haldeman-Julius, 1887-1941
Barrett-Fox, Jason E.
Tuttle, Bill
Graham, Maryemma
Donovan, Brian
Women's studies
United States--History
Socialism
Kansas
Race
Pragmatism
Feminism
Publishing
This thesis is an important intellectual, political, and cultural biography of Marcet Haldeman-Julius. Marcet's life demonstrates the important intersections between class, gender, politics, and individual agency that unfolded against a backdrop of fascinating historical characters, including her aunt Jane Addams, her husband Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, the largest publisher in the world, W.E.B. Du Bois, and John Dewey. In this thesis, I trace her early life including her parents' relationship and her family's tense relation with Jane Addams and the family's relationship with The Appeal to Reason, the large socialist newspaper published out of their town. Marcet's marriage draws her into the milieu of American socialism but also into the difficult terrain of gendered subordination. I document Marcet's emergence out of marital strife and into the public sphere, a sphere she helps create with her own feminist writing, writing that helps to excel the Haldeman-Juliuses to the position of the world's largest private publishing company. Then, I account for Marcet's relationship with Jane Addams and her unique inheritance, from both Addams and John Dewey, of a particular feminist pragmatism, a pragmatism that she further complicates and makes her own. Lastly, I offer a specific example of Marcet's application of her liberal feminist and pragmatist ethics in her fight for racial equality at the University of Kansas. Marcet's life is complicated because she doesn't situate herself as a passive observer and does not accept ideological doctrines (feminism,pragmatism, socialism, etc.) in their entirety. Instead she makes them her own, and applies her own felt commitments to real life social problems, from her own marriage to labor to the struggles of African American students in Kansas's universities.
2008-09-15
2008-09-15
2008-08-21
2008
Thesis
http://dissertations2.umi.com/ku:2511
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4152
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/84022020-08-17T14:10:24Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Real, Truly Live Places: Notes toward the Queer Uncanny
Wendland, Milton W.
Schofield, Ann
Conrad, Kathryn A.
Fowler, Doreen A.
Kunkel, Adrianne D.
Saraswati, Ayu
American studies
GLBT studies
Gender studies
Domestic registry
Mysterious Skin
Queer
Uncanny
Wizard of Oz
This dissertation problematizes contemporary ideas of epistemological dependability and advances queer theory's critique of heteronormativity by reading the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny in conjunction with the critical concept of the queer to produce the queer uncanny. The first chapter analyzes the The Wizard of Oz (1939) and introduces the disruptive interpretive potential of the queer uncanny in several of its manifestations: the compulsion to repeat, doubling, and dislogic. The second chapter focuses on the novel Mysterious Skin (Scott Heim) and of redemption in light of childhood sexual molestation, demonstrates the ability of the queer uncanny to broaden available interpretative ranges vis-à-vis cultural discourses surrounding traumatic events like child sexual abuse. The final chapter applies the lens of the queer uncanny to a municipal domestic partnership registry ordinance that by its own terms provides no rights to registrants but which upon further analysis turns out to offer evidence of the performative potential of the queer uncanny.
2011-11-13
2011-11-13
2011-08-31
2011
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11611
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/8402
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/59972020-07-29T12:40:49Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
IDENTITY PRESENTATION IN STORIES OF PAST AND PRESENT: AN ANALYSIS OF MEMOIRS BY AUTHORS OF THE 1.5 GENERATION OF VIETNAMESE AMERICANS
Cao, Thanh Hai Le
Lester, Cheryl B.
Graham, Maryemma
Anatol, Giselle
American studies
1.5 generation of vietnamese Americans
Adaptation
Conversion
Food
Identity representation
Imagined space
This paper investigates how authors of the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese Americans represent their identity in their memoirs. The analysis shows that the condition under which each author came to the United States, either as an anticipatory or an acute refugee, influences the way each memoir is constructed in terms of timeline and content. In particular, this study shows that the authors choose different themes such as conversion, imagined space and food to talk about the process of adaptation in the new world. Along with the themes, either linear or disruptive timeline is deployed as a way to represent their refugee condition. Together, they constitute a diverse and unique identity representation of the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese Americans.
2010-03-18
2010-03-18
2009-12-16
2009
Thesis
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10665
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/5997
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/248442018-01-31T20:07:48Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Pacifist Battlegrounds: Violence, Community, and the Struggle for LGBTQ Justice in the Mennonite Church USA
Krehbiel, Stephanie Joan
Jelks, Randal M
Tucker, Sherrie
Chappell, Benjamin
Takeyama, Akiko
Janzen, Marike
American studies
Women's studies
Religion
Christianity
diversity
LGBTQ
Mennonites
pacifism
violence
This dissertation focuses on the movement for LGBTQ inclusion within the Mennonite Church USA, a Christian denomination of just under 100,000 members. Mennonites are part of a nearly five century Christian tradition known as Anabaptism, known for an ethic of nonviolence. Yet Mennonite communities and institutions have been and continue to be sites of intense patriarchal and gendered interpersonal violence. While LGBTQ Mennonites and their supporters have been engaged in visible advocacy and grassroots organizing for the past forty years, they continue to struggle for recognition and acceptance within a denomination that mirrors many other U.S. Christian groups in its sharp divisions over sexual politics. Mennonites’ polity tends towards congregational rather then hierarchical arrangements, and church policies are determined and debated at congregational, regional, and national levels through processes known as “discernment.” Discernment is seen as a peaceful approach to settling communal conflict. But LGBTQ Mennonites often experience such processes as abusive and violent. Thus Mennonite conflicts over LGBTQ inclusion are also struggles over how violence should be defined. This study draws on interviews, oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival evidence from the past four decades, arguing that LGBTQ Mennonites and their allies have played an integral role in subverting and revealing the hidden abuses of power enabled by Mennonite communal discourses. It brings together a feminist and queer theory-based analysis of discursive violence with a critique of de-historicized multiculturalism in institutional life.
2017-08-13
2017-08-13
2015-05-31
2015
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:14104
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/24844
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/45032020-07-23T12:23:07Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
Seek Science, Meet Jesus: KU Chinese Student's Experience With Local Christian Influence
Chen, Yan
Schofield, Ann
Katzman, David M.
Miller, Timothy
American studies
In "Seek Science, Meet Jesus," I examine how Chinese students at the University of Kansas in Lawrence interact with local Christians and respond to conversion forces imposed by local evangelical churches. Being atheistic or non-Christian culturally and ideologically, most KU Chinese students reveal curiosity about the American Christian culture and show more responsiveness to American Christian influences than students from other countries. The educational process of Chinese students in Lawrence is characterized by not only the export of American academic standards and religious culture but also Chinese people's longing for modernization. The students' status as educated sojourners makes them different from immigrants and determines that they show resistance and autonomy to the host religious culture.
2009-04-28
2009-04-28
2008-01-01
2008
Thesis
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10135
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4503
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/42302020-06-24T20:48:04Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
"On Behalf of my Comrades": Transnational Private Memories of German Prisoners of War in U.S. Captivity
Weis, Andrea
Lester, Cheryl B.
Tucker, Sherrie
Tuttle, William
Keel, Bill
Bergerson, Andrew S.
American studies
Europe--History
On May 8, 1945 eleven to twelve million Germans experienced the fall of National Socialist Germany while in Allied captivity; four million German soldiers experienced it as captives of the United States. These Germans not only had to negotiate and respond to "victorious" Americans who judged them by standards different from those in the regime for which they fought, but also had to put into perspective their active investment in a political and social structure that had initiated and carried out global war and genocide. This study analyzes nine personal interviews conducted between 2001 and 2004 to address how German soldiers and war prisoners remember their "private" experiences of the rupture of Germany's defeat and their transnational relations with U.S. personnel in captivity. By employing popular memory theory, it will investigate how German veterans, sixty years after the war, compose private memories and senses of self in the persistent shadows of their National Socialist past.
2008-09-29
2008-09-29
2008-08-21
2008
Dissertation
http://dissertations2.umi.com/ku:2676
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4230
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/122492020-10-14T14:14:56Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Weird Bodily Noises: Improvising Race, Gender, and Jazz History
Williams, Peter
Tucker, Sherrie
Hodges Persley, Nicole
Wong, Ketty
Dohoney, Ryan
Heffner Hayes, Michelle
American studies
Music
Avant-garde
Dance
Improvisation
Jazz
Kansas City
Performance
This dissertation explores avant-garde jazz in Kansas City in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to find out how they both reproduce and complicate narratives of jazz history and norms of race and gender. Working in a city associated with an historical subgenre--"Kansas City Jazz"--and in a style whose histories limit avant-garde activity largely to New York City, these musicians pay respect to that history even while their performances complicate it. As practices of improvisation that use music, dance, costumes, and visual art, their performances highlight the embodied aspects of identity--the ways that bodies move with and against norms of race and gender and through space. My dissertation thus seeks to show how local, avant-garde, improvised performances can speak about power relations on a broader scale. The title of my dissertation indicates three primary questions for this study: How do experimental performances that seem "weird" both challenge and reproduce normative ways of thinking about race, gender, and power? In what ways are bodies constrained aesthetically, socially, and historically, and how do they improvise within those constraints? How do avant-garde performances complicate the dominant history of jazz, making it "noisy"? This interdisciplinary study relies on several methodologies, including ethnographic interviews and participant-observation, oral history, and archival research. Chapter One establishes historical precedent for avant-garde jazz in Kansas City by examining performances and performers in the 1960's, showing how local musicians in the scene both complicated and reproduced dominant historical narratives about one of the "cradles of jazz." Chapter Two analyzes several recent performances in Kansas City that use humor and the bodily noise of laughter to point out and critique social inequities while also reproducing social hierarchies. Chapter Three explores the complex questions of appropriation, cultural borrowing, and influence that arise when three white musicians in Kansas City cross imaginary racial lines to perform avant-garde music. Chapter Four looks closely at several performers associated with musician Mark Southerland, whose "wearable horn sculptures" highlight the role of the body in improvisation while they both reinforce and complicate normative gender roles.
2013-09-29
2013-09-29
2013-08-31
2013
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:12952
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/12249
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/104042020-06-12T01:45:42Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Sheepdogs and Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of Grazing on the High Plains
Kerr, Daniel Stewart
Brooks, Karl B.
Worster, Donald
Flores, Ruben
Golash Boza, Tanya
Brown, Chris
America--History
Environmental studies
American studies
Border
Cattle
Evolution
New mexico
Sheep
Texas
An environmental history of High Plains grazing that focused on transhumant sheepherding of New Mexico, watershed cattle ranching of the open range, and barbed-wire stock-farming of the privatized plains--all systems of agroecology practiced on and about the semiarid plains of Texas during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Drew insights from the natural and social sciences as well as from critical race theory to contextualize novel primary sources and to reexamine primary sources that environmental historians had yet to bring to bear on the field. Research focused on the financial records of the XIT ranch held in the archives of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, land records held at the General Land Office of Texas in Austin, and the trail of newspaper coverage, army records, and census documents that track the Romero family from Mora, New Mexico, to Tascosa, Texas, to Dodge City, Kansas, and back again. Corrected long-held misconceptions about Texas history.
2012-11-19
2012-11-19
2010-05-31
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10913
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/10404
en
embargoedAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/104412020-09-18T13:14:29Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
THE "DEAR DIANE" LETTERS AND THE ENCOUNTER OF CHINESE YOUNG WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
Cai, Hong
Katzman, David M.
Lester, Cheryl B.
Yetman, Norman R.
Tuttle, William
Cotton-Spreckelmeyer, Antha
Greene, J.Megan
American studies
Ethnic studies
Women's studies
Assimilation
Chinese women
Identity
Immigration
Jewish
Letters
Abstract Focusing on the "Dear Diane" advice letters, both the English and Chinese texts, this dissertation explores a group of young Chinese immigrant women as they encounter American culture as Chinese Americans were reshaped by new immigration and radical demographic changes in the 1980s. By utilizing assimilation theory as a framework for analyzing Chinese immigration, this work examines several important dimensions and aspects of young Chinese American women's adaptation to American life. This study also compares the "Dear Diane" letters with the Jewish "Bintel Brief" letters in order to explore some common characteristics of the female immigrant experience in the United States. The writer identifies a number of issues that young Chinese American women including the intensifying generational conflict and identity dislocation. Moreover, the writer finds that both groups of letters reveal that Chinese young women faced similar issues as their counterparts--other ethnic Asian and Jewish women. With a strong desire to Americanize, young Chinese American women often faced conflict with both their parents and mainstream society. Therefore, assimilation for young Chinese women was problematic, painstaking, and a prolonged process.
2012-11-26
2012-11-26
2012-08-31
2012
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:12382
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/10441
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/239542018-01-31T20:07:47Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Building Bridges Across Cultures: A Case Study of the People-to-People Campaign, 1956-1975
Serj, Battsetseg
Wilson, Theodore A.
Tucker, Sherrie J.
Jahanbani, Sheyda
Greene, Megan
Donovan, Brian
American studies
This study traces origins, operation, successes and failures of the People-to-People program featured during the second term of the Eisenhower presidency. The program was a product of and a reaction to the Cold War international conflicts that emanated from diametrically opposed ideologies of democracies and the communist world. U.S. claims to the superiority of democracy over communism were rooted in immediate post-war America's quest for world leadership. The People-to-People campaign was a government-backed popular movement, which spread in the 1950s and expanded into the 1960s. It was partially coordinated and partially funded by the United States Information Agency during its first few years, with the expectation that it would attract private as well as grassroots support once it was launched. This dissertation explores People-to-People's various programs and projects including the Sister-Cities and the University chapter as models for secular voluntary movements of ordinary citizens who were committed to improving mutual understanding between peoples from different cultures. The idealistic nature of people-to-people diplomacy, along with a wide variety of personal and social stakes associated with international travel and relations, made the People-to-People University program one of the most popular student organizations on college campuses in the 1960s. People-to-People's popularity and ideals at that time attracted young Americans and provided them with both the opportunity and the enthusiasm to interact with foreign peoples at the grassroots level. It also gave them a sense of belonging to a broader, constructive human network, which promoted an appreciation of diverse cultures and a way to contribute to building the "bonds of solidarity" among people of many nations during the contested period of the Cold War.
2017-05-07
2017-05-07
2014-08-31
2014
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13557
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/23954
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/76282020-08-06T15:45:47Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Reading Cook-Lynn: Anti-Colonialism, Cultural Resistance, and Native Empowerment
Afagla, Kodjo Ruben
Lester, Cheryl B.
Lester, Cheryl B
Leeds, Stacy L.
Jelks, Randal M.
Katzman, David M.
Fitzgearld, Stephanie
American studies
Native American studies
Colonialism
Cultural resistance
Empowerment
Imperialism
Resistance discourse
This work is an intellectual history and cultural study of Cook-Lynn's scholarship and other writings. Most scholars who discuss United States imperialism often prioritize its overseas activities and reduce the colonization of Indian nations to a non-issue. Cook-Lynn, a Native academic and activist, equates U. S. domestic imperialism with the destruction of Indian lives and cultures, refuting the idea that the United States subdued indigenous nations for their own good. A staunch believer in Indian sovereignty, Cook-Lynn holds that Indian treaties established elementary principles of sovereignty and possessory rights for American tribal nations and opposes U.S. strategy to incorporate Indian treaty rights and land ownership into the ethnic heap of multiculturalism. Seeking to rekindle Indian nationalism and ensure the continuance of Indian nations, Cook-Lynn's activist oeuvre advocates for their cultural, political, and social relevance and challenges claims of Indian irrelevance in American history. Cook-Lynn deploys a resistance discourse to the U.S. culture of imperialism to strategize Indian empowerment and advocate for the sovereignty of tribal governance. This dissertation examines her political theories on Indian sovereignty and her focus on the effects of U.S. colonialism on land dispossession, oppression, silenced voices, the devaluation of tribal cultures, and the struggle for Indian self-determination. This interdisciplinary study connects American studies with Native American studies; it not only examines Cook-Lynn's empowerment strategies and legitimizes the decolonization theory that informs her work but also confronts the author's dogmas.
2011-06-21
2011-06-21
2010-12-17
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11266
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7628
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/313552024-01-16T16:44:30Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
‘Yes, But What Have You Done for Me Lately?’: Intersections of Intellectual Property, Work-for-Hire, and The Struggle of the Creative Precariat in the American Comic Book Industry
McWilliams, Ora Charles
Chappell, Ben
Esch, Elizabeth
Bial, Henry
Halegoua, Germaine
Kim, Joo-Ok
American studies
History
Comic book industry
Comic books
Gig economy
Labor
Precarious
Superheroes
The comic book industry has significant challenges with intellectual property rights. Comic books have rarely been treated as a serious art form or cultural phenomenon. It used to be that creating a comic book would be considered shameful or something done only as side work. Beginning in the 1990s, some comic creators were able to leverage enough cultural capital to influence more media. In the post-9/11 world, generic elements of superheroes began to resonate with audiences; superheroes fight against injustices and are able to confront the evils in today’s America. This has created a billion dollar, Oscar-award-winning industry of superhero movies, as well as allowed created comic book careers for artists and writers. However, the work-for-hire contracts used by comic book publishers are alienating creators from their content; intellectual properties and derivative works are owned by companies and not the creator, under these contracts. These contracts also create other insecurities for artists and writers by not providing benefits like insurance, retirement funds, and salary wages, something common in the “gig economy.” This is disheartening to the creator, leaving them internalized with the idea that they are “not writing the great American novel… just writing funnybooks.” In some ways the era of social media and crowdfunding is allowing these creatives to challenge this traditional approach of content creation, and raise awareness of these issues. However, these solutions are not perfect either. Although these solutions do away with a lot of gatekeepers, they also do away with quality controls and often times fall short of fulfillment because of the logistic challenges.
2021-02-07
2021-02-07
2019-08-31
2019
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:16650
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/31355
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7698-0330
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/64482020-08-04T12:50:28Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Moving to the Head of the River: The Early Years of the U.S. Battered Women's Movement
Miller, Elizabeth Barbara Ann
Schofield, Ann
Tucker, Sherrie
Sprague, Joey
Warren, Kim
McCluskey-Fawcett, Kathleen
Women's studies
American studies
Gender studies
Battered women's movement
Domestic violence
Lesbian feminism
Oral history
Second wave feminism
Violence against women
This dissertation chronicles the development of the battered women's movement in the U.S., which began in the early 1970s with telephone "hotlines" for women in crisis. Recognizing that woman battering was not an isolated personal problem, but a widespread social problem, activists developed shelters for battered women, state coalitions of shelter organizations, and a national organization. The movement had two primary goals: providing shelter for battered women, and ending violence against women in their own homes. Using information gleaned from oral history interviews with movement activists, as well as archival and secondary source research, I illustrate how a national social movement grew out of the grassroots organizing efforts of small groups of feminist activists. I argue that the history of the battered women's movement challenges the declension narrative of the women's liberation movement, as I examine the movement's successes and failures in achieving its dual goals.
2010-07-25
2010-07-25
2010-04-21
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10843
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6448
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/41002018-01-31T20:08:08Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
'Recommended by Duncan Hines': Automobility, Authority, and American Gastronomy
Talbott, Damon Lee
Schofield, Ann
Tucker, Sherrie
Chappell, Ben
American studies
Food history
Critic
Automobiles
Cultural authority
Gastronomy
How did Duncan Hines become an authority on roadside dining? What role did he have in the consumption of food and the use of automobiles? What were the messages he pronounced to his audiences? In "'Recommended by Duncan Hines,'" I examine the formation of Duncan Hines as the premier American restaurant critic as occurring in national journals and self-published guidebooks of the 1930s to 1950s. Analyzed as a function of the discursive production of power/knowledge within the historical contexts of cultures of automobility, consumption, and authority, I frame Hines as a mediator between producers and consumers, a position gaining in significance in the early 20th century. Narrating the exchange of commodities, Hines' gastronomy acted as a fount of nationalism and American "taste" based in perceptions of geography, history, and authenticity. Furthermore, my thesis presents a model for comprehending the origins, role, and effects of critics and other cultural authorities.
2008-09-07
2008-09-07
2008-06-09
2008
Thesis
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:2418
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4100
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/97922020-07-14T12:16:17Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster
Vaughn, Rachel Ann
Tucker, Sherrie
Pezzullo, Phaedra
Hart, Tanya
Jahanbani, Sheyda
Schofield, Ann
American studies
Environmental justice
History
Dumpster diving
Food security
Food studies
Oral history
This dissertation explores oral histories with dumpster divers of varying food security levels. The project draws from 15 oral history interviews selected from an 18-interview collection conducted between Spring 2008 and Summer 2010. Interviewees self-identified as divers; varied in economic, gender, sexual, and ethnic identity; and ranged in age from 18-64 years. To supplement this modest number of interviews, I also conducted 52 surveys in Summer 2010. I interview divers as theorists in their own right, and engage the specific ways in which the divers identify and construct their food choice actions in terms of individual food security and broader ecological implications of trash both as a food source and as an international residue of production, trade, consumption, and waste policy. This research raises inquiries into the gender, racial, and class dynamics of food policy, informal food economies, common pool resource usage, and embodied histories of public health and sanitation. Topically, the chapters build from Chapter 1: "Dumpstering the American Way of Life"--a theoretical analysis of the space of the dumpster and its social and legally stigmatized margins framed within questions of ideal citizenship and consumption. Chapter 2: "Situating Food in the Dumpster" explores the possibilities of (re)imagining the dumpster-as-food-source within contexts of food in/security. Chapter 3: "On Twinkies, Chickpeas, and the `Real' Food Paradigm" is an examination of the contemporary re-visitation and application of modernist food discourses as a means of constructing alternative food paradigms in the present. I trace a particularly gendered modernist history through to contemporary food movement literature constructing `good' food and `real' food including works by chef-activists and scholars such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini, Jamie Oliver, and Marion Nestle. Chapter 4: "Tackling Informality: The Dumpster as Public Health Threat" engages turn-of-the-century food specific public health measures in relation to a `politics of clean' as it applies to the dumpster and extends to mechanisms of State control over other exemplary informal street food economies. By overlapping the oral narratives with research about food and waste policies, practices, and literature, I build an overall hypothesis. I begin by arguing that the interviews show there are broad spectrums of divers and diving narratives. Each chapter discusses varying diver experiences in relation to intertwined food, trash, and health related policies and paradigms in an attempt to thicken understandings of the dumpster and garbage as transnational material residue, as food source, and as a form of commons space.
2012-06-03
2012-06-03
2011-12-31
2011
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11926
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/9792
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/213252020-06-16T00:32:45Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Employment Training Policies and Politics, 1980-1982 : The Transition from the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act to the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982
Collins, A. Michael
Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, American Studies, 1985.
2016-08-15
2016-08-15
1985
Dissertation
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/21325
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/64272020-08-03T15:48:21Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Confronting the Cold War Legacy: The Forgotten History of the American Colony in St. Petersburg / A Case Study of Reconciliation
Ginzburg, Lyubov Alexandrovna
Katzman, David M.
Katzman, David M.
Saul, Norman E
Tuttle, William
Miller, Timothy
El-Hodiri, Mohamed A
American studies
Russia--History
Soviet Union
History
International relations
American colony in St. Petersburg
American expatriates in Russia
Public diplomacy
Russian-American relations
St. Petersburg
Russia
This dissertation surveys three decades of the history and dynamics of Russian-American relations, demonstrating that their conduct has never been exclusively confined to governmental operatives and foreign policymakers. The focus of the research is a diverse group of American nationals residing in St. Petersburg-Petrograd, Russia, between 1890 and 1920. Tracing networks of connections which led Americans to Russia, it stresses the importance of successfully established American businesses in a pro-Western St. Petersburg, pays tribute to American journalists and social reformers, and features socialist-leaning intellectuals who traveled to Russia during times of revolutionary upheavals, becoming chroniclers, witnesses, and, in some instances, participants in events that challenged the course of world history. It also examines American religious missions to Russia and ardent sympathizers, who managed much-appreciated relief activities there. Emphasizing the significance of cultural influences and interdependencies, the research introduces those American nationals who found in the former Russian capital a unique opportunity to express themselves artistically through American cultural idioms, or enhance their knowledge of the Russian language, literature, and history. The study examines the extensive archival materials which reveal broad venues of public diplomacy, as well as economic and cultural interaction, reconstructing a collective narrative of the American colony in the city. It also introduces an array of Russian-language sources little-known to Western readers and scholars, and surveys publications brought to the attention of English-speaking historians, yet left untranslated. Primary sources from both countries, some examined for the first time, and the observations of a host of scholars who have preceded the author, are central to the project. Although the history of Russian-American relations has been a well-explored topic, a comprehensive analysis of the contributions of the American colony to the social, economic, and cultural development of the second principal city of Russia is long overdue.
2010-07-25
2010-07-25
2010-04-21
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10765
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6427
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/122012020-10-09T14:40:04Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Senses of Taste: Duncan Hines and American Gastronomy, 1931-1962
Talbott, Damon Lee
Schofield, Ann
Chappell, Ben
Forth, Christopher E
Rath, Eric C
Smith Fischer, Iris
American studies
America--History
Criticism
Food
Sensory studies
Taste
Duncan Hines was the first national restaurant critic in American history and a significant tastemaker in popular culture. This dissertation is an accounting of how senses of taste were formed in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States and how Duncan Hines aided this process. Conceiving of taste as a conjoining of physical sensations and cultural sense by mediators, I argue that Hines guided consumers and producers through the practice of making sense of momentous changes in society that influenced Americans' eating habits as well as their awareness of American foodways. Hines gained and maintained cultural authority because his criticism networked developing mid-century trends including automobility, consumerism, middlebrow criticism, regionalism, suburbanization, the popularity of "eating out," the professionalization of restaurants, the nationalization of media, the discourse of authenticity, and the continued evolution of technologies for the growing, processing, shipping, selling, and cooking of food. From the farm to the fork, American gastronomy is thus predicated on technology, commerce, and media intersecting to offer mediators, like Hines, resources with which to make sense of the tastes occurring within a context. Since these relationships change, I contend that taste is neither an object to be acquired nor a state of being to be achieved, but instead an on-going and contingent activity, a temporary association of things formed in reaction to the context in which it is configured.
2013-09-29
2013-09-29
2013-08-31
2013
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:12905
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/12201
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/218732018-01-31T20:07:47Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Intimate Collisions: Identity, Community, and Place in the Kansas Dirt-Track Auto Racing Sphere
Marston, Steve Booth
Chappell, Ben
Bial, Henry
Tucker, Sherrie
Hamer, Jennifer
Swindell, Jon
American studies
Auto racing
Dirt
Ideology
Kansas
Masculinity
Whiteness
Dirt-track auto racing, spread across the U.S. and concentrated in the nation’s Heartland, is largely unexplored territory within the cultural studies field. In turn, this project addresses contemporary Kansas-centered auto racing as a cultural sphere composed of spaces, objects, and practices derived from the “action” on the dirt oval. Participant-observation ethnography comprised the bulk of research, conducted over three years in garages, museums, and other spaces in which racing-related practice took place. Research and analysis were driven by an identity-based inquiry: How do participants construct senses of self in relation to the Kansas dirt-track racing community? On one hand, I trace processes of reproduction within the racing sphere. Identity ideologies and organizations have long reflected male dominance of competitive spaces, as well as the ubiquity of Whiteness among participants in general. Gendered organization appeared to result, in part, from the patrilineal routes through which men socialized boys into mechanical and operational familiarity with race cars. As a result, locally hegemonic masculinity was constructed around automotive-mechanical competency, competitiveness, and “rugged” engagement with speed and objects that threaten bodily harm. On the other hand, I address the ways in which racing practice entails reformulations of dominant cultural structures. When articulating the appeal of dirt-track racing, participants emphasized variety and disruption, especially in regards to “exciting” on-track “action,” which was contrasted against the mass culture of corporatized NASCAR. Furthermore, drivers embraced the opportunity to enact industrial productivity through their small-group racing operations; in doing so, they exercised power and sovereignty not typically present in their predominantly working-class occupations. As a whole, contextualized within a culturally shifting Kansas, participants converged within the racing sphere to find a sense of localistic community, thus engaging in “intimate collisions” both on and around the track.
2016-11-10
2016-11-10
2016-05-31
2016
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:14587
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/21873
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/145162018-01-31T20:07:55Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970
Bishop, William
Carothers, James B
Earle, Jonathan
Chappell, Ben
Bial, Henry
Marsh, Charles
American studies
American literature
America--History
Baseball
Dodgers
Icon
Bouton, Jim
Harris, Mark
Yankees
The New York Yankees baseball club, arguably the United States' most successful and well-known sports franchise, have acquired many cultural connotations over the years, meanings transcending the immediate world of on-field sporting contest. This study argues that by the 1940s, the Yankee's success in the previous decades and their representation in popular culture caused a coherent set of cultural meanings to crystallize around the club to create an American icon. This icon served as an emblem for a set of interrelated mid-century mainstream American values, namely the American dream of upward mobility, heroic masculinity, and a narrative of national success. The meanings, perspectives on, and uses of this mid-century Yankees cultural icon have not been homogenous, but have shifted generally with the team's on-field performance and broader historic changes, as well as with the perspectives of individual cultural producers and audiences. In particular, increasingly throughout the 1950s and `60s, a general shift towards a negative perspective on the Yankees icon emerged in cultural texts of the era, one that increasingly saw the American values they embodied in a negative light. In these texts, representations of the Yankees as elitist, greedy, racist, too-tradition-bound, and overly-corporate are utilized to convey a critique of these values. This general shift in perceptions and uses of the Yankees icon parallels and is part of the broader cultural conflict and shift occurring between World War II and the end of the 1960s. Methodologically, this study draws on Roland Barthes application of semiotic theory to cultural communication in a broader sense. It draws on baseball history and general cultural history and seeks historical readings of texts from literature, film, popular music, journalism, and sports fan culture. In particular, The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Joe DiMaggio's autobiography Lucky to Be a Yankee (1947), Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Mark Harris's The Southpaw (1953), Douglass Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), Damn Yankees (1955 Broadway, '58 film), Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" (1968) and Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) are analyzed for the way they represent and use the Yankees.
2014-07-05
2014-07-05
2014-05-31
2014
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13448
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/14516
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/41892020-07-21T13:05:05Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1951
Intimate Emptiness: The Flint Hills Wind Turbine Controversy
Graham, Howard Russell
Yetman, Norman R.
Clark, D. Anthony Tyeeme
Lester, Cheryl B
American studies
Flint hills
Wind turbine
Prairie
ABSTRACT Howard Graham, Master of Arts American Studies, July 2008 University of Kansas This study examines the political and social controversy surrounding the proposed introduction of industrial scale wind turbines, roughly, those over 120 feet, in the Flint Hills region of Kansas. The study is primarily concerned with the proposed introduction of wind turbines in Wabaunsee County, Kansas and examines the County's consideration of wind turbine projects between 2002 and 2004. The controversy is contextualized within the social, political, geographical, geologic, and cultural history of the Flint Hills region. The study also examines how these historical factors inform the way people look at and understand both the prairie and wind turbines. Much of the information is gathered from Wabaunsee County Commission and Planning Commission meeting minutes, as well as transcripts of these meetings. The paper concludes by advocating for the continued absence of industrial scale wind turbines in the Flint Hills.
2008-09-15
2008-09-15
2008-07-28
2008
Thesis
http://dissertations2.umi.com/ku:2690
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4189
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/40582020-07-16T15:41:58Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Plunging Into the Very Depths of the Souls of Our People: The Life and Art of Aaron Douglas
Ragar, Cheryl R.
Katzman, David M.
Yetman, Norman R.
Bryan, Jr., Maurice L.
Graham, Maryemma
Eldredge, Charles C.
American studies
Douglas, Aaron
African American visual culture
Black public intellectual
Visual artist Aaron Douglas is widely recognized as an important figure in African American art history. Recent journal articles, exhibitions and exhibition catalogs, and one monograph have begun to catalog his work and offer some biographical information. Yet, the richness of his life and work has yet to be documented. Douglas stands as an example of the complexities of African and American representation and identity formation in the United States from the early twentieth century into the present. His multiple roles as visual artist and storyteller, teacher to younger artists, and active public intellectual provide contexts through which to expand upon and complicate scholarship on Douglas, specifically, and American culture and history more generally.
2008-08-05
2008-08-05
2008-06-18
2008
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:2431
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/4058
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/53262020-07-23T14:19:24Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Transnational Cultural Transactions: Distributing American Teen-girl films in France, 1986-2006
Dotter, Anne
Tucker, Sherrie
Antonio, Robert J.
Falicov, Tamara
Bial, Henry
Fischer, Iris
American studies
Mass communication
Women's studies
Advertising
France
Hollywood
Transcultural
This dissertation analyzes the cultural translation performed by French film distributors - whom I call transcultural intermediaries - in the process of marketing Hollywood teen-girl films, perceived in France as a uniquely American product. This visual brokering alters the representation of teenage girls so as for the construction of the French audience for teen-girl films to be possible. In the process of translating promotional artifacts, the teen-girl is inscribed within the French antiamericanism discourse, an unwitting act of resistance to the cultural hegemony Hollywood represents abroad. My analysis contributes to conversations in cultural and media studies as well as in transnational feminism by showing how young women's bodies bear the brunt of commercial and national feuds across borders through advertisement. This project challenges the assumption among teen-film scholars that there are universal teenage values; questions the disciplinary separation between film and marketing of films; elaborates on the works of scholars who see transnational exchanges on various levels as leading to hybridizations of cultures without defining the meanings emerging from this hybridization; finally, helps better understand the mechanism of gender identity construction using translation as the bridge between decoding and re-encoding, thereby critiquing the stereotyping of teen-girls as they are reinvented to fit local cultural imaginaries.
2009-07-30
2009-07-30
2009-04-28
2009
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10343
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/5326
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/74202020-08-07T12:54:41Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Patrolling the homefront: The emotional labor of Army wives volunteering in Family Readiness Groups
Gassmann, Jaime Nicole Noble
Donovan, Brian
Yetman, Norman R.
Antonio, Robert J.
Nagel, Joane
Chappell, Ben
American studies
Sociology
Military studies
Cultural sociology
Institutions
Military sociology
Volunteer labor
Women's studies
This dissertation examines the emotional labor of Army wives as they volunteer in Army-mandated family-member support groups in each unit called Family Readiness Groups (FRGs). Since its inception, the Army has relied unofficially on soldiers' wives' contributions to the success of their husbands' careers in a two-for-one career pattern--two workers for one paycheck. The Army made such expectations official when in 1988 it began to require volunteer labor to run each unit's FRG. The Army tasks FRGs with connecting members to resources and relaying official information to soldiers' family members. These support groups also serve a vital socializing function, though not all soldiers' spouses participate in the information-dispensing and community-building groups. I conducted thirty-seven in-depth interviews and nine months of participant observation fieldwork among Army wives on and around a large Army post from 2006-2007, during a time when most soldiers were deploying to fight a war in either Iraq or Afghanistan every other year, leaving behind family members to manage the domestic effects of the Global War on Terrorism. This dissertation analyzes the participant-observation and interview data to show how and why the Army's emissaries, in particular FRG leaders, use emotional labor to impose traditional, institutional, "old Army" behaviors including satisfying expectations to work on behalf of one's soldier-spouse with a an Army-supporting attitude. Army wives who normally do the work of managing and displaying prescribed emotions in the private sphere for their own families do that same emotional labor publicly on the homefront when they volunteer to lead FRGs in the tradition of "good" Army-wife behavior. Army wives who lead FRGs often volunteer their labor to satisfy unofficial yet prevailing expectations that they serve, particularly if they are commanders' wives, to contribute to the success of their husbands' careers, to build a social network for themselves and their peers, and to gain a modicum of power (real or perceived) over the process of adjusting their lives to an Army fighting two wars. FRG leaders' emotional labor also includes managing their members' (often unhappy) feelings about the flow of scarce but valuable information about Army life, diffusing or solving family-member problems before they burden soldiers, and patrolling behavior of other Army wives through mentorship and gossip in service of the Army's goals. The Army's usage of volunteers' emotional labor grants the Army increased control over soldiers' families. Even though the Army requires emotional labor in FRGs to help improve family members' attitudes about Army life and thus keep soldiers in the Army, volunteer spouses' efforts are still devalued--both unpaid and derided--as women's work. The dissertation also finds that though the Army provides FRGs ostensibly to support family members, the emotional labor it prescribes for FRG leaders in handbooks and regulations, when combined with informal expectations, sometimes values supporting the Army over family members.
2011-04-26
2011-04-26
2010-08-30
2010
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11150
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7420
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/195502018-01-31T20:07:51Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
"Soft, Glossy Tresses": Shampoo Advertisements, White Women's Hair, and the Late- and Post- World War II Domestic Ideal
Liljequist, Angela G.
Schofield, Ann
Warren, Kim
Batza, Katie
Wilson, Laurel
Innocenti, Beth
Women's studies
American studies
advertisements
domesticity
hair
race
shampoo
This dissertation explores how shampoo advertisements inserted white women’s hair in a late- and post-World War II conceptualization of ideal American domesticity. Rather than merely advertising mid-century hygiene products, I argue that shampoo ads characterized a racialized standard of beauty that naturalized whiteness in the representation of ideal late- and post-war domesticity. Using three prevalent brands as case studies, I situate this analysis between the years 1944 and 1952, a time period I refer to as the Shampoo Revolution. Concurrent with this period during which America transitioned from a wartime to postwar economy was the rapid expansion of the shampoo industry which had profound consequences on popular discourse, elevating a narrow representation of hair as a requisite component of American domesticity. The chapters of this dissertation provide an analysis of the emerging hair culture that was by the mid-1940s, a prominent aspect of popular media and beauty industry interests. Additionally, chapters provide a critical analysis of three leading shampoo brands – Drene, Breck, and Lustre-Crème, their respective advertisements, and ads’ placement in two popular magazines. Ultimately, this study contributes to an understanding of the growing national consciousness, and emphasis on the American home front, as the nation transitioned from war to peacetime.
2016-01-03
2016-01-03
2015-08-31
2015
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:14161
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/19550
en
openAccess
Copyright held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/60242020-07-24T15:00:03Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Mechanics and Applications of Pressure Adaptive Honeycomb
Vos, Roelof
Barrett, Ron M.
Roskam, Jan
Ewing, Mark S
Hale, Richard D
Romkes, Albert
Aerospace engineering
Adaptive
Honeycomb
Morphing
Structure
A pressure-adaptive wing structure is presented that relies on the pressure-altitude relation to adapt the wing shape to the various flight conditions (e.g. landing and cruise). This structure employs conventional, certified aerospace materials and can be implemented in aircraft ranging from LSA to business jets and high-subsonic transports. The adaptive structure consists of a honeycomb which has cells that extent a significant length perpendicular to the plane of the hexagons. In each cell resides a pouch (bladder) that can be pressurized. Pressurization yields a change in the stiffness of the structure. In combination with a restoring force, this structure shows strains in excess of 50% without any plastic deformation in the honeycomb cell walls. Mass specific energy densities for this pressure adaptive honeycomb is on the par with shape memory alloy, which has the highest mass specific energy density of the adaptive materials. A mathematical model based on the equivalent properties of the pressurized honeycomb is developed and verified against experimental tests. The applicability of this new adaptive structure is proven in the wind tunnel for a pressure adaptive flap on a generic wing section resulting in an increase in maximum lift coefficient of 0.3.
2010-03-18
2010-03-18
2009-07-31
2009
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10524
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/6024
EN
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas
oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/145272018-01-31T20:07:56Zcom_1808_9929com_1808_1260col_1808_13803col_1808_1952
Digital Loa and Faith You Can Taste: Hoodoo in the American Imagination
Boson, Crystal Michelle
Jelks, Randal M
Anatol, Giselle
Canady, Darren
Hamer, Jennifer
Mack, Beverly
Tucker, Sherrie
Religion
American studies
Gender studies
Critical race
Hoodoo
Performance theory
Pop culture
Queer theory
Voodoo
Utilizing popular culture mediums and artifacts, this dissertation examines the ways in which the American imaginary plasticizes the faith of Hoodoo and continually strips it of its religious, historic, and cultural impacts. Rather than being acknowledged as a religion, Hoodoo is presented in cultural mediums as something inherently consumable, commercial, and capable of endless, identical reproductions. The artifacts produced around this plastic representation are contemporary reproductions of racist, colonial, and paternalistic historic narratives that have damaging effects both on the religion and Black bodies. The dissertation argues that larger American culture perpetually reproduces these representations to profit from covert racism and religious paternalism while simultaneously erasing its history of Black culture and American colonialism.
2014-07-05
2014-07-05
2014-05-31
2014
Dissertation
http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13371
http://hdl.handle.net/1808/14527
en
openAccess
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
University of Kansas