Sociology

This study examines the childhood emigration, cultural and linguistic transitions and adaptation pathways of Eastern European immigrant students on an urban university campus. Although Eastern Europeans and immigrant children represent a substantial segment of the immigrant population in the U.S. they are understudied groups. After the collapse of the Soviet Union large numbers of migrants emigrated from the former Soviet Republics, but less is known about their experiences compared to other immigrant groups. Immigrant children have historically come to the U.S. since its inception but compared to the adult experience their status has been rendered ambiguous and their experiences marginalized to such an extent that they have largely been invisible in the literature. Commonly children are referred to as "children of immigrants" rather than assigned their own category of "immigrant children." While it is generally acknowledged that primary socialization of children influence their secondary socialization, the influences of child migrants' inculcation in the first culture, migration, acculturation and integration experiences with associated emotions have not been sufficiently considered. There is a general assumption in much of the immigrant scholarships that the cultural influences of the first country on child migrants are essentially negated by the acculturation process in the U.S., and this conjecture leads scholars to construct various generational categories that collapse immigrant children with the second generation native-born youth in their analysis thereby potentially skewing or obscuring critical outcome information. Since immigrant children's voices have largely been missing in the research process, through 34 in-depth interviews with Eastern European immigrant college students, we examined the extent to which the child migrants experienced the migration dislocation and incorporation as well as the possible lasting consequences in their adaptation pathways, self-identifications, social interaction, and standpoints on societal issues associated with emotional acculturation. Collectively, the Russian and Ukrainian immigrant students' narratives about their college experience indicated that they were meeting with success academically, were focused on individual goals, expressed appreciation for diversity, and were integrated into the social and professional organization on the university campus. However, most of the participants who emigrated during childhood reported that they had difficult or traumatic migration transitions in their first U.S. schools and neighborhoods, and often they recounted emotionally the memories of these profound events associated with their acculturation during the interviews. As a group, the Eastern European students expressed that both positive and negative immigration and transitional experiences, perspectives gained from the shared struggle with their parents, openness to diversity, achievement orientation, and work ethic are some of the differentiating…

Sociology

This research examines connections between race, ethnicity, and professional baseball. I use a multi-method approach looking at secondary source data on player positions and contemporary stacking, media analysis, fan narratives and sport blogs in the two contexts of Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I find that minorities are well represented in leadership positions and portrayed positively by the media, but that some racial inequality still exists. Whites and light-skinned Latinos are more likely to hold leadership roles than blacks and dark-skinned Latinos. In addition, media narratives reinforce the mind/body dualism by emphasizing the character make up of white players while highlighting the physicality of darker skinned players. Despite this evidence, fans from all ethnic and racial groups spoke highly of sport as a space that represented racial progress and a place where they felt comfortable are interacting with others who were different from themselves. These narratives were closely connected to fans' desires to maintain positive emotions within the leisure context of sport. Ultimately, I argue that baseball can serve as a site of racial progress and change but that it does so partially within a narrow cultural context. Baseball thus alters symbolic meanings of race but simultaneously misses important opportunities to make deeper social change at the material level.

Temple University – Theses

Religion

This dissertation focuses on lay Catholic ministry to Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia when Frank Rizzo was mayor. Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals” is employed to explain the praxis of the Philadelphia Young Lords, an organization formed in a Puerto Rican neighborhood during the confrontational politics of the 1970s. The dissertation advances previous scholarship on the Young Lords by offering reasons to consider these youthful leaders as lay Catholic advocates of social justice in Philadelphia and describes the role of faith convictions as they pursued social justice in the style of the biblical prophetic burden. Through interviews and textual analysis, the dissertation traces the evolution of lay volunteerism before the Second Vatican Council as foundational to the Young Lords’ application of liberation theology. The Young Lords in Philadelphia also followed the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party’s definition of the people’s multiracial identity and the Nationalists’ defense of Catholic principles. Their experiences are inserted into the general history of Philadelphia, a city which Quakers had founded as a cluster of urban villages, producing a distinctive pattern of ethnic enclaves of Philadelphia’s row house neighborhoods. The city’s Catholicism had structured parish life upon the civic culture, and initially extended this model to its Puerto Rican ministry. However, racial polarization at a time of municipal crisis under Rizzo invited new pastoral strategies towards civil right and the Vietnam War. Despite the Young Lords’ reliance on Marxist principles and the confrontational politics of the Black Panthers, local Catholic clergy supported many of their efforts. The dissertation explores the symbolic capital gained by the Young Lords which made them into a vanguard organization in the city’s fields of political and pastoral interaction.

Temple University – Theses

Sociology

This study is an examination of mobilization processes, with a particular focus on how people come to contemplate and ultimately embrace or reject veganism. It is a response to social movements scholarship that has called for examinations of how identity interacts with mobilization. Engaging the narratives of 34 interview participants who interacted with vegan advocacy networks in Greater Philadelphia, the study accounts for how prospective vegans negotiate forces, such as social networks and ties, that activate or hinder their mobilization; and for how they prioritize veganism amid competing priorities. Among other manners, participants came to contemplate the prospect of becoming vegan upon recognizing veganism as congruent with their other priorities. Participants who became vegan were more likely than participants who did not to prioritize altruism and to seek information that motivated and empowered them. Rather than prioritize their veganism over competing priorities, the vegans more often sought to harmonize their veganism with competing priorities. The study also measures the capacity of people from socioeconomically and racially contrasting neighborhoods in Philadelphia to engage in a behavior and a movement such as veganism. Results from a sample of 335 survey participants suggest that people from impoverished neighborhoods may be less capable because they are less likely to know people who practice veganism. The study's findings suggest that participation in movements is contingent on how prospective participants prioritize, on the incentives with which they contemplate participation, and on their capacity to participate.

Temple University – Theses

Sociology

This dissertation uses in depth interviews and participant observation in order to understand an important contemporary subculture: anarcho-punks. The research was done in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between the years of 2006 and 2012. The overarching theme that connects the different chapters of the dissertation together is a focus on the ways in which the identification narratives of participants are ethical in nature, meaning that the narrators are working to maintain an ethical sense of self in their narration. In addition, I show the identitarian consequences of the ways in which the hyphenation of the anarcho-punk identification works to both separate and join the two different identifications "anarchist" and "punk." I also show the ways in which identifications are narratively structured. This is done throughout the ten chapters of the dissertation. Each of the substantive chapters focuses on the different narratives used by the participants to understand a particular theme that is important to developing an understanding of the subculture overall.

Temple University – Theses

Media & Communication

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore social networking sites' structural affordances and their implications for identity creation, maintenance, performance, broadcast, and comprehension. Facebook is employed as a case study. By applying affordance theory, I argue that scholars should recognize Facebook as an ethic, or as a mediator, that employs moral choices when filtering input that is then displayed and aggregated through the site. By framing identity as narrative, I show that identities are on-going and are not only created via social expectations, but also work as reflexive tools used to write the self into being. Specifically, due to the large scope of this project, I explore the ways in which the structure and cultivated cultures of the site influence notions of, and expectations for, authenticity, agency, and anonymity. Breaking down Facebook into its constituent parts, I first completed a structural discourse analysis of the Sign Up Page, the About Page, Likes, Friends, Photographs, the Timeline, and Cookies. Next, I conducted focus group and one-on-one interviews with 45 emerging adults to learn how they recognize and work within Facebook's structure. Themes emerged that speak to the "cultures" that Facebook privileges and reifies through their granted affordances: Digitally Structured Culture, Visual Culture, Celebrity Culture, and Socially Divided Culture. I found that users generally adhere to Facebook's problematic conceptions of identification on the site, particularly through the ways in which they describe and perform authenticity, agency, and anonymity. Users have come to view the site as the official social space and thus feel pressured to perform a unitary, "accurate," and superficial self. The inherent trust placed in Facebook has led users to rely on the site's decisions regarding structural affordances and to not question the identity guidelines provided. This dissertation concludes with a call for a more rigorous understanding of social networking affordances and a wide-spread application of methods that recognize social media as non-neutral filters. I argue that the limited choices presented by Facebook compel users to build conceptions of identity that adhere to the cultural expectations privileged by the site. Although it is clear that my methods can be applied more generally to other social media and digital spaces, I also argue that Facebook is unique in that it is a "tentpole" of both interfaces and user content – the site offers a variety of identity performance tools and acts as the main place that users visit to "conduct research" on others.

Temple University – Theses

Sociology

In the United States, many, including those who are native-born and those who settle here, faithfully espouse the American Dream. Commonly, higher education is seen as the main pathway to achieve this and success more broadly. However, not much discussion or consideration is given to the processes by which immigrants and their children must adjust and settle into a new country, community, and schooling system in order to achieve entrance into institutions of higher education. Several factors influence the difficulties that immigrant and their descendants will experience, as well as the pathways of mobility available to them. Perhaps one of the most important factors affecting immigrants’ circumstances is the local context in which they are received. The primary goal of this dissertation is to uncover the factors facilitating Mexican students’ transition into higher education as well as how local context affects this process and their broader treatment in southeastern Pennsylvania and New York City. This dissertation addresses two main research questions: What factors and mechanisms facilitate Mexican students’ transition into higher education, and how does local context influence this process. The first question seeks to identify the resources and difficulties that Mexican students encounter in their educational trajectory in order to analyze how these students and their parents are being received in their communities of settlement and how this affects their mobility. The second question aims to specify the extent to which local circumstances influence not just educational attainment and mobility, but also discrimination and racialization. While much, namely assimilation, research has examined this group’s mobility and integration, it has not adequately theorized the effect of location on mobility and integration. Additionally, assimilation research prioritizes mobility and integration over discrimination and racialization. While research on Mexican’s discrimination and racialization is not as prevalent, it also does not focus on how location affects these dynamics. Taking existing scholarship’s inadequacies into account and since most research on US Mexicans is focused on those living in the southwest, it is crucial to investigate the mobility, integration, discrimination, and racialization that Mexicans experience in locations outside of the southwest. Given that this project is concerned with understanding young Mexican’ experiences with education and settlement, qualitative inquiry is employed because it provides an opportunity to intricately observe social life. Sixty individuals, thirty-five are 1.5- and second-generation Mexicans from southeastern Pennsylvania, and twenty-five are second-generation and undocumented individuals from New York City, were interviewed for this study. All Pennsylvania respondents attended the same university and all New York respondents attended the same college. Criteria to participate in this research included having parents who migrated to the United States from…

Sociology

In 1987, statistics transformed rape from a rare and personal concern into an epidemic in popular consciousness. Mary Koss and colleagues conducted victimization surveys with thousands of college women, 1 in 4 of whom reported completed or attempted rape. This finding received tremendous attention in the 1980s, and continues to influence activists and state officials. Notwithstanding the importance of this and other scientific facts, scholars have rarely explored the role of scientists in shaping perceptions of and responses to sexual violence. This project addresses that gap in the literature, via the following questions: (1) how have scientists conceptualized sexual violence among adults; and (2) what social mechanisms enable, constrain, and otherwise influence scientific research on sexual violence? Drawing on insights from feminist science studies, I approach sexual violence as an intra-active phenomenon, and regard objects of study (sexual violence) as inseparable from agencies of observation (research instruments, researchers). Data came from three sources: content analysis of journal abstracts (N=1,313), in-depth assessment of texts in different subfields (N=84), and interviews with researchers (N=31). Ultimately, I argue that sexual violence research has been dominated by psychological inquiries, as well as gendered assumptions regarding who is most capable of perpetrating and experiencing rape. Scientists have produced a tremendous body of knowledge regarding the individual-level causes, individual-level outcomes, and prevalence of men’s sexual aggression toward women. Systemic forces and sexual violence that deviates from this particular gendered pattern remain underexamined. I further argue that scientific research on sexual violence is shaped by a range of social mechanisms that are particular to fields associated with questions of social morality and social movements including feminism(s).

Temple University – Theses

Sociology

Breaking out of the traditional expectations of femininity, women participating in sports, particularly physically aggressive sports, challenge the dominant framework of a sex/gender binary. The reading of essential difference between the bodies of men and women has been central to the history of women's involvement in sports. Historically, women's bodies have been considered incommensurable with and even in danger of damage from participation within the male world of sport. In the current climate of sport, women athletes embody a peculiar dilemma as their participation is often encouraged provided that they maintain an appropriately feminine appearance. Prior research has provided a somewhat limited analysis of the dilemma that women athletes face in embodying femininity and athleticism, often reporting the experiences of a homogenous group of sporting women. To better understand the complex ways that athletes negotiate gender and the body, I focus on the experiences of a diverse group of women athletes. In particular, I pursue the following question: how do women athletes negotiate gender and the body in relation to multiple subject positions, such as those associated with gender, sexuality, race, and type of sport played? To answer this question, I conduct 5 focus group interviews using photo-interviewing and 40 in-depth interviews with athletes in basketball, soccer, and volleyball. The results indicate that women athletes' negotiations of gender and the body are highly influenced by the intersections of race, sexuality, and the type of sport played. Women athletes negotiate gender and the body in complex and ways that both reinscribe and challenge heterosexualized gender norms. While the embodied experiences of these athletes sometimes reinforce assumptions about gendered bodies, they also, at times, present the potential for more fluid and capacious understandings of gendered bodies. As such, these women athletes expose our knowledge about gendered bodies as contested and tenuous. I conclude by presenting areas of future research that arise from the findings in this study.

Temple University – Theses

Religion

In this project, I suggest a Deleuzian ontological perspective to address the interconnected and relational constitution of Muslim women‘s experiences and practices to illuminate the multiple-layers of their lives. Namely, I call into question the category ―Islamist,‖ used for contemporary headscarf-wearing women in Turkey, and examine how this categorization erases contingency, specificity, and relationality of women‘s experiences. For this purpose, I articulate the conception of body as a relational and affective multiplicity based on a Deleuzian ontology. According to this ontology, bodies are composed of an infinite number of smaller bodies through the confluence of relations and the creative capacity of affects, which are produced by this relational flux. Since the body is a relational and affective aggregate and a multiplicity within an assemblage, it is not a stable ontological essence or determined by overarching structures, but it is instead dynamic, continually changing, and always in a process of becoming. Since this Deleuzian approach problematizes the stability and singularity of identities, it offers a radical change for the framing of the question of Muslim women. This approach provides useful means to illuminate the experiences, desires, and practices of women in their contexts and through the particular characters of their relations and affects. Therefore, this project stresses the idea that we need analytical tools which allow us to attend to dynamic configurations of Muslim women without reducing them to existing categories or marginalities.

Temple University – Theses