Thesiss

The purpose of this study was to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by examining the policy’s objectives, values, outcomes, and implications, as well as a brief historical background of public health reform and its policy developme…

The purpose of this dissertation was to assess the health literacy in Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and identify factors relevant to their health literacy. Immigrants have been shown to have lower health literacy than native-born population and e…

Among the many stressors that undocumented Latinx families experience, the current political climate has exacerbated the worries and fears about deportation and can heighten psychological distress. Although the research is minimal with undocumented Latinx, recent figures indicat…

Scholars need to explore legal status and the movement in between legal statuses as a separate phenomenon from citizenship. I develop the “legal status fluidity” framework to investigate how immigrants navigate the U.S. immigration system. I draw my analysis from 54 in-depth int…

The need for culturally competent mental health providers and the Mexican American immigrant population in the United States are growing. This study focused on themes from therapists’ narratives that may help to comprehend the intricacy of difficulties facing Mexican American ch…

With the increasingly racialized schooling and social contexts of the ongoing anti-immigrant, anti-Latinx, and xenophobic national climate, there is an urgency to examine how K-12 Ethnic Studies (ES) classrooms can support Latinx students with navigating and confronting racializ…

Defying the expectations of scholarship predicting that religion will continue to decline, religion remains an influential force that shapes the lives of everyday people. Religious beliefs and communities provide people with cultural tools to understand the world around them, sh…

This dissertation examines stereotypes and prejudices about Muslims, before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, in the United States. The purpose of this qualitative study, narrative inquiry, is to explore how deconstructing stereotypes and prejudices influence how Mus…

The recent rise of political polarization and political appeals against social cohesion and integration has posed unique challenges to civil society. In the U.S., through a growing convergence of social and political identities, individuals make sense of the world and understand…

In Labor, Race & Visuality in Argentina’s Sugar Industry 1868-1904 I examine the relationship between racialization and mechanization in the growing sugar industry in Argentina’s northern province of Tucuman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the …

First introduced in 1875, Blaine Amendments restrict private, parochial schools from utilizing publicly acquired funds. While the federally proposed Blaine Amendment died on the Senate floor, 37 states have adopted constitutional language that limits and/or bars religious school…

In the United States, there is a familiar adage relating to proper conversation etiquette: do not talk about religion and do not talk about politics. The phrase “do not get political” is common in the U.S. American (henceforth American) lexicon; it is “embedded in our vocabulari…

Executive Order 9066 directly impacted around 120,000 Japanese and Japanese American lives and continues to affect lives today through lineage and those sympathetic. Quickly following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, this order led to the Japanese American Internment Camps w…

An ancestral skill is a “first” skill that may have originally been used for survival purposes but is no longer considered by Western culture to be required knowledge for human survival. Ancestral Skills Education is a method of sharing this ancestral knowledge through participa…

In 1895, Emil Georg Conrad Sauer (1862-1942), a world-renowned German pianist and former student of Franz Liszt wrote his first piano concerto, which was published five years later in 1900. Sauer performed it extensively to enthusiastic crowds in Europe and the United States whi…

The United States is often painted as the ‘Nation of Immigrants,’ with an open-door policy where anyone can come to achieve the American Dream with a little hard work. For most of American history, this has not been the case. Immigration restriction has been the way the United S…

The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was the official propaganda agency of the United States during the First World War, seeking to homogenize American public opinion and spread American ideals across the globe. Through a case study of Edwin Björkman’s work among Swedish Am…

Why does the state of California, while a significant presence on today’s world stage, suffer practices which marginalize many of her Spanish-language citizens? I look to the inherently contradictory rhetorical conditions under which the state was founded in the mid-nineteenth c…

Flowers Grew Out of the Asphalt” addresses how the treatment of Black women in the afterlife of slavery, under the guise of whitening ideologies, contributed to the formations of regional identity and Black women’s geographies in the city of São Paulo. The lives and presence of …

In Omaha, Nebraska, bounded by south 24th Street toward the south, south 35th Street toward the north, Ed Creighton Avenue toward the west, and Vinton Street toward the east, lay the remains of an ethnic enclave once known as Sheelytown. Relatively few Omaha residents today know…