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Santurce for Whom? Understanding Resistance to Colonialism and Gentrification in Santurce, Puerto Rico
No full textOver the past decade, Puerto Rico has faced a wave of economic and political change driven by PROMESA (a US law establishing colonial oversight of Puerto Rico’s government), mounting debt and austerity measures, a suite of new neoliberal policies, and natural disasters like Hurricanes Maria and Fiona. A wealth of media and academic literature followed, analyzing this polycrisis through siloed perspectives on gentrification, politics, or economic crisis, often failing to identify solutions to the problems they diagnosed.
In response, this thesis leverages advocacy planning as an interdisciplinary tool to combine understandings of gentrification and colonialism in the Puerto Rican context. By taking a holistic approach, it develops networked understandings of power structures to identify effective strategies for future resistance. To do so, a comprehensive review of the existence of crypto, disaster, and settler colonial structures contextualizes the present political economy of the island. In-depth community surveys and a case study developed from a site visit to Santurce – an island in San Juan – help contextualize the everyday experience of gentrification and colonialism, referred to here as “gentrification-powered colonialism.”
These testimonies frame the relationship between Boricuas (Puerto Ricans), their government, and the US government. Reading existing resistance movements through these colonial and gentrification-based power structures reveals effective strategies for political resistance to these unjust systems. Findings identify colonialism and gentrification as inherently linked through government policy, effectuating community resilience as an effective tool for resistance against political corruption, dispossession, and cultural erosion
The Forge and the Mediator: Narrative, Memory, and the Making of Kiyomizudera
No full textThis dissertation examines the dynamic interplay between narrative traditions and institutional development at Kiyomizudera during the Heian and early Kamakura periods (794–1244 CE). Moving beyond conventional historiographical approaches that privilege official documentation, I demonstrate how religious narratives actively shaped—rather than merely reflected—Kiyomizudera’s transformation from an obscure clan temple into a prominent religious institution. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks articulated by Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann, and Bruno Latour, I analyze how these narratives functioned as mediators of the past, constructing the temple’s memories and institutional image in response to changing sociopolitical contexts.
Through textual analysis of multiple narrative traditions, I reveal how Kiyomizudera became a convergence point for elite and non-elite religious imagination. While the temple appears infrequently in court chronicles, it possesses an extraordinarily rich corpus of forged and fictional narratives, such as engi (origin accounts) and setsuwa (didactic tales). This dissertation approaches these narratives as fluid, dynamic repositories of memory that actively constructed contemporary realities for their creators and audiences. For example, I demonstrate how Kiyomizudera’s foundation narrative underwent significant reconfiguration as the temple transitioned from a Sakanoue family temple to a major pilgrimage destination, deliberately rebalancing the roles of its monastic founder Enchin and secular patron Sakanoue no Tamuramaro to accommodate new institutional affiliations.
Furthermore, I explore how these narratives mediated relationships between the temple and diverse social communities. By examining Kiyomizudera’s setsuwa tradition, I argue that Japanese Kannon tales associated with the temple diverged significantly from Chinese precedents, particularly in their focus on female protagonists, sexuality, and material benefits. These narratives connected the temple with pilgrims and patrons across social strata, proving instrumental to Kiyomizudera’s mid-Heian rise as a center of Kannon worship. I demonstrate how the temple’s institutional trajectory became intertwined with marginalized communities, especially the hinin groups at Kiyomizuzaka. Despite their limited representation in elite-dominated historical records, these “non-human” communities were central to the temple’s medieval social and religious imagination and developments.
By integrating methodologies from historical, literary, religious, and memory studies, this dissertation challenges court- and elite- centered narratives of Heian religious history by highlighting how non-elite participants shaped religious institutions through memory-making narratives and practices. It illustrates memory’s active role in historical development, illuminating the multilayered nature of the representation and imagination of a religious institution like Kiyomizudera in premodern Japan
The Modern Media Playbook: Elite Strategies for Digital Influence
No full textThe first paper in my dissertation examines how social media engagement metrics influence perceptions of electoral success for U.S. congressional candidates. Through two online survey experiments with 800 and 600 participants respectively, the research demonstrates that candidates with higher social media engagement receive significantly higher predictions of electoral success, with ratings increasing 9-13.5% compared to control conditions. The effect is most pronounced among inattentive respondents and shows notable partisan differences, with Democratic voters displaying stronger susceptibility to social media signals than Republicans. Interestingly, neither digital literacy levels nor awareness of automated activity on social media platforms moderated these effects. The study also reveals that politically knowledgeable voters, rather than being immune to social media metrics, systematically incorporate such information into their evaluation process. These findings have significant implications for understanding how social media influences modern political decision-making, particularly in low-information environments such as primary elections, and suggest the emergence of a new heuristic in the digital age of political communication.
In the following paper, I examine how fake social media accounts boost politicians' online popularity and this phenomenon's subsequent spillover on traditional news coverage. Using the 'Botometer' algorithm, I assessed the proportion of bot accounts engaging with tweets from 382 U.S. Congress members on Twitter. A policy change to Twitter's API infrastructure in November 2022 was an exogenous shock to the platform that significantly hampered bot functionality. My first-stage analysis demonstrated that this policy change only affected high-bot-engagement politicians, who saw a substantial decline in followers after November 2022. Placebo comparisons show that this decline was not observed in comparable data from Facebook 'likes' or Instagram followers. My second-stage analysis revealed that, following the policy change, high-bot-engagement politicians also experienced a decline in coverage in digital news articles and TV news from December 2022 to February 2024.
In the third paper, I examine how media coverage, both in terms of volume and sentiment, influences pricing and trading behavior in political prediction markets. Drawing on daily candidate-level data from PredictIt and sentiment-scored news coverage, I analyze 39 betting markets, looking at 78 U.S. political candidates during the 2022 election cycle. Using transformer-based sentiment classification, I find that positive and negative media mentions significantly increase prediction market prices and trade volumes, though negative sentiment often exerts a stronger effect. The relationship is nonlinear, with evidence of diminishing returns from ``attention saturation'' where excessive media coverage yields weaker or even negative marginal effects. A pooled event study design also reveals that extreme sentiment intensity shock days drive sustained increases in trading volume, but only negligible price shifts. The effects of media vary by party, candidate profile, and race competitiveness: Republican candidates, challengers, and those in tightly contested races show heightened sensitivity to negative coverage. Notably, Republican candidates' stronger responses to negative coverage suggest coordinated negative media campaigns could artificially inflate their market prices, potentially influencing resource allocation by donors and political organizations who monitor these market signals for strategic decision-making
A Seat at Whose Table? Black Excellence Definitions, Experiences, and Mental Health Outcomes for Black American Women in Graduate School
No full textThis study examines Black Excellence as a lived phenomenon among Black American women in graduate school, exploring how they define, experience, and navigate its complexities within social and academic spaces, and in their personal lives and histories. While Black Excellence is widely celebrated, existing frameworks—such as Du Bois’ (1903) Talented Tenth and contemporary social narratives—often reinforce hyper-resilience and exceptionalism, failing to capture the intersectional and deeply personal realities of those who embody it.
Using phenomenology as the method of hermeneutic inquiry and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) for data analysis, this study centers participants' voices, allowing them to articulate their own meanings of success, identity, and resilience (Smith et al., 2009). Through in-depth interviews and a visual categorization task, findings revealed that Black Excellence seemed to operate as a multi-dimensional phenomenon shaped by three core themes: intersectionality, collectivism, and resilience.
Participants described the complexity of their intersecting racial and gender identities, the communal nature of their success, and the evolving definition of resilience beyond struggle toward sustainability and self-preservation. Findings highlight the need for future scholarship to examine how Black Excellence can be redefined to center authenticity, rest, and communal care. Implications for education, mental health, and policy emphasize the importance of fostering environments that honor and sustain Black women’s success without reinforcing the burdens of hyper-performance
Where Did the Time Go? Math Anxiety, Processing Speed, and Their Impact on Speeded Math Performance
No full textThe correlation between math anxiety (MA) and math performance (MP) has received increased attention, but prior research has been inconsistent or insufficient to provide meaningful insight into why the two are associated. This study aimed to identify if the MA-MP association is stronger on timed versus untimed measures; if within this association, processing speed plays a mediating role; whether gender acts as a predictor of MP and moderates the MA-MP association; and finally, whether MA predicts MP over and above generalized anxiety. The study sample comprised of archival data from 474 8–13-year-old participants from the Healthy Brain Network and used results from cognitive and academic standardized testing and ratings on anxiety scale questionnaires.
Results showed a measurable negative association between MA and MP across timed and untimed math tasks. This association was most significant for tasks requiring applied problem-solving skills compared to math fluency tasks, and processing speed was not found to have a significant mediating effect, as was hypothesized. Significant gender differences were found, with females experiencing more math anxiety; this anxiety was also found to more significantly relate to their performance on math tasks. Furthermore, math-specific anxiety was found to predict math performance over and above generalized anxiety. Interventions should focus on identifying and reducing math anxiety, with special consideration given to gender differences and the context in which math tasks are presented
Plants, Insects, People, and Power: An Ecological History of Africa's Great Lakes Region
No full textThis dissertation reconstructs long-term historical ecologies of inter-speciated practice among Bantu-speaking societies and their other-than-human cohabitants along the Kivu–Nyanza axis between the western basin of Lake Victoria and the Kivu Rift. It does so principally by deploying the complementary methods of historical linguistics and comparative ethnography among speech communities from two branches of the Great Lakes Bantu languages, namely, West Nyanza and Western Lakes Bantu. The study links data generated by these methods with evidence from archaeology, genetics, climatology, palaeoecology, and other life sciences to sustain a narrative that runs from the mid-first millennium BCE to the nineteenth century CE. In conjunction with this interdisciplinary methodology, the study employs an integrated critical perspective that draws upon practice-based sociology, the “dwelling perspective” emerging out of landscape studies, phenomenology, multispecies studies, and critical temporality and spatiality. The dissertation consequently recovers the embodied, emplaced, and affective habitus of past Bantu-speaking communities across a large swath of Africa’s Great Lakes Region, despite the absence of a local documentary record prior to the nineteenth century.
Comprising a prologue, an introduction, five body chapters, and a conclusion, the study analyzes patterns of human collection, consumption, and conceptualization of various biota (especially plant and insect species) in southern Uganda, western Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern DR Congo over the longue durée. In addition to this comparative work of historical ethnobiology, the study addresses demarcations and uses of discrete types of physical landscapes by the human groups that have called these lands home. As members of expansive cross-cultural and inter-speciated networks, early Bantu-speakers in the Great Lakes Region bestowed on their descendants two fundamental achievements: a tradition of skillful and adaptive agriculture, on the one hand, and conscientious efforts to inculcate a sense of belonging within the region’s physical landscapes, on the other.
Later generations of Bantu-speakers in the region were therefore well-equipped to encounter new types of environments, new plant and animal species, and new human neighbors. The fitful, non-linear maturation of diverse forms of social stratification, subsistence, and spirituality among descendant Bantu societies along the Kivu–Nyanza axis are approached in light of this common ancestral tradition. Because human–plant–insect interactions in the Great Lakes Region have always involved members of all walks of life, untold histories of human social composition are recoverable. Bantu-speakers across the spectra of power and authority shared a conviction that life was an inter-speciated endeavor. Knowledge of and skill in mobilizing other-than-human agents and forces were therefore fundamental to the cultivation and preservation of safety, fertility, success, and belonging.
Yet Bantu-speaking communities, like all global societies, were also defined by inequality and differentiation. A driving concern of this study is to attend to the perspectives of the less powerful individuals that lived within these systems. Focusing on widely accessible plant and insect species facilitates this pursuit. Changes and continuities in the words that people used to name these specimens (both materially and conceptually) reveal long-term, dynamic strategies for household production and reproduction. Such strategies were developed and deployed within and beyond burgeoning state-level structures across Africa’s interlacustrine region. Local incorporation of other-than-human lifeforms and modes of dwelling in these strategies affords the opportunity to reconceptualize Great Lakes human history as fundamentally inter-speciated
Criticality in Collaborative Songwriting: Participatory Action Research Through Creative Cooperation in the Choral Classroom
No full textThis study introduced critical pedagogy into a novel songwriting curriculum offered to a high school choral music ensemble. The purpose was to explore how critical pedagogy affected the perpetuation of students’ agentic, collaborative, creative process, as well as how the students’ dialogue and process affected the teacher’s pedagogy.
Informed by critical theory, this qualitative study used a design-based framework to facilitate teacher/researcher reflexivity, as well as a youth participatory action research framework to position the students as co-researchers, knowledge creators, and stakeholders in the study’s findings. The student participants set the parameters for the project and provided the teacher with personal preferences to guide assigning them into smaller groups. Once groups were assigned, they completed an iterative process of dividing into separate spaces to collaborate then returning to share drafts and feedback, all while the teacher collected data, conferred with a criticality partner, and adjusted instruction based on the challenges each group experienced.
The groups received comparable degrees of instruction but engaged in notably different processes shaped by their communication, shared interests, willingness to experiment, and level of fun. The groups produced similarly distinct musical outputs and generative themes based on their collaborative work, offering insights into the differentiation critical pedagogy requires to authentically serve each student, the influence of institutional pressures on critical work, and the role of trust and play in generating critical themes
From Seeds to Systems: A Qualitative Study of Global Majority Teacher Educators of Color Advancing Global Justice, Critical Pedagogy, and Sustainability in Higher Education
No full textWithin teacher education, the imperative to foster critical global perspectives has emerged as a vital component of preparing educators for the complexities of an increasingly interconnected world. This qualitative multiple case study, grounded in critical pedagogy, critical globalization studies, and teacher agency, explores how four Global Majority teacher educators—individuals who identify as Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, dual-heritage, and/or racialized—understand, enact, and sustain their commitments to global justice within U.S. higher education contexts.
Drawing on contemplative thematic analysis (Bhattacharya, 2025) and Darder’s (2015) critical interpretivism, this multiple case study analyzes interview data and course artifacts to surface the pedagogical, ethical, and political labor these educators carry. Findings reveal justice as a deeply embodied and relational stance—expressed through practices of discernment, refusal, ethical subversion, and care. These educators navigate institutional constraint while cultivating student agency and preserving their own integrity, often through quiet yet powerful acts of resistance.
The study synthesizes these findings into a set of generative insights that function as guiding principles—not prescriptions—for justice-oriented teacher education. These include: honoring discomfort and complexity, refusing institutional co-optation, cultivating protective pedagogical space, and aligning justice commitments across roles. These principles are grounded in lived practice and invite reflection on how educators might design programs, relationships, and curricula with ethical clarity and sustainable vision.
This research contributes to the field of teacher education by offering a grounded, relational understanding of global justice as practice—deeply situated, emotionally demanding, and spiritually rooted. It challenges conventional frameworks of social justice teacher education and invites new conversations around sustainability, agency, and ethical alignment for educators committed to transformation across time, space, and systems
Living on the Bridge: Chinese Immigrants' Cultural Identity Integration Through Transformative Learning
No full textThis interpretative phenomenological study examined how five first-generation Millennial Chinese immigrant women in the United States experienced cultural identity integration through transformative learning. Guided by psycho-critical, psycho-developmental, and social-critical perspectives of transformative learning theory, this research investigated the holistic perspective transformation processes through which acculturation challenges disrupted immigrants’ sense of self, prompting critical reflection on cultural assumptions, beliefs, and dominant ideologies from both heritage and host cultures, and ultimately leading to identity reintegration. The study also explored how these processes of cultural identity integration were shaped by immigrants’ developmental capacities and access to various forms of capital.
The study generated five major findings. First, immigrants’ cultural identity integration was an ongoing, nonlinear transformative learning process that was conditioned by both developmental capacity and their access to various forms of capital, including social, cultural, economic, and recognition-based resources that shaped their identity transformation. Second, while acculturation created disorienting dilemmas, it did not necessarily lead to critical reflection on cultural frames of reference; rather, experiences of misrecognition within social relationships frequently functioned as catalysts for such reflection. Third, misrecognition was manifested through participants’ experiences of multiple forms of oppression—including microaggressions, racial discrimination, and internalized racism in American society, as well as patriarchal and authoritarian pressures from their heritage culture—ultimately leading to the development of critical consciousness. Fourth, higher developmental capacity facilitated the construction of self- recognition value systems that transcend cultural affiliation and fostered more active agency informed by critical consciousness. Fifth, perspective transformation of cultural identity produced “in-between” positioning rather than wholesale replacement of previous cultural frames of reference, with participants ultimately creating bridges between cultures while selectively engaging with or resisting different aspects of dominant ideologies from both heritage and American cultures.
These findings illustrated that transformative learning in migration contexts constitutes both an individual developmental trajectory and a socially embedded process, shaped by struggles for recognition and broader power dynamics. This study advances transformative learning theory by integrating multiple theoretical perspectives to provide a holistic examinationof identity transformation within the under-researched Asian immigrant population. In addition, it offers practical implications for educators, community organizations, and policymakers seeking to support processes of immigrant identity integration more effectively
Dancemaking as Social Learning: Adolescent Decision-Making During Autonomous Small-Group Collaborative Choreography
No full textAdolescent social and emotional learning and civic-identity development are complex, dynamic, culturally adaptive, and reflection-driven processes.
This case study employed a grounded approach and used qualitative research methods to examine small-group decision-making processes among 13 adolescent dancemakers in collaborative choreography. The study privileged participants’ voices and experiences from two high school dance programs in Utah, where the participants were observed navigating complex social, emotional, kinesthetic, and creative decision-making while engaging with peers in an autonomous and democratic learning situation. Data collection methods included observation field notes, interviews, focus groups, and content analyses of participants’ written reflections.
The data was analyzed and coded using an emic approach to determine patterns and themes arising in the data from each participant’s viewpoint. Data analysis was carried out in three phases—data treatment, deductive, and inductive. The results emphasized the significance of belonging in guiding adolescent decision-making during collaborative dancemaking. The findings on sensing and developing belonging were analyzed using an integrative framework as a methodological tool. The analysis aimed to better understand the multi-layered complexities of sensing and developing belonging and its implications for civic identity through collaborative dancemaking.
Overall, this study’s findings uncovered group rights, roles, learning, challenges, benefits, and provided empirical evidence to inform best practices in secondary dance-education choreography and social-emotional learning (SEL) pedagogy. The study’s primary aim was to initiate broader conversations on SEL development, responsible decision-making, and adolescent civic-identity development among its intended audience of educators, administrators, and scholars interested in social, emotional, collaborative learning, leadership, and civic-identity development