Is the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) successful in reaching its goal of supporting students through the completion of their first year at IHE (Institutions of Higher Education) schools? CAMP assists disadvantaged undergraduate students who are children of migrant/seasonal agricultural workers and who are usually migrant workers themselves. The program assists students by providing financial resources, tutors, personal academic advisors, and emotional support to students. Currently, CAMP measures its success by increasing the retention rates of its students and providing them with services that prepare them to enter their second year in good academic standing. Although these programs have been shown to have positive impacts on student retention rates, there is need for analysis of the extent of these successes and whether program methods could be improved to further increase graduation rates. This study examines, in depth, the current status of the program’s various factors ( i.e. funding, culture, academics, recruitting) that enhance and or deter students from continuing on to their second year and considers how improvements could be made. This study will be completed through literature reviews, policy analysis, and program evaluations of current CAMP programs. Ultimately this project aims to uncover the program’s strengths and weaknesses and to recommend at a grass roots practitioner level, as well as at the policy level; the expansion of financial resources, social capital and social support. This study will show that the successes of these types of programs are directly related with funding; the more resources CAMP obtains, the more effective it is as a whole. This research is important because the CAMP program serves as a model for future and current programs. Understanding the CAMP program can lead to creating more effective educational policies that cater to disadvantaged students.

 In 1943 Hanford, Washington became home to the first full scale nuclear production complex and is now the most contaminated nuclear Superfund site. How have the lived experiences, local knowledge, health indicators and perceptions of risk in disparately-impacted communities shaped the complex processes of planning and decision-making of the clean-up at Hanford? Community Based Action Research can provide critical insight into the socio-cultural dimensions of the Hanford site needed to understand the complex processes that shape clean-up efforts, and how those decisions affect the lives of primary stakeholders. This methodology can also be utilized to critically examine how those decisions impact the experiences and health of the larger community. Archival research, participant observation and interviewing have been utilized to identify stakeholder groups and create accessible collaborative descriptive accounts of the Hanford site. This research will add to our collective understanding of the importance and use of cultural resources found on the Federal reservation, the contemporary economic importance of the super fund site, as well as how Hanford has and continues to affect a diverse array of stakeholders. This research has the potential to contribute to understandings of environmental justice policies as well as increase involvement of marginalized stakeholders and facilitate the implementation of collaborative, sustainable solutions to mitigate threats to population health and safety.

While sexual co-mingling of the races in the Americas began as early as the first cases of colonization, miscegenation remained an unspoken taboo in America until roughly the mid-century, when many cases of mixed-race couples began increasing in visibility in local communities, popular culture, and the courts. These couples found themselves thrust into the spotlight as either martyrs for the cause, fuel for the propaganda against mixed unions, or examples for popular interest pieces in magazines and newspapers. The role of news outlets in bringing public awareness to the presence of interracial relationships, for good or for bad, was crucial. This project explores newspaper articles over a 20 year period (late 1950s through the early 1970s) from three American Black newspapers: New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburg Courier, and Atlanta Daily World, and analyzes them from several perspectives, considering regional differences, date of the article (before or after the Loving v. Virginia decision), and subject matter of the article. Findings revealed several themes: emphasis on the white, female opinion, shifting generational divides, and the role of celebrity and celebrity mixed unions in public interracial marriage awareness. This project displays my discoveries in how the black community felt about interracial marriages during this period, as well as how the black media sought to influence public opinion regarding the topic.

The traditional black slave narrative was a political tool used to document the experience of being subjugated and commodified in early America. A revised literature has appeared in the contemporary, post-Civil Rights moment that takes on the pretense of the slave narrative: the neo-slave narrative. Unlike traditional slave narratives, neo-slave narratives’ potency does not hinge on veracity--each neo-slave narrative is a synthesis of oral history and the author's imagination. In this presentation, I investigate how narratives go so far as to rerender history, and transform the image of the brutalized slave to a determinist, autonomous figure in exceptional situations using humor. I will close read two neo-slave narratives: Flight to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed and Oxherding Tale (1982) by Charles Johnson. Of particular interest to this literary investigation are the novels’ respective protagonists who, between them, bear atypical Western educations, cosmopolitan friends, and traverse the landscape of the Antebellum South with wit and manner. I highlight how Johnson and Reed cater to contemporary readers' premonitions of what ought to happen in a treacherous slave narrative by creating comical encounters between the subjected and the empowered. I also discuss how Johnson invokes explicit Western and Eastern philosophical concepts to lend an air of consciousness to slavery's absurdity, and how Reed places deeply stereotyped characters in an anachronistic setting--a time structure that often conflates the events of the Civil Rights moment with the early 19th century--in order to track how black political progress has and has not changed in the intermediate time. Ultimately, I unearth how the two authors use neo-slave narrative humor as a tool to subvert notions of the slave as a stagnant, brutalized subject and foster discussions of black agency between the signposts of enslavement, emancipation, and progressivism in the black experience through American history.

My research aims to counter the notion that women do not mind the silencing, sexualization, and objectification of their bodies by providing a platform whereby the often unseen and unheard female body can voice a resounding reply that, on the contrary, she does mind, and very much so. My research examines works of contemporary historical fiction, like Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, in order to explore the silencing of particular women in critical moments of capitalist transformation within and beyond the United States: the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and imperialism, and the subsequent 20th century proliferation of neoliberalism, nation-building, and imperialism. It highlights this silencing by tracing traumas the female body endures. And does this specifically by defining the different female body parts that function as primary shock-absorbers as women who are coping with the effects of dislocation, displacement, and diaspora are not only gendered and sexualized in these labor markets but are also raced – a key component of representation and sexual exploitation. Vehemently criticizing the phallocratic order responsible for these various states of uprootedness is Luce Irigaray, whose essay “This Sex Which Is Not One” is concerned with the search for and implementation of a uniquely feminine language. My research interrogates the possibility of such a language existing and the significance it would bear in breaking the univocal shroud restricting the expressions and movements of the female body. This analysis utilizes a Marxist reading of the commodification of woman and her sex, as well as Irigaray’s conception of mimesis as it pertains to the recognition and viewing of the female. The injuries of being sexualized, gendered, and raced, unfortunately restrict the feminine discourse that female bodies could potentially produce by dehumanizing the female and rendering her nothing but a voiceless soft slip of flesh.

In this essay and presentation, I examine historical accounts of the civil rights movement to see how these narratives have perpetuated heterosexist domination that allowed male leadership and women's subordination to be normalized.  Furthermore, I examine the ways in which heteronormative forms of masculinity are performed by male leaders through the oppression of women and gays and lesbians. I read these instances of sexism and homophobia as attempts to avenge the alleged emasculation of black men by systems of white supremacy and patriarchy. These historiograhical gaps and obfuscations, I argue, are operations of power, but they also provide possible sites of resistance.