ABSTRACT My project addressed the broad questions of what barriers exist to accessibility for students and staff with disabilities at Arizona State University (ASU) and the reasons both historical and contemporary why those barriers exist. The second objective of my analysis was to provide potential solutions to these problems utilizing the voices and lived experiences of students and staff with disabilities at ASU. In terms of methods, my project employed a mixed methods approach combining historical archival research with individual and focus group interviews with impacted stakeholders. I sought to build community across disciplinary and disability boundaries, as building community represents in my view the greatest asset to create social change. My study found that many of the barriers to accessibility that students and staff with disabilities at ASU face today have much to do with the institution’s historical connection to neoliberalism, ableism and eugenics. Although the task of undermining these systems of oppression may seem daunting at first, the biggest take away from my project is was that small changes can go a long way toward a broader communal understanding of accessibility within the built and classroom environments of Arizona State University. One suggestion that came up repeatedly throughout my interviews was the need for greater disability awareness within the ASU community of students, faculty and staff. In response to this suggestion, myself and my interviewees propose a semester long disability seminar for the ASU community taught by students and staff with lived experience of disability. Another recurring finding was the need for ASU to have greater transparency related to resources for students and staff with disabilities and other intersectional identities. In response to this need, I and two other interested community members have created a categorized list of disability resources that I hope can be updated organically by students and staff with disabilities at ASU as more resources become available. The resource list is included below as appendix E. My hope is that my project can serve as a building block in the ongoing work of envisioning a more accessible Arizona State University.

Hotline crisis counselors witness trauma in others, leaving them vulnerable to compassion fatigue and burnout. Vicarious resilience can counterbalance the harmful effects of trauma work and help individuals avoid vicarious traumatization. This dissertation examined four research questions constructed to explore the lived experiences of child abuse hotline crisis counselors over thirty-six months, both before and during the COVID-pandemic. Furthermore, the recent implementation of text and chat, in addition to a traditional phone call, has ushered in new issues of abuse and concern brought on by the pandemic (i.e., isolation, fear of sickness and death, employment, housing and childcare insecurities, school closures, remote work, divisive custody issues related to masks and vaccines). Using a phenomenological methodology, this study draws upon three years of focus group data (2019, 2020, & 2021). Six focus groups were conducted with twenty-six hotline counselors over the three years to address the research questions that explore the counselors’ professional experiences before and during the pandemic. Analysis of the focus group transcriptions included a single-year analysis that looked at each year and a cross-year analysis to look at themes generated by analyzing all years together. Themes of resilience, workspace, and healing found that the hotline counselors shared positive experiences and personal growth from their work with implications of advocating for self-care not as an individual issue but as a larger collective issue among counselors. The results of this study will advance the concept of vicarious resilience, trauma-informed practices, and, most importantly, sustaining, and empowering helping professionals in challenging times.

Deeply entrenched eugenic values overdetermine who is treated with care and dignity and who is treated with violence. These eugenic values inform and are informed by settler colonialism, patriarchy, and ableism. Carceral locales such as nursing homes, hospitals, and jails enact specific kinds of harm onto disabled people and rely on their convoluted and self-serving bureaucratic processes to evade responsibility. Given my interest in the indivisibility of carceral logics, spaces of capture, and ableism, my focus in this dissertation is both the real-life contexts of the individual incidents and the systemic, cross-institutional patterns evident in each of the three incidents analyzed.I take a modified case study approach to three incidents in which disabled people in carceral locales experience tremendous harm. The first incident is about the gross medical neglect and rape of a San Carlos Apache disabled woman at a skilled nursing care facility in Phoenix, Arizona. The second incident occurred at a hospital in Austin, Texas where doctors worked hastily to killing a Black disabled man within only days of his arrival and change his code status to Do Not Resuscitate against his family’s will. The third incident focuses on duty of care violations and disability-based discrimination against a white disabled man at a Chicago jail. These situations, when analyzed individually and with/against one another, identify important connections relating to institutional power and cross-institution patterns of harm. I find that the paternal dynamics of medical[ized] facilities, the pervading anti-disability sentiments in US society, and bureaucratic violence make accountability and justice impossible.

In the U.S., when the government considers it necessary to intervene in familial relationships for the safety and welfare of a child, the federally mandated initial response is to seek to restore familial relationships through family and community support services. In certain situations, the state determines that children must be removed from their homes of origin for their safety and well-being. This results in these minors moving in with a relative, into a non-relative foster care home or into a congregate care facility until permanency can be established. When this happens, the length of time the minors will reside in these new environments is undetermined and future situations are unknown. It is imperative for the welfare of these youth that each placement provides quality care to meet all of their developmental needs throughout their time in the custody of the state. Adolescents in the foster system frequently experience placement instability. A connection has been established between negative developmental outcomes and a lack of stability for minors while they are in foster care. Youth who are emancipated exit the system without legal ties to anyone. Half or more have not graduated from high school or completed a GED. Many will experience unemployment, homelessness, substance addiction and/or incarceration. Because of these realities, this dissertation examines policies and procedures in the child welfare system that may contribute to the negative developmental outcomes of adolescents aging out of foster care. It seeks to answer the question, “How could improving the quality of care in group homes enable adolescents in state foster care custody to exit the system with positive developmental outcomes?”

Police brutality is a major opposing force to racial justice today. While police brutality in the United States is nothing new, the increase in accessibility to videos, images, headlines, and discussions that stem from police brutality has only risen due to the rise in social media usage and the speed at which information is shared. As the views rise, so does the likelihood that Black college students may experience an emotional and psychological response to the racial violence seen and develop symptoms of race-based traumatic stress. Black college-aged students who spend ample amounts of time on social media and engage with police brutality content are more likely to experience episodes of anger, exhaustion, guilt, irritability, avoidance, depression, and fear for their physical safety. These are symptoms of race-based traumatic stress (RBTS), an emotional and psychological reaction to a racial incident, which views racism as a potential traumatic stressor.The aim of this thesis was to use Dr. Robert Carter’s (2007) theory of race-based traumatic stress as a framework to explore the experiences Black college students have when engaging with police brutality content online and investigate the various mechanisms used to cope with the nonstop media coverage and viral nature of Black Death. The use of existing scholarship, including theories, other studies, and primary data gathered from focus groups, provides a fresh angle to the conversation of police brutality and the effects of widely sharing its content via various social media platforms. This study found that Black college-aged students experience’s online when engaging with police brutality content is overwhelmingly negative, the incident occurs suddenly, and the user has no control over the situation. In addition, participants experienced the core reactions of arousal (anxiety, anger, hypervigilance, and sleeplessness), avoidance (pushing the events out of mind and not using social media often), and intrusion (reoccurring thoughts about the incident). It is reasonable to conclude that witnessing police violence online can lead to the development of race-based traumatic stress, as all participants fit its criteria, as outlined by Carter (2007).

Armed violence is a contemporary global challenge especially in the developing world. It impacts immigration policies locally and internationally. Uganda experienced a twenty-four year -long civil armed conflict, which the president of Uganda declared ended in 2008. Following government instruction, displaced persons have been returning home since then. Despite this official closure, in the course of resettlement, youth specific needs and concerns have been ignored. Female youth have been the most affected due to the interlocking nature of their undervalued gender, age, and marital and reproductive statuses. Despite the complexity of female youth’s social location, research and frameworks about armed violence have focused on men as the perpetuators, marginalizing the impact armed conflict has on young women. Using the case of northern Uganda, this dissertation draws on feminist and indigenous epistemologies to examine the experiences of formerly displaced female youth. First, I deconstruct the western dominant construction of the stages of human growth and development including childhood, youth and adulthood. In this research, I prioritize local perspectives on human development; emphasizing the ambiguity of the concept youth, highlighting its age and gendered limited applicability to northern Uganda. I also examine the local understanding of armed conflict centering its forms and causes. Further, I explore the challenges female youth face, and the strategies they adopt to cope in situations of distress. I argue that studying formerly displaced female youth from their standpoint is critical since female youth have been marginalized in previous research and programs with gender-neutral perspectives. They thus provide a new perspective to armed violence given their multi dimensional standpoint. Female youth have different needs and concerns, which may not feature in mainstream programming largely informed by traditional male dominated systems and structures. Young women’s experiences thus deserve to be acknowledged if female youth are to benefit from the post-conflict reconstruction phase. To fulfill this objective, I used qualitative methods of data collection and analysis.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the language and literacy experiences of Kurdish minority children during their first year of mainstream schooling in a southeastern village in Turkey. I employed ethnographic research methods (participant observation, multi-modal data collection, interviewing, and focus groups) to investigate the language practices of the children in relation to language ideologies circulating in the wider context. I focused on the perspectives and practices of one 1st grade classroom (14 students) but also talked with seven parents, three teachers, and two administrators.

A careful analysis of the data collected shows that there is a hierarchy among languages used in the community—Turkish, English, and Kurdish. The children, their parents, and their teachers all valued Turkish and English more than Kurdish. While explaining some of their reasons for this view, they discussed the status and functions of each language in society with an emphasis on their functions. My analysis also shows that, although participants devalue the Kurdish language, they still value Kurdish as a tie to their ethnic roots. Another key finding of this study is that policies that appear in teachers’ practices and the school environment seemed to be robust mediators of the language beliefs and practices of the Kurds who participated in my study. School is believed to provide opportunities for learning languages in ways that facilitate greater participation in society and increased access to prestigious jobs for Kurdish children who do not want to live in the village long-term. Related to that, one finding demonstrates that current circumstances make language choice like a life choice for Kurdish children. While Kurds who choose Turkish are often successful in school (and therefore have access to better jobs), the ones who maintain their Kurdish usually have only animal breeding or farming as employment options. I also found that although the Kurdish children that I observed subscribed to ideologies that valued Turkish and English over their native language, they did not entirely abandon their Kurdish language. Instead, they were involved in Turkish- Kurdish bilingual practices such as language broking, language sharing, and language crossing.

Women who are incarcerated are viewed as having departed from the hegemonic standard of motherhood, and become questionable in their roles as mothers, and are often perceived as "bad" mothers. While the challenges of parenting behind bars has been widely researched, there is a paucity of research that centers the experiences and challenges of mothers post-incarceration or probation and a void in the literature that attempts to view this population outside of the confines of the good/bad mother dichotomy. This dissertation explores how mothers who are formerly incarcerated or convicted describe their experiences navigating and negotiating their roles not as good or bad mothers but as fierce mothers. The concept of fierce mother exists outside of the good/bad mother binary; it is based on themes that emerged from the stories women told during our conversations about the practice of mothering. The energy of hard-won survival is what they bring to their mother roles and for many it drives their activism around prison abolition issues. Their stories challenge the normative discourse on good/bad mothers, justice, rights, freedom and dignity.

Definitions of quality child care are subjective, depending on who is defining quality, and constructions of quality remain a contested issue in the early childhood field. There are multiple ways of defining quality child care, most of which are from the perspectives of researchers, policymakers, and professionals. Few studies of child care quality take into consideration parents’ perspectives of what quality child care means to them and what they deem as important for the wellbeing of their children (Ceglowski & Davis, 2004, Duncan et al., 2004, Harrist et al., 2007, & Liu et al., 2004). This study compared parent perspectives to criteria for assessing child care used in Quality First, a statewide quality improvement and rating system for providers of center-based or home-based early care and education, to better understand the gaps drawing from ecological theory (refs – add these) and discuss the consequences of these different perspectives.

This study utilized a comparative qualitative analysis of ways in which parents and state agencies view determinants of child care quality. The data for this study were collected from interview responses to open-ended questions on a larger mixed-method study with parents of children under the age of 6 from the Central Arizona area. The quality indicators used by Quality First included the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS-R), Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-R), Family Child Care Environment Rating Scale (FCCERS-R), and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), which were analyzed and compared to parent descriptions of quality factors in child care.

The findings of this study contribute to the discussion of ways in which parents’ perspectives are similar and different to that of quality rating scales, in this case those used by Quality First, and how the gap may be contributing to unintended consequences. In the study, I noticed that parents were more inclined toward affect qualities as quality indicators whereas the Quality First had more structural qualities as quality indicators. This led to the addressing of the need to bridge this gap to have a more comprehensive understanding of quality child care to meet different needs as identified by parents and professionals.

This study examined instructional and attitudinal changes influencing faculty members in a proprietary college after the parent company divorced itself from day-to-day leadership decisions during a "teach-out." A teach-out is the process of school closure, when the college stops enrolling new students, but teaches out currently enrolled students. It explores the strongest influences on faculty members during the teach-out process; how faculty members negotiate their work and how the changes appeared to impact students. Study findings revealed that the strongest influences were fellow faculty members. Several rose as leaders and essentially became educator activists starting a movement focused on what they believed to be an essential component of education and what had been missing previously, namely, creativity. They were supported in this endeavor by local leadership who served as "uplinks" and silently gave power to the movement. Students and the organization became beneficiaries of the renewed engagement of their instructors, which led to increased retention and placement rates. This study sought to understand the marked shift in the organizational culture and climate that governed faculty work life through the framework of organizational discourse as well as from a social justice context of freedom from oppression. Through the use of phenomenology and qualitative methods, including autoethnography, this study found that the structure of the teach-out effectively created a space for transformational leaders to emerge and become educator activists. This initial study provides a promising model for faculty engagement that appears to have positive outcomes for individual faculty members, students and the organization.