This thesis critically examines the dominant narrative constructed in US-based news media about the United States’ institutions of violence, the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), and the Immigrant Rights (IR) movements. Engaging multiple disciplines across the social science that engage race, immigration, the media, and American politics, the thesis situates the media’s role in racial injustice and nation-state violence against the Black and Immigrant communities. White Supremacy is deeply part of the United States' past and present, and the news media plays a critical role in capturing and framing the challenges to entrenched systemic racism led by social movement activism. The news media is situated in a powerful public position, capable of leading or supporting social justice work as well as further entrenching systems of oppression and injustice. This thesis explores whether the media challenges or reinforces the nation-state’s violent and racist institutions and practices. To operationalize the empirical work, the thesis asks how the news media (de)centers and (de)legitimizes social movements, impacted communities, and the nation-state when reporting on BLM and IR. Two original datasets of 8,742 news articles (for BLM) and 3,372 news articles (for IR), covering 2013 to 2023, are analyzed using machine learning techniques like named entity recognition and semantic networks of text, along with qualitative content analysis of select months as critical case studies. The thesis reveals how news media serves as a governance tool capable of stifling dissent by decentering the racial injustices that legitimize movement tactics and simultaneously centering partisan politics and the nation-state.

This study analyzes the role of bipartisan coalitions in creating exclusionary, enforcement focused immigration policy. First, the thesis covers the history of federal immigration law and connects this to critical migration scholarship, which emphasizes the racialization of migration controls and enforcement regimes, by highlighting the growing federal categories of immigrant illegality and criminality. Next, the thesis develops an original framework that builds on prior scholarship in political science to systematically connect coalition building and the Democratic party’s complicity as a cause of this growing regime. Specifically, the thesis applies a coalition building analysis of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, with special focus given to how the president, congressional leaders, and interest groups, in the 1980s. A key finding is that both political parties pushed the enforcement narrative and played key roles to enact employment verification into federal immigration law. The thesis connects this finding to critiques about the two-party political system as well as scholarship that exposes the injustice of U.S. immigration enforcement regime that continued to grow in the interior, at the border, and globally.

This paper assesses the obstacles faced by immigrant aid groups on the U.S./ Mexico border and the resiliency used to challenge these obstacles. The borderlands of the United States and Mexico is a unique landscape for activists and humanitarians to work given the prevalence and amount of entities that police the area and the suspension of certain constitutional protections. The criminalization of activists on the border provides a unique lens in understanding how social movements and nation-building are linked to immigration in the United States. This research aims to provide a rich description of what criminalization is and how it plays out between the government and activist groups along the border. My findings critique the United States and its claim that it is a liberal democracy because it breaks norms and international laws in its assault against activists and humanitarians, many of whom are U.S. citizens. This attack further demonstrates that the violence migrants endure on the border is not just an unfortunate side effect of border policies but very much intentional and by design. In addition to criminalizing activists, this thesis examines the activists’ mental health and exhaustion as they relate to their humanitarian work and how this is also intentional violence the U.S. Government inflicts in order to maintain itself as a nation-state.

It is extraordinarily well-documented that death, physical assault, rape, and psychological trauma are common to those working in the sex industry. This is true around the world, despite the varying laws of different countries. 20 years ago, two opposing policies were introduced in an attempt to end abuse and provide support to those in the industry: the Nordic Model of partial decriminalization, and legalization with regulation. Both models were created with the intention to decrease abuse of the vast number of primarily women and girls in the industry and increase their freedom and protection, as they are some of the most vulnerable and marginalized of society. However, these models approach the issue from conflicting views on the nature of the industry itself and use criminal justice approaches without connecting rights, resulting in unreliable means of protecting the rights of those in the sex industry. This paper utilizes a rights-based framework grounded in criminal race theory (CRT) and feminist rights-based literature in conversation with the reality of working within criminal justice systems to understand how fundamental understandings of the sex industry influence policy making, what the presence or absence of government involvement does to the protection and freedom of sex workers, and what kind of government involvement helps or hinders sex worker’s rights. This will be seen in a case comparison of how both policies have succeeded and failed to provide basic human rights to those in the sex industry in the Nordic Model of partial decriminalization in Stockholm, Sweden, and the legalization model of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

There are many historical inequities regarding housing in the United States, such as the lack of access to affordable and secure housing for people of color, which is a result of centuries of exclusion. These problems remain ineffectively addressed or unaddressed by policy. Indeed, many community-based organizations report that housing policies fail to address the needs of the people—especially those in marginalized communities. Top-down approaches are efficient and more broadly applicable but miss important community-specific problems. Meanwhile, bottom-up approaches excel in highlighting community perspectives and the lived experiences of residents, but they are challenging to generalize across jurisdictions. This thesis captures community-based understandings of policy through in-depth interviews with community-based organizations (CBOs) and applies these understandings to develop a new quantitative framework for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of housing policies that can be applied across the United States. The thesis also explores various housing policies through a multi-dimensional, intersectional, and forward-thinking analysis that centers marginalized communities.

This project aims to situate ending policing on campuses in K-12 education alongside broader social movements. How does the school reform movement connect to broader policing reform efforts in the US? Specifically, who are the key organizations or voices leading the movement in schools, what opportunities or barriers have shaped their efforts over time, and how does this connect to the work of other social movements in the US? Through interviews with frontline activists and school officials this thesis builds an analysis from critical race theory and the intellectual tradition of police abolition to examine the movement to end police presence at schools. The very presence of police on campuses impacts how and for whom schools are situated as a space for building communities of trust.

Drawing from feminist scholarship, this thesis re-articulates the concept of “liberal bargain” to makes sense of political parties, race and class in the United States. Specifically, the concept of “partisan liberal bargain” is developed in this thesis to capture how the Democratic party's behavior strategically de-centers race in favor of class discourse. These bargains, the thesis argues, reinforces how liberal orders and racial orders operate together to marginalize both racial and class-based minorities. Employing discourse analysis of over 1,000 news articles, the thesis reveals and unpacks bargains occurring during the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries, with a focus on three policy areas where racial justice is intimately and historically embedded: 1) criminal justice, 2) health care, and 3) environmental policy. Discourse analysis empirically captures the thesis’ concept of partisan liberal bargains, showing a prominent lack of concrete or substantial centering of race and strong centering of class and neoliberal discourse. Thus, despite the Democratic party’s strong African American voting bloc and association as the party of race and diversity, this thesis and the concept of partisan liberal bargains shows that racial justice is avoided and even delegitimized in party politics.

The increasing job opportunities abroad as spa therapists attract significant numbers of young Indonesian women. Although the placement process is conducted by licensed recruitment agents and supervised by government officials, migrant workers might be at high risk of experiencing work exploitation and physical or sexual abuse. To investigate the phenomenon of documented, yet still vulnerable, female migrant workers, this research conducts interviews with several former spa therapists who were working in Malaysia and some civil servants. This study highlights that individual or personal resistances could be a collective political struggles. Specifically, this research connects individual experiences with the bigger picture of social, economic, and political condition, which, together, constitutes a gender-based labor migration system. To do this, the research employs qualitative-interpretive research methods through discourse analysis and in-depth and open-ended interviews. It also employs an intersectional feminist approach to data analysis to reveal how Indonesian female migrant workers are marginalized and oppressed and the power dynamics at play.

This paper examines the intersections of faith, patriarchy, feminism, and institutional failure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Members of the faith believe the paternal structure of the organization is God's plan. The paper focuses on home, church, and the public sphere to provide a more complete understanding of the ways in which the practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints blur the lines between public and private and asks how women, most centrally the author, navigate contradictions in the doctrine and the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Finally, this paper examines the tension between critical thought from a feminist perspective and being a devout member in the eyes of the church.Data was collected and presented using interpretivist methodology, ethnography and autoethnography. The author draws upon her experience as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and examines the ways power is layered and instrumental to the patriarchal teachings which are often contradictory and in tension with women developing full personhood.

In the past decade, a significant shift has emerged around immigration policy, as advocates and policymakers have made various efforts to pass state and local policies related to immigrant integration or restrictions. This thesis offers original insights into current dynamics in immigration federalism through interviews with lawmakers and community activists in Arizona, a leading state when it comes to restricting the lives of undocumented immigrants. Advancing a new framework that connects the lived experience of officials and activists to partisanship, policy, key events, demographics, and racializing events, this thesis bridges isolated bodies of scholarship on immigration and seeks to demonstrate how every person (not just immigrant) are part of America’s current challenges to become a more inclusive nation of immigrants.