The hijra community individuals are one of the most neglected and underprivileged sexual minority groups in Bangladesh. Historically this community has been excluded from mainstream society and was compelled to live and work in separate communal spaces. However, new policies of inclusion implemented by government and non-government organizations have resulted in many hijra individuals leaving their communities. In this research, I focused on how the hijra individuals of Bangladesh come out of their hijra communities to find work and accommodation in mainstream society. Based on 11 in-depth ethnographic field interviews and qualitative data analysis, I found that after leaving the community, the hijra individuals living in Dhaka enter a gendered borderland where they occupy a unique outsider-within position. They undertake different survival strategies to survive amongst harsh socio-economic conditions intersected by multiple modes of discrimination such as maintaining a new guru (leader) for social protection, developing support networks, and redefining their gender identity as ‘transgender,' provide the tools to survive life outside their community. Through these findings, I reflect on the ways poor sexual minority groups such as the hijra survive and use their limited resources to find access to housing and informal work. These findings will add to the …

The purpose of this study is to determine social factors that influence help seeking behaviors by mothers who are concurrently involved in two social service systems: Child Protective Services (CPS) and family violence advocacy programs. Through the application of the behavioral model (of service use) for vulnerable populations, this study seeks to determine predisposing, enabling and need characteristics that impact help seeking behaviors at a family violence agency after participation in an ADVANCE (Acknowledging Domestic Violence and Navigating Child Protection Effectively) course, a group intervention class developed specifically for women involved with CPS. The research design is a mixed-method approach with an ADVANCE course evaluation embedded within the overall analysis of help seeking behaviors. The analytic strategies include pre-test/post-test means comparisons through paired t-tests, qualitative thematic analysis through arts-based methodology, and ordinary least squares and logistic regression analysis. This study considers six outcome variables related to protective help seeking behaviors: seeking services, seeking protective actions related to children, seeking a safety plan, seeking a protective order, seeking safe housing, and seeking financial independence. Several social factors identified influenced help seeking behaviors amongst child welfare involved women experiencing violence, namely, number of children, age of children, level of interest in services, …

This dissertation investigates the My Stealthy Freedom (MSF) movement, an online movement against mandatory hijab laws in Iran, building on two leading lead social movements' theories, political processes and framing processes theories. Study 1 explores the utility of a tactical approach for explaining the movement's pace of insurgency. I employ a conceptual repertoire focused upon the political process model's core concepts of tactical innovation and tactical adaptations, supplementing these older concepts with the more recently proposed concept of tactical freeze and a newly proposed concept of tactical hashtags that is of particular relevance to online movements. Study 2 focuses on extracting hidden patterns and emotional characteristics in the MSF movement by conducting a topic modeling study on the text appearing in the captions of the main account of the movement on Instagram. It was shown that the actions of Masih Alinejad, the founder of the movement, represented by her online activity and extracted by means of topic modeling, is directly affected by the sequence of important events happening in Iran concluding to a transformation of a social movement to political one. Study 3 models how social movements use social media in the formation of affective publics and apply this model …

In this study, I examine how an online cryptocurrency community discusses the issue of climate change. In particular, I examine distinctive themes present within discussions that occur on the r/CryptoCurrency forum hosted by reddit.com. Existing research has demonstrated that there are significant carbon emissions linked to cryptocurrency. However, cryptocurrency primarily exists as a peer-to-peer system, meaning that the individual perceptions of cryptocurrency adopters may provide insight into how to address the emissions problem. Using latent Dirichlet allocation and publicly available textual data from Reddit, I find that Reddit's cryptocurrency community engages in robust discussions pertaining to the energy needed to power cryptocurrency systems, most of which is generated from fossil fuels. Therefore, the discussions identified in this study suggest that the social aspect of cryptocurrency may be important when examining the links between cryptocurrency and climate change since they help identify what subjects related to climate change are important for this community.

With the proliferation of gender identity labels in the last twenty years, more individuals are identifying outside of a binary understanding of gender. Agender individuals are among this group, but we know very little about their experiences. Gender theorists have examined the ways that gender is performative and structural, but present theory does not provide the tools to understand the experiences of those outside of the binary, and even more so those who identify outside of gender altogether. To address this gap, I ask how agender individuals define their experience and how they navigate a binary gendered world. To answer these questions, I draw on 14 in-depth interviews with agender individuals as well as data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. First, I show the ways that agender individuals can understand this identity and how it shapes their experiences. Second, I develop a framework of four strategies (avoidance, advocacy, performance, and acquiescence) to analyze how agender individuals navigate gendered space. I concluded with a discussion of theoretical and empirical contributions as well as implications for future research.

This research advances the literature on interracial marriage by using variables that align with the social contact hypothesis. The purpose of this project is to accurately gauge the exact social predictors influencing current attitudes towards Black and White interracial marriage. Multiple regression models containing social contact predictors are analyzed using data from the 2018 General Social Survey. The conclusive review of the literature summarizes age, region, and education as essential social contact predictors of attitudes towards interracial marriage. Therefore, the formulated hypotheses and multiple regression models measure this specific relationship controlling for other predictors such as sex and income. For Whites, the two most significant factors are age and living in the south vs. the west. Interestingly, a college education is not significant. For Blacks, the key contact variable that seems to matter is age. Baby boomers are less likely to favor interracial marriage. Overall, results show areas of convergence. Therefore, one's age is significant predictor for White and Black acceptance. However, it also shows divergence-region appears to only matter for Whites. Accordingly, younger Blacks and Whites were more likely to favor close relatives marrying individuals of the opposite race. Older Blacks and Whites were less likely to support interracial …

City officials are in the position to adopt and implement policies within their jurisdiction that can have lasting impacts for businesses, people, and the environment. Sustainability research has highlighted the need to protect the environment by adopting policies which support the three E's of sustainable development (environment, equity, and economy). Stepping aside from the traditional mechanisms for building a successful city focused on economy first can be challenging for policy makers. The problem city officials face is that changes towards environmental protectionism have long been considered harder on city economy than traditional development focused on economic prosperity. Additionally, sustainability planning is thought to mitigate potential negative impacts that planning for environmental protectionism and social equity may have on economic prosperity. To examine this problem faced by city officials, ordinal regression analyses was used to analyze (1) the possible effects of environmental protectionism and social equity on a city's economic prosperity, and (2) whether sustainability planning has a moderating affect between environmental protectionism, social equity, and economic prosperity. This analysis demonstrates that environmental protectionism and social equity are not associated with a decline in economic prosperity. Sustainability planning was directly associated with increased economic prosperity but did not moderate the relationship …

The purpose of this study is to revisit the question of whether welfare benefit levels influence female headship, and whether the effect differs between the two main eras of welfare policy relevant to female headship, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). This study adds to the existing literature by including more up to date data allowing for a comparison between the AFDC and TANF eras. Results show that the effect of welfare benefits on female headship rates changes from negative to positive after welfare reform occurred among blacks, while no change occured among whites.

This dissertation consists of three chapters, aiming to analyze, understand and discuss how Turkish public opinion fluctuates on social media based on governmental actions and how that fluctuation affects the society and politics in Turkey. Using textual data from social media, I combined natural language processing techniques with statistical methods, to study how Turkish public opinion is shaped by governmental actions in various scenarios. In the first chapter, I created a social network of Twitter users to detect the differences in the extent of political polarization between pro-government and opposition voters during the June 2019 Istanbul mayoral election. The second chapter focuses on the stigmatization of a social/religious group in Turkey by government-driven labeling and terrorism designation. Word embeddings are used to pinpoint the offensive language and the hate campaign against the group, considering the labels that are used to identify the group. Finally, the third chapter examines the rally-around-the-flag effect during highly inciting moments like cross-border military operations. A corpus of tweets for each of the two Turkish cross-border military operations is analyzed using topic modeling and sentiment analysis to get a grasp of the rally effect and how the governments can benefit in internal matters from the changes …

In order to more fully inform moves toward equity in emergency management (EM), this research seeks to describe a general landscape of professional Tribal EM, and in particular, to examine how Tribal emergency managers and Tribal Nations are situated in relation to the EM enterprise (EME), and how they are doing resilience in their Tribal Nations. The findings presented in this dissertation reflect efforts to explore and document Tribal emergency managers' descriptions of their work and their perceptions about its context as they seek to do resilience in their Tribes. Specifically, qualitative interviews were conducted with Tribal emergency managers whose Tribal Nations span the United States. Findings indicate that there is significant variation among Tribal nations in terms of EM structures and capacities; Tribal emergency managers engage in a wide array of activities to promote resilience in their communities; and Tribal EM is becoming increasingly professionalized. Importantly, however, the research also uncovered a paradox in which Tribal emergency managers, both implicitly and explicitly excluded from the EME in many ways, find themselves doing resilience in the context of an increasingly popular disaster resilience paradigm that both increasingly shifts the burden of resilience to the local level, and expands the range …

This project examines refugees' experiences of insecure housing and perceptions of home in the U.S. Many scholars of migration have focused on the resettlement experiences of refugees, including access to housing, yet refugees' experiences with housing in the U.S. remain largely undocumented. The following analyzes a case study of an apartment fire that displaced 16 refugee families in Dallas, Texas. Based on 18 in-depth interviews with tenants and members of refugee support organizations and non-profits who responded to the fire, this study reconstructs the events surrounding the fire to explore refugees' perceptions of housing conditions in a low-income neighborhood. This case study contributes to research on housing in two important ways. First, insecure housing conditions preceded the fire at Oakland Place and overall perceptions of housing quality varied among respondents. I find that case managers and members of refugee support organizations identify refugees' housing conditions as insecure, yet refugees express positive feelings about their homes, emphasizing community relations over building quality. Additionally, members of refugee support organizations and non-profits blamed the property manager of Oakland Place for insecure conditions experienced by refugees and perceived the manager as a barrier in refugees' lives. Second, I find that understandings of housing insecurity …

This comparative case study examines the organizational variations in refugee services in Dallas and Amarillo, Texas. Engaging sociological theories of organizations, migration, and the state, this study conceptualizes immigrant-serving organizations as brokers that operate within fields of similar entities that channel resources and services to refugees. Drawing on 60 in-depth interviews and over two hundred hours of participant observation, this study finds two distinct models of resource brokerage. In Dallas, immigrant-serving organizations operated as networked resource brokers, characterized by high levels of collaboration, robust local political support, and community engagement through consistent volunteer labor. These characteristics facilitated the sharing of resources and knowledge, resulting in the establishment of more professionalized services for immigrants and refugees. In contrast, immigrant-serving organizations in Amarillo operated as atomized resource brokers, characterized by fragmented collaborations, inter-organizational competition, limited volunteer labor, and varying levels of political support from local representatives. This atomized brokerage model hindered the efficient allocation of resources and support, leading to fragmented and less comprehensive services for refugees. In conclusion, this study provides valuable insights into the variations within the organizational fields of ISOs in Texas. The comparative analysis of Dallas and Amarillo offers a nuanced understanding of the impact of local context …

The purpose of this research study was to conduct an exploration of the dating preferences of African American women and U.S. men between the ages of 30-74 years old. This research focuses on the dating preferences and desirability of African American women and if they are influential on the high unmarried rates of African American women. A weighted stratified sampling of 2,800 personal advertisements of African American, Asian, Latino and White men and women from Match.com were collected to conduct the research. The five research hypotheses of this study were tested using frequency and percentage distribution, logistic regression and cross-tabulation models. The findings partially support the hypotheses African American women are more likely to prefer a mate with a bachelor's degree or higher and African American women are more likely to prefer a mate of the same race compared to U.S. women of other races. The findings also suggested non-African American men are less likely to have an interest in dating African American women and non-African American men, who are interested in dating African American women, are less likely to prefer women with a bachelor's degree or higher or a more socially desirable body type.

The #noDAPL movement was an Indigenous-led environmental social movement occurring between 2015 and 2017, in which the Standing Rock Sioux and other American Indian tribes comprising the Oceti Sakowin garnered support to oppose the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Pipeline opponents agreed that the pipeline's construction posed a threat to the health and safety of tribal members and other residents of the area and that the pipeline's path crossed previously-designated tribal treaty boundaries, compromising tribal sovereignty. In this body of work, I utilize Facebook data from the Sacred Stone Camp Facebook page to locate and identify collective action frames and core framing tasks, adhering to social movement framing theory. Further, I provide insight into the movement's most used collective action frames and how their use enabled to movement to maintain occupation at protest camps along the Missouri River, garner resources from participants and gain international social support. I also draw on concepts of pan-Indianism and supratribalism to discuss indigenous collective identity, as well as concepts like relational values and Indigenous traditional knowledge to better assess the nuances of Indigenous environmental activism and how this movement evoked discussions of modern day settler colonialism.

This qualitative case study aims to understand the ways in which students identifying as Native American, American Indian, and Indigenous navigate attending a university informed by their identities. Through semi-structured interviews with Indigenous students and participant observation with a Native American student organization, this study identified how this demographic of students navigate and conceptualize their identities as Native and Indigenous peoples, the benefits of joining a Native American student organization on their university campus, and how they experience the university as a racialized organization. One overarching and three nuanced research questions were examined to illustrate how students' identities inform how they experience university life with themes surrounding Native and Indigenous identity construction informed by federal policy and Indigenous community practices, collective identity and student involvement, sense of belonging at college, and understanding universities as racial organizations that participate in racial capitalism. The study findings indicated that students' identities are regularly negotiated, engaged with, and leveraged throughout their college experiences and recommendations were made for how colleges and universities can more adequately and equitably serve this student demographic.

In the last few years, the world has been gripped by a crisis of forced migration and displaced persons. Being forced migrants, asylum-seekers are a unique and diverse population, originating from many countries with different backgrounds and experiences. This makes fulfilling the information needs of the asylum community difficult. Online participatory platforms, such as blogs and discussion forums, are flexible, adaptive information resources that could be used to meet the diverse needs of this population. In this study, I compare two online resources used by asylum-seekers, a blog and discussion forum, using social network analysis and topic modeling techniques. Through these analyses, I have determined the conversational archetype the best reflects both websites and discovered the information needs expressed and, in many cases, resolved through conversations in these online spaces. The core finding of this study is that providing direct access to an expert, such as through an interactive blog, promotes dialogue on a greater variety of topics and increases the likelihood of a thorough response. Furthermore, blog posts may inform participants' comments by providing them with the necessary vocabulary to participate fully in the online setting.

Highly educated and skilled Indian nationals are the largest recipients of H-1B visas in the US. An employer must be willing to sponsor an H-1B work visa for the worker to continue to live and work in the US. This stipulation has granted US employers unprecedented power over H-1B visa holders, which can be understood as status coercion; employers have state-sanctioned power to threaten or discharge a worker from their status, i.e., visa status, which interconnects work and migration status. While the expansive power of employers to curtail a worker's status is one factor driving the ongoing coercive conditions, the other factor is precarious work. There is a gap in the literature in understanding what occurs at the intersection of status coercion and precarious work, especially within high-skilled information technology (IT) jobs. For instance, how does status coercion operate for employer-sponsored H-1B visa holders? Is it similar for dependent visa workers on H-4 EAD visas that rely on their spouse's H-1B, and F-1 OPT visa workers who have employment authorization from USCIS? Lastly, do these visa workers ever resist status coercion? In this study, I draw on twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews of Indian nationals in the IT sector on H-1B, …

Affirmative action policies have been a popular topic in U.S. media since their inception in the Civil Rights Act 1964. Previous studies note that race, gender, and political identity are known influencers of support for affirmative action policies; however, this dissertation analyzes the mediating effects of perceived experiences of discrimination in the workplace on a person's level of support for the preferential hiring and promotion of Black Americans based on the intersection of the race, gender, and political identity. Through social dominance theory (SDT), this dissertation highlights the motivations people may have in support or opposition of affirmative action, especially for Black Americans. Due to the historical lineage of African Americans in the U.S., stereotypes about Black people's work ethic have continued to be mostly negative-which inform hiring, promotion, and admission procedures today. Using the General Social Survey (GSS) to conduct regression and mediation analysis, this dissertation found significant support for mediation of perceived experiences to increase support for affirmative action among white females, and Black people regardless of gender or political identity. While race and gender discrimination were thought to be the most influencing forms of discrimination experienced, age discrimination showed to transcend racial, gender, and political barriers. Accordingly, …

Empirical studies have shown that white racial attitudes tend to predict racial policy support. It has also been established that the relationship between whites' espoused racial tolerance and their support for ameliorative racial policies is imperfect, due to the principal-policy gap which characterized misalignment between individuals' espoused values for racial equity and their limited support for policies aimed at achieving those ends. Less consideration however, has been given to how the principal-policy gap changes over time. Using data from over 14,000 respondents who participated in the General Social Survey from 1994 through 2018, I show that the principal-policy gap is persistent, and that distances between principal and policy decline and expand over time. Using OLS regression models to analyze a sample of white adults, I find that the link between individuals' expressed liberal racial attitudes and their support for racial policies changed over the 24-year span. A noticeable narrowing of the principal-policy gap is also evident in the latter years of the sample. The reduction in the gap from 2014 through 2018 suggests that the influence of social movements like BLM may have been driving this trend.

Hispanic American Catholics are a growing immigrant population in the United States, with Hispanic cultures and Catholicism woven together in unique ways. This situation presents a window through which can be examined the dynamic between individualism and religiosity. Four logistic regression models were estimated utilizing data from the Pew Research Center 2013 Survey of U.S. Latinos, in order to investigate the correlates of Hispanic American Catholic support for women in the Catholic priesthood. Religious individualism (self-determination) was measured in two dimensions, while cultural individualism (acculturation) was measured in one dimension. The first three regression models test three hypotheses related to religious and cultural individualism, while the fourth model factors in all of the variables used. Findings generally supported the saliency of religious individualism over against the hierarchal dogma of the Catholic Church, but not the saliency of cultural individualism. However, findings also exposed the complexities inherent in both Catholic religiosity and acculturation among Hispanic American Catholics.

Student loan debt continues to be an issue in the U.S., with potential long-term effects on loan repayment and potential wealth accumulation. In particular, minorities face barriers in the educational system and accruing wealth. Hispanics occupy a middling position in the U.S. racial hierarchy. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 geocode data, in this study I examined how Hispanic-White differences in student debt change over time and how student debt influences wealth. In addition, I accounted for immigration status via parents' nativity status to investigate debt burdens and subsequent wealth for these respondents. I used hierarchical linear growth models to examine debt growth over time and linear decomposition to examine Hispanic-White differences in wealth accumulation and the impact of student debt on these differences. While findings were largely statistically insignificant, I found that Hispanics tended to start with less debt than their White counterparts and that student debt initially grew for both groups. However, White respondents pay off their debt more quickly than Hispanics. In addition, I found that the wealth gap between White and Hispanic respondents grew significantly between the ages of 20 and 35. While Hispanics tended to start with less debt, my findings suggest that …

This project examined the effects of threat perceptions and group empathy on racial outgroup attitudes. The relationship between threat perception and increased racial prejudice has been well established within the literature, but the effect of group empathy within this dynamic has been largely undocumented. The following study utilizes data from the American National Election Study 2020 Time Series to analyze racial outgroup attitudes among subsamples of Blacks (n = 726), Hispanics (n = 762), and Whites (n = 5,962). Along with threat perception, group empathy was found to be a salient predictor of outgroup attitudes. These results suggest that an effective technique to reduce negative outgroup attitudes would aim to reduce perceptions of outgroups as threatening and increase group empathy.

The appeal of moral panic studies, a once very popular sociological subfield, dropped precipitously around the turn of the century due in large part to debates about disproportionality, the notion a panicked group's concern about a perceived threat exceeds that warranted by its objective harmfulness. Classic theorists claim disproportionality is a panic's essential criterion and that it can be demonstrated by comparing a group's concerned reaction to the available facts. Critics argue it is a value-laden, ideologically tainted construct and often claim it cannot be demonstrated because there are no authoritative facts. These debates were and still are fraught with confusion. Perplexingly, both sides assume a shared definition despite clearly assessing the proportionality of different aspects of the relevant reaction. A typology differentiating the potential types of disproportionality either does not exist in the moral panic literature or remains shrouded in obscurity. In this paper, I review the classic theories, their critiques, and a new postmodern moral panic theory. By juxtaposing the different foci of the orthodox and contemporary theories, I derive a much-needed disproportionality typology. I also develop a new framework through which to assess moral panics predicated on this typology. My hope is these developments will stimulate a …

Drawing on in-depth, semistructured interviews with 42 nonbinary-identified individuals in Texas, I examine both the relationship between pronouns and identity and how individuals use pronouns in interaction. Some individuals speak about their pronoun set as a crucial component of their gender identity, adopting what I refer to as an essential expression strategy, while others discuss their pronoun set as more loosely connected to their non-binary identity, adopting what I refer to as a flexible expression strategy. Whether an individual adopts an essential or flexible expression strategy informs pronoun use in a particular context. Specifically, I find that respondents adopting an essential expression strategy are more likely to emotionally invest in using/enforcing a particular pronoun set and report strong emotions from the use of correct or incorrect pronouns in interaction. In contrast, respondents adopting a flexible expression approach are less emotionally invested in a particular pronoun set. As a result, these respondents are more likely to defer pronoun choice to the audience and prioritize the ease of interaction with less emotional consequences.