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.

Since the late-19th century, academic researchers, nonprofits, and law enforcement have organized in coalition to combat the problem of human trafficking in the United States, while distorting the social consequences of their interventions. This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical examination of the anti-trafficking movement in Arizona. In addition to conducting archival research, data was collected through direct observations of academics, local nonprofit leaders, and law enforcement at anti-trafficking events that were open to the public. By examining vast, invisible anti-trafficking coalitions in Arizona from the 20th century to today, it becomes clear that coalitions garner power and profit by facilitating the criminalization of sex workers and offering support for other groups, most notably Mormon polygamists, whose religious practices can be tantamount to trafficking. Combining Charles Mills’ (2007) concept of white ignorance and the nonprofit industrial complex (INCITE!, 2009), this study draws on literature from critical race theory and feminist theory to interrogate how Christo-fascist discourses of the 19th century white slavery movement continue to guide anti-trafficking coalitions in the contemporary United States. As a social formation in which bourgeois white women have always held influence, this exploration of anti-trafficking activism pivots around political, economic, and cultural conceptions of white Christian women’s capacity to reproduce the white race in the United States which has been since its foundation a Christian nation. In turn, there is limited scope and depth of awareness about the complexity of race, gender, class, agency, in relation to the problems associated with trafficking in Short Creek, Arizona, as well as the interventions that were implemented in response to human trafficking following the reign of Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints’ Prophet, Warren Jeffs. In documenting and analyzing the organizing strategies of professional actors responding to human trafficking between 2016-2021, results generated from this research suggest that the anti-trafficking movement’s discourses are steeped in contradiction, to the effect of reproducing racial capitalism and necessitating the eradication of the trafficking framework. It reveals how the differential treatment of agency among trafficking victims in different communities, whether the women and children in polygamous families, or sex workers in Phoenix, has enabled their ongoing exploitation.

This dissertation examines pro-immigrants' rights activism and advocacy among middle-class White women in and around Phoenix, Arizona, in order to analyze these activists' understandings and enactments of their racialized and gendered citizenship. This project contributes a wealth of qualitative data regarding the operation of race, gender, class, (dis)ability, sexuality, and community in the daily lives and activism of White women pro-immigrants' rights advocates, collected largely through formal and informal interviewing in conjunction with in-depth participant observation. Using a feminist, intersectional analytical lens, and drawing upon critical race studies, Whiteness studies, and citizenship theory, this dissertation ultimately finds that White women face thornily difficult ethical questions about how to wield the rights entailed in their citizenship and their White privilege on behalf of marginalized Latinx non-citizens. This project ultimately argues that the material realities and racial consequences of being a White woman participating in (im)migrants’ rights work in the borderlands means living with the contradiction that one’s specific and intersectionally mediated status as a White woman citizen contributes to and further reifies the gendered system of White supremacy that functions to the direct detriment of the (im)migrants one seeks to assist, while simultaneously endowing one with the advantages and privileges of Whiteness, which together furnish the social capital necessary to challenge that same system of their behalf. The dissertation contends that White women committed to pro-(im)migrants’ rights advocacy and antiracism writ large must reckon with the source of their gendered and racialized citizenship and interrogate to what complicated and unforeseen ends they wield the Master’s tools against the Master’s house. In doing so, the project makes the case that White women's lives, as well as their experiences of citizenship and activism, are inherently and fundamentally intersectional and should be analyzed as such by scholars in Women's and Gender Studies.

People going through homelessness in the contemporary U.S. struggle with a number of dehumanizing challenges. Even as some attempt to secure employment and end their homelessness, they may run into difficulties because they have been Othered to such a significant level. They have effectively been left out of society because of their lack of participation in its dominant activity as prescribed by market fundamentalism, the creation and exchange of goods. The following thesis seeks to explore the experience of homelessness for those within a homeless shelter environment in an economic-focused society. It utilizes Midrash Social Research Methodology (MSRM) to focus on the voice of the person going through homelessness, the marginalized Other. It relies on the phenomenology of the 20th-Century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in an effort to explore the meaning and knowledge to be found in conversations held with the Other. The goal of this thesis is to propose a purposeful refocusing on service through conversation. The issue of homelessness is multi-faceted and its causes are as diverse as the people who experience it. Service providers in particular must engage those being Othered, and they must provide support in ways that allow for pluralistic realities, not prescribing singular means of ending homelessness.