How do Queer Black Women make sense of their experiences within educational settings? How do they engage in space-making? How do educational settings protect Black Queer Women's bodies? Through a series of in-depth interviews with individuals that identify as, are labeled by others as, or previously identified as Queer Black Women, I found that participants understood their lived experiences intersectionality and understood their experiences in educational settings as critical to their self-development. Participants described race, sexuality, and gender as overlapping systems of oppression that negatively affected their experiences within educational settings. Not only did participants experience discrimination due to their race or gender, but also due to their sexuality. This seen and/or invisible identity leads them to experience multiple axes of oppression, not only inflicted by peers and teachers, but also the institutions. The findings have implications for theories of intersectionality and queer of color critique.

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).

This thesis examines the social determinants of Alt-Right activity and provides an empirical assessment of whether the Alt-Right is influenced by social processes similar to those explaining participation in traditional white supremacist organizations. Using Internet search data from all counties in the United States (U.S.) between 2017 and 2018, I examine the effect of various county-level variables on search volume for Alt-Right content. Results indicate that the determinants of Alt-Right activity systematically differ from what one would expect for conventional racist groups. I find that counties with larger percentages of college graduates, of highly educated non-white and immigrant groups, and higher poverty levels for college graduates tend to have a higher search volume for Alt-Right content. Overall, these findings suggest that, in marked contrast to traditional hate organizations—the Alt-Right’s constituency is comprised predominantly of affluent, college-educated individuals.

People who have been incarcerated struggle to find access to quality housing in the United States, which leads to over 600,000 people a year facing an extreme housing crisis with an increased risk of homelessness. People who have been incarcerated face barriers that keep them from securing employment, earning an income, and gaining financial stability, which can have a major impact on housing quality and home ownership. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this thesis examines ex-offenders’ access to quality housing and the impact incarceration has on home ownership. Results from Ordinary Least Squares regression indicate that households of fathers who have been incarcerated are at higher risk of living in poor quality housing compared to households of fathers who have never been incarcerated. Likewise, results of logistic regression analysis revealed that the odds of owning a home were lower for households in which the father had been incarcerated than for families in which the father had not been incarcerated.

This creative project offers an in-depth interpersonal narrative within the creation and process of utilizing art as a form of political resistance. This project will be exploring how political resistance has been utilized within the African American community for the uses of self-preservation and protection. This project will first offer an in-depth analysis within Civil Rights Movements and the systematic context associated within, then will be utilizing personal poetry, narrative to offer a glimpse of prison life that the American public does not usually hear from the prisoners themselves.

Additional Media File: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a_xql-uNSY&authuser=0