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 dissertation explores how Sub-Saharan African women now resettled in the United States learn about sex. Prior to the colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa, extended family members such as paternal aunts and grandmothers were responsible for sexuality education for both men and women. Sexuality education often began at puberty and continued across the life span. This sexuality education covered menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, child spacing and sexual pleasure. However, during colonization sexuality education was moved out of the hands of family members and community members and was now offered in schools. This school-based sexuality education was further disrupted by migration from Sub-Saharan Africa to the United States. Using a qualitative thematic analysis, I explore how sexuality education changed first with colonialism, through migration, and to resettlement in the United States. I then explore how, beginning with puberty, Sub-Saharan African refugee and immigrant women learn about menstruation and sex, and the role of social media in their sex lives. I highlight the role of consistent and comprehensive sexuality education of women in understanding and experiencing their menstruation. Additionally, I discuss how Sub-Saharan African women learn about sex and pleasure from both male and female peers. And finally, I illustrate how Sub-Saharan African women create culturally relevant and religiously specific online counterpublics to discuss and learn about sex. Understanding how Sub-Saharan African immigrant women learn about sex has implications for sexuality education policy in the United States and the role of pleasure in sexual and reproductive health.

Music is an integral part of a community's identity, and music streaming has changed the way in which people interact with popular music as a whole. While significant research has been done regarding how streaming services have impacted the way users engage with music, little has been done to account for how streaming has changed the creation of new music. Additionally, globalization in music results in unique hybrid genres rather than complete adoption of global culture, making it hard to measure the global impact on regional sounds, as chart diversity alone cannot account for this unique interaction. This research addresses this gap in literature by utilizing Spotify’s audio features to analyze regional popular music characteristics from 2010 through 2020 using the Top 100 tracks from the global, Korean, and Japanese charts. It then observes whether the chart data demonstrates a convergence or divergence in relation to the musical attributes of global popular music and the growth of music streaming, and if it is reflecting a globalization effect. The results suggest that local artists reflect global trends in already globalized markets, and that streaming may be having a heterogenization effect on popular music. Additionally, the data also suggests that observing the musical characteristics of a region may be able to measure how globalized a region's music culture is, allowing for the observation of globalization beyond looking at chart diversity and instead observing the music characteristics of domestic artists.

Increasing misinformation in social media channels has become more prevalent since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as countless myths and rumors have circulated over the internet. This misinformation has potentially lethal consequences as many people make important health decisions based on what they read online, thus creating an urgent need to combat it. Although many Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been used to identify misinformation in text, prompt-based methods are under-studied for this task. This work explores prompt learning to classify COVID-19 related misinformation. To this extent, I analyze the effectiveness of this proposed approach on four datasets. Experimental results show that prompt-based classification achieves on average ~13% and ~6% improvement compared to a single-task and multi-task model, respectively. Moreover, analysis shows that prompt-based models can achieve competitive results compared to baselines in a few-shot learning scenario.

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.

The basis of social power which has expanded in the most dangerous way over the last few decades has been that of information control, and how that control is used. Misinformation and the intentional spread of misinformation referred to as disinformation, has become commonplace among various bodies of power to either expand their own influence or diminish opposing influence. The methods of disinformation utilized in the various spheres of politics, the commercial marketplace, and the media today are explored in depth to better contextualize and describe the problems that disinformation and its use pose in the world today.

The ongoing Red for Ed movement in Arizona sparks an interesting discussion on its place as a social movement. This thesis examines the movement in close detail, particularly in regard to how it fits within the social movement literature’s insider/outsider framework. While partisanship is clearly important for understanding movement successes and failures, this study goes beyond party to explore through the case of Arizona how teacher movements are constrained by 1) teacher associations that operate as outsiders to state politics and 2) school districts that isolate the problem priorities (funding; teacher pay) from gaining large-scale public reaction that can be leveraged to change state policy. In short, I show how teacher movements face significant institutional barriers that localize their messaging and prevent insider access from state politics.

The “filter bubble” has been a heated discussion topic since several years ago. In addition to possible algorithmic contribution to this phenomenon, people’s selective exposure tendency may be another primary cause of the “filter bubble” on social media. Prior research indicates that, under the influence of selective exposure tendency, people tend to perceive pro-attitudinal news as more credible than counter-attitudinal news, with strong partisans more likely to be affected. The proposed thesis seeks to examine whether the perceived credibility of a news source and story on social media is influenced by selective exposure and strength of partisanship. Through an experimental study via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, 468 participants chose or were assigned to read an ostensible news story from a social media feed with the news source and ideological slant varied between participants. The results showed that people reported higher perceived source and story credibility when the source and stories were pro-attitudinal (consistent with their political ideology) as opposed to counter-attitudinal, regardless of participants’ age, race, perceived credibility of news from social media, in general, and strength of partisanship. However, contrary to the hypotheses, selective exposure behavior (i.e., choosing a preferred news source before reading a news story) did not affect credibility perceptions when participants read counter-attitudinal news from a pro-attitudinal source. Last, strength of partisanship did not moderate the influence of selective exposure on credibility perceptions. In sum, this study suggests that although selective exposure tendency may affect people’s credibility perceptions and contribute to “filter bubbles,” the impact of selective exposure behavior may be overestimated in terms of perceived source and story credibility of news on social media.

This project seeks to explore how organizations work toward refugee and immigrant integration through forming different types of coalitions and strategic networks. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to identify when coalitions emerge between refugee organizations and immigrant rights groups in order to examine their development, from how the coalitions broadly conceive of refugee and immigrant rights, to how they organize resources and information sharing, service provision, policy advocacy, and policy implementation. The project is guided by the question: What explains the formation of coalitions that advocate for both immigrant rights and refugee rights? Through examining the formation and development of these coalitions, this thesis engages at the intersections of immigration federalism, refugee studies and human rights scholarship to reveal deeper complexities in the politics of immigrant integration. The project sharpens these three scholarly intersections by three multi-level jurisdictions – California and Arizona in the United States and Athens in Greece – and by employing comparative analysis to unpack how national governments and federalism dynamics shape coalition building around immigrant integration.