Afro-Latina women experience over-sexualization within contemporary society in ways that their white, female counterparts do not experience. Since the Reconstruction era, black women have been stereotyped as being promiscuous and oversexed. These sexualized stereotypes have carried weight within society for generations and have begun to encroach on other minority races, such as Latina women. Within their novels, The Bluest Eye and The Poet X, Toni Morrison and Elizabeth Acevedo do not shy away from discussing sex, sexualized stereotypes, and how sex impacts young women of color. Instead, they have confronted over-sexualization in their coming-of-age novels about Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl living in Loraine, Ohio during the 1940s, and Xiomara Batista, a young Dominican teenager living in Harlem, New York during the 2000s. Both authors utilize the complicated world of a teenage girl in a society that is accepting of negative sexualized stereotypes and challenge the over-sexualization through their main characters. This thesis analyzes how both authors confront the over-sexualization of Afro-Latina women to give a voice to young women who may be suffering in silence, and who are struggling to navigate a world that tells them they are only valued for what their body can give to a man.

The widespread use of smartphones has made it easier to browse the internet and consume various forms of media, including videos and advertisements. This study aimed to investigate the effects of restricting video access while increasing exposure to advertisements. Specifically, we examined whether participants would watch fewer videos when exposed to more advertisements and whether they would tolerate more ads to gain additional video-watching time. We recruited four students from Salem State University to participate in an experiment designed to manipulate their video and advertisement viewing behavior. Baseline levels of advertisement and video viewing behaviors were measured to create two conditions of disequilibrium: Deficit and Excess. Deficit conditions restricted access to videos while Excess conditions bombarded participants with more advertisements than they viewed during baseline. The results demonstrated that disequilibrium could alter participants' media consumption habits by increasing or decreasing time spent watching advertisements and videos. The current study also examined the nature of “browsing” during disequilibrium. Noncontingent browsing was available to determine whether or not participants would engage in this alternative behavior during disequilibrium conditions. Lastly, the current study highlights the ethical implications of disequilibrium, as companies could potentially exploit it for profit.

My Garden (Book) is a collection of essays by Jamica Kincaid. In My Garden (Book) rememory is part of the storytelling and the overall narrative structure. Rememory appears as a recursive happening that allows Kincaid space to return to the historical record to offer recovery. Rememory is present in Kincaid's connection to Antiguan botany and a past that flourishes in the modern present; it exists as a bridge upon which much of the western African diaspora flows. Rememory is also present in the narrative structure of My Garden (Book). Kincaid shakes up the expectations of a narrative form; she breaks sentence structure with thought interruptions, jumps through time and place, inserts lists, and letters, and disrupts categorization and order, such as chapter titles. Rememory becomes an active agent in the narrative storytelling of the garden, excavates otherwise forgotten narratives, and demands a change in thinking, form, and the historical record.

Previous research has demonstrated that the morphology and linear arrays of extrusive volcanic features indicate the presence and orientations of the magmatic constructs that feed them. In extensional tectonic environments, like the East African Rift (EAR), trends of these subsurface dikes can be controlled by inherited lithospheric structures or by the direction of applied stress. Mapping extrusive volcanic features with remote sensing allows for detailed geo-spatial analysis that can reveal valuable data regarding the state of stress in the region or the presence of pre-existing fractures and other lithospheric structures. Mt Marsabit, Kenya (2.32°N, 37.97°E) is a basaltic shield volcano located on the eastern edge of the Turkana Depression in Northern Kenya. The Turkana Depression is a topographical low area of extensional deformation linking the Main Ethiopian Rift (MER) and the Kenya Rift, characterized by a very thin rifted lithosphere (50-60 km; Fishwick, 2010; Kounoudis et al., 2021). While there is typically a predominant north-south orientation of structural and volcanic features in the EAR, some features in east Turkana (e.g. the Dilo-Durkana, Mega, and Hurri Hills volcanic fields) demonstrate superficial NE-SW trends, oblique to the main rift trend. The monogenetic volcanic field situated on Mt Marsabit is no exception and hosts hundreds of tuff cones and maar craters exhibiting an apparent NE-SW trend. The cause of these trends is so far unknown. Here we present data from the mapping and analysis of extrusive volcanic features on Mt Marsabit in an effort to improve our understanding of the tectonic and structural controls on crustal magma transport in this off-axis region of rifting. Analysis of the morphology of these features is performed in ArcGIS Pro while alignments of these features are analyzed in MATLAB. Previously published geological maps are also examined. This volcanic field exhibits a strong northeast-southwest trend in both morphology and linear arrays. Similar trends are observed in other volcanic fields in the eastern extent of the Turkana Depression. The obliquely oriented dikes in these fields may be a result of a combination of controls: en-echelon deformation zones associated with a component of strike-slip deformation; and a rotation of the local stress field.

This thesis follows the adolescent life of Sofia Perez, who acquires a job for the first time at 15 years old. She documents her first experience within the working world in this piece, and also discusses relationships she has made along the way. Over the course of seven years, she blossoms from a shy introvert, to an outgoing and positive spirit. She dives into the good and bad of the workplace, as well as how her strong work ethic has made her the person she is today. From hyperventilating on the first day, to leading a team with ease, Sofia is at the beginning of her career, and ready to find her place in the working world. Her journey started at a retirement community called Bayview, and the six years she spent there were transformative. She hopes for every young teen getting a job for the first time to experience a job that they love, even if it may challenge them or not be in their desired field.

The first five chapters from the book A Key Without A Lock.

This thesis focuses on the concept of liminality and the presence of liminal states in José Saramago’s trilogy of novels, Blindness, All the Names, and The Cave. Defined by qualities of disorientation and ambiguity, liminality speaks to being in a state of “in-between,” which, I argue, is applicable to the central characters in each of these texts. Specifically, I examine how Saramago’s characters experience these liminal states, as well the qualities of the liminal states themselves, which share many - though not all - of the same characteristics as labyrinths and caves. To that end, I trace the liminal journeys of the central characters in each novel, the actions required to successfully complete their journeys, and how the culmination of these journeys manifest as an achievement of change engendered by realization, epiphany, and clarity of consciousness. This thesis is divided into three chapters, bookended by introduction and conclusion. In the first chapter, I detail the history of liminality and define the “liminal state” and “liminal subject.” I also discuss how Saramago’s characters can be considered liminal subjects, and the events that precipitate the characters’ entrances into their respective liminal states. The second chapter features the analysis of the beginning stages of the characters’ liminal journeys - the “descents into darkness and the “confrontations with death” - and introduces the concept of “concentric liminality,” as well as the parallels between liminality and symbolic existence. The third chapter explores the final stage of the liminal journey, the “ascension to light,” and the processes by which the characters can achieve their transformations and exit their liminal states.

This thesis examines texts by two queer Indigenous writers, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree) and Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen), to consider how writing about the self—what the Western literary canon commonly terms “memoir” or “autobiography”—is a form of healing in the afterlife of settler-colonialism. Through close readings of Belcourt’s essay collection A History of My Brief Body and Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, this thesis explores how Belcourt and Miranda both invent and reclaim the Indigenous self through the construction of metaphorical mosaics which, in their assembled wholeness, reflect a kind of “living through” of colonialism. Within this framework, this thesis goes on to argue that the stories of the self crafted by Belcourt and Miranda effectively reconstruct the queer Indigenous embodied self, writing against the colonial imagination with assertions of non-heteronormative sexual desire.

In 2008, as I prepared for a travel-study trip led by Salem State University Professors Christopher E. Mauriello and Stephen Matchak to parts of France and Belgium where the Western Front of World War I had been, I found a list of the men from my hometown, Beverly, Massachusetts, who had died in military service during that war. I was struck by two things. First, the names on the list included many names that were on street corners, bridges, parks, and athletic fields that I had used and passed by nearly every day of my life, never knowing why those names were affixed. Second, judging by the surnames, the men represented a wide array of ethnic backgrounds. I knew that Beverly at the time of World War I had a diverse economic and ethnic composition. It was home to both a world-leading factory and to the residences of some of the wealthiest families in the United States. Old Yankee money shared the City with the immigrants and children of immigrants who mainly worked tended the great estates or in a gigantic factory. Those immigrants and children of immigrants were participants and descendants of the participants in the massive waves of immigration that the United States had received in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For men of my generation, the heavy hand of the Vietnam War draft had not fallen equally on all, though I was among the lucky ones with a draft lottery number that guaranteed I would never be called. Like some of America’s earlier wars, Vietnam had seemed like a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight. I wondered how the diverse group of Beverly men had come to be in the World War I army; had they served willingly, by a draft, or both. That curiosity set me on the course that produced this thesis, which is an attempt to answer two questions: 1) Why did the United States adopt a draft, despite long-standing tradition of using mainly volunteer war-time forces and adverse experience with the draft? and 2) Did anti-immigrant feeling very strong at the time affect who was sent to war?