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The objective of this study was to better understand what aspects of place and curriculum influence experiences for underserved youth in an environmental education program. For instance, how can environmental education managers create program experiences that maintain depth and focus, while honoring the unique ways students connect and find meaning with the natural world? (Paper 1) Next, how is student stewardship identity in nature affected by curriculum and programming? (Paper 2) Lastly, what are the place-based learning affordances in specific locations and with specific curricula? (Paper 3) To better understand this, I studied five cohorts of high school students each year for 5 years (the fourth year is excluded in this paper due to the program undergoing an alternative schedule during the 2020 pandemic) in a place based, service-learning, environmental career-pathways education program for underrepresented students in Colorado. This program was unique in that it took students to five service-learning locations where the experiences were differently structured. This allowed an examination of what elements of place and curriculum impacted the student experience. I used a mixed-methods approach that included surveys and ethnography (interviews, observations, field notes taken while embedded as an active participant). Surveys were designed to evaluate curriculum affordances for the participants and were aligned with local (Thorne Nature Center) and regional (Colorado Environmental Education Guidelines) recommendations for teaching to the whole person. This research provides insights about how student nature connecting experiences both prior to and during environmental education programs can help foster stewardship identity development. Further, this research can bridge research to practice to inform curriculum development and evaluation design by highlighting how culturally responsive programming can integrate unique affordances of specific places with the funds of knowledge and experiences that students bring to the experience. These findings encourage curriculum co-design for culturally responsive pedagogy and equitable evaluation so programs and the students they serve receive the impact and value required for a meaningful environmental education program experience. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

There has been little work on entangled intra-actions, or the simultaneous constitution of subjectivities and performances, between these discursive and material understandings of racial difference in higher learning. As a result, research and practice endorse a binary narrative either privileging discursive constructivism (looking to what discourses signify as basis for critique) or materialism (looking to how discourses emerge and work). Without adequate analysis of the content that inheres relational/pedagogical events that broach racial difference, including bodies, spaces, orientations, discourses, and objects, we foreclose opportunities to think carefully of the complex ethics and politics of living within the uneven distributions of precarious life. My project addresses this gap by analyzing the intra-actions of varied becomings (myself and with my students) around diversity work in the present conjuncture of political emergency. Through a rhizomatic (auto) ethnographic and philosophical bricolage with examination of the contexts, processes, and activities of doing diversity work in institutional or disciplinary learning spaces, I argue that many engagements with difference actually do not make a difference, regularly invoking aesthetic distancing (race and racism as happening out there) and reifying sentimental politics and hermeneutical violence. Ultimately, my transdisciplinary research shows that despite good intentions of pursuing diversity and social justice, when engagements with difference are inadvertently aligned with structures that maintain investments in whiteness and the racial status quo, they continue, if not proliferate, the racial inequities already present. My dissertation consists of three papers to: (1) read diversity "conjuncturally;" (2) draw attention to the intra-actions in an education course that produce a white liberalist intimate public; and (3) offer a speculative treatise on the potentialities of decolonial mood work (merging scholarship from decolonial thought and feminist new materialisms) to rethink relationality that is unmoored from white subjection in higher education and beyond. I also offer a creative narrative/parable interlude of a teacher candidate who embodies "Beckyism, "or particular white heterofeminine citizen-subject (can also be used to describe to the "Karen" phenomenon). Here, I provide a stylized fanfiction account that describes the everyday emotional registers and responses of a composite Becky throughout her course of study. Through "progressive" commitments such as equality, and social justice; and sentimental responses to historical atrocities and current social events, these (conditional) protestations made by Becky serve as a hedonistic mechanism for image management that hinges on the exploitation and social death of people of color. In contrast to research that has emphasized the social construction of whiteness, this diffractive research captures the everyday and ambivalent productions and practices enacted through whiteness specifically in higher learning spaces. I theorize how investments in whiteness and diversity emerge, are managed, and reified when addressing a changing sociopolitical climate. This study intervenes by understanding how the claims of diversity can obscure meaningful engagements with power, historical particularities, and material realities. Also noting their predominance in educational spaces, this project attends to white women and their (im)material labor to shed new light on how contemporary racial and gender dynamics can affect the advancement of anti-racism, social justice, and equity. Moreover, this project challenges the representational coherence of research by employing alternative ways to engage language, voice, agency, positionality, and situated knowledge outside the traditional rubric of qualitative inquiry, empiricism, and data analysis. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Abstract: Quality early learning and child care can support children in both short and long-term developmental and educational outcomes. In many ways, notions of quality and related educator dispositions in early learning and child care for Indigenous children and families mirror any program. Yet for many Indigenous families with young children in Canada, daily lived experiences continue to be impacted by colonialism, and it remains unclear how urban early learning and child care programs can be most responsive to families’ priorities and strengths. It is thus imperative for decision makers to understand how decolonial relational-based early learning and child care contexts attract, engage, and support Indigenous children and families. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the limited understanding of potential indicators of quality in early learning and child care and educator dispositions of those working with Indigenous children and families in an urban setting. Weaving together three studies, this multi-paper dissertation identifies current literature regarding indicators of quality in early learning and child care and determines how quality for Indigenous children and families might be shaped by child care contexts, including educator dispositions, pre-service learning environments, and engagement in decolonization work. The first paper shares the results of a scoping review exploring existing literature in the areas of quality and educator dispositions in relation to Indigenous families' experiences with early learning and child care in an urban Canadian context. The second paper, a secondary analysis of qualitative data from a case study, considers Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus of social reproduction to emphasize the role that socially constructed barriers may cause for the persistence of systemic inequalities, and how educators’ dispositions and centre programming can act as potential challenges to such inequalities. The third paper, an autoethnography, navigates reflexive work that explores how post-secondary instructors engage in meaningful decolonization and Indigenization of early learning and child care preservice education.

Today, the word ‘colonialism’ brings to mind a dark page in Western history. In the nineteenth century, it was justified as a civilizing mission of the West, aimed at bringing culture, religion, and prosperity to the ‘primitive’ people of non-Western countries. Many Western colonizers took objects from colonized peoples, bringing them back, first as curiosities, then as objects of study and wonder to be displayed in ethnographic museums. Ethnographic museums today exist in a post-colonial world, where people recognize that taking these objects in many cases was wrong and, in some cases, criminal. This raises the question of whether museums should return these objects or retain them and, and, in case of the latter option, how museums should display ethnographic objects obtained during the colonial period today? Ethnographic museums, generally, have two options: aesthetic display or contextual display. In this paper, I will discuss both options and make a case for, what I believe, is the better display method for ethnographic objects in a post-colonial world.

Under the banner of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), in the 1970s a coalition of developing countries forced the U.S. and other rich nations to revisit the terms of the post-World War II economic settlement through comprehensive global negotiations. This dissertation argues that this economic showdown reshaped U.S. foreign policy and made global inequality a major threat to American national security. Using newly available sources from presidential libraries, the personal papers of cabinet members and ambassadors, and interviews with former National Security Council officials, it demonstrates how the NIEO and accompanying “North-South dialogue” negotiations became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of the 1970s, including the end of “Golden Age” liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the role of human rights in foreign policy. U.S. policy debates and decisions in the North-South dialogue, it concludes, were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends—neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights—that would form the core of America’s post-Cold War foreign policy.

This work examines the Egyptian experience of World War II, the development of an Egyptian-run constitutional state of emergency in response to economic and social crises during the war, and their effect on postwar support among diverse political groups for an active and even authoritarian state. This constitutional framework, based on French état de siège laws of the 19th century, became a routine institution after 1945. Egyptian Cabinet papers illustrate the process through which the Prime Minister’s office created state of siege legislation. These new laws and policies granted the Egyptian state strong police powers to imprison spies, saboteurs, and protesters without charges, along with those accused of stealing from the British army. The state of siege also included broad powers to regulate labor, to nationalize and subsidize the trade in wheat and bread and to suppress the resulting black market. The dissertation argues that this legal framework anchored new modes of surveillance and social scientific knowledge to material practices and institutions that provided continuity in crisis. These institutions were particularly important in the diplomatic colonialism of the British military occupation. They enforced legal jurisdictions and spacial zones and boundaries that microsocial interactions were always in the process of breaking down. I emphasize both inertia and change in relations of power through dynamic institutions: such as the police, food supply bureaucracy, labor unions and their surveillance, public finance and customs and nationality regimes. Focusing on the intellectual and bureaucratic underpinnings of these institutions helps explains events conventionally understood through social and political discontinuities: British decolonization and the creation of the postcolonial Egyptian state. This analysis is the first to establish the early genealogy of the legislation, bureaucratic practices, and public discourses that institutionalized and legitimated a new form of authoritarian rule and legality in Egypt, which continued in the 1958 Emergency Law and military trials for civilian crimes in the present day.

This dissertation examines how the Philippines became the primary postwar site for the development and dissemination of a transnational anti-communist politics. I examine how Philippine elites and their U.S. allies managed local struggles over land reform, armed insurgency, democratic governance, and religion between 1945 and 1960. During the late 1940s and 1950s, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites developed what they conceived of as exportable models for postcolonial development. They designed projects across a range of social arenas, including military bases, universities, and churches, which were to be implemented in the Philippines and throughout the developing world. These globally charged discourses were formed against such local political movements as the Huk rebellion, which sought to challenge the political, economic, and cultural status quo of the colonial world order. My dissertation considers how these local political struggles, characterized by Filipino leaders and U.S policymakers as early sites of tension in a global Cold War, were transformed into laboratories for the development of a globally oriented anti-communist movement. Engaging multilingual sources, this dissertation draws from state, military, personal papers, and civic institutional records in the Philippines and the United States. I highlight the ways that Americans and their Filipino allies continually crossed the political borders of the world throughout this era and brought with them an accumulated knowledge of their experiences in the Philippines. My approach is not strictly bound by national boundaries but instead follows actors and events as they traveled widely throughout the postwar period. This methodology, informed by recent trends in transnational and global history, allows me to focus on the ways in which ideas or movements flow through networks of historical actors. It also highlights the ways that the politicized geographic scales of the Cold War resulted, at moments, in contradictory U.S. foreign policy missions. This dissertation thus not only reveals the collaborative constructions of a transnational anti-communist politics, it highlights the deep fissures in postwar U.S. global power.

This thesis performs Native centered readings of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and suggests classroom activities that may prompt discussions of Native sovereignty. This paper utilizes a critical framework rather than a multicultural one that generally does not address the unique aspirations of Native peoples. This critical approach includes showing students how power is embedded in readings of texts, how different readings of texts evince vastly different understandings, and how creating texts of their own may be a tool for combatting oppression in their own lives. Students will also see colonialism in a variety of places that they may have taken for granted: in education, in literacy, in mapping, in tourism, and even tattooing. Teachers must make their best efforts to learn how to see the American literary canon from Native eyes if they are to create an anti-colonial environment for all of their students.