Race

Wrongful convictions have occurred throughout the United States’, but it was not until the creation of the Innocence Project in 1992 that these cases were re-examined. Like other facets of the criminal justice system, racial disparities are present in exoneration research. Studies have found the rate of exoneration is slower for African Americans compared to other races and represent a disproportionate number of rape exonerations relative to their share of the population. Actual compensation is rarely included in analysis, because total compensation awarded has been a black box till now. This is the first study addressing these gaps, by calculating actual compensation for wrongfully convicted sexual assault exonerees and examine racial disparities between awarded compensation. Findings indicate African American exonerees receive significantly more, around $574,657, compared to white exonerees. Implications include evaluating interrogation techniques, updating DNA databases, testing forensic evidence, and calling for states and territories to have compensation statutes.

Throughout history, women in comics have played subordinate or lesser roles compared to males and were stereotyped. Today, representations have improved in comic-based tv shows. This thesis is answering three research questions: How does one define a “strong female character” within the comic-based and comic-styled genres, specifically in the TV shows Jessica Jones, Agent Carter, and Wynonna Earp? How does race/gender intersectionality affect the ways in which the non-white characters express masculinity or femininity compared to the white characters? How do the videos made by fans of the three tv series define a “strong female character?” This study applies textual and participatory cultures analyses. It is interdisciplinary and uses theories from different areas. This research finds that Agent Carter, Jessica Jones, and Wynonna Earp simultaneously reinforce and challenge stereotypes such as emphasized femininity, hegemonic masculinity and the “Black Buck.” Future research might examine white stereotypes with the white heroines.

Race is a pressing issue that pervades discussions of public policy and societal matters in twenty-first century national cultures—even as those populations, paradoxically, turn toward increasing globalization. We need to understand now, more than ever, what race means to us and how and why it means in order for us to understand our deep investments in it. This study explores—through the genres of slave narrative, fiction, and memoir—the process of socio-semiogenesis by which people recognize and perform race; it also examines the customs that allow people not only to form themselves in groups but also to disrupt, remediate, and invert the implicit racial codes that govern human interaction within and among such groups. This study offers a Peircean, triadic approach to the dialectics of race—an approach that seeks to find a space in which dialogue and healing might occur even as it sheds light on those shades of biology and culture that both form and divide us.

More than 30 states currently implement some form of outcomes or performancebased funding for public two-year and/or four-year institutions of higher education. Thirteen of these states have public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Every state’s higher education governance and power relationships are a unique compilation of internal and external entities such as the governor, governing boards, policymakers, higher education staff and advisors, and the institution’s administration, faculty, students, and alumni. Each entity holds power over the HBCU or its state policy context.