Browsing by Author "Spears, Ellen Griffith"

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    Community Perspectives and Environmental Justice Issues in an Unincorporated Black Township
    (MDPI, 2022) Moore, Teriana; Payne-Foster, Pamela; Oliver, JoAnn S.; Spears, Ellen Griffith; Spencer, Christopher H.; Maye, Jacqueline; Allen, Rebecca S.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Through each era, the southeastern United States was and continues to be an epicenter for industrial companies to establish factories and plants. Though this development attracts economic gain for the companies and surrounding areas, low-income and predominantly Black communities bear the brunt of the environmental consequences while frequently remaining stagnant economically. This qualitative, community-based participatory research study grew out of a larger study designed to recruit lay community advisors from communities labeled as hard to reach in research. We focus on Holt, Alabama, an unincorporated community in the southeastern United States region. The primary goal of this research inquiry is to thematically analyze community interviews stemming from a topic of research, practice, and policy interest to community members: the effects of industrial pollution on Holt citizens' daily lives. Content analysis of focus-group transcripts revealed four emergent themes, including: (1) how the pollution affects their water, soil, and air quality; (2) illness related to pollution; (3) community engagement and empowerment; and (4) suggestions regarding what government officials could do to address this area of need. Building upon the prior research regarding environmental justice, human flourishing, and the definition of nurturing environments, suggestions are made regarding the creation, implementation, and maintenance of project advisory councils focused on issues of environmental justice. Community advocacy and empowerment as well as community and scientific partnerships are imperative to alleviate problems associated with environmental justice.
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    Feet don't fail me now: brass bands in post-Katrina New Orleans
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2014) Miller, Brice Anthony; Hall, James C.; Spears, Ellen Griffith; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    The purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to examine brass bands in post-Katrina New Orleans. Told primarily in the words of the musicians themselves, this study analyzes the intersection of the city's recovery efforts and the complex web of formal and informal sociocultural relationships that exist in the brass band community. The perspectives of these musicians, who were active New Orleans brass band musicians before and after the storm, help us better understand the resurgence and popularity of brass bands in post-Katrina New Orleans by highlighting the ways in which brass bands, as an informal cultural institution, use, experience, and depend on the vitality of public life and the social construction of public space as mechanisms that are critical for their cultural continuity. Using a musician-researcher perspective into the history, culture and people that make up contemporary brass band music in post-Katrina New Orleans, this study reveals new insights that explain the resurgence of brass bands and their performative cultural continuity. It reveals that the everyday lived experiences of the musicians are entrenched in the deep-rooted attachment and dependency of making sense of place and space--New Orleans--through music. Although tourists and outsider scholars see their cultural practices as mere entertainment, their position as community-based cultural practitioners is the sum total of the lived-experiences of real people, in real time, and rooted in a real place where living culture is surviving in spite of myriad struggles in a city still recovering. This study examines the impact of post-disaster recovery and issues such as city policies, gentrification, cultural appropriation, cultural commodification through image-making and popular culture, the appropriation of public space, and education reform efforts are impacting brass bands performative cultural continuity and potentially jeopardizing their longevity as a community-based cultural practice. Hence, if these important cultural practices are restricted, than we not only lose the core relevancy of their sociocultural importance, but we also face the potential loss of an informal cultural institution that has been vital for public life in New Orleans for more than 180 years.
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    Feminisms and fluidity: from breasted existence to breasted resistance in feminist theory and activism
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Sullivan, Maigen; Purvis, Jennifer; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Dominant phallocentric norms call on bodies to fit rigid, static molds that do not allow for any flux or fluidity. It is necessary to note that these standards are a fallacy and that no bodies adhere to such strict structures. However, women's bodies are especially seen as going, and in fact do go, against these standards for what constitutes a proper body. When discussing the ways in which women's bodies act as sites of resistance against heteromasculine norms, their genitalia are often at the center of the conversation. However, we can take the discourse surrounding the fluidity of female genitalia and move it to a higher region--breasts. In Feminisms and Fluidity: From Breasted Existence to Breasted Resistance in Feminist Theory and Activism, I use the language and discourse typically reserved for women's genitalia in relation to breasts by looking at them as fluid sites of control and resistance. I discuss the physicality of breasts as being fluid in that breasts shift their shape with age and movement. I examine the way in which women's breasts are fluid in that they have the potentiality to produce fluids--breast milk. Finally, I expand our understanding of bodily limitations by examining both S/M and Crip Theory as ways to expand the margins of the body.
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    Motherhood on the inside: exploring the challenges facing incarcerated women at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Unnasch, Emily Ann; Cooper, Brittney; Johnson, Ida M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    In this thesis, I argue that the criminal justice system is deeply entrenched in racist and classist perceptions that make incarcerated women especially vulnerable to policies and ideologies that regularly involve the denial of their reproductive and parental rights. With shifting public policies and sentencing reform in reaction to the "war on drugs," women, the poor, and people of color have disproportionately become caught in the net of the criminal justice system. The subtle fusion of the war on drugs with the fetal protection movement has furthermore positioned pregnant women and mothers quite precariously within the criminal justice system, and Alabama's own chemical endangerment law provides a useful case study for exploring this topic. This thesis highlights the unique challenges facing women in correctional institutions, focusing on women's reproductive rights and claims to motherhood in particular. An elaboration of the history of Alabama's Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women helps to reveal these broader issues. In this thesis, I argue that motherhood can provide a means for incarcerated women to strategize resistance and claim agency from the space of the prison, suggesting that programs such as the Montgomery-based organization Aid to Inmate Mothers help meet the specific needs of incarcerated women that are otherwise neglected by the prison system. I use data that I collected from fifteen interviews conducted with inmate mothers at Tutwiler Prison, drawing on the experiences of these women to make an argument about the nature of incarceration for women and the potential for motherhood to be an empowering identity.