Despite significant cultural attention on the phenomenon of school shootings, one of the most predictive dimensions of these tragedies is under-analyzed: gender. Men commit 98% of mass shootings, but robust discussion and research on this relationship is lacking. This dissertation investigates the relationship between masculinity and gun violence…

Native men in higher education experience among the lowest persistence and graduation rates in the United States (Condition of Education, 2020). Native men are subjected to systemic barriers brought by settler colonialism such as racism and patriarchal hegemony which negatively impact their perceptions of masculinity and forces them to move away…

This research utilizes an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis design to investigate female senior student affairs officers (SSAOs) as they experience and implement gendered communication practices in the higher education workplace. Research regarding female SSAO interactions are absent from discourse on gendered communication and no…

This dissertation study addresses the gaps in research concerning the gendered experiences of successful Latino men in higher education. As Latino men in postsecondary education continue to enroll and persist in low numbers, new lenses are needed to consider their educational experiences. This study attempts to add a gendered lens, in the form of…

Leadership represents an abstraction of human thought. While functionalist theories propose leader-centric models, contemporary leadership theories embrace a postmodern paradigm acknowledging ontological and epistemological assumptions of qualitative study. This ideology suggests a multi-dimensional model of leadership that reflects the complexity…

Discussions about sports continue to permeate the news and political realms and may prove to be a useful but underutilized tool to teach difficult subjects like race, gender, and sexuality. However, most scholarly work on sport focuses on a specific systemic inequality within a sport and/or how an issue affects sport and thus are sociological in…

Using creative autoethnographic "testimonio" (CAT), a story is told about the injustices within the learning environment and work environment of higher education toward a person with disabilities: sleep apnea, learning disabilities, negative mental health. The author explores the health difficulties of addressing sleep deprivation while…

The educational experiences of Hispanic students are influenced by the collectivist nature of the Hispanic culture as outlined in Hofstede's (1980) research. In the Hispanic culture, it is common for women to feel uncomfortable and uncertain about taking risks. Males tend to have more dominant values that transpire in assertive and aggressive…

The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the experience of the single father in college. A transformative/feminist perspective, interpreted through the author's personal lens of motherhood, sheds light on ways patriarchy and masculinity constrain the identities of a group of single fathers. Affordances and drawbacks of the father identity…

There have been many studies that focus on understanding various aspects of human sexuality and how it relates to college students. However, the current research focuses on heterosexual students, leaving a void in the research that focuses on gay male college students. Even more crucially, there is a void in research that focuses on the sexual…

This project examines the professional experiences of women of color faculty to uncover less visible mechanisms of inequality in the academy. It is a mixed-methods study with both qualitative and quantitative components. I address the limitations of past research by revealing how even despite the relative successes of women of color in academia,…

Study abroad represents a powerful tool for internationalizing students' higher education experience; however, current participation numbers indicate that male students go on study abroad programs at half the rate of female students. This rate reflects broader engagement trends for male college students, who have fallen behind female participation…

This study explored the family dynamics of persistent African American college men. These students were typical Black males, not those pre-categorized as high-achieving or unprepared for college. The stories of participants revealed their strength, ambition, and intentions to successfully gain a baccalaureate degree. In general Black males are…