Sacked for Dollars: The Exploitation of College Football Players in the Southeastern Conference

This study seeks to answer if academic clustering occurs in the SEC and if race and field value are significant indicators of this phenomena. The academic majors players select or are steered towards may lend credence to the claim that universities possess an avenue for fast tracking an athlete’s eligibility status. At stake in college football’s competitive market are complex streams of revenue ranging from television exposure and merchandise sales to increased student applications and alumni contributions. This market places enormous pressure on SEC football programs to not only keep pace with other programs within the conference, but more importantly, to increase market share by ensuring only elite athletes are recruited, signed, and developed into top performers for the conference. The on-the-field product, then, serves as a means for top programs to access lucrative revenue streams made available through college football’s popularity, marketability, and merchandising. The student-athlete becomes the lynch-pin driving this multi-billion dollar industry. Therefore, we asked the following questions: 1) Are SEC football players clustered into academic majors? 2) If clustering exists, does it differ according to race? 3) If clustering exists, does field value determine which players get clustered? Our findings, in which the majority of starters and key contributors were obtained from only a few majors, support the claim that Universities possess mechanisms that reinforce the systemic foreclosure of a student-athlete\u27s educational freedom

Egyptian Activism in the Modern Era and the Role of Information and Communication Technologies

How was the Mubarak regime overcome? Moreover, what role did technology play in social consolidation and mobilization in Egypt? Is this unique to 2011? This paper proposes that in Egypt, ICT socialization—meaning the process where individuals rely on technology to accommodate norms and values with behaviors that help manage one’s identity—enabled a political self-awareness to occur in each cycle of change, from the Kefaya movement to the April 6th movement to the 2011 Revolution, and evolved political activism into a social force capable of organic mobilization. Accordingly, this study examines correlations among the Egyptian Movement for change, better known as Kefaya, the April 6th movement, and the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 in order to locate causality for large movement consolidation and effective political mobilization in Egypt

The Struggle for Meaning: The Faces and Voices of the Muslim Experience in Miami

This project, as a participatory-research endeavor, seeks to empower Muslim-Americans with a sense of place and voice in an environment that has been more conducive to denying both of these considerations. Previous research on Muslims has not dealt with them fairly, despite any good intentions that may have existed. The point of the PAR project is to gain access to the Muslim experience, rather than speaking for these persons. Rather than use their voice, be their voice, or to speak for Muslims, a participatory research project desires to: speak with Muslims, echo their experiences, co-produce knowledge, and leverage resources as a researcher that may advance community autonomy. The task in this project was to co-create a rendering of different Muslim experiences that has yet to exist. Turning towards Muslims as accomplices necessitated a turn away from the Western gaze that recognized Muslims as antithesis, as mission work, or as victims. An accomplice opens spaces and redirects resources to affirm diversity within a particular community. Together, as collaborators/accomplices/Muslims, we came to understand the meanings and concerns of this marginalized community. This dissertation, then, provides an insider’s account to the burdens, honors, and responsibilities of being a part of a “breaking” Muslim community in Miami. From looking Muslim and feeling the pressures of embodiment to the violence and empowerment realized through Muslim bodies, the struggle for meaning represented a struggle for survival and community, as much as a struggle of faith.</p

Homegrown foreigners: how Christian nationalism and nativist attitudes impact Muslim civil liberties

Building from the literature on racialization of Muslims, we argue that there are two unique dimensions to anti-Muslim attitudes: Christian nationalism and nativism. Christian nationalism subscribes to the idea of Christianity as being central to American identity, and nativism provides insight into the monopolies regulating citizenship. We then test this framework's hypotheses on data drawn from the General Social Survey in 2014 to see if these two dimensions predict support for civil rights infringements of Muslim-Americans compared to other outgroups, including atheists, communists, and racists. The results indicate both Christian nationalism and nativism have significant and negative effects on Muslim civil liberties. We also find some differences between the effects of Christian nationalism and nativism on Muslim civil liberties compared to the other outgroups. We interpret these results as an indication that nativism works as an ordering principle to reconstitute who counts as American and who does not