Showing 1 - 2 of 2 Items
Who We Are: Incarcerated Students and the New Prison Literature, 1995-2010
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein
Access: Open access
- This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Sociocultural Orientations and Mental Illness Stigma: A Novel Mediational Model
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Karis Treadwell
Access: Open access
- This study proposes a novel mediational model to investigate the relationship between sociocultural orientations and mental illness stigma by exploring empathy and controllability attributions as mediators. Past literature suggests that understanding these variables may contain important implications for guiding stigma-reducing efforts. Questionnaires assessing sociocultural orientations, empathy, blaming attributions, and general mental illness stigma were administered to 109 students at a small liberal-arts college in the northeast United States. The sample consisted of 80 female-identifying participants, 28 male-identifying participants, and 1 non-binary participant. Questionnaires administered included the Individualism and Collectivism scale (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998), the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (Reniers et al., 2011), a modified version of the Attribution Questionnaire (Corrigan et al., 2003), and Day’s Mental Illness Stigma Scale (Day et al., 2007). Analysis showed that vertical sociocultural orientations were associated with more blameful attributions and heightened stigma. Horizontal collectivism was associated with increased empathy and less blameful attributions, but empathy did not mediate this relationship. Controllability attributions, but not empathy, partially mediated the relationships between both vertical orientations and stigma. These findings demonstrate the importance of sociocultural orientations, particularly the equality preference dimension, as predictors of mental illness stigma. Efforts to counter societal stigma should consider the role of sociocultural orientations and their interaction with empathy and blaming tendencies.