Stories from the Stacks: The past, present, and future of race and ethnicity at RIT Libraries: RIT Research

RIT Scholar Works in a freely accessible online repository that houses student theses and dissertations as well as the research outputs of faculty and staff. Browse more student research at RIT Scholar Works 

• Life in Mossville, Louisiana: Policy Implications of Toxic Waste Exposure and Environmental Racism (Thesis, 2022) by Clare Kelsey
  Environmental damage disproportionately affects communities of color. Understanding how environmental racism uniquely affects marginalized communities is crucial to effectively develop public policies that will address the systematic racism that is rooted in many existing policies and practices. The town of Mossville, Louisiana provides a case study of a Black town that experienced devastating environmental pollution as well as displacement from the oil and petrochemical industries in the region (Rogers, 2015), with few residents still in the area. 
• Searching for Color in Black & White: Epistemic Closure, the RIT Archives, and the Colonial Roots of White Invisibility (Thesis, 2017) by Andrew James
  This study describes how problematic photographic representation was used as a powerful semiotic tool in the Victorian age conquest of the other, was exported to early Hollywood (creating a lucrative hate-based industry), and was then pushed back into the cultural recesses, settling finally into systemic forms of modern oppression, empowered by the invisibility of whiteness
• Interracial Advertising: A Comparative Analysis on YouTube Comments on a Controversial Interracial Commercial (Thesis, 2016) by Jeanine Alsous
  This paper examines online comments to an interracial family portrayed in two online commercials for Cheerios. The study focused on an in-depth review of literature of history, symbolic interaction theory, critical race theory and co-creation of value, followed by comparative content analysis of online comments and intercoder reliability test.
• Tailor-Made: Meeting the Unique Needs of Women of Color STEM-SBS Faculty Through Mentoring (Conference paper, 2015) by DeLois Crawford
  Women of Color faculty have some of the worst outcomes of all other faculty in terms of attainment of tenure and promotion. They are much more likely than others to leave a university, file suits for discrimination and face hostile work environments and classrooms, and leave academe. It is to a university's and society's benefit to retain talented women of color and remedy these negative outcomes. This paper seeks to address the unique concerns and issues of Women of Color through mentoring.
• Racial profiling and the police: utilizing the Census Transportation Planning Package to benchmark traffic stops made by the North Carolina State Highway Patrol (Thesis, 2014) by Michael R. Herb
  Attempts have been made to gain an understanding of why officers commit acts of racial profiling and to identify different evaluation methods that allow for accurate analysis of racial profiling data. This study attempts to create a new method of evaluation by utilizing the Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) as a benchmark for racial profiling data.