DukeSpace

Find and submit publications, theses, and dissertations by Duke faculty and students.

Communities in DukeSpace

Select a community to browse its collections.

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Recent Submissions

Access status: Open Access ,
Selective Storytelling: Race and Gender Bias in Media Coverage During the 2024 NCAA Basketball Tournament
(2026-04) Wallace, Kennedy
This thesis investigates the media coverage of the men’s and women’s Final Four teams during the 2024 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I basketball tournament. While women’s sports, especially basketball, have seen a rise in popularity over the last few years, media coverage has not reflected that change. Existing research suggests that coverage often utilizes language that reinforces gender and/or racial stereotypes to maximize audience engagement. While prior research has investigated differential media coverage by race and ethnicity for both male and female athletes, very few studies examine the difference in media coverage of men’s and women’s basketball. Collegiate athletes’ experiences are also rarely analyzed from a sociological perspective. Thus, I aim to address these gaps by conducting a qualitative content analysis of 66 Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) articles from two weeks prior to and following the 2024 tournament to analyze the framing of each team, their star players, and their experiences in the tournament. I find evidence of narratives that reinforce gender, race, and ethnicity stereotypes related to the disparity in coverage of men’s and women’s basketball, the prevalence of storylines, the representation of star players, and the role of rivalries in sports. Through this thesis, I address how media can prioritize equality by better representing diverse groups of athletes in and beyond the collegiate sports space.
Access status: Open Access ,
Countrypolitan Grammar: Exploring Exurban Voter Behavior in North Carolina
(2026-04-14) Nobel, Max
Despite their decisive role in recent U.S. Presidential elections, exurban counties remain a blind spot in spatial polarization research. This paper explores exurban voter behav- ior through a case study of North Carolina’s ’Countrypolitan’ counties—the fastest- growing and most conservative areas in the state. Using individual-level data from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study, I estimate a linear probability model to evaluate how the exurban environment alters core drivers of voter choice. I find that exurbia muffles the role of economic identity, amplifies the role of social identity, and heightens the influence of private institutions on Countrypolitan voter’s electoral decisions. Income polarization is neutralized, racial and gender attitudes are magnified, and electoral deviation on the basis of church-related political issues is circumscribed compared to the rest of the state. Education’s influence is attenuated not just in Countrypolitan counties but in all of North Carolina, with a supplementary national-level analysis identifying a significant reduction in the electorally liberalizing effects of college at- tainment for Southern voters. I theorize that these effects stem from a combination of fragmented exurban infrastructure and traditional Southern hierarchies, arguing that exurbia functions as an active socioinstitutional barrier against urbanization.
Access status: Open Access ,
Displacement in Tandem: How Upstream Value Dominance Shapes the Future of Work in the AI Era
(2026-05-18) Cheng, Chenyang
This paper examines how agentic artificial intelligence is reshaping professional labor markets by shifting governance and value capture upstream to vertically integrated platform firms. Drawing on global value chain theory, it argues that the agentic era marks a departure from earlier forms of automation: the primary unit of displacement is no longer the discrete task, but the workflow, role, and value-chain segment. The paper develops the concept of the Agentic Value Chain to describe how firms controlling compute, models, data infrastructure, and orchestration layers become upstream actors across AI-enabled value chains. The analysis introduces the data-to-agent flywheel, a self-reinforcing mechanism through which deployed agents generate operational data, operational data improves agentic systems, improved systems expand the automation frontier, and expanded automation deepens platform lock-in. It distinguishes between so-so automation, where AI augments a smaller number of human “super-workers,” and agentic substitution, where autonomous systems replace roles that make up entire workflows. Empirically, the paper examines the digital marketing through Adobe’s transition from Creative Cloud to Firefly and GenStudio, software engineering through the shift from Copilot-style tools to agentic coding platforms, and the broader collapse of entry-level hiring in AI-exposed occupations. It concludes that agentic AI intensifies existing platform power while creating a qualitatively new form of labor displacement, requiring policy responses that redirect AI toward augmentation and democratize access to agentic computing.
Access status: Open Access ,
Reinventing Care: Nursing Assistants' Embodied Resistance Working in Public Hospitals in China
(2025-12-25) Cheng, Yueqi
For my master’s thesis, I studied third-party patient-care nursing assistants – usually middle-aged, undereducated, female migrants – and their managers. I was inspired to study them because when my grandmother was battling the complications of Parkinson’s Disease, we hired a nursing assistant for her. To write an ethnography, I conducted a three-month fieldwork in two surgical wards in two public hospitals in Changsha, Hunan, where I am from. The title of my thesis is Reinventing Care: Nursing Assistants’ Embodied Resistance Working in Public Hospitals in Changsha, Hunan, in which I narrate the ways nursing assistants resist the bodily regulation of the nursing care industry embedded in public medical institutions. As the Chinese society continues to age, families have no choice but to outsource care to nursing assistants. Since the implementation of the state policy "Hospital Non-Accompanied Nursing Care Service Trial Program" in April 2025, the nursing care industry within public medical institutions has been regulating and supervising nursing assistants more intensively than before the policy. I argue in my thesis that, to respond to institutional control, nursing assistants utilize embodied ways of resistance. In Chapters 2 and 3, I ethnographically depicted the different forms of resistance, including disrupting existing social and spatial orders, uttering dissonances, practicing autonomy, crafting alternative strategies, and forging solidarity with other marginal workers, that nursing assistants embody to confront and resist gazes and exploitation while engaging in physically and emotionally demanding care work.
Access status: Open Access ,
Heartbeat State: Abortion Restrictions and the Maternal Health Crisis in Post-Dobbs South Carolina
(2026-05-13) Wilson, Madison
In 2023, just over a year after the Dobbs decision, South Carolina enacted a six-week abortion ban, effectively eliminating abortion access before most people know they are pregnant. This research investigates how such restrictive abortion legislation directly undermines maternal health outcomes and drives preventable increases in maternal mortality, particularly among Black women and low-income communities in South Carolina who already face severe obstetric disparities. Drawing on the Abortion Care Today audio archive, existing literature, maternal mortality data, and state and federal policy analysis, this research examines abortion not as a political abstraction, but as essential urgent healthcare. When abortion is banned, healthcare isn’t the only thing to disappear—patients do: to complications, to delays, to bans. The findings are clear. Abortion bans and their “exceptions” strip women of medically necessary care, force continuation of dangerous pregnancies, disregard bodily autonomy, delay treatment for miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy, and drive physicians out of states where clinical judgment has been criminalized. Documented deterioration in female health outcomes fall hardest on women and girls capable of pregnancy. Alongside the academic analysis, a community health booklet was developed to bring these findings to reproductive age South Carolinians, translating research into accessible, actionable knowledge for the communities most affected by these laws. This project concludes that abortion restrictions are not peripheral to maternal health—they are a direct assault on it. The evidence is clear: women are suffering at the hands of dismantled infrastructure meant to protect. Abortion is not an exception to healthcare, but a foundational component of it and South Carolinians are paying the price.