In light of rising textbook prices, open education resources (OER) have been shown to decrease non-tuition costs, while simultaneously increasing academic access, student performance, and time-to-graduation rates. Yet very little research to date has explored OER's specific impact on those who are presumed to benefit most from this potential: historically underserved students. This reality has left a significant gap of understanding in the current body of literature, resulting in calls for more empirically-based examinations of OER through a social justice lens. For each of these reasons, this study explored the impact of OER and textbook pricing among racial/ethnic minority students, low-income students, and first-generation college students at a four-year Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in Southern California. Drawing upon more than 700 undergraduate surveys, our univariate, bivariate and multivariate results revealed textbook costs to be a substantial barrier for the vast majority of students. However, those barriers were even more significant among historically underserved college students; thus, confirming textbook affordability as a redistributive justice issue, and positing OER as a potential avenue for realizing a more socially just college experience.

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For this dissertation case study, I examined how individuals, especially those who worked on interorganizational food security programming and policymaking, discussed organizational policy messaging and the discursively constructed meanings around their work related to food security. I focused on the communicative linkages between a US government development organization and the problem of food insecurity because this condition continues to plague nearly a billion people around the world. Specifically, I investigated the communicative processes leading up to the passage of the Global Food Security Act (2016), including the organizational construction of meaning that helped get the bipartisan legislation passed at a contentious time in our government's history. I conducted in-depth, qualitative interviews with food security professionals and coded documents related to the passage of the GFSA. This study serves a dual purpose: 1) The findings provide evidence of language convergence/meaning divergence that adds to a deeper scholarly understanding of how policies are created and interpreted differently, and 2) the findings offer insight into the ways in which a US government organization uses strategic ambiguity to persuade stakeholders to fund food security programming and support impactful international programming.