PhD Dissertation Defense: Ashlyn Salvage

Dissertation Defense for Ashlyn Salvage Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026 Time: 3 p.m. ET In-Person Location: Posvar Hall, Room 5914 (SOE Welcome Center Conference Room) Zoom Link: Available upon request. Contact Ashlyn Salvage at ashlynsalvage@pitt.edu. Dissertation Title: "Constrained or Empowered? Frames, Identity, and Agency for Racial Equity Work in Creative Learning Organizations" Dissertation Description: This dissertation examines how staff in four creative learning organizations navigate racial equity work — and what shapes their capacity to do it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 37 staff across four organizations, alongside analysis of organizational websites and tax documents, the research takes a multi-level view of how racial equity work unfolds in practice. The first study explores how individual staff make sense of racial equity through the lens of their identities and frames. The second study examines how organizations communicate equity commitments through formal materials, how those commitments achieve — or fail to achieve — shared meaning across staff, and where the gap between stated values and daily practice is most persistent. The third study examines agency: how staff describe their capacity to act, what individual-level factors explain variation within the same organizational context, and how organizations have responded to the 2020 racial justice moment and the current anti-DEI climate. Together, the three studies offer a nuanced, multi-level account of how racial equity work is understood, communicated, and enacted in practice, with implications for how organizations approach their messaging and equity commitments, and what individual-level and contextual factors shape the capacity to engage in equity work. Dissertation Committee: Dr. Eleanor Anderson (chair), Dr. Tom Akiva, Dr. Heather McCambly, Dr. Deirdre Smith.