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Have A Good One: A Writer’S Search For Place, Rafael Gallegos

Theatre & Dance ETDs

In this personal essay I will summarize my creative journey as a writer throughout my time in the Dramatic Writing program at the University of New Mexico. I will explore how the notion of home has shaped me and my work, focusing on my childhood in Lubbock, Texas, my theatrical coming of age in New York City, and my return to Albuquerque in search of my personal voice. I will present two works that illustrate my maturation as a dramatist and my focus on community and place as thematic throughlines. Have a Good One is a play set in a …

Critical Discourse Analysis Of Human Rights Education: Defensoría Del Pueblo Program In Ecuador, Monserrat Fernandez-Vela

Latin American Studies ETDs

This dissertation recognizes Human Rights Education (HRE) discourse as a multifaceted and multimodal construction situated socially and historically. Using a Multimodal Critical Discourse Study (MCDS), the research explores the HRE discourse proposed by the Defensoría del Pueblo de Ecuador (DPE), the National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) in charge of designing, approving and implementing contents, methodologies and resources of HRE initiatives nationwide. I focus on the educational, communicational, and ontological discourse of the DPE, materialized in three books published in 2015-2016. The results addressed the stenghts of the communicational and educative content and design of the books, showing the levels of …

Freirean Pedagogy In Music Education, Tyler Slamkowski

Music ETDs

This is a qualitative, multiple case study rooted in grounded theory. It explores how music teachers might implement Paulo Freire’s theories in their classrooms, as well as best practices in Freirean music teaching. Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educational theorist who claimed that education, rooted in dialogue and co-creation of knowledge, could confront major structural injustices, such as inequality, exploitation, and violence.

The three participants in this study worked in the same large, Southwestern district. Participants were selected based on how their teaching fit with characteristics of Freirean Pedagogy. Three music educators, Robert, Eliza, and Jackie, the participants in this …

Little Farm Hands: Rural Child Labor, Family, And Memory In The U.S. Southwest, 1890-1940, Jairo E. Marshall

History ETDs

Child labor was a traditional subsistence and agricultural practice throughout the rural Southwest. Between 1890 and 1940 a series of changes occurred within agriculture, ranching, and rural land/labor patterns in New Mexico and Texas. However, child labor remained a useful economic strategy for families well into this period, because it remained grounded in environmental challenges, cultural practices, agrarian ideologies, and children’s social and physical development. Agribusinesses took advantage of this labor pool, while schools and communities continued to allow children to labor, believing it to be either necessary or beneficial.

Families and children continued to have agency to determine the …

Seventeenth-Century Spanish Colonial Identity In New Mexico: A Study Of Identity Practices Through Material Culture, Caroline M. Gabe

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation explores how seventeenth-century Spanish colonial households expressed their group identity at a regional level in New Mexico. Through the material remains of daily practice and repetitive actions, identity markers tied to adornment, technological traditions, and culinary practices are compared between 14 assemblages to test four identity models. Seventeenth-century colonists were eating a combination of Old World domesticates and wild game on colonoware and majolica serving vessels, cooking using Indigenous pottery, grinding with Puebloan style tools, and conducting household scale production and prospecting. While assemblages are consistent in basic composition, variations are present tied to socioeconomic status. This blending …

Calling All Corpses: An Examination Of The Treatment Of The Dead In Old English Literature, Jessica Troy

English Language and Literature ETDs

The care and disposal of the dead bodies, an unavoidable reminder of one’s mortality, rarely receives in-depth literary attention. In early medieval England, the Anglo-Saxons dealt with corpses but seldom discussed the undertaking in written documents. Instead they focused on the grandiose deeds of heroes like Beowulf and the holy lives of revered saints.

This dissertation examines various genres of Old English literature to identify times when authors discuss corpses and to what end these discussions led. Hagiographers, for example, describe the corpses of certain saints such as Æthelthryth and Edmund at length while the bodies of other saints are …

Npr's Tiny Desk Concert Series: Vocalities Of Outrage And Acts Of Gaiety, Aubrie M. Powell

Music ETDs

The Tiny Desk concert series features live video-recorded performances of artists at the desk of NPR Music’s Bob Boilen, the series’ main host. This thesis interrogates NPR Music’s values and the ways artists both manifest and queer those ideals in performance. I argue, in light of the 2016 election, performers challenge NPR Music’s taste system through two modes of subversion. The first mode considers vocalities of outrage specifically in the performances of Saul Williams and the Drive-By Truckers. These performers shift their social positions in expressions of outrage through vocality—as the embodied materiality of the voice and its constructed meanings …

Multimodal Composition And Digital Technology: Investigating The Out-Of-Class Experiences Of Students In A First-Year Composition Class, Jennifer Morgan Sims

English Language and Literature ETDs

This study explores how first-year students in a multimodal composition class use digital technology outside of class to complete their projects. The tendency in Composition studies to characterize students as “self-teaching” users of technology may obscure complex out-of-class experiences, so this study analyzes data from project reflections of 19 first-year students completing digital multimodal compositions to gain insight into their practices. Qualitative analysis reveals that the technical problems students encountered tended to be frequent and repetitive, and some problems were exacerbated by conflicts between the assignment requirements and the capacity of the technology required. Students tended to use trial-and-error methods …

From Deconstruction To Rehabilitation: Heidegger, Gadamer, And Modernity, David Liakos

Philosophy ETDs

This dissertation is a study of the problem of modernity, formulated as the following multivalent question: How should we understand the scope, character, and limitations of our historical age? The study approaches this question from the point of view of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. We will, first, clarify how Heidegger and Gadamer think about modernity, thereby shedding light on their widely misunderstood intellectual relationship; and, next, uncover and defend a distinctively Gadamerian response to modernity as a viable argument, and as potentially more coherent and hopeful than Heidegger’s answer to the problem of the modern age.

In the first …

Female Protagonist Mega-Archetypes: A Study In Medieval European Romances, Doaa Omran

English Language and Literature ETDs

Despite the claim that structuralism has sung its swan song, my research offers new insights in the field of structuralism through archetypal criticism by exploring four female hero mega-archetypes as narrative structures inspired by the Qur’an and the Bible. These scriptural narratives offer tenets, based on narratives and motifs, that, as structural units, create and identify mega-archetypes. This study posits how, rather than being extensions of existing structuralist taxonomies on the male hero monomyth, the female mega-archetypes enrich that monomythical narrative. This work details the structure of the mega-archetypes Zulaikhah (Potiphar’s wife), Sarah and Hagar, the Virgin Mary, and Queen …

Unsettling Indian Health Services: Secularism, Modern Medicine, & The Reproduction Of The U.S. Settler State Through The 1954 Transfer Act, Jillian Elizabeth Grisel

American Studies ETDs

This thesis takes up the role of secularism in modern medicine as a political doctrine that works in service of settler colonialism. I argue the Declaration of Human Rights and the World Health Organization (WHO) globally institutionalized secular ideologies in the post-World War II environment. This thesis links how this global reordering came to inform U.S. health policy by examining how government officials and medical experts drew from the WHO and framed infectious diseases as a security issue to impose a biomedical order in Indian country. By contextualizing modern medicine within a settler political economy and secular political doctrine, I …

Cartographies Of Precarity: The Cultural Politics Of Filipina And Mexican Migrant Domestic Workers, Maria Eugenia Lopez-Garcia

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of migrant domestic work in the 2000s within popular culture, mass media, contemporary art, and grassroots national organizing. While scholars and activists have identified that migrant domestic workers are the hidden backbone of the U.S. economy, dominant cultural and social narratives reinforce the racialized and gendered logics of capitalism that work to devalue domestic work as informal, disposable and precarious. It was not until after the struggle of domestic workers achieved recognition through the ratification of the International Labor Office of Convention 189 in July 2011 that this labor sector gained more intense media …

More Than A Fiesta: Cinco De Mayo Celebrations And The Transboundary Link In Ambos Nogales, Kristen S. Valencia

American Studies ETDs

In a contemporary context, the United States-Mexico border raises concerns regarding undocumented migration, drug and human trafficking, and cartel or gang violence. While these are material realities that come, at times, with grave consequences and outcomes, they are not the only characteristics or facets of the border region. The intention of the border is to delineate and separate, however, this ignores the stationary communities along the territorial demarcation which interact with and demonstrate the fluidity of life at the line. Transboundariness, as defined by Lawrence A. Herzog, provides the framework with which to examine cross-boundary connections that result from economic …

Sex, Labor, And Digital Spaces: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Gpguiadelas, A Brazilian Sex Worker Twitter Feed, Ailesha L. Ringer

Communication ETDs

This dissertation project is a critical discourse analysis of written and visual texts produced for GPGuiaDelas, a Brazilian sex worker Twitter feed. Drawing on digital labor studies, feminist studies on sex work, and Brazilian studies on race and gender, 176 Twitter conversations between sex workers and clients were analyzed in order to answer the following: (1) What are the dominant themes in the discourse about sex work constructed through microblogging on social media?; (2) What are the discursive practices of sex workers who use social media as a platform?; and (3) What theoretical insights emerge from the analysis of sex …

The Chaotic Domestic: Tracing Affect In Representations Of Nation, Class, And Gender In Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Women’S Writing, Kelly J. Hunnings

English Language and Literature ETDs

My dissertation traces a term I call the “chaotic domestic” in the writing of a collection of eighteenth-century women laboring-class writers: Mary Barber, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Janet Little. The chaotic domestic in the hands of these writers is multi-layered and affect-driven, focusing as they do on issues regarding nation, class, and gender. As both a poetic trope and the seeming natural and dynamic state of the domestic sphere, the image of the domestic that this set of writers represents and defines is turbulent, unruly, and one that deals with the tangled web of local and global, …

Clever Cleric: Saint Wilfrid Of York And The Complexities Of Power And Authority In Seventh-Century England, Olivia E. Gannon

History ETDs

Saint Wilfrid of York was a Northumbrian bishop, abbot, and missionary. He was born in 634 and died in 709/710. His life was characterized by his landholdings that spanned territories and kingdoms, his enduring persistence to remain bishop, his monastic empire, his hostile relationships with kings, his powerful friends and supporters, and his resistance in the face of adversity. Wilfrid’s achievements were remarkable for a seventh-century bishop – a bishop deserving of recognition for his lasting impact on England. By closely examining the sources, this thesis analyzes Wilfrid’s tumultuous life and career in the form of his landholdings, his trips …

Beach Bodies: Gender And The Beach In American Culture, 1880-1940, Margaret Elena Depond

History ETDs

This dissertation argues that American beaches, within the world of leisure and pleasure, were significant contested spaces of social change and debate. Overtime, from about 1880 to 1940, social restrictions loosened at the beach, allowing men, women, and people of color to express themselves in ways that had been previously controlled, curtailed, or proscribed. The emergence of mass popular amusements at the beach attracted a wide array of the American population. Both working-class and middle-class Americans absorbed the culture of new beach attractions, such as amusement parks, piers, boardwalks, and bathhouses. In doing so, they interacted more with each other …

Statewise: Jurisdictional Fictions, Transnational Politics And Remaking The Nation State On The Chiapas-Guatemala Border, 1821-1899, Lean Sweeney

History ETDs

Statewise: Jurisdictional Fictions, Transnational Politics And Remaking The Nation State On The Chiapas-Guatemala Border, 1821-1899, focuses on the undrawn border between Mexico and Guatemala during the nineteenth century. I argue that this lack of national definition allowed social actors and state authorities in both Mexico and Guatemala to successfully negotiate alliances and competing territorial claims. In this space of "jurisdictional fiction," where the Mexican and Guatemalan governments' claims to authority were undermined by their lack of political, economic and military control, exiles could become political leaders, contrabandists could hold the keys and records to the customs house, displaced indigenous …

Narrating Refugee Lives: Political Asylum In 21st Century France, Susmitha Udayan

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This dissertation examines representations of refugees in legal and aesthetic texts. Using the notion of chronotope as a conceptual framework, it studies the use of time and space in various refugee narratives to argue that aesthetic texts about refugees foreground the concept of spatiality to materialize and historicize the refugee condition. These texts, I contend, provide a necessary counternarrative to the depersonalized, dehistoricized representations of refugees encountered in legal texts and media discourses. Comparative analysis of legal and literary texts shows that adventure-time, which dominates legal asylum narratives, contributes to produce coherent, linear, singularized legal asylum stories. Such a narration …

Camp De Thiaroye Ou La Déconstruction Du Mythe Colonial Par Le Truchement De La Langue Française, Maurice Tetne Mr.

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The history between France and Africa has been peppered with numerous irregularities and crimes. Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane’s film Camp de Thiaroye (1988) returned to this painful story of the Thiaroye tragedy. That film chronicles the criminal massacre by the French of returning Senegalese soldiers. The latter, having sacrificed themselves for France during WWII, demanded treatment and compensation equal to their French counterparts. Interestingly, one of the significant details of this film is the multitude of languages and “patois” that the various African soldiers speak. At the same time, the lingua-franca, a kind of “pidgin” called Français-tirailleur, is simultaneously …

A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis Of The Discourse Of English Friday Sermons, Ahmad Alenezi

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

On every Friday, in every mosque in the world, Muslims gather for Friday sermons in answer to the call: “O you, who have believed, when [the adhan] is called for the prayer on the day of Jumu’ah [Friday], then proceed to the remembrance of Allah and leave trade. That is better for you, if you only knew” (Quran, 62:9). Typically, the Friday prayer is shortened by half to accommodate the presentation of the Friday sermon; this emphasizes the importance of the sermons. The present study is a discourse analysis that examined 12 sermons delivered on the first Friday of every …

Immigration/Migration And Settler Colonialism: Doing Critical Ethnic Studies On The U.S. - Mexico Border, Raquel A. Madrigal

American Studies ETDs

My dissertation argues that the U.S.-Mexico border, and the militarized operations of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement along the border, including state and federal anti-immigration law, are historically ongoing settler colonial structures of U.S. imperialism, and empire, which are asserted upon, and over Indigenous people and their land. I claim that these anti-immigrant, and anti-migrant structures and operations perpetuate Native dispossession, and removal, as well as deny Native presence and sovereignty. I also contend that undocumented immigrant and migrant justice must be accountable and responsible to Indigenous peoples, their land, and …

Science For All: Exploring Science Communication For Public Engagement In Culturally Diverse Scenarios In The Americas, Denisse Helena Vasquez-Guevara

Latin American Studies ETDs

Universities in the United States and Ecuador must meet various policy guidelines concerning research and teaching that address the needs of their local communities. In Ecuador, the higher education law requires that universities undertake research and public outreach projects that respond to societal needs. In the United States, Carnegie Research Classifications motivate universities to serve their publics by carrying out community-engaged research. However, evaluations of public outreach projects and community-engaged research have consistently demonstrated that the segments of society that are ostensibly served by these initiatives are not meaningfully engaged in them; members of the public are treated as, and …

Living The Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, And Culture, Trisha Venisa Martinez

American Studies ETDs

Living the Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, and Culture is an ethnographic interdisciplinary study that draws upon the voices of Manitos, or Hispanic New Mexicans, and experiences of migration from Northern New Mexico into Wyoming from late 19th century to the present. This project exemplifies how consciousness or a heightened sense of awareness derives from the value system of querencia or how one establishes a sense of self and community through place. I argue the cultural landscape of a person’s place of origin injects a set of values and distinct qualities that create a strong sense of identity, enable community, …

(Re)Insurgent Ecologies: Dwelling Together Between Queasy Worlds, Kirsten E. Mundt

American Studies ETDs

Discourses that construct the “self” as something to be fixed, or made whole, chart a retreat from relational ecosystems back to the individual, reinforcing colonial politics rooted in bounded individualism. This project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and “self,” makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship. New meanings and attachments are forged within queasy border zones of incommensurability, toggling between the particular and the universal, between desires for solidarity and recognition that colonial violences continue to be unequally distributed and borne. …

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Exploration, Disruption, Diaspora: Movement Of Nuevomexicanos To Utah, 1776-1850, Linda C. Eleshuk Roybal

American Studies ETDs

ABSTRACT

Nuevomexicano villages of northern New Mexico have experienced disruptions throughout their existence. This dissertation is a study of what occurred in early disruptions leading to the great departure of the 1940s, during World War II and immediately following, known as the New Mexico diaspora, where a number of villagers moved out of New Mexico to other states, including Utah, most expecting to settle for a time with hopes of return to their home villages. The study asks what happened especially during the great disruption, discourses of disruption and movement, what Nuevomexicanos carried with them in movement, whether they returned …

Urban In Nature: Yosemite, Cars, And California's Cities, 1913–1970, Guy Mcclellan

History ETDs

The impacts of national parks do not stop at their borders, and neither should their histories. Located less than a day’s drive from California’s biggest cities, Yosemite National Park remains a product of their combined influences. “Urban in Nature” is a relational history of the park and its nearby metropolitan areas like Merced (70 miles away), Berkeley (180), San Francisco (200), and Los Angeles (300).

Since the advent of the automobile Yosemite has been a mirror of the state’s urban areas, rather than an escape from them. Passenger cars drove Yosemite’s urbanization in two interconnected ways. Firstly, increasing amounts of …

Reflected Dispositions, Taylor Hedum

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

My MFA Thesis Exhibition, Reflected Dispositions, features an installation of sculptural objects and light projections in an unconventionally dark gallery setting. Spotlights shine onto the reflective sculptures, and the light is cast onto the surrounding environment. Motors or water deform the sculptures to create dynamic motion in the projections, with the cyclical changes and tempo meant to evoke a state of reflection in the audience. The percepts magnify the nuances of the material; to reveal the previously unseen.

My interest to control light stems from experiments with materials and the unexpected reflections that they produce. Since then, I have learned …

A New Theory Of Musical Semiosis, Matthew Stanley

Music ETDs

Musical semiotics is the study of the various ways in which musical structures become meaningful. This thesis is an attempt to create a logical, systematized, transformational theory of musical semiotics that can elucidate the various ways in which music conveys meaning. While the semiotic exploration of music is by no means novel, this thesis presents a unique, highly rigorous, and truly theoretical approach to musical semiotics that differs significantly from previous theories. By combining all aspects of the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce with the metaphor theories of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Zoltan Kovecses, a theoretical apparatus is …