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Identifying With “The Native” In Anglo-American Environmental Writing: A Rhetorical Study, Alexis Piper

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

IDENTIFYING WITH “THE NATIVE”

IN ANGLO-AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING:

A RHETORICAL STUDY

by

Alexis F. Piper

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2016

Under the Supervision of Professor Anne Wysocki

In an effort to contribute to rhetorical theories of “identification” this dissertation examines Anglo nature writing written for Anglo audiences in the United States over several centuries. In my conclusion, I suggest approaches current nature writers might use to offer audiences ways of engaging with Indigenous peoples and Native conceptions of environment that are more ethical, appropriate, and effective than approaches used in previous centuries. I maintain that such approaches could potentially …

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, And The Creation Of "Authentic Voices" In The Black Women's Literary Tradition, Anna Storm

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on African American women’s literature from the 1890s through 1948, covering the New Negro movement and sentimental domestic novel, the folk writings of the early twentieth century, and white-life fiction. The study investigates writers and texts that at various points in the creation of a black women’s literary tradition have been labeled “inauthentic” or have otherwise received comparably little attention by scholars of the tradition. In particular, I examine the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Zora Neale Hurston, placing them in conversation with one another and within the broader context of black women’s writing at the turn …

Gender Reflections: A Reconsideration Of Pictish Mirror And Comb Symbols, Traci N. Billings

Theses and Dissertations

The interpretation of prehistoric iconography is complicated by the tendency to project

contemporary male/female gender dichotomies into the past. Pictish monumental stone sculpture

in Scotland has been studied over the last 100 years. Traditionally, mirror and comb symbols

found on some stones produced in Scotland between AD 400 and AD 900 have been interpreted

as being associated exclusively with women and/or the female gender. This thesis re-examines

this assumption in light of more recent work to offer a new interpretation of Pictish mirror and

comb symbols and to suggest a larger context for their possible meaning. Utilizing the Canmore

database, …

The Waiting House, Erika Marie Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this collection, The Waiting House, use techniques associated with an evolving elegiac tradition in their portrayal of anticipatory grief born of terminal illness and impending loss. Like the melancholic mourning of modern elegies described by Jahan Ramazani, my poems often resist consolation even as they borrow from elegiac conventions like poetic substitution and repetition. Additionally, they utilize strategies and patterns of literary anger outlined by Alicia Suskin Ostriker as common in postwar American women’s poetry, to express anger that is also anticipatory grief. Finally, this collection uses illness metaphors to question the well being of a larger …

Investigating The Functions Of Copper Material Culture From Four Oneota Sites In The Lake Koshkonong Locality Of Wisconsin, Jacqueline Marie Pozza

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Oneota use of native copper in the Lake Koshkonong locality between A.D. 1100 and 1400. Over 600 pieces of Oneota copper artifacts originating from four sites were documented and analyzed in order to investigate distribution, production, utilization, and the ideological and social significance behind this raw material. The artifacts analyzed for this study were recovered from Oneota sites adjacent to Lake Koshkonong in Jefferson County, Wisconsin: Crabapple Point (47JE93), Schmeling (47JE833), Koshkonong Creek Village (47JE379), and Crescent Bay Hunt Club (47JE904). These assemblages primarily included awls, beads, pendants, and fragmented material. The data set also includes unique …

Hashtagging Your Health: Using Psychosocial Variables And Social Media Use To Understand Impression Management And Exercise Behaviors In Women, Caitlyn Hauff

Theses and Dissertations

Our society has become heavily reliant on social media, especially in the health and exercise domain. Social and environmental factors impact females’ body image perceptions and create body image disturbances, yet little research is dedicated to the exploration of how social media, and social comparisons through social media exposure, impact exercise behaviors and body image perceptions in females. Considering Perloff's (2014) theoretical model, the current study explored how the interaction between individual psychosocial variables and social media use predict exercise behaviors and engagement in impression management in women. Using a mixed methodological approach, the specific aims of this study were …

Gay Liberation Is One Thing, But Nobody Likes A Dyke: Emerging Frames In Queer Radio, Ryan Charles Sugden

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how a social movement uses the media to progress in society. I conduct a framing analysis on the queer community’s use of radio during two time periods: 1970s queer radio program Gay Perspective and a 2015-2016 program, Queery. I examine the show through three emerging frames: Cultured, Diversity, and Assimilation. The thesis studies how segments of the LGBTQIA+ community framed the discussion of gay rights in the 1970s and how those frames have (and haven’t) changed in 2016. Gay Perspective focused much of its energy on trying to demonstrate the need for rights and attempts to demonstrate …

Rail: African & African American Labor And The Ties That Bind In The Atlantic World, Benjamin David Wendorf

Theses and Dissertations

As was intended, the construction of railways transformed the landscape and societies of the Atlantic World. Great fortunes and forces emerged in the directions of the tracks, sufficient to create structures of economy and organize communities in ways that persisted long after a railway’s use had diminished. In this dissertation, the author argues that the connections and reorganization effected by railway construction created new economic paths in the American South, Panama, and Gold Coast West Africa; the transformations were marked by struggles for power along racial lines, enslavement and coercion in labor, and the interchange between communities and their existing …

The Comedians: A Novel, Roswitha T. Both

Theses and Dissertations

In the spring of 1970, university campuses across the United States were roiled by the news that the Vietnam War had been escalated, through a bombing campaign, into the jungles of Laos and Cambodia. The protests at UW-Madison campus were among the largest. Frustration that, despite years of protests, the War not only continued but had expanded beyond Vietnam’s borders, led to the bombing of a physics research building on the UW campus later that summer. THE COMEDIANS begins a few weeks after that bombing. The novel’s primary setting is a student housing co-op near Langdon Street, formerly known as …

Eco Ephemeral: Works By Thomas Ferrella & Artists’ Books From Special Collections, Uw-Milwaukee Libraries, Pamela Caserta Hugdahl

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis essay and accompanying exhibition approach environmental concerns through an art historical perspective by considering works of art by Thomas Ferrella, M.D. and artists’ books from Special Collections at UW-Milwaukee Libraries. The exhibition evades conventional boundaries of galleries in order to present artists’ books in their intended manner and to display Ferrella’s outdoor installations in context with UWM’s award-winning sustainability initiatives. The results exemplify how we shape earth and in turn how our actions upon earth impact us, emphasizing human interdependence on fragile ecosystems. Ferrella’s artworks and medical expertise in combination with the content in the artists’ books and …

Sicilian Intellectual And Cultural Resistance To Piedmont's Appropriation (1860-1920), Giordana Poggioli-Kaftan

Theses and Dissertations

Through my analysis of literary works, I endeavor to bring to the fore a cultural and intellectual counter-hegemonic discourse that came to be articulated by three Sicilian writers in the years following Italy’s unification. Their intent was that of debunking a national discourse that constructed Italian Southerners as “Otherness.” My study focuses on six primary texts, five short stories, and one novel, written at the turn of the twentieth century. These texts include Giovanni Verga’s “What is the King?” and “Freedom”; Luigi Pirandello’s “Madam Mimma,” “The Black Baby Goat,” and “The Other Son”; Luigi Capuana’s Rabbato’s Americani. In order to …

Meaning In Motion, Kara Hendrickson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis essay and accompanying exhibition examine the capacity of interactive art to stage situations for participants to explore embodiment. In presenting the four-part interactive suite "Body Language" by Nathaniel Stern, the exhibition invites viewers to engage with digital projections that track and respond to movement by producing animated text and spoken utterances. Through the juxtaposition of motion performed by the viewer’s physical body with computer-generated words and speech, "Body Language" explores the complex ways in which the body and language depend upon each other to create and communicate meaning. This essay also proposes that the gallery uses its power …

Decolonizing African-American Museums: A Case Study On Two African-American Museums In The South, Anastacia Jonique Scott

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand how African-American museums’ exhibits help individuals gain their sense of racial identity through public memory. In an era where the United States is supposedly “post-racial” African-American museums are flourishing. As institutions serving an important role in preserving the collective memory of African-American people in the US, African-American museums evoke questions of representation within the larger US narrative that confirm the persistent saliency of race in society, and therefore continue to have a public function in maintaining and developing a racial African-American identity (Jackson 2012; Eichstedt and Small 2002; Wilson 2012; Golding 2009).

My research is …

Talkin' Back And Shifting Black; Black Motherhood, Identity Development And Doctoral Study, Amber Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how the context of doctoral study within predominantly white and elite research institutions in the Midwest facilitates identity development among Black doctoral women student parents. This phenomenological study employed Black feminist epistemologies as both a methodological underpinning and interpretive lens to examine how seven Black women doctoral student parents negotiate and made meaning of their intersectional identities.

The six key findings that emerged from this study were: (1) negotiating intersectionality as trauma in childhood; (2) negotiating microaggressions related to invisibility/hypervisibility; (3) negotiating structural macroaggressions as violence; (4) hidden costs of negotiating …

The Female Accomplice: Rape, Liberalism, And The Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Dawn Arendt Nawrot

Theses and Dissertations

Previous scholarship on rape narratives within the emerging eighteenth-century novel focuses on a dichotomous construction of the female agent struggling against the male rapist and against a biased patriarchal society. However, my project expands this gendered model by evaluating how the presence of colluding female accomplices complicate understandings of female agency and patriarchal violence. I argue that depictions of femes soles as treacherous and mercenary liberal subjects, who embody the corruption of the market, play a vital part in domesticating single women of the developing middle class. I analyze the ways in which female accomplices to rape represent a sizeable …

Nietzsche And Problem Of Nihilism, Zahra Meyboti

Theses and Dissertations

It is generally accepted that life-affirmation is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Nietzsche’s aim is to affirm life despite all miseries for human beings conscious of the

horror and terror of existence and avoid nihilism. He is concerned with life affirmation

almost in all of his works, In my thesis I will consider how he involved with avoiding

nihilism to affirm life according to his two books, The Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of

Morals.

Nietzsche's Signpost For Feminism, Sara N. Pope

Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the apparent misogyny and anti-feminism found in Part VII of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (BGE). Following an interpretation put forward by Maudemarie Clark, I argue that Nietzsche’s claims and observations about women are purposely reflective of the dubious metaphysical assumptions of dualism and essentialism maintained with respect to biological sex. Given this, we can see Nietzsche’s text as highlighting the effects of “cultural breeding” in the form of gender. Thus, this paper aims to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s characterizations of women and “woman’s emancipation” as an important signification of the culturally bred, latent discrimination of the sexes, …

Impact Location In An Isotropic Plate Without Training, Prasanna Rajbhandari

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

IMPACT LOCATION IN AN ISOTROPIC PLATE WITHOUT TRAINING

by

Prasanna Rajbhandari

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2016

Under the Supervision of Professor Dr. Nathan Salowitz

Unexpected impacts are major concerns in the aerospace industry that can cause difficulty to detect damage. Techniques have been developed to determine the impact location using piezoelectric sensors. Most existing systems require training data to develop a database of known structural responses and properties that can be referenced for location of impacts. This data collection is time consuming and if an impact and corresponding sensor data is outside the range of training data, the system …

Locutionary Disablement And Epistemic Injustice, Dana Elizabeth Grabelsky

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, I investigate how the notion of epistemic injustice relates to two distinct, though not incompatible, models of the phenomenon of silencing: epistemic and linguistic. I argue that a linguistic model of silencing can be used to elucidate the nature of hermeneutical injustice—a type of epistemic injustice identified by Miranda Fricker. I put forth my own reformulation of the linguistic model of silencing as locutionary (as opposed to illocutionary) disablement, when it occurs in cases of hermeneutical injustice, and I argue that this reformulation can respond to the criticism that Fricker’s construal of hermeneutical injustice falls prey to …

Nietzsche's Autonomy, Responsibility, And Will Unification, Waylon Jennings Smith

Theses and Dissertations

The modern analytic’s conception of morality usually grounds the agent’s mo-rality in some conception of responsibility and autonomy. Friedrich Nietzsche agrees that morality should be grounded in responsibility and autonomy, however his con-ceptions of responsibility and autonomy are quite different from the modern analytic literature. In this paper, I present Nietzsche’s account of autonomy and responsibility. In part one, I describe Nietzsche’s beliefs about human nature and how the human psyche became disparate. The sovereign individual is also introduced as the Nie-tzschean ideal capable of autonomy and responsibility. The second part of the paper refines Nietzshce’s ideas concerning both the …

Sound And Vision: Marketing Recorded Music In The Age Of Radio, Daniel Martin Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

In the early 1930s, the popularity of radio and the economic austerity of the Great Depression threatened to make the phonograph record obsolete. However, by the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, records were returning to popularity. This return coincided with the first instances of the appearance of unique cover artwork on record albums. This thesis explores the cultural and industrial factors that converged in the late 1930s to make album artwork viable in ways that it would not have been earlier. This thesis also investigates how RCA Victor and Columbia, two record companies that had …

Skin In The Game: Providing Redress For American Sports' Appropriation Of Native American Iconography, Geraud Blanks

Theses and Dissertations

To date, legal efforts to eradicate the use of Native American iconography in American sports have focused on the concept of Indian nicknames as disparaging terms and Indian mascots as harmful images. But subjective claims of harm are hard to prove and are often thwarted by First Amendment protections because judges remain reluctant to regulate expressive and commercial freedom of speech based on offense. And while a 2014 ruling by the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board cancelling six of the Washington Redskins’ trademark registrations was a landmark moment for name-change advocates, the decision could …

Young Adult Authors, Readers, And Feminized Social Media, Margaret R. Kohlmann

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at YA literature, a feminized genre that continues to gain momentum in publishing and popular culture. Specifically, I look at YA authors and their readers’ interactions on social media and the manner in which these conversations are gendered. I argue that YA authors are expected to utilize feminized traits on social media with their readers and fellow authors, but they use same traits to create social change in the genre and industry. This project analyzes three different types of readers: Readers, Reader-Creators, and Bloggers and their interactions with YA authors on social media. My interviews with five …

Collective Management In A Cooperative: Problematizing Productivity And Power, Avery Edenfield

Theses and Dissertations

Since the mid-twentieth century, the structure of the workplace has undergone a transformation. While the conventional firm with its rigid bureaucracies is still in use, many businesses have grown increasingly flexible, flat, and polycentric: “empowerment” and “innovation” are the coin of the realm. As the way we work changed, professional communication scholarship pivoted to consider communication practices in these structures.

While professional communication scholars have long discussed these kinds of organizations, they have not discussed an increasingly popular alternative: cooperatives. Owned and operated by the people who use them, these organizations can significantly affect the communities in which they operate. …

Colorscapes: Marko Spalatin 1970-2001, Jacqueline Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

Artist and printmaker Marko Spalatin (b. 1945) is known for his ability to capture the transitory optical effect of color and light through the interaction of geometric forms in space. His career developed from concepts of the 1960s Op art movement, which produced a heightened viewing experience of the work of art rather than focusing on content. This movement drew on modernism’s interests in breaking traditional academic definitions that viewed color as an extraneous addition, and shifted toward the depiction of color as having its own sense of form and dynamism. Spalatin established his style by creating highly colored surfaces …

The Unsung Evolutionist: Charles Rau's Swiss Lake Dwelling Collection At The Smithsonian Institution, Liam C. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

During the second half of the nineteenth century, museums and collectors around the world engaged in a collecting frenzy focused on objects from the Swiss Alpine sites known as Pfahlbauten. Romantic reconstructions of these sites captured the antiquarian imagination and resulted in an artifact diaspora. Charles (Carl) Rau, a German-American archaeologist who became the first Curator of Antiquities at the Smithsonian Institution (SI), collected several hundred Neolithic and Bronze Age artifacts from the lake dwelling sites of Robenhausen and Auvernier, donating this material as well as his library to the SI upon his death in 1886. This thesis investigates the …

The Ambience Of Innovation: A Material Semiotic Analysis Of Corporate And Community Innovation Sites, Reed Stratton

Theses and Dissertations

There are unprecedented opportunities in professional and technical writing (PTW) and rhetoric research thanks to a contemporary expansion of rhetorical studies beyond the linguistic/symbolic and into the material, accounting for the rhetorical contributions of “nonhumans” (Latour Reassembling the Social). Material rhetoric frameworks such as Thomas Rickert’s ambient rhetoric and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, provide fertile grounds for PTW/rhetoric research that explores the diffusion of “rhetoric into material space” (Rickert xii) which has especially exciting implications for the study of place and how it embodies values and rhetorically shapes acting, thinking, and the entire spectrum of “human flourishing” (Rickert xii).

This …

Granite And Rainbow: Queer Authority And Authorship In T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, And Virginia Woolf, Heejoung Shin

Theses and Dissertations

“Granite and Rainbow” argues that queerness is an essential condition for normative creativity to properly function in literary Modernism. Specifically, for the three modernist authors I explore in this project, queerness is at the heart of their literary performances: the private, bawdy, scintillatingly homoerotic Eliot feigning an impersonal, cerebral voice in public; the wounded, traumatized, feminine Yeats desiring for a compelling, masculine mask; and the scared and unsatisfiable Woolf whose strong desire for the maternal and a female tradition of writing is almost always cut short by her simultaneously antithetical craving for a male tradition of writing. This dissertation approaches …

Comic Cuts: The Satirical Prints Of Warrington Colescott, Nicholas William Pipho

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper I examine the work of prominent Wisconsin printmaker Warrington Colescott, based on the social and political context he was working in during the second half of the twentieth century. Colescott is known for his satirical intaglio prints that address a wide range of topics including American history, contemporary politics, and the history of art. In this paper I focus specifically on three topics that he addressed in his prints: protest, war and the military, and the environment. My study relies heavily on archival interviews with the artist, as well as research undertaken for exhibitions of Colescott’s work, …

A False Sense Of Security: A Feminist Content Analysis Of Media Representations Of Rape Prevention Devices, Kelsey Erin Jandrey

Theses and Dissertations

Rape prevention products inscribe blame for rape onto female bodies and do not actually prevent rape. I will specifically examining three different rape prevention products: the Rapex condom, color-changing and drug-detecting nail polish, and rape prevention undergarments through a content analysis of the written media representations about these devices. Examining these products and the meanings and motivations behind their creation is important for understanding larger trends in the way rape prevention discourse functions, as well as understanding our society's ideas about what it means to be appropriately feminine. Rape prevention products and rape prevention discourse are mutually constructed. It is …