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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 …

What, Why, And How Much?: The Integration Of Culture In The Secondary Foreign Language Classroom, Danielle Patricia Asay

Theses and Dissertations

Culture is an integral part of the FL classroom, yet teachers often face difficulties when incorporating it into their curricula. This survey study gathered data from teachers of many different languages, including ASL, all at the secondary level in the state of Utah. The study attempts to describe how secondary FL teachers view the role of culture in language teaching. It also details which models, means, or methods teachers use to communicate culture to their students, as well as the amount of culture included in their lesson planning, instruction, and assessment. Factors that contribute to more culture inclusion in the …

Discriminacion A Un Martir: The Ballad Of Felix Longoria, Cristobal A. Carrizales

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at how the Felix Longoria Affair propelled Hector P. Garcia, Lyndon B. Johnson and the American G.I. Forum into the national limelight, while also leaving the Longorias, Three Rivers and Texas in a state of disrepair. The affair in general helped expose injustices that were occurring to Mexicans American in Texas at the time, but left the family, Three Rivers and Texas in a battle over the legacy of how each would be seen in the annals of history.

If This Heart Had A Mouth: A Forbidden Romance Narrated Through Mimesis: Poems, Julieta V. Corpus

Theses and Dissertations

If This Heart Had a Mouth consists of forty-two poems where love is the catalyst for a multitude of emotions, ranging from falling in love, to hopelessness, to a begrudging kind of acceptance at losing the beloved to somebody else. To create all forty-two poems, 23 written in Spanish, and 19 poems written in English, I employed the literary device called Mimesis which entails deriving an original poem from someone else's work.

To create each poem, I followed another poet’s original work, line by line. I imitated that poet’s rhythm through their use of meter. I counted the number of …

The Artists Journey- Strolling The Edges Of The Universe, Mary P. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Space exploration has always fascinated me, and so has the idea ( so far fictional) that humankind may someday encounter extraterrestrial life. My series of paintings and prints are a visual expression of the awe and wonder I feel as I follow our species’s unending drive to expand the boundaries of its known world.

But the unknown is not just out there in interstellar space. And there are other lifeforms to encounter right here on our own planet. Another series of my paintings documents Earth’s flora. Our ties to the microorganisms, animals, and plants on our planet, and the life …

Love Sex God, Magdiel G. Alfonso

Theses and Dissertations

As a result of the absence of a father-figure and the repulsion of machismo, a love for that masculinity and a void within grew from the missing father-son/male-male interaction; this is the drive to codify my work with homoerotic imagery bathed with guilty religiosity through a torturous sadomasochist context to display a life-mirrored desire to punish and love the male simultaneously while feeling guilty doing it. The work is inspired by homoerotic and religious art history and at times the blending of the two.

The purpose of this work is not only to show the love for the celebration of …

Boricua Type: Intersectional Hybrid Transcultural Art Concepts And Illustrations, Isaac Santiago

Theses and Dissertations

The concepts and artworks contained in this thesis embodies most of the research that I did in and outside the University. My particular experiences as a Puerto Rican, born and raised, and as a migrant artist in Mexico and Texas. Most of the research was made by trail and error independently or with little to no guidance. In conclusion I found my artistic self: technically, personally, and reached a high level of commitment to our community as a prepared professional.

From A Long Line Of Thieves, Lucinda Zamora-Wiley

Theses and Dissertations

This is a work of original creative writing, containing works of poetry, prose poems, flash non-fiction, and personal essays. The primary subject areas include family relations after PTSD, love, interracial struggles within marriage and family, pride of place--including Texas and the United States, and poetic/artistic inspirations that influenced the author.

The Subjugation Of The Texas Indians From The 17th–19th Centuries, Erhard M. Vandeventer

Theses and Dissertations

The Americas have long been a center of conflict as European powers competed for control of the resources of these untapped lands. Spain, France, and England contributed to the turbulent era of colonization. Each left their mark on the Western Hemisphere. Spain couldn’t know that an Independent Mexico would emerge from the actions of the first Spanish conquistadors. The Republic of Texas was actually a stepchild of Spain created through its Mexican land grants and missions. The lands they colonized were not empty. Spain, Mexico and the Texas Republic, found their new holdings populated by Native Americans who were not …

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 …

Quis Tantus Furor? The Servian Question, Gallus, And Orpheus In Georgics 4, Kyle Glenn Merkley

Theses and Dissertations

In Servius' commentary, there are two elusive statements concerning the ending of the Georgics. Both of these statements seem to imply that Vergil changed the ending of the Georgics and that the Orpheus epyllion as it now stands was a later edition to the poem. The question of whether or not Servius is correct in this assertion is a central question in Vergilian studies. By focusing on the reception of Orpheus prior to Vergil, the Roman Orpheus of Vergil's time, and Vergil's own use of the Orpheus figure, a potential answer emerges to the Servian question. In order to …

James Tissot's And Emile Zola's Shopgirl:The Working Girl As La Parisienne, Elizabeth Pusey

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues for the cultural space of late nineteenth-century Parisian shopgirls as a position of power. The shopgirls' role in society is an ambiguous position connecting fashion consumer culture, class divides, gender and identity perceptions, and the workspace. Using James Tissot's Femme à Paris series, specifically the image Demoiselles de Magasin, and Emile Zola's novel Au Bonheur des Dames as primary sources, I examine the role of the shopgirl as a liminal position within the definition of the iconic 'La Parisienne' woman. By looking at women's work and the role of shopgirls in the boutique and department store …

The Ontology Of Immanence: Arriving At Being In Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, Rachel R. Gilman

Theses and Dissertations

In response to the economic and political upheaval of World War I, Scottish Modernism explored the cultural and linguistic changes of a nation trying to identify itself amidst a world-wide conflict. Scholars and critics have considered Nan Shepherd's fiction in this context—focusing on issues of gender, female identity, language, and land—but have yet to look seriously at her work The Living Mountain and its contributions to the Modernist movement. More recently, critics like Louisa Gairn and Robert MacFarlane have called attention to Shepherd's small but powerful text in an ecocritical and philosophical light, reframing her contribution to issues of Scottish …

“Sparks Fly ”: Connecting Midwestern Historic Forts Through A Comparative Study Of Gunflints, Jeffrey A. Spanbauer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will outline the temporal changes and choices of colonial powers and individuals as expressed at historic frontier posts in the Midwest between 1683 and 1779 as expressed through their supply and usage of gunflints. Gunflints exist as persistent artifacts at historic sites, and especially so at fortifications like Fort de Chartres, Fort St. Joseph, Fort Michilimackinac and Fort Ouiatenon. These sites exist within the same chronological timeframe, from 1690-1780, and saw occupation by both the French and British, with nearby indigenous groups, and should serve as instructive means to investigate the factors involved in the supply, selection, and …

The New York With Instance, Or Abject In The Personal Environment, Liam Kirby

Theses and Dissertations

This paper was produced by an artificial neural network. An algorithm iteratively taught itself how to write by studying the text of thesis papers from the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 MFA semesters. After hundreds of generations of self-education, the program can produce endless thesis papers, writing letter-by-letter. The images were created through an identical process, using 8000 installation photographs from the website Contemporary Art Daily as a dataset.

Braving Shame: The Rhetoric Of Bravery In Contemporary Women's Memoir, Debra Gayle Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation interrogates the rhetoric of bravery as a culturally-infused way of hearing certain kinds of personal narratives. As a cultural rhetoric, “bravery” has deep roots in masculine militaristic ideology in which cowardice, courage, and shame are conceptually linked to a sense of duty. The memoir industry represents one environment that archives what is valued as brave writing. As rhetoric precariously at work in the memoir industry, this dissertation investigates the cultural assumptions that drive literary bravery as it is used to assess contemporary memoirs, particularly memoirs written by women. Braving Shame invokes a new brand of bravery—one that de-emphasizes …

Pathway: A Gateway To Global Church Education, Benjamin Charles Peterson

Theses and Dissertations

Education and learning have ever been at the core of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Throughout its history that now extends nearly one hundred ninety years, the Church has made numerous attempts to provide educational opportunities for its members. Some attempts have failed, and others were met with some success—though limited, to be sure. In hindsight, most of these efforts were simply laying the foundation for something far greater. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the groundwork for global Church education had been laid, and the seeds planted. Beginning with a pilot administered through BYU-Idaho, a …

Creativity & Religion: A Self-Study Of Mormon Mindset In The Art Classroom, Shon Scot Feller

Theses and Dissertations

A high school art teacher investigates the relationship of his religious beliefs with his notions of what it means to be creative. This Mormon teacher examines his religious and experiential life through self-study, by drawing from autoethnographic and hermeneutic phenomenological strategies. He believes that everyone, including himself and his students, has a creative potential. He also analyzes how his Mormon religion affects his view of creativity and how creativity has affected his behavior as a Mormon. The conclusions he reaches uncover the need for balance between his creative self and his Mormon self and outlines several ways to merge these …

Searching For The Sublime, Kheng Saik Lim

Theses and Dissertations

The influential philosophers Edmund Burke and Emmanuel Kant understand the sublime as events and objects that cause an emotional reaction so magnificent that the intellect fails to comprehend it. It is thus deeply felt and experienced but remains undefined and non-understood. Searching for the Sublime is a suite of paintings that seek to respond to these definitions of the sublime. Together they address and evoke themes of mystery, fear, power, and the unknowable through the medium of painting.

Finding Chinese Jesus: Chinese Christians And American Missionaries In The Republic Of China (1912-1949), Matthew Joseph Douthitt

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the beliefs and practices of Chinese Christians and their American missionary counterparts in the Republic of China (1912-1949). Between the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the rise of the People's Republic, the Chinese people seriously reexamined politics, religion, and their relationship with the West. Many scholars claim that Chinese people could not completely understand and accept Christianity due to insurmountable cultural differences. I would argue religious misunderstanding did not befall our historical subjects the Chinese Christians; rather misunderstanding has plagued the modern scholar. Misunderstanding did not arise from a centuries old cultural mindset. Instead, Sino-Christianity conformed …

Mass Media’S Cultivation Effect On Islamic, Muslim, And Qur’Anic Prejudice, Shanna J. Carlson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the power of the mass media’s ability to cultivate reality in terms of the threat of Islam. A rhetorical analysis of the messages portrayed by the mass media is then compared to the findings of the study. While the study did not find any significant correlation between consumption of media and fear of Muslims, the Qur’an, or Islam, it did find a strong negative correlation between inter-group contact and salience of stereotypes.

All Hands Bury The Dead, Summer Qabazard

Theses and Dissertations

All Hands Bury the Dead is a collection of poetry, salted with creative non-fiction, and images, exploring trauma, memory, time, nostalgia, mental health, and love in the backgrounds of the Gulf War in Kuwait (1990-1991), domestic violence, relationships, and academia. The dissertation includes a critical preface that theorizes how racist, sexist, and colonialist ideologies can be reproduced in and supported through the uncritical application of theory to practice. The dissertation also includes an exploration of the assumptions about the innateness of creative writing ability that utilizes psychological theories of creativity to build a pedagogy to support the creative potential of …

Out The Window: The Coalescence Of Internal And External Space, Micah Allen Zavacky

Theses and Dissertations

Out the Window: The Coalescence of Internal and External Space is a supportive statement for an exhibition of prints, drawings, and paintings that begin with direct observation. Building on Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinctions of space and place, I examine how these terms reflect my subjective interpretations of objective subject matters. Landscape, still life in domestic interiors, and garden subjects, as observed and interpreted in the prints, drawings, and paintings, not only reveal the shifting roles of space and place but also the ongoing processes of change occurring both externally in the observed environment and internally in my response to it.

Hints Of Wholeness, Dylan Yvonne Welch

Theses and Dissertations

The fertile tension between what we know and don’t know about ourselves is the mystery that invigorates existence. In this essay, I posit that beauty is found in a knot of knowability and unknowability bound together in wholeness. This work contemplates our unique receptivity to that underlying but invisible wholeness which makes its presence known as beauty in nature immediately around us and on a cosmic scale.

"Twenty Or Thirty Or Forty Years Ago": Time, Posthistory, And The Hyper-Present In Patrick Mccabe's The Butcher Boy, Benjamin Moroni Killgore

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a commentary on Patrick McCabe's novel, The Butcher Boy, which was published in 1992. The novel is told through the perspective of the main character, Francie Brady, who through the majority of the narration is depicted as a young boy. Francie's life is riddled with tragedy with his moving from the loss of one important person in his life to another until the pain of these losses triggers a violent paranoid outburst resulting in the murder of the fixation of an obsession of his, Mrs. Nugent. This thesis looks at the events of the novel through …

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, …

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 …