Digital Commons Network^™

Schaffer And Monism: Validating The Priority Of The Whole, Phillip Av Pennell

CMC Senior Theses

Philosophy Thesis

The Integration Of African Americans In The Civilian Conservation Corps In Massachusetts, Caitlin E. Pinkham

Graduate Masters Theses

The Civilian Conservation Corps employed young white and black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In 1935 Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ordered the segregation of Corps camps across the country. Massachusetts’ camps remained integrated due in large part to low funding and a small African American population. The experiences of Massachusetts’ African American population present a new general narrative of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Federal government imposed a three percent African American quota, ensuring that African Americans participated in Massachusetts as the Civilian Conservation Corps expanded. This quota represents a Federal acknowledgement …

Stepsisters, Patrick Donachie

Capstones

This story details how parishioners in several New York City Catholic parishes responded to news that their churches would be shuttered by the New York Archdiocese. Parishioners appealed to the Vatican to overturn Cardinal Timothy Dolan's decisions, and the story details their struggle with church hierarchy and their own personal challenges.

In The Race To Reach New Wine Drinkers Old World Taste Is Losing Out, Lillian Knoepp

Capstones

But this old world is losing its grip on the wine industry. French wine production and consumption are falling while the New World of wine is gaining ground in both areas. Experts say that new wine making techniques and higher consumption in New World markets like the United States have changed the French wine industry.

For the French, more than just their wine industry is at stake. For many, the loss of French wine is a loss of French identity.

“They can't choose between the two. Because French people - we are wine and cheese - we are everything,” said …

Oil: A Cautionary Story, Kat Long

Capstones

William Scoresby threw his harpoon into the whale and the arrow-­‐shaped tip landed deep within its lung. The bowhead jerked and dove out of sight. Seven men in the boat watched the harpoon’s rope uncoil, and when it slackened, they knew the whale was coming up for air. They got their knives ready

Reshaping The Event Horizon‑ Marketing Utopia At Music Festivals, Justin D. Joffe

Capstones

Imagine a world where every leisure activity is tracked, recorded, and then analyzed as market research according to your age and gender demographic. Imagine the next phase after smartphone payments, when a chip linking your finances isn’t in your phone, but on your wrist. Imagine a vast field of fellow fun-­‐seekers, eating, drinking and dancing in hedonistic, chemically enhanced utopia. Such a scene certainly requires some open-­‐ mindedness and improvisation, sure, a willingness to submit oneself to a vulnerable environment of whimsy. Now imagine being subtly exposed to advertisements in such a mindset. It’s no Orwellian controlled dystopia, really. You’ve …

Unsettling: The Real Influx Of Syrian Refugees, Isabel M. Riofrio, Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, Marguerite Ward

Capstones

While heated arguments have been sparked by President Obama’s plan to accept more Syrians, one key aspect remains little examined in the public debate: the government’s long-running program for helping refugees establish new lives in America.

The federal government oversees a complex program to help refugees come to this country. But is is an effort that does not live up to all its promises, leaving the path more difficult for refugees to adapt to their new homeland. A NYCity News Service investigation examining hundreds of audits, financial filings and internal government reports found government-funded refugee charities contracted to help the …

Restaurant Owners Owing Millions Of Dollars To Workers Close Down, Only To Open Again Under Related Owners, Rajashree Chakravarty

Capstones

Many restaurants in New York city have cases registered against them for failing to adhere to the labor laws of the state. In most of the cases, workers demand the wage that they have lost over the course of their work but face a hard time retrieving the money from the employers. In many cases, the owners declare bankruptcy and close down the restaurant for the time being but open again under a different name or under the ownership of a related family member. Though the court cases are ruled in the workers’ favor, they do not get the money …

Silk Wings: The Making Of Noma, Sandra C. Lopez-Monsalve

Capstones

Silk Wings: The Making of Noma is a documentary that follows a group of aerialists, dancers and acrobats as they create an original new show. Conceived and directed by aerialist and choreographer Sara Zepezauer, Noma is a show that explores sight, sound, and movement.

Through beautifully shot performances and intimate interviews, the film follows Sara and her troupe through the path of creation and personal motivations. In this vibrant journey, Sara finds inspiration to cope with her father’s diagnosed carcinoma.

Silk Wings is a story about creativity, perseverance, hope and friendship.

The Sixty-Six Percent, Natalie Abruzzo

Capstones

The Sixty-Six Percent represent the percentage of women in the U.S. who are overweight. They are regarded as full-figured or “plus” size in the world of women’s apparel. Even though more than half of American women wear a “plus” size - size 14 and up - designs for these women account for a fraction of women’s apparel - Only 37% of women's wear is plus-size.

The Sixty-Six Percent is coming at an important time in a broader conversation about de-stigmatizing what it means to be a plus-size woman in America. Fat shaming has become taboo and mainstream media as well …

400 Meters, Luke Tress

Capstones

A short documentary on the closest Israeli village to the Gaza border, one year after the 2014 war.

The Push For Plus: How A Small Part Of The Fashion Industry Hopes To Make Big Changes To The Plus-Size Women’S Fashion Market, Alexa Pipia

Capstones

67 percent of the American female population is plus-size, yet 85 percent of the clothing sold to women in the country does not fit them and is not created with them in mind. A select group of designers, stylists, models, modeling agencies, and students are taking initiative on how to take the stigma out of plus-size fashion.

Geisha On Fire, Beimeng Fu

Capstones

Masae Satouchi is not an average Japanese woman. When she lived in Shiga Prefecture, a country town an hour away from Kyoto, her ex-boyfriends were uncomfortable with her eccentricity. She liked to wear colorful clothes, they didn’t. “I was too colorful to live in Japan,” she says. Japan is, of course, a modern, industrialized nation. The society, however, is famously conservative and does not allow for much unique self-expression. The situation is particularly difficult for Japanese women. Japan ranks 105 out of 136 in global gender gap index. Most women their quit jobs after having their first child.

First Year Sober And A Lifelong Journey, Lisa Brown

Capstones

This is a non-fiction narrative story that shows the difficulty and process of the first year of sobriety from substance abuse, using in-depth journalism reporting. The piece follows two individuals from New York during the first weeks or months of their recovery as they maintain a sober lifestyle.

The Reanimation Of The Zombie Genre, William Engel

Capstones

The following piece is an examination of the evolution of the zombie in popular media. It begins with a brief recap of the zombie’s history, beginning with its roots in 19th century Haitian folklore, followed by its usage in the format of film. The most notable and enduring entries in the zombie film genre served as scathing critiques of contemporary human issues, encapsulating all of the fears and insecurities of its audience. In recent years, however, due to the way the international film market has changed, the zombie film has lost its emotional power and edge. Contemporary zombie filmmakers are …

#Sociallyconnected: The Now And Then Era Of The Fangirl, Tionah Y. Lee

Capstones

Exploring the increased feeling of connection between fans and their favorite male musicians through social media.

Leaving Home, Keeping The Faith, Damian J. Geminder

Capstones

This capstone explores how outreach to immigrant and non-English-speaking communities is vital to the health of the American Catholic Church.

3 Kings Of Bangkok, Alden F. Nusser

Capstones

A portrait of three Elvis impersonators in Bangkok, Thailand.

Webcam Child Sex Abuse, Lena Masri

Capstones

Webcam child sex is a booming global industry, a twist in pedophilia as fast growing and difficult to police, according to law enforcement officials.

Questions Of Citizenship: Oregonian Reactions To Japanese Immigrants' Quest For Naturalization Rights In The United States, 1894-1952, Alison Leigh Jessie

Dissertations and Theses

This study examines the discrimination against Japanese immigrants in U.S. naturalization law up to 1952 and how it was covered in the Oregonian newspaper, one of the oldest and most widely read newspapers on the West Coast. The anti-Japanese movement was much larger in California, but this paper focuses on the attitudes in Oregon, which at times echoed sentiments in California but at other times conveyed support for Japanese naturalization. Naturalization laws at the turn of the century were vague, leaving the task of defining who was white, and thus eligible for naturalization, to the courts. Japanese applicants were often …

Rædende Iudithðe: The Heroic, Mythological And Christian Elements In The Old English Poem Judith, Judith Caywood

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project, devoted to the Old English epic fragment Judith, argues that the title character arises from the complex multicultural forces that shaped Anglo-Saxon society, positing that she exists between the mythological, the heroic and the Christian. Simultaneously Christian saint, Germanic warrior and pagan demi-goddess or supernatural figure, Judith arbitrates amongst the seemingly incompatible forces that shaped the poet’s world, allowing the poem to serve as an important site for the making of a new Anglo-Saxon mythos, one which incorporates these disparate yet co-existing elements. Judith becomes a single figure who is able to reconcile these opposing forces within …

Modernism Contested: Gego's Grids And The Aesthetics Of Temporality, Victoria L. Fedrigotti

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces Gego’s contestation of art historical modernism through examining her relationship to the modernist grid and to her modernist genealogy of Constructivism, Geometric Abstraction, and Kineticism. These two nonlinear developments subvert the teleological conception of progress presumed by Greenbergian modernism, and bring forth Gego’s own aesthetic conception of temporality.

The Politics And Aesthetics Of American Art During The Cold War: Commissions For Philip Johnson’S New York State Pavilion At The 1964-1965 World’S Fair, Alexandria Valera

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the social and cultural climate surrounding the art commissions for Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair. The research presented herein examines how the economic and cultural climate of 1960's America affected the architectural landscape at the World's Fair and how Johnson's Pavilion was integrated into it. Finally, this thesis examines how artworks by John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and others responded to the commercial premise of the fair itself. This thesis argues that ultimately the artworks presented used the language of commercial art to critique the Fair and the …

How To Look At Monsters: Staging Female Bodies From The Periphery Of The Seventeenth-Century Spanish World In Baroque Portraiture And Hapsburg Collections, Risa A. Puleo

Theses and Dissertations

This inquiry examines portraits of “monsters”—an early modern term describing those whose bodies challenged socially-constructed categories by deviating from the social norm through differences of race, gender and physical or mental capacity, painted for Hapsburg royals across Europe, who collected specimens, including people, representing the scope of their territories.

Claudio Perna, Ca. 1970: The Impossibility Of Wholeness, Silvia Benedetti

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis identifies two main themes in Claudio Perna’s (1938–1997) work: his use of technology to explore self-representation and his interrogation of mapping as means of knowledge. This study also situates Perna’s conceptual work in relation to his field of human geography, in the specific Venezuelan context.

Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press And Fluxus, Meghan A. Dellacrosse

Theses and Dissertations

"Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press and Fluxus," positions Knowles’ Big Book (1966) as a case study of historical methodology and interdisciplinary artistic practice in the post-war period. This comprehensive analysis of Big Book, a work of art no longer extant, contextualizes its publisher, Something Else Press through Dick Higgins’ concept of “intermedia,” and important lesser-known junctures relevant to Fluxus and the group’s leader George Maciunas are illuminated. Knowles' early and lesser-known silkscreen paintings are also examined.

Performing Conquest And Resistance In The Streets Of Eighteenth Century Potosí: Identity And Artifice In The Cityscapes Of Gaspar Miguel De Berrío And Melchor Pérez De Holguín, Agnieszka A. Ficek

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the ways in which Potosí's two most influential colonial artists represented the urban dynamics of race, class and labor in their depictions of the Andean 'City of Silver' during the eighteenth century, when silver production, profits and population were dramatically declining.

Translating Transformative Human Rights Education Through Visual Languages & Informal Spaces, Jazzmin Chizu Gota

Master's Projects and Capstones

This project examines methods, theories, and practices of translating human rights education through multiple vernaculars. Developed as a workshop in sociocultural syntax deconstruction and an educational human rights education website focused on the domestic population of the US, the project focuses on localizing human rights concepts to the public vernacular of the country. Human rights education (HRE) and media and information literacy (MIL) are expanded and redefined as social literacy, or the ability to navigate and decode the present, complex realities that both HRE and MIL were developed to address. Reframing media and visual arts as an archive of past …

The Monroe Doctrine As The Transparent Veil Of Isolation During The League Of Nations Debate, Luther D. Roadcap

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In June 1919, President Woodrow Wilson returned from Paris after several months of negotiating the Treaty of Versailles to end World War One. At the peace conference, Wilson achieved his goal of establishing the League of Nations. However, he had one more hurdle: convince the Republican Senate to ratify the treaty. This was no easy task as Republicans claimed the treaty nullified the Monroe Doctrine, even though the century-old foreign policy was recognized, by name, in the League of Nations Covenant. Why, then, did opponents of the League of Nations in the United States claim isolation and refuse to ratify …

Drive Toward Freedom: African American: The Story Of Black Automobility In The Fight For Civil Rights, Xavier Macy

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Looking across the 20^th century, this thesis seeks to understand the relationship African Americans developed between automobility and the fight for civil rights, filling a gap left in the historiography of both the automobile and the Civil Rights Movement. Historians of the automobile have almost exclusively focused their lens on white suburbia and the “autotopias” that Americans created, while historians of the Civil Rights Movement ignored the automobile entirely. This thesis hopes to begin to fill that void by explaining how African Americans exploited the technological system of the automobile to create forms of transportation accessible to African American …