Digital Commons Network^™

Tracing The Dispossession Of The Enslaves Black Woman And A Potential For Resistance., Lila R. O'Conell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Bharatanatyam & Tassa And The Tales We've Lived, Shivani Balkaran

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

From Fashion, To Violence, To A Forgotten Era: The Zoot Suit And Mexican-American Youth Culture In 1940’S America, Adelaide Iris Ord Treadwell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

The Black Ancestral Artist Path, Cerina Zuleica Shippey

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The Black Ancestral Artist Path is a project dedicated to uncovering the migratory pattern between Black American Creatives from NY to Paris. Why has this trend continued today from those of the Lost Generation? What about France entices the American? And how does living there change their art and sense of self? This project also compared Black French artists and their understanding of the French colonial empire. When these two groups are brought together, how do they learn from one another? Black Americans are forced to reckon with the both the freedom and the privilege they experience being able to …

Plurality, Precarity, Nos/Otras: Searching For A New Guarantee Of Dignity In The Contemporary World, Antonia Salathe

Senior Projects Spring 2023

One cannot comprehend the topography of our contemporary globe without seeing the chain-link lines that fractalize sand, sea, and soil. Contemporary global politics is marked by a refugee crisis of colossal proportion. At its core, the contemporary refugee crisis is perpetuated by the fact that there is no framework to apprehend the personhood of the refugee, let alone an organized and attentive global process for directing the flow of vulnerable persons toward safety.

I argue that in order to ease the burdens placed on vulnerable people we must return to philosophy and look at the refugee crisis for what it …

From Fashion, To Violence, To A Forgotten Era: The Zoot Suit And Mexican-American Youth Culture In 1940’S America, Adelaide Iris Ord Treadwell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to the Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Tryna Be A Mountain, Aru Apaza

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

From Marginal To Modern Culture: A Case Study On Hélio Oiticica And His Aesthetic Contributions To Brazilian National Identity, Jamesia R. Griffin

Senior Projects Spring 2023

In this essay, I follow the historical trajectory of Helio Oiticica, a visual artist from Brazil’s 1960s modern art scene, to explore how attitudes towards his artistic interventions during Brazil's most transformative era affected the social view of “the artist” as a political character. I argue that the historical effectiveness of interventionist art relies on the shifting localized and national social and political identities of the artist. In order to help my reader understand how artists gain historical relevance through interventionist arts, I emphasize contextual and relational modes of analysis to better capture the complex and complicated interactions between historical …

The Freedom Handbook, Sydney Oshuna-Williams

Senior Projects Fall 2023

"The Freedom Handbook." This autobiographical exploration is not only a personal endeavor but a response to the critical framework presented by Frank Wilderson in his book, “AfroPessimism”. For those unfamiliar with AfroPessimism as a theory, it ultimately positions Black people as socially dead, prompting me to challenge the conventional understanding of it solely as a critical theory. If we accept the claims that human life hinges on the complete objectification of a distinct people, the implications extend far beyond the realm of theory, urging us to confront the very essence of freedom itself. As you embark on this journey with …

Sisterhood: : Locating The Photography Of Carrie Mae Weems, Latoya Ruby Frazier, And Deana Lawson Within A Rhizome Of Black Feminist Discourse, Taylor Fama Ndiaye

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Litigation As Integration And Participation: The Role Of Lawsuits In The U.S. Environmental Justice Movement, Tomas Sebastian Forman

Senior Projects Spring 2022

What is, has been, and could be the role of litigation in the U.S. environmental justice movement? To what ends do Indigenous communities, federally-recognized tribes, and rural Black communities choose to engage with the U.S. legal system, an institution which has, over history, consistently subjugated and dispossessed them? How do these groups' particularistic relationships to natural and built environments, conceptions of justice and fairness, and understandings of what effective environmental regulation look like inform that choice? This paper draws from in-depth qualitative research to demonstrate the following things: (1) how environmental justice lawsuits differ from canonical environmental and civil rights …

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

Healing Intergenerational Wounds: Land And Memory As The Site Of Indian Boarding School Violences In The United States, Olivia Nicole Tencer

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In 2021, the location and repatriation of unmarked graves of children at former Indian Residential and Boarding Schools in Canada and the United States headlined some of the largest news media outlets in the Northern hemisphere. Through these media headlines, the untold history of the 19th and 20th century Indian Boarding Schools began to unfold for much of the American public. Through an examination of the history of Indian Boarding Schools in the United States, Western and Indigenous intergenerational trauma theory, memory scholarship, memories of Carlisle school descendants, and decolonial land-based healing practices, this paper explores how Indian Boarding Schools …

Radical Folk Heroes: Anansi & Br’Er Rabbit’S West African Origins & Their Forced Pilgrimages, Sage Adia Swaby

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Immigrant Nannies Of New York City: An Examination Of The Friendships Between Nannies And Mother-Employers, Esmeralda Paula

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This ethnography focuses on the emotions of the women of color who elaborated on their experiences working for wealthy, white families in ethnographic interviews. This project is interested in the connections formed between nannies and mother-employers with the goal of better understanding the positionalities of female domestic workers of color. Immigrant populations are frequently depicted by news outlets as overworked, underpaid, and poor. When interacting with nannies, I realized that these women did not consider themselves impoverished despite working in a role that is identifiable with servanthood. The labor that nannies perform calls back to a long tradition of women …

Tek Dem Han An Tun Fashion: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, And Placemaking In The Jamaican Transmigrant Network, Brenique Bogle

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

“We Had Become The Vc In Our Own Homeland:” Indigenous Veterans Of Vietnam And The 1973 Siege Of Wounded Knee, Margaret Curtin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Black Boys, Native Sons, Rufus Scotts, And Sulas: An Exploration Of Literary Dissent, Shirley Merino

Senior Projects Spring 2021

The responsibility of creating writing that is palatable in order to please every audience but the Black audience is often placed on the shoulders of Black authors. As phrased by Richard Wright in his “Blueprint for Negro Writing” the risk of focusing one’s writing entirely on the Black experience, left Black authors with the risk of being “consigned to oblivion.” Writing that captures the joys, the struggles, and the history of being Black in America, is often overlooked and ignored by white audiences and publishers, as it is often perceived as being unappealing and unpleasant. However, authors like Wright, James …

From Nubia To New York: The Politics Of Advocacy, Agency, And Land Rights In Proximity To The Temple Of Dendur, Conrad Otto Clemens

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Blackness & The Performance Of Our Cultural Identity: A Social, Political & Spiritual Exploration Of The Racialized Performance, Teron Lavell Byrd

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Burden Of Whiteness & The Misery Of Antiracism, Or How I Learned To Care About White People, Adrian S. Costa

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Responding to the ever growing conversations surrounding racism, this essay argues for an examination of white people in the interest of further explicating the systemic hesitation surrounding the earnest confrontation of white supremacy. I do so by firstly diagnosing whiteness as an identity that is burdened by the sociopolitical responsibility of confronting the institutional legacy of white supremacy and redressing its material costs and practical harms against people of color. I continue this line of reasoning to argue that, although these infrastructural mechanisms have largely been vacated out of the legal and moral frameworks of society, that white supremacy has …

Despite The Blues: Richard Wright And Ralph Ellison’S Blues Based Works, Miranda Virginia Reale

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Ain't got no mother, ain't got no culture

Ain't got no friends, ain't got no schoolin'

Ain't got no love, ain't got no name

Ain't got no ticket, ain't got no token

Ain't got no god

–Nina Simone, “Ain’t Got No-I Got Life,” from the album Nuff Said (1968).

In between human intention and reality lies a disproportionate space that Albert Camus labels “the absurd.” Modern man’s affliction is thus absurd, as orthodox systems turn obsolete, the traditional virtues of the past cease to be familiar. The epistemology of the absurd may not have developed from American soil; but I …

Feta, Blintzes, And Burritos: The Evolution Of The Diner And Immigrants' Role In Defining American Food Culture, Alexis Kimberly Maresca

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

A Cultural Clash Of Emotions And Music: Connecting My Passion Of Music To The Buddha Passion, Weilan Li

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Rezistance: Diné Grassroots Organization And Modes Of Activism, Eric Robert Dougherty

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This ethnography looks at themes of Indigeneity and activism as it exists in the everyday realities of young people living in or around the Navajo reservation in the southwest United States. Through work-related projects of hogan construction, land reclamation, watershed management, and language restoration Navajo youth are given opportunities to take control of their present circumstances and imagine a different future for themselves and their families. Besides work, youth and activism are constituted through other mediums and spaces that allow people to express who they are, what they care about, and why these things are important to them. The consistent …

From Colonial Agriculture To Community Resilience: A History Of The United States Gulf Coast, 1718-2005, Olivia Champion Johnson

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

To Keep That Bond: Navigating Black Motherhood Under A Parental State, Anaisa T. Tenuta

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Exploring The Acculturation Preferences Of Bangladeshi-Muslim Second-Generation American Immigrants In New York City., Jakir Hossain

Senior Projects Fall 2019

The purpose of this study is to apply previous frameworks of acculturation to evaluate the acculturation preferences of the Bangladeshi-Muslim second-generation American immigrant population in New York City. This thesis attempts to understand the acculturation preferences of the aforementioned population by analyzing how they view their Bangladeshi ethnic identity and their Islamic religious identity in relation to their American immigrant upbringing. To do this, participants have been organized into acculturation preference tracks based on John Berry’s acculturation preference model. This thesis will then explore possible explanations for why differences between these acculturation preferences exist and why certain individuals found themselves …

Affects Of Elimination: Foundations Of Collectivity, Oskar Coltrane Dye-Furstenberg

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This paper examines specific indigenous social movements in the United States. Two examples are considered: the occupation of the decommissioned Fort-Lawton, Seattle military base in 1970 and the contemporary movement for missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW). Both are examples of resistance to assimilation and ‘elimination’ in the form of collective action by indigenous persons. The paper explores the relation between coming together as a group and responding to the experience of violence, injury, or suffering. This dynamic between collective formation and shared affective experience constructs the foundation upon which these movements imagine and work to enact a social and …

Sanguine Salvation: Pilgrimage And Penance At The Sanctuary Of Chimayo, Isabella J. Spann

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College