Digital Commons Network^™

The Art Of Surviving: Alchemy Of Healing Trauma In Relation To Identity: A Self Study., Rebecca Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis explores trauma’s physical and psychological aspects concerning identity as an artistic practice. Through exploring materials, subject matter, and media, my approach to trauma is based on personal and socially engaged experiences and my attempt to re-conceptualize that experience through the language of contemporary art. Extensively this work is governed by childhood memories and the critical aspect of being raised as a female in a patriarchal society. Being raised female comes with a certain number of expectations and requirements. This work creates a physical and spiritual connection between trauma and the identity of what is female. Discussing these …

The City With A Bathtub Ring: A Century Of Shared Industrial Identity In Belfast, Maine, Michael Munson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Belfast, Maine, is a small, visitor-friendly city of approximately 6,700 residents located on that state’s picturesque mid-coast. Founded by Ulster Scots descendants in 1770, Belfast’s rich history has allowed its sense of place to evolve as the community’s identity changed from a frontier settlement to a commercial seaport, then an industrial city, and currently a host city for several prominent customer call centers. While now charming, increasingly gentrified and popular with tourists, the city earlier prospered for more than a century as a blue-collar industrial community, which eschewed tourism well into the 1980s. This paper addresses Belfast’s sense of place …

Mississippi Modernism: The River Valley And Race In American Culture, 1892-1945, William C. Palmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mississippi Modernism looks to the Mississippi River Valley of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century to analyze the ways individuals expressed and determined their experience in the changing world. By engaging with theories of modernity from Marshall Berman and the Black modernism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. this work proposes the Mississippi watershed as a region where individuals indulge in the processes of modernism remaking the environments, both urban and rural, surrounding them. By thinking about the “dry” and “wet” valleys envisioned by European settlers as Christopher Morris terms it, …

Hidden Amongst People: Experiences Fo Black White Biracial Individuals With Microaggressions, Horizontal Hostilities, And Identity Denial In Educational Settings, Deborah Luckett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative dissertation explores the dissonance between critical race theory and culturally relevant pedagogical practices in the context of non-binary identity formation and identity denial for Black White Biracial (BWBR) individuals. This positioned subject study examines stories of five adult female members of this population. Utilizing Bell’s Storytelling for Social Justice Model (2020) the study reveals the stock, concealed, resistance and, emerging/transforming stories of participants as they recall experiences with monoracially instigated microaggressions and horizontal hostilities. The model provides analytic themes to examine the dissonance. The following questions will be explored:

Primary Question: What socio/cultural interactions influence BWBR racial identity …

Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20^th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …

Down The Stream: The Evolution Of Queer Stream-Of-Consciousness Novels Through The Works Of Virginia Woolf And Ali Smith, Turner Nat Byrd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to understand the evolution of the stream-of-consciousness genre as it applies to, is written by, or centers queer people. Through generous Marxist-feminist readings of the works of Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith—used in this project as exemplars of the genre—it attempts to understand the differences within both the formal and philosophical/political outlook of the two authors. Specifically looking at Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Smith’s Hotel World, The Accidental, and Girl Meets Boy, this project posits that Smith, intentionally or not, has effectively re-written the basic narratives and re-visited the same themes as Woolf, …

David Dinkins And New York City, 1989-1993: Political Coalition Building And Governance At The Dawn Of The Age Of Identity Politics, James J. Barney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Charting the rise and fall of New York City’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, this study provides insight into the complexities of governing and coalition-building in New York City during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. The rise of both identity and conservative politics shaped New York City during Dinkins’s 1989–1993 administration. Dinkins skillfully built a diverse and multiracial political coalition that first unseated three-term mayor Ed Koch in a Democratic primary and then beat Rudy Giuliani in the general election of 1989, only to see the coalition disintegrate in the following years. Dinkins’s rise and fall …

The Tragedy Of Caspian: C. S. Lewis And His Trauma, Chandler Hanton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reconsiders C.S.Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia as a type of scriptotherapy that enabled Lewis to process and come to terms with a life full of serious and significant traumatic events. Trauma theory offers a vehicle for us to consider the alignments and connections between Lewis himself and his fictional creation, Caspian. In the specifics of both characterization and incident, Lewis mirrors the events and relationships that instilled and healed the trauma in his own life. In situating Caspian as his alter-ego, Lewis allowed his writing to function as a gender-specific therapeutic process for addressing the effects of his …