Digital Commons Network^™

Unseen Body, Unheard Voice, Chunxin Yu

Masters Theses

If there is only one place that I know well of, it would be my own body. A living site that has endured all the changing inhabiting environment and all the unwanted judgment, manipulation, even violence - my identity will collapse without its physical entity.

The conscious and unconscious focus on the body makes me highly alert and responsive to the immediate surroundings, from the bathroom at home to an open street in the public. My knowledge of spaces and their relationships is formed by the repetitive experience of them in everyday life.

As an active user of the Bayard …

The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston

Masters Theses

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …

Pace/Place/Space/Tempo—The Choreography Of Equity And Expressions Of Black Living, Vessna Scheff

Masters Theses

My skin is natural. My skin is political. My hair is natural. My hair is political. My speech is natural. My speech is political. There’s no such thing as apolitical.

My current interdisciplinary practice in painting and performance focuses on how Black diasporic identities hold, create, and process subsistence narratives. For this research, I am asking the questions: What role does pace play in resistance strategies and how can it be communicated through tempo? How are unspoken histories conveyed through movement, silence, the glance of an eye, fat crackling in a cast iron, pushing play on a walkman, and seeds …

A Performance Of Disease And Its Cures: Lovesickness In Medieval Iberia, Lillian B. Sanders

Masters Theses

In the context of late medieval Iberia, lovesickness as a real disease was both treatable and threatening to one’s lived experience. Different forms of lovesick cures, from both learned and vernacular healers, arose from the Galenic regime of the humoral body. Cures such as charms, mixtures, and verbal expressions helped heal lovesick patients, as is shown in the archive through sources like remedy books and literary texts depicting lovesick affliction. Much of the current scholarship on lovesickness focuses on medieval medicine through the archive. Through the lens of performance studies, I argue that medieval Iberians enacted cures on lovesick patients …