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With Love & Rage: A Self Portrait Of Borderline Personality Disorder, Sarah Eckstine Mar 2024

With Love & Rage: A Self Portrait Of Borderline Personality Disorder, Sarah Eckstine

Theses and Dissertations

With Love & Rage: A Self Portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder analyses how I use the act of taking self portraits to materialize emotions through photographic means. When I experience intense emotions symptomatic of borderline personality disorder, positive or negative, their onset is routinely sudden and overwhelming; what follows is an impulsive desire to photograph myself to archive the present before the emotions shift or return to stable levels.The Rage images document the emotional aftermath of a sexual assault and rape; anger and depression, by using a red-scale film to emphasize both confrontational and dissociated body language. The Love images …


"Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin"Does N'T Feel Like Love: Exploring Queer Former Catholics' Narratives Of Lived Experiences, Taylor Kay Newswander Mar 2023

"Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin"Does N'T Feel Like Love: Exploring Queer Former Catholics' Narratives Of Lived Experiences, Taylor Kay Newswander

Theses and Dissertations

The Catholic Church is one of the oldest and most widespread religious organizations in the world. Most people are familiar with the Church in some way, but very few know what it is like to be a sexual or gender minority while being raised in a religion as conservative and set in its ways as the Catholic Church. We know that queer people do not stop existing just because one is religious, but not much is known about the sense-making that goes into performing both queer and Catholic identities. Narratives are particularly important tools of both sense-making and performance for …


Disability Representation: Sites Of Grassroots Activism On Grief And Insidious Trauma, Shawna Marie Sheperd Mar 2022

Disability Representation: Sites Of Grassroots Activism On Grief And Insidious Trauma, Shawna Marie Sheperd

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how disability communities are transforming disability representation in the mainstream by using social media and other intermedial platforms to push against stereotypes that portray the disability experience as pitiful or monstrous. People with disabilities, such as Alex Darcy and Shelby Lynch, are creating realistic, nuanced representation on Instagram and Tik Tok that does not shy away from discussing their grief or insidious trauma. Darcy and Lynch are grassroots activists who change how disabilities are perceived in the mainstream and create representative models that navigate disability, trauma, and grief in anti-ableist ways. This thesis also looks at how …


Seven:Twentyfour, Peytin Fitzgerald Mar 2022

Seven:Twentyfour, Peytin Fitzgerald

Theses and Dissertations

In my practice I aim to create a holding space for personal and communal traumas to reside through writing and the visual. I have longed to create a space of vulnerability, intimacy, shame and growth for others to exist. The practice of this work for me is releasing trauma from the body in an act of liberation.


Accounting For Trauma And Mindset In Elementary School Classrooms: A Study Of Check-In / Check-Out As Trauma Intervention, Jenifer Lynne Mcgowan Mar 2021

Accounting For Trauma And Mindset In Elementary School Classrooms: A Study Of Check-In / Check-Out As Trauma Intervention, Jenifer Lynne Mcgowan

Theses and Dissertations

This mixed methods study examines trauma in elementary school children and the need for a relationship to maximize their learning opportunities. Check-in/Check-out is a Tier Two intervention that was used to prioritize behavioral goals, maximize the relationship based on a less-than five minute meeting between the student and the Check-in/Check-out mentor at different points in the day, and provide daily feedback to parents. Within the meeting, the teacher and the student reflect on how the day is going, how the student has met their goal or what needed to be done to meet their goal, all based on positive comments. …


Evaluating The Trauma-Informed Program For Promoting Success, Jessica Foley Jan 2021

Evaluating The Trauma-Informed Program For Promoting Success, Jessica Foley

Theses and Dissertations

Research has shown trauma-informed care in schools is effective in reducing the impact of trauma on children, as well as bolstering future success in those who are at-risk for experiencing trauma. Improving students school climate, emotion regulation strategies, learning behaviors, and friendships in middle school students is effective in preventing the impact of trauma. There is limited research to address implementation of trauma-informed, group-based services in middle schools. In this study, a group-based intervention targeted towards middle school students who are at-risk for trauma will be examined. 54 middle school students in grades 6-8 will be participating in the Trauma-Informed …


When Inexpressible Becomes Expressible: The Duality Of Narrative In Graphic Memoirs Of Growing Up And Trauma, Nina Hanee Jang May 2019

When Inexpressible Becomes Expressible: The Duality Of Narrative In Graphic Memoirs Of Growing Up And Trauma, Nina Hanee Jang

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines two graphic memoirs: Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002), and David Small’s Stitches (2009) to elucidate the connections between the duality of narrative in graphic memoirs and the subject of childhood trauma. I begin by observing how the inexpressible memories of childhood trauma become expressible through the platform of graphic narrative that allows the authors to illustrate rather than verbalize the memories. Following this analysis, I examine the aspects of embodiment and materiality in the two memoirs demonstrating how the form of graphic narrative enables the authors to effectively bring back their memories and become the witnesses …


Trauma And The Credibility Economy: An Analysis Of Epistemic Violence And Its Traumatic Functions, Gina Stinnett Jun 2018

Trauma And The Credibility Economy: An Analysis Of Epistemic Violence And Its Traumatic Functions, Gina Stinnett

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I argue that the work done in philosophy on epistemic injustice can put pressure on the assumptions driving the work of both trauma theory and rhetorical theory. In addition to arguing how epistemic injustice can reinforce trauma, I argue that epistemic injustice has its own power to traumatize. I refer to this as “epistemic trauma,” or a trauma to one’s ability to know their experience and to make a claim based on this knowledge. Research on epistemic injustice states that when one encounters repeated epistemic injustice, they become less likely to share their experiences at all—they fall …


Braving Shame: The Rhetoric Of Bravery In Contemporary Women's Memoir, Debra Gayle Parker Nov 2016

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 …


Split Wounds: Diverging Formations Of Trauma In The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders V, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, And The Rat Laughed, And Once Were Warriors, Emily R. Johnston May 2016

Split Wounds: Diverging Formations Of Trauma In The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders V, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, And The Rat Laughed, And Once Were Warriors, Emily R. Johnston

Theses and Dissertations

Split Wounds interrogates naturalized, normalized trauma wisdom—particularly the individualization and pathologization of sexualized trauma. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discursive formation, explicated in The Archaeology of Knowledge as a set of conditions that enables history, this dissertation elucidates differing discursive formations of trauma in contemporary medical documents, literary texts, and films. The introductory chapter explicates how founding texts in the field of trauma theory construct trauma as a preverbal, psychological experience that can only be represented through fragmented, non-linear, anti-narrative textual strategies. Chapter two exposes such Euro-American modernist ideology in the American Psychiatric Association’s clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder …


Queer Horizons: Queer Assemblages And ( Re ) Visioning The"Coming-Out"Trauma Narrative In Fiction, A Critical Introduction, Eric Jason Pitman Mar 2016

Queer Horizons: Queer Assemblages And ( Re ) Visioning The"Coming-Out"Trauma Narrative In Fiction, A Critical Introduction, Eric Jason Pitman

Theses and Dissertations

The experience of many queer subjects in "coming-out" often results in a great deal of continued adversity over the course of their lifetimes, in spite of what popular, exceptionalized narratives such as the "It Gets Better" campaign might suggest. "Coming out" often entails a great deal of trauma, thus making the need to continue "coming out" a source from which anguish continues to emanate and affect queer bodies. Unfortunately, there are few fictional texts dealing specifically with "coming-out" trauma narratives. Queer subjects who continue to endure trauma through the act of "coming out" often discover that the written worlds of …


Childhood Sexual Abuse And Identity Development: The Role Of Attachment And Self-Esteeem, Joel David Dukett Apr 2015

Childhood Sexual Abuse And Identity Development: The Role Of Attachment And Self-Esteeem, Joel David Dukett

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to examine how childhood sexual abuse (CSA) influences identity development along with attachment and self-esteem. The participants included 208 first-year female undergraduate students from Illinois State University. Students were afforded the opportunity to receive extra credit for their participation and could enter into a random prize drawing. Participants completed a demographics questionnaire, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, The Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire, Dimensions of Identity Development Scale, and the Hot Topics Questionnaire which assesses history of CSA. Of the participants, 145 (69.7%) were in the non-abuse group and 63 (30.3%) were in the abuse group. …


Firefly Song, Lasantha Rodrigo Mar 2014

Firefly Song, Lasantha Rodrigo

Theses and Dissertations

Chethiya is a brown, gay, disabled (ultimately), abused young man from Sri Lanka, who comes to the U.S. on a full scholarship. His dream is to be a Broadway star, but after coming out of his first relationship with an emotionally abusive, alcoholic man, he is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic, degenerative neurological disease that results in demyelination, causing progressive debilitation. The story is divided into six chapters that narrate his life under various marginalizations he is subjected to, culminating in traumatization. The story, however, ends on a positive note of redemption with the narrator looking forward to his …