Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Redefining Ceremony And The Sacred: Short Stories From The Dinétah, Stacie S. Denetsosie

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This is a creative thesis comprised of three short stories centered on the experiences of three Navajo protagonists living on the Navajo reservation. The short stories fit within the field of Native American Literature and highlight issues of mortality, sexuality, and ceremony. The stories illustrate the experiences of modern-day Navajo youth grappling to understand how to connect traditional knowledge with modernity. The three stories featured within this thesis are offered as a way to understand these challenges. Each protagonist is faced with an issue of morality, sexuality, or ceremony, and each reach differing conclusions about these topics within their lives. …

The Red Front Door, A Memoir, Camila B. Sanabria

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This is a creative thesis that contains two components: 1) a critical introduction that defends the representation of mixed-status families and deportation narratives, and 2) a memoir that depicts my experience with deportation and as a member of a mixed-status family. The second component of this thesis will consist of the first four chapters of my memoir, with the remaining chapters to be completed post-graduation. These chapters take place the years before my parents’ deportation and the year immediately after. The memoir is a coming-of-age story that explores my ethnic identity, along with themes such as insider versus outsider. This …

Thylacine Dreams: The Vernacular Resurrection Of An Extinct Marsupial, Daisy M. Ahlstone

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis explores the folk resurrection of the thylacine through artwork and symbolic interaction. The thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, is a marsupial that suffered a government-sanctioned massacre leading to its extinction in 1936. The thylacine’s status as a hidden animal has inspired what folklorists call “ostensive practice”; people not only actively seek out the thylacine in the wilderness of Tasmania today and share their sightings online, but they have also incorporated the thylacine as a symbol of hope and perseverance into various forms of folk art.

There have been upwards of five thousand documented sightings of the …

The Long Horizon, Tiffany Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The idea for my thesis stemmed from a braided essay I wrote for a creative writing class. I didn’t initially plan on expanding my class essay into a memoir, but I have discovered that oftentimes the story finds us rather than the other way around. Using the memoir form allowed me to bridge quite naturally the subjects of grief and landscape by giving me space to reflect on a turbulent period in my life and arrive at some sort of conclusion. While I could see the importance of the natural world in my life, I didn’t realize at first how …

Adapting Environmental Ethics And Behaviors: Toward A Posthuman Rhetoric Of Community Engagement, Beth J. Shirley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

What persuades people one way or another to accept or deny climate change? More importantly, what persuades people to act on, ignore, or even be defiant of climate change? We would like to think that people are motivated when they hear the science explained clearly and when they are presented with a clear understanding of how their actions have a lasting impact. Yet the science on climate change has been made clear for some time, and doubt in climate change science is rampant (at least in the United States).

This dissertation seeks to answer these questions and develop a new …