Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Never Left The Dreaming: A Study Of Decolonization And Enchantment, Javin R. Lee-Lobel

Senior Projects Spring 2024

There is a belief in contemporary left politics that we must re-enchant the world because it has been disenchanted by coloniality: the meanings and sacredness which uphold community and sustain harmony with the earth have been drained through the ‘Western’ project of colonization, modernization, and capitalism. The problem with this belief is that we cannot re-enchant what we understand to be inherently disenchanted.

Via the ontological turn in anthropology, an understanding of the world emerges that is not disenchanted, but inherently imbued with meanings. Enchantment is not applied upon or removed from nonhuman bodies by human minds but is woven …

The Rome Of The West: An Ethnographic Play With Music, Clayton Roma Bragg Webb

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Dreaming Of Nuclear Futures: History, Toxicity, Panic, And Motherhood In Contemporary Pro-Nuclear Advocacy, Mikel Rand Inchausti

Senior Projects Spring 2023

What is the future of nuclear energy? What futures do we imagine in living alongside nuclear energy and nuclear waste? Who is advocating for those worlds? Read to find out. Enjoy!

Nothing Happens Here, Kai Diego Parcher-Charles

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

“Nappy Hair, Don’T Care”: Storytelling Through Strands, Sasha D. Onyango

Senior Projects Spring 2022

There is a Kiswahili phrase that goes “intelligence/the mind is like hair, everyone has their own’. Following that logic, how Kenyan women relate to their hair is unique to the individual yet there remains collective and shared experiences. The questions that I raise throughout the paper explore: 1) how images and narratives of hair throughout Kenyan history have influenced the way women today understand how they interact with their hair, 2) the ways Kenyan women are taught about hair grooming and the journey of learning to care for their hair, and 3) Kenyan women’s understanding of their hair and how …

“A Certain Brauch:” German-Georgian Palatine And Rhenish Immigrant Houses In Columbia County, New York And Their Vernacular Architectural Roots, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this archaeological and architectural survey of 18th Century Palatine and Rhenish immigrant houses in New York's Hudson Valley, specifically in Columbia County, I track the development of three houses from their earliest vernacular forms to those touched by the Georgian influence. The Georgian worldview, stemming from European Enlightenment ideals, began permeating colonial American society in the 18th Century. It's influence first began to touch the wealthy and elite most connected with mother Europe, and then trickled into more common society. I chronicle and analyze Germantown, NY's Reformed Sanctity Church Parsonage, Germantown, NY's Simeon Rockefeller House, and Clermont, NY's "Stone …

Accommodation And Coping In Medieval Catholic England: A Historical Dramaturgy Casebook For The Chester Mystery Cycle’S Play 14: Christ At The House Of Simon The Leper, Christ And The Moneylenders, And Judas’ Plot, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this historically focused dramaturgy casebook for the medieval Catholic Chester Mystery Cycle's Play 14, Christ at the House of Simon the Leper, Christ and the Moneylenders, and Judas’ Plot, I offer suggestions for Play 14's production as it might have appeared in the cycle's final year of performance, 1575. I contextualize and grapple with the play's antisemitisms, and also offer a brief history of antisemitism in medieval Europe. I also analyze Play 14 and the Chester Mystery Cycle for their rhetorical appeals to the medieval vernacular language, contexts, and events, as well as their anachronistic temporal and geographic …

Of Archives And Ghosts, Zara Ruth Franke

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This project, is about Bard's history of ghosts, subcultural lore and what makes something "home" to you. In a place and time, in students life, when things seem dispossessed and temporal. As the subtitle of my written sproj suggests:Temporal spaces of home for Bard students now and then, their connections with each other and how we process memories, ghosts and subcultural lore.

My installation is about these moments in life, when everything seems to freeze for a second, hold still, and you feel like this moment is forever but also not at all. "Ephemerality", in academic, theory terms but also …

Rewriting The Haggadah: Judaism For Those Who Hold Food Close, Rose Noël Wax

Senior Projects Spring 2020

American Jews, specifically those who do not observe, often turn towards food as a performance of Jewish identity, both publicly and privately. Longing for roots, these Jews reach for a piece of Jewish culture that can make them not only feel Jewish, but also grounded in a longstanding tradition that explicitly ties Judaism to a dynamic food culture. In doing so they invent traditions, creating habits sometimes loosely based in prescribed or familial tradition, sometimes not at all. In this way, food, through invented traditions, allows modern non- observant American Jews to make their Jewish identity tangible.

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 …

The Veilmakers, Emily Nicole Giangiulio

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

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 …

Contested Identity And Making Sense Of Atrocity: Understanding The Rohingya Crisis In Myanmar, Christopher Andrew Long

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Myanmar’s recent transition towards democracy has caused western leaders to become increasingly optimistic about the future of human rights within the country. However, since emerging on the international stage in 2012, the Rohingya crisis has drastically upset such expectations, leaving the international community in complete shock over the issue. Attempting to shed light on this human rights tragedy, international media coverage has produced an overly simplified depiction of the Rohingya crisis. In addition, very little academic literature exists seeking to explain the root causes of the issue. By utilizing interviews conducted at the University of Mandalay this paper attempts to …

Place Accumulation: Kingston/Ulster, Callan F. Fish

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Since February 2018, I’ve been listening and recording around Kingston and the town of Ulster; synthesizing interviews, bird song, passing cars, protests, conflict, unique perspectives and oral histories, meetings, optimisms, water, as part of a project called, Place Accumulation: Kingston/Ulster. Using the Dynamic Listening Instrument, an interactive sound sculpture which uses a venn-diagram of electromagnetic fields to allow sounds to be handled as a tactile entity and bended dynamically, sounds are arranged and dispersed back into different locations and events in Kingston. Using a sounding bucket, people in Kingston can listen in, re-arrange, explore, and play with sounds from their …

Musical Infrastructures And Techniques Of Survival In Dakar, Simon Charles Debevoise

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Blasian And Proud: Examining Racialized Experiences Amongst Half Black And Half Japanese Youth In Japan, Helen Itsel Aracena

Senior Projects Spring 2017

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

The Worth Of Aura In The Work Of Fine Art Publishing, Alexander Kunin Bacon

Senior Projects Spring 2017

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

One Thousand Guinea Pigs, Martie Ilena Stothoff

Senior Projects Spring 2017

One Thousand Guinea Pigs

When I was at home earlier in the year, I explained to my parents that my photography project was about the relationship between humans and animals. My father then told me about how he had heard our friend, Gabi, a professor in agriculture at Smith College, on NPR talking about her newest sustainability project. My father said, “You know how people use goats to mow the lawn? Well, she uses guinea pigs. But she needs to use a lot of them – like a thousand.” So, there I am, picturing one thousand guinea pigs munchin’ away, …

Look At Where You Listen: A Study Of Commercial Music And Mediation, Thomas Walton Moore

Senior Projects Spring 2017

A joint senior project submitted to the divisions of arts and social studies. This project aims to reconsider the 'album' as a format of music distribution that has effects on the consumption-of and relationship-with music as commodity. This project consists of writing and recorded-music-making. Please email tom (at) dpimusic (dot) com for a link.

Image Of Yoga: Instagram, Identity, And Western Imagination, Brigid Nell Boll

Senior Projects Spring 2017

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

Sanctioned Silencing, Symbolic Resistance: Race, Space, And Dispossession In A Marginalized South African Community, Killian Richard Miller

Senior Projects Spring 2016

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

My field work and the written portion of my ethnography work through issues of marginality, state apparatuses, illusions of freedom, and making meaning in a context of oppression. All these power dynamics are historically-situated within the cultural context and community of Hangberg, a place forged by the race-based forced removals of Apartheid. British and Dutch colonization, Apartheid's racial regime, and the post-Apartheid oligarchical state, are all historical and contemporary authoritative forces that are impacting the everyday lives of people in Hangberg. Perspectives of power also serve as examples …

"It's Getting Gangsa Up In Here": Balinese Gamelan In The Western Academy, Ruadhan Davis Ward

Senior Projects Spring 2016

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

"Fruits Are Ripe, We Are Fresh": The Rapper, The Emcee, The Cypher And The Participatory Spectrum Of Hip-Hop, Peter Heyer Anchel

Senior Projects Spring 2016

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

Old Time Quiet In A Breathless Age: Faith, Virtue, And The Strength Of The Social Gospel At Trinity-Pawling School, Donald Evan Kanouse Iii

Senior Projects Spring 2016

“Old Time Quiet in a Breathless Age: Faith, Virtue, and the Strength of the Social Gospel at Trinity-Pawling School” is a Senior Project by Donald Evan Kanouse submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College. This project presents All Saints’ Chapel, located on the Trinity-Pawling School campus in Pawling, New York, as a transhistorical symbol of the School’s religion and of its core ideology. Its chapters demonstrate these claims by using both ethnographic and archival research to delve into conceptions of faith, virtue, and masculinity as they were once defined by the School’s founder, Dr. Frederick Gamage, and …

The Unintended Consequences Of The International Women's Movement: Medicalizing Rape In The Democratic Republic Of Congo, Faye N. Forman

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The legal advancements made by western feminists from the 1960s continuing today mark a distinct shift for both the women's movement and mainstream radical feminist philosophy. This project examines the unintended consequences of the rise of the international women's movement as American feminists brought the law to bear as the primary instrument for reform to eradicate rape and violence against women. As contemporary political scholars demonstrate, legal remediation further codifies gender inequality and protective tropes that sexualize women's injury. Chapter 2 and 3 examines the intensified feminist efforts to criminalize domestic abuse at an international level, first at the United …

Walls Have Ears But They Also Speak –A Comparative Study Of Two Playgrounds, Anna Hirson-Sagalyn

Senior Projects Spring 2015

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

Exp(A/E)Ndable (Fall), Stella Rose(N)Fell (Spring), Re-Envisioning The Fourth Wall: The Production Of A Fluid And Mobile Stage An Investigation Of The Placement Of Experimental Dance In Museums (Paper), Julia E Meyer

Senior Projects Spring 2014

Artist Statement:

I’m interested in the bizarre, the dark, the disturbing, and the messy. I collaborate with my dancers to make movement that falls outside the pedestrian, yet remains human in the most peculiar and sometimes virtuosic ways. Exploring site specificity, with a particular focus on transforming spaces to create distinct experiences for viewers and dancers alike. Finding new ways to understand and engage with dance by re-situating the audience and giving them the opportunity to move with dancers, thereby creating their own frame of view and cultivating a personal experience with the bizarre world that they have entered. Right …

"Till Death Do Us Part:" White Weddings And Marriage In Contemporary Ritual, Brieze Levy

Senior Projects Spring 2012

No abstract provided.