Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gaming The Network Poetic: Networking And Code In Art Games, Joshua A. Fishburn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Videogames have historically used networking either to connect players for competition or cooperation or to provide an ephemeral connection to allow the upload, comparison, or assessment of single-player achievement data. The majority of videogames take place on a screen and on established platforms each of which have physical, technical, and sociocultural constraints that dictate how a player will interact. Recent art games, such as those by Jason Rohrer and the Atari VCS games of Ian Bogost highlight experiments in a more focused use of the medium from concept to interaction, both between the player and the software but also foregrounding …

Uncertain Identity: Medical Practitioners In Doctor Thorne And Middlemarch, Denis Illige-Saucier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The medical practitioners who play leading roles in the novels Middlemarch by George Eliot and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope are examples of a new breed of professional medical men that emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century in England. The new class of general practitioners held licenses from the old hierarchical system of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, but they were the driving force in favor of reform and professionalization in medicine. The 1858 Medical Act was an important step on the path toward a new conception of the medical practitioner, and the development of that new medical identity …

The Doctrine Of Christian Perfection For Today: Reading Wesley's Theology Through The Lens Of Process Thought, Jung Sup Ahn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is: A process-theological reading of Wesley's doctrine of perfection, by constructing an adequate concept of God in process, gives renewed importance and vitality to Wesley's doctrine of perfection, a doctrine that has been confused and virtually ignored even by Methodists themselves, despite the central importance Wesley himself assigns it. Why, then, has Wesley's doctrine of perfection been so often misunderstood, confused or even ignored from his time until today? The clue to the answer lies in the failure clearly to heed the distinction between the two senses of divine perfection: perfected perfection (a static state of perfection) and …

Ocosta-By-The-Sea: A Boomtown In Three Narratives, Katherine L. Arntzen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the Washington State 1890s railroad boomtown, Ocosta-by-the-Sea through place, microhistory, and narrative theories. Place theory focuses analysis on the townsite. A microhistory is created by the presentation of three narratives on Ocosta: the city-as-imagined, the city-as-built, and the city-as-remembered. The city-as-imagined narrative recounts the city that Ocosta was projected to become by its founders through analysis of historic maps, advertisements, and financial investments of the city's founders. The city-as-built uncovers information about the built environment of the site. The city-as-remembered reveals the city that has and is remembered by the local community. Site memory is explored through …

Woman Has Two Faces: Re-Examining Eve And Lilith In Jewish Feminist Thought, Diana Carvalho

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the religious history of American feminism, Jewish feminist biblical interpretation shifted attention away from Eve as a viable example of women's identities. Instead, Lilith, the independent, "demon" and "first wife" of Adam is praised as a symbol of female sexuality for "Transformationist" Jewish feminists. Re-claiming Lilith as the "first Eve," "Transformationist" Jewish feminists turn scripture on its head. Eve's creation and her actions in Genesis are interpreted as a product of patriarchy and male dominance, while Lilith in the midrashic narrative, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, is used by Jewish feminists to reclaim their identities on religious and …

Marginality And Coping: A Communal Contextual Narrative Approach To Pastoral Care With Korean American Christians, Jaesang Lyu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Focusing on Korean American experiences of racism, sexism, and intergenerational conflicts related to the acculturation process, this dissertation examines the social reality of marginality and constructs a communal contextual narrative approach to pastoral care. Current approaches to pastoral care in the Korean American church encourage a deferring style of religious coping that maintains the status quo—the internalized status of marginality—without activating self agency for the fulfillment of one’s own selfhood within the communal life of religious communities. A communally grounded sense of self agency is described in terms of three aspects of Korean indigenous culture: 1) uri (we-ness), 2) jeong …

The Passions And Self-Esteem In Mary Astell's Early Feminist Prose, Kathleen A. Ahearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the influence of Cambridge Platonism and materialist philosophy on Mary Astell's early feminism. More specifically, I argue that Astell co-opts Descartes's theory of regulating the passions in his final publication, The Passions of the Soul, to articulate a comprehensive, Enlightenment and body friendly theory of feminine self-esteem that renders her feminism modern. My analysis of Astell's theory of feminine self-esteem follows both textual and contextual cues, thus allowing for a reorientation of her early feminism vis-a-vis contemporary feminist theory. An entire chapter in the dissertation is devoted to Astell's use of Descartes's theory of regulating the …

Irus: An Intercultural Collaborative Art Show Between Artists In Iran And The United States, Morehshin Allahyari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

IRUS is both a research project and art exhibition that form and analyze cultural exchange. Using art that is developed dialogically and collaboratively between Iranian and American artists, the project employs digital media and the traditional mailing system to create an intercultural exhibition.

The exhibition (March 21st, 2009) brings together two teams of artists, one in Tehran and another in Denver, that have assembled under one name: IRUS (Iran - United States), and collaborate under a common theme: dialogue. Both teams consist of artists proficient in various media.

The research will document, and analyze the dialogue process through the …

Sub-Ordination: Mary Magdalene, The Church, And The Ordination Of Women, Richard Bishop

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Roman Catholic Church maintains that it cannot ordain women to the priesthood due to a lack of biblical warrant. The Church therefore relies upon the traditional concept of a Bridegroom-Bride relationship (read: Christ and His Church), which they say can only be maintained if a male priest serves as the representative of the invisible Christ for his Bride during the Eucharist. In this essay, we shall explore the role and treatment of Mary Magdalene and women in early texts and show that they actually did have prominent positions within at least some early Christian communities. Texts were altered, and …

Conversion To Islam In Colorado, Patrick D. Bowen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the scholarship concerning conversion to Islam in the West, few books or articles have been written that examine non-African American US converts. Furthermore, this literature generally neglects using models of conversion for analyzing US Muslims. This thesis is an attempt to begin such a project. For this thesis, I interviewed 13 converts to Islam over the course of a month and a half at a local mosque: 8 females and 5 males; 9 white, 3 Latina/o, and 1 non-African American black. These converts told me their stories of conversion: beginning with their life prior to conversion, the process leading …

Homeland Security And Terrorism In Selected European States, Eric M. Deutcher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the responses to terrorism increased throughout the world. The face of Homeland Security is now heavily focused on the prevention, preparedness, response and recovery of terrorist attacks not only in the United States, but also amongst some of America's oldest allies. This thesis studies the level of change in homeland security strategy of European NATO members after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. The analysis of strategic components within each NATO member's homeland security strategy (history, laws, counterterrorism agencies and budget support) shows significant change. The international community's …

A Vocation As Politics: Work And Popular Theology In A Consumer Culture, Jeffrey E. Scholes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The idea of vocation or a calling is particularly salient in much business motivational literature and popular Christian self-help books alike. Promoted is the idea of vocation that glosses over issues stemming from political power in the corporate workplace in order to given meaning to workers in spite of working conditions. In this form, vocations are unable to engage one's working life in ways that they can and should. I argue that recent trends in academic theologies of vocation as well as the role of consumer culture combine to allow the ascendancy of this form of the idea. I support …

Jean Toomer And Carl Van Vechten: Identity, Exploitation, And The Harlem Renaissance, Phil Shaw

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jean Toomer's Cane is considered one of the literary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance, though the many of his philosophical ideas which inspired it are dismissed. Inversely, Carl Van Vechten's influence as an advocate and patron of African American art is foundational though his Nigger Heaven is dismissed. However, there are commonalities in each authors identity positioning and subsequent exploitation of the black Harlem Renaissance ethos. Further, their utilization of Gurdjieffian principles of objectivity and primitivist images of blacks links and explains, in part, how their identities contributed to the ideas expressed in the novels.

Teacher Artistry And The Not-So-Still Life Of Arts-Centered School Reform, Cassandra Andres Trousas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite a current climate that often undervalues the arts in education, arts-centered schools and school reform continue to proliferate. This study describes, interprets and evaluates arts-centered school reform which is defined within this study as the comprehensive and intentional restructuring and re-culturing of schools using the theories and practices of the arts and arts-learning as the primary basis for educational change decisions to uncover its aims, practices and significance.

Four research questions guided this study: 1) What are the aims of arts-centered school reformers in the two schools studied? 2) What does arts-centered school reform look like in practice? 3) …

A Clash Of Worldviews: The Impact Of Modern Western Notion Of Progress On Indigenous Naga Culture, Tezenlo Thong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term "progress" is a modern Western notion that life is always improving and advancing toward an ideal state. It is a vital modern concept which underlies geographic explorations and scientific and technological inventions as well as the desire to harness nature in order to increase human beings' ease and comfort. With the advent of Western colonization and to the great detriment of the colonized, the notion of progress began to perniciously and pervasively permeate across cultures.

During the classical colonial period, Western anthropologists, sociologists and others had hypothesized, or at least ardently bought into the notion, that human beings, …

Becoming Good Europeans? Globality, The Eu And The Potential To Realize Nietzsche's Idea Of Europe, Michael J. Mcneal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation takes up Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of ‘good Europeanism’ and his related idea of Europe to show how the former disposition may be cultivated to achieve the latter—a reinvigorated culture on the continent. It does so by applying his vitalist politics and power ontology (will to power hypothesis and theory of decadence) to critique European integration in the broader context of globalization. The analysis enables me to theorize how “healthy” individuals might exploit opportunities in the present to become 'good Europeans', with the aim of realizing Nietzsche’s quasi-cosmopolitan idea of Europe. It is my primary contention that Nietzsche’s diagnosis …

Encountering The Religious 'Other': Limitations Of Confining 'Religious' Conversation In Interreligious Dialogue In Denver, Adam Buchanan Westbrook

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963).

Technology, the Internet, and the ability to communicate with one another instantaneously in any place on the globe, at any point in time have made Dr. King's remarks increasingly evident in the 21st century. We now have the unprecedented ability to communicate with people of all groups, all over the world, but are lacking the proper tools for understanding them. The interreligious dialogue movement has strived to utilize religion as one …

Biblical Revision Both Ancient And Modern, Jamie Christine Willeford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Biblical revision has been a part of the Jewish tradition since the Bible began to be canonized in the Second Temple period. Many authors throughout the centuries have seen fit to revise the biblical text: creating a new literary genre that is in this paper termed "rewritten Bible." Maxine Grossman's literary critical method, as advocated in Reading for History in the Damascus Document: A Methodological Method, helps us to understand the different types of meaning that can be created from a text, including meaning that is created outside the intent of the author, as it is in the genre …

Toward A Dialogic Interpretation Of Psychological Belief In Spirits Among Gamei Of Ghana, Ebenezer Narh Yebuah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines central aspects of the ancestral tradition of the Gamei of Ghana which have not previously been investigated systematically from a psychological perspective. It is argued that Carl Gustav Jung and his intellectual descendants are the only Western psychological thinkers who have come close to formulating a conceptual framework that is helpful in this context, because Africa featured prominently in Jung's formulations of his influential psychological theories during his archetypal journey to Africa. Accordingly, core features of Jungian theory are examined in order to determine the extent to which a psychological investigation of Gamei cosmological perspectives, particularly perspectives …

Georgia: Frozen Conflict And The Role Of Displaced Persons, Kate Elizabeth Zimmerly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Though commonly overlooked, communities of displaced persons often play a complex and significant role in the emergence and perpetuation of ethnic conflict. This paper looks at the intersection of these themes in the conflict between the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and the separatist region of Abkhazia. In particular it looks at the nature of protracted or "frozen" conflict with particular attention to the role of the displaced community in the conflict's entrenchment. Specifically, it seeks to answer the question: why do certain conflicts go unresolved for so long, and what role do refugees play in this resolution resistance?

The …

Perceptions Of Race And Academic Success In An Affluent Suburban Middle School, Robyn Ashley Duran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Public school districts across the nation are organizing to eradicate the racial predictability of academic achievement between African American and Hispanic children and their White and Asian peers, (Ferguson, 2001). This phenomenological study was designed to better illuminate the phenomenon of the racial achievement gap in an affluent educational setting. The story of race and academic achievement was told through perceptions held among minority and non-minority parents in an affluent educational setting.

Parents are a large piece of the bedrock which determines the academic success of all students. The role of the parent is particularly important in shaping the academic …

One Of Us: Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes And A Personal Record, Torgeir Ehler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This present work explores the relationship of Joseph Conrad's status as a Polish exile to his creative and biographical work. Its main focus is on the tandem publications of the novel Under Western Eyes and his autobiographical volume A Personal Record, both published within a year of each other and written contemporaneously. The first chapter is a short biographical survey of Conrad's life and addresses some later biographical works by his wife, among others. An overview of critical works that deal with Under Western Eyes is presented in the second chapter. An investigation into narrative structure and its use in …

Flaming Red Wig, Carla Christina Howl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Flaming Red Wig" is a collection of short stories and prose poems with a critical preface. Both the preface and the creative work explore notions of artifice, apposition and entering into a text (both written and character) with stillness or intrusion. I try to create an examination and communion with language on much the same level, ultimately yielding a musicality that creates a rhythmic discourse and dynamic between the significance and the notion. The title of my thesis refers to the obvious motif of artifice and the reoccurring theme of emotional pain attached to gender and humanistic role within specific …

Virgil Ortiz: American Indian Artist, Representational Trickster, And Identity Shapeshifter, Noell Ross Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study opens the door for a re-thinking of how discourse shapes American Indian representation and identity. As such, contemporary American Indian artist, Virgil Ortiz, his art, and the discourse surrounding both art and artist are examined to reveal the strategies and tactics employed in his constitution of a politics of representation that broaden the spectrum of considerations of American Indian identity. Critical invention is the orientation through which two methodological approaches are intertextually applied. A critical rhetorical approach is employed to analyze both the vernacular discourse produced by Ortiz and the dominant discourse constructed by the dominant culture. Sorrells …

Communicating Queer Identities Through Personal Narrative And Intersectional Reflexivity, Richard G. Jones, Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is currently a lack of intersubjective research involving human participants and conceptual frameworks that include queer theory. Queer theory's poststructuralist epistemology tends toward desubjectification, problematizing research that relies on participants' self-reports of lived experience. The author proposes that the interdisciplinary nature of Communication Studies, which is situated within the humanities and social sciences, leaves communication scholars well poised to contribute to ongoing metatheoretical and metamethodological conversations regarding queer theory and intersubjective research, particularly in relation to cultures and identities. To contribute to this scholarly conversation, the author utilizes the deconstructionist lens of queer theory to contextualize communication, employs personal …

Poetry From The Glass Closet: The Experiences Of Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Pk-12 Educators As They Manage Their Sexual Orientation Identity Within A Teaching Role, Megan Suzanne Kennedy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to portray the experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual educators in PK-12 schools in the State of Colorado. This aim emerged from my own personal experiences, previous research, and the current status of state and federal laws. This research focused on the experiences of 15 lesbian, gay, bisexual and allied identified teachers, including myself.

This study focused on a primary research question: What are the experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual PK-12 educators as they manage their sexual orientation identities within a teaching role?

Heuristics was the qualitative methodology best suited to address this …

Religio-Political Groups And The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, Catherine Ruth Orsborn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a quagmire of interests working against one another. In this paper, I explore the specific role of religio-political groups in the conflict. I particularly examine the ideological political and religious foundations of Gush Emunim and Hamas, paying much attention to the question of why they are attractive to people in our current era. I argue that these groups are continuously effective in opposing the current quest for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and that they continue to grow as the result of an identity crisis brought about by factors related to globalization and the failure …

Imagination, Religious Practice, And World Transformations: Sophia, Heidegger, And Jacob Bohme's The Way To Christ, Mark Allen Peckler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is offered as a work of original scholarship in the field of Religion and Psychological Studies (RPS). Through its hermeneutic preservation of Jacob Böhme's The Way to Christ in "conversation" with selected works of Martin Heidegger, I retrieve the question of imagination's relation to religious practice, attending to potentials for world transformations disclosed through this relationship, in order to develop a new hermeneutic option for the RPS field concerning this important question. This new hermeneutic option is developed in such a way as to ensure a subversive compatibility with psychoanalytic hermeneutics—our field's koiné—while opening to certain radical …

Representational Subversions And The Limits Of Postcoloniality: Shahzia Sikander's Strategic Contemporaneity, Linda Eilene Sanchez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Transnational artist Shahzia Sikander challenges the limitations of Edward Said's postcolonial emphasis on secular humanism by deploying the heterogeneous traditions of South Asian miniature painting while strategically drawing on tradition to critique contemporaneity. Through a palimpsest process of composition, Sikander reincorporates the unknown and silenced histories implicit in the tradition of miniature painting to create social imaginaries with motifs that draw on the diverse traditions of South Asian religions and aesthetics to create a subversive politics of remembering wherein alternative images of cosmopolitanism emerge. Through a sustained analysis, this dissertation demonstrates how these alternative traditions interrogate and critique the limitations …

From 'Black-Eyed Girls' To The Mmu (Mujeres Methotistas Unidas): Race, Religion And Gender In The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Adriana Pilar Nieto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study places the stories of Mexican American Methodist women in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands within the context of the organizational history of the United Methodist Women of the Rio Grande Conference of the United Methodist Church: Mujeres Metodistas Unidas, or the MMU. It focuses on the experiences and memories of women who came into contact with the ideals imported by Anglo Methodist missionaries to the U.S. southwest immediately following the conquest of the northern half of Mexico in 1848.

In order to understand the experiences of Mexican American women in relation to the history of Methodism in the southwest, this …