Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Spring 2016, Vantage Point

Vantage Point

No abstract provided.

Fall 2015, Vantage Point

Vantage Point

No abstract provided.

What Does Motivated Mean? Re-Presenting Learning, Technology, And Motivation In Middle Schools Via New Ethnographic Writing, Justin Olmanson

Middle Grades Review

This article offers a critique of the way middle schoolers are often positioned as generalizable objects that can be acted upon to produce measurable increases in motivation and learning. The critique invites a reconsideration and cultural analysis of some of the dominant discourses and perceptions of technology, young adolescence, and the study of motivation. The use of New Ethnographic Writing—a method that performs a cultural critique via extended scenes connects to the roles and status of motivation, technology, and educational research methods deployed within public schools. Coupled with weak theory, this approach offers a way to understand young adolescents as …

Dirt In Your Soul: An Exhibit Plan, Shannon K. Esrich

Food Systems Master's Project Reports

This project is based on the Vermont Folklife Center’s research documenting grassroots food and agriculture in Vermont. The Library of Congress Archie Green Fellowship generously funded this research. Over the course of approximately 18 months, the research team traveled across Vermont to conduct 22 qualitative interviews with a cross-section of Vermont’s food system stakeholders. Additionally, the team dedicated 6 site visits to capturing photographic, audio, and video content from a variety of food producers. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a traveling exhibit featuring the story of Vermont’s modern, changing food system.

This report is designed to …

Walk A Mile In My Shoes: The Social Construction Of Mental Illness Among State Administrators And Consumer-Advocates, Paul Arthur Dragon

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

From 19th century insane asylums to state sponsored eugenic programs in the 20th century, the state has been an incongruous leader and provider of mental health policy and practice. Current practices that include such treatments as confinement, restraints, forced medication and electro-convulsive therapy continue to raise issues of social justice and humane treatment.

Since the 1970s a diverse group of consumers of mental health services from political and radical emancipatory movements to consumer and family initiatives have emerged to question, inform and influence federal and state policies and services. Today state administrators and consumer-advocates meet in formal settings in which …

The Past Isn't Dead: Faulkner's Postcolonialism, Travis Roy Heeren

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

While William Faulkner preceded the formalized movement of postcolonialism, he anticipated a great many of its tenets and wrote them in into the early works of his career. As the theoretical conversation within postcolonialism has expanded in recent years to include notions of the new empire and post-hybridity, this thesis explores the ways in which Faulkner's narrative elements of encounter, fissure, and cycle may allow us to consider the postcolonial narrative more expansively, and to read William Faulkner as a postcolonial author.

Poetics Of The Real, Matthew Mersky

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

ABSTRACT

The premise of my thesis is to approach poetics anew, using psychoanalysis and other related theoretical disciplines to help answer the often overlooked but fundamental question: 'What is poetry?' This thesis is based on the notion that Freud's insight into the unconscious is itself the key to unlocking the essential function of poetry as it has come to be understood in the 20th century, throughout the modernist period; and that Lacan, as a rewriting of Freud, specifically developed a theory of language that provides the beginnings of a psychoanalytic poetics. Another component of this thesis involves the claim that, …

"The Nest Of Tories Which Has Invested This Precinct": The Loyalists Of Newburgh, New York, Kieran John O'Keefe

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis uses a case study approach to examine loyalism during the American Revolution, by considering the Loyalists of Newburgh, New York. I examine the Loyalist community by exploring its origins before the Revolution, analyzing its composition, examining the Loyalists' wartime experiences, and by considering their post-war exile. Studying Newburgh's Loyalists allows for a nuanced understanding of loyalism both in the Hudson Valley and more generally. I argue that migration, religion, wealth, and geographic location shaped Loyalist communities and their experiences.

My thesis is divided into four chapters, the first of which considers the origins of the Loyalist community, which …

Prejudice Against Black Americans Versus Black Africans In College Admission, Asia Mccleary-Gaddy

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Three studies examined prejudice as an explanation for the overrepresentation of Black Africans and the under-representation of native-born Black Americans in Ivy League institutions. I hypothesized admission officers may use Black Africans as a "cover" for their prejudice against Black American natives. The admission of more Black Africans may allow admission officers to express their prejudice toward Black American natives while maintaining an egalitarian image. In Study 1, although the Black African applicant was evaluated as more likable, competent, and had a greater chance of being admitted than the Black American native applicant, differences were only significant when compared with …

Nurse Practitioners' Discussion Of Sexual Identity, Attraction And Behavior, Sarah J. Mclaughlin

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

ABSTRACT

Background: Sexual orientation is comprised of distinct components, including sexual identity, sexual attraction and sexual behavior. Lesbian, gay and bisexual adolescents are at an increased risk of experiencing poor health outcomes compared to non-sexual minority youth. Health care professional organizations recommend that health care providers discuss each component of sexual orientation at every adolescent health supervision visits in order to best assess the adolescent's health risks and needs for intervention and education.

Objective: This survey assessed the frequency with which nurse practitioners (NPs) in the state of Vermont discussed sexual identity, attraction and behavior with adolescents during annual health …

Walking With A Ghost: Sodomy, Sanity And The Secular, Kyle Joseph Campbell

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In the last twenty-five years there has been a boom in scholarship on Charles Brockden Brown that connects his work to social developments that occurred in the early American republic. Brown scholars often read him as a man ahead of his time as his writing addresses, hints at, or even inverts social mores. The scholarship around Brown's novel Edgar Huntly has concentrated on how the narrative addresses westward expansion and white settlers' relationship with Native Americans or the ways in which Edgar Huntly connects to Revolutionary society. Kate Ward Sugar engages with this narrative in a different way, exploring the …

Cultivating Well-Being And Contemplative Ways Of Knowing Through Connection: One Woman's Journey From Monastic Living To Mainstream Academia, Krista Hamel

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines how different types of connection – intimacy, community, and compassion – can positively impact the cultivation of well-being and ways of knowing. Using Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology (narrative storytelling supported by scholarship) I describe my journey from the 15-years I lived as a monastic yogic nun, followed by a period of heartbreak, to my recent experience as a tip-toeing Buddhist and mid-life graduate student who yearned for community, a place to belong, and an opportunity to be heard, seen and valued. I explore how the pain and suffering of loneliness, grief, loss, and change, when met by …

The Long Red Scare: Anarchism, Antiradicalism, And Ideological Exclusion In The Progressive Era, Adam Quinn

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

From 1919 to 1920 the United States carried out a massive campaign against radicals, arresting and deporting thousands of radical immigrants in a matter of months, raiding and shutting down anarchist printing shops, and preventing anarchists from sending both periodicals and personal communications through the mail. This period is widely known as the First Red Scare, and is framed as a reaction to recent anarchist terrorism, syndicalist unionizing, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Though the 1919-20 First Red Scare was certainly unprecedented in its scope, it was made possible through a longer campaign against radicals, throughout which the US government constructed …

Missing The Curfew: A Cultural History Case For Re-Reading Thomas Gray's Most Famous Line, Michael Joseph Thomas

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Virtually all nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' find in the Curfew bell of the opening lines primarily a figure of death evoked by the growing darkness, the fading sounds, the emptying landscape and ultimate solitude of the speaker, and most of all the funerary associations of tolling bells and the 'passing bell' tradition. And yet, culturally, despite some symbolic overlap, the Curfew bell and the passing bell are quite distinct, each with its own characteristic history, practices, traditions, and connotations, distinctions recognized widely in eighteenth century literary and antiquarian circles. In …

The Nile Project: Creating Harmony Through Music In The Nile Basin Region, Kelly Mancini Becker

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

ABSTRACT

The use of the arts as a tool for conflict transformation, or what has been called arts based peacebuilding, is a new and emerging field. Yet, there is sparse empirical evidence on its outcomes. The Nile Project, a musical collaborative from East Africa that brings together musicians from all of the countries that border the Nile River, is aimed at finding a solution to the dire water conflict and crisis in the region. This study aims to explore how their collaborative process of creating and performing music despite their linguistic, cultural, musical, and political differences, can illuminate how music …

My Ántonia And Willa Cather's Reciprocal Regionalism And W.T. Benda's Illustrations, Sean Michael Abrams

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores regionalism as a fictional genre and Willa Cather's experimentations and innovations in her 1918 novel My Ántonia. In it I argue that Cather employs what I will be calling reciprocal regionalism, which expands upon the regionalist relationship between the land and the characters in the story. In My Ántonia and later novels of Cather's, reciprocal regionalism functions in how characters survive, prosper, or perish in the region; the relationship needs to be fluid and adaptable.

Using regionalist criticism and close textual analysis of Willa Cather's novels, essays, and letters, I argue that Cather believes in an inherent …

International Activism Of African Americans In The Interwar Period, Clayton Maxwell Kendall

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

African Americans have a rich history of activism, but their involvement in affecting change during the interwar period is often overlooked in favor of post-Civil War and post-World War II coverage. African Americans also have a rich history of reaching out to the international community when it comes to that activism. This examination looks to illuminate the effect of the connections African Americans made with the rest of the world and how that shaped their worldview and their activism on the international stage. Through the use of newspapers and first-hand accounts, it becomes clear how African American figures and world …

Gendering Fiction: A Mixed Methods Examination Of The Influence Of The "Boy" Book/ "Girl" Book Phenomenon On The Willingness To Read Of Young Adolescents, Megan Farley Munson-Warnken

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Well-meaning educators often recommend more "boy" books to increase reading motivation amongst boys. This experimental mixed-methods study investigated the influence of the "boy" book/ "girl" book phenomenon on willingness to read using a researcher-designed instrument called the Textual Features Sort (TFS). The TFS measured two attitudinal constructs—gendered beliefs about texts and willingness to read—in relation to individual textual features of selected young adult novels. Data came from 50 sixth and seventh grade students at a mid-sized public school in a rural New England state. Mean scores, frequencies, and percentages were analyzed using independent samples t-tests, paired t-tests, and Fisher's exact …