Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Manga History As A Manga Character: The Gekiga Movement's Role In Tatsumi Yoshihiro's A Drifting Life, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Why is manga history so important in Tatsumi's manga biography? Is A Drifting Life an autobiography, or, is it a history of the Japanese comic books, particularly the "mature-audience" gekiga sub-genre? Both? Neither? How do the narratives of history and self intertwine? How should we read the gekiga (dramatic pictures) in this manga?

Systems Theory And The Metaphysics Of Composition, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Ideas from systems theory - recursive unity and emergent attributes - are applied to the metaphysical and meta-metaphysical debates about the ontological status of composites. These ideas suggest the rejection of both extremes of universalism and nihilism, favoring instead the intermediate position that some composites exist in a nontrivial sense - those having unity and emergent novelty - while others do not. Systems theory is egalitarian: it posits that what exist are systems, equal in their ontological status. Some systems are fundamental, but what exists is not merely the fundamental, and the fundamental is not merely the foundational. The status …

El Reto De Una Democracia Planetaria: Vandana Shiva Y La Relevancia Del Feminismo Tradicional, Priya Kapoor

International & Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Este artículo analiza el caso de la activista ambiental y científica Vandana Shiva y su visión de una tierra democrática, al tiempo que examina la teoría feminista. Shiva media múltiples realidades de compañías multinacionales de biotecnología, movilizaciones populares y su propia marca de prácticas feministas. El activismo de Shiva muestra la posición intermediaria de mujeres líderes que deben balancear y comunicar asertivamente las relaciones entre el Estado y las corporaciones, mientras al mismo tiempo reivindican un liderazgo moral.

While examining transnational feminist theory, this article scrutinizes the case of environmental activist and scientist Vandana Shiva and her vision of an …

Early Carthusian Script And Silence, Bennett Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

At its founding and during its first three decades, the Carthusian order developed a distinctive and forceful concept of communication among the members and between the members and the extramural world. Saint Bruno’s life, contemporary twelfth-century exegesis, and the physical situation of La Grande Chartreuse established the necessary context in which this concept evolved. A review of historical background, the relevant documentary texts, and early development demonstrate the shaping of two steps in this concept. Close reading of the principal testimonies of Carthusians Bruno, Guigo I, Guigo II, and some other witnesses, as well as of some passages in Saint …

Afro-Ecuadorian Educational Movement: Racial Oppression, Its Origins And Oral Tradition, Ethan Johnson

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, three objectives are presented, first, to describe the socio-historical context of Afro-Ecuadorians generally and specifically related to education. Here, it is demonstrated how colonial and nation building practices and processes have attempted to silence and make absent the contributions people of African descent have made to development of the nation. Second, the Afro-Ecuadorian social movement is considered within the local, regional and global socio-historical context, and it is argued that the Afro-Ecuadorian Etnoeducación is part of a continuous struggle for freedom and inclusion in the nation as full citizens. The third area of analysis focuses on one …

Synthesis Before The Proto-Niger-Congo Inflectional Verb: Evidence From The Peripheral South Atlantic Languages, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper contributes to the understanding of Proto-Niger-Congo (PNC) verb structure. It supports the contention in Nurse 2007 that PNC verbs were likely more analytical than synthetic in nature. It does so by illustrating several paths of grammaticalization (and cliticization), in a set of several far-west Atlantic languages, geographically distant from the Niger-Congo core.

Social Media, Fandom And Language Learning: A Roundtable With Shannon Sauro And Steven L. Thorne, Dean Wang, Shannon Sauro, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Last November, Dr. Shannon Sauro and Dr. Steven L. Thorne visited the UAB campus to give lectures on, respectively, ‘Fandom, Social Media and Learning’ and ‘Human development and semiotic remediation through mobile place-based gaming’. (. . . ) Questions and responses are transcribed here.

Beyond The Ancestral Code: Towards A Model For Sociolinguistic Language Documentation, George Tucker Childs, Jeff Good, Alice Mitchell

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language’s sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and the relationship between ‘communities’ and ‘languages’ are clearly of interest to documentary linguistics, and this paper considers these issues by reporting on the results of a workshop held on sociolinguistic documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Over sixty participants from Africa and elsewhere discussed theoretical and methodological issues relating to the documentation of language in its social context. …

In The Air Tonight: An Uncommon Interface For Common Concern, Maggie Chan, Dave Colangelo, Patricio Davila, Robert Tu

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper is concerned with addressing social concerns with large-scale, multi-modal media art that uses digital networks, reactive architecture, and the city as semiotic resources. As artists and designers who are involved in socially engaged practice, we see an important role in foregrounding political and social issues through networks and architecture, negotiating and furnishing access to both while shaping compelling interfaces that allow people to contribute by amplifying an area of common concern. We discuss some previous work by Davila and Colangelo and focus on our latest project, In The Air, Tonight, which aims to visualize local wind patterns combined …

The Impact Of Favela Painting, Fariha Rahman

Senior Inquiry High School Program

While Brazil is growing rapidly, increased attention is being paid to its many lowerincome “marginal” neighborhoods, called favelas, found near and within many major Brazilian cities. Three such favelas have been visually transformed by a Dutch design firm’s Favela Painting project, which consists of enormous murals painted on the walls of favela housing. The project was developed by two designers, Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn or Haas&Hahn, after they first visited a Brazilian favela to film a music video. Their original intent had little to do with any negative conditions of favelas – they simply wanted authorization for a painting …

Interpreting Women’S History Through Museum Relics: Lessons From The National Museum Of Unity Enugu, Bright Alozie, Chimee Nkemjika Ihediwa, Vitalis Nwashindu, John Uchne Ngonadi, John Kelechi Ugwuanyi

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although women's history surrounds us, women's contributions to history are easily over looked and often unacknowledged. In fact, decades ago, there was what could be referred to as the invisibility of women in any serious study of history in spite of the fact that history itself has not and can never be solely a male preserve. It was not until recently towards the end of the 20th century that women's history began to be studied and documented. However, since the past fifty years, a number of roadblocks still prevent the historian from producing a coherent narrative on women's history as …

Jim Rockford Or Tony Soprano: Coastal Contrasts In American Suburbia, Carl Abbott

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Both in television shows such as The Rockford Files and The Sopranos and in the fiction of writers such as John Updike, Richard Ford, and Douglas Coupland, popular culture draws a distinction between Atlantic Coast and Pacific Coast suburbs. The differences revolve around two themes. The first concerns the roles of place and space. The second is the varying weight of history, often as manifested through families and social ties. Eastern suburbs and suburbanites are commonly depicted as embedded in place, rooted in time, and entangled in social networks. Western suburbs and suburbanites are often imagined as the opposite—isolated in …

Book Review Of, Ethics Of Liberation: In The Age Of Globalization And Exclusion, Alexander Sager

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Alex Sager, Professor in Philosophy at Portland State University reviews Ethics of Liberation: in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion by Enrique Dussell.

Popular Taste In Art As Related To Culture, Fariha Rahman

Senior Inquiry High School Program

We surround ourselves with visual art, from decorative mirrors and billboard ads to bedroom posters and hotel prints. These various genres of everyday art fall across a wide range, but many relate to or are inspired by institutionalized art. Those who already tend to visit or are inclined towards art museums are usually the ones who gain exposure to museum art, which often caters to their taste, but are still receptive to changes in the art that reflect our world and time period. One of the more major, recent movements in formal art is postmodernism, which developed from resisting societal …

Ticket To Salvation: Nichiren Buddhism In Miyazawa Kenji’S Ginga Tetsudō No Yoru, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Miyazawa Kenji’s Ginga tetsudō no yoru is a children’s story that explores what heaven is like with very visible Christian themes and images, but the logic and vision underneath is more Buddhist than Christian. In Kenji’s prose masterpiece, the author ultimately subsumed Christianity and science into a greater spiritual cosmic vision—Nichiren’s all-encompassing principle of three-thousand-realms-in-a-single-thought (ichinen sanzen). Among the possible interpretations of Ginga tetsudō no yoru, one must consider that it is an expression of the author’s Nichiren Buddhist beliefs, which he long held and explicitly articulated elsewhere in other works and correspondence. Reframing both the scholarship on Kenji’s ties …

Teaching Australian Literature In A Class About Literatures Of Social Reform, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an intriguing thesis about proximity and identification, distance and empathy based on the experience of teaching Sally Morgan’s My Place to American university students alongside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a class examining literature as an agent of social change. Indeed, its response to the question, “How does the Australian production of My Place influence its American reception?” will surprise many people. Students more readily demonstrate empathy with characters and are prepared to ascribe their unenviable life circumstances to social structures that propagate oppression when reading literature about cultural groups …

Reading L2 Russian: The Challenges Of The Russian-English Dictionary, William J. Comer

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This descriptive study examines when and how students use Russian-English dictionaries while reading informational texts in Russian and what success they have with word lookup. The study uses introspective verbal protocols (i.e., think-alouds) to follow how readers construct meaning from two texts while reading them for a limited time first without a dictionary and then with access to a paper bilingual dictionary. Quantitative and qualitative data about readers’ language and dictionary skills are presented based on the readers’ think-aloud protocols for the dictionary portion of the reading sessions. The data reveal patterns of dictionary usage and problems in finding words …

Theoretical Approach In A Case In Diachronic Phonetism: Betacism And Its Repercussions In Modern Spanish (Acercamiento Teórico A Un Caso De Fonetismo Diacrónico: El Betacismo Y Sus Repercursiones), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This research deals with the loss of distinction between the bilabial and labiodental sounds, /b/and /v/, in Spanish using a theoretical and linguistic diachronical perspective. The phonetic evolution of these sounds and their confusion dates back t0 the roots of the Spanish language in the Peninsula territories, especially in the north, in close geographic contact with the Basque. This confusion was already taking place in Vulgar Latin and, specifically, in the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Peninsula. This lack of distinction evolved slowly until the seventeenth century when both sounds lost their phonemic contrast. Differences between the …

In A Senchimentaru Mood: Japanese Sentimentalism In Modern Poetry And Art, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sentimentalism (senchimentarizumu) for Meiji poet Takamura Kōtarō 高 村光太郎, and others of his generation, was not a practice to be cultivated—not in one’s personal life, where it connoted emotional weakness, and certainly not in one’s artistic creations, where the concept suggested a sycophantic appropriation of Western trends. By the Taishō period (1912–1926), however, the term senchimentarizumu appeared with greater and greater regularity in the works of such luminaries as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Hagiwara Sakutarō. What did they mean by it? And why had the term taken on such noticeable cachet? In the article that follows I trace the formation and …

Judy Malloy's Seat At The (Database) Table: A Feminist Reception History Of Early Hypertext Literature, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

When Robert Coover anointed Michael Joyce the ‘granddaddy’ of hypertext literature in a 1992 New York Times article, it could scarcely have been imagined that this pronouncement would come to define the origin of electronic literature. This short article examines the human and machinic operations obscuring Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger, a hypertext that predates afternoon. Malloy's reputation was stunted because Uncle Roger was algorithmically invisible, a factor that became increasingly important as the Web's commercial capacities matured. afternoon's endurance can be traced to its ISBN, which made afternoon easy for readers to find and united disparate stewards in preserving access …

The Editing And Publishing Of Tim Winton In The United States, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Per Henningsgaard presents us with a detailed analysis of 'The editing and publishing of Tim Winton in the United States', and more broadly of the work of cultural translation. Henningsgaard's essay is a fascinating excursion for readers of Winton into the pragmatic details of difference and similarity in national vocabularies and in modes of perception between the purportedly symbiotic North America and Australia. We also gain an appreciation of what the material production of literature entails for authors, editors, publishers and readers globally. We are given the chance to contemplate how ‘the literary’ exists not beyond the marketplace, but certainly …

Reviews Of Thunder: A Film About Ferron, Sarabah, And The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna, Sarah Dougher

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sarah Dougher reviews three films in this issue of Films for the Feminist Classroom: Thunder: A Film about Ferron. Directed by Bitch and Billie Jo Cavallaro; Sarabah. Directed by Maria Luisa Gambale & Gloria Bremer; and The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna. Directed by Sini Anderson.