Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Growing Up Gay In Black America: An Exploration Of The Coming Out Process Of Queer African American Youth, Demarquis Clarke

Marriage and Family Therapy - Dissertations

Although it is commonly acknowledged that homophobia and racial marginalization influence queer African American male youth, there is very little research to back up this belief. Due to the paucity of information for clinicians, families, and communities on the relational dynamics of queer African American male youth and their parents, queer African American male youth were interviewed to explore the ways in which they understand their experience of the disclosure process, paying particular attention to the interface between race and sexual orientation and relational dynamics. This exploratory, qualitative study examined data gathered in interviews with individual male youth that identified …

Thomas Hobbes' Response To The Fool: Justice And Magnanimity, Andrew James Corsa

Philosophy - Dissertations

I focus on Thomas Hobbes' response to the moral skeptic - the Fool - who claims it is sometimes reasonable to break valid covenants (contracts). The Fool maintains that, in some circumstances, violating a covenant will be in a person's best self-interest, and it will be reasonable to violate when it is. I interpret Hobbes to respond that it will never be reasonable for anyone to break a valid covenant, even in the state of nature (prior to society). In fact, everyone is obliged to keep all of his valid covenants, and it is always both reasonable and in each …

Fool For Love, Judy Zanin

Drama - Dissertations

This document is intended to describe the directorial process of producing Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard, from selecting a play, choosing a cast, working with designers and production staff, to directing. Central to the process is the development of effective communication between director and staff involved in the production, including how to rationalize directorial decisions and to succinctly present that information. It is the director who is responsible for the concept of the show's thematic material to be encompassed on the stage as a whole. Above all, the playwright and the script are what should be attended to, and …

The Contrasting Image Of Italian Women Under Fascism In The 1930’S, Jennifer Linda Monti

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The Fascist regime in Italy lasted twenty years, deeply influencing the Italian population and the Italian culture during that time period. Although Fascism tried to control the public and private life of Italians, it was unsuccessful because of the strong presence of the Catholic Church and because ofItaly’s difficult history prior to unification. What the regime did accomplish, however, was the quasi complete consent of the masses because of the numerous activities and organizations it created for them. A particular group on which Fascism focused was women, understanding how central their role was within the family, and wanting to gain …

Reinventing The Classical Recital: Examining The Connections Between Performer And Audience, Kimberly R. Dinicola

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Reinventing the Classical Recital: Examining the Connections Between Performer and Audience was a project intended to create a dialogue between the performer and audience about the kind of experience a classical recital typically is versus what it can be. Recitals given at Syracuse University, and in the classical music community in general, generally have strict guidelines for the amount, type, and quality of music to be performed. Certain composers or types of song are considered more appropriate than others, depending on the instrument and length of the recital. In creating a recital to evaluate in what ways the performer can …

Salt, A Web-Based Ipad Magazine, Caitlin Dewey

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Abstract not included.

New Horizons: A Folk Song Cycle, Chris Cresswell

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The purpose of the project was to create a piece of music that transcended musical genres and told the story of my coming of age in the first decade of the 21st century. The work featured both original text and original music and culminates in a live performance of the work.

I wanted to tell a story. More specifically, I wanted to tell my story. The story of coming of age in the 21st century. I was 11 in the year 2000, I was 21 in 2010. My formative years correlate directly with the formative years of the 21st century. …

American Political Satire: The 20th Century Onward, Michael Contino

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Political satire is an implied freedom enumerated in the first amendment of the Constitution. As a form of political speech, it falls under the category of the most protected form of expression. Now that I’ve got your attention, I can go ahead with the rest of my project. This is a journalistic study of the people who used their freedom of speech to openly criticize the government. More specifically, it’s about the people who openly criticized the government and then became famous for it. Of course, there’s many ways to criticize, many platforms, many audiences, many influences as well.

What …

You Are What You Eat: Photographic Portrait Series, Danielle Carrick

Honors Capstone Projects - All

You Are What You Eat is a photographic portrait series drawing visual parallels between food and people. Each portrait consists of not one, but two separate images – a person and the food they resemble. The series pays homage to portrait photography and food photography but is defined by neither.

Each pairing is based on physical attributes of the food subject and human model. For example, the freckled face of a man is side by side with a sesame seed bagel, the pattern and coloring of both mirroring each other. Likewise, a tall, thin girl is perfectly posed to resemble …

Darken The Beauty Spots, Jillian Ellis

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Darken the Beauty Spots uses images gathered from sources such as Vogue, Good Housekeeping, and action movies to discuss whether images of truly empowered women exist in the media. The project examines six different and specific patterns of imagery found in the media that could potentially be seen as either empowering or repressive. Each pattern occupies its own 35” x 40” canvas that contains between four and eight found images taken out of their original contexts, cropped into fragments, and strategically placed on the canvas in order to create relationships between the images. The work is meant to remain …

The Pinochet Project: A Nation’S Search For Truth Memory Struggles In Post-Pinochet Chile, Christine Mehta

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Chile has fought for 21 years to overcome General Augusto Pinochet’s violent legacy, but moving past the pervasive influence of Pinochet’s 17-year reign is a difficult task, even today. The following work is an investigation on memory, and Chile’s struggle to come to terms with its memory of the dictatorship. The key questions asked are: How do Chileans remember the dictatorship? What does each individual’s memory mean to the collective whole? Why is confronting the past important to Chile’s future?

The investigation is divided into two parts: a journalistic portion in which individual accounts are highlighted, and an academic thesis …

Lovetoleave.Com: A Website About Niche Online Dating In Angeles City, Philippines, Marlei Martinez

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The global community is quickly growing due to the constant advancement of telecommunications across the land and sea. No longer do people have to settle for dating within their hometowns; now, they can simply sign up online, create a dating profile and search for their soul mate with just the click of a mouse.

Niche online dating is a very personalized form of internet romance. Men and women can now sit in front of their computers, type the words, “I want to date an Asian girl/guy” in the Google search bar, and dozens of ‘Asian’ dating websites will appear. This …

Tokoyo: A Story Of Cultural Movement, Melissa Jessel

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Tokoyo: A Story of Cultural Movement is an exploration of Japanese culture through performance. The piece incorporates stylized, ritualistic, and contemporary movement. The device used to portray our research was a folk tale told solely through physical expression. Music by Japanese composers and projections of the country supported the movement and helped to tell the story of the culture.

We were deep into our research when we embarked on our trip to Japan to observe the specificity of the culture in everyday life and performance. Everything that we read, watched, and took part in manifested itself in the final presentation. …

When You Got It, Bump It: A Lost Showgirl’S Cabaret, Mary Claire King

Honors Capstone Projects - All

For my Capstone project, I developed an original cabaret entitled “When You Got It, Bump It: A Lost Showgirl’s Cabaret.” The story follows Mazeppa, the lost showgirl, as she travels the vaudeville “circuit” in an attempt to regain her fame. I portray this leading character, while two other women portray her friends and co-stars. All three characters are based on perhaps some of the most famous showgirls on Broadway, Mazeppa, Tessie Tura and Electra of the 1959 musical, Gypsy.

I performed the cabaret twice, on the evenings of April 2^nd and 3^rd, at the First Unitarian …

What The Health Magazine Redesign, Sarah Glaser

Honors Capstone Projects - All

I was art director for the Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 issues of What the Health magazine, a student-run publication on campus at Syracuse University. To put together the issues I oversaw an entire design department consisting of photographers and graphic artists. Photography assignments often came in late leaving little time for design work, and I did not feel satisfied with the ultimate layout design of the magazine. For my capstone project I took on the challenge creating a final book combining the strongest pieces from both original issues in a redesigned layout. I wanted to overcome the inconsistency that …

A Self-Help Guide To Future Success, Naresh Vissa

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This dissertation takes the form of an eleven-part podcast series titled, “A Self-Help Guide to Future Success.” The radio series relates to the topic of personal success.

Success comes in all sorts of forms – financial, social, ethical, personal: it cannot be defined. In today’s environment, people find themselves confused more than ever before.

As a senior in college who is about to graduate in less than four weeks, I find it mind-boggling how little students have thought about their futures. Furthermore, it is a shame that so many people fail to recognize the current society and conditions surrounding them. …

Flavorly: An Online Food Magazine, Meredith Grace Popolo

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Project Concept

Flavorly.com is an online food magazine that aims to cover culinary topics relevant to Syracuse and the surrounding Central New York regions. It also reports on national food news that is of interest to locals. By nature, an online magazine is a living project which is constantly changing. While a large part of the project was reporting, writing, and editing stories fit for the magazine, a large challenge was simply keeping articles consistent and current.

Context of the Work

In the landscape of journalism today, the web provides an extension of print magazines. It offers more real estate …

Fox Fire, Emily Watanabe

Honors Capstone Projects - All

“Fox Fire” is an independent animated short. Its plot is centered on a young boy, a mysterious girl, and their adventures at a Japanese summer festival. The purpose of this project was to create a short and fun animation to stir the imagination of its viewers while incorporating elements of Japanese culture and experimenting with unique aesthetic choices.

During the initial brainstorming stages of this capstone, I decided that I wanted to somehow incorporate pieces of Japanese culture and mythology into the project. Not only is the folklore fascinating, I often enjoy expressing my Japanese heritage through artwork. The choice …

Directing An Opera In An Undergraduate Setting: Creating A Professional Atmosphere Within The Confines Of A Student Production, Gabrielle Traub

Honors Capstone Projects - All

As a Voice/Opera Performance major, I decided to take my love of opera and performance and familiarize myself with all of the aspects I had yet to understand: Production and Direction. Along with the creative and technical aspects, I also learned how to deal with many different emotional situations, including but not limited to being in a leadership position above my friends and peers.

My concept is as follows: produce and direct a full-length opera production in a foreign language. I decided to direct The Magic Flute in its original language because a) that was the composer’s original intent, and …

Ye People: Irish Travellers In Transition, Mackenzie Reiss

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Ye People: A Photographic Account of Irish Travellers in Transition

Tradition is what links one generation to the next. It is a cause for pride, a sense of belonging, and a way of life. For Irish Travellers living in Dublin, this legacy is in jeopardy. Recent legislation by the Irish government has caused the Travelling community to re-evaluate its terms of existence. For a people who only knew a life on the road, the Housing Act of 1992, banning roadside encampments, has come as a devastating blow. What was once commonplace, has become a rarity. Gone is the sight of …

Before The Bell Rings: The Effects Of Negative Neighborhood Characteristics On Educational Achievement In Ohio Public Schools, Na’Tasha Webb-Prather

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Educational inequality is a salient issue plaguing the youth of America and is also jeopardizing the future of this nation. Before the Bell Rings is a two-part examination of the impact of discriminatory housing practices against blacks and subsequently the impact of negative neighborhood characteristics on educational achievement within Ohio public schools.

As blacks migrated from the South to northern cities they were met with discrimination in the form of restrictive covenants, redlining and other societal practices that clustered them together in inner-city locations. The historical analysis component of this study examines the effects of these discriminatory housing practices for …

In Defense Of Existence Monism, Peter Finocchiaro

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The objective of this paper is a defense of a particular answer to van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question: when is it the case that some objects together compose some additional object? The answer is the conjunction of two claims. The first claim, compositional nihilism says that, necessarily, there is never an instance of material composition, and therefore all material objects that do exist are simple, or without proper parts. The second claim, existence monism, says that there exists a material object, and that all other material objects are identical with this object. In other words, there is just one …

Illuminating Exclusion: Constructions Of National Identity In The Washington National Cathedral's Stained Glass Windows, Maggie T. Gleason

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. offers itself as a national monument and spiritual center for the American people. Thousands of tourists and worshipers visit the Cathedral every year to admire its Neo-Gothic style architecture, stained glass windows, hand-carved sculpture and the general splendor of the massive medieval-inspired structure. I argue that the imagery and iconography of this ornamentation presents American national identity as white and Christian, an ideal that is cultivated through the exclusion and domination of minority racial groups and alternative belief systems in the Cathedral’s decorative program, through the stained glass windows.

In order to shed …

Hero/Heroine: A Study Of The Representation Of Womanhood In Victorian And Neo-Victorian Literature, Laura Depalma

Honors Capstone Projects - All

In this paper, I compare two novels: Shirley by Charlotte Brontë and A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. Shirley follows the lives of two girls navigating adolescence in the early nineteenth century; A Great and Terrible Beauty is the story of four girls, also transitioning into womanhood, in the late Victorian era.

The first interesting thing about these two pieces is that both authors choose to set them in their relative pasts: Brontë, writing near the middle of the nineteenth century, sets her work in 1812, while contemporary writer Libba Bray sets her piece in the Victorian era. …

Grassroots Poverty And Grassroots Human Rights: Grounding Theory In Practice, Scott Collison

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Philosophical discourse on human rights is broad and contested, and not all of it agrees with human rights practice. None of the common philosophical problems, such as the reconciliation between theory and human rights law, the debate between civil-political and socio-economic rights, or even what sort of thing human rights are, has been answered definitively. What is uncontested, however, is the fact that human rights are far from fulfilled in the world today, as world poverty and inequality persist into the 21^st century.

A recent trend across the board—from philosophy to development studies to human rights practice—is to view …

Ensemble Theatre Techniques: Butoh Electra, Jordan Rosin

Honors Capstone Projects - All

For my Capstone project, I was interested in both creating an original piece of theatre and testing a theory I had developed about the way in which a sense of ensemble is cultivated in a company of actors. I theorized that group training in one or more movement disciplines could generate a sense of ensemble just as easily as games or improvisation while having the added benefit of helping us generate material for the particularly physical piece of theatre which I had envisioned. To test the theory, I wrote an original adaptation of the classical Greek tragedy, Electra by Sophocles. …

Strange Angels, Bridgette Werner

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Strange Angels is a documentary photography project exploring the formation of family in the context of Stansberry Children’s Home in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It is a creative project presented as a book of photos and text that together discuss life in the children’s home and how children with fractured families construct family systems in an institutional context. The photography was produced during two trips that I took to Santa Cruz in 2009 and 2010. On both trips I lived on the Stansberry grounds and interacted with the children and their caretakers, becoming acquainted with them and the operations of the …

Crossroads: A Novella, Patricia Ann-Marie Abraham

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Crossroads is the herstory of Tahaj Marie, a woman-child who comes of age in Brooklyn, New York. The single daughter of a single mother, she rejects the pressures put forth by her strict, cold mother and defies her with a sexual relationship at 16 that leaves her pregnant and alone. Spending years raising her son Amir, and rekindling an unsuccessful relationship with his father leads her to the crossroads of her life. Despite the road blocks, she rebuilds herself to strive towards the woman she seeks to become. As a single mother who is Black, female, and disadvantaged, Tahaj Marie …

Citrustv Website Redesign Project, Alyssa Elias

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Many students who live off campus at Syracuse University are unable to view the Orange Television Network. CitrusTV's news, sports and entertainment programming airs on this channel and is therefore unavailable to many students. To expand the viewing audience, the CitrusTV website is crucial.

The original goal of this honors capstone project was to enhance and improve CitrusTV’s website in order to simulate that of a local news station. Through a newly created content management system, students would be able to upload news stories with text, video and pictures.

Because of CitrusTV’s annually changing administration and technical hurdles, the project’s …

The Mosque As A Political, Economic, And Social Institution 622 – Present, Hope Collins

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 the Communist “threat” that plagued the West throughout the latter half of the 20^th century all but disappeared and was replaced with the “threat” of Islam. Prior to 9/11 Islam was a largely misunderstood religion and, despite its emergence as a media sensation in the past decade or so, very little headway has been made to better understand it.

Often times this misunderstanding has led to latent, and at times manifest, anti-Islamic sentiment and in many cases this anti-Islamic sentiment has been directed at the mosque as the physical embodiment of …