Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ucf Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter Spring 2013, Megan M. Haught

UCF Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter

This is the Spring 2013 edition of the UCF Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter which celebrates the accomplishments and community activity of the faculty, staff, and students from the University of Central Florida Cocoa and Palm Bay campuses.

• Two Palm Bay Psychology students were awarded second place at the Showcase for Undergraduate Research in April. Two other psychology students won Honorable Mentions
• Leandra Preston-Sidler was the keynote speaker for University of South Florida’s Service-Learning Day
• Palm Bay Early Childhood Development and Education program students collaborated with a UCF Holmes Partnership research project at McAuliffe Elementary

Together, Science And Art Can Provide Answers In Search For Truth, Carla Poindexter

UCF Forum

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of UCF this year, we are reminded that the core benefit of an upper-level education is the opportunity to pursue and obtain insight and knowledge over blindness and ignorance.

The Week That Was, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

Some may regard this as one of the strangest weeks ever in Sportsworld. Certainly the less than forthcoming appearance by Lance Armstrong with Oprah had some surrealistic qualities. After years, or even decades, of denial, Armstrong told America’s mother-confessor that, yes, he had indulged in all sorts of performance enhancement techniques to win his record seven Tour de France crowns. The fact that he had taken PED’s surprised no one, but the fact that he did a TV confessional- “bless me Oprah for I have sinned”- surprised a lot of people both in and out of the cycling community.

Baseball Hall Of Fame, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

The biggest problem and greatest injustice with the voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame was not revealed yesterday. It is a problem and injustice that goes back several years and multiple votes by various groups of voters.

Hockey, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

In my Florida neighborhood it was a quiet Saturday morning. In fact it was probably much the same across much of the United States. No one was in the streets celebrating. No one made comparisons to 1980 when the United States won the World Junior Hockey Championship in Ufa, a city of million or so in Central Russia.

An Examination Of The Actor's Approach To Playwriting: Are Playwrights Able To Write About What Is Unfamiliar To Them?, Kayla Zaniboni

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Playwrights write about what is familiar to them. Their inspiration comes from their childhood, past relationships, and their personal view of the world. But could a playwright write about something to which they have no personal connection? Using the book Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, I will write a one act play about mental illness. I have no personal experience or personal connection to mental illness, but I will approach the process the same way as an actor does a character. I will go into the writing process as an actor, completing character analyses for the characters and using …

Mercury, Adrienne Gaines

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mercury is a collection of short stories based in the fictional town of Mercury, Georgia. Set over the course of several decades, the stories trace the events that changed individuals, families, and a whole community for decades. Loosely based on the author’s real-life family history, the stories, both humorous and heartbreaking, show characters caught between the past and the present and searching for a way forward. A girl who makes friends with a ghost, a woman who can’t help but run from crying babies, a man forced to face the town’s darkest side—these and other characters respond in surprising ways …

All Of Chinese Literature Condensed: A Sourcebook From The Playwright, Director, And Biggest Fan, Whitney Emerson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aristotle stated in his Poetics that theatre’s dual purpose was to educate and entertain. Centuries later the Roman Horace and Indian Bharata echoed his same sentiments. I intend to realize all three theorist’s ideas on the theatre by creating an original educational and entertaining work and bringing it to performance. The audience will retain information without being aware of learning if it is presented in a pleasurable way. The most important geopolitical relationship of this century will be between China and America. In order to educate the American public about the culture of The Middle Kingdom, I propose to write …

The Former Lives Of Buildings, Bethany Duvall-Francisco

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Former Lives of Buildings is a novel about thirty-one-year-old architect Adelle Corey. Adelle is a woman in denial. A nightmare figure called the Baron steals memories of her closest relationships and most poignant experiences. He hides the memories in Adelle’s dreams, where he reconstructs them into buildings. The only way she can recover the memories is by cutting or tattooing these buildings into her skin. Adelle uses notebooks, mnemonic devices, and academic trivia to keep track of her daily routines. The novel takes place in contemporary times and opens in the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, Connecticut, where Adelle …

Dangerous Instincts, Kirsten Holt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dangerous Instincts is a collection of poems unified thematically by recurring and interstitial questions of the wilderness, the natural sciences - particularly astrophysics - the occult, and the mythic universe. These poems explore the mystical implications of the natural world and its meaning in the aesthetic consciousness, particularly in a highly secular century. Implied is the poet’s selfdiscovery and search for the divine. The collection emerges, not simply as interpretation, but a means of coming to terms with the fear of and compulsion to question the universe, and through those questions find illumination in the ordinariness of lived life and …

Forced Outage, Caitlin Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poems explores an inner emotional life contrasted with a plodding existence in the external world of day to day business as usual. The poems embrace the importance of noting moments of beauty and grace in an otherwise bland landscape, and mourn the difficulty of holding onto such moments as life moves forward. These poems lead the way down bumpy emotional roads and explore the struggle to make human connections in simple circumstances. Most important, they attempt to capture the beauty of the connections that come from these struggles, and the triumphant promise that we are not alone.

Pebbles And Shards, Edith Kindle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pebbles and Shards is a collection of personal essays based on family relationships that focus upon motherhood, responsibility, and the complexity of love and loss. The essays explore how people cope with the inevitability of loss and how they move beyond that loss to find something meaningful, perhaps even beautiful. They reflect upon success and failure in the face of loss and how, either way, life goes on, heedless of people’s desires and plans. The essays in Pebbles and Shards, while meant to stand alone, are thematically connected so that, read together, each story resonates with the others. In “Promises,” …

Mirrors And Vanities, Leslie Salas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mirrors and Vanities is a multi-modal collection which showcases the diversity of working in long and short storytelling forms. Featured in this thesis are fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, and screenplay. Using unconventional approaches to storytelling in order to achieve emotional resonance with the audience while maintaining high standards for craft, these stories and essays explore the costs inherent to the subtle nuances of interpersonal relationships. The fiction focuses on the complications of characters keeping secrets. A husband discovers the truth behind his wife’s miscarriage. A girl visits her fiancé in purgatory. A boy crosses a line and loses his best …

Antipodes: Ways To See The World, Brenda Sallee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the geographical oddities of my past, the process of transitioning between worlds, and the kinds of relationships that survive those transitions. In a world where I can fly from Atlanta to Beijing non-stop in fifteen hours, I sometimes convince myself that geography no longer matters. I was born in the tropics, raised in the arctic, and became a dual citizen of the same two countries twice. I could distinguish gunshots from fireworks by age five and have ridden the Trans-Siberian Railroad in both directions. I have milked a water buffalo and played Tchaikovsky’s piano …

Zora, Genevieve Tyrrell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This mixed-media memoir uses a variety of forms from short epigrammatic essays to straightforward stories and graphic narratives to explore the author’s coming-of-age experiences augmented by chronic illness. Trying to succeed in the film industry, romance, and family situations, the young female narrator navigates the often unexpected or disappointing consequences of having an autonomic nervous system disorder. Relationships between conflicting identities emerge—between healthy versus sick self, projected/envisioned versus actual self, and tough versus vulnerable self—as the narrator journeys toward a more complete and accepting self-understanding.

Drops Of Light In The Dark, April Urban

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The short stories in this collection focus on young individuals’, especially women’s, experience and development as they navigate personal relationships and search for a place in the world. Both longer stories and flash fiction are included, and stories are told in past and present tense, and from first, second, and third person point of view. However, the narration of all of these stories stays close to the characters’ points of view, inhabiting their visceral experience. These stories take place in a variety of settings, including a beachside motel, college campuses, bars, and offices. All of these characters, though, struggle with …

Preventable Conditions, William Wight

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Preventable Conditions is a collection of literary short stories intended to explore themes of familial communication, complementary dysfunctions, and the degree to which we all try to hide from or correct our own mistakes. The first five stories in the collection are related, while the last three stand alone. Each of the stories before “Fair Grounds” is told from the perspective of a different member of the Powell family, a fictional clan from Marietta, Georgia. The Powell family stories largely adhere to the basic conventions of realism, while the three remaining pieces venture closer to the absurd.

Reason For Rejoice, Jennifer Karr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories features characters who face unexpected situations arising from ordinary circumstances. Most of the characters find themselves compelled to react in ways that may even surprise themselves. A young woman finds her first feeling of joy in a long time in the face of her mother’s possible death. Best friends recall their years spent doing drugs and ignoring responsibility. When a woman confronts her fear of sex, she finds herself literally in another world. Rather than sticking with one form, several stories depart from traditional structures. One flash fiction piece is told in the first-person collective …

Toward The Red Shore, Gary Bomhoff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A fictional novel utilizing third person limited narration from the perspective of the primary character, Ilya Kollide, who narrates the story as though it were happening in his head as it occurred, with frequent embellishments. He has come to live near an old mansion on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, named Neimasaurus, to find an antiquated, dusty world of faded aristocracy. Temporarily orphaned at the age sixteen by the recent death of his parents, he has traveled four thousand miles to live with his last living relative, an uncle named Demetri, whom he has never met. The year is 1990, only this …

This Stuff Is Finished: Amiri Baraka's Renunciation Of The Ghosts Of White Women And Homosexuals Past, Susan Stone-Lawrence

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines auto/biographical, theoretical, critical, literary, and dramatic works by and about LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, primarily focusing on the eruption of “Hate Whitey” sentiment and rhetoric that characterized a decadelong cultural nationalist phase of the henceforth selfdeclaredly Black poet-playwright’s career. As a black militant, LeRoi Jones left his white wife and other white associates in Greenwich Village, moved to Harlem, changed his name to Amiri Baraka, converted to Islam, and started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. This thesis contends that Baraka’s Black Arts Movement era plays emphasize negation of the value of white women and gay men, who had …

The Ethos Of Humor In Technical Communication, David Roberts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the realm of technical communication, humor has often been regarded as an unnecessary or risky rhetorical device that can negatively impact the credibility of a document. While many other professional fields, such as medicine, computer technology fields, or business have used humor, and humor continues to crop up in "user as producer" documentation, technical writing continues to approach humor cautiously and with little theoretical guidance. In order to fully understand how humor functions, it is important to understand the main theories of humor: superiority, relief, and incongruity. It is also important to understand how humor functions, by looking at …

Intercultural Communication In The Global Age: Lessons Learned From French Technical Communicators, Nicole Tallman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the cultural considerations American technical communicators must address when working with French colleagues and when creating technical documentation for French audiences. A review of the literature on intercultural communication theory was conducted, along with a review of the limited research on technical communication in France and the needs of French audiences. A qualitative online survey of French technical communicators was also conducted. Through this survey, French technical communicators reported on their intercultural beliefs, experiences, and practices, and information, language, and cultural needs. Survey responses were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Two main themes were developed as a …

The Bane Of Liberty: Opposition To Standing Armies As The Basis Of Antifederalist Thought, Charles Brand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The severely neglected subject of Antifederalism is the focal point of this project. As the framing ideology opposed to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Antifederalism has not been treated with the same historical care as Federalism, the successful and currently operational ideology. This is both an intellectual and ethical mistake that ignores the role that Antifederalism played in procuring the Bill of Rights, and still plays in the sphere of political dissent. The de facto successors to the Revolutionary mentality, Antifederalists took it upon themselves to conclusively secure the American conception of liberty, already wrested from British hands, from …

Boy Meets Boy: Envisioning Queer Youth Novels For Translation To The Stage, Daniel Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Queer Youth, or young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning, is a demographic with an increasing presence in contemporary society. Along with this increased presence has come an increase in support groups available to these youths that range from Gay-Straight Alliances at their schools, community groups from their local gay and lesbian center to, most recently, theater companies that have begun to offer workshops and performance opportunities within the Queer Youth Theatre genre. Queer Youth Theatre is an emerging form of topical theatre that deals with issues and situations queer youth may face in their daily …

Interactionz: Engaging Lgbtq+ Youth Using Theatre For Social Change, Jonathan Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Theatre for social change is a term used to describe a wide range of theatre-based techniques and methods. Through implementation of performance techniques, participants are encouraged to creatively explore and communicate various ideas with the specific intention of eliciting a societal or political shift within a given community. Through this thesis, I will explore the impact of applying theatre for social change in a youth-centered environment. I will discuss my journey as creator, facilitator, and project director of interACTionZ, a queer youth theatre program in Orlando, FL formed through a partnership between Theatre UCF at the University of Central Florida …

A Clutch, A Pride, A Murder, John Miles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Clutch, A Pride, A Murder is a linked collection of seven short fiction pieces and one novella that examine a world much like our own, but with the cover revealed—a world laid bare, exposed by its desires, its emotions, its beauties, and all its machinations. All of the stories involve, either directly or indirectly, the fictional Ohio city of Milton. Some of the stories take place within this seemingly typical American city, while others only involve characters coming from or in some cases returning to this unassuming location. Regardless, the events of these stories either in cause or effect …

The Red Scare And The Bi's Quest For Power: The Soviet Ark As Political Theater, Austin Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Red Scare of 1919-1920 has been presented as a wave of anti-Radical hysteria that swept post WWI America; a hysteria to which the state reluctantly capitulated to by arresting Radicals and deporting those alien Radicals they deemed most threatening. This presentation, however, is ludicrous when the motivations of the state and its conservative allies are examined. The truth of the matter was that almost all of the people targeted by the Red Scare represented no significant threat to the institutions of the United States and were merely targeted for holding Leftwing ideas, or being connected to a group that …

From Skeptical Disinterest To Ideological Crusade: The Road To American Participation In The Greek Civil War, 1943-1949, Stephen Villiotis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way in which the United States formulated its policy toward Greece during the Greek civil war (1943-1949). It asserts that U.S. intervention in Greece was based on circumstantial evidence and the assumption of Soviet global intentions, rather than on dispatches from the field which consistently reported from 1943-1946 that the Soviets were not involved in that country’s affairs. It also maintains that the post-Truman Doctrine American policy in Greece was in essence, a continuation of British policy there from 1943-1946, which meant to impose an unpopular government on the people of Greece, and tolerated unlawful violence …

Crimean Rhetorical Sovereignty: Resisting A Deportation Of Identity, Christian Berry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On a small contested part of the world, the peninsula of Crimea, once a part of the former Soviet Union, lives a people who have endured genocide and who have struggled to etch out an identity in a land once their own. They are the Crimean Tatar. Even their name, an exonym promoting the Crimeans’ “peripheral status” (Powell) and their ensuing “cultural schizophrenia” (Vizenor), bears witness to the otherization they have withstood throughout centuries. However, despite attempts to relegate them to the history books, Crimeans are alive and well in the “motherland,” but not without some difficulty. Having been forced …

Too Few Voices, Too Many Distractions, Too Little Concern, Too Little Understanding: The American Media During The Rwandan Genocide Of 1994, Skip-Thomas Parrish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Upwards of one million people died during the Genocide, Civil War, and Refugee Crisis in Rwanda and surrounding nations, during one of the fastest Genocides to occur in modern history. Even though the United Nations and its member states had a legal mandate to intervene in cases of Genocide due to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the world chose not to. While there were a myriad of reasons for this the media played a part in this situation. Using the coverage of US print magazine articles, this thesis argues that the media missed the …