Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Changing “Face” Of North Omaha, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

Amid my constant cry for north Omaha Blacks to wake up and realize how much our vote matters for our self-interest and in spite of my understanding of the deep and profound reasons poverty stricken communities do not vote, it is time to step back and review the true faces of North Omaha and assess our options.

Lessons From The University Of Missouri, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

There are many stories, many angles, many perspectives and many opinions as to the impact of the recent events at the University of Missouri (UM). While I find these reactions and opinions interesting my focus will continue to be our community. However, what lessons can we deride from UM and apply to our challenges right here in river city.

Latinos Throughout The City: A Snapshot Of Socio-Demographic Differences In Omaha, Nebraska, Jasney Cogua-Lopez, Lissette Aliaga-Linares, Lourdes Gouveia

Latino/Latin American Studies Reports

Researchers from OLLAS have released a new report detailing the demographic makeup of Latinos throughout Omaha. This is the first detailed analysis of the trends of Latinos living in various parts of the entire city. It confirms and challenges generalizations that are frequently made about this population in Omaha.

The report chronicles the dispersion of Latinos throughout the city and their increasing diversity. This publication highlights that geographic location is predictably tied to socioeconomic conditions. The farther west in the city Latinos live, the more advantaged they are. This pattern also holds true for indicators such as educational attainment, income …

Voter Turnout: Ferguson, Mo Is A Teachable Moment In History In Why Black Votes Matter, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

Earlier this month I visited Ferguson, Mo. I stood by the signs saying welcome, and population 21,203. What the signs did not say: “here lies the grave of a young Black male named Michael Brown who should not have died”, “here is a city that has a population of nearly 70% Black” and “here is a black population that voted at only 8%”. Yes only 8% voter turnout. Ferguson, Mo black residents contributed to the environment that killed young Brown. Mostly all of the elected officials and all but 3 of the police in Ferguson are white. That is the …

Breaking News: How To Vote, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

In this column, we have been and will continue to discuss the need to vote and why to vote. Now, let’s focus on “How to Vote”. Maybe you think you already know how to vote. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Before I send you off to vote “half baked”, let’s make sure you know how. Knowing how to vote will maximize your vote. With only a small percentage of us voting, let’s make sure that we voters get the most out of our vote. Black Votes Matter.

I Learned More From Them Than They Did From Me: Shifting From Deficit To Asset-Based Perspectives In Service-Learning, Sandra Rodriguez-Arroyo

Scholarship of Metropolitan Mission

Research is presented on a Conceptual Model for Cultural Engagement (CMCE) service-learning course for inservice teachers. The teachers worked with tweens from a non-profit youth organization to showcase their Latino community. Research data reveals that the course did implement the CMCE, emphasizing asset-based perspectives of the youth and their communities.

The Resurrection Of Jim Crow And The Birth Of A Non-Voting Black Community, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

THE RESURRECTION OF JIM CROW AND THE BIRTH OF A NON VOTING BLACK COMMUNITY. BOTH NEED A QUICK BURIAL. After the passage of the 15th amendment to the US constitution in 1870, Black folk were given the right to participate as citizens and given the right to vote.

This Column Began Last Month With A Hopeful Call For Our Community To Energize And Understand That Black Votes Matter, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

This column began last month with a hopeful call for our community to energize and understand that Black Votes Matter. We have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the important 1965 Voting Rights Act and the one-year anniversary of the tragedy of Ferguson, Mo which includes a total lack of voter recognition that Black Votes Matter in a city with 67% Black population.

Russia And Britain In Persia: Imperial Ambitions In Qajar Iran. By Firuz Kazemzadeh. (New York, Ny: I. B. Tauris, 2013. Pp. Xvii, 711. $85.00.), James D. Clark

History Faculty Publications

This is a reprint of the author's classic study of British and Russian policies and intervention in Iran from the 1860s to 1914. For this edition, Firuz Kazemzadeh has consulted Russian archive materials and books that became accessible after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet he maintains that those sources confirmed his earlier conclusions, and he has made no changes to this edition. The book is basically “a case study in imperialism,” tracing the steady increase in penetration that occurred, and it largely relies upon British and Russian primary sources (vii). The few Persian sources that are cited are …

National Gallery Of Modern Art, Tammi M. Owens

Criss Library Faculty Publications

The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) was founded in 1954 at the Jaipur House near the India Gate in New Delhi, India. Today the NGMA holds a permanent collection of over 17,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs, including most of Amrita Sher-Gil’s work not already in private collections, several hundred works by members of the Tagore family, and more than 6,700 works by painter Nandalal Bose. In 2009, the museum’s exhibition space significantly increased with the addition of several new wings.

Is Service-Learning The Answer? Preparing Teacher Candidates To Work With Ells Through Service-Learning Experiences, Sandra Rodriguez-Arroyo

Scholarship of Metropolitan Mission

In an effort to address the gaps in preparing teacher candidates (TCs) to work with English Language Learners (ELLs), service-learning experiences (SLE) were integrated into two courses within a teacher education program. This exploratory case study sought to explore the outcomes of teacher candidates (TCs) engaged in SLE with diverse students and families, particularly ELLs. Content analysis of students’ reflections provided insights of the impact of the SLE. Findings indicate that participating in service-learning with ELLs provides opportunities for TCs to engage in positive interactions that help to address misconceptions about students, families, and communities. TCs also began to confront …

Comics And Composition, Comics As Composition: Navigating Production And Consumption, Tammie M. Kennedy, Jessi Thomsen, Erica Trabold

English Faculty Publications

Composition has a vested interest in exploring how comics studies can inform our teaching of writing, multimodal literacies, and visual rhetoric. Composition and rhetoric has already demonstrated a growing interest in comics (including graphic literatures, graphic novels, graphic narratives, digital storytelling) as complex sites of literacy and as spaces to theorize and practice multimodal composing. Comics also provide opportunities to explore the rhetorical choices and transactions that must be negotiated between composers and readers. However, despite composition scholars’ interest in multiliteracies, multimodal composing, and visual rhetoric, the interdependent and fluid connections between images and words remain largely disengaged. For example, …

Minding The Tragic Gap: Conversations Of Invisibility In Early Childhood Music Education, Regina Carlow, Shelly C. Cooper, Julia Church Hoffman

Music Faculty Publications

During the last few decades, the music education profession has slowly begun to recognize the impact of music experiences in early childhood. Key publications in the 1970s drew attention to music education for young children (Greenberg 1976, Simons 1978, Zimmerman 1972). Articles focusing on young children's musical development appeared in the 1980s (Hargreaves, 1986; Peery, Peery, & Draper, 1987; Sloboda, 1985; Swanick & Tillman, 1986). MENC (now the NationalAssociation for Music Education-NafME) began to address early childhood music education through "focus days" attached to biennial national conferences and through the establishment of the Early Childhood Special Research Interest Group. Yet …

Crowdsourcing Digital Public History, Jason A. Heppler, Gabriel K. Wolfenstein

Criss Library Faculty Publications

The generation of communal knowledge is not a new phenomenon. In the late nineteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary solicited volunteers to submit words and their usage for inclusion in the dictionary ( 1 ). Carl Becker, writing in 1932 on what was already an old discussion in the historical profession, noted that "if the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history" (2). The historian Jo Guldi's work on participatory mapping shows that urban planners in the middle of the twentieth century attempted …

Review Of Social Class In Applied Linguistics By David Block, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

As Block writes in the prologue and the epilogue, the book is primarily about erasure; his motivation for writing the book is to highlight “the substantial and sometimes complete erasure of social class in applied linguistics research due to the ways in which applied linguists frame their discussions of issues such as identity, inequality, disadvantage and exclusion” (pp. ix–x). Overall, Block achieves his goal of illustrating the widespread absence of social class in applied linguistics; however, the book itself makes some missteps in exploring the very construct it claims as its focus.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter …

Conversatorios About Inequality And Social Mobility In The Latino Community, Lourdes Gouveia, Jasney Cogua-Lopez, Claudia Lucero, Claudia García, Yuriko Doku

Latino/Latin American Studies Other Publications

OLLAS has reported on the socio-economic characteristics of Latinos in Omaha and Nebraska for many years. For the past couple of years, OLLAS and other organizations have shared concerns about the barriers that may block the full deployment of this population’s talents and abilities, and their full and equitable integration into the city of Omaha. To explore these concerns, we organized a series of conversations (conversatorios) in March 2015 with proportionate participation of Latinos at the grassroots and in leadership positions. Eventually, these conversations were to be extended to include a wider array of stakeholders from the larger community.

The Role Of Culture In Comics Of The Quotidian, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Studies of the quotidian often start from a social sciences perspective that daily life is made up of routine practices and ingrained assumptions. This is also found in studies of literature, art and economics. The premise of the quotidian, however, must be examined through a lens of culture. This essay explores how the notion of the quotidian in comics rests on culture, which in turn comprises various nexus of practice. Drawing evidence from Exit Wounds (by Rutu Modan) and Questionable Content (by Jeph Jacques), the essay extends the notion of the quotidian from a specific reference to ‘slice of life …

2015 Bethsaida Field Report, Rami Arav, Carl Savage, Nicolae Roddy, Gregory C. Jenks, Vanessa Workman, Kenneth M. Bensimon

Field Reports

The 2015 excavation season at Bethsaida took place during May 28th to July 3rd, 2015. Seventy six faculty, students and volunteers joined this season. The expedition was hosted in Ginosar Village, Kibbutz Ginosar. We are very grateful for the kind and efficient hospitality Ginosar team and members, provides us for more than 20 years.

Weitz Cec Art Viewbook, Weitz Cec

Programs and Brochures

This brochure lists art purchased through the building fund or donated to the Weitz CEC. The core collection was acquired through a competitive process open to UNO faculty, staff, students, and local area artists. A committee comprised of art and design professionals and university volunteers selected works that represent both the individual artist’s interpretation of the Weitz CEC vision and the collective talent of Omaha’s vibrant visual arts community.

Which Side Are You On? The Worlds Of Grant Morrison, Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Adnan Mahmutovic, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Grant Morrison is a key figure among the first wave of authors of the so-called "British Generation" (Sandifer and Eklund). The works of the other two creators, Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, have been the basis for a wealth of scholarly research within the field of comics studies and whole constellations of literary scholarship (Sandifer and Eklund; Sanders; Krueger and Shaeffer; Millidge). Morrison's fictional worlds, however, remain understudied, despite the fact that, as Marc Singer observes, Morrison's work and career seem to be evenly distributed along a continuum ranging from the alternative Vertigo material to the mainstream superhero comics (Singer …

Making And Breaking The Superhero Quotidian: How All-Star Superman Embodies And Revises The Everyday, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

This essay explores the idea of the everyday in All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Scholars identify the everyday, or the quotidian, as including routine behaviors and ingrained assumptions (e.g., Borland and Sutton), and the construct of the quotidian as culture has been explored in comics (Bramlett). Depending on circumstances, characters may navigate the Metropolis cityscape or the Kent farm, take trips to the moon, explore the Daily Planet office building, and meet otherworldly heroes and villains. Even though much of the world of the superhero is extraordinary and wondrous to readers, the characters themselves nevertheless have a …

A Luminous Haze; Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Plagiarism, Todd Richardson

English Faculty Publications

"I really was never any more than what I was," Bob Dylan writes in his autobiography Chronicles, "a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."1 I'd call his proclamation inefficient if that didn't imply that it gets a job done, albeit poorly. The sentence, rather, strikes me as grand­sounding balderdash. It begins with a promise of humility, after which it gradually evaporates into bleary images that never realize anything resembling actual meaning. On the whole, Dylan is exceedingly specific throughout Chronicles, recounting in detail the music …

Vizscore: An On-Screen Notation Delivery System For Live Performance, Seth Shafer

Music Faculty Publications

VizScore is an open-source, on-screen notation delivery system designed with the performer’s strengths in mind. By harnessing a performer’s learned skills of reading traditional paper notation and practice of interpreting time from a conductor’s gestures, VizScore creates a notation environment that can integrate seamlessly into any performance situation and help musicians play in time with other instruments, live or computer-generated. The paper reviews some general design principles of on-screen notation as put forth by current experts in the field and offers a new model for on-screen notational display. The paper then assesses results from a comparative study between VizScore and …