Arts and Humanities Commons^™

An Exploration Of Complementary And Alternative Medicine Usage Within The Vietnamese Community In Lincoln, Nebraska, Helen Duong

Honors Theses

Lincoln, Nebraska is home to over 5,000 Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, many of whom practice complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as a result of healing traditions passed down through family members. This thesis explores the use of CAM among the Vietnamese population of Lincoln. The study employs an analysis of the literature on CAM among Vietnamese populations and thematic analysis of interviews conducted with members of the Vietnamese community of Lincoln, NE. Interviews explore perceptions of healthcare quality and access within this community as well as investigate the link between CAM and allopathic (Western) medicine. Findings suggest that certain CAM …

Cultural Folk, Political Lore: The Politics Of Folklore During The United States Occupation Of Haiti From 1915 To 1934, Cheyla G. Muñoz Ramos

Honors Theses

My project focuses on Haitian folklore in the early twentieth century in connection to the first United States’ occupation of Haiti. The United States’ Marine Corps occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. This nineteenth-year occupation brought violence and racial stereotypes towards the Haitian population, especially the peasantry. United States Americans coming to Haiti intensified these stereotypes. During this period, Haitian upper-and middle-class members heavily politized Haitian folklore and used it to defend Haiti against these stereotypes. Scholars have long discussed the anthropological works of ethno-anthropologist Jean Price-Mars as someone who tried to show the value of Haitian folklore, especially the …

Un País Invertido: The Current Immigration Regime Of Colombia, Magdalena Hendrickson

Honors Theses

Throughout its turbulent history, Colombia has seen drastic changes in structure and administration. From military coups to shaky coalitions, the country’s infamous instability has long forced its citizens to find better prospects elsewhere. However, with the rise of the Maduro administration in Venezuela, Colombia faced a massive new flow of migrants and was forced to rectify current circumstances without properly addressing its internal issues beforehand. Despite its historical status as a nation of emigrants, Colombia marks a new norm for the rest of the globe. As new issues like climate change and increased armed conflict grow worldwide, countries on the …

Calculating Risk: A Scoping Review Of Ncaa D1 Football Players’ Motivations To Play And The Correlation To Demographic Characteristics And Injury Experiences, Kathleen D. Walsh

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research was to investigate the motivations of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 (D1) football players for playing the game and how these motivations are associated with their socioeconomic status (SES). Further, the research aimed to investigate how the uncovered motivations were linked to injury experiences. The original project was designed as a survey-based mixed methods study on a national scale. However, issues with participant recruitment led to sidelining of that primary research. The research presented is a scoping review of the available literature pertaining to the research question: What is known from existing literature …

A Dream Come True: More Than 50 Years After Black Students Demanded Faculty And Student Leadership Roles At The University Of Mississippi, Students Of Color Are Still Grappling With What It Means To Be Included., Kaylynn Steen

Honors Theses

This thesis tells the story of University of Mississippi alumna Treasure Fisher’s journey in the organization Column’s Society, an organization known as the hosts and hostess of the University of Mississippi. Throughout Fisher’s story, historical moments from the university’s complex relationship with its Black students are weaved through in an attempt to provide context for some of the lingering racial issues at the university today. Fisher’s story, these historical moments, and other anecdotal experiences from current and former Black students, faculty, and staff at the university challenges the reader to examine what representation does, and maybe should, mean to this …

Wakara's Waterscapes: Storytelling, Cartography, And Rhetorical Sovereignty On The Shores Of The Green River, Abbey O'Brien

Honors Theses

In the mid nineteenth-century, Wakara, a prominent Ute leader, witnessed the invasion of his homeland by Mormon settlers and mountain-men. He met the scouts and explorers who were sent out to examine the land and waterscapes, and who drew maps along their way. It was those same maps which were eventually used as tools to justify colonial expansion all across the Utah territories, Wakara’s home. But Wakara resisted. Employing his understandings of the roles that cartography and the written word played in Mormon and settler discourse, Wakara created his own maps in order to assert his Indigenous authority over the …

Contemporary Environmental Art: The Multidimensional Relationship Between Black Communities And The American Landscape, Sophia Perkins

Honors Theses

Contemporary environmental art can be inspired by personal experience and reflections between the artist and their surroundings. Black women have a unique interaction with and relation to their environment. I would like to unpack the relationships between Black women and the environment by exploring a few different artists’ work, and by dissecting the effects race and gender have on one’s view of the natural world. I have studied the work of four artists: Torkwase Dyson, Allison Jane Hamilton, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Calida Garcia Rawles. Environmentally, I have a specific interest in bodies of water / Black waterways because of …

Indigenous Storytelling As Decolonial Praxis, Ceremony And At Colby, Georgia Goodman

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to amplify Indigenous lifeways, diplomacies, sciences, diplomatic relations, and the power of storytelling. This is not a piece analyzing Indigenous culture. Rather, this thesis returns the gaze to the settler colonial state, specifically its storytelling ideologies, to show that systemic practices of inequity in storytelling can be disrupted and decolonized through a recentering of Indigenous ideologies. For example, reciprocity with lands and animals, reflection on positionality and decentering colonial understandings of time and place.

Coded: Dialect Diversity In The Secondary American Classroom, Madeline Dunn

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the differences between dialects along racial, cultural, and ethnic lines with a specific focus on Black and Latine students inside the public secondary classrooms of America. The focus of the paper is on two linguistic tactics: “code-switching,” a linguistic practice which teaches students to separate their home language from the language they use in formal or professional settings, and “code-meshing,” a linguistic practice to teach students how to mesh together multiple dialects with which a student is familiar. Through the creation of a historical framework and an analysis of existing literature, theory, and pedagogical practices regarding the …

Katrina Vs. Ida: A Comparative Analysis Of Fema Housing Recovery Efforts With Regard To Vulnerable Populations, Alyssa Harrynanan

Honors Theses

When Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, it revealed disparities in the way that recovery efforts are handled after storms. For example, it demonstrated flaws in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s attempt to provide housing for disaster survivors. The agency failed to adequately accommodate vulnerable populations, including communities of color, low-income individuals, the elderly, and people with disabilities, in its housing recovery process. Since then, efforts have been made to reform the agency and ensure that all individuals, regardless of race, income, education or disability level, are accommodated by FEMA. However, when Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana exactly 16 years later …

By Her Hands: An Analysis Of The Hidden Labor Of Black Women At The Hugh Craft House Site In Holly Springs, Mykayla Williamson

Honors Theses

This project unearths the hidden labor of Black women by analyzing architectural remains, artifacts, and primary and secondary documentary evidence surrounding the urban antebellum Hugh Craft House site in Holly Springs, Mississippi. This project considers the gap in theorizing the hidden labor of Black women in the seldom-researched setting of urban slavery. It also draws on household and Black feminist archaeology theories to uncover the hidden labor in the domestic spheres that the enslaved women were actively shaping. Research methods included watching clips of Behind the Big House tour interpretations; taking a Craft House tour in Holly Springs; looking at …

Preservation And Public History In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Walker Bray

Honors Theses

This paper is an exploration of the history of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all Black community in the Mississippi Delta formed by freedmen in the wake of Reconstruction. This paper also discusses the ways in which Mound Bayou citizens are working to preserve their history and make it known to a wider audience. In particular, this work discusses the recently opened Mound Bayou Museum of African American Culture and History and related efforts to restore and preserve historic structures in Mound Bayou. In addition, this work also seeks to explore ways in which the University of Mississippi can effectively supplement …

Settler Colonialism And The Movement Towards Indigenous Forest Sovereignty, Madison Zucco

Honors Theses

This research paper examines the historical and political implications of settler colonialism on Indigenous nations in forested areas around the world. Through a thorough analysis of the Haida First Nation, Pacheedaht First Nation, and the Sámi people, it is argued that settler colonial legislation systematically and intentionally separated Indigenous people and their knowledge from forested areas. Since then, shared management protocols have been implemented to amend racist and environmentally degrading legislation on forested land, but are limited in their effect to reconcile the settler colonial legal system. The only true way to reconcile the settler colonial structure in place that …

All These Things We've Done Before: A Brief History Of Red-Power Inspired Projects, Programs, And Efforts At The University Of Nebraska-Lincoln And What They Can Do For Us Today, Jake Borgmann

Honors Theses

The Red Power Movement from 1969-1975 inspired both Indigenous and non- Indigenous students and faculty from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) to work for the betterment of Indigenous peoples in areas of affirmation, education, leadership, and language preservation and revitalization. For a time, student efforts by the Council of American Indian Students, faculty sponsored Indigenous education-centered programs, educational outreach through television, and Lakota language courses helped carve out an Indigenous space on campus where Indigenous students could thrive and seek empowerment through education. This era of Red Power-inspired projects, programs, and efforts at UNL peaked from 1969 to the early …

Nebraska Stories Of Humanity: Increasing Accessibility To Holocaust Education, Aila Ganic

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to answer the question: How can the digital humanities provide a vehicle that elevates the human impact of survivor narrative and testimony? An analyzation of how the digital humanities could preserve survivor testimony is conducted through an examination of how Bea Karp’s narrative will be shared through the Nebraska Stories of Humanity portal project. Based on this analyzation, the Nebraska Stories of Humanity portal could be an effective method for teaching Holocaust education for three main reasons. First, this portal project avoids perpetrator-oriented narratives by highlighting survivors and soldiers who liberated camps. Further, it also offers a …

Understanding The Role Of Race In American Medicine, Fariel C. A. Lamountain

Honors Theses

Long running inequity in health care and outcomes in the United States stem from failure to acknowledge the underlying role of the Transatlantic slave trade as it manifests in all facets of American society and commerce. This paper focuses specifically on the American medical system and its foundations to understand the precursors to generational trends in lack of access to healthcare and poor health for Black communities. This paper uses a three-pronged approach to understand the racist cycle of inequity, highlighting the history and origins of racism in American medicine, personal accounts and statistical evidence of inequity, and community and …

Community Interventions To The Food Insecurity Crisis Inuit Currently Face In Nunangat, Alyssia R. Getschow

Honors Theses

Inuit living in Nunangat, a northern territory in Canada, are facing unprecedented rates of food insecurity. The increasing impacts of anthropogenic climate change are rapidly changing the Arctic landscape in Nunangat, posing challenges to Inuit hunters who hunt and live completely self-sufficient off of the land. This lack of access to country foods and the impacts these conditions are having on Inuit communities are forcing Inuit to consider aid propositions from the Canadian government. Due to a long history of conflict with white settlers during the colonization of Canada, there is a feeling of distrust and cultural distaste between Canada …

Ethnicity And “Women Religious”: How Irish-American And Other Ethnic Nuns Were Presented In American Newspapers From 1865 To 1915, Lydia Hursh

Honors Theses

While Catholicism in America has had a turbulent history of mixed rejection and acceptance, the American Catholic Church prior to World War One was not considered a monolithic institution by the American clergy or in certain contexts by the American press. Women religious, such as nuns, were considered unnatural and malevolent at the worst, although this characterization in popular opinion declined after the Civil War, to unusual but benevolent at the best. Moreover, ethnicity was a determining factor among male authors for where on the sliding-scale of social alienation a nun or her convent might fall, although the degree of …

"Gone, But Never Forgotten:" Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Girls In The United States, Julianna Kramer

Honors Theses

Native women and girls in the United States are twice as likely to be sexually assaulted compared to white women, and murder rates on certain reservations can be tenfold higher than the national average. This pervasive violence traces back to colonialism. Native women have historically been abused, exploited, and neglected by America’s institutions, and lasting prejudice against Native peoples endures.

The United States government has stripped tribal governments of their ability to seek justice for their women. The Major Crimes Act of 1885, Proclamation 280, and the Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978) decision place responsibility for investigating and prosecuting …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Analyzing Inhumane Practices In Mississippi’S Correctional Institutions Due To Overcrowding, Understaffing, And Diminished Funding, Ariel A. Williams

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to examine the political, social, and economic factors which have led to inhumane conditions in Mississippi’s correctional facilities. Several methods were employed, including a comparison of the historical and current methods of funding, staffing, and rehabilitating prisoners based on literature reviews. State-sponsored reports from various departments and the legislature were analyzed to provide insight into budgetary restrictions and political will to allocate funds. Statistical surveys and data were reviewed to determine how overcrowding and understaffing negatively affect administrative capacity and prisoners’ mental and physical well-being. Ultimately, it may be concluded that Mississippi has high …

Being Female And Indigenous: Barriers To Reducing Bolivia's Maternal Mortality Rates Under Evo Morales, Channell Cole

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to answer the question: What are the barriers to attempts to reduce Bolivia’s maternal mortality rate under Evo Morales? While Morales’ presidency began in 2006, the timeline is from 2004 to the present to account for changes due to his policy. Using activity theory and social capital theory, I argue that machismo and racism are two social factors that are barriers to efforts to reduce the maternal mortality rate. Machismo manifests itself uniquely in Bolivia, as I argue through a comparison to Paraguay. Machismo is also riddled with a history of anti-indigenous racism. I examine the Rockefeller …

Moving The Monument: The University Of Mississippi’S Decades-Long Journey To Relocate Its Confederate Monument, Hadley Hitson

Honors Theses

This thesis tells the story of how thousands of students, faculty, staff, alumni and other members of the university community banded together to relocate The University of Mississippi’s Confederate monument. The movement for relocation officially began in the spring of 2019 with the unanimous vote by the Associated Student Body Senate to move the monument to UM’s Confederate cemetery, but long before that, change happened at the university that paved the way.

This creative telling of recent history explains how national and local events — including pro-Confederate marches in Oxford and the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — …

The Portrayal Of Race And Gender In Revolutionary Cuban Cinema, Sarah Bartley

Honors Theses

Cinema has been one of the most useful tools to portray the political and social beliefs prevalent during a given point in history. Following the Cuban Revolution, once-marginalized communities were given far more opportunity to participate in education, in the workforce, and in society. Institutionalized racism and sexism were combatted as Fidel Castro’s major areas of focus after the Cuban Revolution’s 1959 victory. Class issues were improved as the wealth inequality that had defined pre-Revolutionary Cuba was minimized following the nationalizing of private property. Despite these improvements, however, there remained sentiments of dissatisfaction regarding social issues in Revolutionary Cuba, including …

Looking Beyond Binaries: How Native Activists Create Decolonized Futures, Sam Guido

Honors Theses

Native people in the United States and Canada have been resisting settler colonialism for as long as settlers have tried to impose it upon them. That activism has been continuous across centuries; however, sometimes that overall narrative has been lost due to the imposition of settler perspectives that constrain Native activism. Recent Native activist movements in the United States and Canada such as the anti-Keystone Pipeline protests and Idle No More received a lot of attention from both the public and the media, but there was an impulse to define these movements within binary categories like “male or female” or …

Mediating Asian-Ness: How And Why Does Asian Identity Salience Vary By Biracial Status?, Kaitlan Wong

Honors Theses

The following study explores how and why Asian identity salience may vary between biracial and monoracial Asians. This study further aims to find potential mediators—including daily Asian contact, linked fate, group solidarity, and microaggressions—that might explain any group differences in Asian identity salience. I used the 2016 Post-Election National Asian American Survey to explore these research aims. Contrary to expectations, I found that biracial Asians have higher Asian identity salience than monoracial Asians. As expected, linked fate and microaggressions were positively associated with Asian identity salience. Surprisingly, daily Asian contact was negatively associated and group solidarity was not significantly associated …

El Mar Y La Gente: Hacia Una Contextualización De Lo Indígena En El Botón De Nácar, Jonathan Braden Taylor

Honors Theses

El presente trabajo analiza las ramificaciones ontológicas, epistemológicas, y políticas del botón de nácar, un documental hecho en 2015 por el cineasta Patricio Guzmán. El siguiente análisis busca poner esta obra cinemática en el contexto de la formulación y el desarrollo del estado-nación chileno, lo cual ha ocurrido a expensas de las personas indígenas de la zona. Se observa que se emplea significación verdaderamente descolonizada en representaciones y discusiones de espacios acuáticos, lo cual engendra avances teóricos que utilizo para contextualizar el filme. Se sostiene que los efectos políticos de dicha significación descolonizada se ponen en marcha productivamente cuando son …

Ethnicity And Education: College Attendance Patterns Among Early 20th-Century Maine's Immigrant Community, Jacob M. Nash

Honors Theses

I examine the college attendance patterns of second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants in Maine in the early 20^th century relative to other ethnic groups using individual-level Census records. I employ the Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson (ABE) algorithm to track second-generation Jewish, Italian, French Canadian, English Canadian and European immigrants from the 1910 Census to the 1940 Census. My logistic regression analysis indicates that second-generation Jewish immigrants in Maine attended college at significantly higher rates than their peers of similar background in every other ethnic group. While I cannot evaluate them, I also discuss potential explanations for the disparity in college attendance …

Una Deconstrucción Espacial: Movimiento Maricas Bolivia Y La Resistencia Indígena Cuir, Cooper J. Bussberg

Honors Theses

El legado (neo)colonial ha intentado borrar las experiencias Indígenas cuir en Abiayala. Sin embargo, existen cambios a esta historia. Grupos activistas se están adaptando a retos distintos por medios diferentes. Movimiento Maricas Bolivia es una organización activista de La Paz, Bolivia que ejerce activismo en su canal de YouTube donde publican varios videos informativos alrededor del tema Indígena cuir. En este proyecto, yo aplico una perspectiva teórica trans- Indígena hemisférica para aproximar a un entendimiento mejor de la resistencia Indígena cuir de Movimiento Maricas Bolivia. Utilizo varios críticos de los estudios Indígenas de varios sitios de Abiayala para promover la …

“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. …

Success And Failure Of Indigenous Social Movements: A Comparative Case Study Of Ecuador And Chile, Jenna White

Honors Theses

This thesis is a comparative case study of the social movements of the Mapuche in Chile and the fourteen indigenous tribes in Ecuador. I study their social movements by utilizing the structural strain theory of social movements. This theory states that people in society experience deprivation, the people recognize the deprivation, a solution is proposed and this ideology is diffused to the society, events occur to begin motion of the movement, the society (including government) need to be open to change, and eventually there will be mobilization of resources in order to form a successful social movement. The dependent variable …