Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Desolation, Kiara Adelina Hernandez Padron

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Desolation was made in mind with my late aunt's mental illness, schizophrenia. Though I don't know what it's like having it, listening to her in the past and others about her hardships made me think about her mindset constantly throughout her whole life. This sculpture was made by digitally mapping out the composition, cutting out individual pieces of wood with each layer representing the depth of the many heads of emptiness.

Heroic Women Of The West: The Role Of Women In Developing The West, Oluchi Angela Ekwenye

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The women's suffrage movement in Wyoming offers an illustrative example of the instrumental role that some women played in shaping the early American West. In 1869, Esther Morris spearheaded the fight for women's right to vote in the Wyoming territory. As a prominent judge and justice of the peace, Morris utilized her political clout and legal expertise to lobby territorial lawmakers. She helped draft a progressive bill granting all Wyoming women the right to vote, which the all-male legislature passed into law that same year. Using primary sources, this research discusses how women like Esther Morris paved the way for …

The Diary Of Anne Frank Costume Design, Thomas Rowe

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

UNO's Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Thomas Rowe

The Diary of Anne Frank Costume Design

03-08-24

Theatre costume design requires having a dual perspective on small details as well as the big picture. It is a collaborative art form resulting in an intricate storytelling medium. For the theatre, there is a process of research that must go into your work. UNOTheatre's process starts in the year before a production opens, beginning with script analysis and discussion with the design team. Throughout the design process, research, rough sketches, and final design packages are presented. For The Diary of Anne Frank, …

Perishing Personhood, Alaina Mann

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Many people think that art and science do not overlap, especially in an educational sense. As someone who is both a biology and studio art major, I wanted to explore this mentality. This past semester I dived into a project to prove just how much these subjects can work together to expand our understanding of how art can be used for research purposes in a medical setting. With support from my Life Drawing professor, I was able to create multiple drawings from life and from photographs centered around my grandmother's Alzheimer’s Disease during my frequent visits to her nursing home. …

Two Sides To Every Coin: Analyzing The Historical Perspectives Of Gender Nonconforming Individuals In America, Sydney Meier

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

For some, the idea of any gender other than male/man or female/woman is incomprehensible. For others, gender is seen as a spectrum where individuals flow between man, woman, or somewhere in between. Most live in the gray area where it is recognized that two sexes and two genders exist with a little leeway for variances. The gender binary is a pervasive social construct that limits society due to the refusal of some to accept nonconforming individuals into the feminist umbrella of inclusivity. In this paper, I argue that rather than a binary, gender should be accepted as a spectrum due …

Developing A Discrete Event Simulation Model To Overcome Human Trafficking, Sydney Meier

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Human trafficking is a complex issue that affects society and the global economy. This societal problem involves the commercial exchange and exploitation of people through forced labor, domestic servitude, and sex trade. Human trafficking is considered the third most profitable organized crime in the world. By analyzing the flow of monetary gains/resources, information and trafficked people from the perspective of traffickers, police force, and advocacy organizations, this research aims to develop a discrete event simulation model to represent this complex system. The following paper describes the developmental process of acquiring data and creating a base model. While the model is …

Creating An Omaha Fringe Festival, Tamar Neumann

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Tamar Neumann

UNO Theatre Graduate Program

Omaha Fringe Festival

Creating an Omaha Fringe Festival

For my research project, I started a small theatre Fringe festival that consisted of ten different performances (plays) over the course of three days. Each performance group got three performances. The artists self-produced their works and the festival provided the venue, technical staff, and marketing. I recruited volunteers to help staff the box office and usher and I hired staff to run the technical side of the theatre. The festival also gave the artists 75% of the total box office. My research focused on answering the …

A Typological And Iconographic Analysis Of Macedonian Burials In The Classical And Early Hellenistic Period (5th-Mid 3rd Centuries Bce), Ann Haverkost

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Much of what we know of ancient cultures comes from burials, and this is also true in Macedonia. Yet, little is known about Classical Macedonian culture outside of the nobility, and even less is known about what they thought of death. This project analyzes funerary images from Macedonia during the Classical and early Hellenistic periods (5^th- mid 3^rd century BCE) with three questions in mind. First, are there specific motifs that are more prevalent? Second, is there a change in motifs over time? Third, how are these images similar to and different from images in Greece and …

Using From The Heartland In The First-Year Writing Classroom: Measuring Instructor Reception Of The Customized Textbook, Sarah Cohen

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The aim of the first-year writing program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) is to equip students with critical reading and writing tools and strategies to advance effective written communication well into their future. This study examines and measures attitudes of UNO composition instructors – who come from a variety of pedagogical and theoretical backgrounds – toward the efficacy of UNO’s self-published Composition I textbook, From the Heartland: Critical Reading and Writing at UNO. In many ways, From the Heartland embraces what Richard Fulkerson refers to as “a critical cultural pedagogy” which encourages students to consider personal …

Teacher Beliefs About Focus On Form: Differences And Similarities Among Native And L2 Spanish Speakers, Bailey Morley

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Although there has been research conducted around the beliefs of English as a foreign language teachers in regards to grammar, this research has not been extended to Spanish as a foreign language teachers. This study seeks to fill this gap in literature by identifying differences between native speakers (NS) and speakers of Spanish as a second language (L2) who are teachers of Spanish as a foreign language. Specifically, it aimed to investigate their differing beliefs toward grammar instruction. In this quantitative research study, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire, which included statements about grammar instruction in the classroom. Participants …

National Opera Association: Undergraduate Scene Repertoire, Melissa Comstock, Gina Comstock

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

In January 2018, UNO students Melissa Comstock and Gina Comstock performed in a presentation at the 2018 National Opera Association Conference in New Orleans, LA. The presentation entitled “Beyond Fledermaus: Undergraduate Friendly Opera Scenes from the Golden Age of Operetta” was given by UNO Professor Shelby VanNordstrand and Iowa State University Professor Jodi Goble. The presentation included three live performances featuring the professors’ students. Comstock and Comstock will discuss the preparation and rehearsal processes for the performance and the benefits of inter-university collaboration. Video footage from one of the live performances will be shown.

Collaborative Disagreement: Coming To See The Evidence In A New Light, Erin Wiebe

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Many disagreements regarding complex matters are essentially disagreements about how evidence ought to be assessed. After all, the way in which one assigns weight and strength to various pieces of evidence determines what one believes. These “evidential valuations” are the product of one’s previous experiences and background beliefs. One’s evidential valuations are determined by the ways of understanding the world one acquires from past evidence and the authority figures one recognizes. Accordingly, the greater the difference in two individuals’ background experiences, the greater the difference in their evidential valuations. Thus, disagreements over complex matters such as philosophy, religion, and politics …

Collaborative Disagreement: Coming To See The Evidence In A New Light, Erin Wiebe

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Many disagreements regarding complex matters are essentially disagreements about how evidence ought to be assessed. After all, the way in which one assigns weight and strength to various pieces of evidence determines what one believes. These “evidential valuations” are the product of one’s previous experiences and background beliefs. One’s evidential valuations are determined by the ways of understanding the world one acquires from past evidence and the authority figures one recognizes. Accordingly, the greater the difference in two individuals’ background experiences, the greater the difference in their evidential valuations. Thus, disagreements over complex matters such as philosophy, religion, and politics …

Humankind: A Perspective Collection, Madison Larimore

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

HumanKind, an ongoing project that began with FUSE funding, preserves diverse perspectives and addresses the empathy deficit in the form of creative nonfiction profiles. Profiles are an ideal, underused form for promoting empathy and establishing contact points across differences. Traditionally, profiles are written about celebrities or people of established public interest, but this oral presentation will present a collection of multimodal profiles written from the perspectives of fifteen everyday students at the University of Nebraska at Omaha from diverse backgrounds. Each profile is based on the answers the students provided during an extensive interview of over 100 questions about what …

Design For Safety: Decreasing First Responder Health Risks Through Real-Time Bio-Sensor Alerts, Suzy Fendrick

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The focus of this research project is using the Design Thinking process to create an informative dashboard for first responders. Design Thinking involves empathizing with the user, defining the problems to be solved, ideation, creating prototypes, and testing. This iterate process focuses on the user, resulting in the most effective product possible. The dashboard will display real-time biosensor data from sensors in the first responders’ uniforms. This project is part of a larger project with the goal of vastly improving the safety of first responders during emergency hazardous material incidents.

Revenge Pornography: An Analysis Of Privacy, Obscenity, And The First Amendment, Kamrin Baker

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

An important issue in modern communication law and policy is the emergence of harassment via the Internet and social media. One form of such harassment is revenge pornography, the sharing of sexual images or videos without the consent of the individual depicted, usually at the hands of an ex-lover. In punishing the posters and purveyors of revenge pornography, perpetrators are often convicted of unrelated crimes such as identify theft or fraud, furthering the silence of revenge pornography. This new challenge in law raises some serious questions about the intersections of obscenity, privacy and the First Amendment in the effort to …

Talk, Not Talking Points, Okina Tran, San Juana Paramo, Maya Solarana, Ameres Groves, Maria Nevada

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The (PRSSA) National Bateman Case Study Competition provides public relations students from across the U.S. the opportunity to apply the skills they have learned from internships and the classroom and implement those skills into a public relations campaign.

In 2019, the PRSA Foundation has created the Diverse Voices Initiative and the book “Diverse Voices: Profiles in Leadership,” in an effort to promote and improve diversity and inclusion in the communications sector. The book includes oral histories of 35 diverse communication professionals.

Talk, Not Talking Points is based on the insight many people in organizations believe diversity and inclusion are merely …

Electronic Music And The Uno Technology Assisted Performance Ensemble, Nicholas Spencer

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The University of Nebraska at Omaha's Technology Assisted Performance Ensemble (or TAPE) is UNO's first Laptop Orchestra. TAPE focuses on electronic music as well as exploring the boundaries of what we understand to be music. Combining traditional music theory and digital synthesis creates a new genre of academic music that is on the cutting edge of research in both fields of music and technology. TAPE was founded by Dr. Seth Shafer and Nicholas Spencer with initial funding by the University of Nebraska at Omaha's FUSE grant.

Futurism In Fashion: What Does That Mean?, Jonathan Orozco

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

In fashion, the term ‘futuristic’ is often used to describe avant-garde clothing designs. It could refer to several things, such as the clothing’s method of production, the materials used, or the garment’s design. Futurism can even refer to the 20^th century Italian art movement, and indeed, this movement addressed the problem of designing fashion for the 20^th century. We would learn much by examining Futurist fashions in order to understand its legacy in relation to contemporary fashion designers viewed as futuristic today. This paper will review this legacy by looking at five specific examples—Italian Futurists and their contribution …

Representations Of Immigration In Québécois Film, Roland R. Buchta

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Québec is a region where national identity plays a particularly important role, mainly due to its social context, and the historical influence of anglophones on the province’s affairs. This element is reflected in its cinematic productions, as Santoro, Bachand, Desroches and Loiselle stated, “Québec cinema is indeed but the most recent example of the Québécois’ ability to translate their cultural specificity into an enduring and increasingly appreciated source of cultural and economic vitality” (161). Santoro et al further claimed that “Québec cinema is indeed a rich and increasingly diversified art form and has taken its place on the world stage …

The Sound Of Earth Crying, Takeru Oshima

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

You can learn a lot about water shortage we are facing throughout the poster.

There is some quizzes to know how much you know about it. And there are two case studies of how art relates to water shortage.

At the end, you can literally hear what Earth's crying sounds like with metronome.

Pilot Study Of Empathy In Adults, Libby Moberg

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Empathy is of critical public health importance due to its association with relationship satisfaction and well-being (Davis & Oathout, 1987; Davis, 1983). There is growing evidence that bilingual individuals may have higher levels of empathy (Javor, 2016). One potential mechanism for this relationship is that bilingual individuals tend to have higher levels of executive functioning (Costa et al, 2008), which is linked to higher empathy because individuals are able to more easily adopt others’ perspectives. Previous studies examining this question have largely relied on self-report questionnaires assessing empathy as a general tendency (i.e., trait). No studies have examined differences in …

The Forgotten : Child Soldiers, Sam Fee

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Child soldiers have been slowly forgotten about by the public over the last century. There are only a few groups of people are trying to fight for these children. As a visual artist, I created a painting, my work entitled Invisible Children utilizes acrylic and wildfire blacklight paint to symbolize the underreported presence of children in global conflict, the hidden image represents the light we need to shine on these issues.

#Makingroom: A Study Of Twitter's Influence On The Social Justice Advocacy Of Women Of Color, Alissa Duong

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Abstract

This qualitative study looks to discover the effects Twitter has on the social justice advocacy of women of color. Recent studies show that using social media leads to increased political activeness and social justice advocacy. This study examines the relationship between Twitter, women of color, and their social justice advocacy. To test these relationships, secondary research and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with three prominent women of color in the social justice advocacy community on Twitter. The use of social media, specifically Twitter, allows women of all colors to join and share their experiences, build camaraderie, feel validated, and …

The Impact Of Immigration On Cold War Modernization Efforts: A Case Study Of South Korea, Shannon Hayes

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

This paper explores the intersection of American foreign and domestic policies during the Cold War. The United States sought to foster political and economic alliances in the developing world in the 1950s and 1960s by employing a new foreign policy initiative: modernization theory. Governmental officials and non-state actors carried out these policies in areas of the globe considered the most susceptible to communist influences because of cultural practices and economic realities. However, even while American policymakers sought to modernize political and economic systems, the nation’s own immigration policies may have worked against these efforts. This paper will explore the impact …

The Privilege Of Home: A 400 Year Family History Of Immigration And Inhabitation On Native Land, Kristine Mahler

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

This presentation culls together the extensive text-based, place-based, and experience-based research I completed on the history of immigration and inhabitation on native land from 1620 through 2018 through the specific lens of my ancestors: French settlers who lived in Kébec’s St. Lawrence Valley and immigrated to western Wisconsin around 1865, eventually settling in northern Minnesota. As I researched my ancestry alongside the history of white settlement and forced native resettlement in these regions, I recognized a pattern of repeated inhabitation—traced through baptismal, marriage, and death certificates—by my family onto recently-vacated native land.

In my text-based research, I was riveted by …

An Oral History Of Italian American Identity & Perception During The First Half Of The 20th Century, Joshua A. Hoxmeier

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

This paper will detail the experiences, perceptions, and memories of working and middle class Italian American men during the first half of the twentieth century and examine the differences between how the two World Wars and their aftermaths shaped the ethnic identity of these men. By looking at Italian American World War II veterans, I conclude the notion that Italian American inclusion was achieved through the First World War and the nationalism of the 1920s, especially the restriction of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, is not fully representative of both the realities and perceptions of a sizable number of …

Twenty-First Century Representations Of Albert Camus’S “L’Hôte”, Roland R. Buchta

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Albert Camus, an Algerian-born French writer, philosopher, and winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in literature, had a significant impact on 20^th-century world literature and philosophical thought. Even today, Camus’s essays, novels, plays, and short stories remain relevant and compelling. More recent adaptations of his work incorporate such important themes as the meaning of life and death, French colonialism and practices, and basic human rights. This presentation examines the short story L’Hôte (Eng. The Guest) (1957) from Camus’s the Exile and the Kingdom collection, as well as the graphic novel L’Hôte (2009) by Jacques Ferrandez, and the …

The Property Of Mass: An Interdisciplinary Metaphysical Investigation, Benjamin Hayworth

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The property of mass as used in the physical sciences is somewhat of a metaphysical conundrum. Not only has the definition of mass changed with various paradigm shifts in physics, but the powers belonging to the property have also varied. In my study, I begin by examining the historical context surrounding the term, including the changes to its definition. In doing so, it is revealed that various definitions of mass are used and circulated in general discussion, so a cogent criterion of identity is established by which each definition can be measured. After determining the distinctions between each mass term, …

Contemporary Flute Music By Argentine Composers, Erica Nightengale

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Aside from Alberto Ginastera and Astor Piazzolla there are very few known composers from Argentina. Both Ginastera and Piazzolla have written well-known pieces for flute; however, the known flute repertoire from Argentina is small in comparison to other countries. This is due to a number of factors including the high cost of publication in Argentina; because of this composers aren’t able to circulate their works. Pieces are discovered by word of mouth and rarely make it outside of the country. This research aims to collect and expose contemporary flute works by Argentine composers. The works collected represent a variety of …