Arts and Humanities Commons^™

New Roots: A Transracial Adoption Story, Scarlett Kuang

Capstones

This is a documentary on transracial adoption. Transracial adoption is becoming more and more common in America. In 2011, 4 out of 10 adopted children were raised by families of a different race or ethnicity. Daniel and Lisa Conklins have 11 children. After giving birth to 6, the couple adopted another 5 children from 5 different countries. They live in Castile, a farm town in upstate New York. The then 6-year-old Ezra needs to adapt to a totally new environment and embrace his new family. For Elaina who was adopted as a baby, the challenge is to survive in a …

Murmur/Murmuro, Paola M. Di Tolla

Theses and Dissertations

By using repetition or misplacing intonations and accents, etc. one can imitate the slipperiness of spoken language. However, it is the accidental slippage that I find most revealing and exciting because it allows for two conversations to exist in one. Once spoken language is transcribed as text, it is put through another filter and the risk of [accidental] slippage increases by a different measure. Fingers don’t keep up or autocorrect insists on taking matters into its own hands.

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

Study Abroad Blog: A Comprehensive Exploration Into Country And Culture, Kristin Zimney

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This writing serves as the reflective/contextual essay component of my creative thesis project. My creative project includes a detailed study abroad blog with photos, videos, and translated interviews I conducted with Salamanca locals regarding certain aspects of Spanish culture. This essay details the workings, text, and video content of my study abroad blog, and is intended to inform on a deeper basis with supporting research, the topics covered in the interviews.

Paradise Entertainment's Feature Of The Week: Splint, Brittney Callahan

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Watching television has been part of my daily ritual since childhood. Every time it was turned on, I was able to enter into new worlds that were exotic compared to my house. Each story on the screen filled me with hope, inspired me with passion, and took me to a place where everything, no matter how terrible, seemed to have a purpose, an arc, and an end. These visual narratives birthed the idea of an equational life, one that seemed simple and mathematical. After I realized that life couldn’t be firmly calculated, I decided to invent my own alternative realities …

In-Between: The Spaces Of Modernity, Elisa Fabris Valenti

LSU Master's Theses

During the past three years as a graduate student, I have experienced loneliness. Having recently emigrated from Italy, I have often asked myself why I am experiencing such hard times adjusting to a different country. My thesis explores this question. Referring to Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, I have chosen a geographical and spatial starting point to approach my work. Italian cities are built around the central piazza where social, political, and economic life revolves. In my thesis, I depict American spaces that lack specific location and create solitude within the urban corridors. Private feelings, such as loneliness, are paradoxes …

"Poetry Is Not A Luxury:" Dis-Ing Self, Dis-Ing Archive, Ehm West

Senior Projects Spring 2018

‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury:’ Dis-ing Self, Dis-sing Archive,” is divided into three separate interrogations of such rts institutions, archives, and constructions of identity. Each chapter explores how these related categories are challenged by curators, artists and artists’ respective styles or forms. My central focus investigates the use of paraficition and disidentification in Cheryl Dunye's work. In both her early video works and first feature-length film The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye investigates the complexity of her own Black lesbian identity and the constructedness of identity as a whole. She begins her practice as a moving image artist during a …

Black And Grey: An Audio-Visual Tribute To The Undefined, Jewel Evans

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Process:

My project was originally called Seven Stages of “Griffe.” The term “griffe” was a racial category describing people who are three quarters black and one quarter white, which is my actual genetic makeup. My original plan was to analyze the history of the term and reference it in seven songs representing the seven stages of grief, and create a long music video to open up dialogue about the racial definitions we ascribe ourselves to. The project changed when I reached an impasse in my historical research, given that the term was obsolete by the 18th century and had …

She Inches Glass To Break: Conversations Between Friends, Liang Xia Luscombe

Theses and Dissertations

She inches glass to break: conversations between friends is a project that aims to manifest, through research and practice, my own feminist language within the videos I have produced in my final year of my Masters of Fine Arts. My feminist language is Australian and intersectional, invested in combating sexism, racism and in deepening language and representation around sexuality in relation to Asian women. This project discusses my video She inches glass to break (2018) in length, which created intersectional feminist dialogue in response to feminist filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s film Ticket of No Return (1979) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). …

Normal Couple Stuff, John Oglesby Whitescarver

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Some Brief Notes on Objects: Sculpture Empowers Objects to Show Us (people) New Ways of Relating

Jack Whitescarver

Objects have legs, torsos, extending arms, faces, surfaces, fronts, backs. These sculptures are not stand-ins for people. They are objects that follow the rules of how objects stand, sit, or hang in space. Rules work as the obstructions that focus energy into the act of forming. I’m interested in new ways of relating and I’m interested in how that relates to failure. Revolution on the state level is a movement that always fails at it is simply the replacement of one system …

The Break, Ian Gerson

Theses and Dissertations

The Break is a personal investigation into problems and possibilities of representing my specific transgender identity.

Trans as a tactic to speak about a state of forever becoming, forever in between, outside of and in opposition to dominant social norms of being.

Trans as a model for a different way of viewing and being in the world.

Can we form a different kind of horizontal shared power though a collective refusal to play into existing structures from which we have been excluded? What are the potentials for modeling other ways of being, other ways of (dis)engaging, other ways to be …