Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Big Nothing: A Story About Bicycles And The Girls Who Ride Them In The Heart Of West Texas, Keziah Staska

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Their one-way road trip had started the day before when they left their home in San Bernardino for the final time. Paisley was afraid of moving away from the city she grew up in, but not for the same reasons many children her age would be. . So, her social life wasn’t her primary concern when it came time to abandon her home. Instead, she was afraid to leave San Bernardino because she had memorized all the perfect bike routes within a thirty-mile radius. On the other, the fear that their new home would have insufficient routes and roads compared …

The Partition Of Ireland: Anglo-Irish Relations As Reflected In A Political Idea, Cian G. Mceneaney

Honors Program Theses and Projects

After years of postponement, and at the time of writing, Britain is set to leave the European Union on December 31, 2020, after complications mainly due to the new-age “Irish Question:'' how to handle the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the south?

African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Justina Ireland’s young adult novels Dread Nation (2017) and Deathless Divide (2020) tell the story of a Black girl by the name of Jane living in the aftermath of the Civil War, around 1880.

Triumph & Turmoil: The Duality Of Sylvia Plath, Matthew Edgar

Honors Program Theses and Projects

During this study, we will attempt to showcase how a 20th century misogynistic society created one of their own greatest adversaries in the form of Sylvia Plath.

The Role Of Principles And Personal Relationships In Greek Tragedy And Epic, Ellen Pariser

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Understanding motivations are vital for understanding any characters, especially ones so far removed from contemporary society. Through this paper I will attempt to explore the tug between principles and close personal relationships that is often central to ancient texts and manifests so prevalently in the genres of tragedy and epic.

Reframing The Audience In Shakespeare Studies, Ethan Child

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Playwrights write their plays to be performed as theatrical events. These temporally-bound events, in which drama reaches its full potential, introduce factors that do not exist in textual forms of literature.

Challenging The "Butcher" Reputation: General Grant's Strategy In The Overland Campaign, Sean Ftizgerald

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Ulysses S. Grant's exploits had earned him a reputation as an offensive- minded general who was not afraid of hard fighting and made no excuses.

Twentieth Century Organ Works As Pedagogical Devices: Using Select Compositions By Hermann Schroeder, Jean Langlais, And Daniel Pinkham As Teaching Tools For The Beginning Organ Student, Mary-Katherine Fletcher

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Countless teaching methods, articles, and books have been written about organ pedagogy. But even with so many options from which to choose, a few of these have emerged as some of the most frequently used teaching materials for beginning organ students.

Violet Is One Letter Off From Violent, Audrey E. Spina

Master’s Theses and Projects

The poems in this creative collection, Violet is one letter off from violent, aim to add to the critical conversation in contemporary poetry about violence, women’s anger, patriarchal oppression, and physical and sexual assault, specifically drawing on analyses from the poetry of Rachel McKibbens, Tarfia Faizullah, Emily Skaja, Erika L. Sánchez, Tracy K. Smith, Safiya Sinclair, and Paisley Rekdal. My myriad speakers, who take both first and third person points of narrative view, reclaim and reproduce their own stories in ways that are complex, vulnerable, and angry as a result of living under and through traumatic experiences in domestic and …

Cold Snap, Skylar Beauregard

Master’s Theses and Projects

For my Master’s Thesis project, I will be writing an original piece of realistic fiction inspired by the “dirty realism” literary movement of the 20th century. This piece of fiction, at the end of these two semesters, will resemble a novella in length and style while focusing on execution and maintenance of profluence as an element of narrative craft. My first semester will be spent conducting topical research on female urban youth and modern sex work in the form of short interviews and field research, closely reading some relevant contemporary “dirty realism” pieces of fiction, and using craft-based handbooks to …

Indigenous Women Defying All Odds: An Analysis Of The Use Of Gender Violence During The Civil War Of Guatemala, 1960-1996, Vivian A. Phillips

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Guatemala has been torn by class, race, gender, and politics throughout its history. During the late nineteenth-century coffee boom, elites expanded their landholdings at the expense of peasant communities.

Including The ‘Invisible Middle’ Of Decoloniality, Su-Ming Khoo, Anique Vered

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article traces a conversation around how to theorise and approach the inclusion of experiences, concepts and bodies situated in the ‘invisible middle’ of decoloniality. If coloniality is an immense, lengthy process resulting in colonial/modern structures (Mignolo 2007) comprising the ‘colonial present’ (Gregory 2004), ‘decoloniality’ requires surfacing, baring and bringing to bear the invisibilities and erasures of bodies that exist and resist with, through and in spite of colonial extraction and appropriation.

We explore and connect different ideas of ‘being in the middle’ of decoloniality, paying particular attention to the notion of ‘the invisible middle’ in embodied practices of solidarity …

Mothers As The Middle-Ground Between The Mountain And The State, Hasret Cetinkaya

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper analyses how the ‘Peace Mothers’ in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan are structurally located in the middle-ground between familial relations and the state, as they strive to come to terms with their children’s interpretation of the politics of decolonisation through the project of Kurdish democratisation and ‘revolution’. Such a politics takes its dominant form in the vehicle of The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a movement who see themselves as a decolonial and left-wing militant group, and whose membership is both young and committed to radical political transformation. At stake for the mothers of these members who have become an …

Decolonizing The Womb: Agency Against Obstetric Violence In Tijuana, Mexico, Ester Espinoza-Reyes, Marlene Solís

Journal of International Women's Studies

Obstetric violence is a human rights violation that consists of actions or omissions of healthcare personnel that harms people during pregnancy, childbirth or puerperium. Some practices through which it is expressed are the mistreatment, unnecessary procedures, denying of medical attention or provoking damage either physically or mentally. In particular, we understand obstetric violence as the result of a colonization of the womb, that is, of the occupation of the concept of motherhood by the dictates of patriarchal ideology (Fineman, 1991; Ehrenreich, 1993) and of the Colonial/Modern Gender System, proposed by Lugones (2007). The objective of this paper is to analyze …

Analysing Contemporary Women’S Movements For Bodily Autonomy, Pluriversalizing The Feminist Scholarship On The Politics Of Respectability, Dyuti Chakravarty, Alice Feldman, Emma Penney

Journal of International Women's Studies

We began this project intending to theorise the respectability politics within the Irish Repeal (pro-choice) movement through the lenses of postcolonial and Black feminism, and through the experiences of members of Pinjra Tod, a movement seeking the right to mobility for Indian women students. Instead, we found ourselves excavating the inextricable links between respectability politics and the representational politics of academic knowledge production (Cruz in Collins-White et al 2015) in relation to Irish Women’s Studies and the racialised politics of representation in the Repeal campaign. Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland with her husband on a work visa, …

Commoning Molecules: Decolonising Biological Patents By Gender Hacking Protocols, Maddalena Fragnito

Journal of International Women's Studies

By making reference to the political context of “molecular invasion” (Critical Art Ensemble 2002), this article will compare two practices of production and administration of hormones to highlight the consequences at stake when business property extends over bodies and cells of humans, animals and plants.

On the one hand, I will examine DIWO (Do It With Others) biohacking workshops that synthesise pharmaceutical hormones and share the know-how by using open-source protocols and participatory workshop methods. I will refer to these specific practices as exemplary of a growing approach to the topic which represents a new field combining biohacking, activism, art, …

“Valli” At The Border: Adivasi Women De-Link From Settler Colonialism Paving Re-Enchantment Of The Forest Commons, Deepa Kozhisseri

Journal of International Women's Studies

The forests of Attappady Hills part of the Western Ghats in Kerala homeland to Adivasi people is a frontier region where a settler population is now predominant. This paper aims to bring the concept of borders as a heuristic device to interpret gender-ecology-indigeneity in Attappady. The conversations among Adivasis, between Adivasis and settlers, between Adivasi women and their children become in media res dialogues of their border subjectivity. This was an empirical study in Attappady in which life experiences, oral history and myths were studied using narrative analysis. The paper discusses four findings: First how land dispossession disproportionately impacted Adivasi …

Decolonizing The Anti-Extractive Struggle: Amazonian Women’S Practices Of Forest-Making In Ecuador, Andrea Sempértegui

Journal of International Women's Studies

In October 2013, a group of indigenous women from the southeastern Ecuadorian Amazon started the “March of Life”. This 250-km long march – organized and led entirely by female representatives from the Achuar, Shuar, Zapara, Kichwa, Shiwiar, Andoa, and Waorani indigenous organizations – proceeded from the Amazonian city of Puyo to the capital city of Quito and was a response to the 11th oil licensing round in their territories. After this symbolic and arduous march, Amazonian women have continued to organize as a network and as active members of their indigenous organizations against renewed attempts by the government of licensing …

“I Used To Think You Were Just A Story”: Imagined Violence In Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ A Red Girl’S Reasoning, Hannah Barrie

Journal of International Women's Studies

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ 2012 short film A Red Girl’s Reasoning dismantles the narrative of colonial sexualized violence in its representation of the protagonist, Delia, enacting retributive violence against white men. Tailfeathers’ tense eleven-minute film depicts a First Nations woman seeking violent vengeance against white men who have sexually assaulted Indigenous women. This essay explores the political and transformative potential of such stories of revenge, examining A Red Girl’s Reasoning’s fictional representation of violence against the colonial oppressor alongside J. Halberstam’s discussion of imagined violence. I argue that this story of violent revenge is productive in its utopic depiction of a counterreality …

Embodied Liminality And Gendered State Violence: Artivist Expressions In The Mmiw Movement, Rachel Presley

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines four multimedia artivist artefacts at the nexus of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s (MMIW) crisis. I position artivism as a decolonial methodology that radically alters our attunement to embodied aesthetics, contending that feminist artivists employ a radical imagination to liberate the body/body politic. Decoloniality must be an enacted praxis, and for many Indigenous feminists, creative and artistic practices provide a transformative pathway towards “making” and “living out” one’s indigeneity as knowledge and tradition-bearers. Each of the four exhibits illustrate the ways in which settler politics are narrated and resisted through and by the Indigenous body. My …

Ghostly Others: Limiting Constructions Of Deserving Subjects In Asylum Claims And Sanctuary Protection, Maria E. Vargas

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this article, I examine the different constructions of deserving subjects in the new Sanctuary Movement and how sexuality, gender, whiteness, and class create an ostensibly inclusionary agenda that produces ghostly others. Punitive anti-immigrant legislation in the United States has incited mass protests to defend the rights of undocumented migrants. In 2007 this pro-immigrant movement sought to deploy the sanctuary strategy as practiced in the Central American Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. Using the case of Sulma Franco, a Guatemalan lesbian who was granted Sanctuary by the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, I illuminate the limitations of deservingness under …

A New Genealogy For Critical Oa Publishing: Towards A Politics Of Intersectional Transnationality, Rebekka Kiesewetter

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this article, I suggest opening out from the digital genealogies critical strands within the Open Access (OA) movement usually associate themselves with: I propose a genealogy of OA publishing that takes into consideration feminist and decolonial transnational publishing initiatives that have been active in non-digital realms before, and in parallel to what these critical strands have highlighted as their digital origins. The ways in which these pre-digital initiatives organised and mobilised feminist and decolonial transnational struggle through publishing might offer new insights for contemporary critical OA – specifically, with regards to questions around how to confront uneven hierarchies of …

Designing Research To Dismantle Oppression: Utilizing Critical Narrative Analysis & Critical Participatory Action Research In Research On Mothering And Work And Beyond, Nicole Dillard

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper seeks to explore Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA) and Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) as valuable methodologies in research for their potential to challenge the inherent absoluteness of master narratives through the personal and counter-narratives of research participants, while also providing participants an action-oriented emancipatory opportunity to lead the change needed in their organizations, communities and society at large.

Citing a previous study which explored how patriarchal, colonially-structured master narratives have played a significant role in reproducing the limited views which dominate American understanding of working mothers, the author will demonstrate how CNA and CPAR combined can expose how …

Decolonial African Feminism For White Allies, Deirdre Byrne

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminism is a word, a discourse and a political position that is frequently met with suspicion in African circles. There are various reasons for this distrust. Some (often those in disciplines that have proactively embraced decoloniality) hold that feminism is a western colonizing construct, which has been imposed on the country by imperialists. This response implicitly or explicitly accuses feminism of complicity with a colonizing agenda that desires the subordination of African epistemologies. Others equate a feminist political position with an uncritical anger and aggression towards men. They argue that, far from being antagonistic towards men, women need to make …

The Salon Is Now In Session: A Reflection On Unisa’S Decolonial Reading, Motlatsi Khosi, Lenka Vráblíková

Journal of International Women's Studies

How can we – those who are involved in institutions of higher education as researchers, students, educators and administrators – contribute to the decolonial project? How can we dismantle colonial structures in ways that speak to and from our practices of teaching and learning? And how are we to engage with what has become known as ‘Decolonial Theory’ in our everyday practice inside the university? As follows from the work of thinkers and educators such as bell hooks, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, the control of the means of producing and reproducing knowledge is key for sustaining coloniality but …

On Witches, Shrooms, And Sourdough: A Critical Reimagining Of The White Settler Relationship To Land, Abby Maxwell

Journal of International Women's Studies

Through an exploration of witches, mycelium, and fermentation, this research seeks to forward a critically anti-colonial project of reimagining the white settler relationship to land. The centuries-old socio-ecological crises being unveiled today are secondary only to the reigning logic-project of whiteness, which operates through gendered and racialized erasure, displacement, and subjugation, always toward the further spreading of whiteness. To unlearn this logic, white settlers must attune to the pulse of another substrate; unearth other stories as a means of unlearning and reorienting ourselves. In my position as a white settler and cis queer woman living and learning on the territories …

In Medias Res: Decolonial Interventions Editorial Introduction, Su-Ming Khoo, Anique Vered, Sayan Dey

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Selection 8: A Conversation About Race, Class, Feminism And Spirituality. Sponsored By Ground Work, New Bedford, Ma, Usa

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Book Review Essay: Me Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism, Rachel Phillips

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Book Review Essay Siren Song, Taimur Rahman

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.