Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“I Thought I Knew”: Teaching Graduate Students New Ways Of Understanding Meanings Of Diverse Social Identities, Maria S. Johnson

Feminist Pedagogy

Instructors should not assume that graduate students understand meanings of terms for various social identities. In this article, I highlight a teaching activity I created titled, “What’s in a name?” that requires graduate students to research historical and contemporary uses of various racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, and immigration terms. The assignment helps graduate students develop inclusive vocabulary and deepen their understanding of their positionality. It also supports braver classroom contexts for students and instructors. The assignment is best facilitated by instructors informed of diverse social identities, open to difficult conversations, and aware of the influence of their own social identities …

Maine Women's Hall Of Fame And Maryann Hartman Awards / Call For Nominations, John C. Volin, University Of Maine Office Of The Executive Vice President For Academic Affairs & Provost

General University of Maine Publications

The University of Maine seeks nominations for the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame and the Maryann Hartman awards. Beginning in 2023, UMaine will partner with the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame to sustain our common tradition of honoring exceptional Maine women. We define ‘woman’ broadly so to include any person who lives life as a woman. We also define achievements broadly, and in recognition that much important work in and for Maine communities may lie outside traditional standards for achievement and across all walks of life. We hope to inspire nominations of candidates across a wide range of professions and …

On Teaching Diversity And Inclusion, Clara Bradbury-Rance

Feminist Pedagogy

In 2020, I was asked to design a module called “Diversity and Inclusion in Practice” for a new online MA. To design a module around this theme was to reckon with a paradox. Scholars such as Sara Ahmed, working across feminist, queer, and critical race studies, have given us theoretical and methodological frameworks not simply for celebrating “diversity” but for exploring this term itself as a function of power. While the use of terms such as diversity and inclusion may be a strategic necessity for social justice work around higher education’s current agenda, this “language of diversity” (Ahmed 2012: 51) …

An Evaluation Of Women’S Social Status In Colonial Hong Kong With A Feminist Lens - Case Studies, Heng Du

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Even though Hong Kong remained under British control from 1842 to 1997, denizens were not modernized in a way comparable to that of the British. To the contrary, while governing Hong Kong, British colonizers allowed continued reference to ancient Chinese customs in the area. Such policy diminished women’s chances of receiving fair treatment in matters such as property management and divorce. Unlike in Hong Kong, women were legislated to be parallel to men in matrimonial and property inheritance petitions in China, Britain, and colonial Singapore. This study is based on two exemplary cases judged by authorities in colonial Hong Kong. …

Gender Stereotypes And Representation Of Women In Roald Dahl's Books, Sarah Hunt

Senior Theses and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the role and representation of women in Roald Dahl’s children’s novels. To do this, I conducted a document analysis of five of Dahl’s books - “James and the Giant Peach” (1961), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964), “Danny, The Champion of the World” (1975), “The Witches” (1983), and “Matilda” (1988) - in order to answer the following questions: How does Roald Dahl portray women and girls in his novels? What gendered stereotypes are present, and how does this portrayal change over time? I was able to answer this question through utilizing …

Rooms That Awaken Us: A Poetic Inquiry Of Multiple Selves, Rawda Harb

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Using poetry as a research method, the author wrote for self-expression, self-discovery and self-healing during the pandemic. As she wrote, she realized that she is a different person in different settings with differ- ent people. Without intending to ever share this work, she then examines her multiple selves’ learning-teach- ing dance with life using literature by Aoki, Leggo, Dewey, Tajfel and others. She even discusses the notion of multiple selves in life with her young children and is fascinated by their artistic response.

Spa203. ¿Qué Hacemos Con La Lengua? Lenguaje, Diversidad Y Derechos Humanos, Juan Jesús Payán

Open Educational Resources

Descripción del curso

SPA203 - (For native or near-native speakers.) The grammatical structure of today's standard Spanish. Intensive practice in reading, speaking, and elementary composition.

En SPA203 vamos a explorar la relación entre el lenguaje y la diversidad en el marco de los derechos humanos fundamentales. El título del curso, “¿qué hacemos con la lengua?”, nos pregunta dos cosas: qué tipo de prejuicios perpetuamos por medio del lenguaje y cómo hacer para que la lengua albergue de manera efectiva la diversidad de nuestra sociedad. En un contexto actual, sorprendente estancado en la indiferencia, la ignorancia, el prejuicio y estigmatización de …

"Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History Of Sexual Violence" By Seo-Young Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomplete Compilation of Links to Sources Documenting Stanford’s History of Sexual Violence, in Chronological Order”—should be mandatory reading for administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and stakeholders at both Stanford and CUNY. #MeToo #MeTooAcademia

A Deconstructive Reading Of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Ansam Riyadh Abdullah Almaaroof, Nibras Ibrahim Mahmood

Journal of STEPS for Humanities and Social Sciences

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is a postmodern synthesis of Shakespeare's two most famous tragedies, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. It takes off where Shakespeare plays shockingly end. The experience of the protagonist Constance in with Desdemona and Juliet is essential to develop her character for the better when she realizes that Desdemona and Juliet are part of her personality. She has to drown in her unconsciousness to find her true self and change her determined identity through socially gender constructs. This study aims at identifying the representation of Shakespeare's women characters in MacDonald's play and their roles in developing …

Brujas Of Yesterday, Their Legacy Today, Maggi Delgado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brujas of Yesterday, their Legacy Today explores the impact of witch narratives on the lives of Latin American women. This bilingual interactive space collects both myths passed down through generations, ones still taught today, and stories of real women who bear the consequences of the legendary bruja character. Like witch hunts of women who did not fit the model of a “good woman,” the now correctly named femicides are examples of the prevailing misogynistic and anti-feminist rhetoric plaguing Latin American cultures diasporas. With a digital interactive map and timeline, the project aims to breathe new life into these old tales, …

Teaching The Lady’S Museum And Sophia: Imperialism, Early Feminism, And Beyond, Karenza Sutton-Bennett, Susan Carlile

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay argues for the value of teaching Charlotte Lennox’s periodical The Lady’s Museum (1760-61) in undergraduate literature, history, media studies, postcolonial, and gender studies classrooms. Lennox’s magazine, which includes one of the first serialized novels “Harriot and Sophia” (later published as the stand-alone novel Sophia (1762)) encouraged debate of the proto-discipline topics of history, geography, literary criticism, astronomy, botany, and zoology. This essay offers a flexible teaching module, which can be taught in one to five days, that focuses on the themes of early female education and imperialism using full or excerpted portions of essays from the eidolon, “Of …

Sharing Walks As A Witnessing Practice: Exploring Movement-Based Pedagogies, Catalina Hernandez-Cabal

Feminist Pedagogy

How we walk—or our inability to do so—is telling of who we have been. I propose this simple movement practice as a pedagogical engagement with the concept of faithful witnessing, which refers to attending to modes of power unbalance that might go unnoticed, and to people's creative and resistant possibilities (Lugones, 2003; Figueroa-Vásquez, 2015). This activity is suggested to provoke reflections about how we understand and experience social difference and power unbalances. The work introduces a simple score (a creative prompt) to explore walking-with others, creating instructions to teach others our movement, learning others', and delving into conversations concerning the …

Christianity, Feminism, And Identity Development In Christian Higher Education, Kaitlin Merlino

Communication Student Scholarship

Identity formation acts as an important part of human development. At the same time, some difficulty occurs when a person attempts to hold two identities that seemingly contradict. For those that identify as both feminists and Christians, this dilemma creates difficulties. As these two identity camps have been on opposing ends of a variety of issues for years, some may even feel unable to claim both of these labels simultaneously. At the same time, some can hold the values of each even as they reject the identity labels. The context of higher education provides students with an environment where they …

Nasty Woman: An Analysis Of Women's Rage In Popular Culture, Sarah Kee

Honors Theses

The goal of this senior project was to analyze the underlying cause for why certain female characters in popular culture were villainized for their behavior and generally deemed to be “nasty woman.” After reading numerous books and viewing films that contained “nasty woman”, there was a common denominator that linked their behavior and influenced their decision to enact their often-bloody retribution: the patriarchy. These women were a victim of some aspect of the patriarchy, commonly sexual assault, and could not receive the support they needed, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The “nasty women” analyzed in …

Anti-Pornography Feminism, Kinktok, And Consent: What We Can Learn From The Sex Wars And Leather/Sadomasochistic History, Nic Cloyd

Honors Theses

Sex education and LGBTQA+ history have long been censored and removed from curriculums across the United States. As this information has disappeared from our education systems, important values like consent and boundary setting have become increasingly obsolete despite the modern body autonomy movement. Leather and SM culture, which began post-WWII and reached their peak in the 1970s during the sexual liberation, have become increasingly important as their ethical and moral codes have been lost over time to the HIV/AIDs epidemic and censorship from second and third wave feminsism. Two prominent movements, anti-pornography and sex-work exclusionary radical feminism, have worked to …

Clash And Cooperation Of Ecofeminism And Postmodern Feminism: The Intersection Of Two Theories In Dystopic Literature, Ashton Koch

Honors Theses

Ecofeminism and postmodern feminism are regarded as opposite theories in their attempts to solve for ecological and patriarchal oppression. This thesis argues that these two theories are not mutually exclusive, and must work together to effectively combat oppression faced by the environment and by women. It uses two works of literature, Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood to argue for the combination of ecofeminist and postmodern feminist strategies. Both works are dystopic in nature, portraying the destruction of the environment and patriarchal discourse against women. Ultimately, this thesis analyzes the strategies …

Archiving Feminist Truth In Trump’S Wake Of Lies, Julie Shayne

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This article is about an assignment I do in one of my Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies social movement classes. I revised the assignment the first time teaching the class after Trump lost the 2020 election. For the assignment, students work in groups to research local feminist and gender justice organizations and deposit all of their original materials – recordings, photos, flyers, etc. – into a digital, open access archive I co-created several years ago with librarians and staff on my campus. In 2021 I had my students do the “post-Trump” edition where they researched local organizations about how their …

Feminist Catholic Organizational Identity: A Phenomenological Study Of Charism In The Lay Educator Of A Notre Dame De Namur Learning Community, Kathleen Barrera Quiazon

Doctoral Dissertations

The Catholic schools of women’s religious congregations in the United States possess a distinctive Catholic identity, owed in great part to the charism of their founders and the feminist worldview that emerged in the sisters’ mission, communal narratives, and ministries. With the decline of women religious across the country, schools and congregations ask questions for the future of that identity in the hands of lay educators. As with many religiously sponsored schools, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and their lay partners in education are engaged in these critical questions for their own learning communities across the country.

This …

A Local Lens On Global Media Literacy: Teaching Media And The Arab World, Katharina Schmoll

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The globalization and transnationalization of media use have facilitated access to voices from the Arab world. Students and teachers in Western higher education can make use of these voices within and outside the classroom to enhance students’ knowledge of the region and challenge Eurocentric imaginations of the ‘Other’. Yet to ensure students engage with these Arab sources in a meaningful way, media literacy is key. Drawing on and challenging a framework of global critical media literacy, this article argues that media literacy is grounded in time and space, meaning an effective teaching of global media literacy skills supposes an awareness …

Feminist Attitudes, Behaviors, And Culture Shaping Women’S Center Practice, Angela Clark-Taylor, Emily Creamer, Barbara Lesavoy, Catherine Cerulli Dr.

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

The present article contributes to the growing research on women’s centers to extend and encourage the role of feminism in women’s center within higher education. We provide a brief history of feminism and women’s centers in higher education to illuminate the connections between previous research and our women’s center research on community perceptions of feminisms.

The Naked Truth: Mabel Wadsworth Women's Health Center's Sexuality Education Series, Women's Resource Center

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Flyer promoting a Women's Sexual Health education series hosted by the Women's Resource Center with the Mabel Wadsworth Women's Health Center.

Black Feminism And Me/Maine Webinar, University Of Maine Alumni Association

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Video of the University of Maine Alumni Association's Black Feminism and Me/Maine Webinar.

The conversation was facilitated by Laren Babb who pursued a graduate degree in chemistry from the University of Maine. Around the table will be: Dr. Samaa Abdurraqib, Associate Director, Maine Humanities Council; Dr. Lori Banks, Assistant Professor of Biology, Bates College; Dr. Leslie Hill, Professor Emerita of Politics, Bates College; Amara Ifeji, Director of Youth Engagement and Policy, Maine Environmental Association and National Geographic Young Explorer; and Kosi Ifeji, Bangor High School student and Youth Hub Coordinator, Maine Environmental Education Association.

The event was made possible with …

“It Kind Of Shows The Terrible Morality Of This Scene": Using Graphic Novels To Encourage Feminist Readings Of Jewish Hebrew Texts With Religious Significance, Talia Hurwich

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

This study considers whether and in what ways graphic novel adaptations of traditional Jewish Hebrew texts can encourage adolescent Modern Orthodox girls to adopt autonomous critical responses when encountering narratives that present women in unequal roles vis a vis men. According to scholars, Jewish literacy should teach students to read traditional Hebrew texts reverently while forming autonomous interpretations and opinions. Instead, Jewish educators teach normative readings posed by approved rabbinic authorities. This is particularly the case when teaching issues relating to gender among Modern Orthodox Jews, a conservative Jewish denomination, strives to synthesize tradition with the values of modern, secular …

The Conscience Of Little Women: Beth's Epic, Mcewen Baker

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

From its conception, and through countless retellings, there is no doubt that Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is an American classic that has stood the test of time. Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation affirms and extends this legacy; the playwright adopts a contemporary feminist approach that defies gender norms and exclusivity in casting and encourages an actor-centered approach. This essay explains the importance of this adaptation and its influence on my portrayal of Beth March in Belmont University’s Fall 2021 production. It touches on the often overlooked significance of the second youngest sister as well as how my personal battle with …

The Evolution Of Female Writers In The 20th Century: From The Late 19th Century Towards 21st Centyry, Umida Fayzullaeva, Nasiba Parmonova

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

This article gives an overview of writing by women in a revolutionary phase during the twentieth century and highlights the distinguished features of twentieth century women's literature including the diverse range of themes, change in women's social and family roles, a remarkable shift in subjects of writing which added a new frontier in women's writing. While contemplating the study of twentieth century women's literature, the most significant features that came under the spotlight include discovery of women's self- identity, women coming out from the male defined precincts to achieve independence and the authors' expedition towards autonomy and self-assertion through their …

«Cuida Tu Alma Y Tu Cuerpo Por Dios Y La Falange»: Women’S Education And La Sección Femenina In Franco’S Spain, Madeleine Fontenay

College Honors Program

My thesis exploration is on La Sección Femenina and its diffusion of female cultural guides and shaping of female education in the early francoist period, from 1939 to 1959. The Sección Femenina and its field offices published work in many facets of women's lives to influence and reeducate women or their values and place. The contrast of rhetoric and reality gives insight into the values and upbringings of generations of Spaniards. By setting the female figure as the foundation of their francoist society, the Sección Femenina held immense cultural power. I am approaching the topic from an educational perspective, focusing …

Amanda Baldwin's Master's Portfolio, Amanda Baldwin

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This is the final portfolio for my Master's of Arts in the field of English. It includes an analytical narrative along with four projects that I feel best illustrate my knowledge, skills, and growth. These four pieces are entitled "Putting a Feminist Twist on Classic Literature," "Teaching Antigone in the Modern Classroom," “Feminism and Racial Studies in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees,” and “Literacy Narrative Analysis.”

Naming And Re(Claiming) Feminism In Orthodoxy: Voicing The Gender And Religious Identities Of Greek Orthodox Women, Anne Marie Adams

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a qualitative study of the effects of Greek Orthodoxy on the gender and religious identity meaning-making of five Greek-American women. The emergent themes from this study indicate that participants’ gender and religious identities were heavily influenced by the dueling tensions and contradictions between patriarchy and feminism, conservative traditionalism and modernity, and secular life and the religious community (i.e., family and church). Underpinning this study are Narrative Identity Theory and Feminist Standpoint Theory. Portraiture methodology was employed across three semi-structured interviews, as well as three written/video reflection journals to reveal how women, as articulated through their own perspectives, …

Diversity And Inclusion_Women's History Month 2021 Poster, University Of Maine Office For Diversity And Inclusion

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Poster for the University of Maine Office for Diversity and Inclusion's Women's History Month 2021 events.

Umaine Office For Diversity And Inclusion Women's History Month Wrap-Up And Welcome Spring! Email, University Of Maine Office For Diversity And Inclusion

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Email from the UMaine Office for Diversity and Inclusion with various details of the Office's work and details of events related to Women's History Month.