Art and Design Commons^™

Driven By Personality: Exploring The Relationship Between Custom Cars And Self-Expression, Tharwa Dalansi

Theses and Dissertations

Custom Car Culture (CCC) is a form of creativity that emerges from personal identities and passions. It involves the restoration, modification and personal adornment of commercially manufactured cars. This process creates a journey, where the enthusiast goes through multiple phases of self-reflection. But due to a lack of local resources, Qatar-based CCC enthusiasts often have to send their cars abroad to Dubai or Japan in order to customize them, relinquishing creative control in the process.

In response to these challenges, based on observations and interviews conducted among actual CCC enthusiasts, I develop a platform for engagement between these enthusiasts and …

“This Ain’T Just A Rap Song”: 2pac, Sociopolitical Realities, And Hip Hop Nation Language, Leah Tonnette Gaines

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

2Pac’s music was not merely rap songs. His music was and continues to be a platform for communicating important messages and concerns with his audiences. To relay these messages, he often used Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL). In this research, I will conduct a linguistic analysis to illustrate how 2Pac’s music communicated sociopolitical realities through his use of HHNL. To construct possible answers for the questions that guided this work, the researcher transcribed, coded, and analyzed a sample size of 2Pac’s music. From the sample of songs used, the researcher was able to detect three common themes throughout, namely relaying, …

Hustle In H-Town: Hip Hop Entrepreneurialism In Houston, Brittany L. Long

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Imagine a sprawling, overheated American megalopolis that epitomizes diversity and segregation in one of the world’s youngest countries. Despite Houston’s history of structural racism and segregation, Houston Hip Hop entrepreneurs built communities and created storied businesses that culminate in a sense of local pride and Hip Hop identity that has not been replicated in the same manner in any other city. An examination of thought-provoking existing scholarship about the Hip Hop South and Hip Hop in Houston, as well as an examination of existing and collected primary sources (interviews) allow me to demonstrate two things: Hip Hop entrepreneurialism is a …

Hip Hop And Spoken Word Therapy In School Counseling: Developing Culturally Responsive Approaches Book Review, Kalyn T. Coghill

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Hip Hop and Spoken Word Therapy in School Counseling: Developing Culturally Responsive Approaches by Ian Levy maps out the ways in which school counselors can incorporate Hip-Hop into their counseling practices in the K-12 school system. Levy provides examples of lessons they crafted specifically for this type of pedagogy and breaks down Hip Hop's contribution to education and counseling.

Metamosque – Envisioning The Mosque As A Virtual Public Space, Alaa Albarazy

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the mosque was not only a space for a communal prayer but also a place for building a community. Today, however, with conflicts and diseases fragmenting society, people are less able to gather physically in large spaces. Out of necessity, people rely on technology to get together and interact virtually. In this context, my research challenges the notion of the mosque as a physical space, proposing, instead, its extension into virtual space. Recent global events pose the question: Can the metaverse offer an opportunity for the mosque to reassert itself as a public space. I propose that a MetaMosque …

It Takes A Muscle: Wholes, Holes, And Other Voids, Saar Shemesh

Theses and Dissertations

IT TAKES A MUSCLE¹

In the BELLY of the BEAST, the HUMAN

in the deep end of a SWIMMING POOL

in a GRAVE, looking up/out from within

at the base of a CRATER, ABYSS, PIT

the room as a CRADLE, INCUBATOR

architecture as MOTHER MOULD.²

____________________________

¹ Title is borrowed and abbreviated: Spectral Display, “It Takes A Muscle To Fall In Love,” 1982.

² For what American-English delineates as ‘mold,’ British-English uses ‘mould’ and is more specific in its technicality. The former doesn’t distinguish in spelling between mold (fungus) and mold (mould). I’m not particularly a fan of …

Objectified: Forced Marriages And Bitter Reality Of Violence Against Women In India, Anurag Wallace

Theses and Dissertations

Domestic violence against women is an ongoing problem in India. With cases rising ever higher, the time has come to talk openly about the uncomfortable truths behind arranged marriages, which foster injustice and often lead to violence against women. The wedding dress is a symbol of purity in traditional Indian weddings, but in the case of marriages that turn abusive, it can become a symbol of oppression and patriarchy. During the research phase of this investigation, women once stuck in abusive marriages—treated as objects—talked about the objects that made them feel trapped and explained how these everyday objects became silent …

A Critical Interpretive Synthesis Of Research Linking Hip Hop And Wellbeing In Schools, Alexander Crooke, Cristina Almeida, Rachael Comte

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Hip Hop is recognized as an agent for youth development in both educational and well-being spaces, yet literature exploring the intersection of the two areas is comparatively underdeveloped. This article presents a critical interpretive synthesis of twenty-two articles investigating school-based well-being interventions which used Hip Hop. The critical stance taken aimed to identify or expose assumptions underpinning this area of scholarship and practice. Our analysis suggested several assumptions operate in this space, including the idea rap represents a default for Hip Hop culture, and the default beneficiaries of Hip Hop-informed interventions are students of color living in underprivileged, inner-city US …

Spirituality Countering Dehumanization: A Cypher On Asian American Hip Hop Flow, Brett J. Esaki

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Flow—an artistic connection to the beat—is essential to the experience and cultural mix of Hip Hop. “Flow” is also a term from positive psychology that describes a special out-of-body state of consciousness, first articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When Hip Hop performers get into artistic flow, they sometimes become immersed in psychological flow, and this article examines the combination for Asian American Hip Hop. Based on my national survey of Asian Americans in Hip Hop, I argue that dual flow inspires spiritual transformation and mitigates the dehumanization of social marginalization. However, the combination of terms presents problematic possibilities, given that Hip …

Critical Hermeneutics And The Counter Narrative Of Ledger Art, Katie Fuller

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Too often historical artworks in schools, textbooks, cultural institutions, and public spaces share a narrative that bolsters white-centered histories, but when an historical artwork is studied as text it creates room for multiple perspectives (Newfield, 2011) expanding the narrative to include subjugated histories. Looking at art through the philosophy of hermeneutics opens up questions and conflicts that arise within texts based on interpretations of those texts (Leonardo, 2003). This paper will apply the philosophy of hermeneutics to critique historical memory, and it will present ledger art as a visual text and counter narrative to dominant white narratives. Ledger art emerged …

≥I++ Wayward Self, Space, And Language, Mystie Do, Thu Tm Do

Theses and Dissertations

Having crossed different geographical and cultural borders, I can’t seem to position myself beyond society’s forced binaries of race, sexuality, and materiality. My personal diasporic experience drives me to bring together various presences, putting them next to one another, engaging them in dialogues. My works often share multiple space–time possibilities: a digital space, a physical site, a virtual alternity. Occupying these parallel worlds are varied ratios of mixtures of natural ecosystems, my own system of abstraction, and existing technological systems that allow us a level of individual engagement not previously available. I want to invite people to fluctuate between these …

Yolkkh: The Story Of My People, Amna Zelimkha Yandarbin

Theses and Dissertations

The name of my project is: Yolkkh, The Story of My People. With this project I present a series of scarves each one bearing an illustrated scene in order to tell a story – my story and the story of the Noxci people. Noxci are the people who are referred to as “Chechens” by Russians and are generally known by that title. As a Muslim, I have witnessed the way Western media tend to dehumanize my community. In order to contrast this dehumanizing process, I thought that telling the story of my family would help reverse Islamophobic tendencies and raise …

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

Design Hub: Activating Community By Design, Ed Williams

Theses and Dissertations

MOTIVATION

At the turn of the century, Robert Putnam (2000, 27) wrote “...a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current.” Putnam is describing a loss of “social capital” throughout American society. Research suggests that many of our contemporary issues are the result of a decline in “social capital,” or “community.”

This pervasive lack of community is thought to be detrimental to “educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health …

Trans-Inclusive Design, Erin White

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The choices web designers make impact the online and offline experiences of real people who are transgender, non-binary, or gender-variant—choices that can affirm or exclude, uplift or annoy, help or harm. This article shines light on the decisions web professionals make every day and offers specific ideas for how to make content, images, forms, databases, IA, privacy, and algorithms trans-inclusive.

Whirling Hybrids: A Dichotomy Of Belonging, Rabeya Khatoon

Theses and Dissertations

Migration is a phenomenon wherein individuals relocate from one country to another, albeit temporarily or permanently, for numerous reasons. The State of Qatar is a highly diverse nation with a large population of foreign residents. According to Priya D’Souza, as of 2017, 60 percent of the resident population in Qatar are from South Asia. Growing up in this environment, third culture kids develop a unique, hybrid culture through experiencing multiple cultures. This research investigates a dichotomy of belonging from the perspective of South Asians in Qatar. A series of hybridized spinning tops were produced in collaboration with a South Asian …

Weaponization Of Space: Subverting The Architecture Of Occupation, Majdulin Nasrallah

Theses and Dissertations

Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people has manifested itself in countless ways. The built environment, fueled by spatial theory, has been transformed into an instrument of war that serves a military agenda. In this context, the physical environment is not simply the arena of conflict, but a weapon wielded by occupying forces. This research investigates spatial control through seemingly mundane architecture and military practices, which are deployed deliberately to strangulate Palestinian livelihood and prosperity. Derived from Deleuze and Guittari’s delineation of smooth and striated space, with an emphasis on walls and barriers, this thesis subverts …

Compost Rich Of Resistance: Wayfinding In Tel Aviv And Jerusalem, Taylor K. Miller

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

It is not common to travel to a region searching for what is wrong and askew. But this is precisely how I move through greater Palestine-Israel each time I visit. Explosions and incessant pummeling have forced the sidewalks and retaining walls to heave–Styrofoam slabs serve as an equally hasty and hideous shim. But in this, there is hope. Even where the sidewalk momentarily ends–likely that in just a few months a new road, deeper into the West Bank will be built–it is glaring that these foundations are laid at an unsustainable pace. In a land where the forest often obscures …

In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk

Theses and Dissertations

We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.

Escapism: Indulging In Daydreams, Tanruk Pairoj-Boriboon

Theses and Dissertations

A fantasy world, that exists only in our minds, provides us a place where we can mentally escape from everyday reality. Escapism, such as indulging in daydreams, allows us to experience comfort and makes us feel safe, eliminating feelings of insecurity and vulnerability.

This study aims to use playfulness and reverie as a tool to access and confront mental discomforts. Transforming disturbing situations into an experience of reverie; a correction of unsatisfying reality, by converting a solid component of the real world into a desirable infinite form will provide alternative viewpoints.

Throughout my work, this method has been employed to …

Orthodontists’ And Patients’ Preferences In Website Design In The Selection Of An Orthodontic Practice: A Comparative Study, Taylor R. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Objective: To determine which website characteristics are preferred by orthodontists, adult patients, and parents of patients.

Materials and Methods: 1,000 active members of the American Association of Orthodontists and 750 active orthodontic patients/parents were sampled. Participants rated the importance of website characteristics, indicated presence of those characteristics on the current website, and ranked sample website images. Preferences were compared between orthodontist and the patient/parent group using t-tests and sample websites were compared using ANOVA models and Tukey’s adjusted post-hoc tests. Significance level was set at 0.05.

Results: 11 of the 16 website features showed significant differences between patients/parents and orthodontists. …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

Recovery From Design, Cassandra J. Ellison

Theses and Dissertations

Through research, inquiry, and an evaluation of Recovery By Design, a ‘design therapy’ program that serves people with mental illness, substance use disorders, and developmental disabilities, it is my assertion that the practice of design has therapeutic potential and can aid in the process of recovery. To the novice, the practices of conception, shaping form, and praxis have empowering benefit especially when guided by Conditional and Transformation Design methods together with an emphasis on materiality and vernacular form.

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …

Open / Close: Assimilating Immersive Spaces In Visual Communication, Anika Sarin

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in two spaces obverse to each other: open and closed. An open space develops organically based on how people inhabit it. Interacting with an open space is a dynamic, sporadic, multisensory, immersive, and subjective experience. In such spaces, we are confronted with an alternative aesthetic, one that is in conflict with the seamlessness of a closed space. A closed space is anchored on definite variables like structure, use and boundaries. While interaction between people and space is important, the space is tightly controlled and interaction is designed. Through this thesis project, I present a method that metaphorically …

A Mapping System As A Method In Experiential Culture Learning And Engagement, Faisal Mohammad

Theses and Dissertations

From my observation as a new resident in Education City, I recognize a need for cultural awareness and communication amongst those studying and working in this particular area. With this project I propose a different experience, a new way to use experiential learning as a mechanism to change people’s predetermined opinions about one another and disrupt personal biases in order to foster cultural awareness and friendship.

A mapping system or wayfinding strategy to navigate a new city is the beginning of a visitor’s experience in a new place. This new experience is one way for users to identify locations through …

The Future Of Arabic Music: No Sound Without Silence, Nesma Magdy Khodier Vcuq

Theses and Dissertations

For centuries, Arabic music has been intrinsically linked to Arab culture and by extension bonded to the environmental landscape of the region, reflecting their emotions, moods, and behaviors. Numerous technological advancements in the latter half of the twentieth century, have greatly affected the rich legacy of Arabic music, significantly impacting the natural progression of traditional Arabic musical genres, scales, and instrumentation.

This thesis serves as an introduction to generative methods of music production, specifically music generated through gestures. Through generative music, and its unique ability to map gestures to different musical parameters, music can be produced using computer algorithms.

The …

From Me To You, Isabel Lee

Auctus: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

As an artist, my work has allowed me to produce as a multidisciplinary thinker, maker, and communicator. Beyond the physicality of medium, much of my desire to make my work manifests in the nuances of human relationships and genuine experiences that I seek and recall in my own life. My most lasting work meanders around the elements of unspoken communication, intimate gestures, and quixotic quests.

Through performative sculpture, I pursue thinking and making through nontraditional materials, utilizing some form of human interaction in the process. Exploring my curiosity for relational and performative art, I’m interested in works that are exist …

Proactive Conversation, 3d Printing, And An Old Nintendo, Tesha C. Ellis

Undergraduate Research Posters

Abstract

One hundred years from now, it would be a true historical treat to be able to showcase 20th and 21st century digital entertainment by presenting video game consoles in mint condition for interactive, educational, play. Arguably, it would be more enlightening and informative for future audiences to be able to physically engage with the electronic artifacts instead of simply observing them behind glass. With the use of 3D technology, components of video game systems can be preserved, and then printed as needed for repairs. It will help keep them functional for future researchers, educators, and enthusiasts.

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …