Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Breakwater: Anti-Blackness In Geoscience Lessons From Long Beach, Ca, Christina Marsh

Pomona Senior Theses

Breakwaters are more than just physical structures that protect against storm surges and in the context of Long Beach, CA, my hometown, they are actualizations of economic, social, environmental, geologic, and policy challenges. Inspired by Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy, and Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, I use an extended metaphor and autoethnographic approach to connect a chronology of my educational life to the physical structure of a breakwater. Where the breakwater also acts as a signifier of my personal experiences of seeing it, questioning its purpose, and not always finding an answer. …

Moving In The Underground: The Politics Of Black Joy In Roller-Skating And Funk Music In Chicago, John West

Pomona Senior Theses

Skating provides a moment of limited protection from the dangers of being Black in the after-life of slavery. Skating provides a way to temporarily escape the pain of the outside that is depicted above. The pain of a modern post-racial colorblind slave society. A society plagued with hyper-surveillance, mass incarceration, and domestic militarism targeted at Black and Brown bodies. Our joy and pleasure are what sustain us. We turn to jubilee to offer a moment of freedom from the burden of racial capitalism. Subversive Black joy, the joy that allows Black folk to restore, recreate, and reinvent themselves is how …

Remote Learning In The Era Of Covid-19: Accounting For Students' Personal Verve, Marissa Langley

Scripps Senior Theses

This study focuses on accommodating remote academic lessons for students’ personal verve levels. Personal verve is defined as the ability to adapt to and concentrate in environments with high levels of stimulation. The sociocultural psychologists Boykin discerned higher verve levels in Black communities compared to White communities. Boykin found that many Black students tend to learn best in high verve conditions, which incorporate aspects of African American culture like group work, varied activities, movement and noise, as opposed to traditional low verve conditions which consist of sitting quietly at a desk during lectures. White students tend to have low personal …

"May We Be Buried Alive Together": Towards An Intersectional Feminist True Crime Praxis, Alexandra White

Pomona Senior Theses

Most mainstream true crime narratives revolve around a corpse. It is usually the body of a woman. The body is most often white. Not always, but in the cultural imaginary, she is blonde. She comes from a good family. She was a sweet girl. What happened to her? While this question haunts the general public, it also animates true crime communities as the victim becomes a symbol of innocence, a site of spectacular violence, and evidence of the incomprehensible extreme of human behavior. The question brings (primarily) white, cis women true crime fans together in the name of fascination, fear, …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

La Modernité Tunisienne Dévoilée : Une Étude Autour De La Femme Célibataire, Madison Wagner

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explains recent accounts of discrimination and cutbacks in reproductive health spaces in Tunisia. Complicating dominant analyses, which attribute these events to the post-revolution political atmosphere which has allowed the proliferation of islamic extremism, I interpret these instances as a manifestation of a deeply rooted stigma against sexually active single women. I trace this stigma’s inception to the contradictory way that Habib Bourguiba conceptualized modernity after independence, and the responsibility he assigned to Tunisian women to embody that modernity. This responsibility remains salient today, and is putting Tunisian women in an increasingly untenable and vulnerable position.

After independence, Bourguiba …