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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Arts Of The Street: Sense Perception, Creativity And Resistance In Everyday Urban Life, Nicholas Wees Aug 2022

The Arts Of The Street: Sense Perception, Creativity And Resistance In Everyday Urban Life, Nicholas Wees

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I examine questions concerning space, perception, everyday creativity, and the social ordering of the senses, and go on to describe a class of creative urban practices that I name the arts of the street. These include, but are not necessarily limited to, street performance (busking), street art in the usual sense (graffiti, murals, postering, etc.), punk, hip hop culture, and skateboarding (street skating). As disparate as they seem, all of these practices share certain key characteristics: they are forms of everyday creativity that claim space according to their own intentions, in opposition to the dominant socio-political …


Radiant Dreams And Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives And American Intervention In Postwar Speculative Popular Culture, Aidan J. Warlow Feb 2022

Radiant Dreams And Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives And American Intervention In Postwar Speculative Popular Culture, Aidan J. Warlow

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project explores three distinct sets of Japanese and American postwar popular culture texts to demonstrate that there is a continuum of Japanese cultural interest in pacifism through resistance narratives in speculative fiction. Through close readings of Godzilla, Mobile Suit Gundam and Akira, and Metal Gear Solid, which I compare with similar American texts, my project positions its objects of study as points of cultural resistance to hegemonic pro-American cultural products. Each text produces commentary on Japanese-American relations with specific respect to nuclear policy and military expansionism. Significant Japanese cultural producers have grown increasingly critical of Japanese-American …