Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Challenging Filipino Colonial Mentality With Philippine Art, Francesca V. Mateo

Master's Theses

For 350 years, the Philippines was colonized by Spain and the United States. The Philippines became a sovereign nation in 1946 yet, fifty years later, colonial teachings continue to oppress Filipinos due to their colonial mentality (CM.) CM is an internalized oppression among Filipinos in which they experience an automatic preference for anything Western—European or U.S. American—and rejection of anything Filipino. Although Filipinos show signs of a CM, there are Filipinos who are challenging CM by engaging in Philippine art. Philippine art is defined as Filipino-made visual art, literature, music, and dance intended to promote Philippine culture. This …

Wabanaki Access To Sweetgrass (Hierochloe Odorata) Within Coastal Maine's Diminishing Open Land Tradition, Amanda Marie Ellis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nontimber forest products (NTFPs), refer to a class of resources (i.e. moss, fungi, mushrooms, plants, etc.) gathered in both rural and urban landscapes. NTFPs are utilized by a variety of cultures all over the world and are a critical part of medicinal, spiritual, dietary, and economic practices. In fact, some NTFP species are so critical to people that they are considered ‘cultural keystone species’ (Garibaldi and Turner 2004). This designation means that without access to the NTFP, cultural survival is at risk. This is the case in Maine where the Wabanaki, a confederacy of four tribes (Passamaqouddy, Penobscot, Mikmaq, and …

History In Collaboration: Equalizing The Arts And The Humanities In San Francisco, Nicole C. Meldahl

Master's Projects and Capstones

Historically, there has been a critical imbalance in the way history and preservation organizations are civically supported in comparison with the amount of funding that is available to arts organizations in the United States. To correct this imbalance in San Francisco, I propose the creation of a San Francisco Department of Culture that would place the San Francisco Arts Commission equally alongside a San Francisco History Commission within a department that absorbs responsibilities currently managed by other divisions with in city government, such as the Planning Department and the Office and Economic and Workforce Development. City government necessarily takes time …

Heritage Tourism In Washington County, Tennessee: Linking Place, Placelessness, And Preservation, Chad F. Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the formation of spatial theory and the linkage between space and place and their relationship with historic preservation and heritage tourism. First, this thesis analyzes the terms space and place, and how scholars define each term. Second, this thesis focuses on the concept of placelessness. Third, this thesis examines historic preservation as a strategy to help alleviate placelessness and as a crucial link to heritage tourism. This thesis also will use regional examples of preservation and tourism as exemplified by the preservation efforts of private organizations, citizens, and government officials in Jonesborough,Johnson City, and Washington County,Tennessee. This …

Eveleth, Minnesota: A Portrait Of My Home Town, Judith I. Luna

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This 30-minute documentary film provides snapshots of the small northeastern iron mining town of Eveleth, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range. It uses a two-pronged approach: 1) a first-person return to the town by the filmmaker almost 50 years after graduating from high school to see how the town may have changed, 2) a look at some historical and cultural factors which made the town what it was when the filmmaker was growing up and what continues to animate the town in the face of iron mining’s decline and rebirth. The latter include the immigrant experience and influence as the …

The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11^th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …

Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship Between Museums, Native Americans And Artists, Karrie E. Myers

Museum Studies Theses

Museums today have many responsibilities, including protecting and understanding objects in their care. Many also have relationships with groups of people whose items or artworks are housed within their institutions. This paper explores the relationship between museums and Northwest Coast Native Americans and their artists. Participating museums include those in and out of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Burke Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum. Museum professionals who conducted research for some of these museums included Franz Boas, …

(Re)Presenting Peoples And Storied Lands: Public Presentation Of Archaeology And Representation Of Native Americans In Selected Western U.S. Protected Areas, Cerinda Survant

Dissertations and Theses

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people visit the Native American ancestral lands in the western United States developed for tourism and recreation. The stewards of these lands seek to engage visitors and enrich their experience, and simultaneously to protect the lands' natural and cultural resources. To achieve their mission, protected areas regularly use interpretation -- materials and experiences that aim to educate visitors about resources and see them as personally meaningful. However, there is little literature on interpretive content in protected areas, few qualitative studies of interpretation as constructed by visitors and interpreters, and little literature on the representation …

Unveiling Laïcité: Secularism Algerian Muslims And The Headscarf Affair In Modern France, Coleen Nugent

Honors Theses

The historical relationship between the French state and its form of secularism, laïcité, and the French Muslim population is fraught with conflict, misunderstanding, and ambivalence. Laïcité, is a form of secularism unique to France, thus why it refuses to be translated from its native French. France also has a unique colonial relationship with Algeria, which was considered an integral part of France during France's colonial empire. Both the history of laïcité and the history of this colonial relationship help to explain the modern relationship between laïcité and the French Muslim population. In order to analyze this conflict, the "Head Scarf …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

How Liberal Korean And Taiwanese Textbooks Portray Their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”, Frances Chan

Student Work

A 2015-2016 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Frances Chan (Timothy Dwight College '16) for her essay submitted to the Department of History, “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”.” (Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History, advisor.)

Frances Chan’s essay “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles,” is a fascinating exploration of the creation of historical memory as seen in textbooks on the history of postwar economic development in Korea and Taiwan. Drawing on her remarkable linguistic skills in both Korean and …

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?: Food Inequlaity And Black Americans, Christina Foster

Capstone Collection

Food insecurity is an issue that plagues many people throughout the world. It only requires a brief search on the United Nation’s (U.N.) World Hunger Map to determine that this is indeed a worldwide crisis. Conversely, within the United States, the issue of hunger is often treated as “minimal” in comparison to other countries. A deeper inquiry into hunger within the U.S. reveals an even more disturbing connection: the role of white supremacy and systemic racism in regard to hunger. Academic research pertaining to food access is quite recent. Be that as it may, it is of no surprise that …

Their Swords, Our Plowshares: "Peaceful" Nuclear Weapons, Propaganda, And Cold War Memory Expressed In Film: 1959-1989, Michael A. St. Jacques

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons as tools of warfare and diplomacy. Immediately following the Second World War, American attitudes toward the atomic bomb were overwhelmingly positive. Once the Soviet Union developed their own atomic bomb and the United States lost the atomic monopoly, attitudes started to shift. After the first hydrogen bombs tests, public sentiment, as demonstrated in film, became markedly negative. To counter these negative attitudes and portray their nuclear weapons as peaceful tools instead of weapons of mass destruction, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed …

A One Percent Chance: Jabotinsky, Bernadotte, And The Iron Wall Doctrine, Andrew Harman

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis is an examination of the long historical processes that have led to the Israel/Palestine conflict to the contemporary period, focusing mostly on the period before Israeli independence and the 1948 war that created the Jewish state. As Zionism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century to combat the antisemitism of Europe, practical and political facets of the movement sought immigration to Palestine, an area occupied by a large population of Arab natives. The answer to how the Zionists would achieve a Jewish state in that region, largely ignoring the indigenous population, fostered disagreements and a split in …

The Power Of A Secret: Secret Societies And The Easter Rising, Sierra M. Harlan

Senior Theses

The Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.) and the Irish Volunteer Force (I.V.F.) altered Irish Nationalist tactics from Parliamentary supported Home Rule to a republican movement for Irish Independence. The actions of these secret societies between 1900 and 1916, during the Irish Revolutionary period,[1] are the reason that Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1922. The change from political negotiations by the ineffective Irish Parliamentary Party to the republican movement would never have happened without the Easter Rising of 1916. The centennial anniversary of this Easter Rising makes The Power of a Secret: Ireland’s Secret Societies and the Easter …

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …

When Ink Turned Into Bullets: The Effect Of The Press In Buffalo, New York And The Nation Along With Its Role In Igniting A Civil War, Nicole C. Kondziela

History Theses

The American Civil War was a multi-faceted conflict: North versus South, states’ rights versus federal law, slavery versus abolition. Due to increasing and constant advancements in technology, this was the first war in American history that developed in full view of the public through newspapers. The Industrial Revolution and capitalism allowed the press to evolve into rich and powerful soap boxes for political bosses and editors alike to voice their opinions far beyond the village square. Unbeknownst to much of the public at the time, the Union had been at the mercy of newspaper editors and politicians in a grand …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Civilizational Imperatives: American Colonial Culture In The Islamic Philippines, 1899-1942, Oliver Charbonneau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the colonial experience in the Islamic Philippines between 1899 and 1942. Occupying Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago in 1899, U.S. Army officials assumed sovereignty over a series of Muslim populations collectively referred to as ‘Moros.’ Beholden to pre-existing notions of Moro ungovernability, for two decades military and civilian administrators ruled the Southern Philippines separately from the Christian regions of the North. In the 1920s, Islamic areas of Mindanao and Sulu were ‘normalized’ and haphazardly assimilated into the emergent Philippine nation-state. Never fully integrated, the Muslim South persisted as an exotic frontier zone in the American and Filipino …

Everyday Farm Life In The Moxee Valley 1915-1950: Historical Ethnography, Terri Towner

All Master's Theses

This study collected oral histories of those who lived or worked in the Moxee Valley, within the greater Yakima Valley of Washington State from 1915-1950. It documents and records the historical and cultural processes of farm life and its evolution for people living in this foremost hop-growing region of the United States. The larger goal is to characterize the community and social processes for use as primary source documentation to create historically accurate programs at the Gendron Hop Ranch-Living History Farm near Moxee. Nineteen participants were interviewed. Topics addressed in the study include farming in the Valley, the household, roles …

Antithetical Commentaries On X, Y And The Disruption Of Being, Eva Rocha

Theses and Dissertations

Through discursive essays and poetic narrative, Antithetical Commentaries on X, Y and the Disruption of Being explores the tenuous relationship between modes of measurement and the struggle for human relevance in the post-contemporary digital age. In the introductory essay, “Not the Feather, but the Bird”, I give an overview of the inherent problems of object-oriented ontology, and how it relates to aesthetics and social issues of our times. In the Developmental Overview, I detail how I developed my installation approach and techniques, particularly with regard to the three-way dynamic of the artist:work:viewer relationship and how it can encourage …

Sanctioned Silencing, Symbolic Resistance: Race, Space, And Dispossession In A Marginalized South African Community, Killian Richard Miller

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

My field work and the written portion of my ethnography work through issues of marginality, state apparatuses, illusions of freedom, and making meaning in a context of oppression. All these power dynamics are historically-situated within the cultural context and community of Hangberg, a place forged by the race-based forced removals of Apartheid. British and Dutch colonization, Apartheid's racial regime, and the post-Apartheid oligarchical state, are all historical and contemporary authoritative forces that are impacting the everyday lives of people in Hangberg. Perspectives of power also serve as examples …