Digital Commons Network^™

Controlled Observation: The Challenges Of Therapy For The Mentally Ill Incarcerated Population, Esther Tingué

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Popular perception and objective of incarceration is confinement, brutality and in some cases inhumane conditions. But what about the incarcerated population who suffer from the additional burden of mental illness? How does confinement affect mentally ill inmates? This capstone project asks: (1) how do individuals/organizations provide rehabilitative services in this evolved culture of crime and punishment? And (2) how is therapy provided in a restricted environment? I examine these questions from the perspective of the therapist, the person who (in a restricted environment) takes on the responsibility of treating and managing the effects of mental illness for this population.

Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crafting Girlhoods emphasizes nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American girls' agency and creativity within the prescribed limits of educational crafts—including sewing and periodical-making. My first section shows how girls use psychological means to resist the cultural and gendered imperatives of sewing and tidiness, while my second section shows how girls resisted the censorship and harassment that the newspaper and periodical forms allowed by creating intimate communities in the pages of their periodicals that could help them negotiate these difficulties. In both cases, I will show how the craft forms themselves were their own antidote to the constricting force …

Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will argue that New Deal legislation accounted for increased importance placed on consumers and the articulation of consumer citizenship as female during the Great Depression. Once New Deal programs and legislation determined and legitimized the consumer citizen, the consumer citizen exercised influence though purchasing power. Analyzing the ways the federal government defined women as consumer citizens through programs like the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle Campaign offers important insight into who was considered to have a voice. Notions of citizenship define groups by who has the necessary attributes and qualifications—in this case the means to purchase goods—to be …

Fair World 64: A Text-Based Game Of The 1964–1965 World's Fair, Christofer R. Gass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project is a text-based game of a typical day during the first season of the 1964 World’s Fair in what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The 1964-1965 World’s Fair, that Robert Moses presided over as president, was one of the largest and most expensive fairs ever created, but only days after the last fairgoer left through the turnstile most of the many pavilions that brought education, entertainment, and joy to so many people were destroyed to leave a vast open space that is relatively empty to this day. Although most of the pavilions were either relocated or demolished, there …

“The Amazing Iroquois”: Haudenosaunee History In Myth And Memory, 1776–1955, John C. Winters

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is a history and memory study of Iroquois exceptionalism. This is an idea that shaped our understanding of the Iroquois as the “most studied” Indian nation and that they, as the debunked Iroquois Influence Thesis claimed, influenced the structure and scope of the U.S. Constitution. My study examines the lives of four related (by blood and by claim) Seneca leaders: Red Jacket, Ely S. Parker, Harriet Maxwell Converse, and Arthur C. Parker. These four stand out because each was one of the most famous Native Americans of their generation who worked within and against American colonial society and …

Creating New Suns: Early Examples Of Afrofuturist Literature, Makeba Lavan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the last twenty years, specifically with the summer 2002 issue of Social Text edited by Dr. Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism has become a serious focus for academic inquiry. For people familiar with the term, Afrofuturism is presented as a movement borne of our contemporary moment. However, this dissertation explores the ways in which Afrofuturism is actually a cornerstone for both African American literature and the struggle for civil/human rights. I do this by exploring the following questions: How does the enslavement of African/ African Americans and its aftermath play out in early African American literature? How do African Americans writers …

Political Fictions: Black Feminist Novels Of Slavery And The Narrative Of The American Left, Elizabeth A. Foley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

African-American women at the turn of the 1970s were the ostensible beneficiaries of the multiple liberation movements that had arisen during the previous decades: the civil rights movement, Black Power, second-wave feminism, and the gay rights movement. But black women’s unique vantage point at the crossroads of multiple forms of discrimination – a position that would eventually necessitate the coining of the term intersectionality – allowed them to see the failures and shortcomings of each of these movements with a clarity that often escaped their political peers, and brought home to them the necessity of creating their own movement, one …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

The Life And Death Of Mambo: Culture And Consumption In New York's Salsa Dance Scene, Carmela Muzio Dormani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades salsa dancing has become a global phenomenon, spawning a variety of styles and levels. Although formerly passed from person to person through Latinx family and community networks, salsa dance has long been practiced in a more codified way. Today, salsa is largely reproduced in dance studio classes, congresses, and competitions collectively referred to as “the salsa scene”. In New York City, the salsa scene retains vestiges of Nuyorican and Afro-Caribbean identity, though it is practiced by people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and marketed to a global base. Building on long term participation observation and nearly …

Dear Black Child: A Discussion On The Formation Of Identity For African Diasporic Adolescents In The U.S., Sokhnagade B. Ndiaye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this capstone project, I am using art, photography, and music to depict the experiences of African diasporic youth in the United States. I will explore the white supremacist systems that contribute to the anxiety that comes with being a black child in America. In this project, I plan to discuss the ways in which African diasporic adolescents develop their identity and consciousness and the ways in which living in American society helps and/or hinders the development of this identity and consciousness. I argue that living in the United States forces black youth to form double and triple consciousnesses, which …

Revisioning Popular Narratives Of Trans Lives, 1952–1976, Melina A. Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation calls for a reconsideration of popular narratives and visual media created by or written about trans people in the United States prior to Stonewall. Grounded in research conducted at the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California, the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the Transgender Collection at Yale University, “Revisioning” argues that the texts that trans readers collected, exchanged within communities, and engaged with in their own writing and scrapbooking are essential to the historicization of trans identity at midcentury. By extending …

Faqs For Administrators And Leaders At Community- And Faith-Based Organizations, Centers For Disease Control And Prevention

Pandemic Response and Religion in the USA: Health

This is the Frequently Asked Questions webpage from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention designed to help places of worship prevent the spread of COVID-19 in their congregations. The FAQ page includes prevention strategies, community outreach strategies, and how to decide if services should be in person or virtual. Issues such as discrimination and marginalized populations are discussed on the FAQ page.

Community And Faith-Based Organizations: Plan, Prepare, And Respond, Centers For Disease Control And Prevention

Pandemic Response and Religion in the USA: Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

"The Jeep Is Here To Stay!" Projections Of America And Franco-American Relations During World War Ii, Connie L. Gentry

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

During World War II, the Office of War Information produced American and Allied propaganda that was used at home and abroad. Robert Riskin, head of the Bureau of Motion Pictures Overseas Branch, was responsible for creating Projections of America, a documentary film series made to introduce foreigners to America whilst combating negative impressions of Americans that arose in the interwar years. Films from Projections of America contained themes of American culture, ideology, industry and technology, and democracy. In France, these films were used to sway French opinion of Americans while promoting friendship and appreciation for American culture. Ultimately, the …

The Bird Woman, Erinn Beth M. Langille

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

No Longer Fenced Out: Outlaw Media Discourse And Resistance To Gentrification In Greenwich Village, Joseph Francis Gallegos

American Studies ETDs

Greenwich Village is a so-called “gayborhood” that accepts and welcomes LGBT people. However, Greenwich Village has been undergoing gentrification for the past few decades, and this process exists due to a police-created order of violence that subjugates and displaces queer people and people of color. This order seeks to create a space that is friendly to capital and wealth.

Resistance to these strategies requires tactics that do not necessarily hew to mainstream methods of getting a message out, such as using mainstream media to make a case against gentrification. These often fail, as they will fall on deaf ears of …

"I Speak For The Preservation Of The Union" : Daniel Webster, Law, And Morality In The Writings Of The American Renaissance, Rebecca Nicole Girardin

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Daniel Webster, one of the most prominent politicians and orators in American history, effectively ended his political career on March 7th,1850. Webster’s support of the Compromise of 1850 included the Fugitive Slave Law, which forced Northern complicity in the return of captured fugitive slaves. Webster supported the legislation because he interpreted the law based on precedent and a notion of “natural law” determined by geography rather than morality. In this thesis, I look at how two writers of the American Renaissance, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used literature to critique the understanding of law promoted by Webster in …

Pleasure Is All Mine, Lola Ogbara

Graduate School of Art Theses

One’s identity is shaped by many factors such as race, culture, physical appearance, nationality, and religion—amongst many more. As an artist, the subjugation of identity in the context of race, gender, and sexuality is a world I examine closely. Subverting myths of sexual deviancy and racial inferiority that perpetually pathologizes Black feminine sexuality, I often use and reference my own body to create avenues of power through physical and intellectual pleasure. Through material use of clay, metal, photography, and installation, I emphasize on how contemporary Black social cultures are able to write their own narratives in order to further progressions …

“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. …

Epic On An American Scale: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Tiffany M. Messick

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

I am pleased to submit an original research article entitled “Epic on an American Scale: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio” for consideration for publication in Beyond the Margins. In this article I examine the link between ancient Greek epic and American Midwestern Agrarianism. Specifically, I examine how Greek and Roman epic influenced Modernism as evidenced in one of the earliest Modernist works, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I find that Anderson employs many epic elements to convey the link between the two empires and emphasize the epic nature of the collapse of American Agrarianism.

I believe my article would be a …

Going Slumming In Mexico: Rereading Primitivism In Katherine Anne Porter’S Flowering Judas And Other Stories, Annika M. Schadewaldt

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in-Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in Mexico crucially shaped her artistic vision, there is less agreement on the specificities of her image of …

"The Fact Of The Black Poet": Four Phenomenological Interviews With Prominent American Writers On The Impact Of The Furious Flower Poetry Center, Karen E. Risch Mott

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The purpose of this study was to discern the impact, if any, of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the United States’ first academic center devoted to Black poetry. A qualitative approach centered on semi-structured phenomenological interviews was applied, and four nationally acclaimed poets were recruited for a purposive sample: Jericho Brown, PhD; Toi Derricotte, MA; Tyehimba Jess, MFA; and Evie Shockley, JD, PhD. Emergent themes were identified based on content analysis by hand-coding transcripts; these findings lead to a conclusion that Furious Flower’s impact on the poets has been significant and consistent in three ways: 1) creating a platform for …

The Rise Of Totalitarianism, Colonial Mimicry, And Gender And Sexuality In The Twentieth Century English Literature, Shahin Hossain

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Shahin Hossain provides an alternative reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.

Sacralizing The Secular: Preserving Space In Sarah Orne Jewett’S “A White Heron”, Maria Catherina Capozzoli

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The tides have changed. Mountains have shifted. But, Sarah Orne Jewett’s zealous love for country remains unaffected. She is the sweet fragrance of peonies and roses infusing the American literary canon. Sacralizing the Secular: Preserving Space in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” explores Jewett’s invention of a form suitable to the nature of her experience of country life allowed her to depict the instinctive and organic symbiotic relationship between man, woman, child, and nature in her short story, “A White Heron”: a benchmark of eco-criticism. This Earth-centered approach is informed by Cheryll Glotfelty, who set out to create the …

A Is For Asylum Seeker / A De Asilo [Toc], Rachel Ida Buff, Alejandra Oliva

Sociology

A clear and concise A to Z of keywords that echo our current human rights crisis

As millions are forced to leave their nations of origin due to political, economic, and environmental peril, rising racism and xenophobia has led to increasingly harsh policies. A mass-mediated political circus obscures both histories of migration and longstanding definitions of words for people on the move, fomenting widespread linguistic confusion. Under this circus tent, there is no regard for history, legal advocacy, or jurisprudence. Yet in a world where the differences between “undocumented migrant” and “asylum seeker” can mean life or death, words have …

Forgiveness, Freedom And The Inmate Issue, Taylor Smith

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Forgiveness Freedom and the Inmate Issue:

It is no secret that the United States has a mass incarceration problem. The war on drugs, traffic violations, and the Three Strikes Law, are just pieces of the systems being used to repeatedly place people behind bars. What we are facing now as a society is the repercussions of reintegrating under educated, digitally literate, mentally abandoned individuals back into society. In addition to post jail operatives like parole fees, fines and probation scheduling are re-sentencing these individuals into a society they no longer relate to, that socially struggle to adapt to and that …

Gender, Race, And Class In Various Aspects Of American Literature: A Portfolio, Harry Olafsen

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Harry Olafsen takes a closer look at various texts in American Literature, including women in 1960s country music, Us directed by Jordan Peele, and southern women's diaries from the Civil War.