Digital Commons Network^™

Decoloniality, Identity, And Aesthetic Publicity, Monique Roelofs

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay explores how the decolonial practices of Latina poet Alicia Borinsky in Frivolous Women and Other Sinners(2009) and British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien in Lessons of the Hour (2019) occasion open-ended conceptions of the public that engage economic and technological developments in tandem with questions of individual encounters, objects, and values. Their figurations point beyond the domain of aesthesis to a view of aesthetic publicity on which unprecedented social identities emerge through interactions among multiple, often mutually opposed platforms and assemblies. The essay offers working definitions of aesthetic publicity and decolonial aesthetics and continues by scrutinizing …

The Art Of Social Justice, Jennifer Miles, Laura Dawson

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

As this HJSR special issue on social justice unfolded, it became clear to the editorial team that this publication would be incomplete without addressing the well-documented role of art in social justice movements. We asked two of our managing editors, Jennifer Miles and Laura Dawson, to research and write about this area of social action. They interviewed two artists, a spoken word performer and a visual artist, both of whom understand their art as part of larger social justice projects. These artists raise awareness, highlight obstacles and avenues for change, and create space for solidarity and sanctuary. The following montage …

Pippin, Department Of Theatre And Dance

Fall 2022

What are you willing to give to make your life extraordinary? What if you could have fame and glory handed to you? PIPPIN explores the journey of one young man who knows he’s meant to be great but knows not what it will cost. This multi-Tony Award-winning musical dazzles with exciting choreography and show-stopping songs by the writer/composer of Wicked, Stephen Schwartz.

Volume Cxlii, Number 8, November 11, 2022, Lawrence University

The Lawrentian

No abstract provided.

A History Of Ecofeminist: Socialist Resistance To Eco-Crisis In India, Gowri Parameswaran

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This article traces the history of women's environmental activism in India after independence. The earliest organizing efforts came from women from indigenous communities who wanted to collectively push back against government and private encroachments into communal lands. From the 1970s to the late 1980s, ecofeminism became a dominant paradigm to analyze and respond to environmental issues globally. Indian feminists adapted the model to analyzing ecological issues locally while also pushing back against its essentialism and its blindness to social and economic inequities. Indian eco(feminist) socialists demanded a centering of the voices of the most vulnerable communities in environmental movements. In …

A Material Stratum: Black Bodies And Environmental Exploitation In Edward P. Jones' The Known World, Julia Woodward

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper seeks to reckon with the entwined realities of black lives, environmental degradation, and the Anthropocene through engagement with Edward P. Jones’ 2003 novel The Known World and Kathryn Yusoff’s recent critical work on the Black Anthropocenes. Yusoff contends that, “Literally stretching black and brown bodies across the seismic fault lines of the earth, Black Anthropocenes subtend White Geology as a material stratum,” (xii). This paper will examine the ways in which Yusoff and Jones are in conversation, and try to elucidate the ways in which the Anthropocene is both built upon and a harbinger of mass death. How …

Intercultural Content Reuse And Social Justice: Comparing Chinese And U.S. Media Coverage Of Anti-Asian Racism During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Chenxing Xie

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The outbreak of COVID-19 as a global pandemic has brought human society tremendous pressure and significant changes. Asian Americans suffered from both the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Asian racism. Organizations were established to fight against anti-Asian hate and related crimes. An organization named Stop AAPI Hate publishes yearly reports regarding anti-Asian hate, and the content is reused by mass and social media worldwide. This study adopts theories of content reuse, intercultural communication, immaterial labor, and social justice to conduct a qualitative content analysis of the content reused by mass and social media in China and the United States. The results show …

Response To Mark Wilhelm: Dei, Great; Dws (Dismantling White Supremacy), Even Better, Vic Thasiah

Intersections

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Intersections

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of A Company's Inherent Values On Its Sustainability: Case Study Of Portuguese Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Charlie Lynch

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

SMEs are a significant portion of global corporations and, while individually might not compare to larger corporations in total emissions, holistically have significant impact. Therefore, understanding how a company's inherent values influence its ability to be sustainable is necessary to help inform the field. Thus, the project was focused on the influence of social, environmental, and economic values on the sustainability of a company. The study compared founder and company profiles generated from an interview with the founder and triangulated through secondary sources. The study found that the inherent values of Veganism, Ethical Drive, and Ecological Consciousness influenced mainly the …

The Future Of Architecture: Measuring The Sustainability Of Paradigm Shifting Architectural Interventions, Jake M. Cohen

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Sustainable development in the built environment seems paradoxical given that the architecture, construction, and buildings sector is one of most polluting, wasteful, and inefficient industries. Despite this notion, the role of the architect is evolving and their influence on design is expanding beyond ideas for physical structures and into designing interactions between the built environment and components such as policy, material usage, sustainability, and urban regeneration. Architects that are able to implement paradigm shifting design ideas that improve the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability can be catalytic for systemic change and act as a vehicle to move away …

How Spirituality Intensifies Sustainability: A Case Study Of Ananda Valley In Northern Portugal, Mia Handler

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The religious affiliations of citizens in the West are currently shifting away from the fundamentalist, traditional structures of the past towards more alternative spiritualities. Furthermore, as a result of the climate crisis, ecovillages are becoming increasingly popular. Ecovillages are intentional, “sustainable” communities that seek to reduce consumption, live in harmony with nature, and create strong social bonds. They are characterized by varying levels of spiritual involvement (Greenberg, 2014, p. 274). As such, the objective of this paper is to study the relationship between spirituality and environmentally-friendly practices and attitudes, using the ecovillage Ananda Valley – an Ananda Marga Master Unit …

A Planetary Imagination: Responses To Chakrabarty’S Socio-Natural Historiography, Editorial Introduction, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 essay in Critical Inquiry, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” sent tremors through the environmentally aware humanities in the 2010s. Last year, he published the book that brought that essay forward into the present, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. It’s no overstatement to think of this book as having clanged the bell for a new normal in the humanities and social sciences when it comes to telling the story of ourselves, that is, when it comes to human history. Responsible history should today be geological even when recounting the human record. Chakrabarty raised a …

Eco-Digital Pedagogies: Why And How Teaching The Green Humanities Can Shape Change, Laura Barbasrhoden

Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

[First paragraph] In Now You See It, interdisciplinary scholar and education leader Cathy Davidson points out a stunningly obvious truth about human perception: “Whatever you see means there is something you do not see” (290). Practitioners of the environmental humanities have long taken on tasks of seeing and saying what is not seen, what is not heard, from the vantage point of dominant ideologies, from consumerist economic models to the instrumentalist, anthropocentric rationalities that undergird them. Meantime, over the last few decades, we green humanities scholars have broadened our range of vision: studied more diverse texts, deepened analyses, and …

Resistance To Petro-Hegemony: A Three Terrains Of Power Analysis Of The Line 3 Tar Sands Pipeline In Minnesota, Melissa Burrell, Corrie Grosse, Brigid Mark

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

In northern Minnesota, the Line 3 tar sands pipeline crosses Indigenous treaty territory, the Mississippi River, and wild rice lakes. Despite the severity of climate crisis and widespread public opposition, Canadian pipeline company Enbridge succeeded in securing permits for, constructing, and ultimately running oil in the pipeline in fall 2021. How was this possible and how did the climate justice movement try to resist? Drawing on participant observation and interviews in the Stop Line 3 movement, this article employs LeQuesne's (2019) concepts of petro-hegemony and carbon rebellion to explain why Line 3 was approved and to assess water protectors' resistance. …

“Something Large And Old Awoke”: Ecopoetics And Compassion In Tracy K. Smith’S Wade In The Water, Kaitlin Hoelzer

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Susa Young Gates Award Essay

First Place

Both historical and contemporary Black poets have used their work to identify, condemn, and suggest solutions to problems stemming from racism in American society. Indeed, as Arnold Rampersad notes in his introduction to The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, many Black poets use “poetry as a vehicle of protest against social injustice in America.” Art is inherently political, even when its arguments do not overtly engage in political debates. As Lorraine Hansberry argues, all art is rooted in a particular social and political consciousness. The choice is “not whether one will …

Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …

Full Issue

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers And Africa’S Digital Futures, Treasa De Loughry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers and Africa’s Digital Futures,” Treasa De Loughry focuses on different visual responses to e-waste in West Africa, from eco-documentary film and photography responses to the infamous Agbogbloshie e-waste yard in Ghana; to techno-utopian visions of e-waste bricoleurs, and e-waste as a signifier and artefact of the neocolonial nature of the capitalist world-ecology. The first half of this article focuses on Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes’ documentary film, Welcome to Sodom (2018), grounding it in critiques of the transmedial influence of the documentary form, while attending to the film’s pyrotechnical “optical regime” (Schoonover). …

Women Of The Wolf, Rosemary Sekora

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This is a creative thesis that introduces the novel Women of the Wolf and discusses the writer’s influences and research progress. Themes within the novel will include women relationships, cult culture, religious influences, and Native American (mis)representation. The sample included is the first ten pages from the novel.

Advisor: Timothy Schaffert

The Child In The Basement: Debilitating Mechanisms In American Science Fiction, Tessa Swehla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the tension between progressive narratives about the future that often frame disability as a medical condition with no place in the future and deliberate debilitation of certain populations for the sake of commodification. These two ideas would seem in conflict with one another, but together, they form a strategy of control. Using the interconnected discourses of medicine and US science fiction, this project synthesizes ideas from debility and disability theory, posthuman studies, medical humanities, and computer science and programming to demonstrate how these two ideas coexist. Each section includes an interchapter that introduces the key idea and …

Social Justice And Exponential Functions: Using Pandemic Data To Increase Student Understanding, Jane Friedman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This paper describes a class activity based on real data about COVID-19 death rates in California. The activity helps students learn about exponential functions while providing an opportunity to integrate social justice concerns into the mathematics classroom.

Remembering Drew Christiansen, S.J., Distinguished Advisor On Peacebuilding For The U.S. Catholic Bishops, Gerard Powers

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Environment, Power, And Justice : Southern African Histories, Graeme Wynn, Jane Carruthers, Nancy J. Jacobs

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these historical and locally specific case studies analyze and engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity.

This book highlights the ways poor and vulnerable people in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have mobilized against the structural and political forces that deny them a healthy and sustainable environment. Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these studies engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity. Some chapters track the genealogies of contemporary activism, while others introduce positions, actors, and thinkers not previously identified with environmental justice. Addressing health, economic …

Winding Down River Road, Gillian Harper

LSU Master's Theses

As a mechanism to explore my temporary home in Louisiana, Winding Down River Road is a collection of artworks that integrates natural materials collected from landscapes in southern Louisiana with steel and petroleum-based products. My interest in researching environmental issues, ecology, and industry has shaped my vehicles for observation and how I generate data. Through a variety of methodologies, I am considering how climate change is forcing many of us to re-contextualize how our home can be affected by the very industries we rely on. Personal engagement with residents living in the dystopian atmosphere of southern Louisiana’s industrial corridor and …

The Firefly Trapper, Jona Pedersen

Floodwall Magazine

No abstract provided.

Final Master's Portfolio, Amy Hromiak

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio represents the work I completed over the two-year Master of Arts in the field of English program with a focus on teaching. The first paper, “Dystopian Literature IS a Call to Action: Teaching The Hunger Games in High School,” is a teaching-based project that discusses positive ways to incorporate dystopian young adult literature, and more specifically, The Hunger Games, in high school ELA curriculum. The second paper, “Chaos is Monstrous in Wuthering Heights,” is a research-based analytical project that discusses the idea that what makes Heathcliff monstrous is the chaos that he embodies. Overall, these projects …

Full Issue 16.1

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Mass Violence, Environmental Harm, And The Limits Of Transitional Justice, Rachel Killean, Lauren Dempster

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The relationship between the environment and mass violence is complex and multi-faceted. The effects of environmental degradation can destabilize societies and cause conflict. Attacks on the environment can harm targeted groups, and both mass violence and subsequent transitions can have harmful environmental legacies. Given this backdrop, it is notable that the field of transitional justice has paid relatively little attention to the intersections between mass violence and environmental degradation. This article interrogates this inattention and explores the limitations and possibilities of transitional justice as a means of addressing the environmental harms associated with mass violence. The article makes four key …

Climate In Crisis: Art And Activism At The Brooklyn Museum, Nancy B. Rosoff

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This paper explores the Brooklyn Museum’s activism-centered museum practice as exemplified by the exhibition Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas. The exhibition presents the collections of Indigenous art from North, Central, and South America through the lens of climate change and its impact on the survival of Indigenous people. The main thesis is that the current climate emergency is part of a longer history of environmental colonialism that began five hundred years ago. For millennia, Indigenous communities throughout the Americas have maintained profound and expansive relationships with the natural world. However, beginning in the 1500s, Europe’s …