Digital Commons Network^™

Marginality As Lens: Abū Ḥāmid Al-Qudsī’S Writings And Mamluk Urbanism, Moaaz Lafi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis takes the life and works of Abū Ḥāmid al-Qudsī (also known as al-Maqdisī), a Shāfiʿī jurist and Cairene historian who died in the late ninth/fifteenth century, as a point of entry into a central question: how was knowledge about the city produced in Mamluk Cairo? Addressing this question requires engagement with the multiple contexts, political, social, and religious, that shaped and conditioned the production of knowledge in that period. Moreover, a critical engagement with the author’s own biography, through a careful reading of biographical dictionaries and historical chronicles, is essential for uncovering further dimensions of how such knowledge …

Documenting Death: A Question Of Sovereignty In The Cairo Geniza, Thomas Adkins

Theses and Dissertations

How can death offer a case study for the question of sovereignty in eleventh to thirteenth century Egypt as it was performed by sovereigns, officials, and subjects alike, and, in this context, how can the documentary practices preserved in the Geniza be understood as an instrument to perform sovereignty? This thesis uses death as a case study in the same way that scholars of the medieval Islamic world have studied taxation, administration, and ceremonials to understand sovereignty as it was performed by the state, officials, and subjects. This performance of sovereignty by each implicated actor left a rich documentary trail, …

"Il-Lingwa Tal-Kċina": The Advocacy For The Maltese Language, 1930s–1940s, Elisabeth Fiorini

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In this project I investigate the understudied history of Malta and the Maltese language, focusing on the period of the Second World War. Going through newspaper archives and survivors’ accounts, I untangle the complex cultural shifts occurring in the British Colony of Malta, specifically with language. I argue that it was the intense bombing campaign of Fascist Italy––and later Nazi Germany––that led to the Maltese people to finally reject the Italian language and embrace their indigenous language along with British influences. This paper goes into the complex political and colonial history, looking at the British led breakdown of the diglossic …

“What Was Man Created For?”: Socialist Visions Of The Future In William Morris's News From Nowhere And Andrey Platonov’S Chevengur, Jasper Digennaro-Willcox

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper aims to expand on the various theories of socialist utopianism first put forward by Hegel and Marx, and later expanded by Frederic Jameson, through a comparative analysis of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur (1928). While Morris presents a coherent and optimistic vision of a post-capitalist society, where labor, art, and daily life are harmoniously integrated, Platonov’s destabilizes this vision, depicting a fragmented and ambiguous utopia shaped by revolutionary upheaval and competing philosophical influences. These two polarities of what the utopian novel can look like have both been underappreciated and misunderstood for very different …

Lack Of Effects Of Autistic Traits On Adjunct Control Processing, Alyssa Crezee

Theses and Dissertations

Autism has effects on social, communication, and information processing factors (American Psychological Association, 2022; Happé & Frith, 2006). Sentence processing is a type of information processing that synthesizes both discourse and local information (e.g., syntactic and morphological). This thesis explores potential effects of autistic traits on sentence processing in the context of adjunct control structures. In a two-part study, adult English L1 participants (n=118) were administered a self-paced-reading (SPR) task with comprehension and acceptability questions for task 1. Task 2 consisted of an online survey containing three standardized autism questionnaires: the Autism Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001), the Broad …

The Welfare System To Prison Pipeline In America: How Media, Policy, And Surveillance Extend The Reach Of Mass Incarceration Through Child Welfare Practices, Delaney A. Painter

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Scholarship across youth social policy, child welfare, media studies, and criminology has documented media driven moral panic, racial disproportionality in child welfare involvement, and foster-care-to-prison pathways as related but individual, distinct phenomena. Similarly, critical frameworks by Alexander and Ritchie trace how mass incarceration unfolds across marginalized communities, yet often begin analysis at points of formal criminal legal contact.

This paper builds on an integrated framework that identifies child welfare as a distinct and underrecognized branch of mass incarceration operating at an earlier stage of the life course. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, this analysis demonstrates how fear based media narratives shape …

Forced Dependency: The Subjugation Of Women Through Medicine In Ancient Greece And Rome, Evelyn J. Polovich

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

In the ancient Mediterranean men were in charge of every facet of life, including women’s medicine. They forced women out of the oversight of gynecology and reformed it into a method of control that they could assert in order to force women into a position of submission. This paper aims to bring the ways in which ancient medicine was influenced by cultural ideas and worked to subjugate women and allow men to gain further control over their autonomy. This research was inspired by the works of ancient physicians like Hippocrates, Soranus, and Galen, as well as contemporary sources that critique …

Drawing As Continuance: What Insists On Being Heard, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article extends She-Hero through an inquiry into drawing as a creation-centred practice of continuance. Five drawings are engaged as aesthetic encounters through which relational and perceptual shifts become perceptible, allowing inner authority to emerge as a cultivated capacity to remain responsive to what is unfolding. Drawing is approached as a site of metramorphic reconfiguration where imagination, memory, and embodied sensing participate in the decolonizing of perceptual habits and the restoration of relational ways of knowing.

The Intertidal Zone As Never-Ending Painting, Alison Shields

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

An intertidal zone, the area where the ocean meets the land is, by definition, in a constant state of change. As the tides move in and recede daily, the ecosystem continuously transforms as new stimuli are washed in and out, prompting constant motion. Tide pools are thus mini worlds, rhythmically changing throughout the days. I similarly view a painting as an ever-changing ecosystem, each layer responding to new elements while always evolving in relation to what came before. Throughout the past decade, I have sought out a space of not knowing, uncertainty and emergence through the development of both physical …

Showing It! Art Matters. But Why? How?, Holly Edwards

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article addresses the agency of art with reference to an exhibition entitled “The Nature of Spirit”.  That show appeared in the local public library, resonating strongly with notions of “heartwork”.  My first Artizein publication was written in response to 9/11, and this one maintains comparable urgency, seeking solace in art precisely when the world seems to be sliding into lunacy. The prose explores the powers of art in traumatizing times with words, while the images offer the reader insight and support energetically.

Text/Ures, Kathy Mantas

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

By entwining the voices of other co-creators, text and images, I share a brief site-specific photo-reverie of my life-long allure to trees—in this instance, by attending to the trees near my home. This offering is rooted in peripatetic aesthetic practices that embrace a slower creative approach and more spellbinding ways of living, learning and knowing. In essence, this is an invitation to have an artful encounter with text/ures of trees.

Attending The Way Of The Crane: Centring Our Lives Through Creative-Centred Work, Alexandra Fidyk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

A dreamscape using pastiche is used for reflecting upon the value of creative-centred practice and research. Attending to the image through reflection and circumambulation offers entry to a centring practice. In holding both, a new image emerged. The dreamscape—an unexpected scene of cranes in joyous dance—unfolds as actual dream and offers a metaphor for understanding an arc within the dreamer’s life. In this condensed yet nuanced rumination, personal and professional, poetic and haptic, participating and witnessing blur. This practice, the way of the Crane, is timely because it introduces relational pedagogy and testimonial teaching for our times—while touching the pulse …

The Verge, Reconsidered: Love, Salt, Seed, Time, Origin, Interweave––Triptychs In Conversation Across Time, Marna Hauk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Sparked particularly by the poetic and the emergent data conversation analysis from an earlier Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal article (Hauk & Kippen, 2020) piece, which discussed data from 2016, the author creates a contemporary “conversation” from visual and poetic material, in 2026, and imagines forward a further 10 years to 2036. The three-plated visual-poetic artworkings speak also back and forth across the verges of spacetimemattering, riding the dip and wave, tide and weave, of deeper time and meaning sensing, with visual and poetic material. The original article proposed collaborative workings with other researchers. This work imagines the artworkings and …

Mapping The Legacy Of Cinnabar Mining In California's Santa Ynez River, Lorrie Blair

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This essay is a reflection of an artist residency focused on the environmental legacy of California’s cinnabar mining. The mineral cinnabar is a primary source of mercury that was used to mine gold in California in the 1800s, and is still used globally. For this residency, I asked, “How can I creatively map the emotional and sensory landscapes of Cinnabar mining sites?” “How can art making serve to expose elements of an ecological crisis?” To answer these questions, I created cyanotypes made in and with the Santa Ynez River, which flowed through two abandoned cinnabar mines. Cyanotypes are made by …

Teaching The Eye To Slow Down: Attentive Noticing As Ecological Practice, Sara Ko

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This visual essay unfolds through acts of careful noticing. Drawing from materials encountered through repeated walks across forested landscapes on Vancouver Island, it translates moss, soil, plant matter, and animal traces into immersive digital environments. Working through atmosphere, texture, and shifting forms rather than fixed representation, the project explores how perception is shaped by time spent with what is often overlooked. Digital processes are used not to stabilize or explain, but to hold uncertainty, fragility, and partial presence. The work invites readers to slow their looking and consider how learning, relation, and meaning can emerge through sustained attention.

Red Thread Projects For Placentary Peace, Nané Jordan

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Red Thread Projects are aesthetic expressions of my placental, eco-birthing philosophies as an artisteducator- scholar with lifelong roots reclaiming midwifery, and compassionate mother-centred birth care. Uplifting “birth” within embodied, feminist epistemologies, I aim to re-vision with the Mother, writ large and small. Since 1997, I have been creating textile artworks with red thread, activating these through performances in nature, where artwork, body, and place become interwoven texts, gifting gratitude to and with Mother Earth. My arts-centred research contributes to community education that empowers birth-givers, while advocating for the embodied, love-infused potentials of birth for human thriving.

Moving Forward: The Pulse Of Arts-Centred Research [Editorial], Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial

Artizein Editorial Team: Movements And Transitions, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial overview of movements and transitions taking place with the Artizein editorial team.

About The Cover Art: Pulsing Renewal, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

“Pulsing Renewal,” featured on the cover of this issue, is part of River’s Invocations, a creation-centred inquiry exploring River's ecologies, relationality, and creation. The painting was chosen for its close affinity with the issue theme, The Pulse of Arts-Centred Research. The visual language of Pulsing Renewal—its movement, rhythm, and emergence—echoes the vitality, responsiveness, and ongoing renewal evident across the articles, artworks, and conversations assembled in this volume. The work is presented here as a thematic point of entry into the diverse inquiries that follow.

Full Issue_Artizein Arts And Teaching Journal, Darlene St. Georges, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Full Issue

Stages Of Belonging: The Yiddish Art Theatre’S Search For Its Home In New York City, 1918-1934, Octavia Chudnow

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the main form of entertainment for the Jewish immigrant community was shund (trash) theater: popular and commercial theater. Although many immigrants enjoyed this kind of entertainment, playwrights, artists, and intellectuals critiqued its place in immigrants’ lives, especially since shund revealed the process of assimilation and was considered low-brow art. In 1918, Maurice Schwartz opened the Yiddish Art Theatre to create high-brow art for Jewish audiences. In my essay, I focus on the company’s history between 1918 and 1934, on the theater’s move from downtown to Midtown and back to the Lower East …

To Be Known: Stories And Belonging, Jennifer Vermeer

Staff Work

"Stories not only give our kids a fresh perspective to see the world and themselves, but they also open opportunities for our kids to ask questions they might not know how to ask otherwise."

Posting about learning about ourselves through the stories of others from In All Things, an online hub that offers insight into maintaining and faithful and orthodox  Reformed Christian worldview while fearlessly engaging in  every aspect of contemporary life – until all is made new.

To Be Known

The Technology Of Tradition And Biology Of Narrative: New Analogies For The Study Of Homer And Epic, Eunice Kim

Open Access Fund Publications

In two separate, timely books Bozzone and Christensen draw from a wide range of scientific disciplines and modern parallels to consider how Homeric language and epic stories are in some ways living and alive. For Bozzone, who analyses the various formal features of Homer’s poetic technique by incorporating cognitive and linguistic frameworks, Homeric language is ‘living’ insofar as it operates on mechanisms analogous to those a speaker uses for natural languages and other kinds of speaking performances. Christensen, on the other hand, applies a series of biological analogies to epic poetry and imagines that the narrative of Homeric epic is …

Performance Arteries: From The Street To The Salon, Zoella Lin

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis concerns itself with navigating what it means to build community during a time of uncertainty. Specifically, it is an analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry in Les Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris alongside his figure of the flâneur as a way to understand the aporia of the modern world (modernity) as a way to inform how instances of connection can occur. The first chapter suggests that a close reading of Baudelaire's poetry gives us insight into what it means to live in this present moment by looking at how Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur navigated the rapidly changing world of …

The Influence Of Gustav Holst's The Planets On The Music Of John Williams, Kara Lewis

Senior Honors Theses

Throughout his six-decade career in film music, John Williams has achieved incredible success. Yet, one of the most prominent criticisms of Williams’ work is that it borrows heavily from classical repertoire. It is common to read that Williams stole from composers such as Gustav Holst. This paper examines in what aspects and to what extent the music of Williams takes inspiration specifically from Holst’s The Planets. Overall style and specific excerpts will be compared to demonstrate that, while the two share some characteristics, there is not an overall sameness of style. It shall also be demonstrated that certain excerpts …

2026-06-09 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from June 9, 2026.

Sermon On The Spectrum, Jan A. Wozniak

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

No abstract provided.

"Everyone Leaves Me Behind”: How Harmful Tropes In Fiction Impact Autistic Women, Sara E. Allard

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Until now, females with ASD have been ignored by healthcare professionals, policymakers, and the general public. The unique presentation of autistic women and girls is now in the cultural spotlight within not just the advocacy and scientific community, but also the arts. Female autistic characters are getting increased representation across literature and television, yet their narratives are still often stuck in the past. Most authors and screenwriters have yet to understand the specific struggles that female autistics face compared to their male counterparts, relying on the outdated, reductive perceptions that have plagued them for decades.

This article outlines three harmful …

Living Through Misinformation: An Autoethnography Of Autism In Chinese Communities, Joy Lu

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This critical autoethnographic essay examines how misconception, misinformation, and disinformation shape understandings of autism within Chinese communities and produce tangible harm for autistic individuals and their families. Drawing on lived experience, advocacy work, digital observation, and cross-cultural analysis, it explores how language, medical practices, social media, and professional authority sustain persistent misrepresentation.

The essay argues that this misinformation is not merely the result of ignorance, but a socially reinforced and institutionally supported system of knowledge. By situating personal encounters within broader cultural and structural contexts, it highlights the interconnected roles of language, power, and exclusion in shaping autistic lives. It …

Misinformation, Misattunement, And Autistic Theatre: Representation, Access, And Cultural Harm, Sarah J. Nuttall, Jessica Telling

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This article explores how autistic people experience theatre, showing that exclusion often comes not from individuals but from the way theatre spaces are designed and understood. Using audience feedback from Chameleon (Telling, 2025), an autistic-led production, we look at how common ideas about autism shape both what audiences expect to see on stage and how autistic people are treated in the theatre. Misinformation sets expectations about how autistic people should look, behave, and communicate, and these expectations influence how autistic presence is interpreted. We show how casting autistic performers, designing sensory‑aware environments, and inviting ongoing audience feedback can challenge these …