Digital Commons Network^™

Rooted In Between, Manavi Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Rooted in Between is a personal project that explores the complexities of belonging and the emotions that come with navigating between spaces that we call home. This written thesis is in support of the carefully curated video based and photographic work presented at an exhibition of the same title. The project's primary objective is to delve into the physical and emotional baggage that we carry with us as we move from one place to another. The project highlights the coping mechanisms adopted by the different generations in my family while struggling to find a place where we truly belong.

Bibliography, Kristi Branham

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Kristi Branham.

Identities Of Women In Indian Art And History, Nalini Rao

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The stereotypical image of Indian women portrayed in the art of stone sculpture is often interpreted as images of beauty that are sensuous, religious as well depict social life. There are historical reasons for depicting her as such. This paper inquires into the changing depiction and social forces that influenced feminine imagery. This paper examines the portrayal of beauty through idealization of female body which has evolved over the centuries in India. It also aims to understand their changing status and explores issues of feminine identity, status, and empowerment largely in ancient and medieval India. It also provides a brief …

Intelektuwal Na Talambuhay Ni Bonifacio P. Sibayan: Muhon Ng Pagpaplanong Pangwika At Bilingguwal Na Edukasyon Sa Pilipinas, Jay Israel B. De Leon

Malay Journal

Nilalayon ng papel na ito na pag-aralan ang buhay at mga gawa ni Bonifacio P. Sibayan (1916–2005), isang Pilipinong lingguwista, sa pamamagitan ng isang intelektuwal na talambuhay. Partikular nitong sinisiyasat ang kaniyang mga ideya bilang tagapangunang iskolar ng pagpaplanong pangwika sa Pilipinas. Pangunahing ginamit ang mga primaryang batis na nasusulat, katulad ng mga aklat at mga artikulo, at di-nasusulat, katulad ng personal na panayam sa mga iskolar na nagkaroon ng personal na interaksiyon kay Sibayan. Ginabayan naman ng metodong biograpikal, partikular ng anyong iskolarli-historikal, at balangkas ng intelektuwal na talambuhay ang pagsusuri ng papel. Tatlong pangunahing tema ng mga ideya …

Peat And Patty: Providing A Voice For Nature Through Animation, Clinnie Brinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Peat and Patty is a 3D animated short story of a young scientist, Patty, and her pet parrot Peat, whose goal is to save their world from a dying ecosystem. Ultimately, they inadvertently receive help from a nearby polar bear which leads to the success of Patty's experiment. The purpose of this story is to highlight the dangers of global warming to our own ecosystem thus building eco-consciousness in viewers. We currently have natural disasters increasing in frequency, a rising global temperature, and pollution in our bodies of water (Rossati). By personifying nature, animation can invoke empathy from viewers towards …

Domesticating Space: Media Production Pedagogy For The Empowerment Of Marginalized Youth, Maarit Jaakkola, Linda Sternö, Elias Fryk

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This article investigates the role of space in media and information literacy (MIL), especially when supporting learners’ production skills. The MIL framework is to a great extent focused on deconstruction of messages in a private position of reception, while the theoretical, didactic and ethical components of the production pedagogy are less developed. This multiple-case study analyses the situated agency of young people in a vulnerable position with regard to the spaces where agency is sustained. We develop the concept of production context into a more specific concept of production space and apply it to the film club in a suburb …

Black Female Athletes’ Use Of Social Media For Activism: An Intersectional And Cyberfeminist Analysis Of U.S. Hammer-Thrower, Gwen Berry's 2019 And 2021 Podium Protests, Ariel Newell

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Much attention has been paid to Black male athlete activism both historically and in the contemporary movement for black lives. Black female athletes have also made historic contributions as activists, and they continue to do so. However, Black female athlete activism has not always been acknowledged or heard. This is a problem, as Black women in American sports and society face overlapping racial and gender inequities and injustices that distinctly marginalize and oppress them. However, some Black female athlete activists (BFAAs) have begun using social media to challenge media narratives about themselves, to redefine what it means to be a …

Quarantined Across Borders: Theorizing Embodied Transnationalism, Precarious Citizenship, And Resilience For Collective Healing, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Aisha Durham, Joëlle M. Cruz

Media Studies - All Scholarship

Embodied transnationalism is characterized by intimate experiences of human-made political borders that define, limit, and restrict flows of the “Other.” In the Quarantined Across Borders collection, contributors from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds address the material and discursive differences in how they experience the pandemic in terms of a public health crisis and public policy response that intersects racialized gender, class, citizenship status, and profession.

Theorizing The Spiritual-Secular Binary In Modern And Contemporary Art Of – And By Artists From – The Swana Region, Valerie Gonzalez

Regards

The present article critically examines the spiritual–secular binary in modern and contemporary art from the SWANA region and by artists with heritage from that region who live or have lived elsewhere. Given this binary’s origin in the European Enlightenment’s view of religion, and its epistemic canonization through post-Enlightenment ideas on art and culture in the colonial era, this examination is carried out within the framework of current decolonizing art historical discourses and their postcolonial background.
The reflection begins with a key moment of global modernism, underpinned by the colonial diffusion of secularism. It then proceeds to explore the cultural shifts …

Ambient Athleticism: Politicizing Akira’S Accelerationist Olympiad, Thomas G. Chaplin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis politicizes Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated cyberpunk film, Akira, specifically through how it stages its myriad neoliberal crises as opportunities for accelerationist solutions mediated by the Tokyo Olympics. Akira’s display of fully animated and intense action physics produces an aesthetic relation to its own athletes that contracts around their bodies in an attempt to transgress classical and oppressive compositions. Akira’s vague utopic promise receives broad acceptance and affirmation by extant scholarship, often relying on the accelerative impulses found in the works of Gilles Deleuze to substantiate Akira’s hopeful ending. Invoking Gilles Deleuze’s notion of athleticism, this thesis critically rereads …

Deconstructing The University: Contemporary Dei, Neoliberal Rationalities, And The Abolition Of The Administrative Apparatus, Jonah Henkle

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

The following chapters attempt to develop some working theories to combat capitalist exploitation and racist and gendered oppression in the university, culminating in a call for the abolition of the university’s administrative apparatus. The project is divided broadly into two parts, which are referential to each other, but maintain slightly different areas of focus. Part 1 details a preliminary critique of the political-economy of the contemporary neoliberal university, drawing influence from Marxian economics and structuralist theories of ideology, critiquing contemporary discourses of diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI). Part 2 focuses more directly on issues pertaining to oppression and difference, maintaining …

Girls From The Heights: From Mexican Spitfire To Maddy Perez, Gabi Martinez

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

The stereotype of the “Spicy Latina” is as prevalent today as it was in the early days of film, and tracing its origins leads to the discovery of a complicated root system of prejudice and stereotype. From the days of Lupe Velez and the film Mexican Spitfire, to the TV shows Modern Family and Jane the Virgin, Hollywood has never seemed to know how to portray Latinas in all of their complexity. This paper investigates how the white male gaze has shaped the perception of Latinas in the media, and how even the modern, more diverse media landscape contributes …

Religious Hegemony And "Muslim" Horror Movies, Shaheed N. Mohammed

Journal of Religion & Film

The present paper examines horror films originating in Muslim contexts and available on U.S. streaming services. Using Gramsci's concept of hegemony, the paper examines how such films negotiate and articulate with the dominant Hollywood mainstream horror genre with particular attention to the hegemonic power of the mainstream with its Christian iconography and assumptions.

Life In The Multiverse: Bringing Chaos Out Of Order?, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper was given as the opening keynote address at the International Conference on Religion and Film at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on June 8, 2022, and is here presented in that form.

My thanks go to those who organized the conference for Vrije Universiteit, notably Professor Johan Roeland and Miranda van Holland.

Unearthing Montreal’S Past In Hochelaga, Terre Des Âmes, Marla Epp

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

[First paragraph] In his 2017 film, Hochelaga, terre des âmes (Hochelaga, Land of Souls), Québécois filmmaker François Girard delves into the complex history of Montreal. When a sinkhole appears in a football stadium, the site becomes an archaeological dig, led by a Mohawk graduate student at the Université de Montréal. The film tracks the progress of the dig, unearthing layers of history and revealing the stories of the generations of people who lived on the land, including the Indigenous peoples who lived there first.1

Analog Matters: Labels, Cassettes, And Alternative Economies In Argentina’S Independent Music Scenes, Maria Agustina Checa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of current cassette production and circulation in Argentina. It analyzes the work of independent labels that record music available online onto cassette tapes, incorporating a variety of music styles. I examine practices of production, circulation, and exchange, and the alternative economies performed around cassettes, with particular attention to the materialities constituting these processes. Through cassettes, I conceptualize and trace "relational value," a notion to understand objects with different kinds of social agencies valued for their abilities to generate connections. Relational value is a theoretical construct that emerges from the ground-up approach to studying …

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay, Sourit Bhattacharya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern …

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). …

Signs Of The Inhuman: Hauntings And Lost Futures In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’S La Compañía, Marcela Romero Rivera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as …

Returning To The Past To Rethink Socio-Political Antagonisms: Mapping Today’S Situation In Regards To Popular Insurrections, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Hernán Scholten, David Pavón-Cuellar, Gonzalo Salas, Oscar Ariel Cabeza, Jesús William Huanca Arohuanca, Sergio J. Aguilar Alcalá

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article seeks to elaborate a map or cartogram based on a number of protests and social mobilizations that took place in different parts of the world -mainly in Latin America, but also in Europe and Asia. Beyond the data and figures available from various sources, which never speak for themselves, an interpretation is proposed here to reveal the meaning of these events. In other words, by displaying a map of these social movements, the authors propose not only the visualization of a collection of data, but also an illumination of these events in the light of history. From there, …

Necropolitics And Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ In Hong Kong After Rancière And Mbembe, Anthony Siu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “Necropolitics and Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ in Hong Kong after Rancière and Mbembe,” Anthony Siu examines images from Defiance.Voices, a two-volume collection that gathers photography and art illustrations about the Hong Kong Protests. He studies how paintings from the second volume register politics and events, arguing that visual art can be viewed as a new form of “speculative fictions,” a material ontology that historicizes modes of sovereign violence in postcolony. The introduction situates the debate of aesthetics in Hong Kong, conjoining Rancière’s thinking on “the people” and Achille Mbembe’s philosophy on “necropolitics.” The first cluster of …

Fredric Jameson And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’S Periodizing The Black Internal Colony, Jeremy Matthew Glick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for …

Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ And ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth In Urban China, Diego Gullotta, Lili Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to …

Breadtube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats To Spread Countercultural Ideology, Jj Sylvia Iv, Kyle Moody

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of …

Periodizing The Residuality Of A Composite Protest Art Form: The Case Of Telangana Dhoom Dham, Vamshi Vemireddy, Sasi Kiran R. Mallam

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article will document the emergence of the composite art form of “Dhoom Dham” in the state of Telangana, a southern state from India. A mixture of folk song-and-dance routines interspersed with political speeches, Dhoom Dham emerged as a potent form of political protest during the Telangana statehood movement and dominated the cultural imaginary of the movement. It has the characteristics of a residual cultural form as conceptualized by Raymond Williams. Dhoom Dham masterfully combined the elements of folk and repurposed the left protest music traditions to help the cause of the formation of separate state of Telangana. …

Sounding The State Of The World: Interview With Karim Rafi, Summer 2021, Matthew Brauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from …

A Case Of Pandemic Narrative And The End Of Post-Cold War, Yongbing Jin, Penghan Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The topical book Wuhan Diary, authored by the Chinese writer Fang Fang during the COVID-19 lockdown of Wuhan, is not so much a diary as a “becoming-diary,” given its performative practices. Wuhan Diary’s emphasis on the individual or private nature of its writing activity is attributable to its characteristic realistic conception of authenticity, which resulted historically from the humanist trend within Chinese literature in the 1980s as a significant element of post-socialist realism. Insofar as Wuhan Diary claims an overarching authorship that does not cohere with—or is, indeed, utterly subverted by—its textual complexities, it can be interpreted as …

Biopolitics In The Twenty-First Century: India And The Pandemic, _ Swatie, Rashee Mehra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Swatie and Rashee Mehra discuss in their "Biopolitics in the Twenty-first Century: India and the Pandemic”, the rise of the biopolitical state in India in the 2020s. The article emphasizes the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics for the pandemic in India. The biopolitical governmentality of the Indian state operates at several levels to politicize ‘life itself’: racism (the notion that sections of the population are disposable), economics (the notion of privatization of care), and the logic of contagion (based on ideas of threat perception and risk). The article engages with biopolitics in the 21st century and looks at …

Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a …

Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Marty Gilroy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city …