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Dreams To Reality, Annette Gomez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

Beneath the shade of the trees, I reflect on the weight of my family’s dreams and the determination it takes to pursue a degree. The clear blue skies and open spaces remind me that possibilities are just as boundless, even when the roads feel steep. Here, amidst the peace and beauty I find the strength to strive as a First-Generation Latina student.

A New Beginning, Jefferson Ramos

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

The purpose of my reflection is to demonstrate to other individuals, especially first-generation students, my experience with the college process, along with the obstacles I faced, the doubts, and everything that comes along with being the first person in your family to attend a higher education institution in the United States. In my reflection, I describe the process that I experienced, from the very beginning of high school to the start of my college journey. To finalize my reflection, I leave the reader with three important tips I have learned along the journey: being resilient, not being afraid of new …

My Experience, Gabby Flores

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This essay reflects personal experiences starting college and navigating new environments that are new to me.

Deceiving Angels Ii, Alejandra Rodriguez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

I share a dream with my family. The dream of graduating from college, getting a good job, and living a better life. A life where we won’t be financially tied down. I am now attending Loyola Marymount University and pursuing a degree in Animation. I’m the first in my family to pursue a degree in Film & Television, and even though I can’t help the thoughts that I should be doing something more “impactful,” I know that it’s my passion and that it is the combined efforts of my family and those who have helped me, that led me here. …

Trailblazin, Zahir Pineda

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

My "trailblazin" collage is just a collage of me and my brother as we grew up. It was just us two for the majority of our childhood and we were always pushed to make the most of our education here in the US. Growing up I always relied on him, and he made sure to be there to guide me and help me learn from his mistakes. Fast forward to now and we're both at LMU together, and the same way he trailblazed the path for me, I hope to do for my two younger siblings. It symbolizes what has …

Introduction

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

No abstract provided.

Family Dynamics In Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, Isabell Lachinpour

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This paper was originally a submission for my general psychology final. The prompt for it was to analyze any topic covered in class and connect to any form of fictional media. I chose to study the social psychology behind the relationships of immigrant parents and their children, connecting it to the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan. I especially picked this movie because of how connected I felt to the characters in the movie as I have gone through some of the same experiences they have and know many immigrant children that have felt …

Historical Methods Manual, Hollie Marquess, Brian Gribben

All Open Educational Resources

The Historical Methods Manual is a guide for history majors or students in history courses.

Combatting Road Accidents And Fatalities : The Colonial State, Voluntary Organisations, And Road Safety In Northern Rhodesia, 1940s-1964, Mbozi Santebe

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) experienced an increase in the use of motor vehicles from the late 1920s. Consequently, there was a rapid increase in the occurrence of road accidents from the 1940s onwards. The rise in cases of accidents attracted attention of the colonial state and other stakeholders that embarked on measures to improve road safety. Using a corpus of archival sources, this article examines the measures that the colonial state and voluntary organisations undertook to improve road safety in Northern Rhodesia from the 1940s to 1964. It contributes to scholarly works on the use of motor vehicles in Africa …

Criteria For Rejecting Ideas In African Philosophy : A Historical And Epistemological Analysis, Eric C. Mgalula

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

The rejection of African ideas remains a pivotal debate in African philosophy, centring on tensions between universalist epistemologies and culturally specific criteria. This study synthesizes fragmented discussions into a cohesive framework, interrogating when and why African ideas may be deemed inadequate. It critiques contemporary African scholarship that rigidly adheres to indigenous traditions under decolonial and nationalist imperatives, advocating instead for a balanced approach that harmonizes intellectual rigor with cultural authenticity. Through a historical analysis of key thinkers—from Tempels and Hountondji to Wiredu and Oyewumí—this article historicizes the evolution of evaluative criteria in African philosophy, challenging colonial legacies and romanticized traditionalism. …

The Reciprocity Of Misfortune: The Little Tradition Of Disasters In The Philippines, Greg Bankoff, Bianca Angelien Aban Claveria, David Lozada Iii, Camille L. Silva

History Department Faculty Publications

Just as there is a great and little tradition in religion and civilization, there is a great and little tradition in disaster. This article explores the origins of community resilience in rural areas of the Philippines based on local reciprocity and cooperation and how ­ these customary practices form the basis of national disaster risk-­reduction policies. The endless strug­gle to feed and shelter a family and contend with repeated hazards, whether natu­ral or human-­induced, promotes collective action. There is a need to cooperate with neighbors, a web of dyadic and community relationships born out of necessity that constitutes a “reciprocity …

Research Guide To Womanist Literature: Historical, Anticolonial, And Fictional Perspectives, Apoliana Da Conceicao Dos Santos

FIRE Fund Bibliographies

This bibliography was compiled for both research and teaching purposes, organized into three thematic categories reflecting a hemispheric, anticolonial, and womanist approach to knowledge production. The collection centers Black, Afro-Latin American, and feminist voices, offering alternative epistemologies that challenge Eurocentric, patriarchal, and colonial frameworks commonly reproduced in academic syllabi. It invites professors and students across disciplines to engage with scholarship and storytelling that foreground women's histories, theories, and creative expressions.

The first category, Historical Womanist Literature, examines testimonies, resistance, kinship, and survival of Black women under slavery and colonial rule across the Atlantic world, drawing extensively from histories of gendered …

Spa 619 - Seminar In Studies Of Hispanic And Latin American Cultures, Juan Jesús Payán

Open Educational Resources

SPA619 es un curso diseñado para estudiantes de los programas de maestría en literatura española y educación. En esta clase conocerás o revisitarás de manera crítica conceptos históricos socialmente construidos, pero que habitualmente se dan como realidades objetivas o empíricas. Problematizaremos, por ejemplo, no solo una noción panétnica reduccionista de la “cultura hispánica”, sino también la ficción de diferencia radical generada desde el nacionalismo exclusionista.

Aunque seguiremos un viaje cronológico a través de hitos de la historiografía hispánica, en este curso nos interrogaremos sobre la construcción misma de lo que damos en llamar “historia”. Para ello, no solo tocaremos principios …

Beyond The North Star: The Southward Flight Of Enslaved People To Mexico, Kayro Gonzalez

Theses (2016-Present)

When most people think of the Underground Railroad, they often picture brave individuals escaping the slave-owning South, seeking safety in the northern United States or Canada. However, it's essential to recognize that the fight for freedom went far beyond those regions. In 1830, Mexico abolished slavery, leading many escapees from enslaved areas across the United States. With freedom just a few miles away, hundreds of American slaves established several secretive and advanced routes into Mexico’s northern states, settling in newly founded free black colonies like San Lorenzo de los Negros and El Nacimiento de los Negros, among others. Using data …

Decomposition And Excavation Of War Memories And Massacres In Na Hong-Jin’S The Wailing, Grace Jung

BCES: Faculty Publications

This chapter examines Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016) as an allegory of South Korea’s unresolved colonial and Cold War traumas, arguing that the film’s deliberate ambiguity, cacophony, and generic instability reflect the difficulty of recovering histories of violence that have been suppressed, erased, or inadequately mourned. While scholarship on South Korean zombie cinema has frequently interpreted the zombie through neoliberal capitalism, economic crisis, contagion, and social alienation, this chapter locates the Korean zombie within a longer history of civil war, massacres, sexual violence, and authoritarian state repression. Drawing on Heonik Kwon’s concept of Cold War “decomposition,” the zombie …

The Black Curse: The Curse Of Ham And The Mark Of Cain As Justification For Black Subjugation, Margaret Phillips

History in the Making

The concept of race, particularly the construction of blackness and anti-blackness, emerged during the Medieval and Early Modern periods around the Mediterranean and its surrounding cultures. It is a concept of religious origin, in that it first depended on the worldview of the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam— and their interpretations of the narratives surrounding the Biblical figures Cain and Ham. This established the “mark” of black skin as a curse placed by the Abrahamic God that made up the foundational justifications for racial hierarchies and the subjugation of black Africans. The convenient narrative framed blackness as inherently inferior and …

English King And German Commoner: An Exploration Of Sixteenth Century Clothing And Identity, Bradley Moore

The Ozark Historical Review

There is perhaps no other external article which is more closely tied to one’s sense of identity than clothing. With a quick glance, one can readily gauge a person by their dress. So too, in the sixteenth century; clothing was used to construct identity, and in some cases to deconstruct it as well. This paper seeks to explore how identity and clothing are in many ways, inseparable. Concepts of religiosity, gender, nationalism, and “the other” were all intimately tied to dress and fashion. During the sixteenth century, perhaps even more strongly than now, clothing could be read like a book …

The Italian Colony Of São Paulo: Race, Class, And Cultural Capital In Brazil, Giulia Riccò

Race & Ethnic Studies

WINNER, 2024 ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PUBLICATION AWARD FOR A MANUSCRIPT IN ITALIAN LITERARY STUDIES, MODERN LANGUAGES ASSOCIATION

Introduces a way to study migration that privileges literary analysis over and against sociological data and insists on the importance of culture in the production of political identities

This book argues that Italians first became racialized as white in São Paulo, Brazil, at the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas Italians in the United States struggled with xenophobia and were often not fully acknowledged as white, in São Paulo, due to a series of social, economic, and cultural fac­tors, Italians became closely …

Books Of Interest Fall 2025, Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Books that may be of interest to scholars of the comparative study of civilizations, and may add significantly to the body of scholarship in the civilizational field. These books are also available for book reviews in future editions of Comparative Civilizations Review.

The Fragrance Muse: Musk As A Symbolic Tapestry In Classical Persian Poetry, Akbar Shirini, Shen Xudong, Zhao Dan

Comparative Civilizations Review

This paper explores the symbolic representation of musk in classical Persian poetry, uncovering its role as a multifaceted emblem of Iranian cultural identity and human experience. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of primary texts from the Ganjoor archive and secondary sources, the study traces musk’s historical significance across China, Iran, and Islamic world. In China, musk is prized for its rarity, medicinal properties, and metaphysical roles; in Iran, it intertwines with mythology, Zoroastrian cosmology, and trade; in Islamic contexts, it holds commercial and therapeutic value, cherished by figures like Mohammad. Within Persian poetry, musk transcends its material origins, symbolizing blackness …

The Female Body In Visual Narratives, Dolly Sharma

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

When a photographer seeks to capture the culture of a particular place inhabited by a minority group in society, a pertinent question arises as to how one might capture the female body in ways that avoid eroticisation while still conveying the photographer’s intent. The way photographers approach the Himalayan and Indian regions is particularly complex when they must decide whether to ask women to pose themselves in order to frame the multiple narratives that emerge out of a female body—such as motherhood, nurturing an infant, ornamentation and adornment, and the bodily manifestations of patriarchal and prejudicial practices. Photographer Olivier Föllmi, …

Refashioning The Meanings Of Dress In Palestinian Transnational Communities, Enaya Othman

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

This paper examines how Palestinian women in both the homeland and diaspora contexts have sustained and redefined cultural heritage through tatreez embroidery and revitalized the traditional thob since 1948. As designers, artisans, and entrepreneurs, they have transformed cultural dress into a site of socio-political agency, economic empowerment, and national identity-making. Their work not only preserves inherited forms but also recasts them as living cultural practices that resist colonial erasure and counter Orientalist and Western feminist narratives portraying Arab and Muslim women as passive. From post-Nakba efforts to safeguard thobs as tangible material testaments of Palestinian life to contemporary hybrid fashion …

The Layers Of Trauma In Gisella Perl’S I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz, Tiffany Sidders

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

Contemporary trauma theory argues that trauma operates in a binary, linear fashion that represents healing from a crisis. As one of the foremost trauma theorists, Cathy Caruth situates trauma within a binary framework of either victim or perpetrator but does not fully account for victims who became perpetrators or those who perpetrated for survival—or for the survival of others. One example of such a figure is Gisella Perl. In her memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, Perl describes multiple layers of trauma that create a deeper connection to her emotions and her lived experience in Auschwitz. Unlike other …

Flowing Progress: Transforming The Danube Through Infrastructure, Stefan Dorondel, Luminita Gatejel

Central European Studies

Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts …

Black Americans’ Strategic Disengagement In Digital Protest: A Thematic Analysis Of Youtube Responses To Latino Deportation Appeals (2025), Professor Meya E. Hargett

The Scholarship Without Borders Journal

This qualitative study, grounded in digital discourse theory, investigates Black Americans’ responses to the Latino community’s calls for protest support against federal deportation policies under the current U.S. administration. Twelve publicly available YouTube videos from Spring 2025 were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis to identify key patterns in Black discourse, including themes of strategic withdrawal, political disillusionment, solidarity fatigue, and historical tension.

This study defines 'stand down' as a deliberate, non-antagonistic decision to refrain from participating in another group’s protest movement. Findings indicate that disengagement is not rooted in apathy but is shaped by long-standing racialized experiences, ideological misalignment, and …

Elizabeth Female Academy: A Historical Case Study Revealing Antebellum Mississippi's Role In Shaping The Southern Belle, Summer Cutrer Tierno

Dissertations

Historians and educational scholars have extensively examined the subject of women's education, resulting in a rich body of literature that traces its evolution over the centuries. Moreover, this body of work encompasses significant movements advocating for women's rights to education and the establishment of colleges specifically for women. Scholars have also analyzed the challenges women encounter in accessing educational opportunities, including societal norms, economic barriers, and institutional discrimination. Notable works highlight the contributions of key figures, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who advocated for women's education in both historical and contemporary contexts. Overall, this comprehensive scholarship not only documents the advancement …

The Soldier Saint: Latter-Day Saint Veterans Of The Vietnam War, Cassie Evans

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This digital exhibit and accompanying paper explore the experiences and contributions of Latter-day Saint veterans during the Vietnam War, focusing on their role within both military and religious contexts. Despite representing only a small percentage of the American military forces in Vietnam, Latter-day Saints influenced the war's cultural and spiritual landscape. Through personal narratives, interviews, and historical analysis, the study sheds light on how these veterans navigated the complexities of their faith amidst the challenges of combat.

Additionally, it considers the relationship between military service and missionary efforts, highlighting how the presence of Latter-day Saint soldiers contributed to later religious …

Dreaming, Building, And Enduring Black Voices: Black Media In Omaha In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Elodie C. Galeazzi-Kelly

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation examines the purposes and roles of Black media in Omaha during the post–Civil Rights Era. It asks how African Americans and their allies in Omaha developed innovative media forms, institutions, and communication strategies to amplify Black voices, build community, and advocate for Black interests amid the rapidly shifting political and social landscape of the time. The study focuses first on three traditional forms of media (newspapers, radio, and television) and then broadens the definition of media to include key Black cultural institutions. These include a dramatic arts collective, a historical museum and archive, a memorial foundation, and an …

Critical Communication Pedagogy At The End Of The World, Tyler S. Rife

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This essay draws upon my experiences teaching the undergraduate course, “Communication at the End of the World,” to argue for an approach to critical communication pedagogy (CCP) contextualized by and reflexively responsive to planetary-scale ecological crises. I outline how five commitments have come to guide my classroom’s explorations through our topic of “end-times” communication: (1) Anthropocentrism and speciesism participate in the maintenance of social hierarchy; (2) environmental justice and social justice are intimately entangled projects; (3) ecological crisis is (re)made concrete, embodied, proximal, and implicative; (4) critique of language involves critique of humanism and humanist historicization; and, (5) ecologically just …

Full Issue 19.1

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.