Digital Commons Network^™

Mixed Race Futurity Through Contemporary Archetypes: Mutants, Cyborgs And Dhampirs, Kobe Jackson

Masters Theses

Analysis of Enlightenment philosphes reveals how the contemporary archetypes, mutants, cyborgs and dhampirs may be situated as sources for understanding mixed race positionality. Arranged on a trajectory of hybrid mythology reaching from ancient times into the present day, their contemporary relevance is put into context. Through modern speculative fiction, historical mythology and the theoretical frameworks of sociology, and philosophy, two tropes are revealed to be imposed roles for mixed race people. The first one, the tragic hybrid is a term which references a character specific to the context of American colonial slavery, the tragic mulatto. By reframing the term, tragic …

Mindfulness Matters: Addressing Anxiety And Navigating Toward Wellbeing Through Miea Mindfulness Practices, A Mixed-Methods Study Of Lgbtiq Graduate Writing Students, Kim Westerman

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Mindfulness Matters: Addressing Anxiety and Navigating Toward Wellbeing Through MIEA Mindfulness Practices, a Mixed-Methods Study of LGBTIQ Graduate Writing Students

Anxiety has always been a part of the human experience, even before the phenomenon was conceptualized in the 17^th century and named by Freud in the 19th. And human beings have devised many strategies for addressing anxiety: reducing it, ignoring it, distracting oneself from it, despairing over it, medicating it, engaging with it, moving through it, co-existing with it. The current zeitgeist, more than four years into the COVID-19 global pandemic, situates anxiety as a central facet of …

“Kematz'ib' Para Gritar” Innovative Technologies In Revitalizing The Mayan Languages: Empowering Youth Through Poetry - A Narrative Study, Héctor De Jesús Palala Martínez

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

This dissertation explores innovative approaches to preserving and revitalizing the linguistic and cultural heritage of Mayan-speaking youth of Guatemalan descent in rural Nebraska. It delves into the intersection of technology, artistic expression, and cultural practices, emphasizing the revitalization of Mayan languages in Abya Yala (the Americas), particularly emphasizing the Guatemalan and the Mayan diasporas in Nebraska.

The research investigates the roles of digital humanities, culture-based education, and poetic expressions in language preservation/revitalization efforts among Mayan youth and unaccompanied minors in transnational educational settings. Central to the study is an academic initiative for transnational Mayan high school students integrating poetry and …

Best Integrated Writing Fall 2024 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Kristie Mckiernan, Tracy Smith

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University.

Ways Of Decoloniality By The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’S Katara Demonstrates How To Revive A Community In Ecological Distress Brought By The Colonial Expansion Of The Fire Nation, Jose Santos P. Ardivilla

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Book 3: The Book Of Fire, the “Gaang” consisting of Avatar Aang, Toph, Sokka, and Katara chanced upon a fishing village on stilts,ravaged by the pollution of its waterways. The pollution comes from the industrial activity of the Colonial Masters’ Fire Nation which greatly affected the village. This animation is from Nickelodeon, a channel geared for children’s entertainment, thus implicates humorous asides in what purports to be a serious epicurean reclaiming of a lost balance through indigenous visual culture, solidarity, media studies, and ecocriticism. Katara disguises herself as …

Gender, Age, Class And Racial Stereotypes, And Power Relations In Television Ads: 2011-13 Vs 2021-22, Thomas D. Clark, Julie Stewart

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article demonstrates how faculty and DEI experts can use resources included in this paper to highlight how a range of stereotypes are created and reinforced in television ads, and it identifies several topics for future analysis. To understand how depictions of gender, class, age, and race intersect in 8 television ads featuring the relationship between the race of individuals depicted in romantic and platonic relationships this article examines 4 pairs of commercials from 2011-2013 and 2021-2022. Drawing on concepts of intercategorical complexity, it describes product, setting, characters and relationships to help gain a deeper understanding of how various stereotypes …

Mixedness Comes Of Age: Learning From Multiracial Portrayals In Young Adult Tv Series, Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero, Lisa Delacruz Combs

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Representation in literature, popular culture, and media has been shown to influence identity development and belonging as exemplified in the enduring hashtag #RepresentationMatters. However, mixed race representation on television has received little attention in research and scholarship. Hence, this essay examines how multiracial characters are portrayed in coming of age and young adult storylines from four TV series (All American, Charmed, Trinkets, and Dear White Peoples) representing two different networks (Netflix and The CW). Through a close reading of dialogue within the context of larger story arcs, we identify and critique common tropes in order …

Media Literacy, Education, And A Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned In A Gender And Pop Culture Classroom, Jessica Lowell Mason, Ebehitale Imobhio

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes that “to engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries.” Hence, this paper explores, through narrative dialogue, teacher and student perspectives on the pedagogical impact of the global pandemic on the process of engaging with and learning about media literacy. By naming and narrating teacher and student experiences and perspectives from a course on gender and pop culture that took place during the Spring 2020 semester, the paper aims to demonstrate the …

Crossing Over: The Migrant “Other” In The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Casey Joe Walker, Anthony Ramirez, Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Two mainstream films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) reflect anxiety about the alien (migrant) “other” through difference and crisis. In this article, we explore how refugees and “shithole” planets form a major plot point in Captain Marvel (2019). At the most extreme, alien exclusion is articulated in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), from the villain’s perspective, as a Malthusian need for extermination of lives to preserve environmental balance. Seemingly innocuous, these narratives are symbolic of a creeping right-wing discourse that dehumanizes outsiders, refugees, and migrants in popular culture. Inspired by the call to consider how film and new media …

Experimental Forms And Identity Politics In 21st Century American Poetry, Ronnie Stephens

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

“Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry” explores the function of form in American poetry and its proximity to whiteness. Through an analysis of experimental and nontraditional forms I argue that poets Fatimah Asghar, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Ilya Kaminsky, and Danez Smith challenge traditional notions of what a poem is; these authors use graphics and co-opt familiar text objects to challenge larger assumptions about gender identity, ableism, and the immigrant experience. These experimental forms are grounded in a larger poetic tradition that alters traditional forms, such as the sonnet, to disrupt and further dialogue …

The Many Ways Of Wakanda: Viewpoint Diversity In Black Panther And Its Implications For Civics Education, Justin Frank Martin

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Like many of its superhero film predecessors, Black Panther (2018) achieved widespread popularity both domestically and internationally. Although the film examines the focal character T’Challa’s (Black Panther) attempt to balance his dual responsibilities as king and protector of Wakanda, the viewpoint diversity displayed by its citizens suggests that the film’s central character is Wakandan society. Drawing on events and themes from the film, the essay argues that social domain theory (SDT)—a theory that attempts to explain the development of sociomoral concepts across the lifespan—provides a useful lens to examine Wakandans’ viewpoint diversity as portrayed in the film, specifically with regards …

D&D Beyond Bikini-Mail: Having Women At The Table, Daniel Carlson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Dungeons and Dragons represents a space that is often treated as an echo chamber for young (usually white) men to act out fantasies of power and control, which makes up for their inability to perform such actions in the real world. Using the work of Sherry Turkle and Michelle Dickey, I posit that this game is a nuanced location acting as a safe space for people to act out different aspects of their identity or life experiences in a low-risk environment enhanced by the connections made between the players and their characters. In this work, I have utililzed feminist frames …

Unmasking Male Voices In Woman Hollering Creek: Contributions To Pedagogy And Masculinity Studies, Ramón Javier Guerra, Joan Latchaw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In teaching Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek to undergraduates, we have developed a sociocultural and historical framework, beginning with the theoretical work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and the concept of transfrontera feminism. With incidents of seduction and sexual abuse of women, spousal abuse, and patriarchal family structures, the collection of stories strongly indicates the oppressive representation of machismo. Scholars and teachers have drawn important critiques of Cisneros’s work based on destructive sociocultural forces on women. However, in rereading the text with an intended focus on the representations of male characters, we have surmised that Cisneros structured the stories in the …

Visuality Of Race In Popular Culture: Teaching Racial Histories And Iconography In Media, Joni Boyd Acuff, Amelia M. Kraehe

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The repetition of racist imagery from historical to contemporary popular culture is indicative of a lack of visual culture education among artists, designers, and other creative cultural producers working today. This paper addresses the dearth of resources for teaching visual codes and conventions of racial iconography that are recycled in popular media and contribute to the fabrication of racial differences, maintenance of racial hierarchies, and normalization of white supremacist ideology. Inspired by Critical Race Theory in art and visual culture education, the essay proposes teaching tactics and sites/sights that can support students in developing visual understandings of race in popular …

Afrosurrealism, Aristotle, And Racial Presence In Netflix’S Luke Cage, Angela D. Mack

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay examines Netflix’s Luke Cage as a rhetorical reading of racial embodiment and productions of the cultural identity of Blackness and People of Color, and the tensions they produce to help audiences understand the current climatic flux between racial hostility and American idealism. With only two seasons in the small-screen version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Cheo Hodari Coker’s adaptation of the 1970s Blaxploitation Power Man comic foregrounded the recent wave of superhero narratives that expanded minority/gender representation from both major comic houses (MCU and DC Extended Universe [DCEU]). This examination employs the lens of Afrosurrealism, a conceptual …

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy, Laurie Fuller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy raises questions and analyzes classroom practices based on adrienne maree brown’s (2017) Emergent Strategy, a radical self-help manual for our current political climate that calls for a paradigm shift in organizing work. Black, mixed, queer, pansexual, feminist writer, pleasure activist, facilitator and sci-fi scholar, brown builds on a continuous tradition of women of color feminists resisting oppression to bring together science fiction and permaculture, biomimicry and organizing, pleasure and activism. She offers fresh perspectives on how to imagine liberation and provides dynamic ways to think about teaching and learning. Emergent Strategy provides principles to …

Resistance, Race, And Myth: A Critical Survey Of American Popular Music Culture In The 20th Century, Scott Haden Church

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The topic of popular music in the United States has garnered much analysis from scholars, particularly how popular music has created or reflected American myths, collective memory, and racial politics. This essay is a review of select research on the interface between 20th century American popular music, culture, and power. The essay reveals that pop music scholarship is rooted in paradox. Hence, it focuses on three chiastic or antithetical themes permeating scholarship on the topic: Popular music as either cultural hegemony or resistance to that cultural hegemony; Popular music as fundamental to the American myth, or the American myth as …

Human Sacrifice And Propaganda In Popular Media: More Than Morbid Curiosity, Jason Tatlock

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Representations of human sacrifice, whether based upon real or fictitious events, powerfully demonstrate societal norms and fascinations related to the acceptability of slaying humans for religious or national interests, particularly given the divisive and bloody nature of the topic. Readers of eye-witness accounts, newspaper reports, and historical narratives, and viewers of cinematic productions, war posters, and political cartoons come face to face with the beliefs and agendas of the creators of popular media. Such sources represent the slaying of victims in sacred rituals, as individuals attempt to demarcate societal boundaries along the etic/ emic spectrum, be they commentaries on their …

Eastern Imaginaries, Erika Quinn

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Orientalist tropes shaped Western ideas about the East in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries through travelogues and fiction, and have persisted into the twenty-first. One central set -piece of these stereotypes is the imaginary Eastern European country, “Ruritania.” The advantages and drawbacks of such an imagined place are explored more thoroughly through two recent pieces of pop culture, Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, and China Miéville’s novel The City and the City. While Anderson’s film entertains and sustains Orientalist stereotypes, Miéville’s novel demands the reader go deeper to empathize with characters and grapple with key issues about …

The Pedagogy And Politics Of Racial Passing: Examining Media Literacy In Turn-Of-The-Century Activist Periodicals, Tara Propper

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article explores how we can use African American activist media to theorize the role of pedagogy in the public sphere. Focusing on how racial passing stories expose the limiting (and often tropic) binaries through which racial identity is deciphered, this analysis further highlights the extent to which these binary constructions of identity are learned through media narration.

Using the December 1912, issue of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis Magazine as a touchstone for investigation, this analysis considers how pedagogy is taken up as both a theme and project in the magazine. Foregrounding the degree to which Crisis critiques …

The Diyinii Of Naachid: Diné Rhetoric As Ritual, Edward L. Karshner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Rhetoric is far more than a theory of communication or the antiquated ancestor of freshman composition courses. As a system, rhetoric is the process that directs, on the one hand, individual experiences with the world and structures, and on the other, the stories cultures tell about themselves. These foundational narratives (myths) reveal a culture’s metaphysical understanding of the nature of reality, the psychological understanding of human nature, and the epistemological notion of what can be known. Using the Diné Bahané, this paper will explore Diné rhetoric as naachid, an inclusive, outward-directed communication model of problem solving which functions …

“Can You Imagine, A Real, Live Indian Right Here In Walnut Grove?”: American Indians In Television Adaptations Of Little House On The Prairie, Amy S. Fatzinger

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels have been adapted into two major television series: Michael Landon’s well-known series, which aired from 1974-1983, and a more recent Disney adaptation, which aired as a miniseries in 2005. The premier movie, which preceded Landon’s series, and the Disney miniseries both focus on the events in Wilder’s 1935 novel, Little House on the Prairie, which covered the period from 1869-1871 during which the Ingalls family lived among the Osage in Kansas Indian Territory. Wilder’s portrayal of the Osage in her novel is controversial, but she does also include some literary devices that allow …

Healthcare-Seeking Behavior In A Toxic Landscape: Investigating Cancer Care Awareness In Louisiana's Cancer Alley, Moumita Roy

LSU Master's Theses

The fossil fuel and petrochemical sector in the Louisiana region, known as "Cancer Alley," has a devastating impact not only on the environment but also on the health and lives of the local population. Extreme pollution from the petrochemical industry not only elevated cancer rates in this region but also maternal, reproductive, and newborn health harms, respiratory diseases, and other complex health issues. This study examined the healthcare-seeking behavior of some residents and their awareness of cancer facilities within a 100-mile radius of their homes and identified key challenges, such as proximity of cancer care and accessibility, financial constraints, and …

Pura Vida: Reflections From Costa Rica, Lisette Gonzalez, Carolina Hernandez, Natalia Zevallos, Ailani Anglin, Isabela Jimenez, Melissa Johnson, Isabella Madrid, Xion Nelson, Alexia Pineda, Delaney Rendon, Chaylah Williams, Angel Vilchis

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

The First-Gen Voices Journal is proud to feature a special volume dedicated to the transformative experiences of first-generation college students on the recent Study Abroad Social Justice Immersion Trip to Costa Rica. Through this journey, participants gained a deeper grasp of activism and community building while engaging with social justice concerns on a worldwide scale. This volume will demonstrate the tenacity, enthusiasm, and vision of first-generation college students dedicated to societal change.

This issue features embedded film content. Experience the unique blend of text and film by clicking on the front cover image.

La Vida Rica, Angel Vilchis

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

Through a first-person perspective, we travel along to Costa Rica with LMU’s First To Go students. Utilizing a long format, home video style, the goal is to communicate the authentic experiences that occurred during the trip. It’s one thing to be a young adult getting the chance to explore new parts of the world, but it’s a different privilege to get to do it with others that you can connect with. So much so that in the couple months preceding the trip, I found myself dealing with that post-trip depression. However, in that state, I found the beauty of being …

On My Heart, Chaylah Williams

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

I never thought that when I would start traveling internationally that it would be alone I always imagined it with my family, but never did I imagine traveling to really interact with the communities either I always thought of traveling as leisure. I guess I could say this impression was not implemented when OI started traveling as I started to notice how I didn’t want to do touristy things and I really just wanted to be. To be there to be present to be aware and I think that is what I enjoyed the most about my trip to Costa …

A Worthwhile Perspective, Delaney Rendon

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

Opening your mind to a new wide perspective can shed light onto the knowledge and culture that another country can show you. There is much beauty in Costa Rica but also struggles that need to be shared.

“Feel The Rain On Your Skin”, Alexia "Lexie" Pineda

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

In the face of immense social and global crises, from genocides to overlapping racial, political, and environmental struggles, 19 students chose connection and healing through artistry. This shared experience in Costa Rica was a transformative journey aimed at reigniting hope, compassion, and responsibility.

Leading With Love, Xion Nelson

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

The travel experience to Costa Rica, how love is important in these travel experiences. Community is something to be thankful for, being able to learn to protect your communities.

Cries Of Injustice, Isabella Madrid

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

The injustices that occur in Costa Rica, the life that Costa Rica is filled with. Testimonies and tragedies that inspire and stick with you.