Digital Commons Network^™

Cultivating Creation: Exploring Traditional Ecological Knowledge Of Native Song, Sara Moncada

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Humanities scholarship, the result of millennia of deep reflection on the human condition, informs the practices and principles that structure the way we approach our investigation of the human experience. As we consider the ways in which the humanities canon shapes the relationship of what we include as “knowledge” and how we value it, the continued exploration of how meaning and value are perceived in traditional knowledge systems and their contributions to our current models of thinking and process is vital. Through an investigation of relationships between Native song and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), I explore the importance of Native …

Book Review: Violence As A Generative Force: Identity, Memory, And Nationalism In A Balkan Community, Kjell Anderson

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

The Social Life Of Black Thought In The Long Eighteenth Century, Kristina Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Social Life of Black Thought in the Long Eighteenth Century moves from the framework of social death to the foundations of social life in the study of early black Anglophone writings. By exploring the diverse textual and visual forms through which black life appeared in the Anglo-Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century, my project argues for situating early black writings within the social spheres of the city, the plantation, slaves’ provision grounds and independent markets, and churches. In this regard, I depart from the popular model of social death in literary criticism as a mode of reading early …

The Tuskegee Revolt: Student Activism, Black Power, And The Legacy Of Booker T. Washington, Brian P. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Tuskegee Revolt: Student Activism, Black Power, and the Legacy of Booker T. Washington” is a historical study of a student movement that challenged prevailing educational and political ideas in the nation’s most ideologically important historically black university. The late 1960s student movement at Tuskegee Institute played a significant off-campus role in shaping local, regional, and national social movements and politics. In the process, these Tuskegee students turned their attention back on-campus, and attempted to radically revise their school’s educational framework. Founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881, Tuskegee Institute represents the origin of a particular (and recurring) political-educational-paradigm for …

Perceptions Of Barriers To Leadership Appointment And Promotion Of African American Female Commissioned Officers In The United States Military, Beverly Henderson Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

The U.S. military is perceived by many to be the example of workplace meritocracy, but historical studies have shown that the perceptions of African American female commissioned officers run counter to that belief. The military has as its goal the movement from a diverse fighting force to one that is totally inclusive of all members. The purpose of this study was to gather insights into whether the military has moved toward full integration from the viewpoint of the demographic that has shown the least confidence in the accomplishment of that task.

This qualitative study involved 12 participants: active duty, retired, …

The Imperial Legacy: An Examination Of The Trends Of Empire And Genocide From German Southwest Africa To The General Government, Laura Guebert

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

This project is an examination of correlations between imperial enterprises of the Second German Empire and the Nazi Reich through the lenses of global and imperial critiques. The three primary case studies are German Southwest Africa, the Ober Ost, and Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, particularly the General Government. This research draws heavily on certain themes and theories developed by leading historians of modern German and Eastern European history, including Timothy Snyder, Ben Kiernan, Shelley Baranowski, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, and Christopher Browning. By understanding the shared trends of empire and genocide, it is my aim to bring the actions of the National …

The Imperial Legacy: An Examination Of The Trends Of Empire And Genocide From German Southwest Africa To The General Government, Laura Guebert

Scholars Week

This project is an examination of the correlations between imperial enterprises of the Second German Empire and the Nazi Reich through the lenses of global and imperial critiques. By studying the realities and experiences of German Southwest Africa, the Ober Ost, and Nazi-occupied Easter Europe, this paper attempts to identify the common elements of German imperialism: pathos, frantic improvisation, cognizance of contemporaries, and industrial modernity. To help elucidate these elements, this research studied the themes and theories developed by leading historians of modern German and Eastern European history, including Timothy Snyder, Ben Kiernan, Shelley Baranowski, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, and Christopher …

The Semi-Anti-Apocalypse Of Black Panther, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is one of a series of films reviews of Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler.

The Effect Of Chicanx Studies In High School Graduation Rates, Angelica Garcia-Macias

2018 Symposium

Chicanx students have a relatively lower high school graduation rate in the United States than other ethnic groups. This study assesses Arizona’s civic curriculum to determine the inclusivity of Latinx social movements that have influenced high school graduation rates. Additionally, Arizona has had ethnic studies within the Tucson school district for various years, since the 1990s. The study will compare graduation rates among Latinx student, through resources provided by ethnic studies. The Latinx Critical Race Theory is used to explain the findings and the works of ethnic studies on the Latinx population. The method of analysis for this study includes …

Breast Cancer Disparities Among African American Women Corresponding To Health Service Barriers, Dianne Jamerson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

African American women tend to experience higher health disparities in cancer-related illness than any other female population in the United States. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to identify and examine access-related barriers that play a significant role in the decision-making process of this population when seeking breast cancer health services. The central research question explored the effect that barriers to health care have on African American women in the Southeastern region of the United States. Secondary research questions explored the role the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has on improving access to affordable, quality …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Dedan Kimathi On Trial : Colonial Justice And Popular Memory In Kenya’S Mau Mau Rebellion, Julie Macarthur

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

The transcript from this historic trial, long thought destroyed or hidden, unearths a piece of the British colonial archive at a critical point in the Mau Mau Rebellion. Its discovery and landmark publication unsettles an already contentious Kenyan history and its reverberations in the postcolonial present.

Perhaps no figure embodied the ambiguities, colonial fears, and collective imaginations of Kenya’s decolonization era more than Dedan Kimathi, the self-proclaimed field marshal of the rebel forces that took to the forests to fight colonial rule in the 1950s. Kimathi personified many of the contradictions that the Mau Mau Rebellion represented: rebel statesman, literate …

Waru, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Waru (2017), directed by Briar Grace-Smith, Ainsley Gardiner, Renae Maihi, Casey Kaa, Awanui Simich-Pene, Chelsea Cohen, Katie Wolfe, and Paula Jones.

Yellowing The Logarithm: How Money Solved The Problem Of Freedom, Neil S. Agarwal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on the historical development of a co-constitutive relationship between money as the form of appearance of value and race as the form of appearance of human difference. It demonstrates this relationship through a study of experiments with monetary value in eighteenth-century British America. At a time when Bank of England notes circulated primarily among merchants and within London, colonial freeholders issued paper currencies through representative assemblies and posited a link between this enterprise and the well-being of a larger provincial community within which their bills would circulate. I show how their experiments provided a means for creole …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …

Buildings And Books: Segregated Libraries As Places For Community-Making, Interaction And Learning In The Age Of Jim Crow (Presentation For The Society For The History Of Authorship, Reading, And Publishing Annual Conference, June 2017), Matthew R. Griffis

Publications and Other Resources

From the conference program: "This presentation reviews the preliminary findings of a federally funded, 3-year historical study that explores how segregated Carnegie libraries were used as places of community-making, interaction, and learning for African Americans in the age of Jim Crow. Known then as "Carnegie Negro libraries," these public libraries opened in eight southern states between 1900 and 1925 and were an extension of the well-known library development program funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

"Drawing on archival sources, including newly completed oral history interviews with surviving library users, this presentation explores how these libraries helped foster a …

Capturing Their Stories: Collecting Oral Histories From Users Of Segregated Libraries In The South (Presentation For The Southern History Of Education Society Annual Meeting, March 2017), Matthew R. Griffis

Publications and Other Resources

From the conference program: "This presentation reviews the progress of a federally-funded, 3-year historical study that explores how segregated Carnegie libraries were used as places of community-making, interaction, and learning for African Americans in the days of Jim Crow. Known then as “Carnegie colored libraries,” these public libraries opened in eight southern states between 1900 and 1925 and were an extension of the well-known library development program funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Some operated for as many as six decades until, by the 1970s, most had closed or were integrated into the library systems of their larger …

Theories Of The Self, Race, And Essentialization In Buddhism In The United States During The “Yellow Peril,” 1899-1957, Ryan Anningson

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation is an intellectual history tracing developing notions of the Self in Buddhism through Buddhist publications during the years from 1899-1957. I define this time period as the Era of the Yellow Peril, due to common views in the United States of an Asian “other” which formed a larger clash of civilizations globally. 1899-1957 was marked by pessimism and dread due to two World Wars and the Great Depression, while popular and academic cultures argued for the validity of race sciences, and the application of these “sciences” through eugenics. Buddhism in the United States was created through a global …

Ecological Crisis And The Re-Enchantment Of Nature In Jaime Huenún’S Reducciones., Ida Day

Modern Languages Faculty Research

Chilean poet Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones (Reductions; 2012) explores the social and environmental consequences of European colonization since the second half of the nineteenth century, when southern Chile received thousands of German immigrants as part of a state-sponsored colonization plan. Confronted with large stretches of impenetrable native forests, the colonists began a deforestation process in order to prepare the land for agriculture and livestock farming, which left a profound impact on the society, economy, and geography of the region. In less than a century, the region spanning La Araucanía to Chiloé lost at least three million hectares of native forests. The …

The Patriarch (Mahana), Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Patriarch (2016), directed by Lee Tamahori.

Geographies Of Desecration: Race, Indigeneity, And The Militarization Of Hawai'i, Laurel Turbin Mei-Singh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Geographies of Desecration: Race, Indigeneity, and the Militarization of Hawai‘i develops a genealogy of military fences and their relationship to Hawaiian struggles for self-determination and national liberation. Military occupation has transformed entire ways of life on the islands by altering Hawaiian land tenure systems through displacement, disruption of subsistence practices, and environmental degradation. Hawaiian mo‘olelo (stories, history) also structure life in a highly militarized place, centering interconnectivity between human and nonhuman realms while impelling grassroots efforts that shape its landscape.

This dissertation develops in-depth case studies of militarized sites on the Wai‘anae Coast of O‘ahu, where military bases occupy 34% …

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …

Race, Rebellion, And Arab Muslim Slavery : The Zanj Rebellion In Iraq, 869 - 883 C.E., Nicholas C. Mcleod

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the ninth century, enslaved Africans from the east coast of Africa, called the Zanj, revolted for nearly fifteen years in southern Iraq against their Arab slave masters and challenged the social order of the Abbasid Empire. This thesis is a socio-historical investigation on the role that race played in starting the Zanj Rebellion of 869 C.E. It examines the Arab Islamic slave trade and the racial stratification experienced by blacks in the early centuries of Islamic history in conjunction with the Zanj Rebellion. The thesis applies a structural framework for analyzing race, to demonstrate the racialization process, prevalent racial …

Reel Racism, Real Consequences : A Multiple Case Analysis Of Savior Films As Racial Projects., Eric A. Jordan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how four blockbuster movies released in the years 2000-2014 represent racial projects. Racial projects encompass anything that helps people understand race. Films are racial projects because of their racist portrayal of characters. Films can be used to train audiences to view race in various ways that may contribute to problematic colorblindness. Specifically, the “White Savior” and “Magical Negro” tropes are ways through which films tell the viewers what to expect from White characters and characters of color. Viewers walk away from these films having constructed a racialized schema about White and Black characters, which further supports the …

Bolling V. Sharpe And Beyond: The Unfinished And Untold History Of School Desegregation In Washington, D.C., Bryce Celotto

Honors College Theses

While the Brown V. Board of Education case is constantly referenced when discussing educational equity and desegregation, Bolling v. Sharpe stands as another important education civil rights case and is perhaps more telling of the story of education in the United States. Bolling V. Sharpe was argued and decided in the United States Supreme Court over the course of 1952 to 1954. Similar to Brown v. Board in terms of intent, Bolling v. Sharpe aimed to desegregate public schools in Washington, D.C. in order to give African-American students equal access to a high quality public education on par with that …

Causing Conversation: Civil War Memory In Beyoncé’S “Formation”, Anika N. Jensen

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

Not only did Beyoncé slay in her latest music video, but she got historical. Her single "Formation" touches on feminism, oppression, sexuality, and police brutality, and her video offers a visual representation for the overall theme of African American cultural ownership. It is, of course, an essential message for contemporary discussion, and the formerly-silenced subject is beginning to achieve prevalence in the music industry, but there is something special and bold about Beyoncé’s take on race: by appealing to Civil War memory and forcing viewers to accept the African American struggle for life, freedom, and success, she is shattering perceptions …

Immigrants In The Sexual Revolution: Perceptions, Participation, And Belonging, The Netherlands And Denmark, 1960s-80s, Andrew D.J. Shield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an historical study of first-generation immigrants in Denmark and the Netherlands in the 1960s-80s and their perceptions of the 'Sexual Revolution.' Foreign workers and post-colonial immigrants arrived during the same decades when laws regarding women's equality, contraception and abortion, homosexuality, pornography, adultery and divorce were challenged and reformed, in many cases in the context of intensive social movement activism. This research explores immigrants' perceptions of the dramatic changes in sexual and gender relations transforming Europe in the 1960s-80s, and the instances of immigrant solidarity with, and participation in, networks for social justice, women's equality, and sexual liberation.

Part …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …