Digital Commons Network^™

'I Don't Want To See Him Impeached, I Want To See Him In Prison,' Said Nancy Pelosi: Three Ways To Give The Speaker What She Wants, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is three humorous fictitious drabbles about Trump which are linked by a common theme.

Vinyl As Event: Record Store Day And The Value-Vibrant Matter Nexus, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Why would anyone purchase expensive, natural resource-intensive, and seemingly obsolete material carriers of music when streaming providers provide unlimited access to over 40 million songs for a small monthly fee? As I will show, we can no longer assume that contemporary interest is driven solely by a collector’s market or because of the audible qualities of the vinyl listening experience, and must attend to the many ways people engage with record objects today – and by extension, the vinyl record as an ontological multiple. Through an analysis of Record Store Day 2015 and affiliated phenomena including YouTube unboxing videos, other …

Contemporary Stories Of Female Development And The Outer Limits Of Maternal Sexuality In Susan Choi’S My Education And Amy Sohn’S Prospect Park West, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

While liberal sexuality has been integrated into contemporary discursive understandings of female possibilities, barriers remain to representing mothers as sexual beings. This essay explores maternal representations in Choi’s My Education (2013) and Sohn’s Prospect Park West (2009) that challenge cultural ideals of good motherhood and invite scrutiny of normative paths and goals of female development. These 21^st-century American novels confront and even embrace active maternal sexuality but retreat at the boundary of the maternal/sexual breast to allow protagonists in contemporary alterations of female stories of development to achieve maturity through acceptance of the ideal of good motherhood .Each …

Ethnography Made Easy, Mary Gatta, Alia R. Tyner-Mullings, Ryan Coughlan

Open Educational Resources

This is an Open Educational Resource for the teaching of an Ethnography class. It was specifically designed for Ethnographies of Work taught at Stella and Charles Guttman Community College.

This currently represents a draft. We are working on ensuring that references and attributions are correct and that images, case studies and examples are representative. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please email us: [email protected]

Subjective Experience Of Autonomy And Psychological Well-Being: A Cross-Cultural Study With Korean American And European American Young Adults, Esther J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aimed to explore whether parenting beliefs and practices that might promote academic or professional achievements also undermine aspects of psychological well-being. Specifically, the study focused on the relationship between the experience of subjective autonomy and psychological well-being measured in terms of self-esteem, flourishing, and life satisfaction. The sample consisted of 86 second-generation Korean Americans (KAs) and 99 European Americans (EAs) ages 25-35. Perceived parental autonomy support (versus psychological control) and perceived parental modernity (versus traditionalism) were also examined for group differences and associations with psychological well-being. As a group, KAs perceived greater parental psychological control and parental traditionalism …

Gendered Subjectivity And Resistance: Brazilian Women’S Performance-For-Camera, 1973–1982, Gillian Sneed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the work of a group of women artists in Brazil during the period of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), working in the genre of “performance-for-camera” (i.e., performance for film and video, rather than for a live audience). The artists are Lygia Pape (1927–2004), Letícia Parente (1930–1991), Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933), Sonia Andrade (b. 1935), Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942), and Regina Vater (b. 1943). Some of these women were friends and colleagues who collaborated with each other; all of them contributed significantly to the development of film and video art in Brazil. Their works share an impulse …

Men Set On Fire. Algernon Sidney & John Adams: Remodeling Anglo-American Republicanism, Deborah B. Charnoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation systematically examines the republican political ideas of the relatively unknown seventeenth-century English aristocratic Algernon Sidney, a passionate author and political activist who was executed for his ideas, and the famous but generally misunderstood eighteenth-century American revolutionary, Founder, and second President of the United States, John Adams. Republicanism is an entangled field of intellectual history in which historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and others have grappled for years, often without regard to the work of those in disciplines other than their own; yet we have consistently failed to take into account critical elements that inform the tradition, indeed, one …

Restoring Solidarity: "Accountability" In Radical Leftist Subcultures, Sarah M. Hanks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In radical left activist subcultures, ‘accountability processes’ are a form of DIY transformative justice dealing with abuse and sexual assault, focusing on the needs of the ‘survivor’ and transformation of the ‘perpetrator.’ Within activism identifying abuse is particularly difficult because it means acknowledging abuse by a person considered politically virtuous. The specifics of a process are situational and provisional. The overwhelming pattern is male identified people abusing female identified, gender non-binary, and transgender people. My research examines why activists are developing processes to address problems and whether or not they are successful.

Within the subculture, the topic is important enough …

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

Infinity Wars: Post 9/11 Superhero Films And American Empire, Peter J. Bruno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last two decades, superhero films have accounted for some of the most popular and financially lucrative films of all time. This thesis analyzes some of the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of various superhero films following their post 9/11 boom. Beginning with America’s response to the events of 9/11 and a subsequent retreat into a Manichean world of good versus evil, I introduce the term “empirical reality” in order to account for the ways daily American life is shielded from the worst effects of U.S. foreign policy. On screen this manifests by perpetuating the myth of the “clean war” …

Hermeneutics: A Literary Interpretive Art, David A. Reitman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the historical traditions of hermeneutics and its potential to enhance the process of literary interpretation and understanding. The discussion draws from the historical emplotment of hermeneutics as literary theory and method presented in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism with further elaboration from several other texts. The central aim of the thesis is to illuminate the challenges inherent in the literary interpretive arts by investigating select philosophical and linguistic approaches to the study and practice of literary theory and criticism embodied within the canonical works of the Anthology. The narrative begins in ancient Greece, traverses …

'When You're A Star, They Let You Do It' To Trump: Or, President Vagina T. Fireball's Executive Order, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is a humorous short story about how a star holds Trump accountable for his misogyny.

The Pedagogies Of Cultural Studies, Gordon Alley-Young

Publications and Research

The Pedagogy of Cultural Studies, edited by Andrew Hickey, seeks to expand understandings of pedagogy beyond the formal classroom to something one practices when doing research, when bringing academia into engagement with the wider society and when engaging in social activism. In examining Cultural Studies pedagogy, the contributors to this book hope to understand how the discipline is currently defined to determine future directions for, and practice in, this field. This review considers the relevance of The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies for those in sport and education. Contributors to this volume varyingly examine how Cultural Studies scholars have educational exchanges …

Re-Constructing “China” In A Transnational Context, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

This study critically examines two Chinese newspapers’ representation of China as a “nation” and “culture.” Prior studies have deeply and broadly explored various ways through which China, Chinese culture, and nationalism were constructed in popular media forums. What has been missing is a continued exploration of these constructions offered by the Chinese media sources that are published outside the dominant Chinese cultural, national, and political contexts. Using World Journal and Sing Tao Daily, two major Chinese immigrant newspapers, as the texts for analysis, this study produces important findings that demonstrate how China is constructed as a contested, multi-layered, powerful, …

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, And Paradox In Subaltern Labor Photography, Mahnure Janis

Theses and Dissertations

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, and Paradox in Subaltern Labor Photography is an expanded cinema performance examining 'cheap' labor in the fast fashion industry through a self-reflexive diasporic lens. The images and narration explores the garment factories in Bangladesh and contains ‘a photographer’s cognitive meta-data’, including ethical dilemmas while taking the images.

Perplexed Poetics: Romanticism And The Vortex Of Ideologies, Jaime Luque Lau

Student Theses and Dissertations

In three parts, this thesis explores the tension between the critical and emotional poetics in Romantic poetry, as well as the entanglement of individual will and politics. As a point of entrance, the first part focuses on the major and current trends of scholarly discourses about Romanticism. I will examine Jerome McGann’s influential book of criticism on Romanticism, Romantic Ideology, in juxtaposition with Marc Redfield’s The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. In particular, the discussion of the two books suggest the problems of aesthetic-political and historical discourses; specifically, I argue that McGann’s critical examination of “Romantic ideology” …

Lessons Of A Failed Study: Lone Research, Media Analysis, And The Limitations Of Bracketing, Katherine Gregory

Publications and Research

Failed research can function as the underbelly of all qualitative research projects that come to fruition. These shadow projects offer invaluable insights to future research and researchers alike. In this article, I trace a failed life history of sex offenders project from its conceptualization to its abandonment, after conducting a series of searches on the online National Sex Offender Registry database. Through the use of preliminary field notes and an analysis of media representations, I examine the role of bracketing of the topic, as a by-product of the phenomenological tradition, and other methodological issues such as physical and emotional vulnerability …

718-554-3854, James S. Chrzan

Theses and Dissertations

718-554-3854 is a poem that originally appeared in various printed, spoken, and recorded iterations throughout part one of the Spring 2019 Hunter College MFA Thesis exhibition. Accompanying the text are extensive notes that elaborate on the ideas, influences, and intentions that informed the poem and the exhibition.

Working Lives: Artistic Solidarity In Revolutionary Peru (1960–1980), Jose R. Chavarry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the discourses and experiences of cultural work as a form of intellectual and artistic solidarity in Peru during the 1960s and 1970s. Amid the broader Latin American and global spirit of revolution, anti-imperialism and Third World liberation, in Peru these decades saw a radical transformation in society where rural and urban masses rose against a traditional political and socioeconomic system that maintained colonial structures of domination and oppression of marginalized populations. In an attempt to rein in this desborde popular, as it became known, the nationalist and populist Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces and a …

Presenciar El Pasado: Witnessing The Spanish And Argentine Dictatorships Through Film And Television, Kristina L. Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the ways in which recent (1999–2017) films and television series ask today’s spectators to witness the 20^th-century Spanish and Argentine dictatorships by analyzing these texts on both a narrative and technical level. I examine torture in the Argentine films Garage Olimpo (Marco Bechis, 1999), Crónica de una fuga (Andrés Caetano, 2006), and, from Spain, La voz dormida (Benito Zambrano, 2011). I also investigate the theme of disappearance as seen in two Spain-Argentina joint ventures, Pasaje de vida (Diego Corsini, 2015) and Los pasos perdidos (Manane Rodríguez, 2001), both of which portray how parental absence affects …

Dramaturgies Of Democracy: Performance, Cultural Policy, And Citizenship In Chile, 1979–Present, Jennifer J. Thompson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the relationship between performance, cultural policy, and citi­zenship in Chile (1979-present). Through emblematic case studies of key performance interventions (including the work of the Colectivo Acciones de Arte [CADA], Andrés Pérez, Manuela Infante, and Guillermo Calderón), intertwined with analyses of cultural policy and political discourse, I ask how Chilean performance dramaturgically enacts forms of democratic citizenship—first during Pinochet’s dictatorship as a hoped-for future and later, fol­lowing the democratic transition, as a present, if incomplete, reality. Re­sponding to the vexed transitions to democracy, scholarship on Latin American theatre and performance has emphasized its resistance to the state. I …

The Body And Its Signifiers: Bodily Depictions In Niccolò De’ Conti And Odorico Da Pordenone, Antonella Dalla Torre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines textual, bodily depictions in two western European, medieval and late-medieval travel accounts, which describe the eastern travels of the Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti and those of the Franciscan friar Odorico da Pordenone. My analysis show how a connection between the characterizations of the body and the process of identity definition is forged and sustained in these texts.

Through a cultural-studies perspective, my work focuses specifically on depictions of the body in Poggio Bracciolini’s account of the travels of Niccolò de’ Conti and in the text of a vernacular rendition of Odorico da Pordenone’s Relatio, the …

Vanishing Leaves: A Study Of Walt Whitman Through Location-Based Mobile Technologies, Jesse A. Merandy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vanishing Leaves is a location-based mobile experience (LBME), which employs mobile devices equipped with GPS and high-speed wireless internet capabilities to take users to Brooklyn Heights to learn about the poet Walt Whitman and his connection to the neighborhood where he lived, worked, and published the first edition of his masterwork Leaves of Grass. Through this active first-person immersive learning experience, Vanishing Leaves embraces experimental scholarly methods that extend outside the classroom and off the page in order to engage learners and invite them to create meaningful, personal connections to writers and their literary works.

The following white paper …

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

Migritude: Migrant Structures Of Feeling In A Minor Literature Of Globalization, Ashna Ali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Migritude: Structures of Feeling in a Minor Literature of Globalization examines contemporary postcolonial narratives of migration written by women of color writing in English and in Italian under the rubric of “migritude.” Migritude literature describes the work of a disparate yet distinct group of contemporary authors whose work describes the condition of being a migrant under globalization with a critical feminist and anti-imperialist politics and poetics. It is a global justice movement that sees literature as a form of cultural activism. Migritude literatures traces the connections between contemporary globalization and colonial processes of the past and sheds light on how …

Transfigurations Of The News: True Fictions, Strange Thresholds, Jeffrey Peer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation compares twentieth-century literary journalism from the U.S. and Mexico, with a focus on the nonfiction novel and the Mexican chronicle. The dissertation considers the two genres both historically and theoretically, in order to distinguish the borders between literature and unscrupulous journalism. North American journalism is at the heart of a crisis over the epistemological status of facts and their place in our political discourse. Some have argued that works of literary nonfiction can damage social norms like journalistic objectivity. Others argue that forms like the chronicle and the nonfiction novel can describe experience better than news reports. This …

The Crusader And The Dictator: An Exploration Of Ideology And Neurodivergence In Contemporary Technology Practice, David J. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A common theme in public discourse is the recognition that technology in general, and digital technology specifically, has an enormous impact on the everyday lives of people from all walks of modern life, in almost every corner of the globe. This thesis interrogates the connection between neurodivergence—the presence of neurological variations considered outside the cognitive norm— and individualistic ideology within the information technology industries. Through the biographies, substantial record of activities, public statements, and writings surrounding two influential figures in the contemporary practice of computer science, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, it conducts an investigation into this convergence and its …

Cosmopolitan Democracy: Re-Evaluation Of Globalization And World Economic System, Muhammad Dalhatu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines cosmopolitan democracy theory as a method of addressing the problems of globalization. I begin by introducing the concept of “cosmopolitan democracy.” I then proceed to discuss contemporary political climate and its relation to critiques of globalization. Finally, I conclude by examining the elaborations of cosmopolitan democracy by various theorists as a way of addressing these problems. Chapter 1 introduces the work of David Held who introduced the concept in his book, Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Global Order: Reflections on the 20^th Anniversary of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” Cosmopolitan democracy refers to global governance through democratic theory. Held …

A Space To Learn, Amy R. Goods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I explore what it means to different people, in different places throughout life’s spectrum to create a space to learn. This dissertation is a collection of work that I have written throughout my time at the CUNY Graduate Center. The chapters herein represent an arch of my learning over the past five years. The title, A Space to Learn, has multiple meanings. For one, writing this dissertation has provided me a space to explore and reflect on a variety of topics, ranging from memory loss, to teacher preparation programs, to eugenics and special education, to tracking and …

Historians On Hamilton: How A Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’S Past, Ryan Mckinney

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.