Digital Commons Network^™

A Transnational Conversation On French Colonialism, Immigration, Violence And Sovereignty, Miriam Ticktin, Ruth Marshall, Paolo Bacchetta

Publications and Research

This conversation was transcribed from a panel discussion that took place at The Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXII, “Fashioning Citizenship: Gender and Immigration,” held on March 24, 2007 at Barnard College.

Undergraduate Bulletin 2008-2009, John Jay College Of Criminal Justice

College Bulletins

No abstract provided.

Selection Criteria For Academic Video Game Collections, Elisabeth Tappeiner, Kate Lyons

Publications and Research

As higher education begins to take games and gaming seriously, academic libraries will begin to build video game collections to support research and learning on campus. This article discusses their relevance in academia and proposes useful criteria for building video game collections in academic libraries.

The authors outline selection considerations for developing video game collections and propose the following criteria for selecting games: physical characteristics, teaching and learning principles present in the games, subject matter and content, and the cultural and historical value of a game.

Scholarly Monographs On Rock Music: A Bibliographic Essay, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Purpose This article is an overview of scholarly monographs on rock music from 1980 to the present. It provides an overview to the literature for practical purposes of collections development as well as giving the reader insight into key issues and trends related to a interdisciplinary topic that attracts scholars from many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Design/methodology/approach This bibliographic essay, focusing on works related to American culture and of a general nature, includes an overview and historical background; a discussion of how music and ethnomusiciological scholars approach the topic; geographic approaches; literature on four key icons (Elvis, …

A Quantitative Synthesis Of The Medicinal Ethnobotany Of The Malinké Of Mali And The Asháninka Of Peru, With A New Theoretical Framework, Nathaniel Bletter

Publications and Research

Background: Although ethnomedically and taxonomically guided searches for new medicinal plants can improve the percentage of plants found containing active compounds when compared to random sampling, ethnobotany has fulfilled little of its promise in the last few decades to deliver a bounty of new, laboratory-proven medicinal plants and compounds. It is quite difficult to test, isolate, and elucidate the structure and mechanism of compounds from the plethora of new medicinal plant uses described each year with limited laboratory time and resources and the high cost of clinical trials of new drug candidates.

Methods: A new quantitative theoretical framework of mathematical …

The Ticker, October 15, 2007

The Ticker

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York.

The Ticker, September 24, 2007

The Ticker

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York.

Digg.Com And Socially-Driven Authority, Steven Ovadia

Publications and Research

For years, librarians have been able to distill the notion of authority, in its purest form, to two simple questions: “Who said it?” and “Under whose auspices?” The answer to either, or preferably both, of these questions could tell a researcher whether to rely on the information retrieved. Today, however, in the world of online information, the notion of authority is shifting and librarians working in an instructional capacity must understand the shift and determine ways to help students cope with the changes. Searching in today’s socially-driven information era requires a different skill set for researchers looking for authoritative information. …

Rock Music Scholarship, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

My challenge is to take my master’s thesis, a lengthy annotated bibliography of academic monographs on rock in American culture, and make it come alive and, in the process, provide a sense of how the academic rock discourse has evolved.

Transgender Justice, Richard M. Juang

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Proceedings from CLAGS's Trans Politics, Social Change and Justice conference will be available in January 2007 under the title Transgender Justice.

Undergraduate Bulletin 2007-2008, John Jay College Of Criminal Justice

College Bulletins

No abstract provided.

Learning Communities And The Future Of The Humanities, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

According to Profession's 2005 Presidential Forum, one reason for dwindling enrollment in the Humanities is lack of interdisciplinarity. Learning communities, courses clustered around a common theme and taught to the same group of students are a powerful example of a kind of interdisciplinarity that is flourishing on more than five-hundred campuses in the United States.This essay looks closely at the expanding learning community movement and its relevance to revitalizing the Humanities.

The Intersection Of Race, Gender, And Class In Social Transitions: Caribbean Immigrant Women Negotiating United States Higher Education, Tracy A. Mcfarlane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The experiences of immigrant women of color within US higher education provide a unique opportunity to understand the complex influences of intersecting identities within changing social contexts. This study was designed to determine how the social categories of gender, class, race, and nationality operate in Caribbean immigrant women's experience of being college students. Focus groups and life story interviews were conducted with 27 English-speaking Caribbean-born women attending CUNY undergraduate colleges. The data yielded four main findings: First, Caribbean gender roles and traditions are not homogenous; hence, there is variation in the ways in which these affect women's experiences in the …

Worlds Together . . . Words Apart: An Assessment Of The Effectiveness Of Arts-Based Curriculum For Second Language Learners, Stephanie Urso Spina

Publications and Research

The objective of this study is to assess whether authentic arts-based1 curricula facilitate the acquisition of English as a second language (ESL) without sacrificing proficiency in the first language (Spanish). This question is examined theoretically and empirically. First, the use of an arts-based curriculum is positioned within a Vygotskiian framework of learning as reflected in current research. This overview is organized by two themes: 1) the authenticity of the art experience and 2) the emphasis on social interaction and the cognitive mediation among sign systems. Applicable findings from related literature are reviewed and synthesized within each of these themes. Secondly, …

Relationship Between Parental Physical Discipline And Child Externalizing Problems In The Caribbean Subculture In New York City, Meltem Paker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated the relationship between parental physical discipline (PD) and child externalizing behaviors (EB) in the Caribbean subculture and examined whether acculturation to the European American and Caribbean cultures, generational status, normativity of PD, and warmth in the parent-child relationship moderated this relationship. Eighty-nine parents of Caribbean origin answered an anonymous survey consisting of various scales and demographic questions.

Descriptive analyses indicated that parents in this study used PD an average of 10 times during the past year. The majority (69%) reported using at least one PD act in the past year. All forms of more severe PD (e.g., …

Normalizing The Abnormal: Disability In Music And Music Theory, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The emerging interdisciplinary field of disability studies takes as its subject matter the historical, social, and cultural construction of disability. After a brief introduction to disability studies, this article explores the interconnected histories of disability and music as they are manifested in three theoretical approaches to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western art music (the musical Formenlehre and the tonal theories of Schoenberg and Schenker) and in three works by Beethoven and Schubert. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, disability began to be understood not as something natural and permanent but rather as a deviation from …

Out Of The Blue: Re-Evaluating Electra-Glide In Blue, William Blick

Publications and Research

The 1970s was a time of moral ambiguity for the cinema. The cult- favorite, Electra Glide in Blue demonstrates the polarization of ideologies in America at the time. In this film, there are several conflicting views of the Vietnam War, "Hippies", drugs, conservatism, communes, and the mistrust of authority that made up a zeitgeist of the time. This short article defines the film as a examination of the ambiguity of the 1970s.

Ruthann Robson: Writing Life And Fiction-Theory, Lynda Hall

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Imagining Lesbian Legal Theory, Kendall Thomas

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, And Alien Love: An Interview With Marleen S. Barr, C. Jason Smith, Ximena C. Gallardo, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

Marleen S. Barr is a pioneer of feminist science fiction criticism and a leader in the fight against the ghettoizing influences of genre-labeling in literary criticism. While the noteworthy Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 1992) has been praised as Barr's seminal work in feminist science fiction criticism and theory, it is in Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (U of Iowa P, 2000) where she takes on literary critics' discriminatory practices against "genre fiction" in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular.

Currently teaching at Fordham University in New York City, Barr has …

Contracts In Athenian Law, Ellen Knopf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates contracts and the contractual language of 4^th century B. C. Athens. Its main source is Attic oratory although there is some discussion of inscriptions. Since no ancient Greek word has the same range of meanings as the English word 'contract', the first task is to consider the characteristics of transactions that will count as contracts in the study and to define the term. After giving criteria for identifying contracts, the study examines Greek words whose dictionary definitions include the word 'contract'. Part I surveys the terms, όμολογία, συγγραϕή, συμβόλαιον and συνθήκη, discussing their senses in oratory …

Naming The Future: How Salvadoran Community Radio Builds Civil Society And Popular Culture, Diana Elizabeth Agosta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the participatory community radios of post-war El Salvador through ethnographic research and analyses of their operations and programming. It explores the concrete local meanings of civil society and the ways this medium helped construct a vibrant popular culture.

Its core is an analysis of the relationships between the community radios and the activities of emerging civil society organizations as part of a post-war movement reflecting a Gramscian discourse of civil society. Examples show how their collaboratively produced programs sought to increase popular participation especially among the formerly marginalized rural and urban poor, as well as to deepen …

Creative Uses Of Cultural Genres, Colette Daiute

Publications and Research

Telling - or writing - a story about an event in your life is telling a social story. Autobiographical narrations are also, to be sure, personal and unique, but the social nature of narrating is often overlooked in research and education. In particular, to appreciate what young people are doing when we ask them to share their personal experiences in public institutions like school, we need a theory to guide our reading of narratives as conversations.

This chapter focuses on how young narrators juggle the demanding yet potentially rewarding activity of narrating in public settings, and it offers insights for …

The Invention Of The Classics: Nationalism, Philology And Cultural Politics In Argentina, Fernando Degiovanni

Publications and Research

By the end of 1915, two inexpensive book series devoted to the diffusion of colonial and nineteenth-century texts flooded the shelves of Argentine bookstores. Their deliberately resonant and all-encompassing names - La Biblioteca Argentina (The Argentine Library) and La Cultura Argentina (Argentine Culture) - were unmistakable signs of their nationalist character and aims. Developed respectively by Ricardo Rojas and José lngenieros, two of the most important intellectuals of Centennial Argentina, the nearly simultaneous launch of both series also underscored the editors' enduring competition to promote their contrasting versions of the nation's political and cultural past. The timing of the series' …

Say It Loud! African-American Audiences, Media, And Identity, Gordon Alley-Young

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Queer/Crip: The First Queer Disability Conference, Walter (Peter) Penrose

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The Queer Disability Conference, the first conference of its kind ever, held on June 2 and 3 at San Francisco State University, began with great enthusiasm of the participants, many of whom identified as both disabled and queer in some fashion or another. The opening plenary included an intersex activist, who discussed feelings of not being safe in a world where binary notions of sex and gender make being intersex perilous, and hoping that s/he would feel safe at the conference. A diverse group of activists, academics, and disabled queers provided for an interesting mix of perspectives.

The Postwar Consumer As Feminized Legal Subject, Andrea Mcardle

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Art Or Propaganda: A Historical And Critical Analysis Of African-American Approaches To Dramatic Theory, 1900–1965, Henry D. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation surveys African American approaches to dramatic theory from 1900 to 1965, demonstrating that in the period the issue dominating the field was a great debate that defined black drama as art on the one hand and as propaganda on the other. In an African American cultural history replete with covert and overt struggles for social and political equality, the art or propaganda question necessarily reached a magnitude and importance found in no other area of twentieth-century dramatic theory. The comprehensiveness of the debate that interrogated this question and its historical and cultural depth has largely gone untreated. Moreover, …

Clothes Talk: Youth Modernities And Commodity Consumption In Dakar, Senegal, Suzanne Scheld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on twelve months of fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal and funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, this thesis examines how in the context of contemporary globalization, increased volumes of luxury commodities shape the modern consciousness of individuals in a developing African city. This project specifically examines this phenomenon through a study of youth clothing consumption. Dakar is a consumer society with particular consumer dynamics. In addition to class, patron-clientage and kinship are central to understanding contemporary patterns of consumption in Dakar. Clothing is a commodity that has been radically altered by urbanization and the globalization of manufacturing processes and advertising. …

Modernity And Musical Structure: Neo-Marxist Perspectives On Song Form And Its Successors, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.