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Virginia Woolf And Gertrude Stein’S Repurposing Of Feminine Domestic Language Through The Lens Of Bakhtinian Heteroglossia And Dialogic Theory, Samantha Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This essay examines the ways that Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own and Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and “The Good Anna” recapture feminine domestic language in order to produce a new form of feminist heteroglossia, a reworking of Bakhtinian heteroglossia and dialogic theory.

Warped Gates, Christopher Roberson

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in the ambient conditions that are filtered through our bodies and our relationships with the built structures positioning us. I am combining experimental material approaches with a sensitivity to the spaces around an artwork to create sculptural situations that are dissonant and precarious.

"Mute Flesh": Women's Death-Worlds In David's Story And Waiting For The Barbarians, Kate Finley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis expands upon Achille Mbembe's theory on necropower and death-worlds to incorporate the consideration of gender. This is done using the lens of violence against women during South African apartheid and through an examination of two novels: Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.

The Case Of New Institutionalism: Maria Lind At The Kunstverein München, 2002–2004., Olga Tykhonova

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis focuses on a particular moment in the history of Kunstverein München - the directorship and curatorial practice of Maria Lind from 2002 to 2004, referred to as exemplary of the New Institutionalism. I analyze Lind’s directorship through the lens of the director-curator concept and institution as an “agonistic space.”

A Bite Of The Big Apple: The Anthropology Of Pesticide Use In New York City, Faye O'Brien

Theses and Dissertations

Pesticide exposure in the developing world is well described in anthropology. How pesticide use and exposure is ordered and experienced socially, economically and culturally in Western urban communities is less well studied. The long-term consequences of synergistic pesticide exposure is not easily measurable, which this research addresses through social inquiry.

Studies Of Musical Borrowing: Borrowing As Compositional Tool In Béla Bartók's Second Piano Concerto And The Influence Of Luciano Berio On The Grateful Dead's Approach To Live Improvisation, Michael J. Crowley

Theses and Dissertations

J. Peter Burkholder’s typology of musical borrowing provides new ways of thinking about and understanding how composers and musicians incorporated influential ideas into their own compositions. This paper explores two cases of musical borrowing in order to gain a deeper understanding of the compositional styles of the chosen subjects. In the first study, I explore Béla Bartók’s use of Paraphrase, Modeling and Stylistic Allusion in his Second Piano Concerto, demonstrating how Bartók used borrowing as a compositional tool to develop his own innovative ideas. In the second study, I investigate how Luciano Berio’s compositional style influenced the Grateful Dead’s approach …

Expanding Experimentalism: Art And Popular Music At The Kitchen In New York City, 1971-1985, Sarah A. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores artists' engagement with popular music at the interdisciplinary alternative space, the Kitchen, from 1971 to 1985. It seeks a critical language to challenge institutional frameworks to account for the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between parallel and hybrid popular music and avant-garde performance practices.

Refracting Immigration Rhetoric: The Struggle To Define Identity, Place And Nation In Southern Arizona, Emily Duwel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the refraction of immigration rhetoric in a local context through a collection of letters to the editor of southern Arizona’s largest and only daily newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, for the period 2006-2010. The purpose is to further insight into the process by which xenophobic nationalism is both contested and legitimated ‘on the ground,’ within a violent paradigm of nativist rhetoric and exclusion. Findings reveal essential disjunctures between and within letter-writers’ conceptions of moral proximity and the social contract—as delimiting those obligations and expectations that inhere between society, the self and the stranger—as well as competing notions …

Re-Defining Gender And Sexuality In West African Theatre: Women Artists, Feminist Representations, And Same-Sex Desire In The Twenty-First Century Theatre Of Benin, Burkina Faso, And Togo, Heather J. Denyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines French-language theatre in the West African countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo that tackles gender-related themes. Topics often considered taboo, including domestic violence, child brides, and sexual desire, are publically addressed through contemporary theatre. The study focuses on the growing presence of women artists, including playwrights, actresses, and directors. Particularly since 2010, these artists have shifted the aesthetic and thematic substance of the theatre being created. Their presence has also generated new paths for plays written by and directed by men, including gay male characters and bold women. By considering the field of African women's studies …

Police Reform In Ukraine Since The Euromaidan: Police Reform In Transition And Institutional Crisis, Nicholas Pehlman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why does reform of law enforcement remain so elusive in post-communist countries like Ukraine, despite political upheaval, a public mandate for reform and substantial international assistance? Which components contribute to the success and sustainability of a police reform and which factors produce political will from political leaders to implement the difficulties of police reform? This dissertation argues that in addition to massive corruption and the politics of insecurity, the greatest challenges to reform of Ukraine’s law enforcement system is political competition, resulting in the politicization of law enforcement institutions and law enforcement policy. Political competition is based in Ukraine’s fractured …

Democratization Of Nepal: Towards Consolidation? Perspectives On Rule Of Law & Civil Liberties, Anil J. Shahi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After popular uprisings that started in 1989, Nepal declassed the 200-year old absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy in 1990 and entered into an era of parliamentary democracy. The road to democratization was to be proven tumultuous when the Maoists launched an insurgency in 1996. In 2003, citing democratic government’s inability to end the bloody insurgency and political parties’ utter ineptitude in governance, King Gyanendra dismissed the parliament and retook the reign in an attempt to re-establish absolute monarchy. Just three years after, the Maoists and an alliance of seven political parties reached an agreement to end the insurgency, abolish …

Landing Points, Matt Boyle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This fiction is a phenomenological account of generational memory and change. Special attention is paid to biological New York City and Long Island.

[LANDING POINTS concerns the creative conscience of a middle-aged notary supplies salesman. He looks in on himself through the layered experiences offered by his position in time and space. Set roughly in the future on the South Shore of Long Island, beaches as well as more central locations, Queens, and Berlin, his odyssey takes the reader through a series of memories endlessly infused with desire to establish limits on the writing of the self.]

Refugees From Somalia, Burma/Myanmar And Iraq: Navigating New Lives In The Us In Post-9/11 Context, Ivona Boroje

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis engages with the relationship of the US with refugees, with a focus on the reception and perception of refugees resettled in the US after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Three groups that have resettled in the US in large numbers after 9/11, namely refugees from Somalia, Burma/Myanmar and Iraq groups have had divergent experiences, shaped by factors such as race and/or ethnic identity, religion, cultural norms, expectations about life in the US, histories of their places of origin and the relationship of the US with that place of origin. This thesis attempts to compare the experiences …

Obfuscating Authorship: Results Of A User Study On Nondescript, A Digital Privacy Tool, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

For those who write anonymously, particularly for safety reasons, authorship attribution poses a threat. Nondescript, my web app, guides writers in achieving stylometric obfuscation in order to preserve anonymity. The app runs simulations of authorship attribution scenarios by analyzing the user’s linguistic features. In this paper, I will describe the conception of the Nondescript app; discuss related work; and present the results of a user study. Most users in the study were able to anonymize their writing in at least 5 out of 10 authorship attribution scenarios. Users rated the anonymization process an average of 3.6 out of 5 in …

Culture Clubs: Processing Speech By Deriving And Exploiting Linguistic Subcultures, David Guy Brizan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Spoken language understanding systems are error-prone for several reasons, including individual speech variability. This is manifested in many ways, among which are differences in pronunciation, lexical inventory, grammar and disfluencies. There is, however, a lot of evidence pointing to stable language usage within subgroups of a language population. We call these subgroups linguistic subcultures.

The two broad problems are defined and a survey of the work in this space is performed. The two broad problems are: linguistic subculture detection, commonly performed via Language Identification, Accent Identification or Dialect Identification approaches; and speech and language processing tasks taken which may see …

Reverse The Curse: Colonialist Legacies Of The Magic Poem, Karen E. Lepri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the conceptual relationships between poetry, magic, and race and their effects on both intellectual and creative practices from modernism through the post-war era. In doing so, this study works cross-disciplinarily, tracing early anthropological and sociological characterizations of primitive religion in connection to early-to-mid-twentieth-century literary study and writing. In working across disciplines at this particularly fungible moment in the history of the academy, this dissertation attempts to understand how the concurrent colonial global context effects the production and organization of knowledge just prior to and during modernism. It ultimately seeks to de-colonize literary thinking about poetry by performing …

Rural Adolescent Education Reframed: Can Social Justice, Lewin’S Topology, And Aesthetics Aid Reform Efforts?, Judith F. Upjohn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis is to describe and analyze how changes in classroom-level conditions can help underperforming students thrive despite established school structures that discriminate against and exclude those students from learning opportunities.

Every year, millions of US public school students fail to graduate high school (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2018), despite numerous ongoing education reform efforts (Berkshire & Schneider, n.d.; Strauss, 2017). A large percentage of these students attend rural schools (Arnold, Newman, Gaddy, & Dean, 2005; Status of Rural Education, 2018). The rural conditions of adolescent students adversely affect their educational performance and achievement (Howley …

The Post-9/11 Lgbtq Human Rights Struggle In Egypt, Donna K. Huaman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the struggle for LGBTQ human rights has become a leading standard that depicts whether or not a state can be considered modern and progressive. Yet, while this new criterion seems to be supported by Global North states, other nations in other regions, like Egypt from the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) has criticized the international pressure to implement this standard as neo-imperialist and inauthentic to its Muslim-Arab culture. Egypt claims to be the universal Arab-Muslim voice for the MENA region and has become one of the greatest challengers to the international campaign for …

Generative Adversarial Networks And Word Embeddings For Natural Language Generation, Robert D. Schultz Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We explore using image generation techniques to generate natural language. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), normally used for image generation, were used for this task. To avoid using discrete data such as one-hot encoded vectors, with dimensions corresponding to vocabulary size, we instead use word embeddings as training data. The main motivation for this is the fact that a sentence translated into a sequence of word embeddings (a “word matrix”) is an analogue to a matrix of pixel values in an image. These word matrices can then be used to train a generative adversarial model. The output of the model’s generator …

A Defense Of Pure Connectionism, Alex B. Kiefer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Connectionism is an approach to neural-networks-based cognitive modeling that encompasses the recent deep learning movement in artificial intelligence. It came of age in the 1980s, with its roots in cybernetics and earlier attempts to model the brain as a system of simple parallel processors. Connectionist models center on statistical inference within neural networks with empirically learnable parameters, which can be represented as graphical models. More recent approaches focus on learning and inference within hierarchical generative models. Contra influential and ongoing critiques, I argue in this dissertation that the connectionist approach to cognitive science possesses in principle (and, as is becoming …

Mandarin Assessment In Chinese-English Bilingual Preschoolers, Jennifer A. Chard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Immigrant children who grow up in linguistically and culturally diverse households are at risk for misdiagnosis for language impairment and inappropriate placement in or exclusion from special education classes. Research shows that native language testing is essential in determining eligibility for disability services, as reflected both in federal law (Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004). However, despite growing agreement that native language assessment is a critical component to understanding the abilities and challenges bilingual students face, the standard assessments currently used are largely administered in Standard English and normed on monolingual English speakers. Few options are available to …

The Equal Right To Sing: The American Zeitgeist And Its Implications For Music Education, Youngeun Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to music educators and proponents of arts education, music education in U.S. public schools seems to be in jeopardy. This thesis brings attention to several issues in current music education. It is a case study of music education in New York City public elementary schools. First, it shows that music education is not equally distributed to all students in the public-school system and is especially unequal among elementary schools. Next, it investigates possible causes for this inequality, from the current system’s limitations to more fundamental causes including the cultural perception of music among the U.S. public. The consequences of …

Articulation Of The Japanese Moraic Nasal: Place Of Articulation, Assimilation, And L2 Transfer, Ai Mizoguchi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The moraic nasal /N/ in Japanese has been transcribed in multiple ways, but very few studies have examined its articulation. The nature of its assimilation has often been described in phonology, but again, very few articulatory investigations have been conducted. Also, while a first language (L1) effect on second language (L2) production has been discussed for some phonemes, there is no good research on the effect of Japanese /N/ on L2 English syllable-final nasals. This dissertation investigates the articulation of the moraic nasal /N/ in Japanese using an ultrasound articulatory imaging technique to assess 1) its place of articulation, 2) …

Brace For Impact: The Effects Of Victim Impact Evidence And Judicial Instructions On Juror Memory Distortion And Sentencing Decisions In Capital Trials, Auset E. Alexander

Student Theses

The utilization of visual evidence in the courtroom has increased exponentially in an effort to portray additional information that cannot otherwise be established via forensic evidence and expert testimony. According to Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence (1984), visual evidence may be permitted in court if the prejudicial value does not significantly outweigh the probative value. The admissibility of visual evidence however, becomes controversial when combined with victim impact statements (VIS) during the penalty phase of capital trials.

Previous research has indicated that jurors are often unable to perceive emotional testimony and subsequently make objective sentencing decisions that …

Reconstructing The Demographic History Of The Critically Endangered Black-And-White Ruffed Lemur (Varecia Variegata) In Ranomafana National Park, Aparna Chandrashekar

Theses and Dissertations

Due to heavy fragmentation of their remaining range, the Critically Endangered black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) is facing catastrophic population declines. Skyline analyses at Ranomafana National Park show the ruffed lemur effective population size declining by 84% starting around 1,500 years ago.

My Unfair Trumpie Closely Encounters 'Julie Andrews', Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is a humorous short story about Trump.

"More Like You": Disrupting Native-Speakerism Through A Multimodal Online Intercultural Exchange, Brooke R. Schreiber

Publications and Research

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the harmful effects of native speakerism in English language teaching, including how perceptions of native speaker status are deeply intertwined with race and national identity. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate how teacher training programs might push back on native speakerism by providing classroom opportunities for students to challenge their assumptions about native speakers. This article discusses the disruptive potential of an online intercultural learning activity in which MA TESL students in Sri Lanka communicated through digital platforms with undergraduates in New York City. Drawing on data from interviews and students’ online writing, …

Bmcc Borough Of Manhattan Community College 2019-2020 Bulletin, Borough Of Manhattan Community College

Archives

This is the official college catalog for 2019-2020. It contains course descriptions as well as information on degree programs, college resources and services, admissions, tuition and fees, financial aid, a profile of the college, and rules and regulations.

Writing For The Humanities And Arts, Shamecca A. Harris

Open Educational Resources

This dynamic English Composition course asks students to both create and engage with texts, in a variety of forms, that demonstrate how culture and personal experience inform a writer’s work. In this class, students will read and write voraciously about social, political, economic and cultural issues that influence their lived experiences and use the conventions of multiple genres to both reflect and respond to the times in which they live. Moreover, they will also consciously consider what it means to write academically at the college level through regular self-reflection and revision. In doing so, students will strengthen their rhetorical knowledge …

Writing For The Humanities, Pamela Jean Stemberg

Open Educational Resources

OER syllabus with assignments for second semester English Composition class, Writing in the Humanities.