Digital Commons Network^™

Commonwealth Times 2025-04-02

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Re-Member The Time: Informed Engagement Through Embodied Memory Among Queer Black Greek Letter Organization Members, Shawna Patterson-Stephens, Antron Mahoney, Charles Stephens

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

This study examines the reflexivity of queer BGLO members after graduation and how they made meaning of their involvement when considering encounters with past critical incidents. The authors observed how queer-identified members of Black Greek-lettered organizations navigated opportunities for campus engagement in spaces prone to present heteronormative attitudes. The authors explored how queer-identified members of Black Greek-lettered organizations navigated the processes of identity development and meaning making in spaces prone to presenting heteronormative attitudes. This work is salient because it illustrates the development of subcultures within Black counterspaces in the postsecondary sector. These analyses explicate Black queer folx’s capacity to …

Commonwealth Times 2025-02-26

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2025-01-15

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Parallel Punishments: The School-To-Prison Transgender Pipeline, Rayna Momen, Lindsay K. Semprevivo, Cris Mayo

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

With increasing criminalization of transgender people, especially legislation targeting youth, researchers need to consider more closely the historical and continuing criminalization of gender non-normativity. We suggest in this article that closer attention to queer criminology in relationship to transgender and gender-related social justice education can help shape research agendas and school practices and disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline for transgender youth. Our focus is specifically on how disciplinary practices requiring identification as well as those that ignore identification both contribute to the growth of punitive responses to gender diversity, especially in relationship to race and ethnicity.

Virginia Commonwealth University Courses (2025), Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Listing of courses for the 2025-2026 year.

Virginia Commonwealth University Graduate Bulletin (2025), Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Listing of courses for the 2025-2026 year.

Virginia Commonwealth University Undergraduate Bulletin (2025), Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Undergraduate bulletin for Virginia Commonwealth University for the academic year 2025-2026. It includes information on academic regulations, degree requirements, course offerings, faculty, academic calendar, and tuition and expenses for undergraduate programs

Show Them, Teach Them, Let Them: Empowering Undergraduate Voices Through Student-Centered Theatre, Abigail G. Norris

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the urgent need for theatrical works that resonate with undergraduate students, arguing that student-centered playwriting and production can foster deeper engagement with theatre, reflect contemporary issues, and empower the next generation of theatre-makers. Grounded in a hybrid methodology of creative practice and qualitative research, the study proposes a comprehensive, student-driven model for university theatre programs. Drawing from the author's experiences at both the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Virginia Commonwealth University, the thesis examines institutional season selection processes, inclusive pedagogical strategies in playwriting, and the development of new works through student festivals. Central to the …

Theatre As Sanctuary: Queer Identity, Religious Trauma, And The Path To Healing, Casey Worley

Theses and Dissertations

Growing up as a queer individual in a deeply religious Southern Baptist community, I learned early that faith and identity could feel like irreconcilable forces. I sat in the pews, surrounded by voices that preached love but often excluded people like me. For years, I struggled with the question: Can I be both queer and faithful? This tension—between belief and belonging, between the church I was raised in and the identity I could no longer deny—became the foundation of my journey, my artistic practice, and this thesis.

Through this research, I explore the intersections of queer identity, religious trauma, and …

Strange World, Brooklin Grantz

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis work explores the intersections of masculine and feminine labors as they relate to the structure of domestic space. I utilize materials and processes akin to craft, construction and architecture, and domicile upkeep, noting what is shared between gendered and polarized fields while exploring uses of the grid in various instances as a structure to adhere to and antagonize: a binary. Highlighting the queerness and fluidity of materials and the similarities between seemingly disparate processes, I relate to the objects I make and alter through my own gender fluidity. I do not see masculinity or femininity as autonomous: the …

Orb Weaver, Quinn Standley

Theses and Dissertations

Orb Weaver is a 24-minute experimental video/lm. This essay does not explain its meaning, as viewers should feel the power to trust their own interpretations. Instead, it reflects on the process of making the lm interwoven with autobiographical thoughts.

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

Watchpeopledie . Tv, Noah Lebien

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis piece is a performance called watchpeopledie.tv performed four times at the Anderson Gallery in the Hidden Galleries. There are two rooms in the gallery. The first room is where the audience enters. There is a line on the floor marking that the audience is not to move further into the first room or into the second room. The audio consists of verbatim comments sourced from videos of violence against trans people from the website watchpeopledie.tv, a website in which users post real videos of shootings, suicides, car accidents, etc. The main text, which is my thesis writing below, …

The Red Scare, Ingo Taylor

Jurgen Banned Art Comics Contest

Grand prize winner in the 2025 Jurgen Banned Art Comics Contest.

The Masked Moth, scourge of supervillains and protector of artists from censorship, battles his greatest foe yet—The Red Scare, who emits a scream so terrifying it sends people into a paranoid, anti-Communist frenzy.

Queer-Keying: Performing Video Processes As [Trans]Gressive Resistance, Wren Tiffany

Theses and Dissertations

As part of the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), I transformed the 'Sponge' gallery on the top floor of The Anderson, VCU’s historic thesis exhibition home, into The Green Room, a neon green, immersive video and performance space featuring mirrors, disco lights, a foam tile dance floor, makeup stations, and a functioning green-screen editing suite. This hybrid drag rehearsal and ‘Chroma-key’ green video production room deepened both my understandings of Queer performance art and process-based art making during the Spring of 2025, through two public performance activation …

The Bitch And The Boogeyman: Violence Against Women And Gendered Morality In American Slasher Films, Davis A. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the relationships between on-screen depictions of violence in American slasher horror films and depictions of gendered morality of victims. Slashers are a subgenre of horror film that arose out of the exploitation cinema movement of the 1970s that are characterized primarily by the presence of one or more human killers inflicting violence on a group of protagonists, typically through the use of bladed weapons. Data collected comes from a comprehensive set of thirty-six American slasher films that received a wide theatrical release, with exemptions for films whose primary genre is not slasher and only selecting three films …

Love Letter, Amy S. Duval Ms

Theses and Dissertations

I applied to graduate school to reconnect with and better understand my studio practice, acquire language, and to disrupt my known ways of making. Generally speaking, I see my practice as being about being seen, and unseen, and the pain and pleasure of being perceived. I’ve learned about my ways of being in the studio. I’ve come closer to speaking honestly about my relationship with my materials, processes, tools, how I value my own labor, and how this informs my work. I am grateful for the cascade of small epiphanies that came and left me while I worked in my …

The Page And The Stage: How Comics Perform, Elizabeth Buccella

Theses and Dissertations

Comics and theatre share several, often overlooked similarities, like their unique concept of the gaze, interpretation and execution of a script, and the curation of a distinct visual language. This makes comics a viable candidate for analysis using the field of performance studies and other theatrical forms of analysis. The process of comics and how they are read is discussed before a brief literature review of performance and comics studies scholarship. Two comics, one nonfiction and one fiction, are analyzed using the key concepts from the literature review.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, And Self-Determination Since 1969, Shannon Bewley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2024-10-30

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Co-Producing Learning Space In A Prison-University Partnership, Ross E. Little

Journal of Prison Education Research

This article explores a classroom co-produced by learners serving prison sentences, undergraduate criminology students and a pair of lecturer-facilitators. This space, in a high security prison for men serving life sentences (‘HMP Lifer’), provides a good example of ethical praxis and moral sight working in combination to mitigate against moral and ethical blindness. It is a mechanism by which pedagogical concerns, and some human-centred ones, can be realised in an unconventional context.

There are two areas to the discussion. Firstly, the effects of incorporating students from outside the prison into the classroom space, such as enhanced proximity, the reduction of …

Commonwealth Times 2024-10-16

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2024-08-21

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Teaching Shakespeare In Prison, Renford Reese, Rachel Tracie

Journal of Prison Education Research

The Prison Education Project (PEP) offers life skills and academic courses in 30 correctional facilities in California. Founded in 2011, PEP uses university student and faculty volunteers to teach a range of 32 introductory courses during three seven-week semesters: Fall, Spring, Summer. One of PEP’s most popular courses is the “Introduction to Shakespeare” course. This article examines the impact of teaching an “Introduction to Shakespeare” course in prison. This course introduces in-custody students to the literary interpretation of Shakespeare in the context of their own lived experience. Students in this course deconstruct the use of language and analyze the social, …

Othermothering Encounters With An Anxious Now, Amber Ward, Jesús Quintero, Shaquela Russ, Emily Dellheim, Kellie Fallon, Elizabeth Vann-Womack, Zackary Crawford, Valentina Valbuena-Lopez

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Personal journal entries recount how graduate students and their instructor respond to a point of encounter in an online studio course at a large research institution in the Southeastern United States. Inspired by collectivist othermothering practices, the article speaks to learning from Black scholars while chronicling a shared experience and responding to an anxious now that is navigating the N-word together. The authors aim to center caring exchanges and ethical practices for the purpose of (re)building safety and hope that this article will be helpful to art educators who also encounter the N-word or have similar moments of crisis.

Commonwealth Times 2024-02-14

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2024-01-17

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Virginia Commonwealth University Courses (2024), Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Listing of courses for the 2024-2025 year.

Virginia Commonwealth University Undergraduate Bulletin (2024), Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Undergraduate bulletin for Virginia Commonwealth University for the academic year 2024-2025. It includes information on academic regulations, degree requirements, course offerings, faculty, academic calendar, and tuition and expenses for undergraduate programs.