Digital Commons Network^™

The Afterlives Of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, And The Visibility Of U.S. Human Rights Violations In The “War On Terror”, Rachel Daniell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about access to information.

It examines the different ways that access to U.S. government records related to the “War on Terror” is generated through the intersection of law, bureaucratic policy and procedure norms, and the everyday work of archivists and transparency advocates. I argue that, both through their labor pushing for access to government records via complex records searches, Freedom of Information Act requests, and legal action, and also through their labor layering those records with new forms of metadata in public digital circulation platforms, these individuals, in the context of their organizations, generate new forms of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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” …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture In 19th And 20th Century New York City, Krystyna Michael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity in the Literature and Culture of 19^th- and 20^th-Century New York City,explores the relationship between transformations in urban planning and domestic ideology through American literature. Specifically, I take up Walt Whitman and Edith Wharton as two authors with distinctly ambivalent relationships to the hetero-normative nuclear family and the ways New York’s built environment shaped and controlled the nation’s gender and sexual politics. My reading bridges a critical gap between studies of culture and its literary expressions on the one hand, and of architectural design and the urban environment …

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 …

Know(Ing) Thyself: Examining Complementary Practices Of Health And Wellness Through A Teacher's Standpoint, Ernest Andre Poole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How do we know the nature of a thing; of a person? This is not just a compilation of skills, theories, methods, and methodologies but an examination of the various facets of a human being trying to make sense of a single human being: himself. The research presented here is an attempt to gain a better understanding of self through examination of emotions and how they are expressed, movement and how it brings forth and may hold the possibility of inner wellness, pain and its power as a common language, and the relationship between knowing and feeling. Burgeoning spirituality, self-worth, …

Using Oximeters Heuristically: A Case For Emotionally Adaptive Pedagogy, Corinna Brathwaite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Part of teaching a learner includes the emotions of the teachers and learners, as emotional experiences arise throughout teaching | learning that can be better addressed and coped with. The Sheffer stroke (|) is used to emphasize that teaching and learning are both simultaneous and dependent on the social interaction of learning as both the roles, teacher and learner, are interchangeable. Emotional experiences of teachers and learners impact their emotional state of being. Reflective tools such as heuristics, emotion diaries, clickers, cogenerative dialogues, and oximeters have been used alongside video recordings to prompt awareness of experienced emotions. When educators intentionally …

Brrap Brrap Pew Pew: Representations Of Abortion In Adult Animated Television Comedy, Erika A. Byrnison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis documents and analyzes representation of abortion in American adult animated comedy, charging that it is under-examined and significant because representation on television in other genres has traditionally been absent or misleading. It covers theories on how pop culture communicates social norms, and posits that greater truthful representation of abortion in popular culture may be effective in reducing prevalent abortion stigma in the U.S. amongst the young by normalizing and more accurately representing the procedure. It reviews why our culture should be concerned about reducing abortion stigma in the U.S. It also identifies the “taboo ratings paradox,” wherein television …

Performing Desire In Times Square: Sailors, Hustlers And Masculinity, Kel R. Karpinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From WWII to the early 1970s, New York City as a port town created a liminal space extending from the piers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard all the way to Times Square in Midtown Manhattan. In Times Square, through interactions on the street, in bars and in hotel rooms, desire and masculinity become a performance between and for men. The queerness of these performances lies in the fact that they fall outside of the norms of society both as same-sex encounters and because sex work is viewed as “deviant.” Further, these interactions eschew traditional labels and limits of desire and …

"When We Demand Our Share Of This World”: Struggles For Space, New Possibilities Of Planning, And Municipalist Politics In Mumbai, Malav J. Kanuga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents an urban history of Bombay/Mumbai from the perspective of a politics of plurality, arguing that while the city has emerged from governmental control and planning, its development has also been shaped by myriad popular productive forces of urban society. The dissertation traces the uneven development of the city through significant planning policies, popular movements, and lived experiences of various struggles against regimes of developmentalism—the governing ideologies of development, techniques, policies, and rules of law through which the city has been planned and governed. These ideologies and practices have shifted over time, but since the earliest days of …

Insecure Hegemony: The Cultural Construction Of 'Righteous Retaliation' In The Hunt For Osama Bin Laden, Marisa Tramontano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the American “authorized discourse” about the hunt for and killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to better understand it as an episode in American cultural hegemony maintenance. Through a structural hermeneutic analysis of presidential speeches and widely-circulated national strategy documents, high distribution news coverage, and entertainment media, alongside one-on-one interviews and focus groups, I illuminate the symbolic mechanics by which the death of Osama bin Laden was constructed as righteous and legitimate retaliatory violence in response to the unprompted, offensive violence of the 9/11 attacks.

Drawing on an array of theoretical approaches including classical sociologists Karl …

Software Of The Oppressed: Reprogramming The Invisible Discipline, Erin R. Glass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of software practices within the university and the ways they contribute to a broader status quo of software use, development, and imagination. Through analyzing the history of software practices used in the production and circulation of student and scholarly writing, I argue that this overarching software status quo has oppressive qualities in that it supports the production of passive users, or users who are unable to collectively understand and transform software code for their own interests. I also argue that the university inadvertently normalizes and strengthens the software status quo through what I call …

“Are They Supposed To Be Heugin?": Negotiating Race, Nation, And Representation In Korean Musical Theatre, Ji Hyon Yuh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines contemporary Korean musical theatre as a form of popular culture that has served an important role in reflecting and establishing personal and national identity in Korea, especially as it intersects with the global and local manifestations of race and racial ideologies. I argue that musical theatre has served an important political and economic role, since its beginning as a cultural weapon in the height of the Cold War to more contemporary examples in which Korean musicals serve as a tool to brand Korea as an advanced nation in the world. To make a case for this relationship …

Brentwood, New York 11717: A Multimedia Ethnographic Study On An Immigrant Town, Ashley Mungo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brentwood, New York is a working-class town of about 60,000 situated forty miles east of Manhattan on Long Island. As of the 2010 Census, 68.5 percent of residents are Latino or Hispanic, with 10.7 percent of the overall population living below the federal poverty level. Less than ten percent of the population has obtained a bachelors degree or higher. Street violence, gangs, and overall crime are frequently addressed at community meetings, igniting a fierce debate on immigration within the town that has reached national media, with critics arguing that the exponentially increasing Latino migrant population has caused this crisis.

The …