Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Spirituality And Trauma On Appraisals Of Psychotic-Like Experiences, Kathleen Isaac

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: A substantial portion of the general population (2.5% to 31.4% internationally) reports psychotic-like experiences, which are paranormal, psychic or bizarre perceptual experiences such as voice hearing, or holding strong beliefs (i.e. superstitions) that are neither experienced as pathological nor indicative of a psychotic disorder. Cognitive models of psychosis suggest that the cognitive appraisal (i.e. personal interpretation) of the experience may help distinguish non-clinical psychotic-like experiences from clinical psychotic symptoms. This dissertation attempted to add to cognitive models by assessing whether cultural and personal factors such as spirituality and trauma inform the appraisals of anomalous experiences. This study used a …

Performing Human Rights In Neoliberal Asia: Artistic And Activist Engagements In Hong Kong, Malaysia, And Singapore, Melissa Wansin Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines artistic and activist performances that address issues of rights abuses in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. I demonstrate how the centralized ruling parties encourage the neoliberalization of their economies while maintaining autocratic rule, thus intensifying structural inequalities while also clamping down on dissent. This condition then exacerbates the lack of labor, sexuality, and democratic rights. Concurrently, the states’ aspirations to be part of the global capitalist market have paradoxically provided conditional spaces of political and artistic expression. I contend that existing critiques of human rights from sociological and legalistic perspectives are inadequate for contemplating this state of …

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …

Encountering Place, Pedagogy, And Culture: Study Abroad And Experiential Learning In Morocco And Indonesia, Jennifer M. Pipitone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Efforts to globalize higher education have resulted in study abroad climbing to an all-time high in the United States. Amidst this growth, emergent bodies of literature have uncovered problematic trends in study abroad that reproduce hierarchies of power and colonialism, perpetuate views of an exotic cultural “other,” and privilege tourism over education. In my dissertation, I respond to these problems by exploring ways of teaching and learning in study abroad that embrace the pedagogical power of place to foster awareness of the self in relation to other, cultivate relationality, and deconstruct the exotic. Rather than focusing on the individual as …

Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Not My Queer: Queer Representation In Contemporary Italian Serial Television, Julia Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary Italian television, like many national televisions, has entered a period in which the relationships the producers and consumers of televisual content are increasingly indistinguishable. In this age of media convergence the new participants of this medium work across platforms to actively engage, consume, create, and recreate both televisual content and our understanding of the medium. These new relationships require a new understanding of the semiotic and discursive changes taking place in television so that we may reconceptualize the contemporary interplay between media and society.

This dissertation maps out a new understanding of the televisual economy through an elaboration of …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

The Art Of Cognition: British Empiricism And Victorian Aesthetics, Rachel Kravetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The British are credited—or charged—with establishing empiricism, the view that all knowledge is embedded in sense experience. My project argues for and describes an undercurrent of idealism within British empiricism: the writers of my study investigated modes of thinking that transform sensory experience. To see their idealism at work, it is necessary to look closely at how they conceived of ideas in the mind as pictures. Given that the term “picture” was used to refer to both inner ideas and actual paintings, it is not surprising (though rarely noticed) that when empiricists wanted to consider how the mind shapes ideas, …

Communicationists And Un-Artists: Pedagogical Experiments In California, 1966-1974, Hallie Rose Scott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A network of experimental workshops, classes, and schools foregrounding interdisciplinary, non-hierarchical, and process-based approaches to teaching and learning emerged in coastal California between 1966 and 1974. These initiatives embodied a new pedagogical approach that I call “communication pedagogy,” in which students were taught to exchange ideas and collaborate, rather than to produce objects. Analyzing three central case studies, Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s Experiments in Environment workshops, Ant Farm’s proposals for learning networks, and Allan Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’ course, I argue that communication pedagogy helped to foster a new paradigm for artistic practice: the artist as facilitator and network-creator. By the mid-1970s …

Dark Stars Of The Evening: Performing African American Citizenship And Identity In Germany, 1890-1920, Kristin L. Moriah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1920 demonstrates that black performers in Germany developed wide networks in the performance world as they sought artistic opportunities beyond the racist circumscription of the American popular stage. Their performances became emblematic of modernity, globalization, and imperial might for German audiences at the turn of the century. African American-styled blackness contributed to the formation of the city of Berlin while allowing African American performers to assert themselves on the global stage. Groups like the Four Black Diamonds had a lengthy engagement with the popular stage in Berlin, …

"The Engine Of Free Expression": The Political Economy Of Copyright In The Colonial British Atlantic And Early National United States, Nora Slonimsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1985, the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that copyright was included in the Constitution in order to serve as the “engine of free expression.” By providing economic incentive to drive artistic and scientific innovation, the nation received essential information and other tools of learning necessary to make sound political decisions. However, transnational copyright disputes, then and now, frequently resulted in complex and often contradictory understandings of free expression. The formation of copyright in America was thus a far more complex story, and it is that story that forms the basis of this project.

Amidst the many moving …

The Technocratic Politics Of The Common Core State Standards In History, Kate Duguid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper shows that the explicit aims of the American educational standards for public schools, the Common Core State Standards to teach history to create “college and career ready” students, marks a shift from preparing students for political participation to preparing them for market participation. I trace the intellectual and pedagogical origins of the Common Core’s pretense of technocratic apolitical values back through the previous two major American curricular reform efforts. In the first section I discuss the origins and development of the National History Standards and show how Cold War anxiety prompted a shift in evaluating students as potential …

Toward A Reoriented Radicalism: Black Marxism And Orientalism, Alexandros Orphanides

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 21st century has witnessed the unquestioned supremacy of late capitalism. It holds coercive power over nation states; it generates increased inequality within countries and around the globe. It can, today, exploit everywhere at once. The poorest countries in the world reside in the Global South. Of the twenty poorest countries in the world, seventeen are in Africa; the rest are elsewhere in the Global South. Of the hundred poorest countries in world, over 95 percent are in the Global South. In the United States, Blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous people have poverty rates that greatly exceed the national average. Poverty …

The Fat Female Bodies Of Saturday Night Live: Uncovering The Normative Cultural Power Of A Countercultural Comedy Institution, Katharine Cacace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite its reputation as one of the most countercultural and anti-establishment voices in mainstream television comedy, Saturday Night Live helps produce and reproduces cultural norms. Using weight and gender as a lens, this paper investigates Saturday Night Live’s methods of creating, imitating, and evoking the fat female body in order to limit female agency and police unruly female power. It contends that even the inclusion of nonnormative female bodies—fat bodies, queer bodies, and bodies of color—is merely a reiteration of the techniques of neoliberal multiculturalism for the television audience.

A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the …

Radical Interiorities, Aesthetic Selves: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Miciah Hussey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In her essay “On Being Ill” (1926), Virginia Woolf writes “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others…There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown.” My dissertation explores how the novel’s attempts to represent this inherently intimate and estranging “virgin forest” also test its formal limitations. From free indirect discourse to stream of consciousness, the development of the novel is marked by different modes of reproducing inner life that push beyond the boundaries of historical, social, and physiognomic indices. I argue that these narrative and …

“Vital Glowing Things”: The Art Of Women’S Writing, 1910-1935, Elizabeth C. Decker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The rising field of new modernisms continues to breathe new life into the literature of marginalized writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. By imagining modernism as a series of modes and strategies, and expanding the axes upon which we map modernism’s boundaries, we make way for writers who were shut out by the often imbalanced, limited modernism of the past and illuminate the field with new possibilities. This dissertation takes part in this exciting, vibrant conversation by identifying a mode of modernism present in the literature of three early twentieth-century women writers, who all used visual art techniques to …

Where Have All The Feminists Gone?: A Mixed-Methods Study Of College Students' Attitudes Toward Gender Equality, Erin Maurer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The perceived lack of interest in feminism among “millennials” is a subject of continued debate in sociological literature as well as public discourse. While the U.S. women’s movement of the 1960's and ‘70s can claim some success in reducing educational and professional barriers, legalizing abortion, and transforming conceptions of sex/gender both in academia and in the wider culture, numerous obstacles to gender equality remain. Indeed, the paradox of the second-wave is that it was successful in so many respects that young women and men coming of age today might assume that gender equality is a fait accompli. For scholars and …

Feeling Political: Affect, Emotion, And Ethics In Western Political Theory, John Mcmahon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What conceptual and methodological resources would it take for political theory to be able to more deeply analyze the emotional and affective dimensions of political life? In this dissertation, I articulate interdisciplinary work on affect and emotion into political theory in order to realize four linked objectives: first, to develop a method of reading and interpreting political theory capable of tracing the theoretical work done by affect and emotion in works of political thought; second, to reassess the boundaries of the political theory canon in terms of the thinkers that ‘count’ as part of that canon as well as the …

Examining Relationships Between Basic Emotion Perception And Musical Training In The Prosodic, Facial, And Lexical Channels Of Communication And In Music, Jamie Twaite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research has suggested that intensive musical training may result in transfer effects from musical to non-musical domains. There is considerable research on perceptual and cognitive transfer effects associated with music, but, comparatively, fewer studies examined relationships between musical training and emotion processing. Preliminary findings, though equivocal, suggested that musical training is associated with enhanced perception of emotional prosody, consistent with a growing body of research demonstrating relationships between music and speech. In addition, few studies directly examined the relationship between musical training and the perception of emotions expressed in music, and no studies directly evaluated this relationship in the facial …

The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11^th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …

Building In Public: Critical Reconstruction And The Rebuilding Of Berlin After 1990, Naraelle Hohensee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reconstructing Berlin’s ruined contours after 1990 was one of the most important ways that reunified Germany made a public display of its relationship to the violence wrought by both the Nazis and East Germany during the twentieth century. By integrating historical forms into new buildings in the city’s commercial center, Berlin’s urban planners hoped to show the world that the nation had transcended totalitarianism and was worthy of a prominent place in the new global order. In order to achieve this vision, they adopted an approach called “Critical Reconstruction,” which required architects to follow rigid design standards based on traditional …

Perceptions Of Money: Relationships Between Remembered Parental Rejection, Extrinsic Life Aspirations And Maladaptive Attitudes Toward Money, Rebecca J. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the extent to which maternal rejection, paternal rejection, maternal care, and maternal overprotection predict extrinsic life aspirations as well as maladaptive money attitudes in young adults. Additionally, this study sought to determine if the Adult Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire correlates with the Parental Bonding Instrument. The variable, extrinsic life aspirations, was examined to determine if it mediates between parental rejection and maladaptive money attitudes. Finally, the present study examined gender differences with regard to parental rejection, extrinsic life aspirations, and maladaptive money attitudes. A multiple regression analysis was conducted in a college sample of 366 participants using self-report …

Performing El Rap El ʿArabi 2005-2015: Feeling Politics Amid Neoliberal Incursions In Ramallah, Amman, And Beirut, Rayya S. El Zein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is about politics in Arabic rap. Specifically, it is about affective dynamics and material negotiations during rap concerts in three cities in the Levant. I analyze Arab hip hop culture in the context of three different but related histories of cosmopolitan, middle class growth, and gentrification. Using an ethnomusicological framework rooted in participant observation and performance theory, I compare concert conditions, audience behavior, and accessibility of music production in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut.

In Chapter One, I elaborate the discursive and theoretical frameworks that have pinned the political valences of Arab youth, Arab artists, and Arab rappers in …

Investigating The Construct Of Psychopathy In Lebanese And American Adults, Marie-Anne Issa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychopathy has been primarily investigated in forensic and psychiatric populations in North America. Cross-cultural studies, mainly conducted in Europe, have shown disparities in psychopathy scores and the measures’ psychometric properties, which raise the issue of cultural factors, such as individualism-collectivism, values, and different ways of emotional expression, and the impact of these cultural factors on the construct and its manifestation. Psychopathy has been rarely explored in Arab populations. This dissertation examines the construct of psychopathy among Lebanese adults, to assess its meaning, relevance, and utility among this population and compares the responses of Lebanese to American adults. The design of …

Lengua Y Racismo-Motivación, Competencia Y Conciencia Lingüística En La Clase De Español Como Segunda Lengua: Integración De Contenidos Relacionados Con La Dimensión Socio-Política Del Lenguaje En Un Acercamiento Content-Based, Jose Magro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dentro de un modelo de instrucción lingüística basado en la transmisión de contenidos (content-based instruction), esta disertación trata de averiguar cómo influye en la conciencia lingüística, motivación y competencia lingüística de estudiantes de cursos avanzados de español como segunda lengua, la integración en el programa de contenidos relacionados con la dimensión socio-política del lenguaje (CSP). Desde la perspectiva epistemológica de la lingüística crítica aplicada, se hará un estudio cualitativo apoyado con componentes cuantitativos. Se desarrollarán e integrarán en el programa del grupo experimental materiales con CSP destinados a observar si influyen en el desarrollo de una conciencia lingüística explícitamente antirracista, …

Assembly And Association: Mapping The Development Of The Public Sphere In 19th Century Columbia County, Ny, Christopher L. Meatto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to investigate the development of the Habermasian public sphere in Columbia County, NY, during the rapid expansion of railway transportation from the middle- to the late-19^th century, by gathering and presenting information about the proliferation of railway stations and select public institutions between 1840 and 1900. In charting the spread of area libraries, newspapers, post offices, and churches during this period, this project utilizes and combines methodological approaches taken by a number of landmark recent studies in historical geography and digital history; in so doing, it prototypes the research and pedagogical value and promise of incorporating …