Digital Commons Network^™

Let The Record Show: Mapping Queer Art And Activism In New York City, 1986-1995, Tara Jean-Kelly Burk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although scholars increasingly scrutinize late twentieth-century American art produced in relation to social movements organized around feminism, anti-racist politics, health activism, and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) identity, scholars usually fail to address the importance of printed ephemera as a medium of artistic expression. Ephemeral materials, such as posters, are cheap to make and print. They are typically distributed illicitly via un-commissioned wheat-paste campaigns in urban public space. Collectives tend to make their designs copyright-free to encourage wide distribution. Particularly in the era before digital social media, these materials were central to the ways in which communities coalesced in …

The Contributions Of Earl "Bud" Powell To The Modern Jazz Style, David Joseph Demotta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an analytical study of pianist and composer Bud Powell's contributions to modern jazz (a.k.a. bebop or "bop"), focusing especially on the rhythmic and harmonic implications of Powell's improvisations. The analysis is informed by a series of interviews with professional jazz musicians and is supported by original notated transcriptions of Powell recordings. The aim of this project is to present a cogent technical and theoretical account of Powell's musical style that is grounded in the values of the contemporary jazz community and reflects that community's continued passion for and engagement with Powell.

Chapter One, "Contemporary Pianists and Bud Powell's …

Mobilizing The Collective: Helhesten And The Danish Avant-Garde, 1934-1946, Kerry Greaves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the avant-garde Danish artists' collective Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), which was active from 1941 to 1944 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and undertook cultural resistance during the war. The main claim of this study is that Helhesten was an original and fully established avant-garde before the artists formed the more internationally focused Cobra group, and that the collective's development of sophisticated socio-political engagement and new kinds of countercultural strategies prefigured those of postwar art groups such as Fluxus and the Situationist International. The group and its eponymous journal involved the Danish modernists Asger Jorn, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, …

Performing Blackness In A Mulatto Society: Negotiating Racial Identity Through Music In The Dominican Republic, Angelina Maria Tallaj-García

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation analyzes Dominican racial and ethnic identity through an examination of music and music cultures. Previous studies of Dominican identity have focused primarily on the racialized invention of the Dominican nation as white, or non-black, often centering on the building of Dominican identity in (sometimes violent) opposition to the Haitian nation and to Haitian racial identity. I argue that although Dominicans have not developed an explicit verbal discourse of black affirmation, blackness (albeit a contextually contingent articulation) is embedded in popular conceptions of dominicanidad ("Dominicanness") and is enacted through music. My dissertation explores ways in which popular notions of …

Held And Dropped: A Study Of Metaphor And Subjective Experience In A Psychoanalytic Treatment, Alison Michele Ferst

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explores particular patterns of change that might unfold over the course of an intensive psychoanalytic treatment by mapping the forms of change that might take place in terms of a patient's subjective experience and the meaning that the patient attributes to it as reflected in the effort to express that experience in figurative language (i.e., metaphors). The data set was treatment session transcripts provided by P. A. Dewald over a period of 2 years and is partitioned by Dewald into three sequential phases.

Figurative language in general and metaphor in particular consists of essential forms of representation of …

"Beyond Chingones And Chingados: Performing Masculinities In Contemporary Mexican Theatre", Zaida Godoy Navarro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present investigation focuses on how masculinities are conformed and represented in the plays of two generations of Mexican playwrights, the New Dramatists of Mexico and the younger Sixth Generation in an attempt to reflect upon recent conceptualizations of gender as well as contemporary changes in society mainly due to globalization and the impact of feminism and gay movements. The limited literature focused on Mexican masculinities has overlooked the importance of theatre as a privileged and productive setting for the study of gender. Another common factor in studies dedicated to the representation of Mexican men in literature is the focus …

Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between national and individual development in Victorian and postcolonial novels set in India. My central argument is that the investment in the idea of progress that characterizes colonial narratives of childhood gives way in postcolonial fiction to a suspicion of dominant understandings of progress, and that this difference is manifest in the identity formation of the child character as well as in the form of the novel.

In the Victorian colonial narratives discussed in this study, the bildung of the child involves the overcoming of the child's conflicted cultural identity. The children of …

Verbal Behavior In Individuals With Generalized Anxiety Disorder And Depressive Disorders, Tzachi Slonim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and clinical depression are both internalizing disorders characterized by sustained negative affect and have mainly been studied utilizing either self-report or physiological measures. Fewer studies have focused on behavioral indices of these disorders, and little is known about their overlapping and distinct linguistic features. The present research examined the above gap in two separate studies. Study 1 synthesized previous efforts made to study the linguistic features of individuals with depression. Previous investigations found that depressed individuals evidence high proportions of I-words, high proportions of negatively-valenced words, low proportions of positively-valenced words, and high proportions of cognitive …

The Mad Science Of Hip-Hop: History, Technology, And Poetics Of Hip-Hop's Music, 1975-1991, Patrick Rivers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1979, the first commercial recordings of hip-hop music were released. The music's transition from the parks and clubs of the Bronx to recorded media resulted in hip-hop music being crafted and mediated in a recording studio before reaching the ears of listeners. In this dissertation I present a comprehensive investigation into the history of the instrumental component of hip-hop music heard on recordings, commonly referred to as beats. My historical narrative is formed by: the practices involved in the creation of hip-hop beats; the technologies that facilitated and defined those practices; and the debates around these two aspects that …

Clothing And Social Movements: The Politics Of Dressing In Colonized Tibet, Dicky Yangzom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the relationship between clothing and social movements. Taking the case of Lhakar in the Tibetan Freedom Movement, it explores how Tibetans in Tibet and those in exile imagine national belonging. Second, it delineates how the multiple uses of clothing, both by the colonizing state and the colonial movement articulates its importance in serving as a symbolic boundary in nationalist identity formation. Lastly, using methods of visual analysis, the research explains how the convergence between clothing, social movements, and social media creates a non-violent transnational social movement.

Policy Partners In The Neoliberal Age: Corresponding School And Prison Reforms Since 1970, Jeremy Paul Benson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a comparative policy study of changes in education and incarceration of the past 40 years. Following national and global trends, New York City saw public school and carceral policies converge as the city experienced massive deindustrialization and governmental cutbacks while its political economy shifted to one driven by finance, investment, real estate, and the growth of a low-wage service sector. These changes dramatically increased economic inequality across racial lines, and spurred the intimate linkage of public education and state incarceration as institutional tools for the mass management of low-income communities of color. Following from a growing policy …

Straight Record And The Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters To Foreign Correspondents, Magdalena Bogacka-Rode

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Straight Record and the Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters to Foreign Correspondents engages with Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War (1959), Virginia Cowles' Looking for Trouble (1941) and Josephine Herbst's The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (1991) as documentaries of struggle. Documentary as a mode of writing and image making reveals dissonance, contradictions and varied perspectives which undermine the official historical record. The three writers, I argue, by republishing their Spanish Civil War (SCW) journalism in book form intended to set their record straight. This was motivated by their commitment to the 1930s struggle and the need …

A Feminist Inheritance? Questions Of Subjectivity And Ambivalence In Paul Mccarthy, Mike Kelley And Robert Gober, Marisa White-Hartman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feminist art of the 1970s was groundbreaking in many regards and importantly impacted specific projects by three male artists: Paul McCarthy's performance Sailor's Meat (1975), Mike Kelley's installation Half a Man (1989) and Robert Gober's 1989 installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Despite the general absence of feminist artists as possible influences in the critical literature on these artists, feminist sources have been hidden in plain sight in regards to these works. These artists all take up the problematic of identity formation within the domestic sphere, which was made a legitimate area of inquiry in art by numerous feminist artists …

Successful Aging: Use Of Communication Technology In An Adult Day Program, Wendy Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigated the relationship between learning digital communication technologies in an intergenerational intervention and successful aging among older adults. The specific goal of this study was to uncover the effects of this intervention on the cultural constructions of aging in an urban Adult Day Program in Trinidad and Tobago. This mixed method study utilized the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS; Sheikh & Yesavage, 1986), a life satisfaction scale, well-being measurements, open-ended survey questionnaires and a focus group session. The results from the quantitative items indicated no significant differences after the intervention; however, the focus group discussion and open-ended surveys provided …

Paris And Havana: A Century Of Mutual Influence, Laila Pedro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to trace the history of exchange and influence between Cuban, French, and Francophone Caribbean artists in the twentieth century. I argue, first, that there is a unique and largely unexplored tradition of dialogue, collaboration, and mutual admiration between Cuban, French and Francophone artists; second, that a recurring and essential theme in these artworks is the representation of the human body; and third, that this relationship ought not to be understood within the confines of a single genre, but must be read as a series of dialogues that are both ekphrastic (that is, they rely …

Cologne Carnival's "Alternative" Stunksitzung: Carnivalization? Meta-Carnival? Or Bakhtinian Restoration?, Erik Abbott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1820s, Carnival in Cologne, Germany, underwent a series of reforms, ostensibly to bring the festival back to the people. Among the traditions that developed was the Sitzung, a theatrical variety-show event, with music, comic speeches and sketches, dance troupes, and various additional Carnival-related entertainments. The shows, and Carnival itself were, and largely have been since that time, mostly overseen by a Festival Committee and the official Carnival Societies it recognizes.

In 1984, a group of mostly students decided to create their own version of a Sitzung, an alternative version, the Stunksitzung. From three inaugural performances, it has grown …

Manuel De La Cruz Gonzalez: Transnationalism And The Development Of Modern Art In Costa Rica, Lauran Bonilla-Merchav

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While scholars are increasingly scrutinizing twentieth-century Latin American art and inserting it into the canon of modern art history, studies of the region usually leap from Mexico to South America, skipping Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. This is not due to a lack of dedicated artistic effort in the isthmus, but rather to poor cultural infrastructure, which made being a modern artist in the region particularly challenging, and the underdeveloped state of local art histories, which have yet to traverse national borders. This oversight of Central American art makes it difficult to grasp the full …

An Approach To Understanding Through Practice: Contextual Analysis Of A High School--College Latina/O And Latin American Studies Collaborative Program, Gabriel Antonio Higuera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Collaborative, interdisciplinary, multigenerational, and culturally-rooted educational programs benefit students of historically marginalized groups in the United States. This paper employs critical race theory (CRT) as a means to better understand the greater dynamics undergirding the achievement gap. CRT also serves as a basis for the narrative description of the high school-college collaborative program I created and developed in Phoenix, Arizona, from 2002 to 2006. The program model features 2-year and 4-year college students co-facilitating dialogues on Latina/o and Latin American Studies at participating high schools. Collaborative program structures are analyzed with a focus on their ability to invite community input …

Reading Nation In Translation: The Spectral Transnationality Of The Malaysian Racial Imaginary, Fiona Hsiao Yen Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, literary studies has experienced a global turn, often understood as a move beyond national paradigms of analysis, which are deemed to be narrow and particularistic. Although wary of the tacit universalizing tendencies of global frames, scholars of race and postcoloniality have critically embraced the global by arguing for the need to theorize transnationalism from marginalized perspectives. However, casting the global and the national in oppositional terms ignores the fact that national racial ideologies both actively shape and are shaped by globally circulating ideas about race. An understudied site in postcolonial studies, Malaysia--formerly known as Malaya--is an exemplary …

Promoting Wellness Through Mindfulness-Based Activities, Malgorzata Powietrzynska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The central idea of this dissertation is mindfulness framed as a sociocultural, secular, and multidimensional construct involving attention that is purposeful, in the present moment, and non-judgmental. Mindfulness represents a unification of century-old contemplative Eastern traditions (including Buddhism) and the recent developments of modern, Western science. Hence, supported by the emerging scientific evidence, I argue that mindfulness practices have a potential to offer a wide range of benefits related to wellness. In particular, I report on our hermeneutic-phenomenological studies investigating the centrality of emotions in teaching and learning. Our findings confirm that when adopted in education, mindfulness may mediate positive …

The Arena And Stadium Experience: The Individual, The Venue And The Culture Industry, Anthony Paul Sparacino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores arenas and stadia, specifically Madison Square Garden and Citi Field in New York City, through the prism of Theodor Adorno's conception of the culture industry, the notion that cultural artifacts are consciously created in order to reify the values of the existing social system, especially those of elites. Rather than focusing solely on media culture, this essay proposes that understandings of mass culture can be enhanced by focusing on the context of the consumption of mass-cultural artifacts, namely the development of a conception of place within the mind of the consumer, who has an active role in …

Blogging Through Motherhood: Free Labor, Femininity, And The (Re)Production Of Maternity, Kara Mary Van Cleaf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from a thematic analysis of 47 North American mommy blogs over a 2-year period, I situate the genre in critical discussions of feminism, media, and labor, exploring both the technological and cultural shifts that turn mothers into cultural producers and that turn the experience of motherhood into a commodity. I situate the content of such blogs, or what gets said therein, within theories of media, gender, and labor. Examining the blogs within and against such academic discussions allows me to develop an intersectional analysis of feminism, media, and labor studies.

Brothers In Motion: Religious Practice, Political Action, And The Mobilization Of The Early Muslim Brotherhood, Ian Henry Vandermeulen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In light of Randy Martin's proposal to use dance as an analytic tool for understanding social movements, this article seeks to reconstruct the early mobilization of the Muslim Brotherhood as "bodies in motion." Through a re-examination of both primary and secondary source material, this study highlights the ways in which founder Hasan al-Banna appropriated both Islamic and colonial choreographic logics into the Muslim Brotherhood's pious training regimen, scouting programs, political expression, and social welfare projects. I argue that the Muslim Brotherhood was mobilized through al-Banna's revival of traditional Islamic practices concerning the body, reconfigured for the goal not of otherworldly …

The Transnational Latin American Regionalism Of Mario Vargas Llosa And Milton Hatoum, Michele C. Kettner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present dissertation analyzes the novels The Green House (1966) and The Storyteller (1987), by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, and Two Brothers (2000), by Brazilian novelist Milton Hatoum and reinterpret literary regionalism in the Amazon region. I claim that the new variety of regionalist literature represented by both authors challenges hegemonic national representations of Peru and Brazil and conceptualizes Amazonian ecology in the context of global capitalism. In the first chapter, I evaluate the critical apparatus of the older tradition of Latin American regionalism proposing the concept of the "region" as an "invention" (Albuquerque Jr.). My reading reveals how …

Emotional Expression And Perception In Three Ethnic Groups: Is There An In-Group Advantage?, Ella Björt Teague

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The extent to which emotional recognition is universal or culturally determined has far-ranging implications for the success of cross-cultural communication. Although strong evidence supporting the universality of emotion recognition across differing cultures has accumulated, there is also mounting support for an in-group advantage (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a), defined as the ease by which individuals recognize emotions displayed by members of their in-group group compared to out-group members. Due to mixed results from studies focusing on ethnic groups residing within the same country, the current study investigated the in-group advantage among Black American (BAm), Chinese American (CAm), and White American (WAm) …

We Work, We Eat Together: Anti-Authoritarian Mutual Aid Politics In New York City, 2004-2013, David Spataro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

New York City's neoliberal restructuring has fundamentally transformed the city's labor market and privatized many important aspects of a once robust municipal welfare system. In this research I examine one radical response to these changes: anti-authoritarian mutual aid groups that blend Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture with direct action politics. These are projects where activists attempt to build strong communities of resistance by organizing collective forms of social reproduction. I find that these projects are a threat to neoliberal urbanization because they reorganize reproduction beyond the household scale while simultaneously criticizing the social relations of capitalism as the root of household insecurity. …

On Becoming A Teacher (Or Not): Students Of Color's Perceptions Of Teachers' Work, Consideration Of Teaching As A Career, And Implications For Diversifying The Teaching Force, Amanda Lee Winkelsas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The racial/ethnic demographics of the American public school teaching force stand in contrast to the racial/ethnic demographics of the students and families who are served by our public school system. In an effort to understand the racial/ethnic demographic disparities between the teaching force and the public school student population, this study explores the perceptions of students of color as they relate to teachers' work, authority, and power. Utilizing a participatory, mixed methods approach in one public, urban, college preparatory school, I analyze the experiences, cultural models, and knowledges that shape students' perceptions of teachers' work and their own consideration of …

Affective Language And Attitudes Toward Public Policy, Rachel A. Wolitzky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation project focused on affective and unconscious processes involved in the evaluation of public policy. It follows recent scholarship in political psychology showing how the response to political messages depends greatly on what values and emotions are evoked. Of particular focus has been the notable discrepancy between the conscious way people construe their political judgments and the unconscious operations that more truly account for their views and actions. Motivated by a neuroscientific and psychoanalytic model of the mind and brain that recognizes both the pre-eminence of unconscious (implicit) processing and the primacy of affect in mind (brain) activity, this …

Performing Modernity In Turkey: Conflicts Of Masculinity, Sexuality, And The Köçek Dancer, Brittany Giselle Haynes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis reexamines the history of the köçek dancer in Turkey and thereby opens modern heteronormative constructs of masculinity and sexuality to contestation, particularly as they have been symbolically embodied by the rural population of Anatolia. It traces the evolution of the köçek dancer from the early modern Ottoman Empire when the dancer embodied notions of divine love and the ideal of beauty as a young male object of adult men's desires. In the nineteenth century, perceptions of the köçek began to change, primarily among Ottoman elites, whose modernization efforts were influenced by the European gaze and travelers' Orientalist interpretations …

Writing The Visual In "Baroni: Un Viaje" And Other Recent Work By Sergio Chejfec, Margaret Carson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation has three parts. First, I explore the ways in which word intersects with image in several recent texts by the contemporary Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, whose oeuvre is replete with verbal descriptions of visual artifacts. Second, as a complement to the critical essay, I present my English translation of Chejfec's Baroni: un viaje (2007), a novel featuring the Venezuelan artist Rafaela Baroni, whose extraordinary wood carvings of Virgins, saints and other figures are described in key passages. Third, as a bridge between these two parts, I reflect on the related critical discourses of ekphrasis and translation and on …