Digital Commons Network^™

Capture And Abandon: Social Reproduction And Informal Land Tenure In Jamaica, Rachel Goffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Capture and Abandon: Social Reproduction and Informal Land Tenure in Jamaica examines how ongoing policy development to curtail squatting is shifting state capacity away from a project of land reform and towards one of land management. Scholarship about informal settlements elsewhere tends to understand dispossession as a project of the neoliberal state. I argue that it is strategically necessary to elucidate the ways in which the production of durable but insecure access to land is not novel, but is imbricated in the historical production of a Black labor force that is self-sufficient and yet ready at hand, reproducing themselves through …

“Just Get It Done”: How The New York City High School Admissions Process Is Re-Defining The Work & Identities Of Professionals In Screened High School-Programs, Heather Rippeteau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The implementation of the high school admissions process in the New York City Public schools, has re-defined the work and identities of professionals working the screened high school-programs. This study uses descriptive statistics culled from the Directory of New York City High Schools for 2007 and 2017, and interviews with school personnel from three screened school-programs, to review the impact of the implementation of this process during its first full decade in existence. These data establish the fact that screened school-programs are experiencing the phenomenon of marketization by way of their admissions process. Further, the implementation of this process generates …

Albert Camus's Mediterraneanism In La Peste, Jacquelyn Libby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following dissertation uses the speech Camus gave at the inauguration of a new community arts center in Algiers in 1937, entitled “La Culture Indigène. La Nouvelle Culture Méditerranéenne,” to show that this expression of Mediterraneanism, as well as its evolution, can be detected in his novel La Peste, which was published ten years later in 1947. The bearing of Camus’s identification with the Mediterranean world on his speech is that it generated a sense of in-betweenness. This in-betweenness, I argue, is a key feature of Camus’s Mediterranean thought that is also found in La Peste’s subject matter, …

Assessing The Cyborg Center: Assemblage-Based, Feminist Frameworks Toward Socially Just Writing Center Assessments, Erin M. Andersen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic oppression in the neoliberal university and consciously using assemblage theory as a mechanism for confronting multiliteracies allows writing center directors to see the constant movement and reshaping of students’ knowledges as they approach different environments, different courses, and different genres. Notions of intra-relatedness and intertwinings evident in assemblage theory are essential to this dissertation’s consideration …

Yellowing The Logarithm: How Money Solved The Problem Of Freedom, Neil S. Agarwal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on the historical development of a co-constitutive relationship between money as the form of appearance of value and race as the form of appearance of human difference. It demonstrates this relationship through a study of experiments with monetary value in eighteenth-century British America. At a time when Bank of England notes circulated primarily among merchants and within London, colonial freeholders issued paper currencies through representative assemblies and posited a link between this enterprise and the well-being of a larger provincial community within which their bills would circulate. I show how their experiments provided a means for creole …

The Bunker Hill Story: Welfare, Redevelopment, And Housing Crisis In Postwar Los Angeles, Stephen Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1955, Miss Elizabeth McClellan, an elderly resident of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, handwrote a letter to her city councilman. Her rapidly increasing rent was untenable, she explained: “I find $24.00 is too high on an income of less than $40.00 per month.” She asked the councilman if there was a place in Los Angeles where she could live affordably and within walking distance of a church (McClellan, 1955). As she wrote, a bitter fight over Bunker Hill’s fate was underway. To resolve what they characterized as “blighted conditions conducive to [high] rates of disease, crime, and juvenile delinquency” (CRA, …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Mapping How Culture In New York City And London Influences Respectively The Iconic Fashion Brands Of Kors And Mcqueen: A Case Study, Carol Brathwaite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an explanatory case study that applies geographic information systems (GIS) data, biographical data, and other secondary data. It includes mainly qualitative data collection and analysis; furthermore, the study examines quantitative data on the cultural events offered within each city. Overall, this case study adopts a theoretical perspective. The two individual cases (based on a multiple, holistic case-study design framework) of fashion culture in New York City and London, as per Michael Kors and Alexander McQueen respectively, represent ‘confirmatory cases or presumed replications of the same phenomenon’ (Yin 2014:59). Each describes the house’s fashion aesthetics as well as …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Performance art, with its origins in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, has long been a political, politicized, and transgressive form of art, posing challenges to art world institutions, political and social norms, and the nature of art itself through practitioners’ unconventional uses of the body, space, and audience/viewer participation. Much of the power of performed art comes from its performative and transitory nature: it does not simply express, represent, or communicate information. Rather, performative art forms such as installation or performance are productive of political aesthetics. Art may not necessarily intervene directly with political, legal, and legislative decisions or acts, but …

Spectacular Politics And Everyday Performance: Tracing Music From Ceauşescu’S Romania To Multicultural America, Benjamin Dumbauld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from fieldwork conducted throughout the United States and Canada, this dissertation examines the continued performance of socialist-era music within the Romanian-American community. It addresses why a community largely made up of people who sought to leave the country during the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu continue to perform music tied to that period by tracing the historical performance and reception of multiple genres, ranging from traditional peasant music to folk rock. The dissertation begins by examining the nationalization of Romania’s music industry under the early socialist regime (1944-1965), and locates the difficulties Communist Party members confronted in delineating a …

Constructions Of New England Identity And Place In American Music, 1885-1935, Jacob A. Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines constructions of New England identity and changing perceptions of urban and rural by investigating the history and reception of four American composers between 1885 and 1935: George Chadwick, Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Edward MacDowell. Using the concept of place as a critical lens, I examine how each composer engages, consciously or not, with regional identity myths and narratives, often present in other New England literature, poetry, art, and music.

In the Chadwick, Ives, and Ruggles chapters, I examine how one representative work both reflects and constructs the composer’s sense of place drawn from their experience of …

Cruising Borders, Unsettling Identities: Toward A Queer Diasporic Asian America, Wen Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I challenge the dominant conceptualization of Asian Americanness as a biological and cultural population and a cohesive racial category. Instead, I consider it as a form of flexible subjectivity and an affective emergence that occurs and materializes due to the multiple sites of convergence in the neoliberal assemblage of model minority ideology, imperialist geopolitical history, racialized queer politics, and criminal (in)justices. I examine the spatial and temporal configurations of Asian American subjectivity through a queer and postcolonial lens, first by conducting a critical historical review of the category of Asian American in the geopolitical history of psychological …

A Eurafrican Future: France, Algeria, And The Treaty Of Rome (1951-1975), Megan Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Before the Treaty of Rome (1957) established the European Economic Community (EEC), French officials made it clear that France’s signature on the Treaty was contingent on its partners’ acceptance of Eurafrican policy. Because Algeria held a unique legal status among France’s overseas holdings, the way in which French officials advocated its insertion within EEC regulation merits particular attention. This status stood distinct from that of the associated territories and, when applied to the Treaty, would theoretically extend to Algeria and its residents the guarantees of free labor circulation, development aid, and tariff preferences open to metropolitan citizens through EEC membership. …

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 …

The Expansion Of The Mandarin Mind, Tyler Okney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will examine and contrast two periods of xenophobia and stagnation, late Qing dynasty China, and the PRC under Mao, with a genuine market place of ideas, Shanghai and the other foreign treaty ports in the period 1849 to 1949, and explain how this period of cosmopolitan ferment has had beneficial effects on China today. Countries that have shut themselves off from the outside world have frequently suffered first stagnation, and then decay. While this might appear a commonplace in the abstract, the application of this insight in the development of particular nations has been neither as thorough or …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

K-12 Education, Pedagogy And Student Achievement, Genevieve Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

K-12 Education, Pedagogy and Student Achievement is a study of traditional public schools and charter schools in New York City. The project takes District 2 in Manhattan and District 23 in Brooklyn as its focus in consideration of the effects of difference on student learning. This project argues for constructivist pedagogies in K-12 learning to produce literacy and equity in under-resourced school.

Twenty-First-Century Transnational Theatre Development In The Cases Of Théâtre Du Soleil/Aftaab And Sundance Institute East Africa: Cultural Politics, Performance Aesthetics, And Global Circulation, Julia Goldstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines two case studies of twenty-first-century transnational theatre development programs in which arts organizations from wealthy countries in the Global North extend resources and support for the professional development of theatre artists in regions in the Global South. The first case study takes up the French theatre company Théâtre du Soleil’s work in Afghanistan, starting in 2005, leading to the formation of the Afghan theatre company Aftaab and the next ten years of Soleil’s support of and collaboration with Aftaab, transpiring both in Kabul and Paris. The second case study examines the Sundance Institute East Africa Theatre Lab …

Washington Square Park: Struggles And Debates Over Urban Public Space, Anna Rascovar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public space is often perceived as a space that is open to everyone and is meant for gatherings and interaction; however, there is often a great competition over the use and control of public places in contemporary cities. This master’s thesis uses as an example Washington Square Park, which has become a center of contention due to the interplay of public and private interests. In the center of the current confrontation is New York University’s plan to add 2.4 million gross square feet of new development by 2031 for academic use, faculty and student residential space, athletic facilities and a …

Redshirting: A Critical, Historical Analysis Of The Changing Theories, Policies, And Practices Of Children's Transition Into Kindergarten, Lisa Babel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines the contemporary debate over redshirting within the context of a historical analysis of how schools in the United States have addressed children’s transition into kindergarten. It also considers how preparation for the transition to school is cause for concern that has varied greatly depending on the socio-economic conditions of children’s families. Redshirting is the term currently being used to define a child’s delayed entry into kindergarten, usually with the intention of creating an additional year for that child to develop socially and to strive academically. Central to understanding this phenomenon and how to address it is the …

Making The Gigantic Suburban Residential Complex In Beijing: Political Economy Processes And Everyday Life In The 2010s, Pengfei Li

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suburbanization is an ongoing development process in China. Hundreds of thousands of construction projects are being undertaken in outskirts of most Chinese cities, despite the increasing domestic and international concerns over China’s housing oversupply (Xu, 2010; Gough, 2015; Li, 2015). The suburbanization of China, however, is fundamentally different from the suburbanization of most Western countries, especially the United States, whose massive post-war suburbanization took place as a continuation of its pre-war industrialization and urbanization movements. In the Chinese context, suburbanization is the process of urbanization as well—urbanization and suburbanization have been promoted simultaneously since the 1990s. It is …

Closer Ties: The Dutch Caribbean And The Aftermath Of Empire, 1942-2012, Chelsea Schields

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the unique trajectory of decolonization in the Netherlands and its former Caribbean colonies and argues that sexual and reproductive politics have played a pivotal role in forging a postcolonial commonwealth state. Using sexual politics as a lens, “Closer Ties” explores how postcolonial ties between the Netherlands and its former Caribbean dependencies have strengthened rather than severed in the aftermath of colonial rule. This alternative ending of empire challenges the assumed trajectory of decolonization and locates the drama of imperial dissolution in debates over sexual and reproductive rights in Europe. Looking to the circuits of trans-Atlantic exchange across …

Youth Activists In Kashmir: State Violence, Tehreek, And The Formation Of Political Subjectivity, Mohamad Junaid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of youth activism in a space of geopolitical conflict. It examines ways in which young activists in Indian-administered Kashmir, caught in chronic conditions of state violence and traversed by transnational discourses of identity, experience precarity while desperately seeking to constitute themselves as political subjects through their involvement in Tehreek, or the movement for independence. Toward a theory of political subjectivity as a process of autopoiesis, understood both as a historically contingent yet critical form of reflexivity and as practices of protest, and precarity as a condition marked by persistent vulnerability to state …

Denial: A Sociological Theory, Christina Nadler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops a theory of sociological denial through an investigation of contested social problems. I begin by reviewing the literature on denial, both sociological and psychological, in order to situate the project and exemplify the relevance and need for a sociological theory of denial. Then, through examining three scales of the social, I account for multiple layers of the social structure and denial’s place in each. These scales are the sites at which denial happens: geographic, cognitive, and unconscious. I explore five contested social problems through varied paradigms that allow me to analyze each scale of the structural. I …

Pension Fund Evictions: Lessons For Housing And Labor, Marnie F. Brady

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze an institutional investor portfolio of over-leveraged multifamily rental housing in East Palo Alto, California to demonstrate how changing forms of landlordism produce both new and familiar targets for tenants organizing against displacement and for housing security. Venture capital investors in the first decade of the 2000s exploited the Silicon Valley regional conditions of racial exclusion, uneven development, and municipal rent control. I introduce the legacy of Black political organization in East Palo Alto as a way of contextualizing the tenants’ and the city leaders’ response to the monopoly investment purchase. The structure of this rental …

"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 …

On London Ground: The Landscape Paintings Of Frank Auerbach And Leon Kossoff, Lee Hallman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is the first critical analysis of the parallel, seven-decade-spanning urban landscape oeuvres of British painters Frank Auerbach (b. 1931) and Leon Kossoff (b. 1926). Since the post-World War II era of widespread political, geographical, and psychological displacement, when the practice of observation-based landscape painting had all but disappeared from international advanced art, Auerbach, who came to England in 1939 as a German-Jewish child refugee from the Nazis, and Kossoff, a first-generation Londoner of Ukrainian-Jewish heritage, have obstinately pursued an art of place. As art students in London, the two simultaneously developed laborious painterly processes of accumulation and scraping …

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, …

Expanding Intersectionality Praxis: Informing Culturally-Responsive Programming For Black And Latino Gay And Bisexual Young Men, Justin T. Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black/Latino gay/bisexual young men face a multitude of health disparities caused by various determinants of health. However, despite the awareness of the gaps, health intervention research rarely explores the impact of current health intervention strategies on Black/Latino gay/bisexual young men’s overall health and well-being. Traditional health interventions are deficit-based, health condition-specific, and often limited in their cultural-specificity. As health-related fields move toward holistic, evidence-based practices, new primary prevention approaches need to emerge. Using qualitative investigation strategies, this study included primary analysis of participatory workshop artifacts, and secondary analysis of survey and focus group data. This study identified critical factors necessary …