Digital Commons Network^™

The Medium Of Liberation: Kurdish Language And Education Activism In Turkey, Demet Arpacik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic study examines the Kurdish language and education activism, which I argue, is an anti-colonial movement generating decolonial forms of practices as responses. Prohibited to be spoken even in private spaces until 1991 in Turkey, the Kurdish language has been an intense object of struggle between the Turkish state and the Kurdish population. What historical, political, and sociocultural forces have contributed to colonial language governmentality in Turkey against the Kurdish language and its speakers? How do Kurdish activists challenge the linguistic hegemony in their semi-formal spaces and in what ways are their practices, discourses and policies decolonial? My study …

Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival, 1962–1992, Christopher T. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Histories of “primitivism” in the avant-garde show that Euro-American modernism was always engaged in the appropriation of nonwestern and Indigenous art, with particular interest in Northwest Coast Native art forms by the Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Indian Space Painters. However, there has been little consideration for how Northwest Coast Native artists chose to engage with the styles and tenets of Western modern art. To date, the history of post-war Northwest Coast Native art has been dominated by what is known as the Renaissance, a narrative in which artists pursued a neo-traditional style in modern times through the recovered and revival …

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

The Berbers: Constructed Identities By Foreigners On African Soil, Zineb Askaoui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the textual evidence pertaining to the identity of the local North African population of Morocco. In examining the literature about North Africans and the inscriptions in North Africa, I wish to determine who their authors were. Since North Africa has been invaded and colonized multiple times throughout history, the available literature written by both the foreigners who colonized it and the locals yielded interesting and sometimes contrasting results.

The names that address the local North Africans are pertinent expressions of identity or of forceful submission. This study examines four different terms that have been used to describe …

Lengua, Identidad Y Poder: Ideologías Lingüísticas En La Prensa Hispana De Los Estados Unidos (1980–2007), Evangelia-Lydia Manatou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Esta tesis estudia las ideologías que articulan los tres periódicos hispanófonos de distribución más amplia, en los Estados Unidos, desde finales del siglo XX, al reproducir los debates vinculados a la lengua española y los valores asignados a distintas prácticas lingüísticas producidas por los hispanohablantes que residen en EE. UU. En particular, nos ha interesado por fenómenos tales como el monolingüismo, el bilingüismo y el espanglish, y por las propuestas normativas articuladas tanto por los periódicos como por instituciones españolas dedicadas a la promoción internacional de la lengua. En este trabajo hemos analizado artículos y viñetas de los tres periódicos …

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …

The Art Of Opacity: Guy De Cointet In L.A., Media Farzin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides the first detailed study of the work of French artist Guy de Cointet (1934–1983), specifically the books, objects, and performances he produced in Los Angeles between 1971 and 1983. Much of this work mined pop-cultural sources—genre fiction, magazine advertising, and television serials—for texts, which he reused in deliberately obfuscated ways: in pseudonymous publications written in code or invented languages, as well as in sigil-like paintings that doubled as props for performances in which actors delivered contradictory interpretations of the encoded objects. I argue that Cointet’s appropriations of the visual and narrative logics of postwar culture provide a …

Affect, Behavior And (Dys)Regulation: Integrating Youth's Projective Tests And Self-Reports, Laurel Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Past and current research indicates that unconscious processes (e.g., outside the realm of conscious awareness) contribute to aspects of adaptation and development, such as emotion regulation, adaptability, interpersonal flexibility and overall identity formation. Further, unconscious processes including: Defense Mechanisms (DMs), Affect Maturity (AM) and Object Relations (OR), can be operationalized and scored using valid and reliable psychodynamic instruments (e.g., Rorschach Inkblot Method), with theoretical and empirical links to underlying emotion regulation processes. Currently however, emotional dysregulation and its sequelae (e.g.,depression and ADHD symptoms) are most often assessed based on one’s conscious awareness, using standardized self-report measures or structured clinical interviews. …

An Eco-Political Theory Of Territory, Jonathan Kwan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I advance a novel eco-political theory of territory that grounds a people’s territorial rights in its right to political self-determination understood as inextricably and normatively bound up with its right to ecological integrity and duty of ecological sustainability. I develop a social ontology of the people as the holder of territorial rights based on its members’ place-based common activities that aim at their own independent governance rather than in terms of state institutions, cultural nationhood, ethnogeography, political identity, or shared conceptions of justice. The common activities of a people generate a group right to democratic self-determination since …

The Effects Of Self-Esteem And Motivation On Cognitive Control, Andrea Benavides

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cognitive control describes a set of mechanisms that guide behavior towards a goal (Cohen, 2017). The successful execution of cognitive control is essential for effective learning, information processing, problem solving, and academic achievement (Visu-Petra et al., 2011). The Expected Value of Control framework (EVC; Shenhav et al., 2013) suggests that control carries an inherent cost, which is weighed against the potential benefits of expending it. This cost-benefit analysis determines the direction and intensity that a goal is pursued. Importantly, motivation plays a role in this cost-benefit analysis and may function as the factor that offsets the cost of control expenditure …

From The Unspoken To The Verbalized: Different Ways Of Communication And Their Relationship To Culture In A Traditional Lakota Narrative "Ikto Na Wičhá Ha Kiŋ”, Or “Ikto And The Racoon Skin”, Liliana R. Boladz-Nekipelov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master’s thesis is a discourse analysis of a traditional Lakota story, " Iktó na wičhá ha kiŋ”, or “Ikto and the Racoon Skin”, one of the 64 stories included in the “Dakota Texts”, which were collected by Ella Deloria at three Lakota reservations in 1930s as a part of Franz Boas’ language documentation project. The thesis is also an attempt to examine different communicative strategies employed within the narrative and their relationship to culture, as well as the relationship between form and the transfer of meaning and culture and meaning. The analysis is conducted using Dell Hymes’ ethnographic approach …

Acting Objects: Staging New Materialism, Posthumanism And The Ecocritical Crisis In Contemporary Performance, Sarah Lucie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I investigate the material relationship between human and nonhuman objects in performance, asking what their shifting relations reveal about our contemporary condition. Through analysis of contemporary theatre and performance and theories of new materialism, I aim to uncover the dramaturgical models that shift focus towards the agency of objects, thereby exposing alternate models of relationality. Grounded in sensual interactions generated through the performance event, these relations are equipped to develop an expanded sensibility and responsivity in the human. Additionally, I examine how these events enable experiences of the body where the body is both actor and acted upon. Furthermore, I …

Closing The Chasm: Al-Fārābī On Islam And Politics, Onur F. Muftugil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Much Islamic history evinces a separation between religious and political registers of thought and action. To be sure, these two registers always remained, to some extent, mutually intertwined since the origins of Islam. However, in about two hundred years into Islamic history, or, in other words, in the 9th century, the political register based on coercion began to mark itself off from the moral concerns associated with the religious register. Political authority acquired an increasingly absolute character. It focused more on ensuring the obedience of its subjects than the moral/religious purpose of creating a just society where even the weakest …

Descriptive Inhumanism: Description And Decolonial Aesthetics, Marcos Gonsalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation research examines, how can the act of describing, as a mode of writing, documenting, and representing minoritized bodies, be geared towards an anti-racist, multi-species, and decolonial aesthetic praxis? Paying close attention to modes of writing categorized under the rubric of description, such as ekphrasis, reportage in documentary film, travel writing, and ethnographic description, as this dissertation contends, are integral to understanding how we perceive and apprehend racialized people living out the legacies of coloniality. Through an analysis of 20th century Anglophone literature on the Americas and contemporary queer Latina/o literature, film, and art, this research looks closely at …

Hebrew As A Gendered Language And An Oppressive Mechanism Against Women In The Israeli Society, Rotem Itzhaky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Wherever you look, whether reading a textbook, scrolling through wanted ads, looking at job requirements, or just watching the news on the television – the effects of the gendered nature of Hebrew are noticeable everywhere. For many years I have been fascinated by the fact that Hebrew is a gendered language in a way that promotes patriarchy by using the unmarked masculine form of words as a default. Some claim that the language as we know it today is neutral, and not discriminatory, while others, including women which interviews you can find in this paper, do not experience it as …

Black Skin, White Gaze: The Presence And Function Of The Linchpin Character In Biopics About Black American Protagonists, Nicole N. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout its existence the American film industry has--through the stories it has chosen to tell as well as discriminatory practices such as whitewashing and the erasure of non-White people--enshrined whiteness as the default American racial identity. In multiracial films, Hollywood productions have historically employed racialized character tropes to further emphasize hegemonic American whiteness. This practice continues to the present day with the introduction of the linchpin, a White character who appears in films with majority non-White casts. Although billed and presented as a supporting character, the linchpin’s centrality to a film’s narrative or emotional arc elevates them to main character …

Did The Muslim Ban Cause Islamophobia? Institutional Versus Individual Prejudice, Emma Handte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Muslim ban is part of a storied American history of Islamophobia, and as such acts as more of a reflection of members of the population’s individually held beliefs about Muslims rather than a catalyst for such beliefs. Surveys of Americans on their opinions of Muslims seem to support this view: a “thermometer” reading of respondents’ views towards Muslims shows that from 2014 to 2017 to 2019, “cold” or negative opinions of Muslims actually decreased. This corresponds to a theory of individually directed Islamophobia that is not significantly impacted by institutional policy changes, such as the Muslim ban. But at …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

New Tower Of Babel: Probing The Antecedents And Consequences Of Linguistic Ostracism, Julia N. Leone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While workplace interactions are likely to be conducted in English, the lingua franca of international business (Janssens, Lambert, & Steyaert, 2004), employees may occasionally switch to their native language in their interactions with coworkers who share knowledge of this language. Linguistic ostracism (LO) refers to situations in which two or more people use a language that others in their presence cannot understand (Dotan-Eliaz, Sommer, & Rubin, 2009). This dissertation explored the contextual antecedents of LO in a business setting, probed managerial techniques currently used to mitigate the effects of LO, and examined the relationship between LO and organizational citizenship behaviors. …

Object-Oriented Musicology: Some Implications Of Graham Harman's Philosophy For Music Theory, History, And Criticism, Eric Taxier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation brings the ideas of the philosopher Graham Harman (b. 1968) into a musicological context. His “object-oriented ontology” is widely known in continental philosophy, but it has not yet entered rigorous contact with musicology. Certain factors pose difficulties at first glance, such as Harman’s focus on metaphysical issues (originating in his critique of Martin Heidegger) and his rehabilitation of the widely criticized concept of aesthetic autonomy. But these are also sources of novelty that could make an object-oriented encounter with musicology fruitful. In the first chapter, I outline the main features of Harman’s thought. He critiques assumptions about the …

'Once Famous In An Odd Way': Curiosity And Queerness In Late 19th-Century American Male Impersonation, S.C. Lucier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis depicts the emergence of one particular iteration of the popular female actor within 19^th century performance, the male impersonator, and identifies the ways in which this theatrical expression was related to and affected by similar amusements of the period. Public amusements of this period include a diversity of experiential entertainment that was primarily geared toward working and lower-middle class males. Included in these types of illegitimate theater is the variety hall. Male impersonators were the height of theatrical fashion not only in New York City, which is the focused landscape of this paper, but this type of …

Doing Away With Defaults: Motivation For A Gradient Parameter Space, Katherine Howitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I propose a reconceptualization of the traditional syntactic parameter space of the principles and parameters framework (Chomsky, 1981). In lieu of binary parameter settings, parameter values exist on a gradient plane where a learner’s knowledge of their language is encoded in their confidence that a particular parametric target value, and thus grammatical construction of an encountered sentence, is likely to be licensed by their target grammar. First, I discuss other learnability models in the classic parameter space which lack either psychological plausibility, theoretical consistency, or some combination of the two. Then, I argue for the Gradient Parameter …

Class Based Contestations In Neoliberal France, Sam Goodson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis documents the patterns of resistance taken up by the far left in France from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. Responding directly to the neoliberal reshaping of the French economy the groups that composed the far left diverged on terms of strategy, some holding fast to the class based contention of the previous decades, some jettisoning the language of class for one of identity and democratic inclusion. This project documents these changes and takes up the theoretical debates surrounding them, primarily the debates surrounding “post-Marxism.” It is an intervention on the enduring necessity of class struggle for …

Returning To Imaginative Literary Texts In The Composition Classroom: A Case Study Of Greek Literature And Their Potential In First-Year Writing, Esther M. Gabay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The basis for the argument—a return to literature in first-year college composition—stems from a composition debate that emerged in the 90s that suggested instructors of composition refrain from using literature in their writing courses. The thesis proposes that literature, specifically Greek literature, be re-purposed and integrated back into first-year writing college courses. Chapter one contextualizes the historical debate and proposes imaginative literary texts return to first-year writing. The second chapter presents cross-disciplinary advantages, looking closely at the value of teaching literature in composition classes as a tool for building prior knowledge, developing cross-disciplinary insights and access into other disciplinary conversations, …

Stealin' The Meetin': Black Education History & The Black Panthers' Oakland Community School, Robert P. Robinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation frames the Black Panthers' Oakland Community School (OCS) as a convergence of Black self-determination/Black Power, Black education history, and curriculum studies. Drawing from widely-cited archives, rarely-cited archives, oral history, periodicals, and secondary source material, the proposed study extends the OCS narrative by tracing its curricular trajectory and highlighting the voices of students, parents, and staff. It considers how the school’s history provides examples of educational practices—such as restorative justice and culturally relevant pedagogy—that would not become named or popularized in mainstream education until much later, asserting that histories of this sort can inform educational endeavors in the present. …

The Objectives Of Public Higher Education In New York City Through The Lens Of Language, John-Nicholas Parker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper displays the objectives of public higher education in New York City and their relation to changes in the city. Public higher education in New York City relies on the support of the public. This paper details adjustments to the lexicon of the school in response to changing demographics and historical events by examining statements provided by the school during different periods. Changes to the lexicon relating to class, gender, race, ethnicity, and military service are examined in relation to their historical context. Sources examined in this paper include commission reports, student newspapers, and mission statements. The paper finds …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Hermeneutics Of Residue: Archival Slime And Queer Literacy, Patrick C. James

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hermeneutics of Residue: Archival Slime and Queer Literacy spans the fields of composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, archival studies, and queer theory. Deploying unconventional archival texts such as public graffiti, self-published zines, and underground manuals, this project explores the notion of the queer archive and its complicated entanglements with historiography, sexual and cultural literacy, and epistemology. In order to pursue to this line of inquiry, the dissertation takes José Esteban Muñoz’s observation of a “vexed relationship” between queerness and evidence as an opportunity to broaden the definition of archive, and practice what Muñoz calls a “hermeneutics of residue.” Consequently, …

The Perception Of Prosody In English-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants: A Systematic Review, Grace R. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: The goal of this paper was to systematically review literature in order to investigate the perception of prosody in English-speaking children with cochlear implants.

Methods: A comprehensive search utilizing various peer-reviewed databases accessible through the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center Library was conducted to identify relevant studies. Inclusion criteria included studies that examined prosody perception in pre-and post-lingually deafened children with cochlear implants. Children who utilized unilateral, bilateral, and bimodal configurations of cochlear implants were therefore included in this search.

Results: 9 studies met the inclusion criteria for this systematic review. The findings …

Revisiting Juchitán: Witnessing An Indigenous Mexico Within The Latin American Archive, Michelle G. De La Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout archives of photographic collections, as one discovers the focused, artistic selective process of images that become part of a photographer’s collection, one must venture further and ask: will these choices be decisively remembered by an individual or collective audience or actively be dismissed, misunderstood, and denied presence? For my master’s thesis, I will be analyzing Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s photobook, Juchitán de las Mujeres, a photo-collection of the women-empowered indigenous society in Oaxaca, Mexico which erupted during Latin American photography’s prime in the 20th century, turning away from a deeply exoticized past and towards a celebration of Hispanism as …