Digital Commons Network^™

Independence, Slavery, And Freedom: Southern Women’S Thoughts During The Civil War, Bethany Susan Harper

Masters Theses

This study explores the complex relationship between southern women and their ideas of independence and freedom during the Civil War years. In addition, this study seeks to investigate how southern women’s attitudes regarding slavery changed from 1861-1865. With their husbands, brothers, and fathers serving in the war, southern women were forced to become the sole white authority figures on their estates. This reality shift made them come to understand just how dependent their independence was on slavery. Southern women believed that independence could only come to the Confederacy, and it was inconceivable to have a simultaneous future where the Confederacy …

Then Sings The Church A New Song, Ian D. Bula

Masters Theses

The collective life of the Ancient Israelites was defined by a tumultuous journey through the desert as the primary setting where God continuously sought a relationship with them. Their liberation from Egyptian bondage was the central element that resulted from God’s self- revelation and action toward His people. Their response to Him in worship reflects the nature instilled in all humankind to respond in many ways to divine action. One of these ways is through the use of music. Music has accompanied the worship of God’s people since the time of the Patriarchs. The Exodus was the experience that sprung …

Curriculum Development For Beginning Band: Recruitment And Retention Of Minority Students Living In Poverty, Thomas Andrew Langford

Masters Theses

Despite efforts in many schools to offer quality music education to all students, issues still prevent many minority students from participating in band programs. There are important and unique implications for minority students and students who live in poverty and their ability or desire to participate in a band program. Developing curriculum and teaching strategies to reach minority students and students living in poverty is one way to bridge the educational gap and provide an avenue for students to make a better way for themselves. The study examined existing literature to determine factors attracting or retracting this student population from …

Civic Virtue In America During The Gilded Age, Daniel Gregory Lundstedt

Masters Theses

This study will seek to reevaluate the era which historians have traditionally labeled as the Gilded Age. It will do this through an examination of the state of civic virtue in the United States during this period. This will be accomplished through an interdisciplinary foray into America’s past. From it, hopefully some fresh understandings of what America is, and where it is going, can become apparent. This project falls within the broader exploration of the relationship between the citizen and society and will thus hopefully contribute to that set of literature. This project will be a convergence of several subdisciplines …

Multimodal Vocabulary Instruction: An Approach For Supporting Reading Comprehension, Mary K. Van Singel

Masters Theses

Children bring a wide range of vocabulary knowledge and prior experiences with them when they enter school. Research suggests that in order to bridge childrens’ word knowledge and the word knowledge needed for academic success, teachers must take on a multimodal instructional approach to foster vocabulary development and reading comprehension in students. This project explores how word knowledge develops in children as well as various research based features of vocabulary instruction to support word learning in the classroom. The project is designed to offer teachers professional development that works to grow teacher expertise for what effective vocabulary instruction is, the …

Addressing Disengagement In Text Through An Increase In Autonomy, Access, And Relevant Text Selection, Amanda L. Saffian

Masters Theses

This project proposal employs a broad range of research to design a plan of implementation that would address the effectiveness of increased permanent exposure to more diverse text sets. The essential components of this design are to investigate the efficacy of increasing access to multimodal, high-interest, and responsive texts in closing educational equity gaps as a substantive conceptual model of educational effectiveness and theory-based approaches to increase engagement in literacy and learning. This work would include developing a comprehensive catalog of texts which would allow for the most significant impact on student engagement. The literature used to justify design includes …

Taking Aim: The Evolution Of Women In Competitive Shooting Sports In The 20th Century United States, Alena Rose-Marie Buczynski

Masters Theses

Throughout history, women have been overlooked, discounted, and ignored for their skills and abilities as competitive and professional athletes. Competitive shooting sports were popular in the United States; however, men excluded women from participating in many of these activities until the early 19th century, when America saw the rise of famous markswomen such as Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, and Lillian Smith. These women challenged the masculinity of the sport of shooting and bested many of their male counterparts as they traveled and performed across the United States. In the 1970s, women found themselves entering the Olympic arena of competitive shooting …

American Religion: A Study Of Religious Change From The 1920s Through 1970s, Alexander R. Marks-Katz

Masters Theses

Religion in America persisted along traditional Christian lines until the 1870s. It was then that theological liberalism gained significant headway. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era were still infused with revivals and preachers but there was a growing contingent that challenged the fundamentals of Christian belief. Sometimes this contingent supported revivals but promoted social causes and brought unorthodox biblical interpretations. At other times, they challenged traditional Christianity altogether. By the Great Depression, American culture had undergone such a tremendous amount of change that, faced with adversity, the bottom of religion fell out. Fewer people attended services and contributed funds. More …

That Mirror Again, Kyros Barton

Masters Theses

That Mirror Again is a summary of experiences, used to pose questions about self-hood through technological metaphor and theory. Its memories are disjointed, separate, and removed from time, and are an honest attempt to recenter an identity before the end of formal education. The themes of each section, Aground, Tilt, and Threshold, are presented as isolated definitions that set the mood for the writing before it is introduced. Referencing information age technology, invoking ancient deities in prose, and brushing against the fur of monster-hood, the text holds the memory it carries softly and offers it to the reader.

Toona Sinensis 桃花心木, Li Yang

Masters Theses

This thesis is my journey as an artist and art educator in search of creativity through the lens of sustainability, which may reveal the existence of questions one wonders about but does not provide a specific answer or solution to this within a limited time frame. Through this inquiry, questions are repeatedly asked: What is the definition of art? If art and education have a tremendous impact on human thought and perception, do they point people in the right direction when confronted with global issues such as cultural and natural sustainability? If so, what is the essential difference between art …

Contemporary Eco Theory In Art Education: Field Notes And Desire Paths, Margaret K. Mccullough

Masters Theses

This thesis is an investigation into patterns and overlaps of three critical elements in our world, art, nature, and education. Integral to this investigation and the contributions to humanity of these three are the accurate depiction of specific realities, upon which Science and the majority of global citizens agree, aesthetic sensibility, as well as beneficent solutions (i.e. those which do no harm.) Together we will examine the intersection of subjects, what they combine to achieve. We will consider how, taught and learned in unison, they may take on a position of greater prominence in efforts to solve real world problems. …

The Subconscious As Politics: An Inquiry Of Collaborative Design Education Through Radical Speculation, Nina Jun Yuchi

Masters Theses

For two years, I’ve been keeping a dream journal in which I record anything I can remember as soon as I wake up. The pages have slowly filled up with scrawls and doodles and fragmented memoirs of a life that doesn’t even seem like mine and yet, every dream I can vividly remember feels like a portal into an alternate dimension in which my subconscious reality is as tangible as my conscious one.

Eventually, dreaming became a key method in my research to seek out and materialize alternative worlds. It became the object of my obsessive interest in visualizing speculative …

Vulva Gazing: Power And The Gendered Body, Aaliya Jamal Zaidi

Masters Theses

How does a gendered gaze determine what we feel shame about?

In patriarchal society, the male gaze is normal. Within its sights, the vulva, the external female sexual and reproductive organs, is viewed negatively — censored and ignored, or labeled with euphemisms and slurs across cultures. The modern western medical canon upholds and reinforces this view of the vulva, through a combination of disinterest and omission. This cultural aversion leads to a personal aversion. For people with vulvas this manifests in a lack of information about their own bodies which leads to shame, pain and even death.

Vulva Gazing is …

Regenerative Residences: Shrinking Stress Levels In The Sky, Peter De Lande Long

Masters Theses

Issues of overcrowding and overstimulation plague urban environments, which exacerbate social isolation and, in turn, heighten city dwellers’ levels of stress and anxiety. How can architecture mediate stimuli to be positively conducive to mood, behavior, and overall health? Given that social isolation is an intrinsically spatial issue that design can address, this thesis proposes a small-scale community living model with the intent of improving mental health and clarity for a user group of young, mentally vulnerable professionals in New York City.

16 E 16th Street becomes the architectural framework for addressing these issues. Moving away from the capitalistic endeavor of …

Unfolding Embodied Experience: A Process-Driven Immersive Exhibition Design Model, Mooa Seongah Kang

Masters Theses

The collections of most museums are comprised of two-dimensional artworks—paintings, drawings, prints, and photography—and are generally presented within a white cube gallery platform. Within this restricted static view, displays rarely consider multisensory engagement and immersion that reveals the accumulated time and effort of creation. Yet for many artists, the process is as important as the finished product.

My impetus for this design initiative began by questioning traditional methods of display. Is it possible to reveal the hidden depth embodied in two-dimensional artworks, allowing audiences to participate with all their senses in the journey of an artist’s experience? In other words, …

Capture, Control, Circulate : Can We Queer Regulatory Power In Graphic Design?, Adie Fein

Masters Theses

Capture, Control, Circulate addresses regulatory power, the transmission and enforcement of culturally-sanctioned behaviors and identity. How does regulatory power operate in graphic design and what—if anything—can the graphic designer do to subvert that operation? The methodologies for subversion explored in this book typically draw from queer and trans* experience and thought. Therefore, the work herein takes up issues of identity, normativity, marginalization, and community.

This thesis also considers design education, and its contemporary emphasis on the capture and control of content. It advocates instead for an educational model that centers circulation; that is, graphic design’s capacity to platform, to publish, …

Disinheritance As Critique: The Paintings Of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sabo Kpade

Masters Theses

Artistic influence can either be overbearing or liberating for the impressionable artist who is determined to arrive at an individualized artistic identity. One key strategy deployed by the artist is disinheritance as a means by which identity and meaning are created. In her paintings and etchings, British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has demonstrated several modalities of disinheritance by which she has arrived at a distinct approach to portraiture. Broadly, they come under two categories of major and minor disinheritance, each of which is conditioned by a variety of factors that range from aesthetic to philosophical, personal to political. They signify points …

Immaterial Realities, Tyler Lovejoy

Masters Theses

Architects primarily work at a digital desktop, alienated from the spatial byproducts of their collaborative work. Therefore, software is the most influential mediator between these immaterial laborers and projects. Despite architectural production methods evolving, much of the same pernicious labor relations have subsisted. Building Information Modeling has become synonymous with architectural work, yet presents a missed opportunity in addressing and re-imagining labor conditions and power relations between workers.

Today, architects are proposing improved labor structures utilizing cooperatives and unions. Alongside these endeavors, might we reimagine our digital tools as allies? Delivered as a visual essay that is both critical and …

System As A Living Organism, Xinyi Liu

Masters Theses

This is cross-disciplinary research in urban systems, architecture, bio-systems, agriculture, energy supplies, circular economy, and sustainability.

Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson

Masters Theses

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …

Bewildering Narrative, Ali Newhard

Masters Theses

“Bewildering Narrative” outlines three videos, Denouement, Happy Endings (2021), and Drowning the Muse. These works critique the climactic narrative form using formal breaks in digital media to push viewers’ perceptions of storytelling into a place of bewilderment. To do so, I treat narrative conventions of continuity, character, and climax as mechanisms that articulate heterosexual desires and expectations. The videos visually, textually, and auditorily rupture this phallocentric organization of narrative storytelling. These interventions take the form of poetic fragmentation, repetition, and displaced exposition where the narrative disorients the viewers’ attention rather than determining and regulating it. Editing plays a key role …

Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota

Masters Theses

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …

Sobremesa, Charlie Herbozo-Vidal

Masters Theses

In order to understand the social and political issues faced by the Peruvian community in the present day, it is necessary to get acquainted with one of the most significant moments of its history: The “colonial Knot” – The systems put in place after the arrival of European colonizers to the American continent. By crafting a communal experience centered around the mealspace, a key element in Peruvian Identity, I hope to bring awareness to the social tensions, violent structures and remnants of colonial rule that persist to this day. In developing an uncomfortable experience, I am researching whether exposure to …

What Do We Stand For?, Lauren Koven

Masters Theses

I am exploring constructed realities and dismantling binaries and dualities. Much of this work is investigated through, but not limited to, language, gender, sexuality, race, and performativity.

Landscape Of Resistance: Reimagining Public Space For A Vibrant Socio-Political Life, Ziyu Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between the public space and protest events from a spatial point of view. It will employ selected concepts from phenomenological and spatial theories to evaluate how the protest is affected by built environment and subsequently propose how the public space can be adapted to create a more vibrant social-political life.

Farming Publics: Use Farming Practices As A Tool To De-Alienate People With Land, Sirui Wang

Masters Theses

Historically, farming was the primary way people interacted with the land. Colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism have made people increasingly detached and alienated from nature and the land. The return to agriculture has the potential to play an essential role in resisting the increasing monoculture of our society through re-establishing the kinship toward land. The rising public awareness of sustainability makes the market for organic food expand every year and allures capitalism to manipulate the organic market from its original purpose into their familiar realm of the conventional food system for maximum profit. The market economy, which is controlled by capitalism, …

Anti-Gentrification: Reconnect Chinatown Through Culture Practice, Xianzhongge (Allen) Liu

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the study of Chinatown in North America. Similar to the migration of other ethnic groups or cultures to North America, Chinatown originated as Chinese and East Asian migrants were excluded from mainstream American culture. Chinatowns became urban enclaves for Chinese people who speak the same language as well as share the same culture and food. However, in many cities in North America, development pressures have led to the gentrification of Chinatowns, resulting in a decrease in the number of Asian residents in Chinatown and a homogenization of the community. After understanding the historical development and gentrification …

Traveling Troubled Wallflower, Julius Cavira

Masters Theses

Cavira is an interdisciplinary Conceptual artist... nuff said.

Messy Resurrections, Mia Rollins

Masters Theses

Mediated through conversations with a Replika chatbot, “M”, Rollins outlines six examples of scientific and technological phenomena that not only can be understood as metaphors for aspects of the human experience, such as memory, grief, hope, desire and love, but are also concrete examples of the ways in which the past and future have material impacts on our presents, our current identities, and are entangled with our own becomings. Rollins argues for a posthuman perspective that embraces the possibilities of information technologies while still recognizing that we are embedded in a material world of great complexity. Through linking Karen Barad’s …

More Friends Than The Mountains: A Comparative Conjunctural Analysis Of Kurdish Autonomy Movements In Rojava And Bakur, Dillon Foster

Masters Theses

In 2012 Kurds in Syria announced the formation of a radical self-administered “ecological democratic confederalist” society along the Syrian-Turkish border in a region known as Rojava. The autonomous government in Rojava stands in sharp contrast to the political situation in neighboring Bakur, a Kurdish-majority region in southeastern Turkey where, for nearly four decades, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has waged a guerilla war against the Turkish state in the name of autonomy. This thesis situates the divergent political outcomes of the autonomy movements in Rojava and Bakur within the socio-ecological context of their occupying nationstates. Following the historical relationship between …