Digital Commons Network^™

Sources On Lesbian Subjectivities For The Production Of Lesbian Of Color Identity Formation Through Literature, Art, Film, Or Documentation: An Annotatated Bibliography, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Historically, coming out as a lesbian and then forming an identity of a "lesbian of color" includes seeking out like voices and stories. Librarians who hold an understanding of the lesbian of color coming out process as well as the fluidity of language in Queer Studies will be better equipped to service lesbian of color patrons. This paper holds three tools for reference librarians: A literature review outlining the history of lesbian of color identity formation, secondly, a bibliography with interdisciplinary humanities reference annotations that source lesbians of color in literature, film, performance art, and identity, and thirdly, a model …

A Transnational Conversation On French Colonialism, Immigration, Violence And Sovereignty, Miriam Ticktin, Ruth Marshall, Paolo Bacchetta

Publications and Research

This conversation was transcribed from a panel discussion that took place at The Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXII, “Fashioning Citizenship: Gender and Immigration,” held on March 24, 2007 at Barnard College.

Selection Criteria For Academic Video Game Collections, Elisabeth Tappeiner, Kate Lyons

Publications and Research

As higher education begins to take games and gaming seriously, academic libraries will begin to build video game collections to support research and learning on campus. This article discusses their relevance in academia and proposes useful criteria for building video game collections in academic libraries.

The authors outline selection considerations for developing video game collections and propose the following criteria for selecting games: physical characteristics, teaching and learning principles present in the games, subject matter and content, and the cultural and historical value of a game.

Scholarly Monographs On Rock Music: A Bibliographic Essay, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Purpose This article is an overview of scholarly monographs on rock music from 1980 to the present. It provides an overview to the literature for practical purposes of collections development as well as giving the reader insight into key issues and trends related to a interdisciplinary topic that attracts scholars from many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Design/methodology/approach This bibliographic essay, focusing on works related to American culture and of a general nature, includes an overview and historical background; a discussion of how music and ethnomusiciological scholars approach the topic; geographic approaches; literature on four key icons (Elvis, …

A Quantitative Synthesis Of The Medicinal Ethnobotany Of The Malinké Of Mali And The Asháninka Of Peru, With A New Theoretical Framework, Nathaniel Bletter

Publications and Research

Background: Although ethnomedically and taxonomically guided searches for new medicinal plants can improve the percentage of plants found containing active compounds when compared to random sampling, ethnobotany has fulfilled little of its promise in the last few decades to deliver a bounty of new, laboratory-proven medicinal plants and compounds. It is quite difficult to test, isolate, and elucidate the structure and mechanism of compounds from the plethora of new medicinal plant uses described each year with limited laboratory time and resources and the high cost of clinical trials of new drug candidates.

Methods: A new quantitative theoretical framework of mathematical …

Digg.Com And Socially-Driven Authority, Steven Ovadia

Publications and Research

For years, librarians have been able to distill the notion of authority, in its purest form, to two simple questions: “Who said it?” and “Under whose auspices?” The answer to either, or preferably both, of these questions could tell a researcher whether to rely on the information retrieved. Today, however, in the world of online information, the notion of authority is shifting and librarians working in an instructional capacity must understand the shift and determine ways to help students cope with the changes. Searching in today’s socially-driven information era requires a different skill set for researchers looking for authoritative information. …

Rock Music Scholarship, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

My challenge is to take my master’s thesis, a lengthy annotated bibliography of academic monographs on rock in American culture, and make it come alive and, in the process, provide a sense of how the academic rock discourse has evolved.

Learning Communities And The Future Of The Humanities, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

According to Profession's 2005 Presidential Forum, one reason for dwindling enrollment in the Humanities is lack of interdisciplinarity. Learning communities, courses clustered around a common theme and taught to the same group of students are a powerful example of a kind of interdisciplinarity that is flourishing on more than five-hundred campuses in the United States.This essay looks closely at the expanding learning community movement and its relevance to revitalizing the Humanities.

Worlds Together . . . Words Apart: An Assessment Of The Effectiveness Of Arts-Based Curriculum For Second Language Learners, Stephanie Urso Spina

Publications and Research

The objective of this study is to assess whether authentic arts-based1 curricula facilitate the acquisition of English as a second language (ESL) without sacrificing proficiency in the first language (Spanish). This question is examined theoretically and empirically. First, the use of an arts-based curriculum is positioned within a Vygotskiian framework of learning as reflected in current research. This overview is organized by two themes: 1) the authenticity of the art experience and 2) the emphasis on social interaction and the cognitive mediation among sign systems. Applicable findings from related literature are reviewed and synthesized within each of these themes. Secondly, …

Normalizing The Abnormal: Disability In Music And Music Theory, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The emerging interdisciplinary field of disability studies takes as its subject matter the historical, social, and cultural construction of disability. After a brief introduction to disability studies, this article explores the interconnected histories of disability and music as they are manifested in three theoretical approaches to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western art music (the musical Formenlehre and the tonal theories of Schoenberg and Schenker) and in three works by Beethoven and Schubert. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, disability began to be understood not as something natural and permanent but rather as a deviation from …

Out Of The Blue: Re-Evaluating Electra-Glide In Blue, William Blick

Publications and Research

The 1970s was a time of moral ambiguity for the cinema. The cult- favorite, Electra Glide in Blue demonstrates the polarization of ideologies in America at the time. In this film, there are several conflicting views of the Vietnam War, "Hippies", drugs, conservatism, communes, and the mistrust of authority that made up a zeitgeist of the time. This short article defines the film as a examination of the ambiguity of the 1970s.

Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, And Alien Love: An Interview With Marleen S. Barr, C. Jason Smith, Ximena C. Gallardo, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

Marleen S. Barr is a pioneer of feminist science fiction criticism and a leader in the fight against the ghettoizing influences of genre-labeling in literary criticism. While the noteworthy Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 1992) has been praised as Barr's seminal work in feminist science fiction criticism and theory, it is in Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (U of Iowa P, 2000) where she takes on literary critics' discriminatory practices against "genre fiction" in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular.

Currently teaching at Fordham University in New York City, Barr has …

Creative Uses Of Cultural Genres, Colette Daiute

Publications and Research

Telling - or writing - a story about an event in your life is telling a social story. Autobiographical narrations are also, to be sure, personal and unique, but the social nature of narrating is often overlooked in research and education. In particular, to appreciate what young people are doing when we ask them to share their personal experiences in public institutions like school, we need a theory to guide our reading of narratives as conversations.

This chapter focuses on how young narrators juggle the demanding yet potentially rewarding activity of narrating in public settings, and it offers insights for …

The Invention Of The Classics: Nationalism, Philology And Cultural Politics In Argentina, Fernando Degiovanni

Publications and Research

By the end of 1915, two inexpensive book series devoted to the diffusion of colonial and nineteenth-century texts flooded the shelves of Argentine bookstores. Their deliberately resonant and all-encompassing names - La Biblioteca Argentina (The Argentine Library) and La Cultura Argentina (Argentine Culture) - were unmistakable signs of their nationalist character and aims. Developed respectively by Ricardo Rojas and José lngenieros, two of the most important intellectuals of Centennial Argentina, the nearly simultaneous launch of both series also underscored the editors' enduring competition to promote their contrasting versions of the nation's political and cultural past. The timing of the series' …

Say It Loud! African-American Audiences, Media, And Identity, Gordon Alley-Young

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Postwar Consumer As Feminized Legal Subject, Andrea Mcardle

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Modernity And Musical Structure: Neo-Marxist Perspectives On Song Form And Its Successors, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Poverty Law And Community Activism: Notes From A Law School Clinic, Steve Loffredo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Peer Facilitator In The Experiential Learning Model Of Communication, Gordon Alley-Young

Publications and Research

Abstract: This research examines how peer facilitators in an experiential learning model of communication in introductory speech communication courses offered at the University College of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Canada, are able to meet the specific learning needs of male and female students simultaneously. Also examined is the perceived role of these facilitators within the model. Data in the report are based on focus group interviews with peer facilitators and literature on experiential learning and Cape Breton cultures. The report details facilitators' attempts to establish authority, rapport and an informal educational environment in ways that do not increase power …

The Pitchman In Print: Oral Performance Art In Text And Context, Joseph Ugoretz

Publications and Research

Oral performance art, patterned performative speech for an audience, is perhaps the oldest and most ubiquitous human art form. Specific instances of this art include the performances of griots and guslars, troubadors and shamans, as well as rappers and riddlers, preachers and politicians. While this art form is by definition oral, it is also the case that, frequently, literary art has represented oral performance art. There is written art which depicts oral art, which describes it, appropriates it, criticizes and co‑opts it.

In this dissertation, I define oral performance art as constituting a separate and unique artistic genre, one which …

Gender Politics In Caribbean Popular Music: Consumer Perspectives And Academic Interpretation, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Interview: Cindi Katz. Creating Safe Space And The Materiality Of The Margins, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Cindi Katz, associate professor and chair of the environmental psychology program at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, visited the University of Kentucky in February of 1996 to deliver the keynote address at the 5 1/2 Annual Geography Graduate Student Conference. In her address, entitled "Power, Space and Terror: Social Reproduction and the Public Environment," Professor Katz discussed how changes jn urban built environments, particularly the privatization of urban public space, negatively affected New York City children. Privatization, she argued, not only serves a 'child hating' mentality prevalent in our society, but fosters, among other things, …

Flamenco Deep Song [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Timothy Mitchell's Flamenco Deep Song certainly is not a flamenco handbook describing the genres, forms, instruments, and biographies of flamenco music, but a critical study questioning the accounts of flamenco (its histories, one could say) that have been set forward by historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and even flamenco artists themselves.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender, Polly Thistlethwaite, Daniel C. Tsang

Publications and Research

The proliferation of publications in the lesbian, Gay, bisexual, and transgender press has allowed the weaving of a well-informed network of previously isolated individuals and communities, empowering and unifying lesbian, gay, and other sexual minorities," Dan Tsang and Polly Thistlethwaite wrote in the introduction to the 'Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender' section of Katzes' 1995 edition of Magazines for Libraries. This title review of the queer periodicals of the day was intended to serve as a guide and justification for 'mainstream' libraries' collection building. The number and range of titles in Thistlethwaite and Tsang's collaborative entries (1989, 1992, and …

Spanish Music In The Twentieth Century [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

North-American audiences, musicians, and musicologists remain unfamiliar with twentieth-century Spanish music. Most concertgoers identify Spanish music with the folkloristic tunes associated with such composers as Isaac Albéniz, thus construing a true "other" facing the Germanic musical tradition. The musicological canon is not only almost closed to non-European musics, but also excludes the music of some countries that since the Industrial Revolution have been deemed "peripheral," forgetting, to be sure, that five and six hundred years ago the actual periphery was all lands north of Paris. Most of us were not surprised to hear in a special session on Hispanic music …

Philosophy And The Analysis Of Music: Bridges To Musical Sound, Form, And Reference [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

In recent years there seems to have been a tendency (in theory at least) to view conventional academic disciplines with a certain hostility as intellectual chastisements that, rather than opening our minds to knowledge, merely hinder us. In the humanities especially, interdisciplinary studies have become a trend. Many scholars are tempted to abandon the cozy security of their methodology and embark on other, more adventurous hybrid enterprises. Philosophy and the Analysis of Music, one such enterprise, draws its premises from two apparently different fields, philosophy and musical analysis, in order to arrive at a better understanding of music.

Children And The Environment: Work, Play And Learning In Rural Sudan, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

In agricultural economies, environmental learning and the use of environmental knowledge are central practices of social reproduction. The former is important because it encompasses the acquisition of important vocational skills and knowledge, and the latter because it is often integral to the work of providing or procuring basic needs goods and services. In these societies children learn about the environment--that is, about agriculture, animal husbandry and the use of local resources-- largely in the course of their work and play in a variety of settings. In rural areas of the Third World the transition to capitalist relations of production is …