Digital Commons Network^™

Musical Play Across Ethnic Boundaries In Western Jamaica, Ronald Eric Dickerson

LSU Master's Theses

An ethnography of music, ritual, and festival in western Jamaica, this thesis reports on fieldwork performed in St. Elizabeth and St. James Parishes between June 2002 and January 2003. Featured field sites include rural dancehall events, Kumina performances, Accompong Town's Maroon Heritage Festival, and a Rastafarian music and nutrition festival called "The Supper of Rastafari." Building an account of these and other sites of cultural performance, this study focuses on social connections between groups of participants, traced through poetic, historical, and personal relationships among performers, especially across boundaries of ethnic, stylistic, or religious difference within Jamaica's national cultural identity.

Being Korean And Being Christian: Identity Making In The Korean Baptist Church Of Baton Rouge In The U.S. Deep South, Hyeon Ju Lee

LSU Master's Theses

The post-1965 generation Korean immigrants in the U.S., who have left their country for betterment of their lives, find themselves unable to acculturate to the U.S. mainstream culture. Although legally Americans, these Koreans strive to hold onto their culture they brought with them. A group of Koreans who belong to this post-1965 immigrant generation in Baton Rouge established a church to share religious and cultural experience while speaking Korean language and sharing Korean food--The Korean Baptist Church of Baton Rouge. The members of the Korean Baptist Church of Baton Rouge ("the Church") create a familial community within Christian and Confucian …

Mystery, Wonder, And Awe : The True Nature Of Science, Katie E. Rau

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

The Effectiveness Of Language-Literacy Training For Child Care Workers, Katelyn Beth Venturella

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effectiveness of group-based language-literacy training for child care workers. The first phase of the study followed a pre-post single group comparison design and involved 23 child care providers. The independent variable was the teacher training and the dependant variable was scores from a questionnaire. The second phase of the study involved a sub-group of four child care workers who received one-on-one follow up training after the group sessions. The questionnaire was administered a third time to the follow-up group. An analysis of the questionnaire items at pretest indicated that the …

The Topography Of Syntactic Islands, Danielle Rachel Alfandre

LSU Master's Theses

The Adjunct Island Constraint proposed by Ross (1967) together with Chomsky’s Barriers (1986) are not sufficient to account for the ungrammaticality of wh-extraction out of adjunct clauses, nor do they address the instances of grammatical extraction out of such constructions. Extraction out of Adjunct Islands is now completely predictable using a combination of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program (1995) and Kehler’s Coherence Theory (2002). The combination of these two theories gives an account of both the grammatical and ungrammatical instances of wh- extraction out of adjuncts. The principles of the Minimalist Program together with evidence from Old English adverbial clauses determines the …

Louisiana State University Nasalance Protocol Standardization, Kathryn Ruth Kendrick

LSU Master's Theses

It was the purpose of this study to obtain nasalance values using the Nasometer and a resonance evaluation created at the Louisiana State University (LSU) Speech and Hearing Clinic. The Nasometer was used to measure the amount of nasal acoustic energy in the speech of 40 normal young adults during sustained vowel production, consonant vowel reduplications, and connected speech using the Rainbow Passage. Means and standard deviations are presented for the individual speech tasks and according to gender. Nasalance values for the sustained vowels were significantly higher for the high front vowel /i/ than any other vowel, and the lowest …

Audiating The Lsu Drumline: An Ethnographic Performance, Andrew Michael Causey

LSU Master's Theses

This is an ethnographic study of the drumline of the LSU Marching Band and the mock-fraternity they created called Phi Boota roota (ΦBr). I argue that ΦBr was created as a site to flesh out the various tensions members experience as members of the LSU drumline; they create a rite of passage ritual that functions as a carnivalesque and celebratory inversion of the system they find themselves submerged within. Phi Boota roota marks a created articulation of the transition members make when they become part of the larger ritual of Tigerband; it is a voluntary or liminoid ritual that allows …

Pan African Narratives: Sites Of Resistance In The Black Diaspora, Anita Louise Harris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Africa as a point of reference for Africans dispersed from her shores and their descendants in the Diaspora has perpetuated discourse of longing and ambivalence. For centuries these various sentiments have emerged in Black literary expressions. The quest of this study is to advance Black narrative tradition by proposing a theoretical framework informed by these constructs and predicaments to establish a genre of literature referred to here as Pan African narratives. This work looks at Black response to the dilemma of dispersal and dislocation in the Diaspora from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. More specifically, it examines the emergence …

Shaping Science With Rhetoric: The Cases Of Dobzhansky, Schrdinger, And Wilson, Michael Dietrich

Dartmouth Scholarship

A review of Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson by Leah Ceccarelli.

Heidegger's Relationship To Kantian And Post-Kantian Thought, Ryan S. Hellmers

LSU Master's Theses

I provide a close analysis of truth and freedom in Heidegger’s work during the passage from Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) in 1927 to the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) in 1938. This analysis demonstrates the passage from a Kantian style transcendental analysis of the self to an Idealist inspired study of being-historical thinking. Throughout this shift in thinking, the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling is shown to play an increasingly decisive role in Heidegger’s thought, finally leading him to an understanding of the self in terms of freedom, community, culture, and history that carries important …

"Ya Know Frenchy, You Talk A Broken Language": An Analysis Of Syllable-Coda Phonetic Realizations In Creole African American Vernacular English, Rachel Rose Mentz

LSU Master's Theses

Creole African American Vernacular English or CAAVE is a variety of English spoken by African Americans of French ancestry who live primarily in the French Triangle of Louisiana. Dubois and Horvath (2003b) have previously published on glide absence in CAAVE and have suggested that CAAVE is a unique dialect of English. They attribute CAAVE’s glide absence to the contact of Creole African Americans with diverse groups of English speakers and not to language interference from French. This research further pursues these hypotheses by studying the phonological realization of word final syllable-codas for six old male speakers of CAAVE. The reduction …

Book Review Of, The Music Of Everyday Speech: Prosody And Discourse Analysis, John Hellermann

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviews the book "The Music of Everyday Speech" by Ann K. Wennerstrom.

The Atlantic And Mande Groups Of Niger-Congo: A Study In Contrasts, A Study In Interaction, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents the effects of long-lasting and pervasive contact between two major language groups of Niger-Congo, both of which diverged relatively early from the parent stock. The influence has been asymmetrical: Mande has more deeply influenced Atlantic than vice versa. The details come from two profoundly influenced languages, Kisi, now completely surrounded by Mande, and Mmani, a closely related language, from which all speakers have switched to the Mande language Soussou.

Le contact entre les locuteurs des langues atlantiques et les locuteurs des langues mande est de longue durée et profond. Les deux ensembles sont très différents typologiquement. À …

How To Speak Of Nature? The Exemplary Position Of Mount Koli In Environmental Research, Yrjö Sepänmaa

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Mount Koli in Eastern Finland is a useful example for environmental aesthetics and landscape research. In case studies, an example represents a general set and the conclusion becomes a precedent. Koli provides a wealth of material: descriptions of local nature, art featuring Koli, and documents concerning the environmental debates around it. One can outline both the development of Koli into a culturally significant location and the activities and policies of the process, as well as the values and appreciations that guided them. The material we have can be used to examine an environmental institution designed to have the structure of …

The Heresy Of Paraphrase Revisited, Stefán Snaevarr

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

I try to rejuvenate Cleanth Brooks' old thesis about the 'heresy of paraphrase.' This I do by analysing a couple of well-known poems and by performing thought experiments of the "possible world" kind. They show that paradigmatic examples of poems are not paraphrasable. A prosaic text can be improved with the aid of a paraphrase, but a typical poem cannot. The deeper explanation for the non-rephrasability of poetry is that our understanding of it is basically tacit. In this way I hope to give Brooks' original thesis a more solid foundation.

Narrative Understanding And Understanding Narrative, Sarah E. Worth

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I deal with the question of how it is that we have emotional responses to things that we do not believe in the reality of, specifically things like characters and events in literature and film (the paradox of fiction). The direction in which I wish to take this query is not the traditional philosophical approach to this question, however. There has been much written on this particular approach, and because of this I think that it is becoming, in philosophical effect, stuck. What I wish to do in what follows is to approach this question from a …

Talk To The Animals: A Short Comment On Wolfgang Welsch's "Animal Aesthetics", Stefán Snaevarr

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

I voice some concern about Wolfgang Welsch's defense of the theory that animals can feel aesthetic pleasure. My first concern is epistemological: it is hard to see how we can find out whether they actually feel such pleasures. My second concern is conceptual: aesthetic pleasures have intentional objects and are woven into fallible judgments. It is hard to see that animals have such objects and can perform such judgments.

A Semantic Sketch Of Spatial Grams In Garifuna, Elaine Drom

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Designing Risk Messages In Response To Human-Caused Disasters, Michael E. Hellinger

Theses

Not Included

The Realization Of L2 Speech Events: A Quantitative Study Of Korean Speakers Of L2 English With Respect To Formality And Proficiency, Nevin Liddy

LSU Master's Theses

Guided written conversations were studied from English speakers at four different proficiency levels. They were analyzed according to their speech act realization, speech event realization, and conversation management (as reflected by three levels of speech acts: primary, secondary, and complementary). All four proficiency levels were found to be capable in the formulation of speech acts and events, demonstrating access to certain discourse principles at all levels. Language proficiency was found to effect the way in which a speech event was realized to a greater degree than the level of formality was found to effect the way in which the speech …

Irrationality And Human Reasoning, Michael Aristidou

LSU Master's Theses

In his account of intentional interpretation, Donald Davidson assumes that people are mostly rational. Several psychological experiments though, reveal that human beings deviate drastically from the normative standards of rationality. Therefore, some psychologists arrive to the conclusion that humans are mostly irrational. In this thesis, I raise some objections to both points of view. On the one hand, ascribing rationality to humans in an a priori manner seems a suspicious position to adopt, considering the empirical data that show otherwise. On the other hand, the validity of the experiments and what exactly they test can also be put in question, …

Work Intensification And Professionalism : A Study Of Teachers' Perceptions In The State School System In Western Australia, Niall B. Richardson

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The past two decades have witnessed the introduction throughout much of the Western world of what has become known as economic rationalism, and for some commentators, as economic liberalism. Grounded in neoclassical economic theory, and with close kinship to the Taylorist and Fordist principles of the early decades of the twentieth century, the vision of economic rationalism has led to measures which have tended to favour the business sector in Australia. Throughout the 1990s, the focus has been on the notions of competitiveness, competition, productivity, efficiency, and profit, while the notions of the individual, and of social justice and equity, …

Plague, Pestilence & Pollution : Berkoff's Collision With Aeschylus And Sophocles, Michelle Aslett

Theses : Honours

Our humanity is bound to perennial themes in drama, so when a classic play is adapted to 'suit' contemporary audiences, the revised version will often reflect the zeitgeist of the times in which it was produced. The magic of retrospection then allows us to examine the social and political particulars that influence the adapted as well as the original work. Indeed, Steven Berkoff's reworkings of both Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex reflect an unsettled and divided British context in the throes of ideological upheaval during the 1970's and early 1980's. While consistent criticism of leadership and political strife in …

Under The Thumb : The Role Of Sms In The Forming And Maintenance Of Adolescent Dating Relationships, Jason Noble

Theses : Honours

The use of the mobile phone is a ubiquitous feature of many an individual's social life within contemporary society. Given this, it is somewhat surprising that little academic research has been undertaken into its effects on the social and cultural lives of key user populations. In particular, the Short Message Service- SMS texting- is a mobile phone application that has transformed the lives of large numbers of adolescent city dwellers. Moreover, teenagers and young adults, who represent the adolescent population, have adopted this mobile phone application and subsequently applied it to their social lives in ways that never would have …

The Abject In The Technological Other, Alex Bradley

Theses : Honours

A photographic project and exegesis demonstrating artificial intelligence and artificial life as occurrences of the abject. In the photographic project '0=2', the technologies of artificial intelligence and artificial life are examined in relation to identity, via an elaboration of the psychoanalytic concert of the 'abject'. An exegesis of the creative project contains an investigation of computer technologies in regard to identity, an analysis of the basic concepts and paradigms of the sciences of artificial intelligence and artificial life, and an elaboration of the psychoanalytic concept of the abject - demonstrating A.l. and a-life as cultural instantiations of abjection. In addition, …

Resisting Aggression : Graphic Re-Presentations For Other Bodies, Camilla C. Loveridge

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

These chapters consider how art can provide a space for wider critical debate on established patriarchal power relations, which have operated in Western culture since the Enlightenment period. As a female artist, I want to explore the space in art of both the female body and the community body. This work seeks to position the female body within the "form" of her subjectivity, to destabilize patriarchal strongholds through the displacement of the traditionally aestheticised female "nude”. That is, I examine the (historicized) notion of a “subject” and the representation of an "object”, and understand the female "nude” as a representation …

An Intervention Model To Improve Overall Learning For Rural At-Risk Kindergartners, Vivian S. Burke

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation investigated whether at-risk kindergarten students who were taught with the 5 standards of effective pedagogy over an 8-month period would score higher on achievement measures. The 5 pedagogy standards are (a) joint productive activity, (b) language and literacy development, (c) meaning making, (d) complex thinking, and (e) instructional conversation. These standards emerged from principles of practice that have proven successful with majority and minority at-risk students in a variety of teaching and learning settings over several decades (R. G. Tharpe, 1988).

The researcher developed indicators for each standard, revealing action components of the standards and their functions …

Universal Jurisdiction: Steps Forward, Steps Back, Naomi Roht-Arriaza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A National Survey Of Civil Rights Training Programs For Development, Implementation, And Evaluation Of Civil Rights Training For Wic Employees, Beverley Demetrius

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

The problem was that the state of Georgia Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program was noncompliant with antidiscrimination laws and therefore, risked the loss of federal funds to operate the WIC Program. The purpose of this applied dissertation was to conduct a national survey of civil rights training programs with plans for development, implementation, and evaluation of training for Georgia WIC Program employees.

A combination of the development and evaluation methodologies was used to complete this study. The development methodology was used to develop the civil rights training program for Georgia WIC employees. The evaluation methodology that included process and …

Identity In The Movement For ProvençAl, Anne Bakken

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.