Digital Commons Network^™

Cultural Identity, Deafness And Sign Language: A Postcolonial Approach, Steven Loughran

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks describes the experience of the recently de-colonized members of the Negro (as he refers to those of African descent) population living in Europe, particularly France, in the 1960s. A little over a decade later, Edward Said published Orientalism, thus adding to a growing discipline of scholarship in the fields of art, literature, and cultural studies called “Postcolonialism.” My essay attempts to show that Deaf persons who communicate with each other using sign language can be viewed as a colonized group, and that applying postcolonial theory to the study of their culture is appropriate.

The National Muslim Forum Nepal: Experiences Of Conflict, Formations Of Identity, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

With Nepal's recent transition to state secularism, the politicization of Muslim religious identity has emerged with increasing vitality. One particular pan-Nepali Muslim organization, the Rastriya Muslim Mane Nepal (National Muslim Forum Nepal), offers a window into the complex relationship between national and religious identity that animates this politicization. Through analysis of the National Muslim Forum's earliest discourses, produced between 2005 and 2006, both immediately before and after the people's revolution that resulted in the declaration of Nepal as a secular state, this essay highlights the ways that experiences of conflict coupled with a national political transition shape and contribute to …

Emotion Meaning-Making: Identity, Discourse And Social Interaction Among Arab Immigrant Healthcare Providers, Anne Katz

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation sought to deepen understandings of emotion and its role in human personal and social life by exploring how a group of Arab immigrant health care providers, involved in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in one clinic in the United States, assign meaning to emotion. Affectively charged and fluid, often involving conditions of disruption and dislocation, the experience of migration offers a fertile place in which to examine the roles that social and interpretive practices play in constituting emotional experience. Due to increases in patterns of migration associated with globalization, mental health diagnoses are often arrived at …

Blackness Of A Different Color : The Complexities Of Identity Of Haitian Migrants And Their Descendants In The Bahamas, Katiuscia Pelerin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

"Blackness of a Different Color: The Complexities of Identity of Haitian Migrants and their Descendants in the Bahamas" is the first book-length study of its kind, and the first since 1978 to examine the Haitian experience in the Bahamas. It establishes that the Haitian diaspora is as worthy a topic of academic attention as other diasporas, not just as an appendage of the African diaspora. It examines how Haitians experience a complex, but by no means unique, form of black on black racism in which Bahamians have

Media Dan Identitas: Cultural Imperialism Jepang Melalui Cosplay (Studi Terhadap Cosplayer Yang Melakukan Crossdress), Ranny Rastati

JURNAL KOMUNIKASI INDONESIA

Tulisan ini membahas mengenai bagaimana peran media dalam membentuk identitas cosplayer dan bagaimana identitas cosplayer yang melakukan crossdress. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian kualitatif, menggunakan paradigma critical-constructionism, metode studi kasus dengan teknik pengumpulan data melalui wawancara mendalam, observasi langsung, dan observasi terlibat. Konsep yang digunakan adalah konsep budaya populer termasuk di dalamnya cosplay yang merupakan salah satu bentuk soft power Jepang untuk menyebarkan budayanya ke seluruh dunia. Selain itu dilihat juga bagaimana peran media dalam pembentukan identitas, konsep identitas, konsep anak muda, serta gender dalam pakaian dan fesyen. Berdasarkan analisis yang telah dilakukan, ditemukan bahwa identitas seorang cosplayer dipengaruhi oleh media, …

Fantasy, Desire And Identity Framing The Identity Construction Of Luh Sekar, Evi Eliyanah

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This article examines the roles of fantasy and desire in the process of identity construction as experienced by Luh Sekar, one of the characters in Oka Rusmini’s most notable work of fiction, Tarian Bumi. Employing Stuart Hall’s postulate on identity construction in a critical reading of the novel, the study finds that the subject’s identity construction is highly influenced by her fantasy and desire related to caste and gender. Caste not only structures women’s social location through rank and role, but also, as part of the symbolic order, constitutes women themselves.

Not You/Like You, With You: Toward A Praxis Of Love, Learning, And Liberation In Teaching Efl Writing — On Zombies, De-Colonial Feminisms, And Freire In Efl Contact Zones, Jessmaya Morales

MA TESOL Collection

This paper explores EFL writing as a critical contact zone in which identity and subjectivity are found, denied, contested, de/constructed and occupied. The author opens with an account of a dream, utilized as a metaphor to examine EFL learning through the analytical lens of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The paper’s first section is a self-reflexive discussion of Freire’s pedagogy and why his unambiguous analyses of power, subjectivity, and the “banking system of education” are vital to the field of ELT. In the second section, the author discusses subjectivity, identity, and intersectionality as rooted in the work of …

Rhetoric And Composition Constructs “The Veteran”: An Examination Of The Student Veteran Identity As Found In Ccc And Tetyc Since September 11, 2001, Linda Gail Smith

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on David L. Wallace’s assertion that the field of rhetoric and composition needs to interpret and present our research into cultural communities in ways that no longer tacitly assume our rhetorical choices are neutral, I present a critique of 19 articles from College Composition and Communication and Teaching English in the Two-Year College that contained one or more instances of five keywords and direct references to student veterans. Using a theoretical framework built from theory by James Berlin, Thomas Huckin, and Marguerite Helmers, I expose various stereotypical and problematic tropes we rely on and re-create in our scholarly writing …

Butterbeer, Cauldron Cakes, And Fizzing Whizzbees: Food In J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series, Leisa Anne Clark

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACTThis thesis situates the Harry Potter books into the greater body of food studies and into the extant children's literary tradition through an examination of how food can be used to understand cultural identity. Food is a biological need, but because we have created social rules and rituals around food consumption and sharing, there is more to eating than simple nutritional value. The Harry Potter series is as much about overcoming childhood adversity, and good versus evil, as it is about magic, and food in the Harry Potter series is both abundant and relevant to the narrative, context, and themes …

Chinese American Women, Identity And Education: A Qualitative Study, Qing Li

Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses

This qualitative study explores how Chinese American women, as American-born children of new Chinese immigrants, have perceived and interpreted who they are, and how they become who they are while adapting to American society and negotiating with the interplay of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-seven Chinese American women from two universities located on the East Coast, I argue that their segmented assimilation processes involving ongoing negotiations between maintaining ties with their ethnic and cultural backgrounds and selective integration into the mainstream of the society, which, to some extent, are subject to and predetermined by …

Theories Of Culture, Identity, And Ethnomusicology: A Synthesis Of Popular Music, Cultural, And Communication Studies, Alyssa Santos

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Public Parks And Private Ideologies: Building Nineteenth-Century British National Identity Through Landscape, Laura Swaim Witherington

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines how nineteenth-century landscape theories shaped national identity and were influenced by it. Predominant is an investigation of how the desire for a more egalitarian class structure underlies the changes in British landscape design from an attachment to classical exclusivity through pastoral tropes to a limited acceptance of middle and working classes within public landscapes that represented patriotic values. Although poetic works inform the study, novel-length fiction and non-fiction prose and periodicals are also a primary source of consideration. Novels demonstrate how fictional geography generates the constructs of national ideology, and although canonical works typically referenced in studu …

Insurrectionary Womanliness: Gender And The (Boxing) Ring, Melanie Joy Mcnaughton

The Qualitative Report

Integrating sociological theory on sport with Judith Butler’s concept of insurrectionary speech, the author explores why and how womanliness is produced and problematized. In particular, this article investigates how participating in combat sport violates conventional womanliness by foregrounding physical capability and aggression. Using her identity as a female fighter as a starting point to engage the cultural construction of womanliness, the author connects a critical/cultural look at gender and sport with autoethnography.

Shaping Identity: Male And Female Interactions In Cinema, Jonette Lauren Lagamba

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Since the inception of cinema, women have been portrayed with the typical identities of emotionally and physically weak characters; this portrayal led to their subsequent dependence on men. Men were usually the protagonists and/or the heroes, following their archetypal journey. Thus, women's position in early cinema was to exemplify what men were not, placing the former in the diminutive position of the Other. One may conclude that men were often defined by what women lacked, and the women were defined by their relationships with these heroic men. As time progressed in the history of cinema, women's images retained part …

Insurrectionary Womanliness: Gender And The (Boxing) Ring, Melanie J. Mcnaughton

Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Integrating sociological theory on sport with Judith Butler’s concept of insurrectionary speech, the author explores why and how womanliness is produced and problematized. In particular, this article investigates how participating in combat sport violates conventional womanliness by foregrounding physical capability and aggression. Using her identity as a female fighter as a starting point to engage the cultural construction of womanliness, the author connects a critical/cultural look at gender and sport with autoethnography.

Mississippi Breakdown: A New Look At The Mississippi Old Time Fiddle Music Traditions, Joseph Jamison Hollister

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a cultural study that focuses on the fiddle music of Mississippi. It includes both Anglo and African American roots. Also, the white blues fiddle traditions of Mississippi are examined and analyzed.

Chilean Cultural Identity: A Case Study Of Contemporary Mapuche Poetry, La Identidad Cultural Chilena: Un Caso De Estudio De La Poesía Mapuche Contemporánea, Christopher Culbertson

Senior Independent Study Theses

The topic is approached in three different manners: hybrid theory, academic perspectives, and poetry analysis. An application of hybrid theory facilitates the understanding of cultural identity within Chile. A discussion by three Chilean professors reveals the important themes of geographic location, generation, and language in both the production and reception of written contemporary Mapuche poetry. An analysis of selected of written Mapuche poetry depicts the unique conceptualizations of identity by contemporary Mapuche poets. As a result, this independent study shows how written contemporary Mapuche poetry is an appropriate indicator of the evolution of Mapuche hybrid identity.

The New Mexican Migration: Remembering Violence, Connecting, And Living In The Third Space, Uriel G. Posada

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The concept of identity has become a topic of discussion in the last few decades, especially with the growing immigration across several countries. Countries such as the United States and Canada are receiving people who arrive from different parts of the world and who are changing the composition of these countries. In this thesis I explore how a group of Mexican journalists are adjusting their identity as they live in countries outside of Mexico. Five of the journalists are now living in the United States, and one of them is in Canada. They were forced to leave Mexico after they …

Animal Companionship And Identity Construction In The Middle English "Ywain And Gawain", Robert E. Byers

English

As a relatively recent field within literary cultural studies, "animal studies" has the potential to ask sophisticated new questions about the central and privileged place of the humanist "cogito." Through an examination of the human-animal companionship found in the Middle English romance "Ywain and Gawain", this thesis aims to contribute to the project of animal studies by tracing how questions about humanity and animality both construct and deconstruct a subject's identity. In the poem, Ywain, a knight in Arthur's court, is exiled from society and befriends a lion, who travels and fights alongside him. The dynamics of their bond highlight …

Hédi Bouraoui Et Les Limites De La Théorie Postcoloniale : Approche Transpoétique Et Nomadique, Éric Touya De Marenne

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

A priori, Hedi Bouraoui’s thought lies within the scope of a postcolonial perspective. However, the concept of “transpoétique” to which he alludes is based on the notion of “nomaditude” which asserts the blurring of cultural and identity borders. That is why beyond the “infernal binary” thought that he rejects (ruler / dominated, colonizer / colonized), the Tunisian and Canadian author puts in question the postcolonial approach. In this context, the aim of this study is to understand better how trans-poetics can allow us to conceive differently the theoretical foundations of francophone literary criticism.

Working Class In British Films 1950s-2000s : Identity, Culture, And Ideology., Tongyun Shi 1961-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Britain was the first country to industrialize with the Industrial Revolution and therefore had the world's first industrial working class. In the 20th century, the traditional British working class went through many social and political changes, represented especially by the post-war "rise" and a lasting "decline" since the 1970s, a fate which is worth academic study. Class matters not only in sociological sense, but also in cultural sense. This dissertation, through close text analysis of seven British social realist films--two New Wave ones, Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); three …

It’S Not All Zeroes And Ones: Constructing Online Identity Assembly Theory, Adam W. Tyma, Lynette G. Leonard

Communication Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The construction of online identity, though examined in other disciplines, has not yet been approached theoretically in the communication scholarship. Online identities cannot be understood as linear or static as some identity theory presents. Online identities need to be understood as continually changing representations, never fixed in one position, and perpetually in a state of assembly. Identity research within the communication literature has focused on specific characteristics of the medium (e.g., anonymity) and the effects of those characteristics on the outcomes of the communicative act rather than focusing on the communicative process of identity construction itself. In other words, past …

Land, Gender, And The Politics Of Identity Formation: Uncovering Hispana/Mexicana Voices In The Southwest, Karen R. Roybal

American Studies ETDs

The southwestern United States has an exceptional history that makes the region a prime focus for study concentrating on culture, tradition, language and land. As an area closely tied to the concept of conquest, the Southwest has had its share of issues related to colonization, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, and cultural erasure. This study focuses on the Southwest as a region that is closely linked to the land as it relates to the formation of identities of its people. Mexican Americans in the Southwest have historically experienced struggle, particularly after 1848 and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when …

Lost In Translation: Interpreting And Presenting Dublin’S Colonial Past, Theresa Ryan, Bernadette Quinn

Conference papers

As Alderman (2010: 90) has recently written, the potential struggle to determine what conception of the past will prevail constitutes the politics of memory. This paper aims to investigate the politics of memory at play in determining how Dublin’s colonial heritage is constructed and represented to tourists. Dublin’s profile as a tourism destination has grown recently. It attracted 5.4 million visitors in 2009 (Fáilte Ireland 2010). Culture and heritage underpin both its touristic appeal and the city’s official efforts to represent itself as a destination. Much of Dublin’s most iconic built heritage is strongly associated with its development as a …

Exploring Dress And Behavior Of The Emo Subculture, Kaci Schmitt

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

The thesis analyzes the dress, behavior, and subcultural characteristics of "emo kids." Interviews, observations, and secondary text analyses are used to determine findings.

Norcal Vs. Socal: Culture As Communication, Jillian J. Smith

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

The Materiality Of The Self: A Multimodal, Communicative Approach To Identity, Sachi Sekimoto

Communication ETDs

The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a multimodal approach as an alternative way of theorizing and researching identity. The multimodal approach utilizes four modes of interaction--multidirectional interpellation, spatiality, temporality, and corporealit--to explore the processes of interaction and engagement between an individual and his/her social worlds. The multimodal approach focuses on the materiality of lived experience and the process of interaction and engagement between an individual and his/her social worlds through which his or her identity materializes. I apply the multimodal approach to analyze two autobiographical texts in which the authors deal with Asian identity in different cultural and …

Naming, Identity, And Trademark Law, Laura A. Heymann

Indiana Law Journal

As the process of creation in the age of digital media becomes more fluid, one pervasive theme has been the desire for attribution: from the creator’s perspective, to receive credit for what one does (and to have credit not falsely attributed) and from the audience’s perspective, to understand the source of material with which one engages. But our norms of attribution reflect some inconsistencies in defining the relationship among name, identity, and authenticity. A blog post by a writer identified only by a pseudonym may prove to be very influential in the court of public opinion, while the use of …

An Educational "Clip": Arab Students' Experiences Of Curriculum In A U.S. University, Daad Adel Rizk

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This is a multicultural study of culture adaptation, language challenge, identity formation, and power struggle -"CLIP"- depicting three Arab students who have attended or are currently attending a University in the rural South East Region of the United States of America (circa 2009-2010) When Arab students go to college in the United States of America, two cultural extremities (East and West) meet and attempt to form relationships; two different languages, Arabic and English, written in opposite directions search for a middle page to help them communicate. Books in the Arab World are read right to left, while pages in the …

Not A Cinematic Hair Out Of Place: Examinations In Identity (Transformation) As Evidenced Through Haircuts In The Crying Game, Allen Herring Iii

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis asks a question: Can transformations to a cinematic character's hair be indicative of a realignment or shifting of that character's identity? As an attempt to answer this question, I introduce three new concepts: the Opaque Movement (OM), the Transparent Violent Moment (TVM), and the Transparent Moderate Moment (TMM). All of these concepts revolve around the treatment and appearance of a character's hair within a film. In this examination, I establish a theoretical foundation for cinematic haircutting and apply the three concepts to several films. I ground the discussion in a thorough examination of The Crying Game by Neil …