Digital Commons Network^™

Fiber Art Circles, Belonging, And Mental Health In The Queer Community: A Community Arts Based Project, Sage Hess

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explores the role of community and chosen family for queer belonging. The queer community is in a mental health crisis, with substance abuse, high suicide rates, anxiety, depression, personality disorders, and complex post-traumatic stress disorders being pervasive in the community. Current therapeutic services and medical services often enact more harm than good and that mutual aid and chosen family has been a cornerstone to support chronic illnesses. To better understand these complexities, a community arts project was held to explore how it might support these theories. This research was facilitated at a local queer owned Boston fiber shop. …

Art Therapy As A Tool For Korean American Families: A Literature Review, Minju Park

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This literature review aims to offer a comprehensive overview of attributes of Korean culture that make significant impacts on the family dynamic in the Korean immigrant households and to learn different types of art therapy that can help them. This literature review identifies specifically the struggles both first-generation Korean immigrant parents and second-generation Korean-American adolescents experience in order to understand where their conflicts come from. Later, different approaches of art therapy for the conflicts Korean immigrant households face are discussed. Data are collected from existing literature and videos by terms including art therapy for immigrants, family art therapy, Korean immigrant …

Devil In The Details: Witchcraft In Reformation England, Angela A. Luna

Theses and Dissertations

An analysis of the English Reformation’s impact on perceptions of witches and the transformation of witchcraft as a crime prosecutable in courts of law. It demonstrates English diabolism characterized by the use of animal familiars, body markings, and pacts with the Devil, which helped to shape the English witch trials.

Someone Will Remember Us / I Say / Even In Another Time, Paul Anagnostopoulos

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Anagnostopoulos’s paintings and vases use mythological melodrama in a contemporary context to portray vivid images of queer life in the wake of homophobic erasure and tragic loss. “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” traces his aggregate interests in Greco-Roman cultures and art history.

The Chicana Mural Movement: A Reclamation Of Mesoamerican Iconography, Jennifer Vander Els

Theses and Dissertations

An examination of the deployment of indigenous Mexica iconography by Chicana artists during the Chicano Mural Movement. The ethno-national concept of Aztlan, corn and Corn Women, and the deities Coatlicue and Coyolxauhqui were restructured in Chicana murals to uplift and recognize the achievements of the women of the Chicano community.

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

Queer Mother, Hybrid Monster: Serpentine Hybridity And Monstrous Motherhood In D’Arras And Spenser, Farah R. Paterson-Cisco

Theses and Dissertations

Disparate, deformed, and hybridized bodies of women have appeared in mythology and literature in myriad allegorical incarnations as representations of monstrosity. The monstrous serpent-woman hybrid form can be traced back quite far, though at the point when one reaches antiquity, literary examples meld into the religious, mythological, and folkloric. These hybrid beings also embodied meanings particular to their time and culture that work to distinguish them as literary characters, presenting a compelling case for the consideration of the hybridized and deformed figure as a threat to patriarchal systems. Contemporary readings through the lens of feminist, gender, and disability frameworks offer …

The Language Of Legal Violence: The State’S Role In Silencing Capitalist Dissent, 1877-1915, Jaclene Paolucci

Theses and Dissertations

From the 1870s to the eve of World War I, the United States government enacted a violent and repressive campaign against labor activists and political radicals to protect capitalist interests. The growing alliance between employers and the government threatened American democratic traditions and turned those who challenged the capitalist system into potential enemies of the state.

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

The Invisible Box, Rafael Yaluff

Theses and Dissertations

A work of art is something so simple that it puts you in front of it. And through its simplicity it makes you aware of yourself in front of it, it gives you yourself. This paper explores the creative process from a structural perspective

The Cosmicomica, Corinne Bernard

Theses and Dissertations

My drawings are a reconciliation of multiple, coexisting truths. They are a practice of creating a new relationship with this world and myself in it; creating a system of symbols that give substance to the same primordial gunk we swim in daily.

Gloria Rehearsal (Excerpt) A Feminist Mechanism For Metabolization, Eleanor Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Weaving embodied trauma studies with feminist theory, non-hierarchical creative structures, and research in dance improvisation, this thesis paper written by Eleanor Smith contextualizes the dance performance gloria rehearsal (excerpt). The performance piece was choreographed and performed by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, who have been co-choreographing feminist dances since 2006.

The Lives And Afterlives Of The Arenberg Gospels: Materializing Medieval Oaths, Sarah Ganzel

Theses and Dissertations

The “social life” of the Arenberg Gospels, a gospel book later used as an oath book in ecclesiastical officiation ceremonies, illuminates the impact and meaning of oath books in medieval Europe. This thesis traces the manuscript’s materiality throughout its life, showing why both words and flesh mattered to oath rituals.

Loca, Alejandro Heredia

Theses and Dissertations

Loca is a queer transnational novel highlighting the potential of friendship as home when nations, family, and identity groups fail us.

Grouping Against The Groove: Metrical Dissonance In Hiromi's "Voice", Sam Falotico

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis engages theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in an analytical study of Japanese-jazz pianist/composer Hiromi Uehara’s tune “Voice.” In doing so, it examines not only the techniques of this specific artist, but it also explores general issues regarding how a sense of embodied, forward propulsion—that is, a “groove”—may manifest in a jazz work that uses odd meters, and how metrical dissonances function in this context.

Almost Human, Sarah Huang

Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems centered on extinction, loneliness, cultural identity, and what it means to be human.

Red: Stories And Novel Opening, Josephine Sloyan

Theses and Dissertations

“Red: Stories and Novel Opening” is a collection of three short stories and the beginning of a novel.

The Face In The Dogwood, Joshua Barnett

Theses and Dissertations

In this novel-in-progress, eleven-year-old Nate Shea helps his eccentric father look to nature for signs of the Apocalypse. As this "New Work" alienates them from their rural community, Nate must fight to keep his family together even as he loses faith in his father’s mission.

Excerpt From Novel, The House Of Bad Spirit, Balim Barutcu

Theses and Dissertations

This is an excerpt from Balim Barutcu's debut novel, titled (for now!) The House of Bad Spirit. It follows the story of a multi-generational family that lives a split life, not only across countries and continents, but across time. It is the story of a family divided and reunified by the gifts granted by an old god, presiding over their tale amid the stars, from the heavens. She is grateful for the support of the MFA program in Fiction, particularly of her advisors Sigrid Nunez and Adam Haslett.

Darkroom, Alexandra Romero

Theses and Dissertations

Romero’s poetry manuscript “Darkroom” dips into the surreal with a playful tonal range, blurring the distinction between reality and dream state. Scenes are vivid and speakers ever-changing as the poems move between preoccupations of love, anguish and more, scaling from the microscopic to the universal.

For What Cannot Be Reached, Yasmeen Alkishawi

Theses and Dissertations

On searching and yearning for connection, forgiveness and love.

Leonora Carrington’S "Down Below": Transgressive Renderings Of The Grotesque Female Body, Kelsey King

Theses and Dissertations

The classification of the bodily grotesque relies on the transgression of boundaries, marked by an openness to the world. Leonora Carrington’s memoir (1944) and painting (1940) that share the same name, Down Below, illustrate the grotesque body as a revisionist self-configuration, destabilizing traditional representations and eroticization of the female form.

I Mondi Incrociati Di Machiavelli: Il Principe E La Mandragola, Carrie Tighe Cristiano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Machiavelli’s ideas of virtù and fortuna and how, through an exploration of these terms, we can better understand the writer and theorist. By examining his works, principally Principe and Mandragola, we see many consistent ideas as well as gain a clearer understanding of Machiavelli’s character.

Tractatus De Herbis, Botanical Guide To The Universe: A Case Study For Morgan Ms M.873, Darya Badikova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the development of the late medieval pharmacopoeial treatise Tractatus de herbis illustrated in M.873, a fourteenth-century manuscript from the collection of the Morgan Library in New York. Particularly, the thesis considers the use and reception of this encyclopedic work by elite contemporary audiences of the Venetian Republic through material and medical history.

124 Notebooks, Andrea Lerner

Theses and Dissertations

124 Notebooks is a documentary about Brazilian architect and urbanist Jaime Lerner.

In 2010, two Brazilians were included in the TIMES Magazine list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, the ex and now re-elected president, Luiz Inacio da Silva, known as Lula, and the Architect and Urbanist Jaime Lerner. Lerner was listed among the 25 most influential thinkers for his 40 years working with urban sustainability, starting in the 1970s with his urban revolution of a once obscure city in Brazil, Curitiba. Curitiba is where I am from; Jaime Lerner is my father.

In 124 Notebooks …

Diy The Process Of Healing From Trauma Through Woodworking, And Living Off Grid, Rachel A. Pollock

Theses and Dissertations

DIY is a website and short hybrid documentary that explores off-grid living, the longing for authenticity and healing from trauma. It is also about clinging to memories, even ones that may be painful, and the desire to move on. The website, Bare Minimums explores healing through the written word, and the short documentary “Home Is Where You Park It” explores the processing of trauma through video. They are two different approaches that evoke completely different emotions and outcomes. Processing memories and trauma through these mediums shows a kind of nostalgia for what once was, mixed with uncomfortable feelings that anticipate …

Lawn Story Short, Sarah Johnsrude

Theses and Dissertations

Lawn Story Short is a short essay film on lawn culture in a subdivision development outside of Louisville, Kentucky. The film is presented from the point of view of a first person narrator who guides the audience through an inquiry: why are lawns a pervasive icon in the US today?

Zeus Iv, Lauren Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

How do you survive a pandemic? When you’re trapped inside for weeks? When society’s rules are revealed as largely arbitrary?

You get a dog and bring it to the park.

This play is about a group of devoted dog owners in Boston who stumble on an unexpected community. It's a dog park ballet about the close care of strangers.

Contrafreeloading In The Domestic Dog (Canis Lupus Familiaris), Liza Rothkoff

Theses and Dissertations

Contrafreeloading is the behavior of working for food that requires effort to obtain when also provided with food that does not require effort to obtain. More specifically, contrafreeloading can be defined in multiple ways using various criterion such as 1) an animal’s preference and/or 2) an animal’s willingness to work for food when freely available food is offered. To date, multiple studies have evaluated contrafreeloading in various animal species, identifying that many non-domesticated species (e.g., maned wolves, red jungle fowl) and domesticated species (e.g., pigs, goats) demonstrate a preference and/or a willingness to work for food when readily available food …

Impressions Of An Urban Vision: Art Across The Park (1980 And 1982), Marie N. Catalano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Art Across the Park (1980 and 1982), a program of sculpture and performance conceived of by artist David Hammons sited throughout overlooked regions of New York City’s public parks. Amidst debates about the proper use of public space and the role of public art in the early 1980s, Art Across the Park asserted a more culturally expansive model of being in social space, one rooted in strategies of performance as an antidote to lasting effects of social control.