Arts and Humanities Commons^™

We Are All Mestiz(Ç)Os: An Exploration And Deconstruction Of The Myth Of Mestizaje/Mestiçagem In Mexico And Brazil, Michelle Garcia

CMC Senior Theses

Different from the United States, racial-mixing was permissible in Latin America throughout its history. Furthermore, race-mixing has been cemented into the national identities of LatAm states through Mestizaje, thus painting these states as racial democracies. This thesis examines the construction and maintenance of Mestizaje as a myth and sign for racial democracies as well as the racial disconnect created within those in “Mestizo” nations. This thesis contributes to existing literature by utilizing Mexico and Brazil due to their different socio-historical contexts. They will serve as case studies to evaluate the mechanisms that allow this myth to persevere. First, I will …

Transnational Legal Violence: Undocumented Women V. U.S. Immigration Law, Luis A. Mendoza

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how undocumented women, particularly Latinas, experience "transnational legal violence" within the U.S. immigration system. Transnational legal violence extends the framework of legal violence by identifying how immigration policies weaponize absence and distance across national boundaries, forcing women to choose between physical safety and legal recognition. The thesis is guided by a central question: What immigration system are migrant women, specifically Latinas, responding to?

The analysis rooted in the intersections of gender and citizenship reveals how immigration law remains rooted in coverture traditions that historically rendered immigrant women dependent on male U.S. citizens. For these women, deportation presents …

Truth, Reconciliation, And Neoliberalism: Remembering And Forgetting Pinochet’S Chile, Aimee Leigh Gallagher

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay………………..................4

III. Primary Documents and Headnotes.....26

IV. Textbook Critique……………….............36

V. Textbook Entry…………………………....42

Occupied Lands, Occupied Histories: Activist-Historians And The Red Power Movement, Elena Rose Paz Thompson

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay.............................4

II. Primary Document Collection......25

III. Textbook Critique........................37

IV. New Textbook Writing.................42

The Third Revolution: How The Haitian Revolution Redefined The Age Of Revolution, Cedric Rule-Becker

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay.................................2

II. Primary Source Documents............15

III. Textbook Critique...........................25

IV. New Textbook Entry.......................28

Sunrise In The Heartland: The Ahmadiyya Movement And The Foundations Of African American Islam, Hazel Videon

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

During the early 1920s, an immigrant missionary from colonial India named Muhammad Sadiq established headquarters in Chicago for a branch of Islam called the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI). The AMI became the first institutional expression of Islam in the United States to draw a significant number of American converts and was particularly popular among African Americans. Following the Second Great Migration, Black migrants to the urban Midwest sought new ways to express their identity, fulfill both spiritual and material needs, and resist racist violence. The AMI became attractive to them as an alternative to respectability politics and drew upon …

Islam, Memory, And Denial: Preserving Bosniak Identity After The Srebrenica Genocide, Alek Barović

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The role of the Bosniak Islamic Community in preserving identity and collective memory of the Srebrenica genocide remains a subject of ongoing debate among Bosniaks in Bosnia, the wider Balkan region, and the diaspora. This paper explores how Bosniaks perceive the Islamic Community’s efforts in shaping and sustaining post-genocide identity through religious, cultural, and educational initiatives. By analyzing narratives from survivors, religious leaders, and community members, this study investigates whether the Islamic Community is seen as a central institution in the preservation of historical memory or as one actor among many in the broader struggle against denial and historical revisionism. …

Liner Notes On Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music As A Praxis Of Self-Fashioning, Shawn J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Liner Notes on Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music as a Praxis of Self-Fashioning interprets Black musical performance in identity-making, with a focus on how music and Black trans identity intersect and informs Black trans girlhood. As such, Black trans girls render ourselves legible, i.e. understood without shame or judgment, by constructing our identities through the music by Black women we listen and dance to, or watch and sing. These musical connections affirm the possibilities of Black femme expression. This expression of Black femininity is due to what I call an Afrofuturist affect, by which I refer …

Cultural Model Of Indigenous Custom Marriage, Maria G. Stapleton

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines and documents the tradition of Indigenous Custom Marriage (ICM) practiced in a semi-rural community in central Mexico. The arrival of Spaniards to Mesoamerica during the sixteenth century brought new forms of marriage to the region, those of the Christian religion and of the Spanish crown’s laws. While these new forms slowly gained acceptance, the traditional pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican form of getting married has endured over the intervening centuries up through the present. This traditional form of marriage is not monolithic, but shows variation across the diverse ethnic groups, communities, and geographic regions of Mesoamerica. The community studied, Tlanalapa, …

Yes, Those Are My Biological Parents: Growing Up Multiracial In The United States, Angie Navejas

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

“Multiracial individuals are the fastest growing racial population in the United States” (Atkin & Jackson; 2021:305). Literature highlights how parents transmit culture through racial socialization, however there is a missing piece, the perspective of the children. This study sought to expand the existing literature to include children’s perspectives and how it relates to their multiracial identity formation. Recognizing the complexity of conducting research with children, a survey was administered to adults ranging from the ages of 18 to 35 years old. This resulted in a collection of data from their recollection of experiences and interactions with their parents or caregivers …

Workable Seams, Jackson Mills Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In Jackson Mills Smith’s Workable Seams, readers encounter the stories, landscapes, and lives of rural Knox County, Indiana, from the oscillating vantage of a Hoosier boy raised with a Cajun sensibility. After relocating from Louisiana to the river bottoms of the crossroad state at a young age, the speaker gradually uncovers a local history only previously understood in fragmentary shards and fading glimpses.

Alternating between semi-lyrical embodied experiences and memories, documentary pieces in conversation with the state’s historical archive, and the retelling of exaggerated local yarns, poetry is a means of inquiry in Workable Seams. Topics range from …

Indigenous Access And Use On Private Land: A Toolkit For Heart Of The Rockies Land Trust Members, Ian James Craighead

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

"A Changed Understanding Of Our Present": Moby-Dick As Prophetic Ecological Activism, Katie Ann Schini

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale is a classic of American literature, spanning multiple genres and remaining culturally relevant nearly 175 years after its original publication. Though on the surface Moby-Dick reads as an adventure story of a man who experiences the whaling industry firsthand, Herman Melville’s text continues to invite new generations of readership through the framework of the twenty-first century climate crisis.

In this thesis, I position Moby-Dick as a text that can be used to understand our modern society’s current dispositions of ecological grief. My thesis operates at the intersection of three main literary critical theories: ecocriticism, affect, and …

America's Highest Stage: Utopians, Capitalists, And Trail Runners On Pikes Peak, Mitchell Morris

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Since ancient times, Pikes Peak’s prominence on the land has endowed it with prominence in the minds of all who have lived around it. This ancient dynamic was reinforced in the nineteenth century by the famed expedition of Lieutenant Zebulon Pike in 1806 and the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1858. Since then, the mountain has become a stage. Standing tall, visible from hundreds of miles around, and known from coast to coast, Pikes Peak is a platform that has attracted diverse historical actors to come and perform, elevate their endeavors to new heights, and demonstrate what they, and people …

The Complex And Marginalized Experiences Of Bipoc Trafficked Women: An Examination Of Disabilities, Aces, Discrimination, And Racism, Jacquelyn C. A. Meshelemiah, Fabian Arroyo Rojas, Hannah Ruth Steinke, Marlene Carson, Justin A. Haegele

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to examine the lived experiences and multiple identities of disabled BIPOC trafficked women. The findings from this study help to identify a carousel of victimization experienced by disabled BIPOC trafficked women, starting with adverse childhood experiences, onto trafficking victimization that differed between Black and White women, and later while seeking services. These findings highlight the need for providers and researchers to think beyond monolithic identities and consider the intersecting ways in which various forms of oppression (ableism and racism) influence the experiences of disabled trafficked BIPOC women.

Pedagogical Idealism, Race, And The Specter Of Africa In Josefina Aldecoa’S Historia De Una Maestra And Donato Ndongo’S Las Tinieblas De Tu Memoria Negra, Parker Lawson

Funded Scholarship

This article examines two contemporary Spanish novels, Josefina Aldecoa’s Historia de una maestra (1990) and Donato Ndongo’s Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (1987), to assess the status of pedagogical idealism and experimentation with particular attention to Equatorial Guinea. Where previous scholarly attention to Aldecoa’s novel focuses on the protagonist’s credentials as a progressive pedagogue, this article draws attention to Gabriela’s etapa guineana to argue that the text cripples under the weight of postcolonial analysis as regards race, religion, class, and language. Drawing the novel into comparison with Ndongo’s text, the article argues that Spanish colonial pedagogy flattened, or sought …

The Devil In The Forest: How Le Guin Subverts A Tired Trope, Andrew Debella

UKL: The Journal of Ursula K. Le Guin Studies

Scholars understand Ursula K. Le Guin's 1972 The Word for World is Forest as a critique of settler-colonial history, but no academic interest has been given to how this novel also comments on the American religious imagination. This article reveals that Le Guin's allegory to Vietnam replicates the 'devil in the forest' trope to expose how a religiously inspired good/evil dichotomy shaped xenophobic attitudes toward the Vietnamese during the 1970s. By tracing the depictions of Native Americans through American fiction and Captivity Narratives, this article further demonstrates how Le Guin’s novel deploys similar tropes to expose and critique their influence …

Rhythm Against Poethics, Jayvyn Dacas

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis stages an auto-poetic ethnography that listens to, and moves with, the anterior spaces of Black life. Those murmurs, hums, musical hesitations, and infrastructural vibrations that refuse capture by dominant epistemic regimes. Drawing from Ramon Amaro’s reading of Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick and Alexander Weheliye’s reflections on sound, Fred Moten’s insights on displacement, and Tendayi Sithole’s attention to the phonographic, the project situates music production as method and unworlding. Through engagements with the 808, sampling, sound systems, and embodied listening across Florida. Spaces like the warehouse, the party, record stores, and community become the work of Black voices, and …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

Nanaboozhoo And Derrick Bell Go For A Walk, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Articles

When the Anishinaabeg were new to Anishinaabewaki, they knew little about how to fend for themselves. The animals and plants took pity on them and taught the Anishinaabeg. One winter, as the food stores of the Anishinaabeg were running out, an ininaatig (maple tree) saw an Anishinaabe innini (man) weakly scavenge for food. The ininaatig decided to offer part of itself to the Anishinaabeg. The ininaatig told the innini to cut off a branch. Ininaatigwabo, delicious, thick maple syrup, oozed from the stump. There was enough to feed the innini for many days. And there were many, many ininaatigoog …

Racial Battle Fatigue In Higher Education: Understanding The Intersectional Dimensions Of Faculty And Staff Experiences, Candice N. Flowers-Taylor

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation investigates Racial Battle Fatigue within institutions of higher education, focusing on its impact on faculty and staff of color. It examines how race, gender, socio-economic status, and institutional structures intersect to shape individual experiences of this phenomenon. To explore these dynamics, the study employs a qualitative methodology that includes semi-structured interviews, open-ended survey responses, and thematic analysis. It is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Racial Battle Fatigue, Critical Race Theory, and Intersectionality. This research offers insight into the emotional, psychological, and physical toll experienced by faculty and staff of color in predominantly white institutions. It challenges prevailing …

Indigenous-Industrial Heritage: Centering Indigenous Voices In Minnesota's Iron Range, Larissa A. Juip

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Industrial heritage refers to the material remains, sites, landscapes, and practices associated with industrial and extractive activities. As a field, it has historically been concerned with the conservation, management, and interpretation of industrial sites and activities and forms a central narrative within Minnesota's museums. Yet such accounts often privilege object-centered narratives while silencing the presence, knowledge, and contributions of Indigenous and Descendant communities, obscuring their enduring relationships to extractive landscapes. In recent decades, critiques of traditional industrial heritage approaches have identified gaps in the discipline related to the exclusion of marginalized populations, including Indigenous Peoples. Minnesota is home to eleven …

A Case Study Of Harmful Revisionist History: An Analysis Of Nada Por Lo Que Pedir Perdón By Marcelo Gullo Omodeo, Anna Anderson

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

A Critical Narrative Inquiry Into The Experiences Of Latino Male Graduate International Students Attending A Pwi, Cesar Miguel Castellon Gort

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This qualitative study examines how Latino male international graduate students navigate identity, belonging, and exclusion within U.S. higher education. Although international enrollment has increased, the experiences of this student population remain largely invisible in research and institutional practice. Guided by Intersectionality and Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), this study investigates how intersecting dimensions of race, language, age, gender, and immigration status shape these students’ academic and social experiences. Using a critical narrative methodology, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and identity web exercises with four participants. Employing story chaining to link individual narratives, four central themes emerged: 1) Racialized and …

Geographies Of Trauma And Healing: Resistance, Resilience, ‘Ustawi Wa’, And The Lived Experiences Of African Women Refugees From The Ehagl Region In Canada, Rosemary Njeri Kimani-Dupuis Dr., Rosemary Kimani-Dupuis

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation explores the lived experiences of African women refugees from the East and Horn of Africa and Great Lakes (EHAGL) region resettled in Ontario, Canada, with particular focus on the complex intersections of trauma, resilience, and healing within global refugee governance. It asks: How do the gendered and spatial dynamics of refugee protection and Canadian settlement systems sustain structural violence against African women refugees, and how do their transnational experiences challenge and reshape dominant frameworks of care, well-being, and institutional response?

Through a multi-scalar analysis—macro (legal governance frameworks), meso (institutional actors), and micro (women’s narratives)—the study explores how trauma …

“Just Checking”: Racial Profiling And The Criminalization Of Black Students At Post-Secondary Institutions, Yugita Looknauth

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

“Just Checking”: Racial Profiling and the Criminalization of Black Students at Post-Secondary Institutions

This dissertation examined the experiences of Black students who came into contact with campus security at five universities and one college in Ontario, Canada. Critical race theory and methodology, and qualitative research design amplified the voices of 17 participants who shared stories of racial profiling marked by racialization, criminalization, surveillance, and the normalized scrutiny of Black life. These experiences are legitimized by post-secondary institutions that are actively reproducing the very racism they are often celebrated for interrogating by allowing a culture of anti-Black racism to exist with …

Unveiling Trauma And Seeking Justice: Exploring Mass Atrocities Against Tamils Through The Lens Of Religion, Culture, And Global Justice, Arrabe Vigneswaran

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This paper examines the mass atrocities committed against the Tamil population in Sri Lanka, analyzing them through the interconnected lenses of religion, culture, and global justice. It explores how Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism, codified through legal and constitutional mechanisms such as the Sinhala Only Act and state-sponsored cultural erasure, facilitated the systemic marginalization, displacement, and dehumanization of Tamils. The study investigates the legal, political, and cultural underpinnings of these acts ranging from war crimes and ethnic cleansing to potential genocide while assessing the reluctance of both domestic and international actors to enforce meaningful accountability. Drawing on hybrid court models, transitional justice theories, …

An Overview Of Nagpra And The 2024 Revisions, Emily V. Owens-Barber

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Section 11 of the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA) was added to public law in 1989. This required the Smithsonian Museum to repatriate any human remains or funerary objects associated with Native American Ancestry back to their tribes. In 1990, The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was added to federal legislation expanding on this section and requiring that every federally funded institution in the United States that held Native American Remains or funerary objects in their collection must follow this regulation to continue to receive federal funding. Nearly 33 years later in the autumn …

Feminine Felons: Violent Offenders' Intersectional Experiences In Twentieth-Century Montana, Cassidy Ann Vander Voort

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper explores the treatment of violent female offenders in Montana in both the media and prison system from 1900-1960. Women of all races faced gender discrimination from both the carceral system and popular media. Local newspapers sensationalized crimes committed by female offenders, portraying them as women who lived outside of the expectations of womanhood in the twentieth century. Newspapers and courts placed women into two categories: “mad/sad” female offenders, who received forgiveness for their crimes; or unforgivable, “bad” offenders. Crime did not determine these categorizations; instead, gender expectations of the white middle class shaped female criminals’ treatment. If these …

Worn History: The Biography And Value Transformation Of Emma Sansaver's Dress, Lauren I. Stgeorge

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the life of Emma Sansaver’s beaded buckskin dress as both a material object and a cultural witness. Worn during her time at the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian Boarding School and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the dress intersects with assimilationist policy, Indigenous resilience, public spectacle, and personal memory. Unlike the regalia of her teammates, Emma’s dress was preserved, first by Emma herself, then by her descendants, and continues to be cared for and displayed in educational and institutional settings today.

Using the theoretical frameworks of Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff, this project approaches the dress …