Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Autoethnography Of Laughter: Transforming Identity By Teaching Composition And Linguistics Through Humor, Olya Cochran

Theses and Dissertations

The following dissertation is a story composed of humorous and humor-related experiences, lived by me as an immigrant student and instructor. I reflect on how those experiences influenced the transformation and performance of my teaching identity and shaped my humor-based pedagogy for Composition and Introductory Linguistics courses. The work is considering the effects of humor on my linguistic and cultural competences as well as my teaching practice. Along with that, the work provides an overview of scholarship on humor in education and the ways practicing academics utilize humor in their teaching and teaching identities. To reflect on how and why …

Collaboration In The Technical Communication Classroom: Negotiating Team Contracts In A Pwi, Alyssa Herman

Theses and Dissertations

As TPC teacher-scholars, we must acknowledge the overwhelming Whiteness of our field and the racism, ableism, and sexism inherent in our institutions. We must actively work toward inclusivity and socially just collaborations in our classrooms by encouraging dominant-identified students to confront their privileges and implicit biases in order to better engage with historically marginalized students. With that said, this thesis examines how teacher-scholars might take up a cultural-rhetorical approach to teaching TPC and how we might negotiate team contracts in PWIs. Firmly situated within the social justice turn, Herman draws from both feminist disability theory and critical race theory to …

“When Two Elephants Fight, It’S The Ground That Suffers ”: A Neo- Marxist Rhetorical Deconstruction Of The United States’ Rhetoric Of Power In Resistance To United Nations Treaties, Divine Narkotey Aboagye

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I present a Gramscian rhetorical reading of American antagonism to the International Criminal Court, a crucial agency of the UN. I probed the rhetoric of power in resistance concerning the discourse of international treaties by showing how both the United States and the United Nations have become global hegemons. From the foregoing, I uncover American resistance to the constitutive force of United Nations treaties by paying attention to post-Cold War American presidents. By using a neo-Marxist lens and analyzing a key foreign policy accord – the International Criminal Court – that spans the presidencies of Clinton, Bush, …

By Your Powers Combined: Heroic Solutions To Climate Catastrophes In The Fifth Season, Avengers: Infinity War, And Horizon: Zero Daw N, Kematat Matthew Medrala

Theses and Dissertations

Popular entertainment has become concerned with addressing issues of climate catastrophe in order to reflect the real concerns of its audience. Because these media narratives are produced by wealthy institutions that reach millions of people, it is vital to understand what these stories say about the causes of existential crises and their presented solutions. This thesis applies an ecocritical approach informed by environmental justice theorists and Marxist theory in order to analyze what a contemporary popular film, videogame, and novel have to say about addressing an oncoming ecological crisis. This analysis reveals that mass death among the disempowered is considered …

Sleuths As Social Activists: Negotiations Of Power & Morality In Ya Sleuthing Stories, Heather Leigh Sanford

Theses and Dissertations

In “Sleuths as Social Activists: Negotiations of Power & Morality in YA Sleuthing Stories” I aim to explore how adolescent sleuthing stories intersect with negotiations of power, subjectivity, and relationality within the structures and confines of adolescent literature to challenge oppressive paradigms. This project will begin with a focus on gender dynamics, using ethics of care to compare Wendelin Van Draanen’s girl sleuth Sammy Keyes to Anthony Horowitz’s boy sleuth Alex Rider. This analysis of gender will then expand into an intersectional exploration of how age and race additionally implicate how Sammy Keyes and Alex Rider negotiate power and morality …

The Beast And The Revival Of Rome: Mussolini And Rome In The Premillennial Imagination, Jon Stamm

Theses and Dissertations

Premillennial dispensationalism became immensely influential among American Protestants who saw themselves as defenders of orthodoxy. As theological conflict heated up in the early 20th century, dispensationalism’s unique eschatology became one of the characteristic features of the various strands of “fundamentalists” who fought against modernism and the perceived compromises of mainline Protestantism. Their embrace of the dispensationalist view of history and Biblical prophecy had a significant effect on how they interpreted world events and how they lived out their faith. These fundamentalists established patterns of interpretation that in the second half of the 20th century would fuel the emergence of a …

Minor Subjects: Power And Inequity In Children's And Adolescent Literature, Wesley Jacques

Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I examine theoretical parameters of what has historically been considered American children’s and adolescent literature to further complicate its subject matter. The importance of reconsidering subjects is upheld here as key to challenging longstanding cultural and political inequities in the reading and teaching of literature broadly. Nonetheless, as this project contends, children’s and adolescent literature as a discipline is uniquely positioned to examine political power and challenge major power structures, not in spite of its presumed minor position in academic and literary discourse, but largely because of it. Thus, what follows is an inquiry into contemporary theories …

The Underclass Culture Wars: Underclass Ideology And Neoliberalism In The Era Of Gangsta Rap Censorship, 1993-2000, Trumaine W. Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores the impact of underclass ideology and the budding neoliberal consensus on black censorship efforts against gangsta rap music in the 1990s and early 2000s. While there are a few scholarly works that focus on blacks’ involvement in the gangsta rap censorship movement, they fail to provide any serious inquiry into their ideological motivations for pursuing censorship. In an effort to fill this gap, my thesis looks at underclass ideology and neoliberalism in relation to two groups that were active in the gangsta rap censorship movement: black liberals and the Nation of Islam (NOI).

I argue that censors …

The Uses, Understandings, And Values Of Student Strucutral Assisting Metatexts In College First Year Composition Courses, Joseph Ryan Dundovich

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis offers a look into the perceptions, views, and experiences of first-year composition students into being offered a large amount of choice/agency in their major summative writing projects, but also accountability and guidance during their process in the form of resources called ‘structural assisting metatexts’. The major question that guided this study is the following:

- How do first year composition students use, understand, and value forms of structural assisting metatexts during the writing/creation process?

The two parts of the writing process that were specifically researched in conjunction with their correlating metatexts are the topic selection (with the Proposal …

The Reading Eye, Ruminating Body, And Regulated Gaze: ( Re ) Constructing Gender In The Old English Lives Of Saints, Thelma Trujillo

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the eleventh-century collection of Early English hagiography, the Lives of Saints; specifically, four female saints’ lives, those of Saint Agnes, Cecilia, Eugenia and Euphrosyne. Using Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory, I consider how female gender is constructed in these texts by examining gender as manifested in the late antique period when they were first written, and then, in the Early English period when they were copied and translated. This research on gender combines an array of literature, such as Latin theology, Old English laws and penitentials, Latin and Old English hagiography, and contemporary theoretical frameworks. My main …

( Dis ) Ability Discourse And The Mediation Of Disabled Identity In Young Adult Literature And Television, Daniel Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

The primary aim of literary (and media) disability studies scholarship has been to examine the rhetorical effects of the various representations of disability that are found throughout literature, television, and other cultural sites of inquiry. The Internet has helped to facilitate this aim, opening these types of discussions to the general public. Social media has given individuals the power, agency, and voice to assert their ideas about disability identity, and (dis)ability (as a system; see Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined) more broadly to the world, and in doing so, has radically altered the author-text-audience relationship. My project examines the authorial choices of …

Evaluation Of The Matadoc And Comparison Of Auditory Musical, Non-Musical, And Live Music Therapy Stimuli To Increase Awareness And Sense Of Self In Patients With Moderate And Severe Dementia: An Exploratory Case Study, Nicolas A. Espinoza

Theses and Dissertations

Background: The severe stage of dementia (SSD) can cause the loss of self-awareness, affecting the proper assessment, treatment, and care. The Music Therapy Assessment Tool for Awareness of Disorders of Consciousness (MATADOC) is a validated and reliable tool to measure awareness in DOC populations and it might be able to track awareness levels in people with SSD. Also, there is a need to identify effective treatments with people with SSD since pharmacological treatments have shown limited and even negative results. Both live music therapy and music listening of recorded songs have evidence of positive effects.

Purpose: The purpose of this …

Soy Nadie ( I'M Nobody ), Jenny V. Castañon

Theses and Dissertations

In my past paintings, I tried to figure out why my subjects had me empathizing with strangers. Looking back on my Mexican-American upbringing, I realized how society and my communal culture are influencing the way I think and process information. So, for this body of work, the physical fragmentation of the figure alludes to a psychological fragmentation. In this case, it is as if the figure cannot withstand the tension and is barely able to remain whole and recognizable. What remains of the person is trying to repair itself. The pressure in my mind is between the values of general …

Running From The Touch On My Back: Affect And Technology In A Studio Practice, Anthony Noel Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations

I rediscovered a family photo box two years ago. An image of my grandfather sat on the top of the piles in the Tupperware box. The photo created an immediate intensity and infected the entire family photobox. My grandfather committed suicide twenty years before I was born. From the point of this discovery I have needed to explore why vernacular photographs can create haunting resonances. There seem to be limits to the information we can glean from photographs like this one. Photographs like this one activate our desires to fill in unknown details. They also encourage personal hauntings and lingering …

The Water Is Always Running: Vaporwave, Fluxus, And The Role Of Defamiliarization In Music-Led Virtual Realities, Zachary William Buckley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how a Fluxus approach to participatory music can leverage environmental metaphors and affordances, heighten user awareness of their interactions through a making-strange approach to musical interaction, and balance functional and creative user experiences in a meaningful and participatory musical interaction. This research has been conducted using the virtual reality experience The Water Is Always Running. This work presents an unusual music-making environment, a 3D kitchen with dishwashing simulation, to explore how a making-strange approach to musical interaction and participation can heighten the awareness of process for the user. To create this work, ideas have been leveraged from …

Voice, Choice, And ( Material ) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature, Tharini Viswanath

Theses and Dissertations

My study unites two disparate strands of feminist theory: the linguistic, which emphasizes the relationship between language and power, and the material, which argues that the human body has its own agency. I raise three main points. First, I contend that the sexualized feminine body is the site of neither the linguistic nor the material independent of one another, but both the linguistic and the material existing in a state of fluidity and interdependency, which combine to grant the young female character agency. Second, I contend that feminist novels should not only have strong female characters, but that they should …

“Where Words Fail, Music Speaks ”: Emotion Regulation Strategies Using Music When Experiencing Sadness, Kendall M. Ladd

Theses and Dissertations

Past literature has suggested that individuals use the emotion regulation strategies of

catharsis, emotional support, understanding emotions, and mood congruency when deciding to listen to sad music when feeling sad (Friedman et al., 2012; Garrido & Schubert, 2013; Sedikides, 1992; Taylor & Friedman, 2015; van Goethem & Sloboda, 2011). This thesis sought to confirm this by comparing these four strategies to revival, another emotion regulation strategy that uses happy music instead of sad music.

The final sample of participants consisted of 122 undergraduate and graduate students at a Midwestern university. Participants completed questionnaires designed to measure how they typically regulate …