Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gukundana, Lindsay Van Stone

HIM 1990-2015

Twenty years after the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, Violet Walters makes her way to the tiny village of Murumba to fulfill her dream of becoming a philanthropist. In addition to the shock of a new culture, Violet must now contend with Bret Calloway, a hardened philanthropist whose ten years at Murumba have made him less than happy about the arrival of Violet and her optimistic new perspective. Amid the mounting tension of their relationship, war looms in the background. What ensues is a testament to the transformational nature of a culture and its people. Gukundana seeks to illuminate injustices related to …

Buried In The Dust, Jessica Farrell

HIM 1990-2015

In July 2012, I left America for the first time to travel to Madurai, India, for a month-long journalism internship. The inspiration for the poetry in this work is deeply rooted in my experiences while in India, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Not knowing why I chose India to travel to for my first time abroad, I realized much later that I needed to be there in order to transition into the next stage of my life. I always wanted to experience what life was like without the amenities the Western world is accustomed to (hot showers, washers and dryers, reliable …

Ucf Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter Spring 2013, Megan M. Haught

UCF Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter

This is the Spring 2013 edition of the UCF Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter which celebrates the accomplishments and community activity of the faculty, staff, and students from the University of Central Florida Cocoa and Palm Bay campuses.

• Two Palm Bay Psychology students were awarded second place at the Showcase for Undergraduate Research in April. Two other psychology students won Honorable Mentions
• Leandra Preston-Sidler was the keynote speaker for University of South Florida’s Service-Learning Day
• Palm Bay Early Childhood Development and Education program students collaborated with a UCF Holmes Partnership research project at McAuliffe Elementary

Together, Science And Art Can Provide Answers In Search For Truth, Carla Poindexter

UCF Forum

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of UCF this year, we are reminded that the core benefit of an upper-level education is the opportunity to pursue and obtain insight and knowledge over blindness and ignorance.

The Week That Was, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

Some may regard this as one of the strangest weeks ever in Sportsworld. Certainly the less than forthcoming appearance by Lance Armstrong with Oprah had some surrealistic qualities. After years, or even decades, of denial, Armstrong told America’s mother-confessor that, yes, he had indulged in all sorts of performance enhancement techniques to win his record seven Tour de France crowns. The fact that he had taken PED’s surprised no one, but the fact that he did a TV confessional- “bless me Oprah for I have sinned”- surprised a lot of people both in and out of the cycling community.

Baseball Hall Of Fame, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

The biggest problem and greatest injustice with the voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame was not revealed yesterday. It is a problem and injustice that goes back several years and multiple votes by various groups of voters.

Hockey, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

In my Florida neighborhood it was a quiet Saturday morning. In fact it was probably much the same across much of the United States. No one was in the streets celebrating. No one made comparisons to 1980 when the United States won the World Junior Hockey Championship in Ufa, a city of million or so in Central Russia.

Mirrors And Vanities, Leslie Salas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mirrors and Vanities is a multi-modal collection which showcases the diversity of working in long and short storytelling forms. Featured in this thesis are fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, and screenplay. Using unconventional approaches to storytelling in order to achieve emotional resonance with the audience while maintaining high standards for craft, these stories and essays explore the costs inherent to the subtle nuances of interpersonal relationships. The fiction focuses on the complications of characters keeping secrets. A husband discovers the truth behind his wife’s miscarriage. A girl visits her fiancé in purgatory. A boy crosses a line and loses his best …

The Ethos Of Humor In Technical Communication, David Roberts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the realm of technical communication, humor has often been regarded as an unnecessary or risky rhetorical device that can negatively impact the credibility of a document. While many other professional fields, such as medicine, computer technology fields, or business have used humor, and humor continues to crop up in "user as producer" documentation, technical writing continues to approach humor cautiously and with little theoretical guidance. In order to fully understand how humor functions, it is important to understand the main theories of humor: superiority, relief, and incongruity. It is also important to understand how humor functions, by looking at …

Investigation Of The Home, A Metaphor For Belonging, Jeremy Eldridge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The research done for this investigation deals with both the motivation of the artist, the personal history and the individual's artistic process. This process is examined through two bodies of art work dealing with the home as a metaphor. The shared themes of belonging, loss and longing are further reinforced by "visual cues" represented in the photographic works. For the Home Divided series, I approached the style of the photographs and the subject matter through indexical photographs of multi-unit homes and the visual representation of a distinct and bilateral division of the structure. The imagery presented in this series deals …

Transient Motel, Bryce Hammond

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Transient Motel" is an exhibition that investigates the interactions of people and physical environments in low-income areas of Daytona Beach, Florida. The purpose of the exhibition is to raise social awareness of low-income communities among the public through visual art. Interactions between motel guests were documented as first-hand sound recordings of conversations, interviews and other activities. These recordings are projected through speakers within a constructed life-sized replica of the motel rooms in which they were recorded. Found and appropriated furniture and fixtures from the actual rooms are arranged within the replica as objects of art to familiarize the public with …

Forced Outage, Caitlin Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poems explores an inner emotional life contrasted with a plodding existence in the external world of day to day business as usual. The poems embrace the importance of noting moments of beauty and grace in an otherwise bland landscape, and mourn the difficulty of holding onto such moments as life moves forward. These poems lead the way down bumpy emotional roads and explore the struggle to make human connections in simple circumstances. Most important, they attempt to capture the beauty of the connections that come from these struggles, and the triumphant promise that we are not alone.

Living Between Two Worlds: Conflict, Investigation And The Change, Noura Abdulhameed Shuqair

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beginning with my exploration of art as an aesthetic object, this paper shows the growth of my work and concept. Through my practice, I have been able to understand the contradictions in my traditional society and western modernity. It has helped me grapple with my own beliefs, and begin to confront those I don't agree with.

Hidden Scars: The Art Of Ptsd, Gabriel Gonzalez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the use of mixed media, I explore imagery that reveals the trauma of returning combat veterans, of which I am one, as we try to reintegrate into a society that does not understand the war that still lingers within us. In my work, I depict emotional disturbances that are related to my personal encounters with war. My working process starts by referencing mainstream media imagery, which I juxtapose against harsh images inspired by veterans' drug and alcohol use, trauma and death. My black-and-white pixelated paintings feature the fragmented memories of a hostile combat environment, and although "Out of My …

Pebbles And Shards, Edith Kindle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pebbles and Shards is a collection of personal essays based on family relationships that focus upon motherhood, responsibility, and the complexity of love and loss. The essays explore how people cope with the inevitability of loss and how they move beyond that loss to find something meaningful, perhaps even beautiful. They reflect upon success and failure in the face of loss and how, either way, life goes on, heedless of people’s desires and plans. The essays in Pebbles and Shards, while meant to stand alone, are thematically connected so that, read together, each story resonates with the others. In “Promises,” …

Threads Of Identity: Marisol's Exploration Of Self, Emily Williams

HIM 1990-2015

Marisol Escobar, known in the 1960s as the "Latin Garbo," is a sculptor famous for showing with the Pop art greats. However, Marisol holds a curious position in art history, stranded between the formalism of the fifties' and sixties' male-dominated Pop movement and the conceptual experimentation and radicalism that followed. Trained as a draftsman and painter early in her career, Marisol's main body of work mostly consists of large-scale wooden and mixed-medium sculpture. Lesser known, her lithographs, drawings, collages and small figurines further prove her technical and artistic validity. Preferring to go by surname only, Marisol’s quiet yet intense observation …

Crimean Rhetorical Sovereignty: Resisting A Deportation Of Identity, Christian Berry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On a small contested part of the world, the peninsula of Crimea, once a part of the former Soviet Union, lives a people who have endured genocide and who have struggled to etch out an identity in a land once their own. They are the Crimean Tatar. Even their name, an exonym promoting the Crimeans’ “peripheral status” (Powell) and their ensuing “cultural schizophrenia” (Vizenor), bears witness to the otherization they have withstood throughout centuries. However, despite attempts to relegate them to the history books, Crimeans are alive and well in the “motherland,” but not without some difficulty. Having been forced …

Theodore Is Dying: From Development Through Distribution, Ryan Pomeranz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Theodore Is Dying is a feature length film written and directed by Ryan Ceri Pomeranz. It was undertaken as a partial fulfillment of the requirements to receive a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Digital Media from the Department of Film in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida. The film aims to explore both the immediate and the long-term effects of choices made by four people at specific moments of demarcation in their lives. Structurally, the film is presented in an episodic and non- linear style that attempts to examine each protagonist’s own …

The Decorruption: The Making Of A Political Satire, Maria Garcia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Decorruption is a feature-length fiction film directed by María García, made as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida. The film is a political satire, which tells the story of a country plagued by corruption, where a rebellious government employee discovers that death is the only solution to the problem, so she sets out on a killing spree against the corrupt. The film was produced on a microbudget (under $50,000) level, following the program’s guidelines. It was shot in Ecuador with non-professional actors and a …

Pembroke Circle: A Portrayal Of Social Themes Using Micro-Budget Cinema, Max Rousseau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pembroke Circle is a feature-length, micro-budget, digital motion picture, written, produced and directed by Max Rousseau as a part of the University of Central Florida’s Masters in Fine Arts program in Digital Entrepreneurial Cinema. The filmmaker engaged some very difficult material in the micro-budget paradigm and grew personally and professionally in the process. This thesis documents the writing process, pre-production, fund-raising, production and post-production; all leading to the completion of a festival-ready feature film. It is the hope that this thesis will create an understanding of what it takes to make a micro-budget film and offer some help to future …

Avatar And Self: A Rhetoric Of Identity Mediated Through Collaborative Role-Play, Pamela Andrews

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project responds to a problem in scholarship describing the relationship between virtual avatars and their physical users. In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle identifies points of slippage wherein the persona of the avatar becomes conflated with the user‘s sense of self to create an authentic self predicated on both real and virtual experiences (Turkle 184-5). Although the conflation of the authentic self with the virtual has provided various affordances for serious games or other pedagogical projects such as classrooms hosted through the game Second Life, the processes enabling identification with an avatar have been largely overlooked. This project …

Upbuilding Oppositions: Kierkegaard, Camus, And The Philosophy Of Love, Jesus Luzardo

HIM 1990-2015

Despite the fact that they are both known as leading figures of existentialism, the relationship between 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and 20th century French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus has largely gone unexplored in secondary scholarship. In the few times that their relationship is discussed, focus is heavily placed on the most obvious difference between the two thinkers: their religious orientations, which tends to prevent any further analysis or discussion. Furthermore, popular conceptions of each thinker-largely informed by their most popular works, arguably Fear and Trembling and The Myth of Sisyphus, respectively-tend to depict them as pessimistic and …

Outside The Cage: The Political Campaign To Destroy Mixed Martial Arts, Andrew Doeg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is an early history of Mixed Martial Arts in America. It focuses primarily on the political campaign to ban the sport in the 1990s and the repercussions that campaign had on MMA itself. Furthermore, it examines the censorship of music and video games in the 1990s. The central argument of this work is that the political campaign to ban Mixed Martial Arts was part of a larger political movement to censor violent entertainment. Connections are shown in the actions and rhetoric of politicians who attacked music, video games and the Ultimate Fighting Championship on the grounds that it glorified …

Captain John Smith And American Identity: Evolutions Of Constructed Narratives And Myths In The 20th And 21st Centuries, Joseph Corbett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historical narratives and anecdotes concerning Captain John Smith have been told and retold throughout the entire history the United States of America, and they have proved to be sacred, influential, and contested elements in the construction of the individual, sectional, regional, and national identity of many. In this thesis, I first outline some of the history of how narratives and discourses surrounding Captain John Smith were directly connected with the identity of many Americans during the 18th and 19th century, especially Virginians and Southerners. Then I outline how these narratives and discourses from the 18th and 19th centuries have continued …

Pompey's Organization Of The East, Joshua Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis illustrates how Pompey’s annexations and organizing of the eastern provinces for Rome were more pragmatic than imperialistic. Greek and Eastern specialists are used in order to give a better back story than the imperialist thesis offers in its reasoning for the annexations. By adding more detail from the Greek and Eastern perspective, other dimensions are opened that shed new light upon the subject of Pompey’s eastern settlements. Through this method, the pirate campaign and the annexation of Syria are greatly developed, especially in concern to changes in culture that Pompey’s settlements forced. The culture of piracy and banditry …

The Bane Of Liberty: Opposition To Standing Armies As The Basis Of Antifederalist Thought, Charles Brand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The severely neglected subject of Antifederalism is the focal point of this project. As the framing ideology opposed to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Antifederalism has not been treated with the same historical care as Federalism, the successful and currently operational ideology. This is both an intellectual and ethical mistake that ignores the role that Antifederalism played in procuring the Bill of Rights, and still plays in the sphere of political dissent. The de facto successors to the Revolutionary mentality, Antifederalists took it upon themselves to conclusively secure the American conception of liberty, already wrested from British hands, from …

I Play To Beat The Machine: Masculinity And The Video Game Industry In The United States, Anne Mcdivitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the video game industry within the United States from the first game that was created in 1958 until the shift to Japanese dominance of the industry in 1985, and how white, middle class masculinity was reflected through the sphere of video gaming. The first section examines the projections of white, middle class masculinity in U.S. culture and how that affected the types of video games that the developers created. The second section examines reflections of this masculine culture that surrounded video gaming in the 1970s and 1980s in the developers, gamers, and the media, while demonstrating how …

Orisa Tradtion, Catholicism, And The Construction Of Black Identity In 19th Century Brazil And Cuba, Allison Sellers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares the role of the hybridized religious traditions Candomblé and Santería in the construction of identity for people of color in Brazil and Cuba in the 19th century. In particular, it focuses on the development of these traditions within Catholic confraternities and contrasts the use of ethnic and religious categories within them to define “African-ness” and “blackness” as Brazil and Cuba transitioned from slaveholding colonies to pos t-abolition nationstates. This comparison is illustrated through the examination of each colony’s slave trade and the nature of slavery as it was practiced within them; the analysis of the structure of …

Ucf Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter Fall 2013, Megan M. Haught

UCF Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter

This is the Fall 2013 edition of the UCF Cocoa & Palm Bay Newsletter which celebrates the accomplishments and community activity of the faculty, staff, and students from the University of Central Florida Cocoa and Palm Bay campuses. Some of the exciting news in this edition:
-Faculty and staff supported the Central Brevard Sharing Center and Children's Hunger Project for the holidays
-Both campuses hosted multiple International Education Week activities
-Construction started on a new dedicated College of Business testing lab
-Gerry Deveau and Angel Edgecombe completed Safe Zone Allies training

Methods Short Of War: The United States Reacts To The Rise Of The Third Reich, Kenneth Negy

HIM 1990-2015

This project analyzes the various opinions in the United States of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s and studies the amount of information that was available in the United States regarding Nazi Germany before entering World War II. Specifically, it seeks to understand why the United States did relatively little to influence German and European affairs even in the face of increasing Nazi brutality and bellicosity. The analysis has been divided into three different categories. The first focuses on the United States government, and the President and Secretary of State in particular. The second category analyzes the minority …