Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Defense Of Hume's Dictum, Cameron Gibbs

Doctoral Dissertations

Is the world internally connected by a web of necessary connections or is everything loose and independent? Followers of David Hume accept the latter by upholding Hume’s Dictum, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. Roughly put, anything can coexist with anything else, and anything can fail to coexist with anything else. Hume put it like this: “There is no object which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves.” Since Hume’s day, Hume’s Dictum has played a major role in philosophy, especially in contemporary metaphysics. In ruling out necessary connections, …

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair

Doctoral Dissertations

Cultural and literary theorists have been increasingly advocating for a posthuman ethic that challenges oppressive binaries of all kinds. In turn, the field of queer ecology, which investigates discourses of sex and nature for implicit heterosexism and androcentrism, has come to the fore. This dissertation, rooted firmly in this newer branch of ecocriticism, focuses on various inter-species environments imagined by early twentieth-century queer women writers. Each of their works, in different ways, challenges the naturalization of social hierarchies based on gender, sexuality, race, class, and species being reinforced in the burgeoning fields of sexology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Their novels …

Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs

Doctoral Dissertations

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …

The Body (Re)Public: Women On/As The Landscape Of Modernity, From Zola’S Au Bonheur Des Dames To Varda’S Cléo De 5 À 7, Christine Gutman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which questions of gender, space and mobility intersect in a selection of fin-de-siècle French novels and 1960s French New Wave films in an effort to discern how the representational interplay of these three elements gives allegorical form to the sociopolitical anxieties of the times in which the works were produced. Using the Paris Commune of 1871 and the protests of May ’68 as anchoring points for the two periodizations underlying my inquiry, I examine how women in the novels of Emile Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames, Nana) and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam ( …

Reconsidering Diasporic Literature: "Homeland" And "Otherness" In The Lost Daughter Of Happiness, Qijun Zhou

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the transformation of “homeland” and “otherness” as well as the relationship between each other in The Lost Daughter of Happiness （扶桑 Fusang). I begin by exploring how the migration of Chinese to the United States is depicted as an endless trajectory in the story through a historical engagement and a dialogue between two generations. From there, I plan to point out that the story complicates the meaning of diaspora as it can not only represent a spatial dislocation, but also a temporal dislocation. Thus, I argue that it destabilizes the conventional ideology which refers “homeland” to a …

“Nothing Material Occurred”: The Maritime Captures That Caused Then Outlasted The United States’ Quasi War With France, Emma Zeig

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the French maritime seizures during the eighteenth-century US Quasi War with France (also called the half war, or the United States’ undeclared war with France), encompassing events on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in France, the United States, and the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. The analysis focuses on the captured ships, telling the stories of seamen who feared for their lives and merchants who lost their ships. This point of view allows the thesis to explore an area of the Quasi War that are less documented in other histories: how civilian participants experienced violence and the indifference …

'Choose A Language Like A Wedding Ring': Polysystems, Norms And Pseudotranslation In Lea Goldberg’S Poetry & Prose, Benjamin Rangell

Masters Theses

Lea Goldberg [1911-1970] is one of modern Hebrew literature’s most significant poet/translators. This thesis approaches her early poetry and prose from the perspective of three theories of translation. ‘Polysystems’, ‘norms’, and ‘pseudotranslation’ grew from the scholarly and translation-lineage in Hebrew literary studies that Goldberg herself contributed to. Utilizing these three methods of reading, this thesis argues that translation’s thematization in Goldberg’s creative work is evidence for the poet’s ideal for a cosmopolitan, multilingual, national literature in the new Jewish State. This receptive stance to previous and concurrent literary traditions was met with much skepticism and criticism from Goldberg’s colleagues, and …

The Morality Of Chinese Legalism: Han Fei’S Advanced Philosophy, Yuan Ke

Masters Theses

Legalism, as one of the most useful philosophies of government, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The work of Han Fei—one of the most influential proponents of Legalism—has been scrutinized and critiqued for centuries as immoral. I intend to show Legalism, especially the Han Feizi, is moral through focusing on four aspects of Han Fei’s work. First, his understanding of human nature. Han Fei states people are born with a hatred of harm and a love of profit. This understanding of human nature can never lead to a cognitive distortions in governing. So it is a moral basic …

Translation Issues In Modern Chinese Literature: Viewpoint, Fate And Metaphor In Xia Shang's "The Finger-Guessing Game", Jonathan Heinrichs

Masters Theses

The Finger-Guessing Game is a novel with many layers of themes, characterization, and metaphor, and conveying all of these varied aspects requires a detailed, careful approach to translation. With this thesis I aim to show that strictly adhering to a singular translation method, such as “word-for-word” or “sense-for-sense,” will produce unsatisfactory results at certain points within the novel. This is accomplished by an overview of several different unique aspects of the writing style of this novel, viewpoint, the theme of fate, and the use of idioms and metaphors. Following this will be an analysis of these aspects’ functions within the …

Meatspace, Nicholas M. Criscuolo

Masters Theses

“MeatSpace” is a group of related bodies of work including podcasts, prints and videos produced by working with simulation technologies such as “weak A.I.”, virtual reality, and 3d scans. Collectively the works explore how people relate to these technologies and how they relate to us. They share thematic or process-oriented sensibilities involving a series of rule-based steps that alternate between the procedural and the intentional. “Uncanny” is defined as strangely familiar. Something which falls in the Uncanny Valley feels wrong, but the reasons may be difficult to articulate. “MeatSpace” is an ongoing experiment to see where our own digital reflections …

Peripheral Rural Landscapes And Architectural Heritage Around Kayseri As A Sustainable Preservation Problem, Bahar Elagoz Timur, Nilufer Baturayoglu Yoney

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

The rural areas on the perimeter of Kayseri present a rich heritage and culture environment threatened by recent urban development. This paper focuses on the valley settlements on the northeast of the city in Gesi and Koramaz valleys, some of which date from as early as the Medieval period and whose population was multi-ethnic and multi-religious until the middle of the 20th century. Following the emigration of the Armenian and Greek population, the activities which have created and sustained these settlements for many centuries are disappearing as well as the architectural heritage as the villages are partially and seasonally occupied. …

Kc 1.2: Rights-Based Approaches In Rural Heritage - Principles And Practice, Bente Mathisen, Ave Paulus, Grainne Shaffrey, Gurmeet Sangha Rai, Riin Alatalu

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

The „Our Common Dignity Initiative “ working group (OCD- RBA WG) started as an ICOMOS initiative in 2007 and expanded in 2011 as cooperation for the Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Convention (ICCROM, ICOMOS, IUCN) under the coordination by ICOMOS Norway. It deals with the Rights-Based Approaches (RBA) in World Heritage management. ICOMOS has taken important initiatives over the last decade to respect, protect and fulfil the rights to culture for individuals and communities by including RBA in its work, through its Ethical Principles and the Our Common Dignity Initiative. In celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Universal …

Panel 9. Paper 9.2: Maintenance Of Water Systems Of Cultural Heritage--Case Studies Along Silk Roads, Jian Feng, Xueqing Yang, Yisi Liu

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

Water has become a vital element in studying heritages, since researchers has realized that heritages are not only about sites per se, but also include multiple elements that reflect human social and cultural development along historical evolution, and water is one of the most important sector to study. To study further maintenance of water systems of cultural heritages, it is necessary to understand the authenticity of water which is decided by interactions between human and water into consideration, and notice different interactions would result in different discussion on further water management and preservation, for water systems have been changed and …

Panel 7. Paper 7.1: Rural Heritage On The World Heritage List: The Case Of Villages With Fortified Churches From Romania, Sergiu Musteata

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

Rural heritage represents the foundation of our past, which includes material and immaterial heritage. By studying rural heritage, we could better understand the past and integrate it into sustainable development of modern communities.

My presentation will be focussed on the example of villages with fortified churches from Transylvania, which are the most representative rural heritage of Romania, and includes series of villages, but just seven of them were inscribed in the World Heritage List – Prejmier-Tartlau, Biertan, Valea Viilor, Calnic, Saschiz-Keisd, Darju, and Viscri. I will discuss the role and impact of public participation in various preservation and development projects. …

Panel 6. Paper 6.3: Processus De Valorisation Du Ksar De Temacine, Quels Dispositifs Et Stratégie De Communication? The Process Of Valorizing Temacine Ksar - Plans And Communication Strategies, Aissa Merah, Hayat Zerouali, Loubna Mouna, Moulay Hicham Guenoun, Mouna El Gaied, Nozha Smati

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

À l’heure où le tourisme et la culture sont fortement affectés par la croissance d’informations en ligne, la valorisation de sites architecturaux – de surcroît classés secteurs sauvegardés – se pose plus que jamais. Comment valoriser un patrimoine architectural en tant que « produit touristique » tout en respectant sa préservation et son authenticité? Au prisme de la communication publique et territoriale, nous nous concentrerons sur la valorisation du site du ksar de Temacine, situé au bord de l’Oued Righ dans le bas Sahara algérien. Dans un premier temps, il s’agira d’analyser les différents supports et les différentes actions de …

Panel 6 Paper 6.1: Ksar Ait Ben Haddou : Quelle Démarche Pour Le Développement Social Durable D'Un Site Patrimoine Mondial ?, Hayat Zerouali, Loubna Mouna, Hicham Guenoun, Mouna El Gaied, Nozha Smati, Aissa Merah

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

Ksar Ait Ben Haddou classé patrimoine mondial par l'UNESCO depuis 1987 est aujourd'hui à l'origine d'une nouvelle dynamique sociale grâce à l'implication d'un ensemble d'acteurs dans un processus de valorisation du patrimoine culturel de ce site emblématique encapsulant valeur universelle et identité locale. Il s'agit notamment de l'Association Ait Aissa pour le Développement et la Culture et l'Association We Speak Citizen qui mobilise une démarche terrain experte auprès de la population locale et de ses représentants. Sur un autre plan, cette dynamique est menée en relation avec le comité de gestion du Ksar Ait Ben Haddou et les autorités locales. …

Panel 5 Paper 5.1 Egyptian Rural Practices: Living Heritage And Musealization, Mohamed Badry Kamel Basuny Amer M.A.

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

Rural heritage is a complicated cultural knowledge. Considering the visitors who come, to the living heritage sites, spending their spare time and at the same time, to get a piece of new knowledge in a nostalgic context, the heritage exhibition is the ideal EDUTAINMENTAL deliverable that could transmit the rural heritage knowledge using the interactive thinking methodology. The former approach creates a kind of curiosity for the visitors guaranteeing the life-long learning process. Therefore, reviewing the cultural significance of intangible cultural heritage, especially the manifestations of the rural socio-cultural heritage practices, the research paper aims at presenting a new aspect …

Panel 5 Rural Intangible Cultural Heritage, Junjie Su, Mohamed Badry Kamel Basuny Amer M.A., Xuanlin Liu

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

Rural areas is the place where rural intangible heritage is found rich and diverse, whereas vulnerable to fast social, cultural, political and economic transformations, in particular in developing and underdeveloped areas. Although the concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has been established in UNESCO and accepted by many ICH Convention signatories, it has not been consistently adopted and implemented from international level to local level without divergencies. An analysis of rural ICH is to analyse how rural traditional culture, memories and past are used by different stakeholders for current society. (Re)defining rural ICH is a way to both rethink and …

Panel 4 Paper 4.3: Rural Landscape Case Study From Icomos/Iucn Connecting Practice Project: Learning About Resilience And Sustainability From Practical Experience, Kristal Buckley, Gwenaelle Bourdin, Leanna Wigboldus

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

Rural landscapes with interconnected CultureNature heritage value have much to contribute to the resiliency and sustainability of food production, use of renewable natural resources and overall well-being of communities. Rural landscapes are addressed in UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in SDG 11 as a type of ‘human settlement’ and Target 11.4 calls for 'strengthening efforts ‘to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage.’ Even so, to date, the contributions of rural landscapes have had limited recognition within the global framework for the UN SDGs and some reference in the UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda.

This paper will contribute a …

Existence Stories, Althea Keaton

Masters Theses

Existence Stories is an interactive activist art project that gathers personal narratives from people about the ways in which their lives have been impacted by the current political climate in the United States, particularly surrounding the 2016 Presidential election and its aftermath. The project harnesses first-person narrative and audience participation as tools for humanizing the “Other” and building connections between people through the act of sharing stories. As the project has progressed over time, it has evolved in multiple directions and come to incorporate a variety of media, primarily comics, animation, printmaking, and zines. The roles that reproduction, distribution, and …

I Speak As One In Doubt, Margaret Hazel Wilson

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition I Speak as One in Doubt. Blending epistolary format and visionary narrative, the artist addresses her complex relationship to her Catholic upbringing.

Fielding, Emily Tareila

Masters Theses

Fielding is an ongoing exploration of place-making, spaces of learning and relationship building in formal and informal learning environments. The project is comprised of a series of events and workshops that are embodied, multimodal, olfactory and engagement-focused and a mobile cart that helps to facilitate these happenings both in and out of the formal gallery space. I regard my art practice as pedagogical, a blurring of art and life into intentional ways of being in the world; an experience of sharing practices with others and a form of what is regarded in institutionalized art as social practice. I find art …

“Æthelthryth”: Shaping A Religious Woman In Tenth-Century Winchester, Victoria Kent Worth

Doctoral Dissertations

It is well established that Anglo-Saxon writers were concerned with a specific set of principles (chastity, wisdom and piety) articulated in monastic life. However, the representation of women’s religious lives and the exemplification of their values influencing male saint’s Lives and their authors have to date been largely overlooked. To rectify this omission, I focus on Wulfstan’s tenth-century Vita St. Æthelwoldi, in which Æthelthryth’s character plays a far more significant role than we have heretofore noticed. Apart from the traditional figurae the author uses to depict her virtuous devotion, Wulfstan’s account of Æthelthryth is a testimony of a particular …

The Epistemic Dimensions Of Moral Responsibility And Respect, John Robison

Doctoral Dissertations

What epistemic conditions must one satisfy to be morally responsible for an action or attitude? A common worry is that robust epistemic requirements would have disastrous implications for our responsibility attributing practices: we would be unable to make epistemically justified responsibility attributions, or we would be licensed to disrespectfully excuse agents for their sincerely held beliefs. Those more optimistic about robust epistemic requirements inadvertently make them too demanding to explain the moral successes of ordinary agents. The present project shows how both the pessimists and optimists rely on instructively mistaken assumptions in epistemology, ethics, and action theory, and it culminates …

Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20th Century Literary Representations Of The Black Male Race Traitor, Gregory Coleman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Black Men Who Betray Their Race, gathers a literary archive in order to identify and introduce the “race traitor” as a heretofore unrecognized yet important trope within 20^th century African-American Literature. In addition to coping with the burden of racism, African Americans have had to put considerable energy toward negotiating the possibility of being perceived as race traitors by others within the African American community. This study tracks the possibilities and perils of black group identity in literary representations of black men, neither privileging opposition to the white world, nor celebrating black unity beyond it. Focusing …

The Political Work Of Memory In Collaborative Caribbean Archaeology, Elena Sesma

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the product of a community-based research project that sought to understand how descendants of the 19th century Millars Plantation on the southern end of Eleuthera, Bahamas continue to use and reinterpret the landscape that they have called home for over a century and a half. In 1871, the last owner of the Millars Plantation left the estate in her will to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. That descendant community still upholds their right to this land today, although in recent years, a Bahamian developer has attempted to gain title to the acreage through the …

Pakistani Pro-Democracy Movement: From The 1960s To The 2000s, Sofia Checa

Doctoral Dissertations

In Pakistan from the 1960s to the 2000s, with a focus on the latter. The dissertation is composed of three different papers. The first paper is an analysis of the changing civil society in Pakistan. I argue that in order to understand why the two movements were so different, we need to look at not just a snap shot of the civil society, but its evolution over the years. Rather than thinking of civil society as a static collection of different groups and organizations, this research analyzes it as a combination of groups (or structures) as well as processes that …

Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory In The Age Of Social Media, Erica Fagen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the representation of Holocaust memory through photographs on the social media platforms of Flickr and Instagram. It looks at how visitors – armed with digital cameras and smartphones – depicted their experiences at the former concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. The study’s arguments are twofold: firstly, social media posts about visits to former concentration camps are a form of Holocaust memory, and secondly, social media allows people from all backgrounds the opportunity to share their memories online. Holocaust memory on social media introduces a new, digital kind of memory called “filtered memory.” This study …

‘Black Intifada’: Black Arts Movement, Palestinian Poetry Of Resistance And The Roots Of Black And Palestinian Solidarity, Nadia Alahmed

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary contrapuntal study of Black Arts, Black Power Movements, Palestinian Poetry of Resistance and Palestinian Nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It starts with the examination of shared historical, political cultural and aesthetic forces that propelled the emergence of these movements and how their shared ideological matrix determined the resonance of their political and artistic strategies and goals. It moves on to analyze Black discourse on the Palestine/Israeli conflict from 1948, until the 1967 War, using W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin as models, showing how its key characteristics premeditated the transformation of this discourse …

“Greetings, I Am An Immortal God!”: Reading, Imagination, And Personal Divinity In Late Antiquity, 2nd – 5th Centuries Ce, Mark Roblee

Doctoral Dissertations

In City of God, Augustine entertains “personal divinity”—the idea that a person could become an immortal god. Recent scholarship has focused on the social function of such beliefs. The divine status of public figures such as emperors and martyrs has become a trope widely understood in its social and institutional dimensions. I add to this sociological understanding by inquiring into individual experience. How did a late antique person become divine? How did she understand divinity and the limits of the self? In City of God, Augustine assembles an archive that includes references to works by Platonists Apuleius, Plotinus, …