Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ghosts, Hauntings, Kinship, And Contamination: Key Tropes For Narrating Extinction In Jeff Vandermeer's Hummingbird Salamander And James Bradley's Ghost Species, Christopher Hardesty Nicholson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the narrative portrayals of issues pertaining to anthropogenic extinction in two contemporary speculative fiction novels: Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021) and James Bradley’s Ghost Species (2020). This focus leads to consideration of narrative genre, tropes, and affective resonance. The first half of this thesis centers the genres of tragedy and elegy, their tropes of ghosts and hauntings, and the affective processes of grief and horror. Within these narrative frameworks extinction is experienced as a claustrophobic site of horror in Hummingbird Salamander, and as a time-warping inspiration of grief in Ghost Species. However, in each novel …

Mansfield, Marines, And Mothers: The Politics Of Resistance To The American Intervention In North China From 1945-1946, James Robert Compton

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

At the conclusion of World War II, American citizens, including millions of deployed servicemen, reasserted the democratic freedoms they sacrificed to win the war. The American intervention in North China during the Chinese Civil War presented a ripe opportunity for civic restoration in late 1945. Controversial and seemingly at odds with the stated goals of the Second World War—namely the “Four Freedoms” and the Atlantic Charter—the US military presence in North China faced formidable domestic political obstacles. This thesis explores the nexus of domestic politics and foreign policy in the post-World War II era. Focusing on 1945-1946, this project steps …

Other Orchards, Sam B. Robison

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Other Orchards is comprised of poems each suspect in their own way of those boundaries that might separate humans from nature, rural from urban, worker from scholar, or human from beast. Using the figure of the orchard, a kind of “false forest,” this collection studies the ways we map ourselves onto our work and the way work might inform an understanding of the self. Ultimately, these are poems that emerge from the seams of things—the shoulder of highway strewn with dead antelope, the feral apple tree lost to the woods, the farmer lost in their work, slowing becoming less and …

Damming Paradise: Public Power, Free Enterprise, And Tribal Sovereignty In The Mountain West In The Twentieth Century, Jacob T. Schmidt

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

“Damming Paradise” examines the transformation of the political economy of the Mountain West through the development of hydropower over the course of the twentieth century. Beginning with early attempts to regulate electricity marketing and dam construction, this thesis traces the development of a conservation paradigm which insisted upon full development of water resources and public ownership of hydropower facilities. The author then follows that development through the New Deal and Post War eras, focusing particular attention on the Kerr Dam (now Seli’š Ksanka Qlispe’ Dam) and Hungry Horse Dam on Montana’s Flathead River. “Damming Paradise” then examines the attempt to …

The Request Is Not Compatible: Competing Frames Of Public Lands Discourse In The Lolo Peak Ski Resort Controversy, Philip A. Sharp

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Sharp, Philip, A., M.A., Spring 2022

Communication Studies

ABSTRACT

The Request Is Not Compatible: Competing Frames of Public Lands Discourse in the Lolo Peak Ski Resort Controversy

Co-Chair (in absentia): Steve Schwarze Co-Chair: Joel Iverson

In mid-2003, the United States Forest Service (USFS) received a pre-application for a Special Use Permit to build and operate an all-season ski resort on public lands near Missoula, Montana. The ensuing public deliberation over the possible use of protected lands for outdoor commercial recreational purposes provides a site of rhetorical inquiry. In this rhetorical criticism I analyze and evaluate arguments presented by the USFS, …

Mother Superior, Brandon R. Hansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Prologue /The Lake Within

I am a fisherman. Every time I raise my arm to cast, I’m searching for an answer.

What is a lake?

I throw my lure at the lilies of my childhood, the sunken log of my crib. With every cast I hope the truth will follow it back, this little piece of me I offer to the mystery.

My earliest memories are at the bus stop, where a shroud of mist swirled about me and I listed side-to-side, six-AM eyes drooping while I waited for that big yellow ship to bust through the fog and …

The Curiosociety, Luke G. Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Changing, Sabrina B. Black

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In poems that center on experiences of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, The Changing explores the formation of identity and the malleability of the self. Sabrina Black writes into the spaces between people—at times finding connection there and at times isolation. Throughout the collection, the speaker reflects on complicated relationships with family members, classmates, and friends; on the ways those relationships have shaped her; and, most of all, on her relationship with that elusive thing called the self.

In a series of “Dear Advice Columnist” poems scattered throughout the manuscript, Black shifts focus away from personal experience, adopting the persona …

Gigi, Helen Wesley Kapp

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Francis’s grandpa taught her how to wrestle alligators. By the time Francis was sixteen, she could hold her own, but all it takes is one gator. Just one gator who almost gets the best of you, and suddenly you’ve got a dead animal; somebody’s getting stitches; you’re getting haunted by the ghost of the alligator you just killed; and your mom’s making you move to Charleston to attend a swanky prep school where the kids don’t wrestle gators, but surviving the gossip is even harder.

The Existential Challenges Of Cyberspace, Sean Cleary

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Cyberspace is an emergent environment that has come to facilitate a growing range of human activity. Here, information is tightly woven, freed of unnecessary context and always within reach. This thesis explores the existential challenges that arise from increased engagement in this space and offers solutions informed by Henry Thoreau and Søren Kierkegaard. Section One offers an ontological account of cyberspace and describes its relationship to what I call the lifeworld. Section Two further examines the relationship drawn out in Section One, introduces the challenge of foreground saturation and appeals to Thoreau for solutions. Section Three introduces the concept of …

Battles Of The Mind: The Reaction Against Progressive Education, 1945-1959, Ben Yturri

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis discerns the relationships between three interrelated movements of the post-war period (circa 1945-1959): the overwhelming concern among leading intellectuals regarding the relationship between the individual and society, the post-war debates over education, and rising religious observance. Following WWII, the nation’s leading scholars and social critics addressed the most important problem facing the country and, for that matter, the world: how to avoid totalitarianism. Almost naturally, such anxieties influenced new debates over education. Broadly speaking, these controversies involved two related disputes over the efficacy of progressive education and the proper relationship between church and state. After World War II, …

Into The Tidy Shape Imagined, Hope Isabella Ruskaup

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

In The Landscape Of Her Life, Susan M. Sinitiere

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

To reconcile perceptions of female expectations in light of realistic outcomes, the idealized domestic space where formality and dilapidation coexist with botanicals is the aesthetic of the autobiographical context of Seeds Once Sown. The ‘home’ melds together an acknowledgement of matriarchal influence that formed my identity as a homemaker and mother, but also serves as a place of independent contemplation on a mid-life passage through a seasonal change of life, now separate from domestic adherences.

Sunbaby, Katelyn Eva Garcia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Above all else, Sunbaby is a project concerned with that which is passed down from a mother to her daughters. Less interested in writing into the center of violent acts, this series of poems aims instead to consider all the things – both physical and psychological – that exist of the edges of violence. What happens to a body in the wake of violent acts? What informs the trauma of families? These are questions Sunbaby asks its reader to grapple with.

Set to background of the desert and mountain West, Sunbaby lingers on bodies (human and other) subjected to environmental …

Sexual Whatever, Madeline Rose Tecmire

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

A rerouting of gendered power, Sexual Whatever unleashes femininity repressed in America’s nuclear families. This collection of narrative poetry puts pressure on patriarchal traditions of Christianity through persona, Madonna—a radical culmination of the Madonna-Whore Complex—resisting systemic domination of female sexuality in both public and private spaces. While Madonna dismantles the patriarchy, she investigates the mechanisms of domestic violence, emotional manipulation, the very value of a proper Christian woman.

This book dares to demean female characters through love, sex, and family, while still giving voice to abusers, creating webs of confusion around the many definitions of domestic violence. More characters question …

Kid Gloves, Anne North Kolle

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Kid Gloves is an excerpt from a novel in progress that follows the lives of three generations of women—Dorothy, Lydia, and Maisie—and explores the privileges and traumas they hold onto and pass down. The novel takes place in wealthy Baltimore society in the week leading up to Maisie’s debutante ball, but it is interspersed with stories from the past that inform the lives of the three women today.

The Syndemic Landscape: A New Paradigm For Montana Suicide Prevention Grounded In Agricultural Renewal, Emory Chandler Padgett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana has had one of the highest suicide rates in the nation for half a century, and since 2000, it has risen almost 50%. Despite suicide’s alarming persistence in the state, there has been minimal academic study of suicide or mental health specifically in Montana, so this thesis attempts to answer a few questions: Why does Montana have such a high suicide rate? Is there something culturally, historically, or socially unique about Montana that contributes to suicide? Are current prevention efforts helpful, harmful, or lacking? Could a consideration of culture and land benefit an understanding of suicide in Montana? What …

Cases Vs. Statistics: A Crux In The History Of Medicine, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

During the 1720s in England, inoculation was described as a kind of engrafting, and we might say that proponents like James Jurin, the secretary of the Royal Society, engrafted the procedure itself onto their customary modes of thinking and doing. In Jurin’s case the transplant was particularly awkward, in that inoculation had already broken through the limitations he imposed on it by the time he picked up his pen.

Below The Line: Misrepresented Sources In The Rosenhan Hoax, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

Though footnotes may seem like technicalities in the sciences, work in these disciplines is by no means independent of textual sources. How often are sources checked? In the unique case of D. L. Rosenhan’s celebrated—and as we now know, fabricated—study ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’, a review of any of several listed sources (or even an ordinarily attentive reading of the text itself) would have suggested strongly that something was not right. Had readers examined Rosenhan’s sources with ordinary care, so many misrepresentations would have been uncovered that the credibility of the entire performance would have come into question. …

The Heated Fight Over One Of America's Newest National Scenic Trails, Kylie Foster Mohr

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Wildflower Launch, Anna Schale

The Oval

No abstract provided.

To My Beloved Body,, Hanna Carstensen

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Rust Blooming, Alec Bartell

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Jupiter, Caroline Tuss

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Lingering, Andrea Halland

The Oval

No abstract provided.

I Will Not Beg, I Am An Oyster, Frances Brauneis

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Watering Stones, Madeline Kelly

The Oval

No abstract provided.

False Joy, Wren Roe

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Contributors' Notes, Back Cover

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Exposure, Melissa Paulsen

The Oval

No abstract provided.