Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Determinants Of Affect, Emotional Arousal, And Autobiographical Memories On Music-Evoked Nostalgia, Alycia Sterenberg

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to further explore both person – level and context – level constructs established by Barrett et al. (2010) in relation to music-evoked nostalgia. This study also measures the strength of the relationship between self-reported arousal levels and electrodermal activity (EDA) as well as if they are good predictors of nostalgia. Methods include listening to personalized playlists to elicit feelings of nostalgia while electrodermal activity collects changes in arousal. Participants then answer questions of song familiarity, pleasure, arousal, and autobiographical salience to gather context – level constructs. Results indicate that both person – level and …

The Effect Of Patterned Sensory Enhancement On Balance And Ambulation In Persons Diagnosed With Parkinson’S Disease, Brittany Barko

Masters Theses

One rehabilitation protocol effective in delaying the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is Lee Silverman Voice Training BIG (LSVT BIG), comprising pre-gait exercises and gait training. This study seeks to determine if combining Patterned Sensory Enhancement (PSE), a music therapy intervention, with LSVT BIG will improve quality of movement. During physical therapy sessions with three participants, a music therapist adapted the PSE stimuli to support each patient’s motor needs, which were then recorded on CD and sent with patients to exercise with at home. Results showed improved balance and ambulation comparing pre- and post- measures of the BERG balance scale …

Annie Dillard: At The Altar Of Nature, Kelley A. Kasul

Masters Theses

This thesis intends to delve into Annie Dillard’s time spent at Tinker Creek. Why Dillard chose to go into nature is critiqued, as well as what she found. One of the things it appears Annie Dillard sought and found was a connection to the Divine. She had been searching for this connection in various churches but had not found what she needed there. There is another, perhaps more pressing, issue of the mystical journey Dillard went on as well. This was an internal journey, not a physical journey. Both of these topics are vetted for the purposes of furthering the …

“Who Has A Right To Say What Focus Is The Legitimate Focus?” Tennessee Williams And Julia Margaret Cameron’S Theatrical Portraits Of Women, Jennifer M. Klug

Masters Theses

In the production notes preceding The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams said: “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” In spite of Williams’s emphasis on the limitations of literal representation, some of his most famous female characters were created in a tradition similar to that of portraits of women by the Victorian-era photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Both Cameron and Williams made …

An Examination Of Age Labels In Music Related Dissertations And Theses: 2009-2016, Phillicia Jackson

Masters Theses

The life expectancy rate of advanced age individuals has increased dramatically in recent years, creating a greater need for research topics related to this segment of the population. Smith (2009) completed a content analysis of the use of age labels describing this advanced age group using dissertations and theses produced between 1983 and 2008. This current investigation replicated the process used in the earlier study using dissertations and theses completed between 2009 and 2016. The same search procedure, inclusion criteria, and analysis protocol was used, in order to be able to evaluate changes which may have occurred over time. A …

Reaching The Sacred Through The Secular: Biblical Elements And The Superiority Of Divine Love In Three Of Marie De France’S Lais, Sarah J. Kooienga

Masters Theses

In the Prologue to her Lais, Marie de France hints that her text possesses multiple layers of meaning: “The custom among the ancients…was to speak quite obscurely / in the books they wrote, / so that those who were to come after / and study them / might gloss the letter / and supply its significance from their own wisdom” (9, 11-16). Critics who study the Lais agree that the tales overwhelmingly focus on romantic love, and most of the existing scholarship overlooks the fact that this theme is merely one layer of the text’s significance. To the contrary, …

Castles In The Sky, Iva Milovanović

Masters Theses

I was born and raised in the city of Belgrade. From the 1950’s till the beginning of 1990’s it was the capital city of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. From the 1950’s until the 1980’s Yugoslavia experienced a financial and thus architectural boom. The president Josip Broz Tito financed construction of WWII Memorials to demonstrate the strength of the socialist republic throughout the Balkans. These giant memorials, along with most of the architecture of Belgrade from that time, were built in brutalist style. Brutalism signified power, progress and a forward moving country.

However, when I was born a new …

On The Edge Of Being, Zoe Gross

Masters Theses

On the Edge of Being represents a focused exploration of clay, craft, femininity, fragility, and self-care. The title is hopeful. It represents a certain radical gentleness with myself and with my work. It reminds me that as hard as I try, there is always room to grow and improve. It is also a bit of a joke with myself; I am rarely satisfied.

I began this body of work as a way of rejoicing in the tamped down impulses of my early artistic career. I wanted to infuse my work with magic: color, texture, pattern, flowers, frills, lace, kitsch and …

Very-Asian Variation, Nicholas Oh

Masters Theses

Nicholas Oh is a Korean American Artist currently working in Providence.

Oh graduated from San Francisco State University and he is currently a graduate student at Rhode Island School of Design.

He focuses on creating clay sculpture and mixed media installation that deals with race and identity as a Korean American in America.

Oh has done residencies at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado and has shown at Mills College Art Museum in California, Milwaukee Art Institute in Wisconsin, American Museum of Ceramic Art and Pence Gallery in California.

Ouroboros, Christopher Dove Drury

Masters Theses

Art is communication.

Objects are for making and giving.

Life is to be loved with others.

I work directly and swiftly with material to mark time and labor.

This is a pathway to resolve suffering, to be present.

A Place For Plastics : Bioplastics, Bacteria And Our Thoughtless Acts, Megan Valanidas

Masters Theses

One third of all plastics end up in the ecosystem. It is time we start designing for this outcome. 311 million tons of plastics were produced in 2014 and that number is projected to more than double by 2050. Just 5% of plastics are recycled. Recycling alone is not mitigating the problem. The carbon footprint alone is massive. China’s recent announcement to no longer recycle the West’s waste promises even more challenges. We need to design for plastics to end up in the ecosystem and in the waste stream. This is where plastics go and this is where they should …

In A Distant Land, Ohad Sarfaty

Masters Theses

For the past few years I have avidly collected oral histories, family memories and imagery as a way to better understand and contextualize myself, my roots, and my own personal path. My recent paintings reference my first-hand experience as an immigrant, as well as my family's long and complicated history with displacement. The paintings were put together much like a game of telephone, their narratives transmitted through generations, stretched and skewed by family members and friends, rendering them fragmented yet crystallized. In the process of painting, seeing parallels between the past and the present has been frustrating and disturbing. The …

Sky Well, Molly Kaderka

Masters Theses

Since the era of Romanticism, landscape painting has fallen into three aesthetic forms of representation: the Pastoral, the Picturesque, and the Sublime. This last form celebrates the awe and fear that arises through human encounters with nature. Many contemporary critics dismiss the Natural Sublime, claiming either that technology has replaced nature as a source of the sublime, or that humankind’s present-day destruction of nature prevents our also standing in awe of it. I disagree with both arguments. To me, humanity’s disruption of Earth’s ecosystems does not impede an individual’s experience of exhilaration witnessing, say, a volcanic eruption. And modern technology …

Dispatches From Planet Nowhere, Aaron Field Simmons

Masters Theses

Dispatches From Planet Nowhere explores how using the tools of fiction can aid and expand User Research and Product Design in the field of Industrial Design. The thesis asks the fundamental question of how imagining other worlds can teach us about our own. Aaron’s belief is that using the lens of fiction, and especially science fiction and fantasy, can give us novel and unique insights into what people hope, fear, and dream about the future. Drawing on the fields of Speculative Design and Future Studies Aaron proposes a new method for gathering user data, and a participatory model for understanding …

To See Again, Ada Goldfeld

Masters Theses

Contemporary criticism often describes realist paintings as facsimiles of our world, mimetic copies of a shared reality. Cast as a singular approach to painting that, with practice, any artist may adopt, realism is seen as an easy way out, which has been superseded by more complicated, advanced, and abstract visual languages. It is in this context that describing a painting as “realistic” becomes a backhanded compliment— recognition of acquired skill, but a jab to creativity—and all the more of a slight given the value that contemporary art has placed on de-skilling.

These blanket statements around realism misrepresent the tradition, diminishing …

A Natural Circus, Cecilia Plasencia

Masters Theses

I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no interest in controlling and manipulating matter to my own heart’s content. I’m rather bored of rigidly perfect geometries and sentiments. Rather than controlling materials I allow them to do as they please. I capture their moment of revelation, and allow them to speak for themselves. I realize this process of making demotes me from creator to conduit, but I’ve noted that the materials have a far more unique and intelligent message than I could ever imagine.

So, I listen to matter. Matter has one very good friend, the center of the …

Journey Through The Wasteland, Songlin Li

Masters Theses

I started planning this book at the end of last year, because I had to write it for my thesis, and also because I saw this as an opportunity to create, like making artwork. But the difference is that this does not look like my usual art, being only a book comprised of words and images.

From the end of last year to the beginning of this year, I experienced a terrible spiritual disillusionment and was caught in a cycle of depression and anxiety. Even though I was prepared to write this book last fall, I only really started in …

Hyperlink : Connecting Space, Time, Language, And Technology, Marie Otsuka

Masters Theses

This thesis constitutes a methodology for examining our use of systems and tools. We are constantly generating physical and digital residues, and tracing them can reveal an underlying syntax of structures that produced them. I work with these artifacts to highlight the capacities and constraints of language and technology, and what results is a transparency that draws us closer to the raw material. Once broken down into bare elements, new forms can then be resynthesized. Both critical and celebratory, this inquiry uncovers logical structures to reimagine means of making and to create alternate tools for thought.

Radically Normal : The Menstruation Issue, Kathryn Smiley

Masters Theses

Hey readers, Periods are normal. But you’d never know that by checking out the average bathroom. The only menstruation-related public restroom fixture considered remotely standard is the trash, the one used to hide the evidence. A tampon dispenser is a rare sighting –a functioning, stocked dispenser, even rarer still.

Dispensers’ exclusion from public space reveals the ways that menstruation is not treated like other natural body functions. Instead, it has long been considered a sign of imbalance and weakness, discussed mainly in hushed tones and sly euphemisms. Historically, the medical profession has greatly contributed to cultural anxieties about women and …

For A Better Normal : Fostering The Informal Sector In Post-Hurricane Puerto Rico, As A Pathway For Economic Stabilization, Jonathan W. Melendez Davidson

Masters Theses

For a Better Normal is a proposal to aid informal produce vendors in post-hurricane Puerto Rico. The project takes the shape of a toolkit that facilitates the creation of a cooperative buyer’s club. This cooperative not only provides vendors with the opportunity to create sustainable businesses, but also acts as a pathway to formalization. The outcome of this thesis becomes a case study for how to re-think the potential of the informal economy in relation to the Island’s economic crisis.

Wild Power, Iris Han

Masters Theses

Wild Power is a journey to understand myself by creating wearable pieces representing aspects of my character. A human body is limited physically and it cannot show the whole identity of a person. I have desired to empower myself and also express my complex innermost feelings by ornamenting my body with another layer. This aspiration has motivated me to make wearable objects with diverse and different qualities of beauty. Especially, I have thought for a long time about how fashion can strengthen a women’s power living under societal standards that treats gender differently. From this interest, my artwork naturally reflects …

Ghost, A Stone, Audrey Blood

Masters Theses

This is a book of cement and paper. It addresses questions of surface, self, interior, and relations with the environment. It points to emotional and affective geographies in the context of printmaking.

Squishy Play, Lauren Traugott-Campbell

Masters Theses

Work is part of our identity and dictates how workers spend most of their time in the US. This obsession has truncated our imagination and ability to conceive of alternatives. As a tactic to reclaim free time, I offer a practice I refer to as squishy play in which participants momentarily adopt new social norms to collectively discover new ways of engaging with the world and each other.

I use squishy play as a lens to investigate the power structures, social norms, and material output of late capitalism in the US. Squishy play is generous in its frivolity. It is …

Constellations, Maria Rull Bescós

Masters Theses

In this book you will find a collection of projects that both reflect and simultaneously reinvent my personal way of seeing the world, which I consider to be a space that is complex, diverse, and in continuous transformation.

Graphic design is the lens through which I examine and understand this complexity, and it is also the medium through which I translate this huge realm into navigable systems of ideas, tales, forms, and experiences.

I have been inspired to produce my own systems in response to those I discover through actively observing my environment (territory), reflecting upon my personal background (origin), …

Placefulness, Ellen Christensen

Masters Theses

Graphic design has been referred to as a tool of inquiry — a method of thinking visually. Design can polish, beautify, hierarchize, eliminate, prioritize, propagandize, or disseminate. Using spatial inquiry as a primary mode of investigation, I argue that graphic design is also a process of attention and care. How can graphic design be a tool of expansion and inclusion?

By encouraging spaces of attention and listening within the built environment and virtual worlds, we can think critically about power dynamics, interiority and exteriority, and subjectivity and objectivity. Within this phase of late capitalism, I focus on leftovers, scraps, and …

Tiny Diasporas, Angela Lorenzo

Masters Theses

I see myself as a literary curator — I collect and sequence texts and images, both digital and analog, to reveal, connect, and construct narratives, resulting in shifting meanings and significances. Inhabiting this curatorial ethos, I investigate hidden subtexts, locating personal and collective relations to the margins and files marked “miscellany.” Working in books and installations, I engage with the inherited meanings of visual languages (form, typography, color, material, format) to open up well-worn narratives and craft new interpretations.

Tiny Diasporas is a primer to a design practice that borrows the form of an abecedarius, an alphabetical wordlist for learning …

Summer Peaches And Salt-Tinged Fog, Carolina Jiménez

Masters Theses

The pieces that I create are monuments of the mundane; they are both garments and--through their installation--a place as well. They are portraits of loved people, embodied through hand labor and industrial processes. In this project I destabilize the idea of a memory palace--an imagined rational space which holds memory--and replace it with an ever-expanding memory atmosphere. From a palace of marble and bronze to a fog of salt tinged color, a sky turning, like a cut plum, from orange to purple, music carried on the breeze.

I map individuals, qualities of light, flashes of color and material. Specific moments …

Between Gods And Animals : Deconstructing Heteronormative Masculines Pursuit To Sustain Power, Shawn Bush

Masters Theses

Between Gods and Animals is a multi-angle exploration of the Caucasian heteronormative male’s endless pursuit to sustain power and inability to live by their own set of codes. Using the Grecco Roman period as an origin point, this work examines the forces that have historically perpetuated the myth of masculinity. Relating past ideals of maleness to contemporary standards this thesis illuminates patriarchal structures that are systematizing masculinity while providing a space to normalize a gamut of masculines. The visual works included act as an introspective approach in accepting the complacency of my existence as a man who has operated within …

The Bird's Eye View, Ipek Kosova

Masters Theses

How can we make sense of the borders between destruction and construction, between matter and ourselves, at the same time? How habitable is a border? How does sound echo and vibrate on the border? Are borders a space of segregation or dialogue? Where is the border between our brain and our own voice? Between the transparent and opaque? Between the paint and the floor? Between the receiver and transmitter? Between the eye and the tear? Are borders monuments of extinctions of human contact?

The self defines itself as bordered and limited. The moments where destructive events seem like a ruin …

Space, Junk, Brandon Olsen

Masters Theses

Space, Junk acknowledges and embraces the world as a chaotic and uncertain place. Graphic design often directly contrasts the messiness of humanity. Clean and ordered composition can conceal the muddled nature of a subject. The designer's role isn't to force perfection, but to create an aesthetic that accurately represents content. I place value on rips, smears, blurriness, and distortion as well as feelings provoked by variability. Through works created in multiple spaces (book space, architectural space, web space, etc.) this thesis focuses on finding worth in undervalued junk, using mess as a means to represent convoluted issues, and utilizing fun …