Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Museum Exhibition: Meowthical, Abigail Carter

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Graphic Design

My Home, Kayla Boyce

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Graphic Design

Dual Colonization Of Okinawa: Gendered And Militarized Violence, Katie Y. Hashimoto

Student Research Symposium

Off the southern part of Japan is the small archipelago of Okinawa. Making up only 0.6% of Japan’s total land mass, Okinawa hosts 74% of the nation’s U.S. military bases. Since World War II, the U.S. military has grown a dominating presence on the islands, inevitably influencing the lives of the locals. A portion of Okinawans have since been protesting for the removal/reduction of these bases through what is known as the Anti-Base Movement but have been largely ignored by the governments of Japan and the U.S. At first glance, these protests seem to be centered around environmental issues, land …

Film History Digests, Nathan A. Varner

Student Research Symposium

Film History Digests is a web series created by Nathan Varner and chronicled popular culture's smaller and underrepresented parts. This project showcased collaboration, innovation, consistency, and determination for a small team. In return, we uncovered the decades-long mystery, shined a light on mental health, and provided a subtext of non-partisan political discourse all over a year.

Disentangling The Nazis And The Vikings, Arden Goldberg

Student Research Symposium

In the development of nationalism, and specifically white ethnonationalism, the Norse have played an unfortunate role, and one that deserves a closer interrogation. In the larger scheme of white nationalism, those who seek to directly appropriate Norse symbology and a reconstruction of their own ideal of Norse culture are a relative minority, but they remain a minority which taints the study of Norse history. In this talk, I will examine how Norse symbology and identity has come to be appropriated by white nationalists, compare the racist perceptions of the Norse with knowable historical realities, explain the usefulness of Norse symbology …

Dawn Of A Silver Millennium: Millenarianism, Futurity, And Utopia In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Matthew Dentice

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

The story of Sailor Moon, told and retold in countless forms in the thirty years since the original manga’s publication, is imbued with a cosmic sense of time. The modern-day protagonists’ personal journeys are tightly interwoven with the distant past of the Silver Millennium and the far future of thirtieth-century Crystal Tokyo. But only the manga is fully willing to grapple with what the future means for its own present moment. Written in the early 1990s during Japan's "Lost Decade," Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon dramatizes the angst that accompanies the imminent arrival of a new millennium. As the Sailor Guardians …

The Imagined Histories And Futures Of The Past: Wwi And The Cultural Imagination, Kelly Aliano

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In this paper, I look at various modes of imagining the futures incarnated by the First World War, beginning with artists and writers, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Maria Remarque, who experienced and depicted the war from a firsthand point of view. From here, I expand that framework to include J.R.R. Tolkien, whose masterpiece Lord of the Rings may owe no small debt to his wartime experiences. I consider the Doctor Who episodes, “Human Nature” and “Family of Blood,” as contemporary attempts to reinsert WWI into the cultural consciousness. Finally, I look at the two versions of War Horse …

Super Apocalypto 64: Inhabiting Revelation As A Video Game Made Of Sacred Words, Greg Jones

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

The book of Revelation makes the living and life-giving reality of Scripture known to audiences via the vision articulated by John. He conveys this divine reality through words – both read and heard – which call for more than the passive reception of a static text. Rather, Revelation is also participatory; its words are meant to be read, heard and kept in the life of faith. How can one articulate this dynamic interactivity with accessible terms that render divine reality as recognizable in everyday life and highly-qualified language which makes it clear that divine reality is never comprehended in …

Peripheral Storytelling: Cinematic Structures And Audience Agency, Carlos Tkacz

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

A cultural phenomenon we are all unfortunately familiar with is terrible movies. By terrible movies I mean the kind that lack any semblance of structure, movies in which the characters are flatly drawn, the storylines are predictable, and the writing is especially bad. More specifically, I am interested in why these movies seem to be breeding without end and are no longer relegated to (maybe they never were) the low budget genre films some of us love to hate. I am talking here about the relatively new phenomena of the high-budget, popular-yet-terrible film.

Specifically, I am interested in applying Structuralism, …

Mourning The Marathon: Black Men Rappers, Homicide Survivorship Bereavement, And The Rap Tribute Of Nipsey Hussle, Melvin L. Williams, Justin K. Winley, Justin Causey

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Eritrean-American rapper Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom’s murder represented a cultural cataclysmic event that startled the hip-hop community and triggered previous memories of Black men’s homicidal deaths in rap and Black American urban communities. Nipsey Hussle’s death inspired touching rap tribute songs by Black men rappers, who sought to commemorate his cultural legacy and express their bereavement pains as homicide survivors. Rap tribute songs occupy a significant history, as rappers historically employed them to honor hip-hop’s fallen soldiers, communicate their homicide survivorship bereavement processes, and speak about social perils in the Black community. Framed by critical race (CRT) and gender role …

Into The Woods: Freedom And The Forest In The Hunger Games, Robert B. Hackey

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Forests are contested terrains in literature. The woods are a bucolic setting far removed from the hectic, bustling world of the city or the grueling challenges of industrial life. At the same time, however, the forest challenges us – in the woods, we must take stock of ourselves, overcome unfamiliar obstacles, and face our fears. The forested settings of the Hunger Games – both natural and manmade – force tributes to wrestle with the nature of human freedom. Drawing upon political theorists from Thomas Hobbes to Isaiah Berlin, my paper also explores how tributes face a choice between positive and …

“A Meaningless Institution”: Allen Ginsberg And The Struggle To Resist Dehumanization, James Altman

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

This presentation details how in poems such as “A Meaningless Institution,” “Howl,” and “American Change” Allen Ginsberg depicts individuals striving as best they can to maintain their freedom, especially freedom of thought in the face of lockstep conformity. In doing so, they seek to hang onto and reassert their humanity. In virtually every line, Ginsberg’s ideas about free speech, democracy, patriotism, inclusiveness, the environment, and community collided with the dehumanizing ideals of mainstream Cold War America. Ginsberg’s reverence for the United States as celebrated by his artistic “father” Walt Whitman functions as the catalyst for him to protest what the …

Where Epistemology And Metaphysics Touch In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Seth Vannatta

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In Lois Lowry’s dystopian young adult novel, The Giver, the veil of perception— the gap between appearance and reality— is woven into the community as a policy measure meant to establish Sameness—the effort to insure a world without conflict, inequality, difference, pain, or freedom of choice. But a question lingers in the premise of the novel’s community. Given that our options for bridging the gap amount to building a bridge of experience across it or digging a tunnel of existence under it, has the bridge been sabotaged to render perception spurious, or has the tunnel been blocked to alter reality …

Black Culture And Community In Good Times, Angela Nelson

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

The situation comedy Good Times broadcast on the CBS network from February 8, 1974 to August 1, 1979, is a television milestone because it was the first series to feature a recurring, intact Black two-parent nuclear family, the Evanses, on American primetime television. In the conventions of seventies “TV World,” the “intact Black nuclear family” is a married, heterosexual, two-parent African American family with children all living in a single dwelling at the same time. David Marc in Demographic Vistas notes the focus of American situation comedies up to 1974: “The sitcom is a representational form, and its subject is …

A Semiotic Analysis Of Community’S “Advanced Dungeons And Dragons”, Marci Mazzarotto

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Unsurprisingly, the use of blackface rightfully remains a controversial topic situated within a remarkedly large sphere of popular culture (spanning nearly 200 years), as its roots stem directly from the systematic oppression of the African American community by silencing their voices and deleting their visibility. Such depictions turned people of color into grotesque and exaggerated caricatures that cemented deeply hurtful, incorrect, and negative stereotypes that continue to live and haunt our society and culture today.

This project addresses the controversial use of blackface in popular media, by briefly contextualizing its history and influence and then situating such context within a …

"Of Backstories And Epiphanies And Such: A Formalist's Analysis Of Dallas Jenkins' Youtube Series 'The Chosen.'", Richard Logsdon

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Of Backstories and Epiphanies: A formalist’s analysis of Dallas Jenkin’s The Chosen

In this essay, I attempt a formalist’s analysis of YouTube sensation The Chosen, so far a two part, sixteen-episode series about Jesus. In taking a formalist’s approach to this series, I seek the unifying principle holding the episodes of The Chosen together and determining the selection and arrangement of parts.

Presented from perspective of Jesus’ followers, the series' episodes make use of backstories and epiphanies to convey the unifying message that Jesus Christ was God and man. Those who experiences the epiphanies, often occurring in backstories intended to …

When First We Practice To Deceive: The Semiotics Of The Chinese Tv Drama The First Half Of My Life, William M. Kirtley

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Abstract

In the darkest days of the pandemic, an online streaming service offered escape in the form of a 42-episode Chinese dramatic TV series, The First Half of My Life (2017).

This paper provides a history of semiotic thought followed by an analysis of a woman’s professional life in the Peoples Republic of China. It uses, Canadian Sociologist Irving Goffman’s concept of dramaturgy and Austrian social psychologist Fritz Heider’s balance theory. This popular series is the story of the paradigmatic transformation of its female heroine, Luo Zijun, from dependent housewife to independent businessperson. Her ex-husband declares, “I never imagined …

A Visual Exploration Of Bias In Covid-19 Coverage, Elizabeth Zak

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

During the Covid-19 pandemic, news outlets used information visualizations to convey noteworthy data about different facets of the crisis in a short period of time. Despite claims of neutrality, an information visualization also conveys bias. Exploring bias in visualizations allows us to understand the bias that some news outlets hold. I chose to explore how news outlets conveyed political bias in a visualization. In this study, using the AllSides scale, I first identified ten news outlets of varying political bias. I then collected five Covid-19 visualizations from each news outlet. I analyzed each visualization’s use of information visualization techniques and …

Adoption Communication In The Media, Samantha Schaffer

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Adoption communication is a vital part of developing healthy family relationships in families formed through adoption. The media has recently begun depicting more of the difficulties that adoptees experience. Three key television shows are Charmed, A Million Little Things, and This Is Us, which depict communication about adoption. These television shows offer the opportunity to analyze master narratives, family communication patterns, and information regulation through popular culture. By illustrating the difficulties experienced by adoptees, these shows provide adoptive families with the occasion to begin difficult yet necessary conversations. These television shows not only exemplify adoption communication they also …

Delicacy Of Taste And Passion In The Use Of Mobile Phone Social Trading Apps, Christopher M. Innes

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

No abstract provided.

West Texas Ghost Story, Clayton Bradshaw

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

"West Texas Ghost Story" explores the negative impacts of capitalism and patriarchal society on the well-being of individuals and the ability of families to remain intact under duress of such oppressive regimes. It follows the story of a young man growing up around the oil fields of West Texas in the 1990s as his father begins to hollow out and become a ghostly figure. The young man turns to art as a therapeutic outlet for this loss, eventually making his way to Marfa. The ghost story in question becomes one of metaphorical and perceived experience for the young man.

Women And Gender Studies And The Potentiality Of Feminist Leadership, Clara Perka

Thinking Matters Symposium

Graduates of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) programs gain skills that aid in the development of a feminist leadership, a leadership practice that is committed to challenging oppressive structures and institutions and empowering others to reach their full potential. Through semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study explored the experiences of five graduates of WGS undergraduate programs in the Northeast region of the United States whose post-graduation work across a variety of professional fields has offered them opportunities to practice feminist leadership. While research on both WGS and Leadership is abundant, this research addresses the gap in the literature on feminist leadership …

Empowering Libraries Through Controlled Digital Lending, Chris Freeland

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Libraries play a crucial societal role in providing access to information and preserving that information over time. Unfortunately that role is under threat from a number of sources: budget reductions, exorbitant licensing fees, and the inability for libraries to own (not lease) digital content. In this session, Chris Freeland, Director of the Open Libraries program at the Internet Archive, will cover how existing library practices like interlibrary loan & controlled digital lending empower libraries to reach their patrons where they're learning—online—and the new efforts helping libraries take control of their digital futures.

Angels, Snakes, And Everything In Between: The Fall Of The Byzantine Eunuch, Tess E. Nye

Young Historians Conference

Great figures of fascination, eunuchs have mystified ancients and contemporaries alike through their physical mutilation, sexual ambiguity, and distinct roles within civilizations and societies. Underpinning Byzantine imperial court life, eunuchs possessed great influence in domestic and political spheres for much of the empire’s history. Following the Latin occupation of Constantinople in the 13^th century and extending onwards, however, eunuchs and their influence became increasingly obsolete. This paper explores the broad scope of the Byzantine eunuch’s social and political power and the causes for the eunuch’s decline nearing the collapse of the Byzantine empire.

So Many Possibilities: A History Of Noodles & Pasta, Nola Lierheimer

Young Historians Conference

There are many foods historians consider to be an important part of history but many have overlooked a food with rich culinary, cultural, and historical impact: the noodle. Much of the history of this food is complex and different throughout the diverse societies it is a part of. This paper focuses on the unique, influential cultures and traditions of Italy and China, through the lens of noodles and pasta. Additionally, it expands to examine surrounding regions and the culmination of ideas that have led to distinct noodle cultures around the world. From prehistoric times to the present day, this food …

Poetry To Prose: The Influence Of Herodotus On Written History, Frances B. Currie

Young Historians Conference

In his book, The Histories, Herodotus of Halicarnassus expertly displayed his inquiries into the cultures and conflicts that transformed the Mediterranean world during the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century BCE. By writing his narrative in prose, citing his work, and providing cultural reasoning for past events, Herodotus earned himself the nicknames “father of history” and “father of comparative ethnography,” but his inclusion of fables also labeled him the “father of lies.” A historian named Thucydides eventually refined the historical genre to focus on politics without the inclusion of myths, narrowing the discipline of history for another thousand years. …

Don't Breathe: An Analysis Of The Factors Of The Victorian River Thames' Restoration, Lucie N. Jain

Young Historians Conference

In the summer of 1858, the River Thames of London was polluted beyond recognition, producing an intolerable smell that reached all corners of the city and inspired a surge of rhetoric commenting on the state of the once adored river. Prior to the nineteenth century, the Thames was the jewel of London and the main source of the city’s prosperity. However, industrialism took a toll on the river’s beauty and health, and the once pristine waterway was quickly spoiled in the space of mere decades. Tracing back to nineteenth century London, this paper aims to explore the causes of the …

The Troubles: Root Causes Of Tension In Northern Ireland, Eleanor M. Snyder

Young Historians Conference

Since the first British invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, the native Irish people have been negatively affected by British presence and rule. When the English first set out to conquer Ireland, they did so on the notion and basis of religion, aiming to anglicize the Irish people. The ramifications of creating a class of people, who were second to the British colonizers, have remained persistent throughout history and into present times. The modern culmination of this historical conflict occurred in the 1960’s during the time of the Troubles. However, this Northern Irish conflict was not divided on theological …

All About Dynamics: Katherine Howard's Hidden Story, Samantha E. Knofler

Young Historians Conference

Often considered Henry VIII’s “wanton wife,” Katherine Howard’s story has been twisted and appropriated throughout the centuries to fit the propaganda of the court or the perceived love story between her and Thomas Culpepper. No older than nineteen at the time of her beheading, Howard supposedly professed “I die a queen, but would rather die the wife of Culpepper.” However, through an in depth analysis of primary sources and new scholarship, her story is far more complicated than previously considered. Transcripts from court documents, witnesses throughout her life, and her own words paint less of a romantic tragedy and more …

Schism And Suppression: Early Threats To The Esperanto Language, And Resulting Impacts On International Acceptance, Anabel E. Cull

Young Historians Conference

The constructed language of Esperanto, created by Polish linguist Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof in 1887, was founded with the intention of facilitating global peace and unification. Due to the mission and philosophy of the language, known as Esperantism, Zamenhof’s invention gained popularity among political reformers and communities facing religious discrimination. Aiming to resolve conflict through common language, Esperantism inspired hope amidst the increasingly oppressive social and political climate present in Eastern Europe and Russia during the early 1900’s. This paper explores the contributing factors to Esperanto’s decline, and the impact of internal conflict, political affiliation, and religious significance on efforts to …