Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Erik S. Tjernberg : Augustana Alum Of 1886, Maame Araba Vander-Pallen, Sosena Gebremariam, Drew Davis

Celebration of Learning

Erik S. Tjernberg graduated from Augustana in 1886. We will discuss his career as a pastor, his family history and his genealogy. We will include information about life in Augustana in the 1880s. We will use sources from Augustana's special collections and original Swedish Parish records.

John Fredrik Seedoff: Augustana Alum Of 1886, Anthony M. Cozzi, Jaden W. Dellitt, Luke J. Johnson

Celebration of Learning

John Seedoff was a graduate from Augustana in 1886. We will discuss his career as a pastor, his family history, and his genealogy. We will include when he arrived at Augustana, and what he did as a student here.

Carl Erik Elving: Augustana Alum Of 1886, Adrian Sowicz, Evan Webber, Emma Gannaway

Celebration of Learning

Carl Erik Elving was a graduate from Augustana in 1886. We will discuss his career as a pastor, his family history and his genealogy. We use historic records from Augustana's Special Collections and Swedish parish records.

Peter Olof Hansen; Augustana Alum Of 1886, Elizabeth J. Merrill, Abby R. Redlinger, Joshua R. Anderson

Celebration of Learning

Peter Olof Hansen graduated from Augustana in June of 1886. We have researched his immigration to the United States, his family history and genealogy, and his career as a pastor after Augustana.

Peter Mathias Lindberg: Augustana Alum Of 1886, Nicole Kunz, Anna Matava, Rebecca Casad

Celebration of Learning

Peter Mathias Lindberg graduated from Augustana in 1886. We will discuss his career as a pastor, his family history, and his genealogy.

Slashing Signs: Mary Richardson's Attack On "The Rokeby Venus" As Semioclasm, Robyn Epstein

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

When art is the victim of violence the object itself isn’t the only thing under attack. I see acts of violence against art as a two-step process: an attack on the physical art object and an attack on the icon, symbol, or sign it represents. This paper examines the 1914 slashing of the Diego Velàzquez painting The Rokeby Venus (1647-51) by British suffragette Mary Richardson. Using this attack as a case study, I argue that the event is semioclastic, as opposed to iconoclastic or vandalistic, meaning that it is an attack on the painting as a sign and is therefore …

“The Living Nightmare: Deathlok And African American Slavery In Contemporary Society”, Christian Organ

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

Deathlok #1-4 (July-Oct. 1990), produced by an African-American team lead by writer Dwayne McDuffie, features the first iteration of a black man, Michael Collins, being Deathlok, a character who had previously seen multiple rewrites through the lens of different white men. Along with the skin of the character changing, the tone of the comic changes to highlight the subservient, slave like, nature of Collins’ relationship to corporate America. While other research has correctly observed the prominent parallels to slavery in Collins relationship to corporate America after his transformation into the killing machine Deathlok, this paper asserts that Collins’ slavery and …

Move: Philadelphia's Forgotten Bombing, Charles Abraham

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

On May 13^th, 1985, the city of Philadelphia erupted into flames. Under the orders of Mayor Wilson Goode, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb onto the rowhouse containing MOVE, a cult-like organization, on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia causing a fire which killed eleven people, including five children, and burning down sixty-one other houses. But instead of the bombing ending his political career, Mayor Goode was reelected, and the bombing slipped into obscurity outside of Philadelphia. This major event in the history of Philadelphia was forgotten because of the lack of connection between the city and the …

Love, Sex, And Marriage In Ibn Battuta's Travels, Rachel Singer

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

Abu ‘Abdallah ibn Battuta was a Muslim legal scholar who traveled nearly 73,000 miles in the mid-fourteenth century and wrote a popular rihla, or travel diary, of his experiences. The rihla was a public and impersonal genre that traditionally contained little, if any, biographical material about its author. However, Ibn Battuta’s rihla includes detailed narratives about its author’s marriages, concubines, and sexual exploits. Although discussion of these themes is virtually unseen in other contemporary rihlas, few historians have discussed why Ibn Battuta breaks tradition to include this material.

This paper argues that Ibn Battuta describes his marital and …

From Complaisance To Collaboration: Analyzing Citizens’ Motives Near Concentration And Extermination Camps During The Holocaust, Jordan Green

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

The role of local peoples near concentration camps, extermination camps, and mass shooting sites in Europe during World War II is a widely unexplored area of the Holocaust. Although locals both knew of these sites and their purposes, many chose to be complaisant while others collaborated with the Nazi regime. Therefore, non-persecuted Germans and occupied peoples near the camps played a substantial role in the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. These civilians’ actions, or lack thereof, in response to the crimes against humanity before their eyes were driven by three main factors: economic gain, antisemitism, and fear. Regardless of motive, …

How Dumbledore Saved Europe: A Comparison Of Fascist Rhetoric In European History And In The Harry Potter Franchises, Emma Pederson, Natalie Rice

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

In recent years, the popularity of the Harry Potter franchise has seen a resurgence with the release of the first two Fantastic Beasts films and accompanying screenplays. As parallels have been drawn between Voldemort’s Death Eaters and Nazis, it is time to examine the relationship between Gellert Grindelwald and real-life fascists. Through such a comparison, we can see common rhetoric in both real and fictional fascism.

Gellert Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore have not only a Nazi-like goal of racial purity, but employ Nazi-like language to defend themselves. Related fascist rhetoric is woven throughout other European history, particularly in the dialogues …

Dissent And Disruption: How Artists Redefine Museum Spaces And Audience Engagement, Paige E. Sellars

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

This paper delves into the concept of artistic creation from engagement with museum collections and the intimate connection between museum curation the post-modern and contemporary artist. I discuss the work of Nedko Solakov at the Frans Hals Museum, Jenny Holzer and Donald Judd at the Museum of Applied Art in Vienna, and Fred Wilson at the Baltimore Historical Society. These artists intentionally reengaged with art and museum objects via deliberate installations and clever interventions to broaden the narrative and in some instances, contest the hierarchical dissemination of knowledge provided by the curator and the museum. Museums of the past espoused …

Blood, Meth, And Tears: The Super Soldiers Of World War Ii, Nicholas Racine

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

Day and night, soldiers in World War II were physically and mentally strained by fatigue and psychiatric distress. Consequently, many soldiers were left exhausted and demoralized. War efforts hinged on soldiers succeeding in missions, thus a fast-acting solution was needed. Development of the psychostimulant drugs Benzedrine and Pervitin in the 1920s and 30s spurred enthusiasm among scientists, the media, the public, and various governments. Potent and powerful, these drugs exert effects that promote wakefulness, elevated mood, and improved field performance. Governments quickly began researching use of stimulants to improve their war efforts. By the early 40s, both drugs had millions …

Retelling The Classics: The Harlem Renaissance, Biblical Stories, And Black Peoplehood, Mina Magalhaes

Celebration of Learning

Applying social identity theory to the process of creating peoplehood can illustrate the positive power that literature has in uplifting marginalized communities by showing their worth. James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, both composed during the Harlem Renaissance, offer one way to create Black peoplehood by creating depictions of God’s love for His Black people through the repurposing of biblical stories. Through the implementation of social identity theory to Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Johnson’s “The Creation,” I argue that these two authors addressed the need among African Americans to …

Motivation And Confidence: More Than Cheerleading, Dr. Paul Olsen

Celebration of Learning

What empowers self-confidence in athletic performance? Most of us know the psychology and language of motivation in positive reinforcement: "way to go"; "good work"; "I believe in you" are some examples. It's a sort of "cheerleading." But confidence goes much deeper into the realm of how the athlete understands the "existential self" in the world. Is he more than a point getter? Is she more than "all-conference" or a "record holder"?

Literature (novels, poetry, essays) often demonstrates that the depth of confidence is found in demonstrative love. If one feels worthy of love, and the love is demonstrated, fear of …

Analyzing Sentiment In Twitter Tweets As A Basis For Music Creation, Jeff Lupker

Western Research Forum

Analysis of the sentiment associated with different words has long been used as a pre-compositional tool by various composers through their use of the words of poets, lyricists or writers in creating their music. While the interpretation of any given word and its relation to music might have loosely followed some implicitly accepted notions amongst composers, there was no accurate method for qualifying each word according to its sentiment in standard usage. More recent research measuring individuals’ evaluation of text has led to a quantitative ranking of words in terms of properties concerning sentiment. My current research is an attempt …

Beware The Cat In The Hat: How Children's Literature Is The Modern Form Of Segregation, Lucy Kebler

Celebration of Learning

Every person grows up exposed to children’s literature. Unfortunately, much of the children’s literature that is published is racially discriminatory, historically inaccurate, blatantly offensive, or pure propaganda. The research for this presentation began in Augustana College’s library and has transitioned to a much broader space: The Saint Louis Country Library. Through this research, it has become obvious that diverse literature is hard to find and is often marketed as only readable for those in the minority race depicted. Many libraries mark literature that contains African Americans, as to help “guide” readers in their selections. Books labeled in this way make …

Feminism And Faith: How Women Find Empowerment In The Roman Catholic Church, Amanda Schar

Celebration of Learning

This project examines the relationship between feminism and Catholicism, focusing on whether or not women feel empowered by the Roman Catholic Church. Female members of the Augustana community were surveyed and asked to share their own experiences with their Catholic faith.

Themes discussed include the decision to stay in the Church versus the decision to leave, the importance of Catholicism as a cultural identity, and the multitude of ways women have found to empower themselves within the existing Church structure.

Public Libraries As Engines Of Democracy: A Research And Pedagogical Case Study On Design For Re-Entry, Lara Penin, Eduardo Staszowski, John Bruce, Barbara Adams, Mariana Amatulllo

Nordes Conference Series

Founded with principles of equity, freedom and access, public libraries have always served as a cornerstone of democratic values and civic participation. In the context of 21st century transformational forces of globalization and digitization, libraries are also evolving their role from repositories of information and learning, to critical contributors of a culture of care in their communities. In this paper, we present insights from an ongoing collaboration with the Brooklyn Public Library that focused on the library’s current re-entry services directed to formerly incarcerated patrons and their families. Drawing from participatory design and visual ethnographic approaches to inquiry, this study …

Empathy In A Technology-Driven Design Process: Designing For Users Without A Voice Of Their Own, Elina Ilen, Camilla Groth, Markus Ahola, Kirsi Niinimäki

Nordes Conference Series

Smart textiles are often developed in sports- oriented contexts through technology-driven processes. In the medical context, practitioners themselves also invent and develop technological aids in response to needs that emerge in practice. In these cases, novel technology may be the first driver for design to secure functionality and reliability, but our study shows that these processes benefit from human-centric and empathic design approaches. The project develops smart textiles for infants with medical adversities, such as preterm birth, neonatal infections, or birth asphyxia, collaboratively with medical researchers. Our pilot research illuminates the need to use the interest group’s empathic understanding as …

How Can We Come To Care In And Through Design?, Li Jönsson, Ann Light, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, Mathilda Tham

Nordes Conference Series

On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site …

What Matters When Turning Utopias Into Material, Philip Hector, Mikko Jalas

Nordes Conference Series

With an increasing number of open laboratories for cultural and technical experimentation in place, questions arise regarding how and with what effects they come about, what they mean to those who partake and how they organize themselves in order to satisfy those involved. Recognizing the way that these spaces reach of alternative technologies and alternative ways of being we conceptualize them as materialized utopias, which are fragile socio-material arrangements. Rather than articulating grand utopian or ecotopian alternative societies, we look at materialized utopias as the gradual tweaking, probing and fixing of things. We elaborate on this with the study of …

Navigating Care In Social Design: A Provisional Model, Eva Knutz, Thomas Markussen, Tau Lenskjold

Nordes Conference Series

The aim of this paper is to show how the value of social design lies in the approach’s ability as a caring practice to foster change for vulnerable groups in society. Yet, to achieve such change, social designers must have a navigational tool that allows them to identify and steer through some of the value conflicts that are typically involved in public service care provision. To substantiate this claim, we rapport from two recent social design projects in the public sector dealing with care within criminal justice and healthcare. Building on these two projects we propose a provisional model for …

Caring For Diversity In Co-Design With Young Immigrants, Dagny Stuedahl, Henry Mainsah

Nordes Conference Series

This exploratory paper will ask questions about how we as co-designers and humanitarian designers engage with the outside and will especially be concerned with dialogues, interaction and knowledge production with young immigrants in co-design processes. We also will ask how we connect the questions arising from the histories of societies that participants bring into the co-design situation, how our practice and co-design understanding can handle cases where we cannot really grasp the complexity when religious, ethnical, personal and political experiences build the ground for collaborations. This becomes especially important in situations where complexity may ruin the co-design process and the …

Design For Sustainable Entangled Human-Nature Systems, Emīlija Veselova

Nordes Conference Series

Humanity must rapidly transition towards sustainable futures. Reaching planetary sustainability requires care for nature and radical transformation of human-made systems. Human and natural systems co-exist in extensive, complex, multi-layered entanglement. Design for sustainability and, ultimately, all design, will need to be transformed towards design for sustainable entangled human-nature systems. This paper outlines six developments to support this transformation. It suggests that all design projects must (1) be viewed as interlinked to human-nature systems and their sustainability, (2) include natural systems and entities as key stakeholders, and (3) include transdisciplinary perspectives on the entangled systems and sustainability. Moreover, design could adopt …

A Tangible Understanding Of Chronic Pain, Christina Fyhn, Jacob Buur

Nordes Conference Series

Pain is essential as a warning system for the human body. For some people, however, pain develops into a chronic condition. What makes it particularly difficult to care for patients with chronic pain conditions is that pain is an individual, subjective feeling. Traditionally, medical experts recommend that patients express their pain experience on a numeric scale or with standardised terms, but patients find this too simplistic to convey their condition. Also, the challenge that pain is a social issue, affecting patients’ work and social life severely, urged us to look for alternative ways in which people might communicate their pain …

Does It Spark Joy?, Connie Svabo

Nordes Conference Series

The question is asked by Japanese clutter-clearing expert Marie Kondo in a Netflix program, where she helps North Americans deal with their many things and where she also teaches participants to fold their clothes in organized ways. The question ‘Does it spark joy?’ in my text is used in an intellectual act of folding together thoughts from situational aesthetics, vital materialism and a philosophy of mingled bodies - into a relational and processual ontology, which overcomes the subject-object divide, highlights the transcendence of self and promotes receptivity to the dynamic and open-ended character of the world. The mundanity of clothing …

Towards Sustainable Textile Materials: Potential Pathways And Dialogues Between Disciplines, Pirjo Kääriäinen, Kirsi Niinimäki

Nordes Conference Series

The need to take care of our material environment has become urgent. New types of scientific collaboration have emerged, and designers are being invited to collaborate with top-level scientists. Several examples have shown that the creativity of designers can be brought into different kinds of scientific collaboration to enhance existing approaches and ways of working. This study investigates various design-science collaborations in the context of material research, all aiming to create sustainable textile materials. The empirical basis of this study consists of five material research and development projects. Our data identified five different approaches to materials; Transforming, Reinventing, Recycling, Biofabrication …

Who Cares? …But First, What Is The Who, And What Is Care?, Ian Coxon, Craig Bremner

Nordes Conference Series

What is Care? A word, a concept or a myth? In this paper we explore some of the key formulations of Care that should be considered if Care is to become instrumentalised in design. Primarily, we revisit that meaning of Care which could be of most value to design. After all, Care, at least to some, is the essence of what it means to be human. The goal of this paper is to prompt reconsideration of the many differing notions of Care and to stop for a moment to investigate one formulation of Care that contributes a way of clearly …

Waste, So What? A Reflection On Waste And The Role Of Designers In A Circular Economy, Holly Mcquillan

Nordes Conference Series

This paper discusses research currently being undertaken which addresses the interrelated volume, value and cost of waste and the responsibility designers have in its creation. The paper begins by outlining the contemporary waste problem (in the fashion industry). Then utilising observations made during recent field tests – where waste reduction and elimination strategies were applied to existing designs – the impact that explicit and implicit design hierarchies and complexity have on waste minimisation attempts are discussed. Questions such as: is waste a problem in the context of proposed Circular Economy models? After all, if we have a Circular Economy, then …