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2007

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Pedagogical Fusion, David Maurice White Jan 2007

Pedagogical Fusion, David Maurice White

Theses and Dissertations

During the five semesters that I have been at VCU I have learned a great deal from the courses that I have been enrolled in but I have learned the most through my experiences as a Teaching Assistant. These experiences have been so valuable because of the wide range of subject areas in which I have been involved and the diverse instructors that I have assisted. Although I hesitate to use the word "problem" I feel that there is a tendency in teacher training for a student to latch onto one professor and model their teaching practices after that one …

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I Built This City, Joshua Isaiah Rodenberg Jan 2007

I Built This City, Joshua Isaiah Rodenberg

Theses and Dissertations

I have been overwhelmed by curiosity, a curiosity that is keeping my desire to make valid. I have an endless infatuation with growth and constructing. My aim is to juxtapose an academic and a "rudimentary" approach that will set up contradictions in which traditional woodworkers may find irreverence towards.

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The Constant Wife Revisited: The Progression Of A Play From Conception To The Final Stage Production, Kimberly H. Parkin Jan 2007

The Constant Wife Revisited: The Progression Of A Play From Conception To The Final Stage Production, Kimberly H. Parkin

Theses and Dissertations

For my thesis, I recorded the progression of my show, The Constant Wife. I discuss the conception of my original scene design as well as the changes that occurred while working with the director and other designers. Throughout the thesis, I address the problems that arose during the pre-production, what I did to rectify those situations, and what I might have done differently if given the opportunity. I have divided the thesis into the following sections – Process of the Pre-Production, Execution of the Design and Evaluation of the Design. The final section of my thesis details what I learned …

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Indeterminate Lines, Hyun Kyung Yoon Jan 2007

Indeterminate Lines, Hyun Kyung Yoon

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis work is about flow. Indeterminate lines symbolize the developing plant form and explore the perception of space by experimenting with the subject's proportion and shape. Movement is also a vital factor of space, a notion found in the early forms of cursive script (grass script) of Far Eastern calligraphy. My individual plant pieces work as dots and lines of cursive script. An installation's ceramic pieces illustrate similar flow and movement when viewed as a whole.

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Gentleman Johnny Plays War: John Burgoyne And The Blockade Of Boston, Catherine Ann Peckinpaugh Vrtis Jan 2007

Gentleman Johnny Plays War: John Burgoyne And The Blockade Of Boston, Catherine Ann Peckinpaugh Vrtis

Theses and Dissertations

John Burgoyne, a British general during the American Revolution, is best known for his defeat by the Continental Army at Saratoga. In addition to serving as a general,Burgoyne was a playwright. While in Boston during the blockade following the Battle ofBunker Hill Burgoyne combined his interests, writing a satire of the war. The Blockade of Boston, Burgoyne's play, was first presented as an afterpiece to a production of The Busybody on January 8, 1776 (Silverman 292).Accounts of the performance differ in detail, but the central event is consistent: during the performance a soldier walked out on stage and announced that …

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Portable Space And Interior Design For Dentists, Yu-Ping Liu Jan 2007

Portable Space And Interior Design For Dentists, Yu-Ping Liu

Theses and Dissertations

In the United State today, many people do not have access to adequate dental treatment, while tooth decay is the single most common chronic childhood disease-five times more common than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever. At the same time, studies show that 80% of dental illness takes place in 25% of the population, which is comprised mostly of lower socioeconomic groups. A study undertaken by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2000, concludes that poor children suffer five times as much tooth decay as their more affluent peers. Furthermore, in poor children with tooth …

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Professional Theatre In The Academic Theatre Setting, Hartwell Keith Hight Jan 2007

Professional Theatre In The Academic Theatre Setting, Hartwell Keith Hight

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to discuss the dynamic of continued employment for the theatre instructor. Surprisingly, very little is written about continued employment for the theatre instructor. In the present study, the terms instructor and teacher carry the same meaning. Because theatre builds successful human beings, a theatre program must allows students, graduates, and other interested candidates the opportunity to work closely with experienced professionals in their field.

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"Shut It Down, Open It Up": A History Of The New Left At The University Of Virginia, Charlottesville, Thomas M. Hanna Jan 2007

"Shut It Down, Open It Up": A History Of The New Left At The University Of Virginia, Charlottesville, Thomas M. Hanna

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a history of social and political activism in Charlottesville during the 1960s focusing on new left student organizing at the University of Virginia. It is a work of social history that establishes a community that has been generally ignored in traditional histories of the new left as one of the most influential centers of new left activism in the South and asserts that this prominence was due to years of activism by local liberals, civil rights advocates, and students during the city's unique experiences on the front lines of the southern desegregation, civil rights, and anti-war struggles. …

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Confrontation: Endeavors In Futility, Gabriel Lashley Barlow Jan 2007

Confrontation: Endeavors In Futility, Gabriel Lashley Barlow

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is intended to compliment and describe the body of work that has been produced within the time I have been enrolled as a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University's Photography and Film department. The paper will include information on both my MFA candidacy presentation as well as a description of the evolution of my artistic endeavors. The main focus of this document is to discuss my formal examination of performance based video works pertaining to the absurd as described by Camus, and later expressed by Samuel Beckett, also the role of the masculine body's physicality within ritualized actions.

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Blogging In The Writing Classroom: A Move Toward Dialogue, Design, And Citizenship, Meghan E. Foster Jan 2007

Blogging In The Writing Classroom: A Move Toward Dialogue, Design, And Citizenship, Meghan E. Foster

Theses and Dissertations

A bridge connecting student's new multi-modal abilities and schooling can be built. Students choose between school and other activities outside of the classroom walls (and sometimes even inside the classroom) and schoolwork seems to be losing ground in the battle of spare time more and more. Students could benefit from an electronic space that incorporates their media know-how, their studies, and others in the classroom. Blogs, or weblogs, provide just that type of space by relying on the user's insightful writing and creativity to retain a dynamic position in the Internet blogging community. Blogs have the ability to better the …

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In Search Of The Ooey Gooey Good, Lauren Ashley Clay Jan 2007

In Search Of The Ooey Gooey Good, Lauren Ashley Clay

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores ideas of everydayness, the mundane, and the repetitive emptiness of consumer culture. It looks at the malaise that plagues everyday life and examines several attempts throughout history to break from its grips which revolve around a search for a more ideal state. This research includes utopias of modernism, the transcendental, the communal living of Shakers and Early Christians, ascetic monks and The Desert Fathers. These ideas have shaped my studio practice as I construct installations based on worlds which allude to the eternal, the otherworldly, and the fragility of our physical world when compared to more eternal …

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Reviving The Seventies, Aimee M. Huber Jan 2007

Reviving The Seventies, Aimee M. Huber

Theses and Dissertations

Design Analysis of the VCU Mainstage production process for The Nerd The comedic farce, The Nerd, written by Larry Shue and directed by Drew Fracher here at VCU, is the production I intend to analyze in terms of the scenic design process. From the initial conception of ideas, to their development through collaboration, to completion of construction, and ultimately, opening night, I plan to breakout my process step by step. I'd like to communicate the transformation of a literary play into the three-dimensional world in my mind.I. Introduction A. Overall description of process as it applies to this particular interaction …

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Within And Without, Shane Robert Rocheleau Jan 2007

Within And Without, Shane Robert Rocheleau

Theses and Dissertations

Within and Without is a document which illustrates my personal and artistic research into the nature of the postmodern conception of the self: that self is unfixed, multiple, and reactive. It explicates my myriad and explorative approaches to photographic portraiture. Furthermore, it indicates many of my theoretical and artistic references and how I have applied my lessons both as an artist and a researcher to maximize the effect of my concepts within the formal and aesthetic confines of my photographs. Finally, this document explains my own beliefs concerning the nature of self and how a synthesis of my influences has …

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Renewing Manchester: A Supportive Life Skills Center For Manchester's Most Underprivileged Residents, Jennifer Lynne Hamilton Jan 2007

Renewing Manchester: A Supportive Life Skills Center For Manchester's Most Underprivileged Residents, Jennifer Lynne Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations

In America today, many people have fallen into sub-standard housing situations. Domestic violence, drug abuse, and lack of educational and employment opportunities are a few of the myriad reasons for this. On average the number of homeless people in the greater Richmond area is 5,200 individuals.1 These are people specifically in need of a re-integration into society.This thesis examines the role that the built environment can play in this process, by providing a sustainable, affordable and flexible site for a program that encourages people to rise above their current state by "recycling" them into better more productive citizens. The intent …

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A Fugitive Sea, Marian Brunn Smith Jan 2007

A Fugitive Sea, Marian Brunn Smith

Theses and Dissertations

I make images that are fragmented like ominous dreams. Described with sensuous marks of paint, they demand intimacy but reveal vulnerability as they threaten to break apart before the eyes. This thesis examines my journey over the past two years at VCU and describes my artistic beliefs and visions.

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Ws 1207 Community Workshops, Katherine M. Thomas Jan 2007

Ws 1207 Community Workshops, Katherine M. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

For my thesis, I have chosen to adapt the abandoned office/warehouse at 1207 North Boulevard for use as a community workshop for all of Richmond's urban neighborhoods. The community workshop's focus will be to provide open workshops, classes, a resource library and design consultation to low and middle income homeowners, affordable housing properties, and community parks. In addition, the center welcomes all of Richmond city residents to join and partake in 1207's resources in order to grow a multi-faceted community focused on improving the lives of all of Richmond City's residents. The center will function as a gathering space for …

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Our Hiding Places, Rashaid Farida Al Jan 2007

Our Hiding Places, Rashaid Farida Al

Theses and Dissertations

I am creating this body of work based on how we as a society interact and utilize our every day valuable possessions. These would consist of personal items such as our keys, wallets and purses, As well as how well we are able to hide them from strangers, insofar as to where we personally choose to place them. It's interesting how many of us can be lackadaisical in this regard and as a result, many times don't carefully think about where we choose to place our valuable objects, until we lose them or worse, have them stolen.I am exploring the …

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Invisible Green, Amanda Sauer Jan 2007

Invisible Green, Amanda Sauer

Theses and Dissertations

How is nature conceived today, a generation into the environmental movement? Many contemporary artists grapple with how to reconcile our inheritance of both a precarious natural world and the culture that created it. My work investigates the subtle intricacies of our relationship with nature. I use photography to develop a way of seeing that points to the often-unnoticed nature in front of us. In particular, my work recognizes and re-imagines nature's deep connections in the context of our ecologically changed world.

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Cradle To Cage: Confronting The Premature Institutionalization Of The Children Of The Incarcerated, Jen Fell Jan 2007

Cradle To Cage: Confronting The Premature Institutionalization Of The Children Of The Incarcerated, Jen Fell

Theses and Dissertations

American prisons are swollen and distended. Over 2 million Americans sit in jail or prison today. About 2/3 of the incarcerated are parents. They parent approximately 2 million children in America today who are separated from mom or dad because of incarceration. Their children suffer from poverty, inconsistency in caregivers, separation from siblings, reduced opportunity to health and education and increased risk for substance abuse, alcoholism and incarceration themselves. Children of the incarcerated are seven times more likely than their peers to become incarcerated as adults.Many of these children are unable to visit their parents. Over half the mothers in …

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Beyond The Threshold: Allusions To The ÒrìsÀ In Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series, Latricia M. January Jan 2007

Beyond The Threshold: Allusions To The ÒrìsÀ In Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series, Latricia M. January

Theses and Dissertations

The Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) created the Silueta Series during the 1970s and ‘80s. It consists of earth-body works in situ featuring the silhouette of the artist's body fashioned from mud, plants, rocks, gunpowder and other materials. Underlying the creation of the Silueta Series is Mendieta's belief that the elements are sentient and powerful beings. This perception is particularly strong in the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria, a creolized form of the Òrìsà tradition of the Yoruba of West Africa introduced to the Americas during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. While scholars have noted Mendieta's incorporation of Santeria in her art, a …

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Walk 14 Blocks, Bryant Mark Dameron Jan 2007

Walk 14 Blocks, Bryant Mark Dameron

Theses and Dissertations

Walk 14 Blocks is a document that describes my two-year investigation of simulation in everyday life. It describes how I examine both simulated places and the tools of simulation. I explain the key elements relating my work to simulation; experience, language, and the video monitor. I trace how I have utilized these elements in several works that led to my thesis exhibition titled Evidence.

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Lucidity, Sarah Rebekah Byrd Mizer Jan 2007

Lucidity, Sarah Rebekah Byrd Mizer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on space, the in-between-ness that exists amidst mental and physical experience. Pith explains personal attachments and rooting systems. The thesis continues with Blessing, narrating love then loss, and finishes with a recipe for making a tomato sandwich. Blessing is followed by Materialize, a collective view of cyclical learning and meandering paths. Finally, the paper concludes with a quirky Women and Swarovski encrusted skulls, which matter-of-factly lists artists (all of whom happen to be women) whose works I find particularly compelling; and also notes on general trends in art I find interesting in a much less obvious manner. …

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The Art Of Collaboration In The Classroom: Team Teaching Performance, Julie K. Phillips Jan 2007

The Art Of Collaboration In The Classroom: Team Teaching Performance, Julie K. Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

The Art of Collaboration in the Classroom: Team Teaching Performance is a co-written masters thesis which records our research in the field of team teaching as it relates to theatre education at the university level. It is our intent that this text be used as a tool for helping universities and teachers decide if a collaborative teaching model is right for their courses. A portion of the text is research-based, examining the scholarly writings which have preceded our work. In Chapter 1, we compiled a set of definitions, in the hopes of codifying the language used within this document as …

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Seeing It Straight, Heather Harvey Jan 2007

Seeing It Straight, Heather Harvey

Theses and Dissertations

This Master of Fine Arts thesis is divided into four main sections:FAITH and DISBELIEF: In which I reckon with the implications of faith versus rationality as a secular nontheistic artist. IDEAS: The central locus of my work is a place of indeterminacy between what is known/familiar and what is just one step outside of that. This has nothing to do with mysticism, science fiction, or anything else unmoored from established fact. Section also touches on the particular vantage of a female artist with working class roots.THE WORK: Selection of work made during graduate school, and the the guiding thoughts behind …

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Breadfruit Fantasies, Matthew Steven Spahr Jan 2007

Breadfruit Fantasies, Matthew Steven Spahr

Theses and Dissertations

Breadfuit is a strange thing. It's a starchy potato-like sustenance not particularly noteworthy by most accounts. But it's history is amazing, an epic journey. Relocated from the Samoan island of Upalu to Oahu, Hawaii in the 12th Century as well as transplanted from Tahiti, as an economical food source for slaves in the West Indies in 1780 the lowly breadfruit has been held in the hands of Fletcher Christian, Captain Bligh, James Cook, King Kamehameha and innumerous other nameless individuals including Matt Spahr. This fruit contains the weight of colonialism, capitalism, exploration and tropical fantasy under its skin. The collision …

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Life In An Occupied City: Women In Winchester, Virginia During The Civil War, Laura Jane Ping Jan 2007

Life In An Occupied City: Women In Winchester, Virginia During The Civil War, Laura Jane Ping

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the homefront experience of middle class, white women living in Winchester, Virginia during the Civil War. The experience of women in Winchester was unique because of Winchester's proximity to both the Union and Confederate capitals. Although the majority of Winchester's women were Confederate supporters a significant minority of the population remained loyal to the Union. Winchester citizens' divided status was further complicated by numerous occupations of the town by both armies. This thesis argues that in order to cope with wartime hardships women's concepts of patriotism changed as homefront morale waned. While early in the war women's …

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Ethical History: A Contradiction Of Terms?, Albert Winkler Jan 2007

Ethical History: A Contradiction Of Terms?, Albert Winkler

Faculty Publications

It is curious that as many historians struggle to make their discipline meaningful to students, these instructors often rob the subject matter of its most fascinating and important aspects. Among the biggest failings of the teaching history is a strong tendency to take humanity out of one of the most humane of all studies. In short, rather than giving students examples of moral accomplishments, history does the exact opposite. Many historians continually say that history does not teach lessons. Even esteemed scholars have indicated that history might teach lessons, but those lessons are unclear at best. In this article, rather …

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The Surprise Exam Paradox: Disentangling Two Reductios, John N. Williams Jan 2007

The Surprise Exam Paradox: Disentangling Two Reductios, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

One tradition of solving the surprise exam paradox, started by Robert Binkley and continued by Doris Olin, Roy Sorensen and Jelle Gerbrandy, construes surprise epistemically and relies upon the oddity of propositions akin to G. E. Moore's paradoxical 'p and I don't believe that p.' Here I argue for an analysis that evolves from Olin's. My analysis is different from hers or indeed any of those in the tradition because it explicitly recognizes that there are two distinct reductios at work in the student's paradoxical argument against the teacher. The weak reductio is easy to fault. Its invalidity determines the …

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Moore's Paradoxes And Iterated Belief, John N. Williams Jan 2007

Moore's Paradoxes And Iterated Belief, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

I give an account of the absurdity of Moorean beliefs of the omissive form (om) p and I don’t believe that p, and the commissive form (com) p and I believe that not-p, from which I extract a definition of Moorean absurdity. I then argue for an account of the absurdity of Moorean assertion. After neutralizing two objections to my whole account, I show that Roy Sorensen’s own account of the absurdity of his ‘iterated cases’ (om1) p and I don’t believe that I believe that p, and (com1) p and I believe that I believe that not-p, is unsatisfactory. …

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Merleau-Ponty On Human Motility And Libet's Paradox, T. Brian Mooney, Damien Norris Jan 2007

Merleau-Ponty On Human Motility And Libet's Paradox, T. Brian Mooney, Damien Norris

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 1979, neuroscientists Libet, Wright, Feinstein and Pearl introduced the delay-and-antedating hypothesis/paradox based on the results of an on-going series of experiments dating back to 1964 that measured the neural adequacy [brain wave activity] of conscious sensory experience. What is fascinating about the results of this experiment is the implication, especially when considered in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s notions of intentionality and the pre-reflective life of human motility, that the body, and hence not solely the mind, is a thinking thing. The experiments and conclusions of Libet et al. have attracted considerable academic attention and have been used in the …

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