Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"I Have A Scream" Enunciaciones Disidentes En Torno Al 15m En España, José Del Valle, Natalia Castro Picón

Publications and Research

En este artículo analizaremos el primer Grito Mudo, gesto colectivo de desobediencia realizado por el movimiento de los Indignados en la Puerta del Sol de Madrid en mayo de 2011, como escena glotopolítica. En esta acción, que consistió en que la multitud auto-convocada guardase un minuto de silencio justo antes de la medianoche, cuando entraba en vigor la sentencia que ilegalizaba la concentración, convergen diferentes formas discursivas (que incluyen el lenguaje, el silencio y los cuerpos) que ponen en conflicto los regímenes normativos que limitan el sentido de la participación política y los límites de la democracia. Este tipo de …

Sex(Edness) In The City: Reimagining Our Urban Spaces With Abraham Akkerman, Duane Allyson U. Gravador-Pancho

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

In this essay, Duane Allyson U. Gravador-Pancho foregrounds the gendered origins of the cities that we build. Taking her cue from Akkerman, Gravador-Pancho outlines the predominantly masculine characteristics of most cities, which coincides with the privileging of Western rationality that emphasizes rigidity and predictability in urban design. Such a predominantly masculine conception and design of the city comes at the cost of setting aside characteristics that are feminine, such as the elements of surprise and eroticism. But how would a city look like if we allowed the feminine to also come into play? “In the context of urban planning and …

Cigar City, Rene T. Rodriguez

LMU Theses and Dissertations

A young woman disconnected from her roots tries to save her family’s cigar factory from a greedy developer planning to gentrify their Latin neighborhood.

Ecocriticism And The Trans-Corporeal : Agency, Language, And Vibrant Matter Of The Environmental “Other” In J.R.R Tolkien’S Middle Earth, Garrett Van Curen

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper explores J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth in light of the material ecocritical notions of trans-corporeality, vibrant matter, and intrinsic language. Namely, this paper asserts that Tolkien’s treatment of plants, specifically trees, deconstructs an otherwise unflattering and over-simplified binary that separates the natural world from the human, while highlighting important nuances sometimes overlooked in Tolkien’s natural world. The two sides of this affixed binary, as this paper asserts, are intermeshed in Tolkien’s conception of Middle Earth in what Stacy Alaimo terms a “trans-corporeal” process. The humanoid and nonhumanoid beings of Tolkien’s world are constantly engaged in a process of mixing …

Let’S Talk About Native American Histories At The Alamo, Gabriel Cohen

Capstone Projects

This exhibit is intended to address an issue that is being hotly debated in San Antonio. The Alamo is one of the most recognizable monuments in the United States and has nurtured a rich and multicultural history for the last three centuries. Despite this diversity, the site only memorializes European American histories. Exhibit panels and programming at the Alamo encourage visitors to learn of the Anglo-Texan experience in Texas, provide a cursory and almost vilifying portrayal of Mexico and demonstrate a neglect for Texas Indian history. While working as a guide at the Alamo, I rationalized how to go about …

Social Nonsense: Creative Diversions For Two Or More Players - Anytime, Anywhere, Doug Shaw

Faculty Book Gallery

This amusing book by Dr. Doug Shaw (American) is the finest in our collection. It consists of a collection of whimsical pastimes that encourage the creation of stories and art. -- provided by the publisher.

The Dynamic Of Unity Writing, Virginia Gilroy

Department of Writing and Communication Theses

The Dynamic Unity of Writing (DUW) offers an object oriented theory of writing, based on the idea of a dynamic unit, which is the simultaneous manifestation of distinct thought processes acting as one. This thesis demonstrates how writing, while grounded in consciousness, fulfills the four characteristics of a dynamic unit: that in its unity of action, writing is a basic level structure; that writing is more than the sum of its parts; that it is observable only in a context of operation; and, that writing exhibits a pattern of correlation across elements. This theory blends the four elements of the …

Occasionally, He’S A Somniaticidal Maniac: Stephen Graham Jones Reclaims Home And History, Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Environmental activism and preservation of the land, acknowledgement of our shared responsibilities to the planet, to unci maka, to Mother Earth, to our home; these are obligations of love we as human beings embrace with devoted regularity. But what happens when we look at stories that might destroy the world entirely, might remold, reshape, reclaim and remake (or perhaps even “rename” in a restorative move) our histories and homes? What is the reception for works that defy the expectations of devotion to the environment in Native American literature one genre at a time? That address historic erasure by reshaping the …

Reorientations; Or, An Indigenous Feminist Reflection On The Anthropocene, Kali Simmons

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Destruction of homelands. Loss of kinship species. Exposure to deadly contaminants. Mass extinction. Transformed lifeways. In the face of these radical changes, a question lingers: How long will life be possible? Recently the academy has also felt the urgency of these environmental problems and proposed to address them within the framework of the term "the Anthropocene." Indigenous studies has offered various responses to the Anthropocene, some arguing that it has utility in framing the violence of colonialism and others critiquing the limitations and assumptions behind the "anthropos" …

Book Review Of, Seeing Fans: Representations Of Fandom In Media And Popular Culture, Edited By Lucy Bennett And Paul Booth, Jungmin Kwon

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

Review of Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth. Seeing fans: Representations of fandom in media and popular culture. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover ₤110 (336p) ISBN 978-1-5013-1845-0; paperback ₤28.99 ISBN 978-1-5013-3954-7; EPUB/MOBI ₤31.30 ISBN 978-1-5013-1846-7; PDF ₤31.30 ISBN 978-1-5013-1847-4.

In Search Of The Iraqi Other: Iraqi Fiction In Diaspora And The Discursive Reenactment Of Ethno-Religious Identities, Yasmeen S. Hanoosh

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In Iraqi fiction, the prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations became noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with …

Aproximación Léxica A Algunos Arabismos Del Castellano Del Siglo Xvi En El Caso Inquisitorial De Lucrecia De León (Lexical Approaches To Some 16th-Century Castilian Arabisms In The Inquisition Case Of Lucrecia De León), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Based on Lucrecia de León’s oneiric records, this study focuses on a series of Arabisms in the Inquisition manuscripts of her persecution and imprisonment. The written documents of this young woman’s dreams, collected and conserved by scribes and inquisitors at the end of the sixteenth century, comprises 415 narrative fragments, dated between 1587 and 1590. The main goal of this article is to analyze three Arabisms, alcabala, ataifor, and búcaro, as examples of the Arabic influence on the Castillian vocabulary of the time. Besides the sociolinguistic analysis of these three words, we present this woman as representative of her gender …

Stories In Order To Live : Essays, Kelsie Seehusen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The following is a collection of creative personal essays, each focusing on a woman writer and a selection of her texts: Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and H.D., respectively. Central to the collection is the construction of identity through literature, whether that’s a queer reading of Woolf’s Orlando, a quest to discover the “true” Dickinson behind her cultural mythos, or a meditation on autobiographical writing in H.D.’s fiction. Though each essay takes on a topic specific to its subject, the collection as a whole explores the intimate relationship between reader and text through a lens of reader-response theory and the phenomenology …

"Farre Fetched And Deare Bought" : Cosmetics And Englishness 1570-1625, Marta Josie Schoel

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study examines cosmetic practice, discourse, and material to explore the ways in which face paint, often made from a mixture of foreign and domestic ingredients, challenges the emergent notion of a pure English identity. Within a broader discourse found in recipe books, anti-cosmetic treatises, public and private documents, and plays for public spectacle—as well as court masques—I examine how early modern performances use cosmetic mixtures as theatrical devices to stage, represent, and negotiate anxieties about England’s increased engagement with the nascent global economy. Worn on the permeable surface of the skin, cosmetic material, such as alum, mercury, and mummia, …

An Underground World : Creative Writing In The Dystopian Genre, Mary Kathleen Brown

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Despite its importance for the creation of a compelling story, world-building is often overlooked in literary studies due to its complexity, with studies instead favoring analysis of plot, character, or situation. The dystopian genre dictates why world-building is a crucial element for fictional writing because it showcases a manipulated relationship between writer and reader. Using the overlap in possible worlds and actual worlds, this paper explores how world-building incites change in the actual world due to a reader correlating the possible world with their own. By way of example, my paper features the first three chapters of my dystopian novel, …

Skin And Other Stories, Brenna Croker

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The horror genre is a broad umbrella under which a number of subgenres and subcategories fall. Skin and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction stories which take on the horror genre. These stories serve to explore, test, and defy the conventions of the horror genre, making use of its tropes and traditions in some instances, abandoning and rejecting them in others. The stories in this collection connect to a number of horror subgenres, including body horror and environmental horror, in an attempt to define and exemplify these categorizations. Furthermore, these stories make use of the horror genre as …

The Contribution Of Acculturative Stress To Body Dissatisfaction Among Latina College Women : Testing The Moderating Effects Of Ethnic Identity And Differentiation Of Self, Julien Alexandra Almonte

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Despite extensive research on the high prevalence of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders among white college women, minimal research has been conducted on Latina college women’s experience of body dissatisfaction. Recent research indicates that Latina college women have a high prevalence of body dissatisfaction and eating disorder pathology. The purpose of the present study was to extend this line of study by investigating the role of acculturative stress as a predictor of body dissatisfaction in Latina college women. Additionally, the study examined the potential buffering effects of ethnic identity and differentiation of self as moderators of the relation between acculturative …

Black Trojans : The Free Black Community's Grassroots Abolition Campaign In Troy, New York Before 1861, Jennifer J. Thompson Burns

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation explores the evolution and trajectory of the abolition movement led by black men and women in Troy, New York, before 1861. At the grassroots level, black Trojan men and women claimed public spaces and founded societies and associations that simultaneously supported local black upliftment and laid the foundation from which a larger abolitionist network, within New York State and across state and national borders, was constructed. Through the operations of an “Aboveground Railroad” system that complimented the Underground Railroad system through Troy but focused on the movement of free people, as well as communications in abolition and black …

Queering Sexual Development Frameworks : A Dynamic Systems Approach To Conceptualizing Other-Sex Sexuality Among Lesbians, Kolbe Franklin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Essentialist models of sexual identity development have dominated social discourse and public opinion since the 1980s. This perspective posits that sexual orientation is an intrinsic, core identity that has roots in specific biological factors. Based on this perspective it is assumed that a person’s sexuality will manifest in a linear fashion throughout the life course. Notably, this model positions individuals with same-sex sexual attractions and behaviors as specific “types” of people. While this perspective has become largely institutionalized in public opinion, within academic research on sexual orientation, there has been little consensus on the veracity of this model. Specifically, the …

Artificial Intelligence And Utility : Deep Problems For A.I. Ethics, Trevor Howard Groves

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

As technology advances further, new problems arise for us to contend with philosophically. Indeed, popular media has already begun presenting the possible issues our society must deal with. One of these is A.I., and how they will challenge old notions of subjects like identity, consciousness, and ethics. It is this third category that this paper is concerned with, namely how the existence of A.I. will affect our choice of ethical theory in regards to their treatment. It is my intention to demonstrate that one particular category of ethical theory, hedonistic consequentialist ones, will be ill equipped to handle these considerations. …

Unbecoming : A Collection Of Short Fiction, Angélica Luisa Valentín Schubert

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This collection contains nine short stories addressing various concepts and issues relating to contemporary femininity in the United States.

Bernard Fall And Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare In Indochina, Nathaniel Lawson Moir

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

What accounts for Bernard Fall’s understanding and description of Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare in Indochina? How did formative experiences during and after the Second World War actuate Fall’s thought on the political nature of warfare in Indochina? What distinguished Fall’s thought on revolutionary warfare from others? Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare in Indochina addresses these questions through an intellectual history and contextual biography of Bernard Fall’s scholarship on the First and Second Indochina Wars. Bernard Fall, an authority on Vietnamese history, society, and the First Indochina War, began to explain in 1957 that subsequent war in Vietnam could not be …

This Brain Had A Mouth: : Lucy Gwin And Her Path To Disability Activism, James Michael Odato

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Author, advocacy journalist, disability rights activist, and magazine founder Lucy Gwin

A Missed Opportunity: Post-Revolutionary Mexican Murals And Incomplete Historical Narratives, Jesus Gandara Ortega

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Honors Program

This research project investigates the sociopolitical factors that contributed to the lack of Afro-Mexican representation in post-revolutionary murals and how the erasure of Afro-Mexicans in government-commissioned propaganda has affected Afro-descendant communities today in Mexico. The post-revolutionary struggles for power to unite the country have all but erased the representation of Afro-descendants in murals, historical records, and among its citizens. The absence of Afro-descendants in post-revolutionary murals contributes to continued stigma and discrimination against Afro-descendants in Mexico.

Stonewall’S Parallel Queer Latinidad, Kassondra Gonzalez

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Honors Program

The Stonewall Riots in New York City marked the official beginning of the U.S. gay rights movement in 1969. Following a police raid, the intense fight between officers and LGBTQ+ bar goers at Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn developed into a series of organized uprisings over the following days. Despite the bar’s predominantly white population, people of color were on the front lines of most physical incidents during the riots as well as other forms of activism (Gan 2007, 131). According to scholar Jessi Gan, the legacy of black and brown activism during this time period has historically been glossed over, particularly …

Dear United States Of America, We Are Children: Unaccompanied Minors At The U.S./Mexico Border, Briana Dominguez

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Honors Program

The United States government creates policies that have systematically excluded nonwhites from being legally recognized as members of U.S. society. Immigration laws have historically been influenced by the cultural construction of race and racism in the United States.

Barbados’ Debt Crisis: The Effects Of Colonialism And Neoliberalism, Noel Chase

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Honors Program

This research project explains the correlation between the tourism sector and Barbados’s cycle of debt. Barbados has continuously incurred debt, from international financing institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, since its independence from Great Britain in 1966. As of 2017, the estimated national debt of Barbados is $7.92 billion (USD).[1] Sir Hillary Beckles, Michael Howard, and other economic experts and professors at the University of the West Indies, believe the country has gone into debt for a variety of different reasons. Barbados incurred such a staggering debt due in part to its violent history of chattel slavery, the …

The Fiction Of Women In Contemporary American Literature : The Borderlands Of Intersectional Feminism, Postcolonial American Studies, And Creative Writing, Skye Anicca

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A collection of nine short stories entitled THE TROUBLE WITH BRIGHT GIRLS is unified by women’s diverse coming-of-age experiences in late twentieth century transnational America. The story collection relies on techniques that highlight dislocation—temporal skips and wide temporal frames, fragmented and recursive narratives, borrowed genres, absurd premise, anti-heroines and anti-epiphanies—which gesture toward collective human experiences while troubling notions of universal knowledge and values and resisting redemption or closure. The critical introduction situates the collection through the theoretical lens of intersectional feminism, informed by Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands, and in relation to field of multiethnic/transnational literature of the U.S. …

Dissidence And Displacement : Translation Theory Through The Work Of Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Darren Smith

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purported thesis is intended to aptly discuss the ways in which the particular work of Natalya Gorbanevskaya is able to be translated through the lens of a Daniel Weissbort and how through a full understanding of certain theories allow for certain notions of displacement and loss to traverse cultural boundaries through the act of translation. After a brief introduction, it is important to discuss the necessary background information and its relation to the task of translation before moving into an in-depth analysis of the poet’s work to argue how this displacement is visible through her translated work, before concluding …

The Magic Of A Strange Sky : Nature And The Mysticism Of Memory In Beckett's Trilogy, Daniel James Warhol

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This essay attempts to examine the later prose of Samuel Beckett within the frame of a growing body of critical research that aligns the author’s universal philosophy of the human condition with Indian and Buddhist philosophies. Inspired by the research of Lidan Lin, in her essay “Samuel Beckett’s Encounter with the East,” and Paul Foster’s Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, I take up a similar line of inquiry, choosing to focus on moments in the trilogy that are concerned with contact between the individual and the natural world. While many critics have …