Arts and Humanities Commons^™

All Souls Day - 2 November 2024, Joe Tedesco

Pastoral Liturgy

No abstract provided.

31st Ordinary Sunday - 3 November 2024, Andrew Doran

Pastoral Liturgy

No abstract provided.

33rd Sunday In Ordinary Time - 17 November 2024, Anthony Doran

Pastoral Liturgy

No abstract provided.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, King Of The Universe - 24 November 2024, Anthony Doran

Pastoral Liturgy

No abstract provided.

Musicians' Appendix

Pastoral Liturgy

No abstract provided.

Japan’S Assimilation Of Okinawa, Alex Thompson

ASPIRE 2024

. My research shows that the initial motivation for assimilating the Okinawan people was to create a national cohesive culture in Japan. Still, it fell short because of the actions of the average citizen in Japan and the governmental strategies. The idea of racial superiority and discrimination kept the Okinawans from ever being recognized as Japanese citizens. In this paper, I will discuss the Japanese government's assimilation practices and how Japanese people contributed to the assimilation policies. After exploring Okinawan culture and how this unique culture was formed, I will examine how the average Japanese citizen's racial superiority complex, humiliation …

Schwarzenbach Goes South, Padraig Rooney

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach arrived in the United States in late August 1936 at the invitation of the American photographer Barbara Hamilton Wright. It was the first of three visits over the next five years, during which Annemarie reported on Roosevelt’s America for a variety of Swiss newspapers and illustrated magazines. Her first road trip through the Rust Belt was a success with her Swiss editors and the two women planned a second in the American South in the Fall of 1937. In late September, they boarded third class on the S.S. Berengaria, bound for New York. The effect …

Shadows Of Virtue: ‘The Abolition Of Man’ In Modern Context, Luke Thomas Soule

Communication Studies

C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man stands as a remarkable examination of the mid-19th century shift towards moral subjectivism. With a detailed study of this text, this essay will utilize ideological and Postmodern criticism to reveal how Lewis builds his defense of objective morality, or what he calls the "Tao," against the educational spread of relativism. The heart of the analysis is the examination of Lewis's use of ideographs. Terms such as "the Tao," "Men without Chests," and "the Abolition of Man'' not only criticize the philosophical trends of the time but also tap into a deep cultural current of …

America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah

Masters Theses

There is a version

of America

that exists

only in dreams,

a kind of folklore,

shrouded in images,

technicolor interiors,

wrapped in plastic,

ghosts of recent past

to haunt and guide;

a constant reminder.

Wishful thinking

a constructed imaginary,

one I can hold in my hand.

Popular culture and spectacle, America and the domestic ideal, capitalism and the collective unconscious of a national identity. As an artist, I am interested in the myriad images that manifest for a viewer when they think of the spectacle of American pop culture, its domestic archetypes, and the material worship it revolves around. My …

Unfurling Blue Carpet Memories, Sara Ahli

Masters Theses

Glass is an amorphous solid, existing in a liminal space, embodying indeterminacy. Its states of transformation from viscous flow to structural solidity carry the imprints of bodily influence. With the direct intention of using glass as a conduit to explore materiality, memory, and self-awareness, I construct a language of embodiment that arises through a series of performative encounters between my physicality and glass in the hot shop.

The mediating process I employ to create and arrive at the glass artwork I make is as necessary as its final form. Motivated by the desire to claim agency over my personal narrative, …

Emotional Factory, Yukun Cui

Masters Theses

该项目设想将上海一个历史悠久的仓库改造成一个创新的、以情感为主题的联合办公空间，超越传统的办公环境。在工作环境质量深刻影响生产力和幸福感的时代，该项目旨在创造一个协调身体、心理和情绪健康的空间。该设计融合了促进健康的元素，例如健身设施、美食和丰富的绿色植物，确保居住者在整个工作日中保持动力和灵感。该项目涉及个人与其环境之间的动态互动。认识到传统的办公室布局往往会限制移动和空间感知，我们的设计引入了一个固有的动态工作空间。灵活的布局，可调节的家具和可移动的隔板使空间能够适应各种活动和需求。互动元素和视觉刺激全天变化，鼓励探索和互动，而不需要持续的身体运动。使用不同的纹理、颜色和照明方案创造了一种多感官体验，使空间充满活力和不断变化的感觉。通过结合这些元素，该项目旨在重新定义现代工作空间，创造一个不仅能提高生产力，而且能丰富人类工作体验的环境。这种创新方法旨在为全球联合办公空间设定新标准，培养社区意识、创造力和幸福感。最终，该项目旨在创造一个开创性的环境，增强人类的工作体验，展示工作空间设计在广泛影响和改善情绪和心理健康方面的潜力。

Sweet Relief, Aaron Feltman

Masters Theses

Relief holds both an emotional and a physical connotation; both the lifting of a burden or emotional baggage and the description of an object with forms that protrude from a planar surface. This thesis explores the ways in which these connotations can co-mingle and inform each other through the creation of hand-carved wooden reliefs. The relief becomes a vessel through which an emotional connection can be formed between viewer and maker by way of a shared sense of labor.

Wood, a material grown from the earth, is transformed into an entirely human-created form, the car; embodying the just-as-human desire for …

Making Room, Rachel Strompf

Masters Theses

Massachusetts is the only state in the United States with a right-to-shelter law which guarantees shelter for families with children and pregnant women.¹ As of February 2024, 3,500 homeless families with children are being sheltered in a motel or hotel with an average length of stay of 14 months, because traditional family shelters have reached capacity.^2,3 While these families are provided temporary shelter, these shelters do not allow for the development of a true sense of “home.” While a motel meets the needs of rudimentary shelter, motels were never designed as long-term accommodations and certainly not with a …

Burning “Between Two Fires”: The Individual Under Erasure In Hassan Blasim’S “The Nightmares Of Carlos Fuentes”, Gautam Basu Thakur

Humanities and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay uses Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interpret Hassan Blasim’s short story “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”. Blasim’s story depicts the psychological struggles of an Iraqi emigrant relating to his embattled sense of belonging in a Dutch society due to the recurrent nightmares of his “traumatic” past. It challenges his assimilationist fantasies. I develop Lacan’s idea of ontological lack as a structural susceptibility that is exacerbated by actual experiences of trauma to underline how racialized refugees from the war-torn global South are doubly vulnerable to experiencing subjective dehiscence between their efforts to forget past war traumas and the challenges of …

The Researcher, Esther Du, Special Collections, Fleet Library

11th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2025

Entry for the 11th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening reception and award ceremony Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 6:30pm, Fleet Library, Main Reading Room. Juror: Roger S. Williams.

Jorge Ricardo Masetti: Journalist, Guerrilla, Cold Warrior, Brooks C. Martin Mr.

Master's Theses

The following thesis describes the life and activities of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentinian journalist who was assigned to interview Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution against dictator Fulgencio Batista. Masetti was responsible for broadcasting interviews with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara to the rest of Latin America for the first time, allowing people to understand what was happening in Cuba through the words of the Revolution’s leaders. Masetti returned to Cuba to found the first international Latin American news agency, Prensa Latina, which still exists today. However, ideological factionalism within Prensa Latina drove Masetti to resign in …

Naturify 2300, Yarina Yiwei Dai

Masters Theses

In my art practice, I explore the interplay between human desires to manipulate and anthropomorphize nature, as seen in the technological augmentation of plants and living entities. This investigation delves into how this intersection, alongside empathy towards these creations, contributes to fears of uncontrollability and the risks of addiction and excessive dependence on technology.

Bioengineering and genetic modification have cultivated unprecedented developments, allowing humans to manipulate the fundamental building blocks of life. My research speculates on this technology further, modifying the genetic code of organisms and creating bioengineered wearable entities with enhanced traits or entirely new functionalities. The primary objective …

Snowstorm, Caleb Shafer

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the connection between memory and place-building, focusing on how personal narratives and physical models compress details to reveal their core essence. Memories serve as a bridge between time and space, allowing for a non-linear experience of time and offering a unique perspective on the existence and transformation of places. Although this compression involves some loss, it generates new narratives and insights into life while examining the power structures and cultural systems inherent in representation.

Umbrales (Thresholds), Maureen Scally

Masters Theses

Umbrales is Spanish for Thresholds.

Thresholds are by nature ambivalent spaces, inviting two distinct realities into play. As an artist, I materialize my experiences as a migrant into an architectural form. A series of textile walls shape a space that is simultaneously interior and exterior so that the audience circulates in the negative space in between. It is in the construction of this threshold condition — a simultaneous placement, neither here nor there — that a complex narrative of place unfolds.

A Delicate Balance, Lily Taylor

Masters Theses

There's a silver key from Lowe’s for the front door and a smaller unmarked gold key for the back door. There are two identical RISD keys–studio and storage closet. There’s the key to my mom’s apartment and another to the gallery where I used to work on Saturdays. There’s the key to the bike lock that I’ve kept on the ring even though my bike was stolen. I tried splitting up all the keys and creating two different sets–daily keys and occasional keys–but I never had the occasional keys when I needed them.

I have been making paintings of the …

Unconditioning Air, Weijia Deng

Masters Theses

Unconditioning Air rethinks the boundaries contrived through environmental control. For more than a century, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) defined the boundaries of interior air. The regime and tools of mechanical conditioning promise stability and manageability of indoor air quality at the expense of external phenomena, and by extension, any complexity or fluctuation in the environment. As a result, air conditioning premises that ideal interior comfort is “bubble-like”, requiring increasingly standardized and highly regimented regulatory tools. The plethora of patent drawings, duct specifications, and ASHRAE comfort codes produce an oppressively tightening grip over indoor air and comfort, rendering both …

Call And Response : Experiments In Storytelling, Deanne Fernandes

Masters Theses

Being part of RISD's inaugural Masters of Illustration cohort has been an immense honor. This journey has been nothing short of transformative and healing, as it has allowed me to unearth layers of self-discovery through my creative practice.

In my thesis, I introduce a fresh research methodology rooted in the principles of call and response, with adaptability, creativity, and storytelling as its foundational pillars. Through the lenses of visual storytelling, experimental animation, graphic journalism, and fictional world-building, I demonstrate how these techniques can effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice. This dynamic approach fosters meaningful connections among diverse perspectives …

Modern Times, Will Beattie

Masters Theses

At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …

Searching For The Hyperobject: Crystals As Transscalar Vehicles, Jay Costello

Masters Theses

When I touch the street outside my house, I'm touching Los Angeles—a contiguous vector of material bisecting a continent. A slab, a stone, dust and oil, a googolplex of tightly packed anisotropic particles... At nightfall, I sneak to the edge of the highway and break off a piece. 'What does it mean for a worm to be aware of the scale of the planet?' Bruno Latour's evocative questioning of scalar jumps prompts an existentialism that places me somewhere between the hyperlocal and the massively distributed. Like a cosmic traveler floating through the universe, I feel adrift. I look around, grasping …

Landing: Body, Site, Material, Renata Berta

Masters Theses

I believe that in order to build on the land, I must establish a profound relationship with it. As an outsider to New England territories, I actively seek this connection through immersive activities such as swimming, surfing, climbing, and extensive walks, immersing myself in the land to better understand it and synchronize with its rhythms. In my artistic and architectural practice, I explore dissolving traditional boundaries, emphasizing the vital return to the land to create a more responsive and embodied architecture that symbiotically engages with the landscape

Within this ongoing project, “Landing: Body, Site, Material,” I conceptualize my body not …

Urban Looms, Recoloring City, Ella Son

Masters Theses

The metropolis has been a dominant and defining aspect of my life. Acutely aware of visual illusions created by the choreographed and unchoreographed movements of people in the streets and the distortions of light and shadow on the glass facades of skyscrapers, I reinterpret the patterns and colors that are in constant interplay into a collection of architectural textiles.

With an emphasis on optical layering, these immersive installations recreate the quality of being spellbound in the city. Scaled to emphasize verticality and activated through transparent overlays and dense color interplay, a rich visual field is activated. In their application, the …

Memory And Experiential Lab, Yufan Xu

Masters Theses

In the tapestry of our lives, there exist moments and places that we can never revisit, scenes etched into our memories that fade with the passage of time. These experiences and memories are treasures, provide us with an anchor to our past. Unfortunately, many of these moments are like fireflies in the night, here one moment and gone the next. Yet, they remain invaluable, forever etched in our hearts and minds. I wonder if it is possible to trigger cherished past experiences and memories in our daily lives, allowing individuals to re-experience similar moments, thereby nourishing the spiritual world. Therefore, …

Graphic Warmline, Soo Min Lee

Masters Theses

Graphic Warmline is a metaphorical helpline for designers.It is a safe space to embrace doubt, navigate the complexities of our surroundings, and to move and adapt in new ways through the design process. Born from my own struggles, and ongoing processes of active-listening, observing, and introspection, this warmline is an invitation to contemplate and reframe standards of perfection and ingrained habits in order to discover genuine joy, a true voice, and to embrace flexibility, openness, and dynamism while designing.

Graphic Warmline offers interactive experimental methods, materials, and formats through actions of interplay in freeform.These experimentations revolve around threads of interplaying …

Timeless Teachings & Unbridled Possibilities, Ruijie Tai

Masters Theses

I am looking at is process of TRANSLATING AND BRIDGING.

Qi, traditionally understood as the vital force that flows through and animates living beings and the environment, lies at the edge of our perceptual capabilities.

The notion that what we cannot "see" holds significant influence over our world suggests that there are aspects of reality and forces at play beyond our direct sensory experience. AI, with its capacity for analyzing vast amounts of data and recognizing patterns beyond human capability, offers a unique tool for exploring these unseen forces.

The potential of AI to perceive and understand Qi could open …

Patchwork: 76km Between Juárez And El Paso, Naheyla Medina

Masters Theses

Located at the western edge of Texas where the Río Bravo ~ Rio Grande, becomes the border between México and the United States. Resides a spectacle of misconceptions that, along with an expansive corten steel border wall embedded into the earth, live to suppress the histories, culture, and environment entangled together like patchwork along this border space. The built environment influences our daily experiences, and our daily experiences can often influence our built environment. This project seeks to leverage, murals as a medium, creative writing, and architectural representations, to rework the mapping between Mexico and the US. Honing in on …