Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Identity Formation Of South Asians: A Phenomenological Study, Shabana Shaheen

Theses and Dissertations

This research explores the lived experiences of South Asians college students. This research, through a qualitative study that is rooted in the philosophy of phenomenology, explores the essence South Asians’ identity formation. Qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews with South Asian college students. The data analysis was under a phenomenological lens that centered the lived experiences and the essence of these experiences in the results. Seven themes emerged from this phenomenological study: negotiating bicultural identity, model minority expectations, meaningful impact of religious spaces, understandings of intra-community tensions, racialization of Islamophobia, understandings of South Asian identity and efficacy of Asian …

Plantiod Planet, Roxana Hojat

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines my studio practice and research during my studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Photo & Film MFA program, which has culminated into my thesis exhibition. Through traditional portraiture and landscape photography that utilize contemporary photographic practices such as digital processing and material studies, my work in Plantiod Planet creates a fiction which examines plant intelligence and the gendering of landscape.

Skinface, Islam Shehab

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout history, skin manipulation was primarily practiced for cultural, tribal, or religious purposes. In the contemporary landscape, skin manipulation has been objectified and commercialized. This is exemplified through bio-upholstery, foreign materials under our skin and changing the skin structure.

This thesis investigates skin manipulation, with the intent to focus experimentation on the skin’s lines of cleavage, a topographical map drawn on our skin and used to define the direction where skin has the most and least flexibility. The aim is to connect and explore materials that can be used as a second skin, while at the same time examining and …

"An Amazing Aptness For Learning Trades:" The Role Of Enslaved Craftsmen In Charleston Cabinetmaking Shops, William A. Strollo

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the role of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston cabinetmaking shops during the late-eighteenth century and how wealthy Charlestonians’ desire fashionable goods fueled the demand for this labor force. The first chapter examines the rise of the wealthy Charlestonians and the origins of their taste for fashionable goods. The second chapter explores the increased use of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston cabinetmaking shops during the last half of the eighteenth century and how they affected the production of fashionable cabinet goods.

Synergy: Game Design + Qur'an Memorization, Sultana Jesmine Moulana

Theses and Dissertations

The rise of digital technology has transformed nearly every part of our daily lives, including the way we learn and memorize. Such transformations raise interesting questions for one of the most long-standing and demanding memorization tasks in the world: the memorization of the Islamic holy book, The Qur’an. For Muslims, The Qur’an is a timeless, sacred text, cradling within its covers many profound images, stories, and parables. Despite rigorous research in the fields of game design and memorization techniques, very little work has been done in combining these two areas of research to create a game-based memorization experience of The …

Recovery From Design, Cassandra J. Ellison

Theses and Dissertations

Through research, inquiry, and an evaluation of Recovery By Design, a ‘design therapy’ program that serves people with mental illness, substance use disorders, and developmental disabilities, it is my assertion that the practice of design has therapeutic potential and can aid in the process of recovery. To the novice, the practices of conception, shaping form, and praxis have empowering benefit especially when guided by Conditional and Transformation Design methods together with an emphasis on materiality and vernacular form.

Distant Electric Vision: Cultural Representations Of Television From “Edison’S Telephonoscope” To The Electronic Screen, Ivy Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

Do inventions that exist only on paper have less credibility than functional technologies? How has the meaning and significance of audiovisual media and technology changed over time? This dissertation examines historiography and methodology for media history, arguing for an interdisciplinary approach. It addresses methodological issues in media history—media in transition, media archaeology, and film history—through an examination of television’s speculative era. It tackles moving-image history through an historical investigation of Victorian and Machine age “television”.

Because the concept and terminology of “television” changed dramatically during this period, I use the phrases “distant electric vision” and “seeing by electricity,” to define …

“Confederate Soldiers In The Siege Of Petersburg And Postwar: An Intensified War And Coping Mechanisms Utilized, 1864- Ca. 1895”, Matthew R. Lempke

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis crafts a narrative about how Confederate soldiers during the siege of Petersburg experienced an intensified war that caused them to refine soldierly coping mechanisms in order to endure. They faced increasing deprivations, new forms of death, fewer restrictions on killing, dwindling fortunes, and increased racial acrimony by facing African American soldiers. In order to adjust, they relied on soldierly camaraderie, Southern notions of honor, letter writing, and an increasingly firm reliance on Protestant Christianity to cope with their situation. Postwar, these veterans repurposed soldierly coping mechanisms and eventually used institutional support from their states. Camaraderie, honor, literary endeavors, …

Good As We Know It: Goodness In Design Discourse Since 1870, Garreth C. Blackwell

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which design and design practitioners have defined value in the design discourse through the vocabulary and concept of goodness since 1870. These definitions of value have been central to design discourse both past and present and deal with the impact and purpose of design work as well as its role in the creation of the approaching future. Since before the coalescence of graphic design as a separate field of design, these questions have been tied to the form, function or social impact of the objects created by designers. Despite the prevalence of this line …

Finding Voice, The Body Speaks: Original Work And Counter-Hegemonic Performance And Practice, Matthew Paul Thornton

Theses and Dissertations

Graduate study in theatre has allowed me to understand my work as an artist and educator from a critical academic perspective. I have researched Butoh as a model for original work that employs multiculturalism against hegemonic control of personal identity. From my own training experience, I am recognizing Capoeira, Contact Improvisation, and Devising processes (co-creation or collaborative creative process in dance) as counter-hegemonic forms and techniques that share a physical/philosophical emphasis on communal engagement, improvisation, circularity and repetition. Looking at them together provides points of intersection for me to examine them as an artist, while posing questions for cross-cultural investigations. …

Gomds - Grumpy Old Men Doing Shakespeare; The Comedy Of Errors As Metaphor For Life, Aging, And Building Community, Elizabeth B. Pedersen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the process of building community over time, through collaboration, to rehearse and produce a portable production of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, looking at the elements of time, trust and age with an ensemble of ten men, all actors over the age of 55. The building of trust over time was vital to the production process and the actors had the time to embody their roles and the language of the play. We look at the questions “why this play,” “why all men?” and “why theatre?” and investigate the physical nature of the play and its …

(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins

Theses and Dissertations

"We are in the world, but not of the world," a maxim frequently spoken in evangelical Christian culture, provides insight into how these individuals view their relationship with secular culture. They presume to share the same temporal plane with secular culture, but do not participate in it. In this dissertation, I explore whether the division between evangelical Christian culture and secular culture is as clear as this aphorism implies. To facilitate this investigation, I examine media Christian content creators created for an American evangelical Christian young adult audience in the early twenty-first century, specifically focusing on novel-length fiction, comics and …

The Monstrous Self: Negotiating The Boundary Of The Abject, Katya Yakubov

Theses and Dissertations

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

The Fractured Memory Of A Mind’S Eye, Russell G. White

Theses and Dissertations

The work I create is informed by questioning reality/identity, the fractalizing planes

of existence our essence occupies, and the artifacts of memory experience navigating

through space time. While existing in this realm of oversaturated media and neon

glow, I question the effects of pervasive data systems overloading or programming the

mental software we possess. My work includes humor as a means of exploring these

conventions while also displaying psychedelic surrealist imagery to help break away

from the conscious prison this existence births our concept apparatuses within.

Construction Of An Album For Oneself, Maria Tinaut

Theses and Dissertations

My work focuses on the construction and validation of images assembled from fragments of found photographs, generating new narratives that hover between “reality” and fiction. Archive and Fiction: Construction of the past and the self is the result of two years of artwork exploring my family archives and my relationship to my family through them. I understand the family as a place of identity in continuous change, serving as a container of history and memory. Conceiving of my family albums as material allows me to approach my family history as a visitor. Mediated memory and constructed memory intertwine in the …

Adventures Close To Home, Ryan Syrell

Theses and Dissertations

My work articulates experiences of intimacy and porosity with regard to domestic space. I think of these paintings as fields of interrelatedness which work to dismantle the perceived thresholds between things. The following text brings together the research of my studio practice and a survey of artists, writers, and filmmakers who have charted related spaces of the ordinary, domestic, and porous.

Positions Of Place: Converging Viewpoints In Visual Communication, Gregory J. Schmidt

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis includes a body of work that explores our visual relationship to the physical spaces and places we inhabit in our everyday lives. Today we live in a complex world where we are bombarded with fragments of information and inundated with distractions. As designers, we are equipped with tools and methods that allow us to experience and interpret our environment through multi-faceted perspectives and from different viewpoints. My approach to graphic design adopts techniques and practices from a mix of different disciplines. The work focuses on a design process that alternates between the parallel depiction of first-person and third-person …

A Dull Soldier And A Keen Guest: Stumbling Through The Falstaffiad One Drink At A Time, Emma Givens

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre history has long interwoven with the production, consumption, and peddling of alcohol. While the seedier aspects of our past generally go unremembered, we can find traces of them in the culture of the times. If we read Shakespeare through the lens of drinking culture, what can we discover about the play and what can that tell us about how to produce his works today? By looking at the rules and customs surrounding alehouses during the English Renaissance I have analyzed the three plays contained within the Falstaffiad (1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Merry Wives …

Wiped Clean, Elizabeth H. Hunter

Theses and Dissertations

It seems that all forms of pain, quotidian and monumental, are catalogued in the same muted and inaccessible space in our memory. In my installation Wiped Clean, I question whether human capacity to externalize physical trauma is aided by a the physical design of our institutions. I examine the architectures and structural mechanisms that mediate traumatic and intimate experiences with our bodies, and explore the potential of self-formation within these conditions.

The Japanese Experience In Virginia, 1900s-1950s: Jim Crow To Internment, Emma T. Ito

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses how Japanese and Japanese Americans may have lived and been perceived in Virginia from 1900s through the 1950s. This work focuses on their positions in society with comparisons to the nation, particularly during the “Jim Crow” era of “colored” and “white,” and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It highlights various means of understanding their positions in Virginia society, with emphasis on Japanese visitors, marriages of Japanese in Virginia, and the inclusion of Japanese in higher education at Roanoke College, Randolph-Macon College, William and Mary, University of Virginia, University of Richmond, Hampden-Sydney College, and Union …

Sound Perception:Encapsulating Intangible Voice Memories In A Physical Memento, Mona Mahmoud Makhlouf

Theses and Dissertations

We live in a very busy world with a variety of sensory stimulation including the olfactory, visual, tactile, and auditory. The five senses are triggered by our surroundings and help us to form meaning about the world.ⅰ Based on where someone grows up, she or he is introduced to various sites and sounds, affecting how they interpret the world. Sounds relate meaning through the association between hearing, memory and an event. Hearing is one of the learning processes, in which individuals give, receive, and store information. We typically rely on our five senses, which contribute to the process of understanding, …

Re-Exploring My Identity As A Japanese Woman, Fumi Amano

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on my motivations and the personal decisions made in the realization of selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition "Voice". The following text shares the many and varied connections between my life and art-making. My issues in my personal relationships with others has spilled out from my heart and turned into these works. I'm continuously expressing the unsuccessful attempts we make at developing true bonds that bridge the gaps between people.

Negotiating Desire: Resisting, Reimagining And Reinscribing Normalized Sexuality And Gender In Fan Fiction, Charity A. Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist.

In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The …

Theatrical Texts And Contexts: Poe And Hawthorne’S Fictional Women, Savannah M. Singletary

Theses and Dissertations

Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne are arguably two of the most highly read and heavily debated nineteenth-century antebellum authors in America. Their writings fascinate readers, while their character depictions, particularly their characterizations of fictional women, prompt intense academic debate. This thesis examines the previously less-studied historical developments surrounding Poe and Hawthorne in the antebellum era that shaped their approach to writing fiction. In particular, this study scrutinizes the effects of the development of a newly popular art form, ballet, the ascendency of female authorship, and the impact of American theatrical reform upon antebellum authors’ authorial faculties, especially Hawthorne and …

Sub For More, Chelsea Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This written thesis unpacks the thoughts and motivations behind the decisions I have made in my artistic practice that have ultimately culminated in my M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition: Sub for More. By merging images of my own work as well as internet sourced images of the culture that drives my work, I have created a platform to begin to understand my experience during graduate school. This text examines and explores my belief in the inherent power in pop culture, my obsession with fame, celebrity, and my self-identity as a participant in current pop-culture.

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …

The Odcombian Climber: How Thomas Coryate Employed Media For Social Advantage, Julian T. Neuhauser

Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Coryate (1577?-1617), the writer, traveler and social climber, embraced various media in order to achieve social gains. This thesis surveys the content and materiality of writings by and about Coryate to investigate the nature of his sociability. The study begins by drawing on John Hoskyns’ (1566–1638) poem, “Convivium philosophicum,” to explore how Coryate used oral and social performance to create a unique form of sociability through which mockery is transmuted into praise. This thesis then addresses how Coryate’s sociability factored into the conflation of aspects of manuscript and print media in the production of the “Panegyricke Verses” that were …

Open / Close: Assimilating Immersive Spaces In Visual Communication, Anika Sarin

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in two spaces obverse to each other: open and closed. An open space develops organically based on how people inhabit it. Interacting with an open space is a dynamic, sporadic, multisensory, immersive, and subjective experience. In such spaces, we are confronted with an alternative aesthetic, one that is in conflict with the seamlessness of a closed space. A closed space is anchored on definite variables like structure, use and boundaries. While interaction between people and space is important, the space is tightly controlled and interaction is designed. Through this thesis project, I present a method that metaphorically …

Planar Refrains, Stephen Anthony Nunes

Theses and Dissertations

My practice explores phenomenal poetic truths that exist in fissures between the sensual and physical qualities of material constructs. Magnifying this confounding interspace, my work activates specific instruments within mutable, relational systems of installation, movement, and documentation. The tools I fabricate function within variable orientations and are implemented as both physical barriers and thresholds into alternate, virtual domains. Intersecting fragments of sound and moving image build a nexus of superimposed spatialities, while material constructions are enveloped in ephemeral intensities. Within this compounded environment, both mind and body are charged as active sites through which durational, contemplative experiences can pass.

Reverberation, …

Should We Straighten Up? Exploring The Responsibilities Of Actor Training For Lgbtq Students, Matthew B. Ferrell

Theses and Dissertations

Gay actors have a long history with the notion of “straightening up” to remain castable and economically feasible in today’s market. Searching to find answers for young acting students while strengthening their own self worth, I will explore the history of gay actors in film, television and theatre and in society to understand this notion more fully. By interviewing working actors and managers in the business I will explore how I can address this question of “straightening up” to the future generation of actors and analyze how we can face the future with integrity and self-respect.