Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Existentialism And Creative Practice, Catherine Hudgens

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

The creative process mimics the existentialist philosophy of human freedom and the responsibility to create one’s own meaning in life through an emphasis on invention, experimentation, and ceaseless becoming. Through my body of work, I examine the meaning-giving capacities of the viewer and creator as agents involved in a work of art. The sculptures, as well as found objects, have the power to illuminate the human circumstances they emerged from, while the process of making is also the process of learning, where objects can be used to understand ourselves and the world. Philosophical concepts can be accessed through art in …

Heroic (Im)Maturity: Domestic Rupture And The Myth Of Telemachus' Coming Of Age, Mary Whitney

College Honors Program

As one of the most enduring narratives discussed in the field of Classics, extensive research has been written about Homer’s Odyssey. The universal and flexible maxims of the desire for homecoming (νόστος) make the events of this epic so compelling. One central aspect of Odysseus’ νόστος is the return of his son Telemachus to a specific role as the obedient prince. This implies that before the resolution of Odysseus’ νόστος, there exists the rupture of the domestic sphere that allows for freedom and chaos, both of which are removed and checked when Odysseus returns to Ithaca. For as long …

The Civil War Conflict Between Anglophones/Francophones In The Northwest And Southwest Regions Of Cameroon, Myriam Jeter

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The Civil War conflict between Anglophones and Francophones, also known as the Ambazonia war, is a long-standing issue that continues to plague the people living in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon. This paper explores the colonial history of the nation, the cause of the ongoing conflict, the reasons for its escalation, and how it gave rise to the Ambazonian separatists who want to have a separate nation called the Ambazonia Republic.

This study contributes to conflict understanding in two ways. First, it sheds light on the cultural and economic impacts of internally generated crises in a country. Second, …

An Ethnographic Case Study Exploring Culturally Responsive Teaching And Learning, James H. Jones Jr.

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

With the continued transformation of the cultural landscape of America and the recognition of the importance of our diverse communities, schools and educational leaders across the country must transform and grow to be reflective of this diverse world. Because it has been demonstrated that principals have a profound impact on instruction and student learning, facilitating the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogies can play a critical role in developing and sustaining effective urban schools. However, there is an undertheorized tension between the inequality regimes of managerialism and the goals of culturally responsive school leadership, highlighting that the undergirding theories of action …

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …

The Solidarity Manifesto: A New Network For Future Change, Sofia Calicchio

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Colonialism is a scheme of standpoint; colonizer versus colonized, West versus East, good versus bad. When put in the foreground, the value of what we see heavily relies on our perspective and knowledge. When learning to dissect, deconstruct, and decolonize spaces, we need to start utilizing decolonial thought as an historical tool rather than a true depiction of reality. Decolonizing spaces and recognizing Western colonization practices means challenging the normative structures in colonial history, thus breaking the cycle of oppression through building community and fostering solidarity. Drawing on theories exploring access to public spheres, representation, protection, permanence, cultural displacement and …

Crafting Journalism: The Pseudonyms Of American Reform, Sierra Fishman

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States saw the rise of "Stunt Girls" and "Sob Sisters" in journalism. These pioneering women defied traditional societal expectations of housewives and pursued careers in reporting, gaining recognition for their accomplishments through the dangerous nature of their work. While many may know the name Nellie Bly, the pseudonym for Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, other reporters played a vital role in the transformation of journalism, including Caloipe, Nellie Bly, Lola, Annie Laurie, Dorothy Dix, Enid, Eva Gay, Nora Marks, Girl Reporter, Nell Nelson, Grace Ermine, Meb, and Olivia. It is important to …

The Chicken’S Too Fat To Cross The Road: Ethical Issues And Dangers Pertaining To Factory Farms, Michael J. Martinus

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

In the mid-20th century, the meat industry implemented a method of rearing livestock called factory farming, which confined animals in close quarters until it was time for slaughter and allowed for more output with cheaper production methods. In modern-day unfortunately, factory farming is still used and treats their animals even worse; genetically modifying chickens until they can’t walk, the unrelenting impregnation of dairy cows, and forcing pigs to live in their own feces. Companies such as Tyson and JBS control about 85% of the meat industry and since their goal is to make the most profit with the least effort, …

An Ethical Framework For Library Publishing Version 2.0, Tina Baich, Nina Collins, Jaime Ding, Abigail Gulya, Zoe Wake Hyde, Bernadette A. Lear, Joshua Neds-Fox, Charlotte Roh, Melanie Schlosser, Kate Shuttleworth, Christine Turner

LPC Publications

Conceived at the Library Publishing Forum in 2017, the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing was a first-of-its-kind document for the LPC and the library publishing community. But remarkable social upheaval in the ensuing years, along with the continued maturation of our discipline, prompted the LPC to convene a task force to update the Framework for our current environment. What the task force developed, to our surprise, looks very little like the original document. An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing Version 2.0 is a true framework to help library publishers set an ethical baseline for their programs and activities. Consisting of …

Sue, Heath Joseph Wooten

All NMU Master's Theses

Sue is a collection of poetry investigating the cyclical nature of grief through the lens of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s schemas of paranoid and reparative readings. The poems employ motifs such as hunting, disease, and human remains to capture the temporal disorientation experienced in the wake of loss. Via an extensive use of metaphor and recurring poem titles, Sue exploits the multivalence of language to conjure a dense field of meaning, meant to capture the undecidability of language noted by philosopher Jacques Derrida. This collection also employs several vectors of derivation, including erasure of text lifted from the 2002 strategy video …

Reason And Rationality In The Post-Pandemic Era, Jordan David Schwanke

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This paper investigates human reason’s proper function and role in the post-pandemic era. Sections 1 and 2 analyze recent literature on Kahneman’s dual processing theory and Hugo Mercier’s and Dan Sperber’s (M&S) interactionalist approach toward human reason. Kahneman’s theory cannot explain how System 2 is still prone to make serious mistakes, and M&S provide a more plausible alternative: reasoning is all intuitive. Humans can intuit reasons for their beliefs and intuitions. But more importantly, reason is the metarepresentational ability to evaluate the strengths or weaknesses of reasons and arguments. Reason, through the process of evolution, is fundamentally used for justification …

A Phenomelogical Inquiry Of The Applicability Of Neurologic Music Therapy For A Student Music Therapist, Katie Fairbourn

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) is a standardized training offered to many different clinical disciplines including music therapy. NMT specializes in research, techniques, and principles regarding the brain’s relationship with music. Despite what the name may suggest, NMT is not affiliated with the music therapy profession, and may be often overlooked by music therapy programs across the country, as was the experience of the principal investigator (PI). There is a lot of research and studies available showing the benefits of NMT for specific clinical populations, but there is no research that examines the effect and value NMT training has when combined …

Mythos Series (Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined, Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined, And Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined) By Stephen Fry, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Book review of Stephen Fry's Mythos series, reviewed by Phillip Fitzsimmons.

Book Review Of, The Nature Of The Game: Links Golf At Bandon Dunes And Far Beyond By Mike Keiser With Stephen Goodwin (Review), William Lang

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1999, Mike Keiser and his associates welcomed golfers to a new and remarkable links golf course on the southern Oregon coast near the town of Bandon. At the mouth of the Coquille River and small bay some thirty miles south of Coos Bay, Bandon had begun as a mining camp in the 1850s and developed an economy in the late nineteenth century based on fishing, logging, dairying, and cranberry cultivation. The area’s spectacular coastline brought tourists, but nothing quite prepared the town for the advent of world-class golf courses — six in total at Bandon Dunes — and an …

Vanishing Flies And The Lady Entomologist, Catherine Mcneur

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

The flies began emerging from the wheat around dusk, giving Margaretta Hare Morris little more than half an hour to observe the tiny, delicate creatures as they flitted from stalk to stalk. Requiring a magnifying glass to see them in any detail, Morris had first observed the flies as flaxseed-like pupa sleepily clinging to the young wheat plants in her neighbour’s field a few days prior, but now that they had fully transformed, there were too many and they were too quick to count. The swarms hovered over the wheat field, laying their eggs in the grain to secure a …

The Hate U Give As Counternarrative: A Rhetorical Site Of Competing Frames & The Disruption Of Dominant Narratives Through Counter-Storytelling & Homing, Jackeline Camacho

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Angie Thomas’s novel, The Hate U Give, is an African American Young Adult novel (AAYA) that captures the violence and devastating effects of police brutality and the gruesome rhetorical strategies that the dominant public sphere uses to criminalize, regulate, and dehumanize Black Americans. In this paper, I use the theoretical framework of counter-storytelling, the theoretical concept of homing, and the rhetorical strategy of framing, to analyze how Thomas exposes the ways in which the dominant public sphere silences, excludes, and discredits the voices and experiences of Black people to give readers access to the dominant public sphere in order …

Meta-Method Analysis On Therapists’ Experiences: An Inquiry Into Qualitative Psychotherapy Research Methodology, Javier L. Rizo

Graduate Masters Theses

I conducted a meta-method study to explore the methodological and reporting characteristics of qualitative studies on therapists’ experiences conducting psychotherapy. Articles were identified through a PsycINFO search, and through a review of article text their methodological and reporting features were coded and quantitatively analyzed. Consideration was given to standards of qualitative research in psychology, especially methodological integrity. Results showed increases in the number of these qualitative studies from the 2000s onwards. This rise seems to be above that in psychology, but comparable to other psychotherapy literature. Publication characteristics of this body of literature, namely journal discipline and impact score, showed …

Telecontraception: An Evaluative Research Study On Birth Control Accessibility Via Smart Phone Applications, Salma Yazmin Atiya

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Birth control accessibility in the United States continues to be a growing issue. Studies have shown that barriers such as transportation to clinics, ability to obtain an appointment at a clinic, having time off work or school, cost, lack of insurance, and residing in contraceptive deserts prevents women from obtaining birth control. However, with telemedicine on the rise, new technologies are becoming available, such as telecontraceptionâ??a recent innovation, where people can obtain birth control through a website or an app on smart phone devices. Telecontraception could potentially serve as a tool to narrow the birth control accessibility gap for uninsured …

A Life Of Work, David Labounty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Life of Work is an examination of workplace nonfiction where work is, for good or bad, a defining moment in a personâ??s life. This collection of creative nonfiction essays about the jobs that have shaped me was created to encourage people to tell their own tales. There is nothing groundbreaking about the work I have done (and continue to do); however, by sharing my experiences, I hope to spark other workplace remembrances, be they stories about slogging away for fifty years on one job or having multiple rewarding careers. The work we do has an enormous impact on the …

The Effects Of Gender On Students’ Learning, Savannah Mansfield

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

There are many struggles students face when pursuing an education. These barriers often leave students weary and disheartened, dreading the seven hours a day they are forced to spend at an institution that does not value their needs or identity. This paper will focus on how gender affects students’ learning in schools. In particular, it will discuss the sexualization of feminine-presenting students, the assumption of violence in masculine-presenting students, and the failure to provide safe and inclusive environments for gender-nonconforming students. All of this will be examined through the lens of gender’s effect on relationships within the education system, as …

Media Analysis And Journalistic Applications, Jose Villasenor Cervantes

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Media has been a part of our lives now for a better part of over a century or more. From newspapers, radio, tv, film, music. All of these have impacted our lives since their creation and have influenced our society for better or worse for educational or not so educational purposes. Media in all of its aspects have been around for many years and that has translated to every part of our society. We see a film and we quickly talk about its whether it was good or bad but we analyze it. This goes for everyone from children to …

Stories Of A Queer Femme, Parker Jones

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

“Stories of a Queer Femme” is a collection of poems about my experience being queer and non-binary while still presenting very feminine. The poems explore growing up, experiencing love, and accepting my life while outside of the gender binary. This collections reveals the course theme of hidden histories: We have always been here. We will always be here. Our lives and our stories matter.

Derailed Fortunes: California's Forgotten Railroad, Alexis Depaolis

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

At a mahogany bar in Collins Saloon of San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, a successful businessman James G. Fair traced a trail of water droplets for his partner Alfred E. Davis to create the map of a visionary rail line soon to be known as the South Pacific Coast. Using historical records and photographs compiled by a selection of local authors and historians, this non-fiction retelling of Davis’ experience highlights the tribulations and triumphs of the most successful narrow gauge line in California history in order to share a largely forgotten but crucial aspect of local industrial archeology, as well as …

Give The Drummer Some: A Dive Into Drum Breaks And Drum Break Production, Kyle Kaldhusdal

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper traces the history of hip-hop culture through the evolution of the drum break, the original context of drum breaks in funk and soul music, their influence on DJ culture, and the subsequent impact of drum breaks on music and music production. It follows the development of breakbeat compilations in the 1970s and 1980s, parallel to the development of turntablism and sampling techniques. It also examines in detail how copyright litigation in the 1990s shaped the development of sample-based music genres and created a niche market for originally-recorded drum breaks over the subsequent decades.

Hispanic Human Capital And Financial Aid Application In The West Census Region, Benjamin Lundy-Paine

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

As of 2021, very few Hispanic residents in the United States held a college degree in comparison to non-Hispanic residents. Research has shown that, particularly for Hispanic students, financial aid increases college persistence. Hispanic Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) submission rates rank among the lowest, preventing many Hispanic students from receiving financial assistance. This issue is most prevalent West Census Region (WCR), where there is the highest concentration of Hispanic residents. To understand what barriers may be preventing Hispanic submission in the WCR this Capstone used logistic regression models to analyze student-level data from the National Center for …

Taxonomic Analysis Of Video Game Instrument Usages, Jack Madison

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper seeks to break down into categories the various ways in which video games utilize instruments and to determine the musicality of these interactions.

The Call Of The Origin: On Christology, Conversion, And Peregrine Identity In Reiner Schürmann’S Early Work On Meister Eckhart, Francesco Guercio, Ian Alexander Moore

Philosophy Faculty Works

In 1969, Reiner Schürmann submitted a thesis to the Dominican school of theology Le Saulchoir. It was titled Peregrine Identity: The Concept of Detachment in Meister Eckhart’s German Sermons. Three years later, Schürmann published Wandering Joy, his celebrated book on Eckhart. In this article, we examine four aspects of the earlier study that cannot, as such, be found in the later one: (1) the specifically Christological dimension of Eckhart’s teaching of detachment; (2) a logic of conversion at work in Eckhart and St. Francis; (3) Schürmann’s hermeneutics of the symbol; and (4) the practical outcomes of Heidegger’s ontological …

The Dark South, Paul Zachos

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis contains a portion of my novel, The Dark South, as well as a craft essay titled “The Use of Plain Style in Modern Fiction Writing.” The craft essay examines how a plain style of writing can be used to great effect in fiction. I explore how simple writing can improve action, description, and exposition, and provide examples of writers who take advantage of these techniques. The Dark South, a Southern horror novel, tells the story of one man’s journey through a twisted version of the American South. Luke, a young man fresh out of college, finds himself stuck …

Something Holy, Madison Silva

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis contains two parts: a craft paper on interiority and seven chapters of a young adult social realism novel. The craft paper explores different strategies for “showing and telling” as a means of conveying interiority in faith-based characters, and it analyzes these strategies in two YA novels, Let’s Call it Doomsday by Katie Henry and Autoboyography by Christina Lauren, both of which center around queer, Mormon characters. The novel chapters in the thesis are from Something Holy, which follows Beck Taylor, an eighteen-year-old, mostly closeted bisexual boy who only has a few months until he leaves on a two-year …

Minyan, Sophia Goldberg

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Minyan is a full-scale art installation that recreates my memory of the synagogue sanctuary my family attended when I was a child. Salient furniture: a bimah, chairs, and a mechitza have been welded from wire and covered in fabric. These items are arranged in their traditional locations, inviting viewers to enter the “sanctuary” space and walk among the furniture. In place of an ark hangs a handmade tallit. The recreation of this familiar space was part of my effort to understand what Judaism means to me and how my identity as a trans and queer person resides within Jewish space. …