Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Performance Of Illustrations And Images As Language In Sarnath Banerjee’S All Quiet In Vikaspuri, Akanksha Barthwal Ms

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri, fictionalizes but at the same time addresses water wars and political ideologies in the city of Delhi. By the means of eco-critical approach in the name of Vi-kas (development) Banerjee discuss the acts of slow violence subverted on nature in the name of progress (vikas). Through text/ images the author depicts chaos and challenges for the readers in more direct and obscene ways. The current paper attempts to look at Banerjee’s illustrations and images as new form of language emerged in modern Indian literature with the possibly that illustrations have more effect on …

A History Of The Underground Comix Scene: The Seriousness Of An Unserious Genre, Harris Darcie Shugart

Master's Theses

The Underground Comix Scene of the 1960s and 1970s was born out of an age of censorship. The Comics Code Authority, a regulatory body created by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, established guidelines requiring publishing houses to self-regulate following a recommendation from the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1953. Comix with an X, for their X-rated nature, represent an emerging counter-culture in the latter half of the 1960s and the 1970s, with an epicenter of San Francisco. These comix and their artists were not interested in obtaining the looming ‘Seal of Approval’ from the …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Auxiliary Damage, Aiyi Cheng

Masters Theses

AuxiliarY DamagE asks what happens to pain when it is moved outside the body and given material form. Pain is not treated here as an image to be represented, but as something processed through repetition, pressure, exposure, and care. It is handled. Washed. Arranged. Pulled out. Swallowed back in.

Hair became the material that allowed this question to stay unstable. While attached to the body, it is intimate and ordinary. Once detached, it becomes residue, evidence, discomfort, value, and loss. In the studio, I washed collected hair, untangled it, threaded it through metal, placed it near flame, held it in …

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Pussy Protest! Protest Zines To Uplift Marginalized Voices, Alekz Nelson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

A publication of 4 separate zines made up of 12 pages each. The zines delve into the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act, trans women and their music artistry, lack of lesbian media, and inmate working conditions. These zines aim to not only raise awareness towards these issues, but spark action from readers by providing practical and doable options to pursue. With societal attitudes and political administrations becoming more conservative, spreading this information and awareness is vital to ensure that these alternatives ways of life are not forcibly erased.

Bugs, Birds, Blue: Queer Ecologies Of Embodiment, Kinship, And Survival, Celeste B. Newcomb

Theses and Dissertations

bugs, birds, blue is a multi-channel audiovisual installation that examines queer ecology as a framework for understanding transgender embodiment, kinship, and survival amid environmental crisis and ongoing political attacks on trans life (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson). Through sculpture, projection, sound, reflective surfaces, and biological imagery, the installation places human bodily matter alongside microbial and aquatic life forms to challenge narratives that frame trans existence as unnatural, recent, or isolated. Instead, the work proposes transness as relational, adaptive, and deeply entangled with broader ecological systems. The installation is composed of two interconnected environments. On one side of the space, three aquariums rest …

Spell Of Forty Small Failings, Erin B. Ehren

Theses and Dissertations

Spell of Forty Small Failings is a collection of images and writings that draws from an unruly range of literary forms, academic disciplines, and religious cannons in order to address the Divine—all that which exists on account of the phenomena of what it is to see and be seen: to hear and be heard: to touch and be touched: to know and be known, and through that knowing proceed beyond mediation. I wrote this thesis for me in the hopes that all along I was writing for you.

A Burlesque: The Shimmering Body Of Revealing, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A Burlesque: The Shimmer Manuscript is a hybrid critical–creative work that examines burlesque as an embodied methodology and a mode of knowledge production. Drawing from my two decades as a performer–scholar, the work reframes glamour, desire, and adornment as epistemological practices rather than theatrical ornamentation. The project is significant in that it expands understandings of performance studies, autotheory, and feminist aesthetics by foregrounding the performer’s body as an intelligent, sensing, world-making apparatus.

The methodology is creative practice research and archive-driven, integrating backstage documentation, AI-assisted photomontage, and theoretical reflection. The work draws from poststructuralist and feminist frameworks (Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, …

Entre La Sombra Y El Lienzo: Clea Dessendre Como Modelo De Personaje Secundario Complejo, Lydia Huijbregts Jaen, Antonio Horno López

GDI. Revista de investigación de Género, Diseño e Innovación

Introducción: Este artículo analiza a Clea Dessendre en Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, explorando su versión real y la pintada en el lienzo, y su impacto en la narrativa del juego. Metodología: Se aplicó un análisis narrativo, psicológico y ludológico, integrando teorías de duelo (Kübler-Ross), socialización (Baumrind) y comunicación (DiSC) vinculadas con la jugabilidad. Resultados: Clea-Real encarna disciplina y perfeccionismo; Clea-Pintada, una proyección maternal. El gameplay conecta su psicología con la experiencia del jugador. Discusión: Las identidades paralelas muestran cómo traumas y expectativas moldean personajes complejos. Conclusiones: Clea evidencia cómo la narrativa y la mecánica se fusionan para crear …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Restorationland: The Lost And Found Objects Of Atlanta's Doll's Head Trail, Thomas Fish

Faculty Articles

The Doll’s Head Trail is a grassroots, low-art installation nestled within a Southeast Atlanta wildlife preserve. Constructed by volunteers and visitors from decades of environmental debris, the trail converts waste into folk art-inspired “junk” displays. The creative upcycling ranges from a miniscule shrine to “Toxic Masculinity” to a stark shoe pile commemorating child gun violence. This article details how queer theory’s “temporal turn” provides insights into material performance as collaborative regeneration. The curious vignettes playfully invert hierarchies, revealing the merits of small-time memorialization. Through these defiantly unofficial grassroot performances, the Doll’s Head Trail both remembers and restores community ruins, demonstrating …

Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love, Jonathan Erick Guzman

Masters Theses

“Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love” is an interdisciplinary thesis that explores the intersections of queer Chicanx identity, photography, and performance as technologies of survival and self-construction. I construct a speculative archive of Chicanx queer experience through my tripartite personas: Barbí, Luke, and myself—collectively, the Guzman Triplets.

Through these embodied avatars, I embrace rasquachismo, camp, Catholic iconography, and hybrid photographic processes—including Polaroids, AI-manipulated imagery, anthotypes, and installation—to investigate visibility, fragmentation, and ancestral memory. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s frameworks of la herida abierta and nepantla, José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and queer futurity, and bell …

The Dialectic Of Airless Space, Ophelia Arc

Masters Theses

The Dialectic of Airless Space is a cumulative, cross-disciplinary research project that explores ‘airless space’ as a somatic and psychological condition shaped by institutional environments. Unfolding over time through five interrelated books, the project weaves together writing, ephemera, textile sculpture, and drawing to archive the invisible architectures of bodily and mental experience.

Grief As Slip: (How Little I Show) An Exploration In Clay, When Words Are Not Enough, Michelle A. Smith

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Grief as Slip (how little I show) implies that even as we acknowledge our mortality and the fleeting nature of life, we still only reveal a fraction of our true selves or our deeper realities. The ceramic artwork in this exhibition carries and conveys a journey through the present and remembered emotions of the artists’ personal narrative. By juxtaposing the tactile nature of clay with the ethereal quality of human experience, Smith contemplates the profound interplay between material transformation and emotional resilience. The exhibition’s intent is to translate the essence of complex emotional states into abstracted forms so they can …

Collage As A Facilitator Of Connection And Belonging: An Application Of Art Therapy With Sgm Clients, Noa L. Shems

Expressive Therapies Theses

This research explored themes of connection and belonging in SGM clients in individual art therapy sessions through the medium of collage. An arts-based research method was developed utilizing the medium of collage in session with clients, followed with reflective response collages and journaling to analyze the data observed. Across 5 art therapy sessions, clients engaging in collage facilitated deeper therapeutic rapport and safety, enhanced a sense of connection with the self, and helped to process barriers and desires around clients’ close relationships.

Folds, Bayan Abukiwan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the fold as an orienting metaphor and material gesture to linger on the minor details of intimacy that are severed by occupation and political violence. Through painting, drawing and ceramics, the work traces the more implicit modes of dehumanization—particularly in relation to Palestine—while engaging the domestic as a site of quiet and complexity. Influenced by artists like Jennifer Packer and Beatriz González, the practice embraces slowness, touch, and opacity to fold the viewer into a haptic encounter with the work.

All You Can Eat, Kelly Schiesswohl

Theses and Dissertations

All You Can Eat is a 2D-animated horror short following the patrons and inhabitants of a bakery as they prepare for its annual pie-eating contest. As the contest nears, tensions rise after the discovery of a dark secret amongst the staff inspires rebellion. Through the visual metaphor of pie and the pie-eating contest, this film explores how sexual violence functions on a systemic level. It explores our collective conditioning to a range of behaviors that contribute to patriarchal oppression and the social cycles that reinforce them across generations. Through design and surreal storytelling, this film captures the urgent threat of …

Body Of Light, Lucy C. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Body of Light is a two channel video installation, incorporating a combination of archival material and present day footage to explore and speculate upon the traces of Audrey Munson’s life that remain, a ghostly presence creeping into our current world.

These Things Happen, Keleigh E. Mcmullen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My artwork emerges from moments of emotional and physical violence—both small and large. Although rooted in my lived experience, the truths I tell in my work are far from unique. Violence often hides in plain sight, buried in the mundane spaces of daily life. Through ceramic sculpture, I spotlight these moments, inviting viewers into a world that is familiar and simultaneously unsettling.

Scale plays a crucial role in this narrative—objects shrink or expand based on their emotional gravity, their object authority, or my own relationship to them. By amplifying the small and shrinking the overwhelming, I reshape how viewers interact …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

Ivy Leaves, Volume 100, Anderson University - South Carolina

Ivy Leaves

The 2025 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Jaylee Koon, Jenna Martin, Rachel Riddle, Milena Ulrich, Emma Brightman, Corinne Lowe, Torie Johnson, Anna Leigh Avant, Darcy Hseih, Kaylie Sheriff, Claudia Sarmiento, LIly Gregory, Ethan Wright, Elise Frauenholtz, KJ Lian, Ellie Gramm, Iley Gramm, Kenzi Miller, Ellie Ruperto, Miriam Cabrera-Santana, Ashlee Keller, Mateo De Los Cobos, Jacob Enzor, Claire Nunes, Abby McDonald, Heidi Dillow, Derek Updegraff and Tim Speaker.

Syncretic Spirits / Espíritus Sincréticos, Angelica Tapia - Estrada

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Syncretic Spirits / Espíritus Sincréticos is a multimedia exhibition that invites viewers into a fantastical space where cultural identity and perception intertwine. Colorful shaped panels, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings bridge physical and metaphysical realms. Personal archetypes intuitively inspired by natural forms drive the work.

Influenced by the dualities of my upbringing as a first-generation Mexican American, I was immersed in Mexican culture through my family traditions while finding a home in the nurturing embrace of the heartland. The work has become a means of reclaiming a new layered sense of self, disentangling from my Catholic upbringing, embracing indigenous healing …

Serious Music With Bea Witkin: An Upper West Side Audio Walk, Megan Hattie Stahl

Theses and Dissertations

Serious Music with Bea Witkin is a site-specific audio walk on New York City’s Upper West Side produced by Megan Hattie Stahl. This immersive, musical documentary explores and extends the life and work of composer Beatrice Witkin (1916-1990). Across four stationary chapters and three walking interludes, participants follow a one-mile route from Riverside Park to Straus Park by way of Witkin’s longtime residence on West End Avenue. Through guided narration, archival music, interviews and recordings of contemporary musicians sight-reading a 1985 string quartet piece by Witkin, Serious Music invites listeners to consider where music begins and ends.

Witkin, who graduated …

Digital Zines As Mental And Sexual Health Communication Tools For Latina Teens: Format And Content Acceptability And Initial Findings, Jenn M. Lilly, D'Andrah Almanzar, Susan R. Pace, Dante D. Bryant

Social Service Faculty Publications

Recognizing the potential of digital zines (defined as selfpublished,

online publications combining artwork and

text) as culturally tailored health communication tools,

this article examines the acceptability and impacts of two

digital zines about mental and sexual health created by

Latina young people for Latina teens as a health communication

strategy. We conducted an anonymous online

survey completed by Latina teens who read the zines (32

for sexual health and 33 for mental health). Data analysis

aimed to explore, summarize, and interpret the collected

data using an artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced

approach. Survey participants found the zine format and

content acceptable and …

You Go, I Will Wait, Rasim Bayramov

Theses and Dissertations

On the other side of the coast, a hand is waiting. On the other side of the shore, someone is waiting for you to come. This space between you and them is an asymptote. The more you wait, the colder the pan is to the hand. But the salt of the sea will cover and warm your hand. There’s much to play with while you wait. The destination is only a promise, a figure disillusioned. Waiting spaces are enchantingly altering

in their premise. A bureaucratic fantasy with no avail and no ending. Systematically accumulated levels of power and control lies …

Glossed Over, Rebecca Oh

Theses and Dissertations

Glossed Over is a collection of interdisciplinary artworks exploring my Korean-American diasporic identity and how gender, queerness, religion, neurodivergence, and internet culture intersect within that experience. Through a blend of painting, woodworking, and sculpture, this installation carries the various elements of undefinable 한 (pronounced: han), a concept I attempt to define and contextualize in the Introduction and throughout this thesis. Each artwork operates through coded language, metaphor, and partial disclosure, offering space for the othered to find recognition through subtle cues and signifiers. Through Glossed Over and this thesis, I scratch the surface of my journey in reconciling generational trauma …

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

Huchum: The Legacy Of Fire Suppression, Indigenous Land Management, And Media Representation, Carolyn Coyne

Pomona Senior Theses

In my thesis, I examine how various forms of news media from the 1900s to present day in Ohlone territory have framed a particular hegemonic ideology around fire that matches early colonial journal entries – an ideology that is fueled by fear, sensationalism, and exclusion and directly commits violence against the Ohlone people. I investigate this time period because this is when modern news corporations, like The New York Times, rose into prominence. Specifically, I question how media representations of fire inform regulations over controlled burns; what are the similarities in discourse between media framing and policy? What tactics are …