Nonfiction Commons^™

Things That Just Happen, Naomi Hollans

Student Scholar Symposium

Naomi Hollans’s nonfiction piece, “Things That Just Happen,” narrates a young woman’s experience with tragedy. After her grandfather’s death from cancer, the young woman receives another shock: her mother is diagnosed with cancer. While her mother endures chemo and the young woman prepares for college, her 4-year-old brother is also diagnosed with cancer. In the midst of these bafflingly painful circumstances, the narrator, her peers, hairdressers, and Sunday school teachers seek an explanation for suffering. Hollans’s reflection examines the human need to understand pain and discusses the various motivations for asking “why?” in response to grief. “Things That Just Happen” …

Change Over Time, Seth Wright

Student Scholar Symposium

No abstract provided.

Divinely Woven, Lily Robinette

Student Scholar Symposium

The relationship between science and faith has often been viewed as contradictory, with individuals typically aligning with one perspective or the other. However, a deeper examination reveals that these two ideologies are not independent but are interconnected parts of the greater tapestry of life. This paper takes the audience on a journey through the thought process of a chemistry student of the spiritual and physical being affirming of each other rather than competing ideas. It delves into the concept of complex interactions of atoms and the purposeful design of life that suggest that the universe is not a product of …

The Disinformation Vaccine: A Case For Integrating Comprehensive Disinformation Education Into First Year Writing Classes, Benjamin F. Jackson

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Students’ exposure to disinformation and misinformation is far greater than it has ever been. As the ability of generative AI to produce image, video, and audio deepfakes grows more sophisticated, disinformation will become even easier to spread and harder to detect. The rapid spread of social, political, scientific, and medical disinformation has been deadly and its potential is disastrous. Security experts now warn that dis/misinformation is the greatest threat to national security. Americans at large and students in particular have a demonstrated lack of information literacy when it comes to detecting false information, and bad actors nationally and globally are …

The Creation Of An African American Jewish Culinary Tradition: Michael Twitty And The Passover Seder As A Vehicle For Remembering Trauma And Celebrating Survival, Samira Mehta

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The Exodus of the Israelites has long held meaning for African American Christians, as noted by scholars of African American religious history. Jewish studies scholars, meanwhile, have written about both Passover and Jewish relationships to the Exodus. Michael Twitty, public historian, James Beard award-winning author, and memoirist, has fused an identity for himself by drawing on the foodways of both traditions to remember and memorialize the trauma of both traditions While Twitty uses food to create meaning in the context of holidays, his memoirs, Kosher Soul and The Cooking Gene, explore how the food of trauma, poverty, and resilience provide …

Leapfrog & How To Half-Bake, Zachary Bajuyo

Scholars Week

The first piece recounts an early experience with frustration and the feeling of breakthrough when learning.

The second piece recounts an early experience of giving up.

A Tedious Oscillation Between Heartfelt Knowledge And Tears: A Metamodern Essay On Bo Burnham’S Work, Josh Denzel C. Ng

DLSU Senior High School Research Congress

Ever since the late 1900s until the early 2000s, philosophers such as Linda Hutcheon declared the death of the postmodern senses and looked ahead to a new generation of intellectuals to provide a heading and analysis for what was still a new concept. David Wallace perceived that literature had to shift away from irony and postmodern deception to recover a forgotten referentiality and essentialism. He introduced the notion of using sincerity and honesty, which conform to the beliefs of transcendentalism. Successively, this gave rise to the birth of the idea of New Sincerity commonly defined as an oscillation between irony …

Understanding Humanity: Demarginalizing The Intersection Of Black Masculinity And Feminity For The Psyche, Kandice Fowlkes

Symposium of Student Scholars

As the intersection of race and gender is a feat for the strong Black man and strong Black woman, the double edged sword is the deterioration of mental health overlooked by the need to maintain the guise of perfection. The social disadvantages of this intersection include a myriad of traumas such as financial stability, violence and oppression, and the internal stigma of judgment, which causes Black men and Women to delay or go undiagnosed for mental health disorders. In turn, this enables an unstable community to unite for mental health reform. Aside from seeking medical help, the conversation of mental …

Research For A Podcast Series: Distinguishing The Voice Of God, Mark Lawton

Liberty University Research Week

Graduate

Creative and Artistic

Fa'amatagi: From Whence The Wind Blows, Annette Roberts

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Fa’amatagi: From Whence the Wind Blows is a love letter to the people and culture of my parents. This is a documentary poetics project that draws upon research of the Mau Movement, archives from the New Zealand government, and personal ethnographies with my own parents who are both of Samoan descent. I curated several pieces of art from book collector Alexander Turnbull and photographer Alfred J. Tattersall. This project delves into the effects of colonialism on a previously isolated people. It explores the act of civil disobedience and what comes of it versus the long-lasting damage of compliance towards a …

Eventide, Kim Idol

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Short story about the death of a century old family business in Los Angeles.

"Cocky" Pants, Kalena Grey

KUCC -- Kutztown University Composition Conference

This work is a narrative essay I wrote for my composition 100 class about one of the biggest aspects of my life, my Jamaican heritage. I grew up hearing my mom pronounce the color "khaki" as "cocky," and it just so happened to rub off on my vernacular in my younger years, as well as my life now as a 20-year-old. I hope this essay gives a peak into my life and find some humor in it as well as some of its cultural aspects.

Humankind: A Perspective Collection, Madison Larimore

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

HumanKind, an ongoing project that began with FUSE funding, preserves diverse perspectives and addresses the empathy deficit in the form of creative nonfiction profiles. Profiles are an ideal, underused form for promoting empathy and establishing contact points across differences. Traditionally, profiles are written about celebrities or people of established public interest, but this oral presentation will present a collection of multimodal profiles written from the perspectives of fifteen everyday students at the University of Nebraska at Omaha from diverse backgrounds. Each profile is based on the answers the students provided during an extensive interview of over 100 questions about what …

Rod Library Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, Angela L. Pratesi, Ayanna Wallican Green, Carter Zehr, Lydia Richards, Katherine Jackson, Molly Walleser

Community Engagement Celebration Day

Rod Library’s Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is a concerted effort to improve the representation of women and minoritized individuals in the arts on the free encyclopedia and in the Wikipedia community. Wikipedia is the fifth most used website in the world, but there is systemic bias embedded in its content due to a lack of diversity. This project is an effort to change that. Students in LIB 3159: Creating Wikipedia for the Arts hosted the Edit-a-thon on March 24. The event was free and open to the public. In addition to community participants, students in ARTHIST 4608: Arts of Africa (who …

The Privilege Of Home: A 400 Year Family History Of Immigration And Inhabitation On Native Land, Kristine Mahler

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

This presentation culls together the extensive text-based, place-based, and experience-based research I completed on the history of immigration and inhabitation on native land from 1620 through 2018 through the specific lens of my ancestors: French settlers who lived in Kébec’s St. Lawrence Valley and immigrated to western Wisconsin around 1865, eventually settling in northern Minnesota. As I researched my ancestry alongside the history of white settlement and forced native resettlement in these regions, I recognized a pattern of repeated inhabitation—traced through baptismal, marriage, and death certificates—by my family onto recently-vacated native land.

In my text-based research, I was riveted by …

Hollywood, The Media, And The Alteration Of Image In The 1940s, Sean M. Conrad

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

I am currently writing a feature-length screenplay entitled Klara based on true events and people surrounding the rise of Nazi Germany and the exile of Jewish-German intellectuals to America during 1933-1945. The narrative is grounded in the work of the European Film Fund (1938-1948), the Paul Kohner Talent Agency, and the various agents of propaganda at work both in Nazi Germany and America during this time period. Through my research I hope to explicate how Jewish-German exile in America influenced not only those exiled, but also the burgeoning American film industry and how the cross-cultural intersection of media propaganda, both …

What’S In A Name?: The Evolution Of The Female Identity In Shalimar The Clown, Jessica Barksdale

Undergraduate Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture

No abstract provided.

English Grammar: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Wendy Delk

Undergraduate Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture

No abstract provided.

Until Valhalla, Mr. Krebs, William J. Williford

Undergraduate Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture

No abstract provided.

Hold Them Down: Oppression Of Film Noir's Working Woman, Shaire Blythe

Undergraduate Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture

Introductory Paragraph:

The struggle for women’s rights and roles in society has been an ongoing battle, since the beginning, with Adam and Eve. The subjugation that was presented upon Eve, because of her fault and easiness to be deceived, has trailed behind mankind, and film noir would not be excluded. The femme fatale seems to play the role of what Eve started, seducing men with her sexuality to carry out wicked schemes and being the downfall of all men. Thus, men began to identify women as a threat to their very essence but, yet, still cannot resist the temptation women …

Dawn Or Doom: The Risks And Rewards Of Emerging Technologies, Diana Hancock, Steve Tally, Gerry Mccartney, Michele Arthur

Purdue P-12 Networking Summit & Poster Session

Dawn or Doom is a free and open to the public conference at Purdue where we focus on benefits and risks surrounding some of the technologies that are both the most disruptive to current practices and being adopted the fastest. A collection of Purdue faculty experts and some outside speakers showcase their many perspectives related to this technology explosion, explore conditions that will foster innovation and investment into the next generation, and address the big-picture issues where both optimism and pessimism are warranted.

P-23 Worldview 2.0: Revisiting, Refinding, And Refining Faith In The University Years, Jacina Shultz

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

In this non-fiction, creative extended essay, I revisit my worldview essay from Western Heritage, specifically focusing on my belief in a loving God. I trace my path to this belief, beginning with my freshmen year of college when I first started to question its legitimacy. Though teetering on the edge of agnosticism, I eventually learned how a belief in a loving God is not a blind one. I came to understand what it means to have a relationship with God. The project reconstructs the reasoning that verified to me that a faith in God does not have to be ignorant. …

The Visit, Jiordan Castle

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

I will be reading a creative essay constructed for Professor Ryan Van Meter's spring 2012 workshop in nonfiction. English Department Chair Dean Rader assisted me in getting my paper chosen for presentation (with a Q&A session) at the upcoming Sigma Tau Delta International Convention this month. The essay is about visiting my father in prison as a teenager and relates to race relations and our justice system in a personal, yet unsentimental way.