History Commons^™

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 …

Frontier: Land, Architecture, And Abstraction, Jacob Boatman

Masters Theses

The abstraction of land is a colonial process by which physical land is transformed into a conceptual or symbolic entity. This transformation occurs through various economic, architectural, and cultural practices that imbue land with abstract values, meanings, and functions beyond its physicality. This includes the division of land into parcels for economic transactions, the design and construction of built environments that shape human interactions with the land, and the cultural narratives and representations that ascribe significance to particular landscapes. Through abstraction, colonial powers devalue indigenous perspectives and relationships to the land, reducing them to mere obstacles in the path of …

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 …

Threading With Hair // Intertwined Stories, Cloris Ding

Masters Theses

“Threading with Hair // Intertwined Stories” is a poignant exploration that navigates the nuanced landscape of women's growth and identity recognition amidst biased societal influences, tracing the trajectory from the artist’s mother's generation to her own. Through a deeply personal lens, the thesis transcends individual narratives to articulate some shared female experiences. Employing reflective works in the form of jewelry, objects and writings, the study delves into female-centric topics, including the fluidity of identity, the transformative journey through various life stages, and the profound impact of societal expectations and family heritage. At the heart of this exploration is the metaphorical …

Billie's Reflections, Billie Wynn, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Student Reflections

No abstract provided.

Skeleton Man, Billie Wynn, Sagian Shaw, Taira Schurman

Group Presentations

No abstract provided.

Fatma's Promise, Husna Abubakar, Simone Khanyi Hadebe, Clarissa Guzman

Group Presentations

No abstract provided.

Wendigo, Raul Falcon, Zoe Gilmore

Group Presentations

No abstract provided.

Taira's Reflections, Taira Schurman, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Student Reflections

No abstract provided.

Simone's Reflections, Simone Khanyi Hadebe, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Student Reflections

No abstract provided.

Sagian's Reflections, Sagian Shaw, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Student Reflections

No abstract provided.

Raul's Reflections, Raul Falcon, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Student Reflections

No abstract provided.

Rise, Ning Yen, Omar Abdelhamid, Erin Xi, Nicole Xu

Group Presentations

No abstract provided.

Session 3 | The Oral Storyteller, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Motion Capture For Orature Wintersession 2024 | Syllabus, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

This winter session course invites students to explore motion capture through the lens of traditional oral storytelling practices. Students will actively identify the unique and distinguishing features of orature, and leverage their own cultural backgrounds, personal perspectives, and idiosyncrasies to create motion capture data that can be used in crafting an immersive digital retelling of a folktale.

Session 7 | Audience Role And Interaction, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Session 4 | The Talking Cloth As Prop, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Session 9 | Digital Immersion & Presence In Oral Storytelling: Being There, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Session 8 | Non-Verbal Storytelling: Facial Expressions, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Session 1 | Orature: Setting The Foundation, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Session 2 | Oral Storytelling Space / Place / Time, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Songa: A Mocap Database, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

No abstract provided.

Session 6 | Motion Capture For The Storytelling Performance, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

Session 5 | Oral Storytelling Props And Costume, Melisa Achoko Allela, Movement Lab

Course Materials

Presentation for the Motion Capture and Orature course offered during the 2024 Wintersession.

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

Surfacing: A (Loose) Manual On Unlayering / Stuff-Making And Hypervisibility, Zoë Pulley

Masters Theses

This is a (loose) manual on a method I like to refer to as surfacing.

A method that synthesizes narrative through the use of surfaces such as textiles, paper, web & video to reveal the spectacularly ordinary parts of Black life within a growing design practice.

A method I (currently) practice in three (evolving) steps:

Unlayering and piecing together stuff (rememory)

Acknowledgment of ancestry through stuff-making (kin)

Consciousness of oneself and the place / time / space in which the work is being disseminated (hypervisibility)

This is a manual that profiles a (current) design practice of a Black female maker …

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

Militure, Bingdong Duan

Masters Theses

The aim of this research is to explore how individual soldier equipment can be systematically integrated into everyday life. War, as the epitome of struggle and conflict, stimulates the fundamental human instinct for survival. To achieve this end, various methods involving a wide range of fields such as technology, culture, economy, and politics are utilized. Under the driving force of survival, explorations are conducted in various areas, with individual soldier equipment being notably prominent. Nations spend a substantial amount each year on developing individual soldier equipment, which optimizes functionality to such an extent that it has formed its unique aesthetics …