History Commons^™

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.

Raul's Reflections, Raul Falcon, 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.

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

Student Reflections

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.

Skeleton Man, Billie Wynn, Sagian Shaw, Taira Schurman

Group Presentations

No abstract provided.

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

Group Presentations

No abstract provided.

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

Student Reflections

No abstract provided.

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.

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

Course Materials

No abstract provided.

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 3 | The Oral Storyteller, 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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. …

Moving Narration: A Journey Through History, Yincheng Zhu

Masters Theses

The Central Pacific, as the first transcontinental railroad, is a remarkable achievement in the history of the United States. However, the story of what happened during its construction, including the struggles of the first generation of immigrants from China who built the tracks, and the resistance of native Americans to cede their lands, is largely forgotten. The California Zephyr, as a long-trip train that currently runs on the Central Pacific tracks, is not only a means of transportation but should also tell the history of survival and resistance embodied by the landscape it moves through and tracks it travels over. …

A Presence Of P____ And W__Th, Riley Wilson

Masters Theses

This body of work examines the involvement of association as it relates to our cultural interpretations of natural phenomena. Flowers and animals, both real and imagined, have been used as symbols for human morality since the beginning of human history. Two sources with which I drew inspiration from are medieval bestiaries and the Victorian practice of flower language. By combining elements from these references, I aim to pair this idea about the human need for classification with my own considerations about my identity. In combination, I also aim to highlight the responsibility that is intrinsic to curiosity. When faced with …

Uncovering Emotional Contamination: Five Sites Of Trauma, Abigail Zola

Masters Theses

“Emotional contamination,” describes residual feelings associated with a space where a negative or tragic event occurred to an individual or group either personally, historically, or politically. Emotional contamination affects people’s associations with place and informs their willingness to spend time in them. This project considers a set of design principles rooted in uncovering and acknowledging the lifespan of a site, and considers how this acknowledgment can exist as an urban system rather than an individual architectural artifact. My thesis work analyzes five case studies in Berlin where political and economic factors determined the result of intervention, and how these sites …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

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 …

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 …

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

Food, Drink, Time, New Year And Cloth, Jian Li

Masters Theses

My project uses traditional Chinese calligraphy culture and my own family stories to create five daily use products to help my user find a sense of belonging to Chinese culture and also introduce my culture and stories to all audiences.

As an international student who came to the US, I have often struggled with a lack of cultural identity and belonging. This is a common issue faced by many who choose to leave their homes and venture to new places. However, I believe that we can overcome this by creating products that generate an emotional connection with their users.