Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons^™

Off The Rez: Witnessing Indigenous Knowledges Through Social Media, Deborah Hales

Ed.D. Dissertations in Practice

The term “Off the Rez” is used, in the title, to mean research that is not done on a reservation or in urban areas. This study aims to discover if social media can be used as an innovative option for non-Indigenous allies to conduct respectful research. The study research questions were, (1) can social media be used as a research tool, to witness Indigenous Knowledges? (2) Can social media be used as research, by non-Indigenous research allies, to have the least impact on Indigenous communities?

This research was conducted using social media, with selected Indigenous participants who were 18, identified …

Haramed And Dangerous: A Thematic Examination Of Muslim Women’S Representation In We Are Lady Parts, Reham Bohamad

Dissertations

Since the early days of Western media, Muslim women have been portrayed in a negative way. From belly dancers to oil-rich horny sheikhs to voiceless passive wives of terrorists. This image has led the Western spectator to associate Islam and the Muslim women’s headscarf (Hijab) with backwardness, extremism, and oppression. In recent years, there has been a positive shift towards a more inclusive and authentic representation of Muslim women. This shift is the result of the post-network era which provides on-demand media outlets that challenge the dominant hegemonic production system and provide diverse and inclusive images that cater to niche …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

The Yellow Qipao, Feibi Wang

Honors Projects

This is a creative project centered around the pre-production of a short film about queer Asian American Christianity and the research that went into it. The synopsis of the script written for the short film is a life in the day of Aspen. Aspen prepares for church and is indecisive of the clothes they want to wear, because they are gender non-conforming. They come out to their mom and there is conflict. My research going into this project consists of researching media representation of queerness, Asian American identity, and Christianity, and how the three identities intersect in Aspen’s life and …

Nationless States And Stateless Beings: The Politics Of Identity And Citizenship In Claudio Mir’S Mondongo Scam And Cheech Marin’S Born In East L.A., Rebecca A. Barnes

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

In the colloquial sense of the term, the word citizen refers to an individual who belongs to a nation, either by birthright or by naturalization. Therefore, citizenship denotes a political and a social belonging, an ideological home, and, in most cases, a strong foundation for the development of one’s personal identity. However, since nations are inherently artificial structures, made only tangible in the present day by a few centuries of recorded history, a philosophical approach to the term citizen complicates this definition. Based off critics including Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Fernando Ortiz, and Jacques Derrida, this essay seeks to explore …

Nsfw: Not So Feminist Women - A Media And Cultural Studies Analysis Of Working Women In Popular Media, Josephine Schofield

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

Even though gender diversity of characters has increased in television shows and films, this study hypothesized that female characters who are presented as feminist icons function as feminist backlash and perpetuate negative and harmful stereotypes. This was found to be especially true for career-focused women. Applying a cultural studies approach to reading television and film studies through a feminist lens identified the antifeminist factors that continue to cause the perpetual loop of independent women reverting to dated social roles. This research connects what audiences consume through popular media to how they perceive their female co-workers. The findings of this study …

Dirty Minds & Failed Endings: Uses Of The Bawdy In Jewish Comedy, American And Israeli Perspectives, Eyal Tamir

Doctoral Dissertations

The connection between Jews, Jewish culture, and comedy in the twentieth century has long been established. The dissertation looks at Jewish comedy, comedians, and comediennes who have made the bawdy a central feature of their work. Moreover, it argues that the bawdy and the lewd have played an important role in the history of Jewish comedy and humor in the United States and in Israel. Aside from simply documenting various uses and occurrences of the bawdy in Jewish comedy, the dissertation seeks out some symptoms, as well as some underlying causes for the proclivity for such material in the work …

“Fashionable To Be Ethnic”: Malka Marom, Yorkville Reimagined, And The Cbc’S A World Of Music, Maureen Chow

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1999, looking back at her 1960s career as a folk performer, Malka Marom commented that she and her former singing partner, Joso Spralja, had reached mainstream success in Canada when it was considered “fashionable to be ethnic.” Here, Malka is referring to the mid-1960s, when she was classified as an ethnic folk singer in Toronto’s Yorkville Village folk scene. She performed alongside Canadian folk “greats” such as Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, and Ian and Sylvia. Malka and Joso released four studio albums through Capitol Records of Canada and were later chosen to host their own CBC television show, A …

A Comparative Analysis Of Political Climates In Lithuania, Poland, And Ireland In The Early 1900s Related To Us Immigration And Media Culture, Annelise Silkaitis

Senior Theses

This thesis explores the process and experience of Lithuanian, Irish, and Polish immigrants during the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as the role of media, specifically newspapers and books, in creating the representation and portrayal of these immigrant groups. These different ethnic groups left Europe for a variety of reasons, mainly economic and political, and sought a better life in the United States. Upon arrival, each group struggled with the Americanization process, learning English, building connections, and forming a new society. Although some immigrant groups formed stronger networks and communities upon arrival, each group faced poverty and discrimination. …

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Surrogate Histories: (De)Mythifying The Franco-Female In Transitionary Spain, Christina Beaubien

Doctoral Dissertations

Within the context of Franco Spain, academic scholarship has proven that the regime manipulated collective history via both active remembering and active forgetting in order to construct legitimacy and a national identity. Moreover, much of the regime’s mythology was based on predetermined concepts of gender difference that was exacerbated by the influence of the Catholic church. In this way, what it meant to be female during the Franco dictatorship was a large part of what came to be the nationalized-gender-mythology of the regime, or rather – myths that constructed the Franco-female. On the one hand, the regime constructed mythology …

“Mortality’S Wilting Flower:” Terror Management Theory And Music In Animated Films, Lauren Bertsch

Senior Honors Projects

There’s something about animated films - so full of light and wonder - that invokes this “warm and fuzzy” feeling when you sit down to watch it. Yet an entire spectrum of human emotion is demanded from us as an audience. Buried in the heart of animated films are these dark themes, problems that lie in the bedrock of humanity. And it leaves us pondering: why? The answer may actually stretch back to when our species developed thought and reason. In 1973, American anthropologist Ernest Becker uncovered the mental foundation that allows us to live, function, and thrive in a …

Memorias | Electronic Literature + Live Coding Performance, Jessica A. Rodriguez Miss, Rolando Rodriguez, Alejandro Brianza, Luis M. Guzman

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Memorias is a web-based artistic project by Jessica Rodríguez developed through the Estuary platform —an online platform to host live coding languages. It is based in six autobiographical writings connected to the way she “hears”, “writes”, “watches”, “reads”, “sees” and “listens” to the word. Through these texts, six code works were designed and programmed, hybridizing natural and computing languages by parsing three existing live coding languages: Tidal Cycles, Punctual, and CineCer0.

Together, Memorias’ languages collide different materialities as well as visual and sonic approaches, going from voices in English, Spanish, Cello and Paetzold samples, audio and visual synthesis, and pre-recorded …

Through The Lens Of Koreans: The Influence Of Media On Perceptions Of Feminism, Neha Cariappa

Master's Projects and Capstones

Regardless of country and culture, the media has the power to influence the opinions and perceptions of its viewers. This project evaluates specific Korean movies—and the reactions of South Koreans to gender representations in films that are considered “feminist”—along with the variety show genre, which also tends to reinforce gender stereotypes and imbalances. With these media representations as a framework, this research explores the impact of the internet in forwarding feminist views along with unearthing the reactions of Koreans. Given the anonymity of the internet and social media, these platforms allow for honest expression and counterpoints to sexist views and …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

The Portrayal Of Income Inequality As Represented In American And Spanish Film, Chloe Riggs

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this thesis, I will examine the portrayal of wealth in film. Further, I argue that the portrayal of wealth in film has the power to shape the public’s perceptions of income inequality, even going so far as to later impact their actions towards both their own and differing economic classes (Kendall 2011; Kenworthy 2007). With a film’s ability to portray wealth, stressing the importance of an individual’s position on the hierarchal economic ladder, the individual is led to view both success and failure as a personal matter, the latter with a scornful gaze. This belief is then naturally cycled …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Recipe For Disaster, Zac Travis

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

Today’s rapid advances in algorithmic processes are creating and generating predictions through common applications, including speech recognition, natural language (text) generation, search engine prediction, social media personalization, and product recommendations. These algorithmic processes rapidly sort through streams of computational calculations and personal digital footprints to predict, make decisions, translate, and attempt to mimic human cognitive function as closely as possible. This is known as machine learning.

The project Recipe for Disaster was developed by exploring automation in technology, specifically through the use of machine learning and recurrent neural networks. These algorithmic models feed on large amounts of data as a …

From Swing King To Swing Kids: The Jazz Era Of ‘Big Band Orchestras’ In World War Ii, Katie Victoria Burnopp

Student Scholar Showcase

Known as the ‘King of Swing’, clarinetist and band leader Benny Goodman (1909-1986) threatened the Nazi cause during WWII. With intent of improving music pedagogy, the purpose of this research was to investigate swing music during World War II. The particular problems of this study were to: (1) identify how the swing music of Benny Goodman (1909-1986) influenced adolescents in the United States of America, United Kingdom, and Germany; (2) explore the Nazi party view on ‘swing’ music of the era; (3) examine how the music of Charlie and his Orchestra became used as a tool for Nazi propaganda; and …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

The Suppression Of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties In Flemish Cinema And The Film Adaptation Of Will-O'-The Wisp, Gertjan Willems

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Suppression of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties in Flemish Cinema and the Film Adaptation of Will-O'-the Wisp" Gertjan Willems analyzes two film projects of Frans Buyens. In 1970, Buyens received a positive funding recommendation for Top-Hit Girl, a satire about community difficulties in Belgium. However, Minister of Culture Frans van Mechelen refused to support the project because it conflicted with his pro-Flemish views. The minister successfully swept this controversial decision under the rug by offering Buyens the option to trade his socially critical project for a film adaptation of Willem Elsschot's novel Will-O'-the Wisp. …

Playing With The History Of Middle Earth: Board Games, Transmedia Storytelling, And The Lord Of The Rings, Adam Brown, Deb Waterhouse-Watson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Contemporary cases of transmedia storytelling have thrown many conventional understandings of ‘adaptation’ into disarray. The resurgence of tabletop game culture has thus far played a significant role in this, though scholars have largely neglected the subject, particularly in terms of how transmedia relationships reconfigure the meaning(s) shaped by and through games by players. This paper addresses this phenomenon through a close analysis of two board games based on The Lord of the Rings, in which the (re)construction of the story-world of the source text(s) impacts strongly on ‘conventional’ modes of narrative and identification. Governed by the adoption of various …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

Dynamic Media: A Need For The Dynamic Use Of Media To Meet Organizational Goals, Alexander J. Scott

Capstone Collection

This qualitative research study looks at how media can be used dynamically as a vehicle for study abroad students to create more meaningful engagements with the communities they visit. It takes a post-structural approach with an emphasis on how media supports participatory community-driven initiatives. It is the result of a 3-month participatory research process that looks at how media is emerging as a resource in some of the most remote communities in Nicaragua. The study was based on interviews with community stakeholders of the study abroad program, participatory observation, questionnaires, talks with community members, and the results of dynamic media …

Lost In Adaptation, Caitlin S. Manocchio

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

philosophical societies that send us here as their representatives- can no longer, in this case, allow itself [the philosophical idea] to be enclosed in a single idiom, at the risk of floating, neutral and disembodied, remote from every body of language

(Derrida 1994: 14)

Introduction

In Sending: on representation (1994), Jacques Derrida questions the function of representation that we can use to offer a challenge to the experience and structure of representation as a practice in visual culture and for contemporary spectatorship. When the function of representation is being questioned, rather than its subject, the practice of representation is seen …

The Subjects Of Fati̇h Akin's Melodramas: A Genealogical Reading Through The Films Of R.W. Fassbinder, Yilmaz Güney And Atif Yilmaz, Emir O. Benli

Doctoral Dissertations

Fatih Akın's feature films Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) resonated strongly with Turkish, German and Turkish German communities, albeit for diverse reasons, opening spaces for debate with regard to subjectivites that foreground their alterity and redefine readings of national identity. This dissertation addresses ways in which the melodramatic modality of Akın's films partake in such debates by presenting a dialogic genealogy of melodramas from Turkish, German and Turkish German contexts. An analysis of Fontane's novel "Effi Briest" and of R.W Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Atıf Yılmaz's O Beautiful Istanbul; and …

2017 Call For Submissions, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

On A Particularly Patriotic Day, Laila M. Mufty

SURGE

I stare at myself in disgust before turning away and beginning to apply skin creams and makeup that promise a lighter complexion. I straighten my naturally thick, curly hair, methodically going over the same strand multiple times while wishing for straight hair like the other perfect blond girls in my grade. I put on a modest all black ensemble in an effort to avoid unwanted attention and pull on a large jacket with a hood to hide my face. [excerpt]

Occupy The Future: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Dystopian Film And The Occupy Movement, Justin J. Grandinetti

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The anarchic Occupy Wall Street protests, which began in 2011, had an immediate impact on politics and the global lexicon. By introducing the terms “the one percent” and “the 99%” into the public sphere, Occupy was able to draw attention to growing global income inequality. This revolutionary spirit was not lost on popular culture, as a number of films that followed the protests were linked to Occupy. The Hunger Games (2012), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Elysium (2013) represent films that were not only extremely successful in the box office, but were also connected to the Occupy Movement because …