Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons^™

Introduction To The Work Of Uygur Poet Bakhtiya, Dilfuza Rozieva, Anna Oldfield

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Introduction to the Work of Uygur Poet Bakhtiya" Dilfuza Rozieva and Anna Oldfield introduce Ilya Bakhtiya's (1932-1987) work. For writers like Bakhtiya, the task was to create a Kazakh Uygur print culture that combined their ethnic heritage with their new reality in the Soviet Union. Bakhtiya published in a variety of genres including lyric, satire, and children's literature in vernacular Uygur. Importantly, Bakhtiya's texts merge and bridge identities in both graceful and appealing ways overcoming the required Soviet context and continuing to inspire Uygurs today.

"100 Years Later, It Is Still So Powerful": Navigating The Effects Of The Armenian Genocide And Its Trauma On Armenian American Youth, Lara S. Kleine

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the effects of the Armenian Genocide on five Armenian American university students ages 18 to 29 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The impact of this event from 100 years ago is passed down generationally and still affects the current descendants of its survivors. Since this genocide is still denied by Turkey, its perpetrators, and by the United States, the impact on Armenians has increased as each generation fights for official recognition.

By conducting semi-structured qualitative interviews, the participants revealed its impact on their identity. This thesis was grounded in intergenerational trauma transmission theory and collective memory …

Where The Rocks Bleed Ink: Images Of Self In Palestinian Political Cartoons, Jonathon P. Wurth

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This graphic novel looks at symbols used by three prominent Palestinian political cartoonists—Naji al Ali, Baha Boukhari, and Khalil Abu Arafeh—that represent the Palestinian people. The goal, assuming that political cartoons accurately reflect the opinions of the common people, is to discern what Palestinians think about themselves. This study finds that while the cartoonists use a number of cultural and religious symbols to represent Palestinians, the most regularly used images—and hypothetically the most insightful—are representations of common Palestinian people themselves. They are depicted as humble yet strong and pious. Al Ali’s cartoons are taken from handala.org, a website dedicated to …

Indigenous Land Rights Of The Khoi In South Africa, Chelsea Wilkins

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Upon discussions in classes at James Madison University, I became aware of the Khoi people. I became interested in their way of life, as well as the implications of globalization and industrialization worldwide. After researching the topic, I decided I wanted to not only write my thesis on this topic, but I wanted to travel to South Africa to learn more. I wanted to know how a refreshment station at the Cape for the Dutch East India Company transformed into a fight for land that ultimately led to the extreme disenfranchisement of the Khoi people and their way of life. …

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 …

Improving Rhode Island’S Health Care System: Lessons From The Cuban Model, Sarah R. Moffitt

Senior Honors Projects

Improving Rhode Island’s health care system: lessons from the Cuban model

Cuba is world renowned for its health care system. In regards to international health crises, Cuba is a leader in sending workers abroad and training doctors from all over the world. Within its own borders, the Cuban model provides free access to all citizens in which every individual has a primary care provider. Cuba boasts high vaccination rates, a long life expectancy, low infant mortality rate, and a population that is one of the healthiest in the western hemisphere.

The purpose of this research project is to evaluate the …

The Celtic Way: Order, Creativity, And The Holy Spirit In The Celtic Monastic Movement, Fiona Leitch

Senior Honors Theses

The Celtic monastic movement lasted hundreds of years and is responsible for much of the spread of Christianity to the West. Much of the movement’s success can be attributed to the Celtic Christians’ understanding of the importance of the role of creative culture and order as well as an openness and responsiveness to the leading of the Holy Spirit. It is these three things working in tandem that influenced the success of the Celtic monastic movement. Although the movement ended a thousand years ago, it can offer guidance and wisdom for carrying out ministry today. A case study of Cuirim …

Gestures As Mimetic Forms Of Identity In Post-Secondary Italian As A Foreign Language Classrooms: A Sociocultural Perspective, Ilaria Nardotto Peltier

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study investigates the use of mimetic gestures of identity by foreign language teachers of Italian and their students in college classes as a form of meaning-making. All four of the teachers were found to use a variety of Italian gestures as a regular aspect of their teaching and presentation of self. Students and teachers also were found to mirror each other’s gestures. None of the teachers had been video-recorded before the study and all were surprised to see the degree to which they appeared to be Italian, although at the same time all believed this to be an important …

Kierkegaard On Truth, Caroline Moore

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Many philosophers believe in three types of truth and all of them are considered objective: correspondence, coherence and pragmatist. Objective knowledge “can designate a knowledge-claim having, roughly, the status of being fully supported or proven.”i If asked, philosophers often say that they believe in a mixture of two or more of the objective truths because each of the truths has points of weakness. While the objective truths cover much of what is considered to be valid truth, they all leave something out, subjective truth. Subjective truth is “a judgment or belief’ “that is compelling for some rational beings (subjects) but …

Grammatical Relations And Grammatical Categories In Malay; The Indonesian Prefix "Men-" Revisited, Johnny Tjia

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

The lexical roots of Malay are flexible with regard to their grammatical categories, which presents a problem in providing grammatical evidence for their category determination. This paper attempts to propose the use of affixes as one way to deal with the issue. Data from Indonesian and Ambon (Malay) language are among others given for clarification. The grammatical evidence from Indonesian active meN-, together with other affixes, are revisited as they can contribute to our understanding of the matter.

Neuter Gender In The Languages Of Aru, Antoinette Schapper

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

This paper examines gender agreement in three little-known languages of the Aru Islands and places them within the larger pattern of "neuter gender" in eastern Indonesia. For each language, I look first at the variety of agreement targets that are controlled by gendered nouns. Secondly, I look at the semantics of nouns that control agreement. I show that whilst having a strongly semantic base involving animacy, gender in Aru languages is a grammatical category in which many nouns denoting certain types of entities that lack discernable biological animacy are assigned to the same gender as that of animate referents. I …

The Indonesian Verbal Suffix "-Nya"; Nominalization Or Subordination?, Philippe Grangé

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

The suffix nya is one of the most frequent and polysemic suffixes in Indonesian. It can provide definite determination and topicalization. The "Verb nya", which often appears in a topicalized subject Noun Phrase (NP), is generally labelled as a deverbal noun. Nevertheless, many syntactic constraints set it apart from Indonesian deverbal nouns. "Verb nya" must be complemented by a NP, which can easily be reconstructed as a former subject: a sentence is topicalized and thus becomes a noun clause, generally the subject of the main clause Verb Phrase (VP). I argue that "Verb nya" is a subordinate noun clause, almost …

Responsive Turns In Indonesian Informal Conversation, M. J. Van Naerssen

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

People have all sorts of expectations about how interlocutors will and should behave linguistically when engaged in a conversation. These conversational norms are usually implicit and are sometimes difficult to master in a language that is new to you. This paper presents a model of different types of responses in informal conversation, illustrated with Indonesian examples. It builds upon the conversation analytic notion of preference; distinguishing preferred - or constructive - responses and dispreferred - or competitive - responses. The model is meant as a tool to cross-linguistically compare response behaviour to gain insight in language specific expectations about interaction …

Causative Constructions In Woirata, Kisar Island (Southwest Maluku, Indonesia), Nazarudin Nazarudin

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

Woirata (or Oirata, see Van Engelenhoven in this volume) is closely related to Fataluku (Timor-Leste) and belongs to the Timor-Leste subgroup of the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family (TAP) together with Makalero and Makasai (Schapper, Huber, and Van Engelenhoven 2012). It has about 1,566 speakers. Taber (1993) suggests that there are 24 languages in Southwest Maluku of which 23 are Austronesian; Woirata is the only non-Austronesian language in the area. It is interesting to research in how far Woirata has been influenced by Austronesian languages. Because the Woirata and other people who live on Kisar Island, like the Meher, are using Melayu …

The Notion Of "Adjective" In Dhao; A Language Spoken In Eastern Indonesia, Jermy I. Balukh

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

It is cross-linguistically defined that adjective is a word category that typically denotes quality and attributes. This category basically falls into semantic properties denoting age, dimension, values, and colours. They also indicate human propensities, physical properties, and speed. Syntactically, adjective typically functions as noun modifiers. However, many adjectives also share features with verbs and/or nouns. This makes adjectives not easy to define. Therefore, morphological and syntactic accounts are required, in addition to semantics, to define the prototypical characteristics of adjectives. This paper has shown that majority of lexemes denoting adjectival properties in Dhao share features with verbs. Although the prefix …

"Kasi" And "Bikin"; Two Causative Strategies In Melayu Tenggara Jauh (Southwest Maluku, Indonesia), Aone Van Engelenhoven

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

This paper discusses the causative constructions found in Melayu Tenggara Jauh 'Far Southeast Malay' (MTJ), which is used as lingua franca in Southwest Maluku. MTJ encodes causatives by means of MTJ features four periphrastic constructions with the verbs bikin 'do/make' and kasi 'give' that signal whether or not the CAUSER (Kemmer and Verhagen 1994) is involved in or has control over the caused event.

Children's Use Of Bahasa Indonesia In Jakarta Kindergartens, Bernadette Kushartanti, Hans Van De Velde, Martin Everaert

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

At a very young age children living in Jakarta use both Colloquial Jakarta Indonesia and Bahasa Indonesia. The children's first and most used language is Colloquial Jakarta Indonesia. In the formal school setting Bahasa Indonesia is frequently used and stimulated on a daily basis, and the learning process of Bahasa Indonesia is accelerated. The question addressed in this article is: how do these children choose from their repertoire of language varieties at this stage of language development? In our study 63 children (aged three to five), were interviewed in a formal and an informal situation in three playgroups and kindergartens. …

A Grammar Of Papuan Malay, Angela Kluge

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

No abstract provided.

Fealess Friday: Kelsey Chapman, Christina L. Bassler

SURGE

Kelsey Chapman ’15 fearlessly advocates for human rights, peace, and justice, focusing on the Middle East. An economics major and Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) minor, Kelsey is the house leader for the MEIS House, an Arabic PLA, and the founder of Gettysburg’s chapter of J Street U. [excerpt]

Pushing The Limit: An Analysis Of The Women Of The Severan Dynasty, Colleen Melone

Honors Projects

By applying Judith Butler’s theories of identity to the imperial women of the Severan dynasty in ancient Rome, this paper proves that while the Severan women had many identities, such as wife, mother, philosopher, or mourner, their imperial identity was most valued due to its ability to give them the freedom to step outside many aspects of their gender and to behave in ways which would customarily be deemed inappropriate. Butler’s theories postulate that actions create identities and that these identities then interact to form new possibilities for action. Using Butler’s theories, this paper first examines the actions of the …

To The Savannah Irish: An Ethnohistory Of The Culture From 1812-1880, Sarah A. Ryniker

Honors College Theses

Between the years of 1812-1880, the Savannah Irish created and maintained an identity based on the Irish ideologies of separatism, independence, and egalitarianism. Through an analysis of Hibernian Society archival toasts and semi-structured interviews, the social, economic, and political institutions which influenced the Savannah-Irish culture emerged. While many aspects of Irish life in Savannah are left to be explored, this research serves to illuminate the creation of identity in the public space between Savannah and the Irish through social, economic, and political means.

Citizenship Without Borders: Understanding Empathy And Domestic Direct Service As Powerful Approaches To Making Global Connections That Matter, Courtney Tielking

Honors College Theses

By unraveling a case study on Georgia Southern University's Alternative Break program, this research examines the relationship between empathy and globalization. Alternative Breaks are week-long trips, during University holidays, which facilitate and encourage direct service, immersion in a specific social issue, and guided reflection sessions. Four active Alternative Break participants and advisors were interviewed to outline accurately and depict their experience with culture-based Alternative Break trips. Their stories demonstrate an alternative to traveling abroad in order to achieve a sense of global citizenship. The research suggests that through empathy and direct service, one can become a global citizen without ever …

A Meal For The Man On The Redline, Stephen Lin

SURGE

These words will bite,

Acid bubbling

At the pit of your bowels

Vowels volatile won’t

Be easy to swallow. [excerpt]

Lost In Translation? Found In Translation? Neither? Both?, Esther Allen, Mary Ann Caws, Peter Constantine, Edith Grossman, Nancy Kline, Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Karen Van Dyck, Alyson Waters, Roger Celestin, Charles Lebel

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Translation specialists Esther Allen, Mary Ann Caws, Peter Constantine, Edith Grossman, Nancy Kline, Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Karen Van Dyck and Alyson Waters respond to the TQC question:

“Lost in translation”; “Found in translation”: Are these just useless commonplaces or are they indicative of something relevant to your own practice?

Place Reimagined, Michelle Unger

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This book shows the creative process and final product of my Independent Study Project, conducted in Prague as part of a semester study abroad program. The project started with interviewing four Czech graphic designers who described places in Prague that are especially meaningful to them. After collecting and transcribing their stories related to their places of inspiration, I visited the locations myself and photographed the locations with sensitivity to the details the artists had emphasized as unique to their experience of the place. While at each site, I also photographed elements of the locations that I personally found interesting and …

Access, Gender, And Agency On Study Abroad: Four Case Studies Of Female Students In Jordan, Jordan Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study follows the experiences of four female students as they sought to gain access to native speakers and the L2, engage with the culture, and fulfill program speaking requirements (two hours of speaking the second language outside of class per weekday) in Amman, Jordan. The research explores the following questions: what challenges did female participants on BYU's intensive Arabic study abroad (SA) program face as they accessed native speakers and the L2 outside of the classroom, how were participants able to persevere through and overcome these challenges, and how were program interventions set up to help participants persevere …

The World In Transition: A Comparative Analysis Of Youth Perceptions In China And America, Tyler D. Prochazka

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Many scholars have argued, over the next two decades China will rise while the United States begins a relative decline. Today’s youth will eventually become the next generation of leaders and policymakers. Thus, understanding youth’s perceptions of these trends can help provide insight into how they will shape the future Sino-U.S. relationship and their state’s standing in the world. This research found that the youth in China were optimistic toward their country’s prospects in the international community compared to their American counterparts. The relative optimism among the Chinese has made them more willing to participate in global affairs and institutions …

Respiration: Breathing Between The Stacks, Jerome D. Clarke

SURGE

How rare are we, who brandish Black and Male identity, in Academia?

In the past two weeks, I have been reminded of my Black maleness in a multitude of ways. I sat alone, subordinate in number, in a dialogue about Internalized Oppression at Diaspora House. Strong women of color discuss this issue while I work to stay respectful and non-oppressive in this space. I sat alone, subordinate in number, in each of my classes, where I am often the only one of my race and class. My race-gender circumstance is a matter of fact to me. How does this Black …

Identifying And Understanding The Difference Between Japanese And English When Giving Walking Directions, Keiko Moriyama Barney

Theses and Dissertations

In order to better identify and understand the differences between Japanese and English, the task of giving walking directions was used. Japanese and American public facilities (10 each) were randomly chosen from which to collect data over the phone in order to examine these differences based on the following five communication styles: 1) politeness, 2) indirectness, 3) self-effacement, 4) back-channel feedback (Aizuchi), 5) and other linguistic and cognitive differences in relation to space and giving directions. The study confirmed what the author reviewed in the literature: Japanese are more polite, English speakers tend to give directions simply and …

An Investigation Into The Motivational Practice Of Teachers Of Albanian And Japanese, Ana-Lisa Clark Mullen

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the use and effectiveness of motivational strategies with teachers and learners of Albanian and Japanese at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, UT. Each teacher was observed three times using a modified version of the Motivation Orientation of Language Teaching (MOLT) observation scheme that was first used by Guilloteaux & Dornyei (2008). Learners were surveyed using an instrument from that same study. Teachers were surveyed using a modified version of the instrument created by Cheng & Dornyei (2007). Data collected from these three instruments provide insight into (a) the relationship between teacher motivational practice and learner …