Philosophy Commons^™

Seeing Is Believing: Observing Trans Spirituality Through The Smith-Waite Tarot, Phoebe Santalla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In 1909 the Rider Company published the Smith-Waite Tarot deck which featured 78 illustrated cards by Pamela Colman Smith. With heavy use of appropriated and ambiguous symbology, the Smith-Waite deck became a meditation tool for realizing alternative realities. By observing the history of the deck, analyzing Smith’s approach to illustration, and retracing the counterculture occult explosion in the 1970s, this essay argues that the Smith-Waite deck is an object the reflects the queered body and self. The modern, trans-contentious, Western political climate creates an environment that obscures the fact that transgender people exist beyond the medicalization of their bodies. To …

Does Ai Ask Good Questions? A Discussion Activity, Katherine Tilghman

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students will prompt ChatGPT to generate discussion questions about a course text or artistic work, then evaluate the questions and modify them to make them more engaging and thought-provoking.

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

Crystal Queer: Fracturing The Binaries Of Matter, Creation, And Landscape, Sarah Knight

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, I compile a series of fragments consisting an analysis of my artwork in the gendered contexts of landscape, self-identity, mythology, and philosophy. I develop my concept of a “queer mark” in my art that serves as a form of queering, a disruption of visual and conceptual cohesion. I form a picture of how our contemporary selves are influenced by our gendered understanding of the landscape through the analysis of philosophical, artistic, and mythological concepts of creation. I see my sculptures as an atlas to an alternative means of understanding identity, a queering of these historical and exclusionary …

Creatures Of Play, Melissa Shelton

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis explores my practice as an artist and my work’s cultural, theoretical and social contexts, such carnival theory, feminist studies and film studies, as well as references to mythology and my own biography. I discuss forms of representation of gendered identities through my work in drawing, performance, animation, video and installation.

The masks we wear become as real as our bare face. Through the act of doubling the representation, my thesis work BECOMING/a fine line situates the mask as the mediator between reflections, mirroring the identity and the notion of performativity. Embracing a certain incompleteness and embodying the theoretical …