Philosophy Commons^™

A Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Assembly Line: Jewelry, Facture, And Alienation, Jonathon A. Zalakos

Masters Theses

A Pot of Gold at the End of the Assembly Line integrates icons of mass-manufacturing with signifiers of joyful work, stimulating a dialogue between industrial and craft labour. Visible traces of the making process left on these works conjure a spectral ‘maker’, implied by the fingerprints, toolmarks, assembly, and conspicuous decision making of an ‘other’. As we relate to these signifiers as opportunities for our own bodily action, this spectre speaks in our own voice. Possessed by this ghost, viewers are vicariously thrust into an imaginary context and made sensitive to the nature of this work — whether it validates …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Recombobulation- Taking The Bad With The Good, Gregory T. Kmieciak

Masters Theses

Recombobulation, a play on the word discombobulated (completely disoriented and utterly confused), is intended as a joke.  In the lore of the Milwaukee airport, the Recombobulation Area is located between the TSA check point and the boarding area, or likewise right after you land and before you are heading out of the airport. It's an area to regroup, get your bearings, or if you're anything like me, have a beer.

I've chosen this made-up word as a thesis title, both for its informal tone and to pay homage to my home town. It offers an air of lightness to otherwise …

Somatic Prosthetics For Planetary Resonance, Disha Dharesh Kumar R

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a 'crisis of imagination', the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as conscious at different levels and participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Information Pansycishm, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. …

Jewelry As A Portable Sanctuary, Yuhao Li

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how individuals remain intact in the presence of emotional difficulty. Rather than treating protection as withdrawal, the research proposes that stability emerges through the construction of an interior structure capable of holding vulnerability without collapse. Drawing on psychological theory, philosophy, and spatial thinking, it frames emotional repair as a spatial condition: an interior that can contain experience and be returned to when external conditions become unstable.
Within this framework, jewelry is redefined as a material extension of this interior. Positioned between body and world, it operates as a structure of containment, functioning as a portable …

Domestic Travelers: Transparent Machines, Hollow Bodies, Hanyi Wang

Masters Theses

Digitization is not a modern invention. Derived from the concept of fingers, this mindset of packing information into quantifiable, interchangeable units sounds mechanical, yet eerily physical. Try to imagine: a ghostly hand with millions of fingers with the same length, likeness, and function. Under the worldview of Digital Narrative, we live in a digital simulation: everything is representable with quantifiable units, fluid across media. Yet under this spectacle of convenient abundance, something is missing. The Unknowables are replaced with arbitrary symbols, while the Uncategorizables are omitted. This is a framework that cannot accommodate human subtleties and complexities. One needs to …

Until The Ground Breaks, Annie Hu

Masters Theses

Until the Ground Breaks explores the complex relationship between personal memory, embodied experience, and internalized "archival logic." By examining long-term cross-cultural diasporic experiences and the shifting dynamics of family narratives—including the sensory experiences and fading memory of a grandmother, a father's correspondence that acts as a textual record of emotional logic, and the continuous revision of family history—this thesis dissects the psychological tremors that occur when the illusion of a singular, stable memory archive collapses. This research rejects the view of memory as a static container of truth, revealing it instead as a dynamic, unstable, and constantly rewritten living system. …

Care Ecologies Between Knots, Eliza R. Marris

Masters Theses

Discarded fibers like raw wool behave the way harm reduction does. Harm reduction resists stigma and works to move beyond assumptions and oversimplifications of substance use and addiction. Wool is irregular, complicated, and emotionally charged. It resists compression and maintains its own being even when pulled apart. Working with raw wool is in relationship with complexity, as is harm reduction.

At its core, harm reduction is grounded in thoughtfulness and empathy towards people, their lived experience, and its nuances. It is a witness to lives, memories, and imprints, acknowledging the entangled realities of addiction. Our detachment from fiber remainders, materials …

Within The Archive: Jewelry And The Poetics Of Historical Trace, Fusheng Zhong

Masters Theses

Jewelry is a poetic translator, through which my intense and complex engagement with history is materialized. By reinterpreting the classical Chinese poem Bring the Wine(Li Bai,752) through paper-based materials, I translate poetry infused with personal traces and a distinct stance into wearable objects that embody the weight of history.

Through jewelry, an art form carried in close proximity to the body, I engage with history by staging acts of document visualization, transforming poems and archival fragments into visual and tactile records.  I suggest that in conditions of informational overload, individuals may gravitate toward reductive positions in order to avoid being …

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

Perceptual Heterotopia: A Spatial Experience Through Light, Media, And Textiles, Anne Yeoji Kim

Masters Theses

This study originates from sensory experience of observing sunrises and sunsets. Although the space in which these phenomena occur remains constant, it is perceived in different ways due to changes in the light that enters the space at these times. From these sensory experiences, the study began to inquire into the relationship between reality and the ideal. From this inquiry, it evolved into an exploration of how the ideal, or utopian, could be experienced through the senses within the realm of reality.

The concept of a heterotopia, as proposed by Michel Foucault, was used to expand upon these issues. A …

Learning From The Remains: Meditations On Sustainability, Julae Tan

Masters Theses

What remains when a person or material assemblage is stripped of its

component parts?

What is left is the remainder, an irreductible core.

Purely cerebral learning can be fleeting. A hybrid approach of cerebral and

visceral, “perverse” learning grounded in a familial understanding of the

remainder yields a more resilient pedagogy that endures long after leaving the

site of formal education.

This research was completed under the aegis of the 2025/26 Sustainability

Design Lab and features the subject of making with paper discards as the

primary mode of interrogation.

Via a collection of essays, a literature review, as well as …

Temporary Constructions, Elliott Golden

Masters Theses

Temporary Constructions is a photographic series made by a process of multiple exposures, material assembly, and surface intervention on large format film. Working in a photographic lighting studio, I build provisional structures from scrap wood and metal and photograph the structures in multiple possible forms to produce images that are visually intelligible but spatially impossible. In my writing, I situate these images within a longer lineage of artists using photography to recast our relationship to surface and depth, and consider what that lineage reveals about contemporary mediation and the increasingly blurred boundary between image and object.

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

V.1 Fall 2025, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2025 issue contains articles on the intersection of the natural world and human experience, technology, identity, immigration, activism, divestment, institutional history, political resistance, decolonization, and the digital vs. physical realms. The issue contains experimental poetry, visual essays, and reflections on the "nature of publication".

Returning Into The Deep Forest--A Methodological Practice Around Memory, Asianness, And Speech, Yu Ye

Masters Theses

">">The title of this thesis is borrowed from the Tang dynasty poem Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei: “Empty mountain, no one in sight—only the echo of voices. Returning sunlight slips into the deep forest, shining once more on moss.” I feel like my essay is responding to this kind of sensation: light does not shine head-on, but folds back, glancing sideways through dense branches, illuminating what is often overlooked. In that gesture of return—quiet, angled, persistent. This thesis unfolds in three chapters, each following a distinct path—image (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes), movement (The Rings of Saturn by …

Echoes Of Longing, Mahalexmi Mohan

Masters Theses

Loss lingers like a shadow, a weight no time can lift. Longing becomes a silent scream, echoing within, unanswered. Internal pain festers in the quiet, where unhealed wounds weave themselves into the fabric of being. Each breath is both survival and surrender, a fragile balance between hope and the hollow ache of what was, what will never be, yet could be.

Abstract

My work is deeply influenced by my experiences within a dysfunctional family structure and is explored through the relationship of emotional vulnerability and its effect on self-worth. Layered into the work is a confrontation with the scars, conflict …

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

I Don't Want To Talk About It, Margaryta Winkler

Masters Theses

This thesis is a contradiction. It is an attempt to verbalize what words can’t capture. It asks what is lost, what is gained and what can only be said when nothing is said at all. It is a love letter to wordless visual narratives. Drawing on the work of animators and illustrators like Gints Zilbalodis, Don Herzfeldt, Shaun Tan and Sophie Burrows, as well as the author’s own explorations, it looks at the risks and rewards of wordless storytelling. It is about silence, but not absence. It is about images that refuse to be reduced to captions and stories that …

Gust, Stroll, Veil, Jungeun Park

Masters Theses

I witness the unsettling and chaotic moments of everyday life:

blood clots in fried eggs, a dead rat on my porch, mites crawling on our skin . . .

These quiet tragedies exist with almost brutal indifference!

We eat, digest, excrete. We menstruate. We parasitize. We coexist.

I seek the intersection of repulsion and wonder in my daily experience and body sensations, visualizing unseen stimuli. I employ veil as a strategy. It conceals yet reveals. Sometimes, it acts as a transparent layer, sharpening what lies beneath. Other times, it blurs colors and forms, rendering them ambiguous. Veil transforms, entices, and …

The Portals: Jewelry As A Site Of Escape And Solace, Jung Ki Min

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates jewelry as a medium for emotional escape and psychological refuge, offering multisensory alternative forms of escapism. Rooted in personal experiences of continuous change and instability, the work explores how imagined spaces—constructed through AI-generated and digitally assisted visuals and layered material processes—can serve as intimate sanctuaries. Drawing from psychological theories, surrealism, and escapism, the study positions jewelry as a portable interface that enables temporary retreat without full detachment from reality. The series of work, which integrates transparent acrylic, visual layering, and subtle dimensionality, materializes these imagined spaces into wearable forms. These pieces invite reflective engagement, allowing wearers to …

Moving With Mountains, Matthew Freeman

Masters Theses

Bodily experiences with stones can produce an experience of the sublime. Through the act of traversing a stone, we can reorient our sense of scale and situatedness in nature. In this thesis, I invoke natural forces of great magnitude in an intimate context, making portable the expansion of thinking that occurs when we imagine ourselves on and as surfaces resembling landscapes.

I have developed my methodology through fieldwork in gorges, beaches and museums, culminating in a study of the conventions of Scholar’s stones and the aesthetics of the sublime. I define the sublime in historical and contemporary contexts by analysing …

The Dialectic Of Airless Space, Ophelia Arc

Masters Theses

The Dialectic of Airless Space is a cumulative, cross-disciplinary research project that explores ‘airless space’ as a somatic and psychological condition shaped by institutional environments. Unfolding over time through five interrelated books, the project weaves together writing, ephemera, textile sculpture, and drawing to archive the invisible architectures of bodily and mental experience.

V.1 Spring 2025, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Spring 2025 issue has the theme "Take It as a Sign" and features pieces on baby fever, spreadsheets and recording information, aura and technology, a trip to Horseshoe Bend, the new Art and Computation department at RISD, home and belonging, Illustration student projects related to sensitive experiences, red brick architecture in Providence, and technology and the English language, along with interviews of students in their studios, poetry, and other creative writing.

Evolving Design Critique For A Changing Industry, Sejin Hwang, Amy Ai, Leo Bang, Yuchen Chen, Kathryn Chen, Tiffany Chang, Stephen Jiang, Chloe Jo, Eileen Lee, Nicole Lu, Ray Liu, Kevin Wei, Elaine Zhang, Ellano Zhou

Student Work

This class serves as an exploratory practice in response to existing studies evaluating critique environments in the design industry. Previous studies identified three key limitations in the critique process: (1) a lack of experience for novice designers working with non-designers when reviewing their work, (2) an ineffective final review structure, and (3) a need for a more constructive and engaging feedback-sharing environment.1 To address these challenges, the course was designed to “critique” critique activities and develop strategic solutions to transform the way design work is reviewed, analyzed, and critiqued. The course was part of a pilot fall semester program called …

Design(Ing) Disruptions: Towards Intimacies Between Feminist Situated Knowledge, Gossip And Design, Senjuti Sangia

Masters Theses

This project highlights and problematizes the knowledge traditions and politics foundational to problem-solving paradigms in design education and practice. By emphasising the ontological nature and turn in design (Willis, 2006, Fry, 2012) , this thesis critically appraises the aforesaid formulations by extending intersectional feminist theories to dominant design epistemology. Drawing on the sociological framing of the matrix of domination, I investigate the dichotomy of the designer and user- as designers, users, and communities find themselves at different junctions in the matrix of domination. Further, I critique design frameworks from the analytical lenses of feminist situated knowledge, In so doing, I …

V.1 Fall 2024, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2024 issue contains articles on RISD Alumni Graciela Batista's Commencement speech on friendship and community, Britain's Royal Festival Hall, birds crashing into glass buildings, an Ojibwe student's reflecting on his native identity, RISD student interviews, an abandoned Bed Bath and Beyond store, Ai Weiwei's Kui Hua Zi, life in Banaras, a student's Yankee Swap experience, the 2024 RISD Grad Show, and indentations, along with student creative writing and a feature on images students saw out …