South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Improving Maternal And Child Health In Bangladesh: The Integration Of Midwives In Conjunction With The United Nations Millenium Development Goals Initiative, Elizabeth Casto

International ResearchScape Journal

As the United Nations Millennium Development Goals initiative comes to a close, it is important to examine what has been effective in combating disparities in developing nations. In this paper I explore the impact midwives have on improving maternal and child health in Bangladesh by focusing on how the United Nations Millennium Development Goals initiative has helped to change societal views on women and birth as midwives become more integrated into improving maternal and child health. It is a quantitative and qualitative approach analyzing the statistics of implementing midwives as these impact cost-effectiveness and change in mortality rates in addition …

Using Analogues To Simulate Intensity, Trajectory, And Dynamical Changes In Alberta Clippers With Global Climate Change, Jamie L. Ward

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alberta Clippers are extratropical cyclones that form in the lee of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and traverse through the Great Plains and Midwest regions of the United States. With the imminent threat of global climate change and its effects on regional teleconnection patterns like El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), properties of Alberta Clipper could be altered as a result of changing atmospheric circulation patterns. Since the Great Plains and Midwest regions both support a large portion of the national population and agricultural activity, the effects of global climate change on Alberta Clippers could affect these areas in a variety of ways. …

A Dendrochronological Analysis Of Insect Outbreaks And Climate Effects On Tamarack From Indiana And Michigan, Nicholas Lorin Flinner

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Disturbances have a strong impact on tree stand dynamics across the world. In North America, the larch sawfly (Pristiphora erichsonii) and larch casebearer (Cleophora laricella) are two non-native species of insects affecting tamarack across much of their native range. The majority of research on the effects of larch sawfly on tamarack (Larix laricina) has been conducted in Canada with very little dendrochronological work in the United States along the geographical boundary of tamarack or on the effects of larch casebearer on radial growth. As a consequence, very little is known about the relationship between tamarack and these insects’ outbreaks in …

The Ecology And Morphology Of Deep-Sea Benthic Foraminifera: The Australian Margin And Epifaunal Pore Characteristics, Jake Willingham

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The distribution and abundance patterns of modern benthic foraminifera are used by paleoceanographers to assess changes in ocean conditions over geologic time. Examination of modern foraminiferal analogs provides the means to determine how these single-celled protists record clues about ambient conditions in their morphology and abundance/distribution patterns. Abundance and vertical distribution patterns of deep-sea benthic foraminifera were examined along the South Australian Margin and Tasman Sea of Australia. This was one of the first studies to examine microhabitat preferences of living (Rose Bengal stained) deep-sea benthic foraminifera within the region. A total of 11 sediment cores were collected via multicorer. …

Sex-Trafficking In Cambodia: Assessing The Role Of Ngos In Rebuilding Cambodia, Katherine M. Wood

Senior Honors Theses

The anti-slavery and other freedom fighting movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not abolish all forms of slavery. Many forms of modern slavery thrive in countries all across the globe. The sex trafficking trade has intensified despite the advocacy of many human rights-based groups. Southeast Asia ranks very high in terms of the source, transit, and destination of sex trafficking. In particular, human trafficking of women and girls for the purpose of forced prostitution remains an increasing problem in Cambodia. Cambodia’s cultural traditions and the breakdown of law under the Khmer Rouge and Democratic Kampuchea have contributed to …

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …

Woman Becomes Goddess In Bollywood: Justice, Violence, And The Feminine In Popular Hindi Film, Kathleen M. Erndl

Journal of Religion & Film

What happens “when a woman becomes Chandika?” This essay contributes to an on-going discussion of the theme of “avenging women” in popular Indian cinema, with particular focus on the transformation of a woman into a fierce Goddess who avenges oppression and re-establishes justice. Analysis of the story line and selected song sequences from the Hindi language film Anjaam (“Outcome,” 1994) in light of themes from the Hindu Sanskrit text, the Devi-Mahatmya (“Greatness of the Goddess,” 5thc. C.E.) shows how traditional religious images and values are adapted and transformed in a modern context.

Girls’ Education, Child Marriage, & Gender Justice: A Study Of Balika Shivir Educational Camp, Rajasthan, India, Nira Pandya

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Girls’ education has long been considered a significant indicator of a girl’s age at marriage in India. Based on this idea, policymakers in India have designed or supported various expensive programs to eliminate child marriage in the country. Using a feminist lens, this paper explores one such intervention, Balika Shivir, an adolescent girls’ residential camp, located in the village of Lunkaransar, Rajasthan, in Western India. I focus specifically on my interviews with girls in this camp, highlighting their reflections on a number of issues dealing with education, culture, and agency in connection with their experiences at Balika Shivir. The …

Why Chinese Neo-Confucian Women Made A Fetish Of Small Feet, Aubrey L. Mcmahan

Grand Valley Journal of History

Abstract for “Why Chinese Neo-Confucian Women Made a Fetish of Small Feet”

This paper explores the source of the traditional practice of Chinese footbinding which first gained popularity at the end of the Tang dynasty and continued to flourish until the last half of the twentieth century.[1] Derived initially from court concubines whose feet were formed to represent an attractive “deer lady” from an Indian tale, footbinding became a wide-spread symbol among the Chinese of obedience, pecuniary reputability, and Confucianism, among other things.[2]^,[3] Drawing on the analyses of such scholars as Beverly Jackson, Valerie Steele …

From Tawa'if To Wife? Making Sense Of Bollywood's Courtesan Genre, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

Although constituting what might be described as only a thimbleful of water in the ocean that is Hindi cinema, the courtesan or tawa'if film is a distinctive Indian genre, one that has no real equivalent in the Western film industry. With Indian and diaspora audiences generally, it has also enjoyed a broad popularity, its music and dance sequences being among the most valued in Hindi film, their specificities often lovingly remembered and reconstructed by fans. Were you, for example, to start singing "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" or "Yeh Kya Hua" especially to a group of north Indians over the …

Insect Abundance And Variability In An Urban-Rural Landscape And Comparison To Foraging Habitat Selection Of Bats, Nicole M. Oehler

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I conducted a study of the relationship between prey availability and foraging habitat selection of Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis), big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus), eastern red bats (Lasiurus borealis) and evening bats (Nycticeius humeralis) in an urban-rural landscape matrix of southwestern Indianapolis. Insects were collected from nine different habitat types found within the range of these species. Insect data were collected from 2006 to 2008 using sticky traps placed in each habitat type. Habitat types were ranked by importance to each bat species (based on previous studies) and then compared to the average number of prey insects captured per habitat …

The Status Of Crawfish Frogs (Lithobates Areolatus) In Indiana, And A Tool To Assess Populations, Nathan J. Engbrecht

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The conservation status of Crawfish Frogs (Lithobates areolatus) in Indiana has changed over the past several decades. Once described as being locally plentiful, declines led to the listing of Crawfish Frogs as a State Endangered Species in 1988. Several records for this species in Indiana are > 50 yrs old and have gone unconfirmed for several decades. However, recent surveys have confirmed the continued presence of Crawfish Frogs in parts of southern Indiana, redefining the perceived range of this species in the state. In an effort to increase survey efficiency in this species, I used automated recording systems and manual call …

Mirabai Comes To America: The Translation And Transformation Of A Saint, Nancy M. Martin

Religious Studies Faculty Articles and Research

The story of the sixteenth-century Hindu saint Mirabai is told and performed in a multitude of genres in India across the centuries, and her songs generate a tradition of continuing composition in her name. Her popularity readily moves across boundaries of language, caste, class, religion, and culture not only within India but also beyond, taking root in American culture more broadly in the latter decades of the 20th century, as Americans begin looking for figures for inspiration and canonisation within an emerging non-institutionalised global spirituality and women around the world mine the past to find their spiritual foremothers. Her popularity …

Police Brutality Makes Headlines: Retelling The Story Of The 1938 Pecan Shellers’ Strike, Laura Cannon Dixon

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 1938 San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike was a unique labor event. It involved conflicts between a dominant white power elite and workers who were culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously different. The power elite separated and suppressed Tejano workers, who were seen as inferior. The five-week strike was an attempt to shake off that suppression. As newspaper reports from the period showed, the power elite responded to picketers with brutal police tactics, but nightsticks, ax handles and tear gas failed to curb worker resistance. The strike was important, therefore, because unlike other Southern labor actions, workers in San Antonio succeeded, …

A Mutiny Of Silence: Swarnakumari Devi's Sati, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Aim:
To discuss how Swarnakumari Devi's family connections as much as her sex contributed to why her work faded from the memory of nationalist India.

Introduction:

The historical context that helped to produce the writing of Swarna-kumari Devi Ghosal also gives us a glimmer into some of the possible reasons why her work faded from the literary memory of nationalist India. Some of that context is hinted at in the back pages of her collection of short stories in English, published in 1919 by Ganesh and Co., Madras. Reminding us of the inescapable connection between capitalism and knowledge, these back …

Glacial/Interglacial Export Production In The Subantarctic South Pacific, Jessica Adamic

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Atmospheric CO2 varied considerably in the past; however, the mechanisms that drive this variability are poorly understood. CO2 is linked to marine primary productivity through the biological carbon pump (BCP), leading to hypotheses that past increases in BCP efficiency in areas such as the Southern Ocean may have contributed to glacial CO2 drawdown (Sarmiento & Toggweiler, 1984). Productivity has varied considerably in the past, but the extent, timing, and impacts remain poorly understood. The Subantarctic South Pacific is an area of the ocean that is crucial to the understanding of both glacial climate and paleo-export productivity. Unfortunately, few studies have …

The Progress Of Indian Women From 1900s To Present, Nidhi Shrivastava

Honors Scholar Theses

Through the study of numerous authors such as the famous Rabindranath Tagore, Manju Kapur, and Anita Nair, my main goal of the thesis was to study and find the progress women have made in India since 1900s. Rabindranath Tagore’s THE HOME AND THE WORLD plant the seed of the women’s movement in India as Bimala, the female protagonist steps out of her household sphere to experience and encounter the “world,” Manju Kapur’s DIFFICULT DAUGHTERS is a story of Virmati, a woman ahead of her times suspended in the hindering traditions during the last years before the partition of 1947. Finally, …

Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

What can we learn about the way that folk storytelling operates for tellers and audience members by examining the telling of stories by characters within such narratives? I examine Maithil women’s folktales in which stories of women’s suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patrilineal formations. The solidarities such women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories and keeping each other’s secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and …

El Otro Encuentro: Gigi Oltavaro-Hormillosa’S "Neo-Queer Precolonial Imagining", Gina Velasco

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

This essay examines the performance and video art piece Cosmic Blood, by Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, a queer Colombian and Filipina American artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It argues that Cosmic Blood is a performative intervention into dominant modes of reading the racialized and gendered Filipina body, as well as a critique of absolutist notions of national and ethnic belonging. Cosmic Blood challenges the inherent heteronormativity and masculinism of dominant notions of nation and kinship, accomplishing this imaginative intervention by its retroping of the past through a lens of queer desire. Within Otalvaro-Hormillosa’s retelling of the moment of first …

Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Ponds are ubiquitous in the Maithil region of Nepal, and they figure prominently in folk narratives and ceremonial paintings produced by women there. I argue that in Maithil women's folktales, as in their paintings, the trope of ponds shifts the imaginative register toward women's perspectives and the importance of women's knowledge and influence in shaping Maithil society, even as this register shift occurs within plots featuring male protagonists. I argue further that in the absence of a habit of exegesis in their expressive arts, and given the cross-referential, dialogic nature of expressive practices, a methodology that draws into interpretive conversation …

Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at …

Rajasthan: Mirabai And Her Poetry, Nancy M. Martin

Religious Studies Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Mirabai (born c. 1500) is among the most well-known and loved of the Hindu women saints devoted to Krishna. Her devotion to her Lord is absolute, as her life and songs attest. Her story is a romantic tale of star-crossed lovers—one human, the other divine—marked by perseverance and triumph in the midst of great suffering. Songs sung in her name speak of the joys and trials of the devotional life and evoke the full range of romantic love, from the devastating longing that marks separated lovers and the blazing anger of a woman betrayed to the sweet and intoxicating pleasures …

The (No) Work And (No) Leisure World Of Women In Assi, Banaras, Nita Kumar

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In the riverside neighborhood (mohalla) of Assi, in the south of Banaras, families of the following professions are to be found: the preparation and retail of foods such as: milk, sweets, tea, paan, peanuts and snacks; clerical work in offices or shops; private professional work, such as priesthood, teaching, boating, cleaning toilets; and crafts, such as masonry, weaving, making and maintaining jacquard machines, carpentry, and goldsmithy. All this work is done by men in the public sphere. In Banaras, the observable and articulated sphere of activity called "work" (kam) largely exists for men only. Men are …

The Americanization Of Tsuru Aoki: Orientalism, Melodrama, Star Image, And The New Woman, Sara Ross

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

This article contextualizes issues of race and Orientalism in the career of Japanese actress Tsuru Aoki within changing representational strategies and ongoing cultural struggles over the public and domestic roles of women in the modern age. According to the author, Aoki's persona blurred the boundaries between Japanese and U.S. identities.

'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal …

Y A-T-Il Une Réception Critique De La Littérature Vietnamienne Francophone?, Ching Selao

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Three approaches seem to characterize the reception of Vietnamese Literature in French: socio-historical, "essentialist" and feminist discourses. This article proposes to analyse the lack of theoretical thought and pertinence in some of the works published on the subject, which appear to introduce and promote this literature rather than study it. Without denying contributions that are indeed interesting, this paper, however, emphasizes works that raise questions and oblige us to ask: is there a critical reception of Vietnamese Francophone Literature?

Linda Lê : Schizo-Positive?, Isabelle Favre

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In her novel entitled "Calomnies", Linda Lê depicts a "mad uncle" and a young female writer fascinated with her uncle’s marginality. In this book, Lê presents a complex view of schizophrenia. Sometimes, the actions and thoughts of the uncle are reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts such as le corps sans organe and la machine célibataire. Some other times however, Lê pays attention to the past of the uncle and shows how, in Vietnam, he witnessed the hypocrisy of his family during the war. These passages are then closer to Laing’s theories, since the environment and conditions in which he …

Feminist Tigers And Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies And Instrument Effects In The Struggle For Definition And Control Over Development In Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

This article offers an analysis of a struggle for control of a women’s development project in Nepal. The story of this struggle is worth telling, for it is rife with the gender politics and neo-colonial context that underscore much of what goes on in contemporary Nepal. In particular, my analysis helps to unravel some of the powerful discourses, threads of interest, and yet unintended effects inevitable under a regime of development aid. The analysis demonstrates that the employment of already available discursive figures of the imperialist feminist and the patriarchal third world man are central to the rhetorical strategies taken …

Review Of Ladies Coupe, By Anita Nair, Haidar Eid

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Mirabai In The Academy And The Politics Of Identity, Nancy M. Martin

Religious Studies Faculty Books and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.