This collection of personal essays, inspired by Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, raises questions about the separation that becomes apparent through writing, education, and transitions between class. The author uses her personal experience of writing in, and attending a private university to explore the interactions of class, literacy, and education....
The four stories and one essay within are linked by themes: love, sex, truth, and music. Three of the stories are told by first person narrators who are also musicians. In "Elementary Music," a young girl views her parents' divorce through the lens of an orchestra concert in which she...
Ralph Ellison died without ever completing his second novel. After his death, the executor of his literary estate, John F. Callahan, edited Ellison's work into a novel published under the title Juneteenth. This thesis examines the problems posed by Ellison's posthumously released text, especially the issues of authorial intent and...
This thesis, a collection of creative non-fiction essays, explores the nature and influence of reading and school in the author's life. After a brief introduction explaining the title, part one describes the sensory dimensions of reading. Part two discusses the author's work as a student and teacher and the contradictions...
For at least 30 years American culture has failed to provide empowering myths and symbols to its adolescents as they come of age and try to make sense of their selves, sexuality and the culture that surrounds them. This lack of myths and symbols is especially harmful to girls and...
Recently, feminist scholars have begun to question the traditional telling of the history of rhetoric. Dissatisfied with a history which is told in terms of privileged, white males to the exclusion of all other voices, these scholars have worked to recover "lost" female rhetoricians and have begun critically rereading the...
Literary and feminist theory have recently begun to recognize William Shakespeare's character of Juliet as a possible feminist heroine, but communicating this interpretation on film will be complicated. Not only will the film need to deal with the issues of adaptation that come with moving any play onto film, but...
This thesis traces the relationship between the First World War, constructions of masculinity, and the life and poetry of T.S. Eliot. Central to this relationship is a study of homoeroticism, which the author characterizes as different from homosexuality but not exclusive of it, in late 19th and early 20th century...
The five short stories included in this thesis depict characters who struggle as they try to balance their responsibilities to each other, and their own independent desires. Whether those desires include personal freedom, another relationship, or self-protection, these characters are at least minimally aware that obtaining what they most want...
DOUBLE EXPOSURE is a novel concerned with the phenomenon of memory. The story explores such questions as: To what extent does "memory" (and the narratives we construct from it) explain who we are? How is memory influenced by others-and does it matter if it is? Can a memory that is...
The narrator of Fortunate Son is Jake, a 21 year-old who has recently arrived in Tucson, Arizona, after the death of his mother. He's spent his entire life on the road with his mother, possibly followed and antagonized by his father, whom Jake has never seen. He has come to...
These six stories represent a child's search for identity. The first story, "Road Map," is intended to be independent from the other pieces in this collection, but has been included because it is clearly set in the same place and explores many of the same themes of the other pieces....
In this creative non-fiction thesis, the author reads her own life, suggesting that she believes in the details of experience and knows truth in and through experience even though the truth is not always clear. The first chapter includes several narratives from her childhood experience. In the second chapter, the...
A prevalent belief during the Victorian age was that the world was divided between inferior beings governed by passion and superior reasoning beings. On the political level, this idea separated inferior passion-driven natives from superior reasoning Europeans. This division contributed to the maintenance and expansion of imperialist rule in distant...
This essay is an exploration of identity formation and expression. Humanity's identity formations create the orientations and languages with which we use to create our knowledge and understanding of the surrounding external environment (both social and physical) and our internal environment (psychological). This essay traces the sources of identity formation...
Standard accounts of women's relationship with technology stress women's need to overcome anxiety to achieve competence with computers. Recent studies provide evidence that this woman-anxiety-technology connection is an oversimplification of the relationship between women and computers. New literature also suggests that making computers more appealing will help girls overcome computational...
The overarching theme of these stories is the relationship between love and hate, especially the connection between kindness and violence. In this fictional world, love often begets hate, and hate, love: a man's capacity for empathy serves as the catalyst for an act of brutality; a character's loneliness, his desire...
I have elected to write a creative nonfiction thesis because it serves to demonstrate my proficiency in the areas of rhetoric and composition. This thesis consists of a series of personal essays based on my effort to reclaim my voice as a writer. In order to organize these essays, I...
Themes of authorship in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe highlight locations in the stories that expose the author's concerns with their responsibilities and contributions to society. In order to frame a discussion of authorship in Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe, it is essential to position Behn and Crusoe...
Indigenous languages worldwide are rapidly disappearing, forced out of use by the spread of dominant Western culture and its languages. On the Warm Springs reservation of Oregon, the Culture and Heritage department, the tribal agency in charge of language preservation, is offering instruction in all three languages of the reservation:...
Music is one of the most important aspects of cultural identity in Corsica. Rooted in ancient history and revitalized in the revolutionary political climate of the 1960s and 70s, its popular choral form--the paghjella--has come to define modern music upon the island. Music, like language, has the ability to communicate...
Fallow is a creative non-fiction book of memory and place. It chronicles the lives of William and Vera Lutz and their lives of struggle on the Northern Plains of North Dakota. It follows a narrator and his attempts to make sense of, and connect to their, lives following both of...
William James came of age at a time of great social and intellectual change in the United States. During this period, new professional identities proliferated, and a new culture of professionalization developed with important ramifications for conceptions of individual and social identity. Professionalization was also closely related to key intellectual...
Rethinking the Dualism: Don DeLillo's White Noise and the Ecocritical Possibilities of the Nature/Culture Mix questions current applications of ecocriticism and offers that these applications are inadequate in dealing with the perceived nature/culture dualism. This thesis suggests that ecocritics need to stop thinking in dualistic terms, but instead must consider...
The purpose of this study was to explore American and Chinese college student underlying cultural assumptions, which influence their perceptions and behaviors in various domains of life. The objectives of this study were to: (a) To generate timely knowledge of Chinese and American youth's cultural images, meanings, and frame of...
This thesis was designed and written with advertising stakeholders in mind. The aim of my thesis is to illustrate how listening to and understanding the behavior and voices of consumers from the perspective of a trained anthropologist can improve advertising strategies. My instruments for conducting this research include an in-depth...
Violence and voice seem to be related. In this thesis I detail personal experiences with violence, and then put them into the context of research done about the ways in which violence affects the writing voice, as well as the speaking voice. Helene Cixous' writings about the writing voice and...
In this thesis, I examine some of the relationships between hierarchy and community that exist in institutions. Within institutions, individuals are separated from one another and organized hierarchically based on arbitrary inequalities. In general, I discusses inequalities based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, etc. Institutions organized based...
Gothic literary works are characterized as such by their ability to represent and evoke terror. The form this representation takes is varied; often terror originates in the atmospheric effects of settings, in the appearance of mysterious, supposedly supernatural phenomena, and, perhaps most significantly, in the behavior of villainous characters. Shakespearean...
This thesis situates a discussion of Thoreau's later natural history essays in the context of the author's other writings. Beginning with an examination of the writings of Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, this paper examines Thoreau's relation to and departure from Emerson's understanding of time, place, and pattern...
Mike Rose researcher, professor, scholar, and author of numerous articles and books including the literacy memoir - Lives on the Boundary - has been active in the field of education and composition for over 30 years. This thesis looks back at the development of the discipline of composition studies to...
This thesis explores the vibrational behavior of the main components of sound production in the violin using a continuum mechanics approach. The author provides a mathematical description of the regions in the vibrating continuum, and begins to develop a system of equations governing their behavior, focusing on the air in...
This thesis explores the role of Quaker women in science in an attempt to arrive at some understanding of what motivated Quaker women in nineteenth century America to go into the sciences. George Fox founded the Society of Friends in the mid-seventeenth century in England and the Quaker theology centered...
In 1952, at the height of the McCarthy era, Franz Kallmann, a Jewish psychiatrist and eugenicist who fled the National Socialist regime in Germany, published a study, in which he claimed to have found a one hundred percent concordance rate for homosexuality among forty pairs of identical twins. From this...
The 13 personal essays in Water over Stones: Oregon Watershed Stories explore the author's experiences in dozens of Oregon watersheds. Using the genre of the personal essay, the author, a fifth-generation Oregonian and amateur ecologist, writes about her life and family relationships in stories that are saturated with the waters...
Street children are a significant presence in Hue, Viet Nam's tourist center, where they eat, sleep, work, and play. Utilizing ethnographic methods, this study examines how tourism impacts the lives of street children involved in the industry. The street children have generally been compelled to leave home because of adverse...
Post World War II victory culture and its fallout-the consensus ideology-led to the creation of a middle class willing to conform to a prescribed set of ideals, safely removed from all danger, and enjoying the material benefits of a growing middle-class income bracket. Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner, two seemingly...
The popularity and pervasiveness of eugenic discourse during the modernist period in England and Ireland raised many questions about race, class, and gender. While Hitler's Nazi "experiment" ultimately demonstrated the consequences of implementing eugenic ideas, forcing eugenicists to abandon, or at least mask, their theories, the eugenics movement before World...
In the early part of his philosophical career, Paul Ricoeur worked out a general theory of symbols which he illustrated with the symbols of evil. He subsequently explained this theory in several essays (his final major statement on symbols can be found in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of...
The Republic of Kiribati is one of the last countries to face the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Pacific. First appearing in the region in 1982, HIV/AIDS was recognized as a national concern during the late 90s. Partnering with the National AIDS Committee, research was conducted using qualitative and quantitative methods...
The purpose of this study was to describe women's outdoor garments worn in Oregon from 1880 to 1920 to determine whether there were garment differences between the Willamette Valley and Eastern Oregon. The question addressed was: can garment differences be explained by the different Oregon climates, geographic locations, and availability...
Doris Lessing and Tsitsi Dangarembga write fiction set in Zimbabwe, the former Southern Rhodesia. Although Lessing grew up as a white settler and Dangarembga, a generation later, as part of the colonized African population, the women sometimes address similar issues. Both write of young girls trying to find a speaking...
This thesis consists of four short stories and Chapter 1 of a novel in progress. Each of the four stories are thematically linked through a common protagonist, Nancy, and through a relatively chronological following of events in her life. I chose to tell Nancy's stories in an attempt to gain...
Dashiell Hammett's fiction and detective pulps generally, offered the reader a chance to participate in vicarious power, by giving them a sense of the profession of detection, both in and out of the stories. It was the realism of the detective figure that allowed the audience to relate to him....
This thesis reviews theoretical and local understandings of sustainability and examines the contributions which the NGO, the Toledo Institute for Development and Environment (TIDE), makes to achieving sustainability in the district of Toledo in Belize, Central America. The study focuses mainly on the Port Honduras Marine Reserve, which TIDE manages...
The Senior Farmers' Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP), piloted in Oregon in 2001, provided $100 worth of vouchers (aka coupons) to low-income seniors to buy fresh local produce from farmers at farmers' markets and roadside stands. Presented in a political ecology framework, this research integrated the perspectives of beneficiaries and their...
Many countries around the world are looking to tourism as a sustainable solution for economic development and many individuals seek business opportunities in the tourism industry. Researchers in the field of anthropology and other disciplines alike have recorded findings of the environmental, economic and cultural impacts of tourism development that...
From July to September, 2002 I spent ten weeks in Kenya conducting full-time research on the macroeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS and community action towards combating the epidemic in locations dominated by members of the Luo tribe in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Gathering data from both the Ministry of Health and non-governmental...
There has been a growing interest in eating disorders among Singaporean medical professionals since the 1990s, and the Singaporean public is also starting to become aware of the risks of these conditions. This ethnographic research on eating disorders in Singapore, conducted in 2001, however, found that the majority of the...
Many development organizations now recognize the importance of culturally sensitive project design and implementation. Unfortunately most of these groups continue to disregard the significance of gender. This qualitative research examines a women's cooperative in rural El Salvador which formed in order to find a means of generating income and to...
The objective of this research is to shed light on the phenomenon of independent volunteer traveling. It represents a form of tourism in which travelers independently organize their own volunteer efforts and typically provide assistance to local people in return for room and board. Travelers operate outside the confines of...
In the past, archaeological investigations have recovered material culture that have often been stored as museum property without a focused analysis or written report of the results. This study focuses on one such assemblage ofchipped stone projectile points from the Bachman Cave locality of southwestern Idaho that has been stored...
While much research has examined the intricate interactions associated with the harvesting of wild animals for human consumption, little work has been undertaken in attempting to understand the greater socio-cultural significance of such use. In addition, to properly understand such systems of interaction, an intimate knowledge is required with regard...
The ecological crisis, recognized by scientists as well as an increasing number of lay people urges a response from a variety of disciplines. The consideration of sustainability requires the help of a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, which can contribute an ability to identify cultural patterns that impede cultural change...
Based on the author's ethnographic research at the Karakuwa fishing community in Japan, this thesis explains a cultural process of the local people's synthesis of the values they place on nature and their everyday behavior in a modern industrial world. Explicated by ethnographic narrative, this study focuses on a revitalization...
One taphonomic problem plaguing archaeologists and physical anthropologists, whether their research is in North American cultures or hominid sites in Africa, is the difficulty in distinguishing bone altered by burning and heating from bone altered by soil processes. Archaeologists working to understand the recent prehistory of the Southern Oregon Coast...
This thesis examines perceptions of cooperation among small to medium sized enterprises (SME) in western Oregon's forest products industry. Recent changes in the industry, such as corporate consolidation, global marketing, and government regulations have created an environment in which many SMEs find it difficult to stay competitive. Cooperation among SMEs...
Past research has categorized animal rights groups into three main categories; conservative, moderate, and radical. While a few studies exist on the animal rights movement as a whole, none have focused specifically on the radical groups. This research project uses an ethnography of communication approach to examine how language constructs...
From February to September of 2001, a significant body of qualitive data was collected to investigate barriers for Hispanic participation in Oregon's managed care Medicaid program. As a means to investigate this topic, comments were solicited from physicians, hospital administrators, social service agencies, and low-income Hispanics through semi-structured focus groups...
Stable isotope analysis of human tissue can provide information about diet independent of artifactual remains. Food is broken down and used in the synthesis of body tissue, so the isotopic composition of hair keratin reflects the isotopic composition of foods consumed. Therefore, the analysis of hair can provide a window...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the current linguistic situation of the Venetian language (a minority language spoken in the northeastern Italian region of Veneto) and its relationship with Italian, the official language of Italy. This is a study of Venetian people and how they are reacting to...
The purpose of the study is to explore the life experiences, identities, and self-esteem of a group of Mexican women who attend Even Start, a family literacy program. The study also focuses on the effect that the program has on the women's self-identities. I chose qualitative research considering I was...
For over 25 years organized groups of low-income families in Oregon have been gathering food that would otherwise go to waste and distributing this food among organization members. The purpose of this research study is to explore the potential for these organizations (gleaning groups) to contribute not only to food...
As a result of academic research into the effects of mass travel, an industry of alternative tourism has emerged. Application of this research has resulted in myriad forms of tourism, two of these being ecotourism and educational travel. Ecotourism represents a response to what is the destructive nature of the...
The United States population continues to increase and diversify. The cultural composition within the United States embodies a multitude of people from a variety of belief systems, religious backgrounds, and ethnicities. Within current biomedical practice, many of these differences are often marginalized, leaving populations with unsatisfactory experiences in seeking health...
In the fall and winter of 1999/2000, efforts by federal, state, and local agencies to restore salmon habitat by protecting land adjacent to rivers and streams drew intense responses citizens in the Pacific Northwest. Despite efforts to "involve" citizens in the development of riparian protection policies, many did not believe...
Shan-Mei, a Tsou aboriginal village in Taiwan, is widely known as a legend of environmental conservation, where ecotourism has been successfully combined with integrated community development. Indigenous knowledge containing "ecological wisdom" and decision-making based on consensus are perceived to be the greatest contributors to this achievement. I conducted three months...
In this thesis, stature reconstruction of three prehistoric/protohistoric Native American populations (from Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and South Dakota) was performed using the Fully Anatomical method in order to formulate regression equations and analyze the ability of regression equations of other researchers to accurately estimate the statures within my study...
Lower rates of computer adoption and usage in rural areas has
been called a "digital divide." This work explores the current state of
connectivity within a rural town of the Pacific Northwest with a
quantitative and qualitative overview of computer usage and access
within civic and activity clubs, ranging from...
This study is intended to provide information about the situation of first-generation Vietnamese women to the IRCO Parent and Child Program Department in Portland, Oregon. Nutrition intervention and food assistance currently offered to Vietnamese women enrolled in this program is the focus of the study. The women interviewed characterize themselves...
The Wanniya-laeto, often referred to as Veddas, are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka. They live primarily in governmental designated areas in the forest with a few Vedda villages on the eastern coastal region. In-depth, semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation were the methods used to access the perceptions...
This thesis examines two neighborhood emergency preparedness programs: the Linn-Benton Neighborhood Emergency Training (LB NET) program in Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A., and the Women's Neighborhood Networking Program (WNNP) in Uzhhorod, Ukraine. In Corvallis, the LB NET began in 1996, in part out of concerns that in a large disaster the local...
A social issue of great importance in contemporary society is the involvement of youth in gangs. Youth involvement in gang activity has dominated the national media and the minds of public policy makers in contemporary society. In this thesis I examine how Latino and Chicano youth sub-culture, language, dress, and...
In June 1999, I was a volunteer for a United States non-governmental organization, Crossroads Africa. I joined six other American women traveling to Ghana, West Africa to participate in a collaborative program designed by the Ghana Red Cross Society and Crossroads Africa. Specifically our group was assigned to work on...
Sweden's changing demographics, due to recent migrations in the last fifty years, have affected the Swedish educational system and Sweden's language policy. Funding for special education in Sweden regarding its minority populations is on the decline. Previous forced linguistic assimilation has occurred in Sweden among the Finnish population to the...
This thesis is based on a study conducted for the state of Oregon's Office of Mental Health Services (OMHS). OMHS' primary research objectives included 1) the identification of the unfunded population (individuals who are uninsured and ineligible for Medicaid) who seek services at community mental health programs and 2) an...
The Coast Reservation of Oregon was established under Executive Order of President Franklin Pierce in November, 1855, as a homeland for the southern Oregon tribes. It was an immense, isolated wilderness, parts of which had burned earlier in the century. There were some prairies where farming was possible, but because...
This thesis examines the values and criteria American companies use in hiring or placing expatriate employees in China. These values and criteria affect the success or failure of expatriate employees and a company's bottom line - profitability. Investigating this topic required an examination of the history of the political, economic,...
Issues of diversity are receiving significant attention within the National Park Service recently, due in large part to a growing awareness that its future as a relevant and viable agency is dependent upon improving its response to and management of diversity. A diversity assessment of Fort Vancouver National Historic Site...
Maya Mopan farmers in southern Belize face socio-economic hardships, persisting environmental constraints, and an unfavorable political climate that has prevented land tenure stability on reservation lands. This thesis describes the agricultural practices of a group of Mopan farmers and examines farm-site diversification and its relationship to ecological knowledge, out-migration, agricultural...
This thesis is an integrated study that links several disciplines-archaeology, anthropology, geography, atmospheric sciences, and microbiology. It attempts to generate an argument that central to climate change is disequilibrium in human ecologies- in my case, disease ecologies in Iceland during the 15th century. This thesis investigates the environment's effect on...
Excavations conducted at Indian Sands (35-CU-67C), located along Oregon's southern coast, during 2002 and 2003 identified two discreet, artifact-bearing stratigraphic units. The uppermost unit is a deflated surface containing burnt shell and lithic artifacts associated with early Holocene ¹⁴C dates, while the underlying unit contained only lithic tools and debitage,...
The Surgeon General of the United States in 2003 documented the existence of striking disparities for minorities and immigrants in mental health services and the underlying knowledge base. This thesis expands the knowledge base by examining the personal experiences and perspectives of community health workers (CHWs) employed in a mental...
New technology may have negative, as well as positive, effects on a sociocultural system. Biodiesel is growing in popularity as a fuel alternative that addresses global warming and reduces dependency on petroleum. The biodiesel innovation fits well into the existing behavioral infrastructure of Linn and Benton Counties, Oregon. The introduction...
Using GIS, this study creates a predictive model of a distinct population of French-Canadian settlers, highlighting shared environmental characteristics of known sites that may have factored into their decision-making process as they chose locations for their farmsteads. While traditional historic and archaeological research has been conducted on French Prairie, the...
In the United States during the last 30 years there has been a shift from extractive natural resource-based economies of the Old West to a New West defined by environmental protection. Over the past century, a growing national support for environmental protection has influenced a lengthening list of national and...
This thesis describes the archaeological site content and integrity of the Copeland site (35BE90) in Corvallis, Oregon. The Copeland site is owned by the Benton County Historical Society and is the future home of the Benton County Historical Museum. In 2001, an Oregon State University archaeological field school was conducted...
This paper defends a reading of Hennan Melville's Moby-Dick that elevates Ishmael's status from mere narrator of Ahab's tragedy to that of protagonist of his own story, a novel of epistemological seafaring. As a metaphysical quester, Ishmael provides the novel's only reliable and complex vision of the condition of man...
This archaeological based research uses ceramics in the study of acculturation from a site excavated by an urban archaeology contract firm, and utilizes the theories of consumer choice, ethnicity and acculturation. Artifact analysis took place in the form of minimum vessel counts, artifact relative frequencies, and Chinese artifact values, as...
This thesis examines archaeological material in order to explore gender and ethnicity issues concerning fur trade era families from a settlement in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Ethnohistorical information consisting of traders journals and travelers observations, as well as documentation from the Hudson's Bay Company, Catholic church records, and genealogical information...
This thesis explores the complexity of relationships between communities and the ecosystems in which they live through a focus on forest restoration and fuels reduction on private land. As a case study, research took place in the Klamath-Siskiyou region of rural Northern California, in Humboldt and Siskiyou counties. The research...
My thesis explains the several problems that arise when a person from a Western English speaking country goes to work as an English teacher at private institutes in South Korea. It is based on my own experiences when I worked as an English teacher at private institutes in South Korea...
Using the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) this thesis shows that entomological information and material can be retrieved using current historical archaeological methods. Historical archaeology has the ability to uncover connections between arenas as varied, and seemingly isolated, as the honey bee, the environment, and human cultures. By focusing on...
This thesis examines the motivations of ecological restoration volunteers with the Oregon chapter of The Nature Conservancy. This study helps fill in voids left by a lack of research on the motivations of ecological restoration volunteers. Studies that have explored restoration volunteer motivation relied largely on surveys that revealed altruistic...
This study examines the utilization of health care by Korean American women in Pierce County, Washington. Pierce County, with its large population of Asian Americans, offers a variety of health care options, everything from biomedicine to acupuncture and herbal remedies. Regarding the multitude of options available, I asked the question...
My current Project on the late fourteenth-century Pearl observes the workings of allegory, courtly language, and poetic landscape. During this study, I pursue the elements of the poem that suggest a lack of spiritual growth and change, and an abundance of pain, torment, and confusion for the poem's narrator. I...
Culturally based stereotypes are a pervasive force behind quick judgments about behavior, intent, and beliefs which allow individuals to interact efficiently to meet their own goals. Gender stereotypes are present in marketing media and servicescapes, where they define the behavior, needs, and wants of shoppers. The literature on consumer behavior...
This quasi-ethnographic research documents the autobiographical utterances of incarcerated women taking part in a narrative writing course, Life Writing, at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. The purpose of this research was to cultivate a better understanding of how incarcerated women move through different discourses of identity via narrative writing, and how,...
In this creative non-fiction thesis, I present a collection of personal essays that examine my significant moments of awkwardness with failed communications or frustrated relationships when I wanted to draw people closer with language, but was unsuccessful. In the twelve stories, I discuss these issues in my interpersonal communication interwoven...
The purpose of this project is to draw a more explicit connection between Eudora Welty and the literary influence Emily Brönte had on her, revealing Welty as a writer who is more integrated into literary tradition and history than many readers and critics have acknowledged. Both writers rely heavily on...