In the fall 2015, students at the University of Missouri embarked upon an extended series of protests aimed at calling out the University’s failure to address recent racist incidents against Black students and a larger oppressive campus culture. The protests prompted the creation of a student group led largely by...
This paper is an exploratory study of the risk perceptions in the Oregon Hazelnut growing community. The study takes place at a time when the industry as a whole has begun to stabilize from the effects of Eastern Filbert Blight, a fungal pathogen that infects hazelnut trees which had devastated...
This thesis explores the potential applications for 3rd generation activity theory in writing studio spaces, using the Undergrad Research and Writing Studio at Oregon State University as a focal point. David R. Russell, Nedra Reynolds, and Deborah Brandt have all investigated systemic and communal elements in student writing processes, while...
As wolves return to their historic habitats both in Oregon and across the globe, emotions are running high between people either gladdened or disturbed by their homecoming. Prior to colonization, wolves occupied the entire Pacific Northwest alongside Indigenous peoples. However, European settlements that ultimately coalesced to form the state of...
This thesis investigates how beginning, women farmers, within in a women farmers’ network in the Willamette Valley, Oregon are accessing land and farming information. Using ethnographic, community-based research methods, I ask how land access mediates their ability to care for their land and soil. Are these farmers interested in fostering...
The trafficking of children is one of the gravest violations of human rights globally today. Every year, hundreds of thousands of girl child are smuggled across borders and sold as mere commodities. There are minimal scholarly works focusing on the girl child and analyzing it from the global trends among...
About 1% of U.S. births each year are planned home births (Vital Statistics Reports 2017). Of these, roughly 10% transfer to a higher level of care during labor (Melissa Cheyney et al. 2014), yet their experiences are rarely heard. Storytelling has long been used not only as entertainment, but as...
In this two-article thesis, I argue that an opposition to Eurocentrism may be articulated without ethnic or identarian determinisms but through a critical engagement with the categories of ethics and truth in a global frame. I build upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to accomplish a...
Contrasting the productive ground gained in ecological rhetorical theory through embedded fieldwork, composition as a discipline has yet to enact such transformative engagements with ecology. In this thesis, I put forward a praxis for ecological rhetoric and composition through permaculture design, utilizing the design framework’s system of ethics and principles...
Women’s lives in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Mekele, Ethiopia are very organized, systematic, and sophisticated. The women in this study model, express, and reflect the values of community, trust, care, stability, and futurity through their perceptions and sentiments regarding social and political change. I document how these values...
This study looks at how gendered language circulates affect in order to coerce gender binary conformity. I analyze the ways gendered phrases like “sit like a lady”, “don’t be a bitch”, and “man up” communicate binary gender expectations within a U.S. context, and what they have to do with larger...
This Thesis examines Brazil’s political and historical context to explore and understand the logics behind the high rates of violence in our society. It focuses in education as one of our main vehicles of disseminating knowledge and therefore culture, language and values that might be contributing and perpetuating sexism, racism,...
Mainstream local food systems focus on environmental and individual health, but labor is out of sight and out of mind. We begin with a story that introduces the immigrant in the room, the locavore’s blind spots, and the need to move beyond mainstream environmentalism and embrace social justice. In the...
Distress among resettled refugees in the U.S. consistently reflects refugees’ experiences of discrimination, re-traumatization, gaps in healthcare services, and disrupted expectations and lived-realities. This thesis aims to fill a critical need for ethnographic studies investigating how recent anti-immigrant, -Muslim, and -Arab rhetoric and policies combine with chronic gaps in services...
This thesis analyzes two Victorian fairy tales that feature queer endings, or endings that offer alternatives to the heteronormative fairy-tale tradition that idealizes heterosexual marriage and the biological family. In both George MacDonald’s The Wise Woman (1875) and E. Nesbit’s “The Island of the Nine Whirlpools” (1901), I argue that...
At the urging of international scientists, large industrialized nations like the United States must transition away from fossil fuel energy and toward renewable energy by 2030 in order to stay the tide of climate change. To complete this energy transition citizens must take up responsibilities to change the known paradigms...
While a number of scholars in the field of Rhetoric and Composition continue to reassert the importance of whiteness as an object of study, a sense of anxiety about the effectiveness of extant antiracist rhetorical practices permeate recent scholarship. This thesis engages with thinking from black studies, afropessimism, and transnational...
In 2010, Mexican cuisine was declared as intangible cultural heritage, integral to Mexican identity and necessary to preserve for the good of humanity. Despite this recognition, first-generation Mexican communities in the United States face an exacerbated likelihood of experiencing food insecurity. In most United States studies, understanding the relationship between...
This project investigates the ways in which conceptions of women and gender in Islam are articulated within discourses of modernity, freedom, and justice. Considering the ways in which third-world literature and scholarship interacts with, and creates, multiculturalist discourse, this paper examines representation, spokesmanship, and the role of the cosmopolitan humanities...
In this paper I discuss an ethnographic research project on identity embodiment among transgender and gender nonconforming punks in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., with focus on the relationship between transgender/gender nonconforming identity and affiliation to DIY punk communities. Trans punks create a unique, hybridized subculture-based identity embodiment...
The purpose of this study is to explore the uncertainty and fear that DACAmented college and university students experience with the potential termination of the United States Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. There is limited research on the experiences of DACAmented individuals during this time of uncertainty for...
The Romantic period sits in a liminal historical space when radically different ideas about the
categories of past, future, progress, and change coexisted in popular consciousness. The French Revolution inaugurated the concept of an Event, something that appears to come out of nowhere, and that not even the most well-informed...
Ever since Henry Jenkins’ groundbreaking _Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture_ (1992), fan studies has slowly worked its way further into mainstream academia. However, particular practices and cultures of femslash fandom, and the contribution of queer women to fandom archives and circulation have, in many ways, been neglected. In...
Recent work in moral philosophy has displayed a renewed interest in ethics and ontology that consider the social constitution of the subject. However, these approaches to ethics, exemplified in Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, often neglect the problem of antiblackness, which Afro-pessimist scholars argue operates at...
This thesis explores the changes in mother-daughter relations in Northeast Thailand over the last three generations in relation to migration out of this region. Qualitative interviews were done with ten families in two villages; the interviews focused on representatives of three generations of women in each family. In recent decades,...
According to the Girls’ Opportunity Index formulated by Lenhardt, et al, (2016), Brazil is the least favorable country in South America to succeed being born a woman, ranking the 102nd position out of 144 analyzed countries. This macro-level statistic speaks to the present landscape of gender inequality, shaped since the...
Ian Angell, in the New Barbarian Manifesto, said “A ‘brave new world’ is being forced upon unsuspecting societies by advances in information technology.” It would seem then, that technological advances happen automatically and have a life of their own. There is a logic to technological advancements that is outside human...
Carnival celebrations in Santiago de Cuba transform large swaths of the city for an anticipated week of festivities, during which Afro-Cuban dancers and musicians are center stage, performing a complicated statement of prescribed cultural ideology, historic acts of agency, and nationalism. A particularly revealing celebration, carnival can be understood as...
This project performs a style analysis of three sentences from three military manuals written across an 80 year time-period. I first discuss the history of style within academic discourse and how it has impacted the study of style within the field of writing and rhetoric. Using this background, I then...
Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia provokes us to embrace our Earthboundedness to approach the problematic political ecologies of the Anthropocene. Latour’s call for the Earthbound is to re-trace networks of society, institutions, and meaning and to challenge, as enemy, those that would continue to behave as if we lived on more...
Native America tribes and community members throughout Oregon have asserted a strong opposition to the fossil fuel industry’s attempt to expand railways, build pipelines, and construct refineries, holding facilities, and export terminals. Despite the limited presence of fossil fuel infrastructure in the state, however, the industry is actively pursuing permits...
The present study considers the mid-nineteenth century origins of the term “sexual inversion,” as it became applied to a variety of nonnormative subjects and sexual practices. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) has long been recognized as a discursive space wherein socially constructed notions of sexuality and gender are interrogated. A key...
Excavation of a pit feature designated as Feature 59 (F59) from the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) in western Idaho offers a unique opportunity to explore more about the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) and how people used pits in the Far West. In this thesis, an analysis is conducted on the...
This thesis explores the roles of scripts in shaping minoritarian subjectivity through Kim Jee-woon’s film The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), Kim Fu’s novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014), and R. Zamora Linmark’s novel Rolling the R’s (1995). In all three works, diasporic characters of Asian descent...
Informed by feminist and queer theories, this thesis provides an alternate reading of selected narratives from the Hindu epic “Mahabharata”. By queering the narratives from the epic, this thesis highlights the existence of fluid notions of sexuality and gender present within Hindu religious texts. In doing so, the study aims...
This thesis offers a feminist perspective on the stories and representations of Hijra individuals and gender non-conforming communities in Bangladesh. It considers these stories for how they represent resistance to dominant gender normative discourses and cultural values in Bangladesh, and I explore how they figure both the struggles and survivals...
The common imagining of archives characterizes these spaces as monolithic, hallowed sites of preserved truths, carefully catalogued and stored, static and frozen in history and waiting to be uncovered. My thesis works to dispel this myth and identify rhetorical elements of the archive’s structure in order to assess how the...
This thesis seeks to explore how an ecofeminist lens is currently the most useful approach for improving farmed animal welfare. Through examining Western conceptions of non-human animals, I seek to shed light upon the inconsistent treatment of domestic species. Species that are dependent upon us deserve, at a minimum, not...
This thesis explores some of the ethical issues pertaining to the use of so-called radical enhancement technology. Key concepts analyzed include “normal function”, “human being”, and “personhood.” I argue that the use of these key concepts in the debate thus far has lacked philosophical rigor, and that a reexamination of...
Women spend substantially more time on unpaid care work than men; they spend a vital part of the day trying to meet the social expectations of their domestic and reproductive roles. The goal of this study is to examine Nigerian women’s experience of housework as a form of unpaid labor....
Night is an extraordinary resource. Unlike air, water, or soil, nighttime is a spatio-temporal phenomenon, which leads to many crucial roles. It provides refuge to wildlife species, triggers hormonal and behavioral responses among a wide variety of organisms, and serves as an essential migratory backdrop for species that navigate by...
My thesis in Environmental Arts and Humanities concerned the idea of animal language, as well as other posthuman ideas around animality and indistinction. I also explored virtual space as it relates to human identity, our notions of reality and perception, and the way contemporary digital artists approach animal subjectivity in...
This thesis examines the discursive seeds of the European endeavor to supremacy and dominance by tracing the germination of Eurocentrism and European exceptionalism in two different eras. Through close attention to textuality, I suggest a rhetorical continuity between the medieval and the early modern eras by focusing not directly on...
The Second World War was not just a military struggle but also a struggle between two different agriculture, food distribution, and nutrition systems in the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany. At the start of the war, both countries understood that food and nutrition would play an important role and carefully...
While the contemporary movement against sexual and domestic violence has roots in radical, feminist theory and anti-state, community-based modes of resistance, over the past several decades, advocates and activists have increasingly turned to corporations and the state for support through the non-profit, prison, and medical industrial complexes. This acceptance of...
What does comida rica mean? In this thesis, I explore the meanings of comida rica, sana, and de nuestra tierra through the discourses, practices, and kitchen geographies in six urban, highland households in the Ecuadorean Andes. This research, as part of a larger investigation carried out by a team of...
Tibetan Buddhism has offered two distinct, seemingly dichotomous perspectives about motherhood as it relates to traversing the spiritual path. In the first, mothering is the antithesis to spiritual development and realization, as it tethers a practitioner to the mundane duties of saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth and suffering, propelling her...
While grammar is a core aspect of written and oral communication, many find grammar instruction equally frustrating and boring, and as such, grammar receives very little formal attention in the university system (Hoffman). My thesis draws attention to this overlooked, and yet central component of composition, and asks a radical...
This thesis invokes Black Jesus as an abstract figure in two seemingly disparate early twentieth century American novels and, in doing so, intervenes in ongoing debates about the ethical capacities of literature as means of grappling with difference. The Christ figure is a literary trope of waning importance in contemporary...
One reading of the post-postmodern literary period argues that as formal aesthetics have (re)engaged with ethics there has been a concomitant move to treat literature as a space of ethical potential. Adam Kelly has called this attitude, when combined with the appropriation of certain metafictional and postmodern techniques, the “New...