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...
Over the past decade, the explosion of social media has secured the Internet as a venue for political discussions of all sorts; as well as a realm of consumption and commodification. One population of women that has utilized social media in this way is the plus-sized fashion ("fatshion") community on...
In this thesis, I examine the experiences of breastfeeding mothers who chose to give birth with Certified Professional Midwives at a free-standing birth center, and the factors that influence their known high rates of breastfeeding initiation and duration. Using grounded theory and data collected from participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and...
This project examines two understudied female characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales who emerge as subversive figures by striving to maintain control over their bodies and being. Through my analyses of the Knight’s and Second Nun’s Tales, I reveal how virginity correlates with bodily autonomy for the narratives’ respective protagonists,...
At first glance, Edgar Rice Burroughs's wildly popular romantic fantasy novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1912), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist science fiction-utopian novel, Herland (1915), with its dystopian companion, With Her in Ourland (1916), may appear to have little in common. Tarzan celebrates the human connection with wild nature...
This thesis examines the challenging situation high school dual credit teachers in Oregon face teaching first-year composition in the high school location. I argue that thorough training, support, and professional development are vital for high school teachers teaching dual credit writing courses, who without it may find themselves faced with...
The purpose of this thesis is to understand the experiences that Nahua children, in rural Mexico, have as they attend schools that are primarily influenced by formal Western education in relation to their own ways of learning and knowing. This research took place over the course of three months within...
This ethnographic study examined some of the ways that global markets and the infrastructure of agribusiness affect local smallholder farmers in the Ten Rivers region who are transitioning toward more sustainable and traditional agricultural methods. The purpose of this research was to discover what barriers smallholder farmers face in developing...
Wendy Bishop's lively voice and scholarly contribution continue to resonate and be important in composition studies. Bishop--poet, scholar, feminist, teacher, ethnographer, and compositionist--sought to blur the lines between creative writing and composition. This thesis argues that in challenging the boundaries that exist between creative writing and composition, Bishop also challenged...
Since the inauguration of the King Abdullah-Aziz Foreign Scholarship Program in 2005, the number of Saudi university students in the United States has increased exponentially, and an unprecedented amount of Saudi women are seeking international degrees. The absence of scholarly research within these women’s home and host countries highlights the...
With the reauthorization of the 2013 Violence Against Women Act all Title IV higher education institutions will now be required to provide "primary prevention and awareness programs for all incoming students." Yet, more research is needed to find prevention programs that are effective (White House Task Force to Protect Students...
This paper contains a review of the literature that inspired and informed my final Master’s art project for Applied Ethics, as well as an explanation and analysis of the art project itself. The review of literature begins with a lens into modern development, and how a history of colonization and...
This thesis explores the artistic imperatives and internal struggles of women painters in two novels, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). I identify Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe as painters who exhibit Impressionist strains, both in how they paint and how they...
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...
The following thesis presents a case study analyzing a service-learning project implemented in a second-year level Writing in Business course at Oregon State University. The classroom project required business writing students to serve as cultural ambassadors and conversation partners with international students through INTO OSU's Cultural Ambassador Conversant Program. Relying...
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...
The shoe repair transaction, as it occurs in the 5000 or so remaining shoe repair shops in the United States, is currently unexamined in academic literature for the significance it holds for either shoe repairers or their customers. Making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection, this...
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...
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...
This thesis takes an auteurist approach to the films of director Terrence Malick by reading them through the spiritual philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I establish Malick's thematic concern with the human struggle to achieve better existences in a broken material world, a concern buoyed by his signature aesthetic that...
Current estimates indicate that between one-third and one-half of women in the United States have at least one abortion in their lifetime, and that many women encounter socioeconomic, logistical, or social obstacles in the process of seeking care (Jones 2005, Guttmacher 2008). The purpose of this study is to critically...
The purpose of this study is to critically analyze whether India’s National Population Policy of 2000 represents a paradigm shift in terms of how the nation-state conceptualizes and address population growth through formal population policy. Analyzed through transnational feminist theory, this study employed political discourse analysis as the research method....
In this ethnographic study, I examine how women living in downstate Illinois decide to give birth at home. I view decision-making as a process that unfolds throughout pregnancy and continues into the postpartum period, contextualizing "choice" in a region where homebirth is a politically and socially marginalized practice. The methodology...
For centuries, continental philosophy has clung to the belief that the world only meaningfully exists through human perception--that, in other words, when a tree falls in the forest, it does not make a sound. Literary theory, which has strong roots in continental philosophy, followed suit, remaining tied to humanism even...
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....
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the most common childhood neurological disorder in the United States, also affects grown women. But girls with ADHD, who tend towards symptoms of inattentiveness, often go undiagnosed until young adulthood. This is because (a) their symptoms are less obvious than the hyperactivity common in ADHD boys, and...
The purpose of this study is to ethnographically examine traditionally prescribed notions of sons and daughters in an Indian diasporic community located on Devon Avenue in Chicago. Informed by the association between "ideal" and "actual" family building patterns, this study situates reproductive behaviors and demographic outcomes in its local context...
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,...
Food insecurity is a widely researched global public health issue, but students in higher education are frequently omitted from the data and are not widely recognized as a population that faces hunger. This thesis explores the college student population in relation to food insecurity and, in particular, their attempt to...
For much of history, U.S. schools have employed ideologies of assimilation and nationhood - involving an exchange of immigrants' ways of life for a homogenous American identity - as frameworks for their curriculum and language education programs. However, a new ideology of multiculturalism has gained popularity in recent decades. Multicultural...
St. Joseph's College was located within St. Paul, Oregon, the first Roman Catholic mission in the Pacific Northwest. The St. Paul mission was finally established in 1839 by Father Francois Blanchet, four years after the French-Canadian settlers in the area, appropriately known as French Prairie, had requested the presence of...
This study aims to identify the effect of different lighting conditions and shelf height in a retail store environment on emotional states, feeling of safety and behavioral intentions. Lighting and store fixture height are two retail store components that can affect consumers’ emotional states and therefore their shopping experience.
This...
Apparel has been described as a portable environment (Jintu & Tsang, 2008). This portable environment has the ability to facilitate human presence in a variety of situations, conditions, and circumstances that would otherwise be uncomfortable, harmful, or even fatal. Personal protective garments (PPGs) that provide thermal insulation from external heat...
This thesis on online communities for sex buyers seeks to understand questions such as “what can we learn from online communities for sex buyers?” We explore these issues with the framework of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and through the use of qualitative research of both the review boards at Punternet...
Current calls for prison abolition have been met with major public resistance.
It is time for movements for prison abolition to engage with these questions: How
have contemporary people of the United States come to accept mass incarceration and
the prison industrial complex, and, what is the impact? Using an...
This study examines the theme of power in Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy (1956/57). Contrasting my analysis with earlier review of the novel that emphasized a hegemonic patriarchal power, I argue that such power was constantly subverted by the dominated: family members of the patriarch. Using James C. Scott's notions...
This thesis is comprised of two articles that examine sympathy, material culture, and ownership in Victorian literature. In the first article, I explore the figure of the heiress in the Victorian literary tradition, focusing on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. George Eliot marked the heiress figure...
This thesis is based on a two-part study that analyzes the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the Hawaii student population at Oregon State University (OSU). I designed and conducted a survey among Hawaii students at OSU. Then I interviewed ten Hawaii students who self-identified as Hawaii Creole English (a.k.a. Pidgin)...
The purpose of this paper is to engage in a mythological discussion which enriches current scholarship regarding the title character of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While major scholars suggest that Beloved as a character is either a solid ghost or—as Zora Neale Hurston suggests based on the quote “people who die...
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...
This ethnographic research examines socioeconomic vulnerabilities to resettlement from a large hydropower dam and agricultural commodification in a Tibetan village in Yunnan Province, Southwest China. After providing an initial background on the dynamics of the research region and hydrodevelopment on its rivers, the research framework of examining vulnerability through a...
According to Katherine McKittrick, black women’s geographies reveal and confront geographies of domination that have been erased or considered unworthy of analysis. This thesis positions #SayHerName protests and natural kink/coiled hair within a black women’s geographic analysis suggesting that both body and hair politics provide historical and contemporary geographic clues...
Shifting the Scholarly Conversation: A Rhetorical Reading of Peter Elbow's Work explores Peter Elbow's contributions to the field of writing and rhetoric. Over the course of his long career, Elbow’s scholarly and pedagogical work has been much praised and much criticized. Elbow's work has influenced generations of teachers and writers,...
In Uganda, there are an estimated 200,000 women suffering from obstetric fistula, with
1,900 new cases expected annually. These figures, combined with a persistently high
maternal mortality rate, have led to an international discourse that claims the solution to
improving maternal health outcomes is facility-based delivery with a skilled birth...
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...
La presente tesis provee una crítica al Programa de Educación para la Sexualidad y Construcción de Ciudadanía en Colombia y examina contribuciones teóricas de pedagogías feministas, Queer y pedagogías críticas con el fin de crear alternativas para la práctica de una educación sexual fundamentada en la justicia social. El desarrollo...
The products, processes, and tools of school feeding programs have been examined from multiple perspectives and disciplines in an attempt to improve child nutrition outcomes, to support local and national agriculture, and increase sustainability practices. There is little qualitative research on the role, needs, and experiences of school food service...
The purpose of this study is to examine the lived experiences of women small-scale entrepreneurs in Qingdao, China by placing their collective experiences within relevant social and economic frameworks. This study, conducted in 2011 over a six-month period, applies an ethnographic approach based in modified grounded theory to bring together...
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...
The Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico was home to one of the most intensively-studied archaic states in the New World. Centered at the hilltop city of Monte Albán, the Zapotec State first arose around 500 BC and eventually encompassed much of the present-day state of Oaxaca. But by the Late Classic...