The thesis is the first third of a novel entitled Steelhead. The story takes place in and around a small southern Oregon town in the summer of 1967. The narrator, eighteen-year-old hot-rodding Emil Reese, discovers hippies swimming naked in the river near his house. The hippies, newly arrived from San...
Sororities play an important role in the process by which sorority women become gendered by influencing members' ideas about what it means to be a woman. Women and men become gendered through regular social interaction with other women and men, and sororities have a particularly strong impact on their members...
This research explores the experience of the growing number of students from Eastern Indonesia who attend universities on Java. It asks key questions about the challenges these often maligned students face as ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities exposed to the dominant culture of their republic during their years of education....
This thesis uses a series of non-fiction vignettes to explore objects, agencies, and networks, applying theories of rhetoric and composition directly to experience and vise versa. Focusing on agency--as understood through sociology's actor-networks, post- humanism’s Object Orientated Ontology, and Ecocriticism's ecological approach--I look at events, landscapes, and partnerships that have...
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...
The purpose of this study is to examine the most significant reasons evangelical
Christian faith is compelling to its adherents. Through the interviews of nineteen
Evangelical Christians, it becomes clear that evangelicals see the Bible and Christian
theology in a literal and factual way. Thus, contrary to some strains of...
The Linn and Benton County Gleaner network has helped the low-income families of urban and rural Oregon reclaim moral, social and cultural capital that is lost in the act of being poor in America. Rather than participating solely in government safety nets, these people reject “hand-outs” in favor of exchanging...
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...
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...
The Mixteco primarily reside in the Mexican State of Oaxaca in Southwestern Mexico. They have been arriving in larger numbers then ever before to this part of the North American continent in the last twenty years.Their experience is composed of different dynamics compared to those of their mainstream Mexican counterpart....