This project examines the production histories of two films that Alfred Hitchcock directed, his Hollywood debut Rebecca (1940) and the memorable Psycho (1960). The first chapter explores how Hitchcock succeeded and failed at influencing the picture as he, despite directing the movie, had to follow the vision that his producer,...
This thesis examines the food insecurity experiences of student clients of the Oregon State University Emergency Food Pantry. Utilizing semi‐structured interviews and participant observation at the food pantry, this study investigated who is using the food pantry, the forms of food insecurity they experience, how they cope with it, and...
School is a hostile environment for many LGBTQ youth. Teachers participate, consciously or unconsciously, in perpetuating oppressive heteronormative expectations in the classroom both through the overt and covert curriculum. Yet, pre-service teachers are under-trained about questions related to gender and sexuality during their teacher preparation. This qualitative study explores the...
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 research was aimed at providing the foundation for changing standards of care in a critical care setting using Catholic concepts of respect for human dignity, subsidiarity, common good, and solidarity as a matter of social justice. I first unpacked the nature of ICU care and the inevitability of the...
Despite the now common usage of the term “girl”, there has been little call for pause and deeper analysis into what we actually mean when we use this term. In particular, animated film provides a wide scope of media texts that claim to focus on girlhood; but how do we...
Recent studies have shown that queer, trans, and non-binary students alike are experiencing sexual assault at higher rates than their heterosexual, cisgender counterparts (Cantor et al. IV). While conversations surrounding university sexual assault education and prevention have increased in recent years, this disparity suggests that not enough is being done...
The LGBTQ population is widely recognized as an at-risk demographic—as a result ofstigma, studies report sexual and gender minorities experience elevated risk for depression,suicide, anxiety, and substance abuse, as well as greater exposure to sexual, physical, andinterpersonal violence (Logie 1244). Asexuality, a marginalized population traditionallyexcluded from the LGBTQ acronym, poses...
In 1965 Malcolm X said that we are living in a time of extremism. People in power have misused it now there has to be a change, and a better world has to be built, and the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods. And I,...
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....
This thesis examines the postmodern confrontation of representation throughout the oeuvre of Martin McDonagh. I particularly look to his later body of work, which directly and self-reflexively confronts issues of artistic representation & masculinity, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of his earliest and most controversial plays. In...
This thesis examines the bilingual poetry of indigenous, Mexican poet Irma Pineda Santiago. In her work, she composes mirrored poems in Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish. I analyze the ways in which her work brings Zapotec and Spanish into contact with one another, demanding that readers acknowledge narratives of erasure that...
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...
In her 2016 article “Beyond Rights as Recognition, Black Twitter and Posthuman Coalitional Possibilities,” Pritha Prasad argues that the hashtag, one of the decade’s most omnipresent features of digital communication, functions as “a performative composing medium that not only demands relationality” and “call[s] for the recognition of both the Black...
During the first decades of the twentieth century different attempts were made to unify the diversifying and specializing sciences. One of these attempts manifested as the History of Science. Established in 1913 with the academic journal Isis, its first article written by George Sarton clarified that the field was created...
In this thesis, I deconstruct strategies of support for the LGBTQ youth of my home community,the Inland Empire. I call on Foucauldian understandings of discourse, knowledge, and power to analyze the existing support networks for LGBTQ youth in the Inland Empire. Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories of Nepantla and Nepantlera, and AnaLouise...
This thesis consists of two major components. The first is Laboring-Class Poets Online (LCPO), a database-driven website that provides information about the more than 2,000 British laboring-class poets who published between 1700 and 1900 and their writing, lives, and literary relationships. I developed LCPO to demonstrate the importance of laboring-class...
Celebrity culture is part of a long history of fame, but the modern celebrity individual came into focus in the nineteenth century. The first part of this thesis distinguishes modern celebrity – including its morality – from other types of fame, explores the intersection of celebrity and gender through the...
Drawing on Deborah Brandt’s “literacy sponsorship,” this thesis examines ways English language learners (ELLs) in the Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center (CMLC) act as literacy sponsors, sharing their expertise in language, textiles, and cooking, based on nine in-depth interviews with ELLs at the center. The findings of this thesis are presented...
This thesis examines alternative modes and forms of production in texts by Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf. Applying queer methodologies drawn from the work of Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, and Elizabeth Freeman, I show how Cather’s The Professor’s House and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse demonstrate and interrogate...
Understanding which factors motivate farmers to adopt certain practices is an important part of helping to solve many agri-environmental issues. This study uses 19 interviews with farmers along Oregon’s Willamette River, a statewide producer survey, and select interviews with organizations and agencies active in the farming community to examine the...
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,...
In this project, I explore the use of monomania as a literary and rhetorical device that pathologizes deviance from certain norms—in this case, sexual and political norms— and allows for contradiction, dissonance, and reform. Using Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark” and Edmund Clarence Stedman’s poem “How Old Brown Took...
Steven Universe, a relatively new show from Cartoon Network, explores an unexpectedly complex understanding of gender through their main protagonists. Utilizing Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity and doing gender, as well as Daniel Dennett’s conception of the self as a theorist’s fiction, and Alexander Weheliye’s understanding of power and...
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...
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...
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...
Women being elected into public office, a recent occurrence, raises questions and concerns about what it means to have women in office. Concerns include: policy differences women in office might produce, changing the image of what it means to be a leader, and ultimately the fear of a shifting society....
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...
A 2014 Pew Research poll revealed large gaps between public opinion and scientific opinion over environmental and biomedical issues (Funk and Rainie). Similarly, a number of recent popular books have described a growing public mistrust in scientific expertise (Mooney; Storr; Specter). Why is it, then, that so much of the...
Indigenous and Latinx communities have always used storytelling to pass along ancestral histories and memories, whether it be through the act of speaking, performing or other types of artwork. This thesis examines the ways that queer Latinx artists are retelling the stories that have been mistold to erase, repress and...
This thesis explores the gendered histories of slavery through the concept of haunting in two neo-slave narrative novels: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I offer readings of these texts through slavery’s geographic and temporal implications, in order to argue that the logics of antiblackness remain a fundamental...
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...
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...
An overarching explanation for environmental degradation has been humans' disconnection from the natural world. Utilizing Whiteheadian theory, I offer that there is no disconnection. Rather, I propose that there is a dearth of relational acknowledgement. I suggest that the Cartesian dualism and modern science led to an illusory belief that...
Italian nationalism and an ‘Italian’ identity were constructed during Italy’s unification movement in the mid 1800’s. However, consensus on a national identity is still weak across Italy today. Instead, a polarization of Northern and Southern regions have contributed to discrimination, institutional racism and exclusion. This thesis demonstrates the multifaceted aspects...
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)...
Author Nella Larsen and photographer James VanDerZee are two of the most canonical figures of Harlem Renaissance studies, whose respective novels and portraits have been explored extensively, if separately, by scholars. Both Larsen's 1929 novel Passing and VanDerZee's studio portraiture of the 1920s and 1930s have been read in terms...
Clashes of ideology are all around us, from our computer and television screens to our composition classrooms, and they merit attention within the composition classroom. This thesis examines the justifications and pedagogies that scholars in rhetoric and composition use to infuse issues of ideology and social ethics into writing instruction...
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....
The question of deep time has been widely debated in the field of American Literature, with scholar Wai Chee Dimock arguing that a deep time perspective puts the chronology of different nations against one another. However, this argument has not adequately addressed the issue of how deep time theories would...
In a mostly abandoned block, capped by concrete, the building at 210 East 1st Street, The Dalles, Oregon still stands as one of three remaining structures. This building housed the Wing Hong Hai Company, a mercantile store and Chinese laundry, from 1889 to 1926. Beneath the modern concrete that encircles...
How do fishing guides of the Cascade and Coast Range rivers negotiate the conflicting tensions between their client’s desire to experience the wild and the extractive nature based tourism of their role as fishing guides? How do they position their services relative to the environment and an imagined landscape that...
Hypermediation, as described by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation, is a style of writing, recording, presenting, etc. that “makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (34). This mode of production...
This thesis examines two cultural productions of the Harlem Renaissance: Aaron Douglas's mural series, Aspects of Negro Life, and Nella Larsen's novel Passing. I read these works together because, more than their shared time period, they showcase an attention to the visual. Both Larsen and Douglas's works are concerned with...
In this thesis, I read the teachers in four mid-century Victorian novels--Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850) and Hard Times (1854), Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Charlotte Brontё's Villette (1853)-- within the context of mid-century English educational debate in an effort to explicate the ways in which these characters...
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...
In the current armed conflicts that have become known to the international community since the sweeping attacks on northern Iraq on Aug. 3, 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) perpetrated extreme forms of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against a small ancient ethno-religious conservative Yazidi group. ISIS has used SGBV against...
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a multimodal adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, released from 2012-2013. As a media event, the show proved how effective transmedia storytelling can be, eventually winning an Emmy for Original Interactive Program. In creating an intensely immediate narrative world, the series adapted more than Jane Austen’s...
Stories of the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 until 1996, have often focused on only encapsulating the violence indigenous people experienced at the hands of the Guatemalan government and military. Although these stories contributed to the many civil rights organizing and calls for justice that followed, these types...