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...
Zora Neale Hurston was a Black American writer
during the period of the Harlem Renaissance. The
purpose of this study is to show that three of her four
novels form a protracted discussion of a particular
type of freedom which was of especial interest to
Hurston. The study seeks to...
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...
Contemporary spiritual tourism impacts many stakeholders including environmental ecosystems, tourists, tourist operators, and community members. Increasingly, in the era of the Anthropocene, there is a need for ethical guidance to inform spiritual tourism so as to mitigate social injustice and environmental degradation. This research project investigates the potential for the...
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...
Kate Chopin, author of the proto-feminist novel The Awakening, was also a prolific writer of short stories. Nineteen of her stories were originally published in Vogue magazine between 1893 and 1900. This study looks at six of these stories, "The Father of Desiree's Baby," "A Respectable Woman," "The Dream of...
The classroom practices discussed in this thesis come slowly and at a "slant" to feminism through critical reading of texts, a practice that I call a (re)presentation of the silent women in texts. Given our patriarchal western culture, making meaning, and especially making sense, of the role and representations of...
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...
Dedicated to recording, portraying, and indicting
the social inequities that he witnessed in nineteenth
century Victorian England, one of Charles Dickens' many
concerns was the roles assigned to women both in the
public and private spheres.
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the
narratives of Amy Dorrit and...
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...
In their modern context questions of heredity have come to be
closely aligned with theories of evolution because all such theories
require the presence of heritable variation. Thus the need for an
understanding of a source of variation and a mechanism for its inheritance
became very apparent with the general...
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 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...
Thesis summarizes interviews with growers residing within the Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) in the Southern Willamette Valley of Oregon. Informal and semi-structured interviews were used to identify perceived impediments and incentives perceived by local farmers in following best management practices related to water quality. Results from the interviews were coded...
Walt Whitman looked to the natural world, which he considered an original example of divine creation, for insights into the methods and patterns of the Creative Force; the poet then intuited connections between these divine natural patterns and human existence and spirituality. Convinced of the divinity of the human body,...
In their master’s thesis, Mateo Rosales Fertig offers the framework of a Curanderismx soul retrieval ceremony as a method of grappling with queerness and multiraciality in anti-colonial border and Chicanx contexts. From the legacies of Chicana, women of color, and QTPOC feminisms, they write out of the works and theories...
This thesis is the first of three sections in what will be a book-long project of creative nonfiction essays. The book will parallel the author's diary with three other family diaries, spanning four generations. This thesis deals with the first of those diaries, written by Antonio Bonetti's, the author's great-grandfather....
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 project blends personal narrative with scholarly work to recognize the interplay between these genre categorizations and to affirm the academic value of lived experience. Through this method, I play in the intersections of trans pedagogies, queer pedagogies, and pedagogies of love and care. By recounting how I blended these...
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...
This thesis is a study of Herman Melville’s symbolism. I have chosen to investigate the elemental images of water, fire, and stone in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), and Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). This work is a semiotic study, insofar as the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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:...
In July of 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
activated the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDLs) provisions of the
Clean Water Act. As the first river in Oregon to implement TMDL
regulations, people and agencies in the Tualatin basin face many
challenges. Non-point source pollution affects water quality in the...
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 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...
This thesis takes an in-depth look at specific behaviors that are putting Maasai women at risk for HIV/AIDS in Kenya. Methods used include in-depth interviews, focus group discussion, demographic data collection, and nutritional anthropometric measurements. The research took place June September 2004. Analysis reveals a strong connection between poverty and...
The purpose of this study has been to develop
insight into the aims and goals of public library service by
considering one particular type of library activity--work
with adult groups.
To determine the influence of historical events on
such service, consideration has been given to group work of
the past...
This thesis is a study of the changes in the cultural definition of the American Dream. I have chosen to use Superman comics, from 1938 to the present day, as litmus tests for how we have societally interpreted our ideas of “success” and the “American Way.” This work is primarily...
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 thesis, I conduct an analysis of blogs in order to understand their potential use in the composition classroom with the goals of students writing for a public audience and developing their rhetorical and civic agency. I do so by exploring the potential for the blogosphere as a public...
In order to assist WAC/WID practitioners and science writing faculty in incorporating translingual perspectives in disciplinary writing instruction, this study extends translingualism to language practice in the sciences by conducting a corpus study of Al-Awamia, a Moroccan agronomic journal. Mapping rhetorically significant changes across abstracts authored in English, French, and...
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 ethnographic study addresses the concerns of Oregon based Community Health Workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through their shared perspectives on the importance of mental health and self-care, CHWs highlight the critical need to learn practical skills in their training in order to better support their communities. Recommendations made by...
St. Lawrence Island, Alaska is home to two Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) under remediation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1985. After more than two decades the local residents continue to be concerned about inadequate site characterization and cleanup. During the summer of 2005, I collected ethnographic...
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...
My thesis consists of two articles that address the ways in which rhetoric emerges from coalitions with unequal power dynamics within the environmental movement. The introduction provides context to help situate my articles within the current environmental movement. In my first article, “Constellating a More Intersectional, Coalitional Rhetoric: Lessons from...
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...
In this thesis, I conduct an analysis of paradigmatic background assumptions deployed in engineering decision-making processes, in order to understand how these assumptions, operating tacitly and in tension with each other, contribute to decisions that are ethically less effective and less substantial than they would otherwise be. I do so...
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...
In this thesis, I explore experiences with my identity, looking at the identity people have
seen me as, who I've thought I was, and the identities my mother's and father's different family
backgrounds suggest I should be. I have divided this discussion into three main areas: my
complexion, the first...
In this era of free trade and globalization, food is traveling greater and greater distances to its consumers. This is causing small farms and small farmers all over the world to protest as their livelihood is being undercut by cheap agricultural commodities from outside their communities. In the Ecuadorian Andes,...
The study is based on a frame of reference for comparing characteristics
of ordered pairs of members of small groups ("relators" in relation to "co-relatives"). An attempt is made to replicate selected
findings from a study of the acquaintance process reported by
Theodore Newcomb. The effectiveness of three measures of...
G.K. Chesterton once stated, “I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairytales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts….The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy book,...
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...
These six stories investigate characters who must
begin to understand their own actions, which are often
made in response to authority. In the lives of these
characters, there are schemas which they believe they
fit, certain rules placed on them by society that they
each feel they must obey. It...
This thesis presents a discussion of the main materialistic theories proposed to explain the process of development among the indigenous population of Latin America. Four theoretical approaches are presented and discussed. The first one deals with the social group referred to as peasants. The second one explains the process of...
This thesis is an IRB-exempt oral history focused on the non-profit Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center (CMLC) in Corvallis, Oregon. The CMLC, formerly on 9th Street, was known to many community members as the Yellow House. The Yellow House was a dedicated community-based space where people of all cultures could come...
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...
The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of women in the
Japanese workplace. Data obtained from in-depth interviews and
questionnaires, shows that the Japanese workplace is in a state of
change moving toward a higher level of opportunity for female workers.
While similar to the circumstances experienced...
This paper explores the language theories of Gary Snyder, an important modern environmental author whose early work was associated with the Beat movement of the early 1950's. I am particularly interested in Snyder's thoughts on how language relates to nature. I focus primarily on Snyder's prose in attempts to understand...
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...
Classification based on metathoracic wing venation does not
coincide with the existing higher classification of the family Scutelleridae.
The wings of the genera in the Scutellerinae possess a
similar general pattern of venation which is quite distinct from that
of Eurygasterinae, Odontoscelinae, Odontotarsinae, and Pachycorinae.
The Scutellerinae wings possess three...
The syllid polychaete Autolytus varius reproduces in the spring
and early summer in Yaquina Bay, Oregon, The fertilized female
epitokes, or Sacconereis, carry the developing eggs and larvae in a
ventral sac until the larvae are ready to be released; incubation
lasts 14 to 18 days in the laboratory, The...
The extraction of tantalum fluoride complexes by large cationic
extractants (tetraphenylarsonium ion, TPA, and crystal violet) and
by methyl isobutyl ketone (MIBK) has been investigated as a function
of fluoride concentration using ¹⁸² Ta as tracer. Extractions by the
cationic extractants into chloroform were carried out in the absence
of...
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...
The study of the social dimensions of Shakespeare's art is represented by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, C.L. Barber, Robert Weimann, Edward Berry, and Michael Bristol. Their work analyzes the background in Elizabethan social practices and popular dramatic traditions that contribute to the form, structure, and meaning of Shakespeare's comedies....
The purpose of this research was to determine whether the transducing phage Pl picks up original bacterial chromosome segments and whether these segments are always the same size. The plan of approach was to grow the donor bacteria Escherichia coli C600 gal⁺ (galactose) in minimal media containing the heavy isotopes...
The goal of this study is to elucidate the similarities between the grammar of oral folk music and oral language grammar through field examples from Grupo Kultura, a group of neo-Latin American musicians in the mid-Willamette Valley area of Oregon. The linguistic analysis of oral folk music explores textual and...
This thesis project explores the experiences of individual people living lives in the face of difficult or oppressive circumstances. It sets forth a series of creative narrative essays that are partly inspired by people the author has encountered and partly created from his own imagination.
First year college writing classes originated in the United States at Harvard University in 1874. Since then, theorizing such a course has proven a place of contention, as its purposes and subjects have proven difficult to sort and impossible to agree upon. When Harvard first began teaching introductory composition, literature...
Pacific lamprey (Lampetra tridentata) have historically been considered by the Western scientific community as a "trash" fish and generally overlooked in West Coast fisheries management. Recent population declines in Pacific Northwest streams have triggered new research to understand the life history and ecological significance of this species. These new studies...
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...
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...
This study examines the interactions between the scientific communities of the
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) in the discovery of the tau lepton by physicist Martin Perl between 1973-
1977. Perl became interested in searching for heavy leptons through positron-electron
collision experiments using the...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships
that were hypothesized to exist between the variables birth order,
family size, and parents college attendance and the dependent variable,
college graduation. The three general hypotheses tested were:
1. A positive relationship exists between a given position in
birth order...
Studies were conducted within a 12-mile radius of Camp Sherman, Oregon, in the Deschutes National Forest during the spring and summer of 1965 and the spring of 1966, with one follow-up visit in the summer of 1967. The feeding and foraging activities of Eutamias amoenus and Citellus lateralis were observed,...
The primary purpose of this study was to explore the relationships
between the variables of sex, age, sibling status, age relationship
of sibling, age spacing between siblings and sex-role preference among
preschool-aged children.
Seventy-one children, 32 boys and 39 girls, ranging in ages
from two-years-eleven-months to five-years-seven-months, served
as subjects....
Weight-specific oxygen consumption of intact bluegill sunfish
was estimated in relation to body weight and temperature by the
sealed jar method. The relationship between body weight and weight-specific oxygen consumption was represented by the equation: Y = aX[superscript b]⁻¹ in which Y is the weight-specific oxygen consumption, expressed
as cc/kg/hr,...
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...