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...
Humans have always been fascinated with whales; from prominent features in mythology, to stories of terrifying monsters on the high seas, to globalized utility, to symbolic wildness and radical environmentalism, to figures and statistics, how have human relationships with whales been understood throughout time? Because humans have a need to...
This thesis argues that the first two novels of Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy mark a sharp turn from the antihumanism of his earlier ‘Southern’ novels to a more affective exploration of posthumanist subjectivity within a world dominated by social discourse and metanarratives. In my examination of All the Pretty...
This thesis examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on farms in the Willamette Valley. Using semi-structured interviews, this study analyzes the economic and social challenges created by the pandemic and the adaptation strategies farmers employed to build resilience within the food system. This study found that the farmers experienced...
This thesis examines the internet phenomenon of the “Sad Girl,” a name given to young women who identify and present themselves as inherently melancholic people online. I position the internet community of the Sad Girl, which spans across three social media platforms, Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram, within a larger history...
This thesis explores the intricate issues surrounding migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, offering diverse perspectives and insights into its drivers, consequences, and ethical dimensions. Through three comprehensive papers, this research offers a nuanced analysis of the complex dynamics influencing the migration crisis. The first examines the historical and theoretical factors...
Asian American poetry is often considered a subcategory of poetry centered on the poets’ backgrounds. However, this project engages with the complexity of Asian American identity and experience as they trickle down from the poets, to their works, to interpretations of their art. Thus, I contend that these poets’ engagement...
Within the field of science communication, the voices, perspectives, and experiences of the LGBTQ+ community have long been kept at the margins. This has led to a gap in material that recognizes queer individuals and communities as audiences, communicators, and stakeholders in STEM. I address this gap by generating a...
Falling Into Place: Relational Perspectives on the US Creative Residency Field is an Environmental Arts & Humanities thesis built around a research project called Creative Residencies and Expanded Senses of Community: Interviews With Artists & Residency Leaders. It’s an extended meditation on arts residencies via research, interviews, and experiential learning,...
Many queer scholars have made the turn away from orientations that treat Victorian queerness as either “lost” or “hidden.” Adding more complexity to literary theories which center practices of “revealing” queer artifacts, Sharon Marcus, for instance, argues queer encounters exist at the surfaces of Victorian literature. In addition, Anjali Arondekar’s...
In the months preceding the 2016 presidential election and during the Trump presidency, rhetoric, composition, and communications scholars expressed an urgent concern about the threat that Trump and his political affiliates posed to the status of truth in political life (McComiskey; Rice; Harsin; Cloud). However, the conversations surrounding the discipline’s...
Feminist compositionists have long argued for addressing the feminization of composition, or its association with low value “women’s work,” by revaluing caring labor (Enos; Heinert and Phillips; Tuell). However, this argument assumes that writing teachers’ care work is beneficial for all students and teachers. Focusing on responding to student writing...
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation drew public ire during the 1980s and 1990s when activist groups forced the declassification of 19,000 documents and discovered proof of accidental and intentional releases of radioactive materials into the environment. These releases had been kept from the public. Although many locals had for decades wondered...
Little scholarship exists on the contemporary trance dance movement known as Ecstatic Dance. This thesis investigates the myriad of pathways dancers in the Ecstatic Dance communities of Western Oregon experience movement-induced altered states of consciousness. A secondary aim was to provide a more visually and ethnographically accessible dance annotation system...
This is an IRB-exempt thesis exploring place relationship in the valley of Lake Creek, Oregon, at Triangle Lake. An interdisciplinary ethnography of place, it involves a synthesis of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic literature; an analysis of nineteenth-century Coos, Alseya (Alsea), and Kalapuya myth-texts from Native oral tradition; a history of...
This thesis explores the common features that unite postcolonial and posthumanist theories, finding that the Cartesian notion of representationalism has enabled the humanist hierarchy that both fields decry. This humanist hierarchy coalesces in the figure of the author, and as such its most effective criticism takes the form of metafiction....
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...
Within composition studies, rhetorical genre studies (RGS) and labor-based grading (LBG) are engaged in similar projects that consider students not only as individuals but also as always part of a community; as such, both have worked to understand how students learn, how students value themselves and their work, and how...
The ongoing “method war” in literary criticism that has manifested as the impasse between Critique and Postcritique, which are identified respectively with paranoid and reparative modes of reading, raises existential questions about criticism in the face of its declining social value under neoliberalism. This thesis enters that impasse to suggest...
Recognized as a site of risk, innovation, and inspiration, failure is a growing area of multidisciplinary inquiry. My thesis draws attention specifically to the way composition studies approaches failure in order to ask: how can we implement failure pedagogies safely, and how do rhetorics of failure move toward social justice...