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 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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
This thesis argues for the importance of justice of recognition not only for humans, but the entire non-human world in the face of environmental destruction and climate crisis. The common response to the degradation of the world’s ecological sphere is to act with technological, scientific, and material based responses. However,...
The increasing focus on internationalization in Taiwan’s language-in-education policy has expanded the use of cross-cultural co-teaching pairs consisting of a native English-speaking teacher and a local non-native English-speaking teacher. While the model holds great potential for combining unique strengths, navigating cross-cultural communication in these co-teaching collaborations can be complex. This...
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...
The Buddhist discipline known as Yogacara can complement the practice of Psychotherapy by virtue of the former’s concepts that allow individuals to examine their minds in a way that produces beneficial insights regarding one’s mental health problems. Yogacara contains the idea of a storehouse consciousness that is similar to the...
In order to advocate for a nonviolent future, I argue throughout this thesis that we must redefine our sense of self within a social context. I assert that Communitarianism, which seeks balance between the individual and their many overlapping communities, can situate our identities as less absolute and more constitutive...
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...
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...
Textiles (including basketry, cordage, woven, knotted, or plaited products) make up a considerable portion of the perishable archaeological record in dry caves of the northern Great Basin region, much of which is created from plants and plant fibers. The archaeological study of precontact textiles greatly informs our understanding of how...
Across from the Memorial Union on Oregon State University’s campus sits Milam Hall, the former site of the Department of Home Economics. The building is named for Ava Milam Clark, the dean of home economics for thirty-three years, from 1917 to 1950. I aim to understand Ava Milam’s early career...
As digital video pushes celluloid film further into obsolescence, many artists and viewers mourn the loss of what they consider a more organic medium. Photochemical film is subject to decay due to variables of care and the inevitability of time, and film’s embodied vulnerabilities are similar to those of the...
Net Values is an Environmental Arts & Humanities thesis that centers around a research project of the same name. The research examines individual fishers’ perceptions of adverse economic and social impacts resulting from shifted fishing effort caused by the Oregon Marine Reserves, and looks to understand how fishers use their...
I argue that Matthew’s seven acts of corporal mercies provide a means of reading Piers Plowman within a framework familiar to medieval audiences, but also exposes the different models of health that are at work within the poem and the soteriological significance of these healths. In chapter one, I focus...
This thesis analyzes contributing factors to Zoom Fatigue and the issues surrounding “attentional dissonance,” or a feeling of tension or rupture between actual and virtual self-perception. The research examines current literature on Zoom Fatigue, and uses the sociological theory of Dramaturgical Analysis, developed by Erving Goffman, to further assess the...
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 project is a personal exploration of happiness and optimism through the lens of a queer and transgender subject who experiences gender dysphoria, depression, and suicidality. Taking inspiration from Ann Cvetkovich’s (2012) Depression: A Public Feeling, this work incorporates both analysis of affective theory, especially Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel...
“The system is fucked. Everything needs to change” was stated by Ashley Paige, a professional dominatrix and author in We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, at a book launch event. Paige’s sentiments are poignant and a call to action to all of us. Through this thesis, I will...
People involved in a nuclear activity, whether they are developing it, benefiting from it, or opposing it, see inherent connections between various aspects of nuclear science and technology. This thesis investigates three nuclear sites: a university research reactor, a dual-purpose reactor that produced plutonium for the U.S. military and electricity...
My thesis examines how the American identity is constructed through thinking shaped by deception and domination, as James Baldwin argues in the corpus of his work. I rely on the work of Eddie Glaude Jr., Sean Kim Butorac, and Joel Schlosser to forward love in Baldwin’s political vision as being...
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...
This thesis thinks through the ways in which Black and Native storying offer epistemological interventions on neoliberal formations of multiracial identity. I argue that Black and Native storytelling methods and methodologies facilitate rethinking and re/unlearning relationships to the racial and ethnic categories of mixed-race, biracial, and multiracial, as well as...
This thesis evaluates the contact zone of the remote composition classroom and offers mediations for leveling the authoritative powers by fronting disability studies in pedagogies. The purpose of this thesis is to create pedagogies from disability scholarship and real teaching experiences that can be implemented in the remote classroom to...
Steps and Stikes is an Environmental Arts and Humanities capstone thesis project taking the shape of an art film. The video layers contemporary dance with natural and industrial imagery on a foundation of personal narrative. It engages with contemporary environmental discourse as a choreographed essay, questioning why the environmental movement...
Close reading has long been favored as an interpretative framework within those classrooms commonly united under the umbrella of English studies. This thesis explores the role of a particular brand of close reading—one often assessed through text-dependent questions—and critiques its centrality within assessment and curriculum materials for the AP Program...
The suffering of animals and the environment due to the advancement of anthropocentric endeavors is undeniable. There is no unitary cause that can account for the “why” of people’s belief in humanities exceptional status compared to animals: Some believe capitalism is the root of disparagement, others believe our scientific prowess...
In 1947, scientists from the University of California departed for a fifteen-month expedition to Africa. Jessie Camp, wife of the head paleontologist Dr. Charles L. Camp, had no official position on the expedition. Yet in performing her traditional domestic duties, she greatly contributed to the overall success of the expedition....
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 analyzes Sophocles’ classic Greek tragedy Antigone as it relates to biopolitics, biopower, democratic language and non-normative principles of politics. I argue that the figure of Antigone enables a better understanding of exclusive biopolitical philosophy. Antigone is a figure not recognized as human because her gender is tortured and...
Steps and Stikes is an Environmental Arts and Humanities capstone thesis project taking the shape of an art film. The video layers contemporary dance with natural and industrial imagery on a foundation of personal narrative. It engages with contemporary environmental discourse as a choreographed essay, questioning why the environmental movement...
This work examines the decolonial potential of queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous storytelling by telling stories using graphic novel chapters, literary analysis, and graphic analysis. I explore the importance of stories in defining us as individuals, as peoples, and as humans. As a mixed-race Indigenous (unregistered Cherokee) transwoman, I engage with...
France’s decision to test their nuclear weapons program in the Sahara in 1960 wholly reshaped how the Cold War infiltrated into West Africa. During a time of nation building, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah urged Ghana and Africa, more broadly, to break ties with colonial powers and rebuke further attempts of...
This thesis focuses on performances of masculinity by British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) airmen in the charged landscape of the First World War prisoner of war (POW) camp. I examine how captive airmen coped with imprisonment by reasserting the familiar homosocial communities of pre-capture squadron life, particularly through practices associated...
Composition scholars who have written about trauma have typically focused on creating classrooms that are conducive to healing and learning. In doing this work, however, they have considered neither how PTSD nor other people’s responses to it can impact one’s perceived rhetoricity in the college classroom. In other words, they...