This thesis explores the ways in which creative placemaking, a neighborhood-based practice for building community, can offer community-building and civic action wisdom as a model for composition. This model brings attention to spatial metaphors for rhetoric and teaching that have persisted for millennia; it re-focuses us on community; it encourages...
This thesis invokes Black Jesus as an abstract figure in two seemingly disparate early twentieth century American novels and, in doing so, intervenes in ongoing debates about the ethical capacities of literature as means of grappling with difference. The Christ figure is a literary trope of waning importance in contemporary...
This draft document describes different types of conservation tools and highlights some conservation programs currently available in Oregon, along with an assessment of their effectiveness for habitat conservation and for participating landowners.
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...
The Other Side of Marin investigates how the lack of communication between family members can lead to potentially devastating consequences. The novella, set in the 1970s in Northern California, is told from the points of view of Lucy, a middle-aged mother of four, and her teenage son, who for his...
This thesis describes how heteropatriarchal, settler colonialism impacted Indigenous communities' systems in power and control, particularly with the American Indian Movement during the 1960s-1970s. Further, the gendered divides this created within the American Indian Movement are described. The murder of Anna Mae Aquash is revisited as an act of gendered...
France's universalistic idea of citizenry has been complicated by a history of colonialism, racialization, and selective acceptance of difference. Although Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood) is France's motto, the consequences of colonial rule continue to impact the lives of non-autochthonous French citizens today. Since the colonial days, immigrants and...
Online fanfiction communities have received attention for providing spaces of creativity and individual empowerment. Yet as critics have sought to establish fanfiction as a worthy object of study, many have not grappled with the ways that fanfictions not only trouble, but also reinforce various discourses and ideas of gender and...
The novella follows a protagonist named Charlie Tinger and his daughter Rainy. The purpose of this novella was to highlight the complexity of a father-daughter relationship, projecting a quirky and special bond between the two. Written with the intent of eliciting emotion in the form of humor and sadness, I...