“The Problems in Our School”: Female Authors in Spanish Journals of Education, 1922-1936

The educational reform project of the Second Spanish Republic stemmed from the educational reform movement in Spain beginning in the late 19th century. The Spanish movement was heavily influenced by foreign ideas and was closely linked to the international New Education movement. Women played important roles in the Spanish educational reform movement as transmitters of foreign ideas and practitioners of new methods. Education was an accepted professional field for women in Spain, and in this field, women went beyond their traditional role as teachers to travel abroad, publish books, and direct schools. This thesis examines articles written by women in two Spanish journals of education, the BILE and the Revista de Pedagogía from 1922-1936. In these articles, women do not simply report on foreign methods or dispense classroom advice, they call for fundamental change to the Spanish educational system and more broadly, to Spanish society. Through their status as experts in education, women were able to enter the public sphere and suggest changes at a national level even at a time when they had no political rights. These women can be classified as social feminists and they worked towards fundamental reform in Spanish society, especially for poor women and children. Although they did not explicitly advocate for women’s rights, they subtly extended their traditional role into the public sphere and entered the political conversation at a time when women were often excluded

“Image”-ing Otherwise: the Ambivalent Politics of Asian American Visual Self-Representation in the post-1965 Era

The post-1965 period was a time of growing Asian American visibility alongside massive sociopolitical unrest, both of which threatened the stability of the U.S. racist capitalist system. During this time, U.S. national culture and Asian Americans contended over the visual forms that would lend Asian visibility political coherence; the “model minority,” the “Asian American,” and the Asian suburbanite were three manifestations of these visual politics. Focusing on Los Angeles as an Asian American population center, this thesis will examine visual evidence from the early model minority press (1966), the Asian American Movement's L.A.-based press (1969-1974), and visual representations of built spaces in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley Asian-majority suburb to synthesize an Asian American visual critique that unsettles the fixity of U.S. national racial imaging and rethinks the history of the politics of how Asian American visibility took form. In piecing together a history of three unstable, intersecting visual narratives surrounding a highly volatile American subject, this thesis hopes to recuperate the urgent ambivalence of the radical ‘60s “Asian American” identity, locating roots of contemporary theoretical interventions in the archives of the movements/counter-movements of the mid-1960s. The ambiguous and ambivalent ways Asian Americans visually self re-present constitute a “politics of refusal” that embraces Asian America’s “coherent incoherence” and denies the American mainstream the ability to regulate (and narrate) Asian immigrant presence in America. The inability to define Asian America allows it a continual liminality that imperils static racial formations that serve to uphold U.S. national culture. Within these visual archives, the lack of a fixed Asian American visual subject lends the identity its power and needs to be seen as crucial to the struggle over the public presence of Asian Americans in the U.S. post-1965 era

El contraproyecto en Contraproyecto: La obra de Carla Grandi dentro del contexto político y poético de la dictadura en Chile

This paper is an analysis of Contraproyecto (1984/1987) by the Chilean poet Carla Grandi as a counterproject against the masculine literary canon and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It considers the four distinct sections of Grandi's work as different instances of counterproject that allow the reader to resist the regime. Additionally, it places Grandi within the historical moment in which women were advocating for democracy both in private and public spheres, considering how female poets and artists in particular expressed their positions as women within the city under the dictatorship

Introduction to African and Africana Studies

This course introduces a global socio-historical framework within which to examine multiple modern African Diasporas. Considering the historical contexts of contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, we examine cultural, economic, and philosophic aspects of African peoples around the globe. We will examine how ideas of what it means to be African culturally, racially, and politically are \ud continually produced and contested. The moment of independence of many African nation-states from European colonial rule in the mid 20th century operates as a centering point from which we will consider economics, race, politics, and artistic expressions. We will explore ideas of “tradition” and “modernity,” representations of Africa, more recent processes of commodification, as well as various cultural and political responses to them. We will consider bodily practices, aesthetics, political ideologies, and social movements in the creative production of African modern worlds and their relationship to contemporary movements of African peoples to the Americas and Europe. In this sense we consider different socio- historical movements in the context of Caribbean and North American history. We also explore African peoples and practices in their continuing dialogues and returns to the African continent. In an abstract sense, the course argues for a complex set of links between violence, memory, and aesthetics. We will use philosophical, political, historical, literary and ethnographic texts as well as popular artistic forms to understand contemporary and historical dynamics of the continent and its global reach. We will consider the nature of historical and anthropological inquiry and expressive texts to examine the practices through which history is continually re-produced in the present

Playing Strangers, Providing Care: An Ethnographic Study of Yik Yak at Swarthmore College

Yik Yak, a location-based anonymous posting app, has been accused of fostering\ud overwhelmingly negative interactions and abuse. The app allows users to “play” at being \ud strangers in their own geographically intimate community. This paper, based on research \ud conducted at Swarthmore College, examines the ways in which interactions on Yik Yak\ud extend beyond the negative, exploring the community’s use of anonymity and \ud construction of support networks through field study and personal accounts of app users

Magnetic Field and Ion Density Correlation Analysis of SSX Plasma

Chaotic and unpredictable behavior are both hallmarks of turbulence. Turbulence may be understood in a variety of ways, but traditionally is understood statistically. By using a statistical metric, such as the autocorrelation function or power spectrum of a turbulent signal, we may begin find structure or order a signal that is seemingly random. Conversely, we may attempt to reproduce this order by combining a large number of periodic wave signals at various frequencies. The idea that such linear combinations can reproduce some aspects of turbulence is the basis of the quasi-linear premise. If we accept the quasi-linear premise, then we break down a turbulent signal into the waves which compose it. The distribution of these waves could potentially inform us of the fundamental characteristics of the signal itself.\ud It is this lofty goal we have in mind when we consider turbulent signals produced by plasma created at the Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment (SSX). In considering these plasmas, we accept the quasi-linear premise and assert that the turbulent behavior of the plasma can be modeled, in part, by a collection of randomly phased waves of various amplitudes. The waves supported by the plasma are obtained by solving the equations of linearized magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) wave theory. They are identified within the plasma through their characteristic fluctuations in magnetic field magnitude |B| and ion density n. More specifically, the wave modes behave uniquely with respect to the relative phase of |B| and n, so we determine the wave mode composition of SSX plasma through correlation analysis of time series of |B| and n. However, analysis of the time series tells us very little about the higher frequency modes of the plasma, so we also perform correlation analysis spectrally by considering the Fourier transforms of the original |B| and n signals. This allows us to determine the wave mode composition of the plasma at various frequencies, including ones that have relatively little power compared to the rest of the signal. Though our analysis is based on a strong assumption, the quasi-linear premise, it will give us new perspective and insight on the character of SSX plasma that would otherwise not be immediately obvious

Humanizing Refugee Journeys

This week on War News Radio, Anna Weber interviews Jody Williams about the plight of refugees during the current European refugee crisis and the importance of seeing the crisis as a human crisis when continuing to find solutions