Learning to Speak: Poems

This project is a collection of poetry that weaves together past, present, and the hopes of a future that causes change. It is set in South Texas and discusses borders spanning from social class, language, and identity. The collection primarily focuses on the Chican@ voice and the shame that comes from the borderlands. I have drawn from the Rio Grande Valley as a source of inspiration while also using family experiences, my own reaction to shame, and the possibilities of an empowered voice

Facing tough realities and inspiring change: The comic satire of Sherman Alexie

Examines the comic modes Sherman Alexie uses, the purposes behind his critical, yet humorous, commentary, the multiple audiences toward which his satire is aimed, and the desired outcomes of his satire. Explores the theme of alcoholism in Alexie\u27s writings that plays a role in the degradation of Native American lives in modern times and why alcoholism has become a problem for the Native American community. Also, examines why Native Americans have become so dependent on White handouts and how this passivity and acceptance has created problems in Indian society. Finally, offers insights into Alexie\u27s use of humor as a means of communicating hope, restoring community, and rebuilding tradition in Native American society

Our heritage is already broken: meditations on a regenerative conservation for cultural and natural heritage

This essay is about the interdependence of story and action with respect to cultural and natural heritage. It is also about the inexorability of change and its relationship to heritage conservation. In the following paragraphs I share several stories and excerpts, some heroic, others less so (I leave it to the reader to decide which is which), to make the case that the traditional, Western perspective on heritage does not hold up well under scrutiny—there is now an emerging paradigm for heritage conservation, one that both realizes its “empty” nature and guides us in developing a conservation approach that aligns with this recognition

Tom Nook, Capitalist or Comrade? On Nook Discourse and the Millennial Housing Crisis

Many millennial Animal Crossing players will experience the joy of paying off their beautiful three-floor in-game home only to have that joy cut short by the crushing realization that they may never experience homeownership in real life. Who do we then take that anger and disappointment out on? The capitalists with a stranglehold on the housing market? The governments and companies holding our lives hostage for student loan debt? Our landlords who take most of our income each month so we can keep a roof over our heads? Our bosses who are criminally underpaying us for our labour? Or is it a fictional racoon? Arguments about the ethics of Animal Crossing’s non-playable character Tom Nook are inescapable in online discussions about the Animal Crossing series. These discussions generally have two sides: either Tom Nook is a capitalistic villain who exploits the player’s labour for housing, or he is a benevolent landowner who helps the player out in hard times. Vossen first sets the stage by discussing the cultural significance of both the Animal Crossing series, focusing in on Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), and the millennial housing crisis. She then examines the many tweets, memes, comics, and articles that vilify Tom Nook (and a few that defend him) and asks: are we really mad at Tom, or are we mad at the cruelty and greed of the billionaires, bosses, and landowners in our real lives? Vossen argues that what she calls “Nook discourse” represents the radical social potential of Animal Crossing to facilitate large-scale real-world conversations about housing, economic precarity, class, and labour that could help change hearts and minds about the nature of wealth

Attuning Entanglements : Notes on a Fermentation Workshop

Non peer reviewe

The NEBLINE, March 2000

Contents: Stormwater Management and Water Quality: Urban Nonpoint Source Pollution All America Selection 2000 Winners Pruning Mature Deciduous Shrubs Educate Yourself Before You Buy Carpenter Ants are Frustrating! Get Ready for Babies! “Tiny Red Dots Moving on My Window Sill” Cats — Keeping the Urban Predator in Check Farming in a Drought Could We Still Have a Y2K Disaster? Stockmen Prepare for Drought Tanks vs. Ponds and Creeks for Livestock Water Dry Conditions Expected Through Spring The Business Plan: Executive Summary To Prune is to Care On the Plate...Supplement Label Changes Convenient, Safe and Nutritious Foods: It’s in a Can Healthy Eating: Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Bars Focus on Food Family & Community Education (FCE): Clarice\u27s Column FCE News Household Hints: Wallpaper Remover Solution Help Your Child Bike Safely National Poison Prevention Week March 19-25 Character Counts! Corner: Responsibility 4-H Bulletin Board 4-H Speech Contest 4-H Horse Bits 4-H Achievement Night Highlights Fair Exhibit Changes Ward “Gus” Shires to Retire March 31 National Ag Week: A “Salute” to Nebraska Agriculture – Sharing the Facts! Nobuko Nyman to Retire March 23 Five Cents Can Improve the World Weed Awareness Special Inser

Recombinant

The hybrid texts (poems and prose) in the following dissertation investigate female and genderqueer lineage in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. In this book-length project, I examine the challenges of communal memory by juxtaposing voices from Asian, African and indigenous communities in the Americas. Set in a speculative future, these voices simultaneously inhabit their own spaces and share pathways, a theme developed through manipulation of white space on the page. The narrative speculates about the origins of M. Lao, a snakehead matriarch who has created a business empire from a fictional edu-tainment park, CoolieWorld, which traffics in the history of coolie labor. In the narrative, M. Lao is forced to confront her troubled relationship to her gender-non-conforming child who has disappeared as she considers her own history of migration, trauma, survival, self-invention and complicity in the trafficking of migrants. These writings force voices from various communities to interact with each other through the poems\u27 experimental graphic and representational practices. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan asserts that diasporan realities do show up the poverty of conventional modes of representation with their insistence on single-rooted, non-traveling, natural origins. But this calls for multi-directional, heterogeneous modes of representation. By drawing on Radhakrishnan\u27s ideas, I create a diasporic poetics that contains multiple voices within a single space on the page. Poems that attempt to make sense of historical remnant share space with M. Lao\u27s fragmented narrative. I also blend historical incidents such as the 1899 anti-Chinese Milwaukee riots with the speculative realm of Coolie World, and in doing so think about how a city renegotiates its identity during long periods of constant redevelopment. To this end, I utilize historical artifacts including photographs; newspaper articles; maps; city directory listings; and records of immigration, birth and death, as well as scholarly research and archaeological records. These kinds of materials contain the shared memory of a community, and by juxtaposing, re-mixing, re-combining and erasing these found texts, recombinant examines both the erasure and reconstruction of community history

Ethical Eating: Overcoming Alienation in the Industrial Food System by Aligning Our Practices with Our Principles

This thesis arose out of a moment of discord, while an environmental philosopher was eating blackberries in the middle of a blizzard in Missoula, Montana. What follows is an attempt to bridge the gap between our principles and our practices, by asking the questions: What does ethical eating look like? Is it possible within our current industrial food system? and If not, what needs to change? Responding to the publication of the 2019 EAT-Lancet report, this essay moves beyond thinking of ethical eating as “healthy” and “sustainable” and challenges the networks of suffering and labour that we take for granted every time we sit down to eat. This essay tells the truths of animals’ living conditions, migrants’ working conditions, and the history of inequitable transcultural relations that has brought us one of our most popular food staples: bananas. Telling these (hi)stories is a partial attempt to overcome the alienation that is a defining characteristic of our current food system. Then, utilising Steven Vogel’s notions of (social) practices and our responsibility for them, and Joan Tronto’s ethics of care, this essay attempts to show how consumer, producer, and policy maker can all do better to mitigate the suffering inherent in our current food system—the industrial food complex. I then discuss three solutions to improving our food system: transparency, auditing, and localisation. Finally, I give the reader an idea of what ethical eating might look like. I call upon my own experience of ethical eating over the past year to help illuminate some of the limitations of our current framework and encourage a “participation” approach on the individual level. I conclude that overcoming the alienation of the industrial food complex will require eating where one is and developing institutionalised networks of practices that compliment this individual practice by making it accessible in our communities