Prizes, Winning, and Identity: Narrative Vocal Music of the Pulitzer Prize, 2008–2018

This thesis considers the ways in which the Pulitzer Prize for Music shapes and is shaped by music of the moment. Since 1943, the Pulitzer Prize has marked 83 pieces as “distinguished” examples of American music. The financial rewarding of winning composers and the initiation of a reciprocal transfer of prestige and political capital, the Pulitzer’s expert juries and governing body has contributed to the preservation of a perpetually-shifting status quo. By chronicling the year-to-year shifts of administrative power dynamics in prize selections, the Pulitzer Prize has mirrored the changing American musical landscape. Drawing on methods of reception history, archival research, and sociological theory, I address recent efforts to reform the Pulitzer’s arbitration of taste. Through an examination of Pulitzer-winning pieces for voice and the prize juries who selected them, I argue that over the past decade we witness a broader and more inclusive definition of American music. A new emphasis by the Prize on global identities and themes—and the social conflicts they articulate—constitute an alteration of the Pulitzer Prize’s institutional identity and its ongoing construction of an American canon for the twenty-first century

The Trinity Reporter, Winter 2014

https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/reporter/2146/thumbnail.jp

Graduate Internship Report- Maxwell High School

This internship and project report includes documentation required in meeting the quality criteria for secondary-level programs of instruction in agriculture. The documents are concurrently used for the Agriculture Incentive Grant review process at Maxwell High School conducted by representatives of the California Department of Education. The supporting material includes information to receive state and local funding, outline the goals and objectives of the program, along with an overview of Maxwell High School, the agriculture program and the community

Performing Cancer Cultures: Activating Healthcare and Environmental Justice

"Performing Cancer Cultures: Activating Healthcare and Environmental Justice" addresses the possibilities for performance to intervene in U.S cancer cultures in three primary ways. First: as renewed, reiterated rituals performed in the NC Moral Mondays and HKonJ coalition movement for, among other things, Medicaid expansion, coal ash clean up, and a fracking ban. Second: in oral histories told and testimonies given in and beyond U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearings on coal ash waste, part of ethnographic research and action-affiliations in Walnut Cove, an environmental health sacrifice zone in Stokes County, NC. Third: in the open format, stage performance of Flipping Cancer that I have offered in multiple sites 2014-19, developed from ongoing, clinician-, caregiver-, and patient-tailored InterPlay workshops and interviews centering stage IV disease. I argue that the embodied performance of story by persons living/dying with advanced cancers in both fossil fuel and healthcare worlds importantly challenges the particularly vigorous claims U.S. cancer cultures make on raced and gendered bodies, leading to the “redemptive-prophetic” stance I pursue in my current work. In body dispatches, spatial reclamation practices, and testimonial witness, I explore the multi-layered inequities that spark creation amidst cultural and policy contradictions, as underrepresented community members mobilize change.Doctor of Philosoph

Unfolding Imagos: an inquiry into the aesthetics of Action-Phenomenology

In modern civilisation, magic in its instrumental (sorcerous) sense would appear to have been completely superseded by science, but that should not blind us to the (arguably) reliable efficacy of invocation, nor to the metaphysical implication of this efficacy–that it points to the psychophysical nature of reality.3 This thesis is an inquiry into the use of imagination as being restorative of identity. Working experimentally with poetic-aesthetic method—writings initially, then visual images—I use altered states of mind, and access to the otherworldly, in order to offer re-arrangements of local realities. Preoccupied as most people are with everyday realities, radical proposals—animism, enchantment, non-ordinary ways of knowing and being— don’t often find room: in our everyday lives, workplaces, relationships; or in action-inquiry. The body of this inquiry reflects the qualities of what Bachelard terms an immense philosophical daydream.4 My claim in-depth is, firstly that working with poetic-aesthetic method in this way is restorative: of individual, groups, societies; secondly, that the framings offered in Part V Light are the bases for further in depth research. Initially proposed as inquiry into the healing of disrupted identity (a consequence of organisational and procedural abuse), the focus of inquiry shifts, unfolds. Inquiry into writing, poetry, aesthetics gives way to a deeper inquiry into connectedness; uncovering healing engendered by Seeing connections: to the morethan- human world (animism), the otherworldly (enchantment). Questions of knowing and being surface, along with how to relate these back to the world. In A Language Older Than Words, Jensen relates a story of connecting a plant—a dracaena cane—to a polygraph. The story relates the plant’s responses to a researcher imagining harming it; plant becoming attuned to human; yoghurt responding to death of remote microbes. This leads to altered ways of knowing and being not often in our consciousness; preoccupied as we are with everyday realities.5 Atelier—a series of experimental practices—provokes deeper inquiry: into the nature and frameworks of inquiry, and, ultimately, theory. The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when they say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, its just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.6 Experience of trauma, abuse, offers distortions of mind and self. These distortions are ascribed as illness but provoked through the deepening inquiry of a series of experimental practices: referred to in this work as The Atelier. I come to suggest that this is a problem of mind; and of our relationship to the unscientific. Playing with these distortions unfolds access to rarely accessed realms: of consciousness; of seeing. Inquiring into these fields of identity reveals new putative fields: Imago-Unfolding; Via Arbora; 4th-Person Inquiry; Action- Phenomenology. These fields occur—in layers—throughout this text, and in mind