A Critical Geopolitical Analysis of Urban/Suburban Green Spaces: Meadowbrook Park as a Material Discourse

This project was created for the EVRN 371 class and presented at the 2020 Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium online event, held November 30th-December 4th. The Symposium was sponsored by the KU Center for Undergraduate Research.This presentation is a critical geopolitical analysis of urban and suburban green spaces using Meadowbrook Park as an example of a material discourse. This presentation emphasizes a critical geopolitical approach to analyzing a physical space, which is Meadowbrook Park. Critical geopolitical analysis aims to unpack a place, text or idea and to think of these things as a narrative with a deeper meaning and to identify what may be hidden or obscured in that narrative

Accessing the Past as Landscape: The Danish Bog Bodies and Modern Memory

This article will investigate variations on place-making involving the museum presentation of the well-preserved bodies of Danish bog sites. While any museum site holds the potential for such a critical analysis, bog bodies have a unique role in the narrative nature of place-making: they are individuals who experienced the story being told (assuming, of course, that the story is “true”). They are, in essence, characters in the created story of the “place-world.” Well-preserved bodies are fully recognizable as humans, with recognizably human faces and, sometimes, discernible facial hair. They seem almost ready to tell the story of the past themselves. By telling these individuals’ stories, museum exhibits and visitors alike imagine and create place in a seemingly more real way: by imagining individuals’ lives, they transform the past into a relatable and accessible place where other humans acted, thought, and made meaning. The past landscape can, after all, have no significance if no one was there to experience it

Hoodie Today, Gown Tomorrow: An Ideological Rhetorical Analysis of Gender-Neutral Clothing

The fields of psychology and sociology have long understood the importance of clothing in self-formation, this study extrapolates this social-science understanding into the realm of rhetorical analysis. This study looks at gender-neutral clothing and its role in meaning making and self identification for women. With a rhetorical basis from Richards and Ogden, this research uses the feminist works of Brummett and Butler to uncover both the positive and negatives effects of gender-neutral clothing on a woman\u27s self-identification and perceptions. Through the presentation of a diffuse narrative and evaluation of the same, gender-neutral clothing is read and decoded for meaning. This research shows that meanings from gender-neutral clothing are inherently perception based and calls for better personal and corporate understanding of perception in meaning making and evaluation

MAKING MEANING USING SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS AND VISUAL GRAMMAR ANALYSIS: COMPARISON OF SOURCE TEXT AND TARGET TEXT REFLECTED IN THE MAIN CHARACTER OF GRAPHIC NOVEL V FOR VENDETTA

This research presents a project designed to investigate a systemic way of analyzing metafunctions’ shifts between source texts and target texts using systemic functional linguistic (SFL) collaborated with visual grammar (VS; systemic functional approach for images). The study tries to examine the correlation between verbal and visual systems and how it affects the making of meaning in graphic novel. The research is descriptive qualitative with embedded case study. The data is acquired from monologue and dialogue uttered by main character of the first graphic novel book V for Vendetta. Content analysis, questionnaire and focus group discussion are conducted to obtain necessity data. The results shows there are shifts in transitivity structure, lexical items, and clauses' interdependency undergo ideational metafunction, modality system and discourse marker shifts undergo interpersonal metafunction, thematic structures, cohesion devices, physical presentation shifts undergo textual metafunction. Also shifts in target text caused by context of visual structure in representational metafunction and compositional metafunction. Those shifts demonstrate meaning changed in target text and can be identified in each metafunctions. The metafunction representational and ideational deal with interpreting content, form, context and symbolized expression in graphic novel. The shifts in transitivity structure and lexical items are caused by intertextuality and the theatricality in the content, form, context and symbolized expression of V for vendetta graphic novel. Interpersonal metafunction relates with enacting social relation. Whereas textual and compositional metafunction deal with organizing text/images, contextualizing the narrative scope and build reading order

Did You Take Care of Everybody? Insights on Crisis Management From Senior Student Affairs Professionals

This constructivist narrative study explored the experiences of five senior student affairs administrators who responded to an organizational crisis impacting their universities. Crisis management is a critical competency for higher education leaders (Peters, 2014) and involves the prevention, mitigation, and planning prior to a crisis; response and recovery during the crisis; and learning and changing following a crisis (Zdziarski, 2006). This study was guided by the research question: how do campus leaders at an institution of higher education (IHE) make meaning of a campus crisis event? Five participants, all of whom are senior student affairs professionals with extensive crisis management experience, shared their stories of responding to the death of a student or staff member on campus. Death is often unexpected and particularly challenging on college campuses, since college is often considered to be a safe environment characterized by tight-knit social communities (Cintrón, 2007). Using crystallization as an overarching framework for understanding, this researcher used narrative interviewing and reflective drawing to facilitate participants’ sharing of their crisis stories. Two distinct scholarly contributions emerged from this study, each employing divergent analytical approaches that were then represented as research manuscripts. The first manuscript, which used organizational frames as a theoretical framework to analyze participants’ stories, drew upon the narrative interview data to elicit the following themes: student affairs’ leaders’ interactions with families, impacts on student affairs leaders’ families, tensions between structure and intuition, adaptability as necessity, and applying lessons learned to organizational change. The second piece, in which the author created transcription poetry as an analytical strategy, situated poems derived from transcript data adjacent to narrative passages and the participants’ reflective drawings to create a tapestry of meaning. Following the presentation of this tapestry, the author reflected upon the methodological challenges that emerged during the research process, including how narrative interviewing opened the way for deep sharing of stories, the use of poemishness and dilemmas of poetic (re)presentation, dilemmas in generating participant-driven reflective images, and the author’s own process of meaning-making while wrestling with the topic of death. The findings in both articles make significant contributions to both the scholarly literature on crisis management in student affairs and higher education as well as the methodological literature on arts-based research, namely the use of transcription poetry and reflective drawing. Since crisis management is an essential competency for student affairs leaders, implications for student affairs graduate preparation and professional practice are discussed

The Art of collaborative storytelling: arts-based representations of narrative contexts”

Draft for: ISA Research Committee on Biography and Society. The author analyses several theories about science and arts converging in a new point of view. Also talks about the functions of storytelling. He starts his work with these phrases: 'Art and science have a common thread - both are fuelled by creativity. Whether writing a paper based on my data or filling a canvas with paint, both processes tell a story' (Taylor 2001) 'Science and art are complementary expressions of the same collective subconscious of society' (Morton 1997:1

Cognitive Poetics: Blending Narrative Mental Spaces. Self-Construal and Identity in Short Literary Fiction

The present study seeks to explore some of the major assumptions made by cognitive linguists regarding language in an attempt to see how various language processes can participate in the emergence of literary meaning. Also, this is an attempt to bridge the gap between linguistics and literary studies. For that purpose, linguistic work with a cognitive orientation can open the floor to one highly debatable question in critical literary theory: the question of interpretation. The primary step in order to meet my objectives is the presentation of a model of analysis that investigates the processes of meaning formation in literary texts – the theory of blending seems to be extremely suitable for an account of meaning formation. I believe that my article can profit substantially from the wide array of instruments provided by the blending theory in order to understand the nature of the reader’s mind while reading literary (short) stories. The study of the basic mental operation of blending is motivated by the general relationship of cognitive poetics and narrative theories. To this end, I will be extensively making use of the blending framework in order to address its narrative implications in two of Hemingway’s already canonical short stories – Big Two-Hearted River and Soldier’s Home. What I hope to demonstrate is that the conceptualization of the narrative mental spaces in these two short stories always has counterfactuality available and uses it as a valuable mental resource. Also, I will try to show that conceptual integration/ blending plays a central role in the self-construal of characters’ identity

Philip: A Connective Figure in Polyvalent Perspective (Chapter in Character Studies in the Fourth Gospel)

While Philip plays no special role in the Synoptics, he plays more of a central role in the Fourth Gospel. Aside from references to Peter and the Beloved Disciple, Philip is mentioned in John more often (a dozen times) than any of the other followers of Jesus - either male or female. Interestingly, he plays a connective role in the narrative, and in several ways. At the outset of the Gospel, during the calling narrative, Philip plays the role of an intermediary, connecting Nathanael with Jesus (John 1:43-48). At the beginning of the feeding narrative, Philip is asked by Jesus to feed the crowd (6:5-7), a request that correlates with his hailing from the nearby town, Bethsaida. At the end of Jesus\u27 public ministry, Philip plays a pivotal role in connecting Greek seekers with Jesus, leading to Jesus\u27 declaration that his hour is fulfilled (12:21-23). And, leading into the first of the final discourses, Philip asks Jesus to show the disciples the Father (14:8-9), whereupon Jesus invites all to a connection with God. As such, Philip provides a bridge between others and Jesus at pivotal points, playing a prominent ambassadorial role. This essay will suggest how that is so in terms of polyvalent characterological analysis, leading to interpretive considerations

An exploration of narrative as a research method

Narrative derives from a long history of literary tradition and is increasingly used as a research method. Narrative in essence is the stories of our lives and the stories of the lives of others. Narrative is open to interpretation. This interpretation develops through collaboration of researcher and respondent or story teller and listener. Narrative, explored through interpretive research allows access to the respondent reality via their socially constructed stories. As a term it is a many sided concept. This paper considers the distinct features of narrative, highlighting the potential for overlap within the terms of life history, life incidents, story telling, biography and autobiography

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences