366 research outputs found

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2022-2023

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    Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction

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    In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible

    The Living Archive as Pedagogy: A Conceptual Case Study of Northern Uganda

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    The Living Archive as Pedagogy emerges from Northern Uganda’s experience of war 1986- 2008, between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Uganda People’s Defense Force previously named the National Resistance Army. This period of war and post-war has been a difficult experience where finding solutions and mechanisms for transition or justice remain complex, restricted, delayed and consequently concealing the reality of lived marginalization from below. The Acholi of Northern Uganda went through predatory atrocities, painful humiliation and unwilled cohabitations with their oppressors during war and post-war. The study explores how the interlinking of archives and pedagogy as independent disciplines can extend possibilities for more transformative education horizons in bottom-up, post-conflict expressions. The study is immersed through a conceptual and theoretical framing in the boundaries of archiving and pedagogy, to understand how the war constructs Acholi’s lived experience in multiple complex ways. While the Acholi re-orient their lives post- war, we recognize their attention in affirming their human agency, ordering of new and different meanings, desiring a different liberation in post-conflict where responsibility in contexts of “up againstness” validates their dwelling and being in spaces that exclude them. The research acknowledges that pedagogy and archiving studies in post-conflict, needs restructuring to challenge the preserving of external and dominant epistemological purviews that order post-conflict reconstruction life. These traditions exclude the experiences of survivor-victims, are tone deaf to community-based groups articulations of post-conflict repair, and neither does lived experiences of the everyday gets organized as an outcome for knowledge. This is discussed at length, as the research responds to its central question of how living archive as pedagogy can offer a transformative education discourse. The conclusion of the study emphasizes self-representation through transformative knowledge positions of I am whom I am, Where I am, Where I Speak, and Where I think. These positions articulate a self-understanding that supports rehistrocizing of post-conflict society as a body resisting exclusion in dominant knowledge formation and institutional omissions. There is evidence of the research foregrounding the formation of person-hood from experiences of ‘up againstness” and knowledge/under-stand[ing] from below. The research facilitates a hermeneutical encounter with specific inscribed bodies of post-conflict experience, the Acholi and Wanjiku whose bodies archive a horizon of possibilities if a different and difficult reading vii of the world is done from locations of struggle to produce consciousness of re-becoming, or returning to the human. These pedagogical experience positions Acholi and Wanjiku as educators, and their lives a living archive. We the readers are invited to a learning process as willing ‘hearers’ of Acholi and Wanjiku testimony, to own responsibility as our practice to ensure they appear in the world to say their truth, as they defy conditions of their oppression.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Education, School of Education Research and Engagement, 202

    New Cold War? A comparison of Russian and US foreign policy discourses in the time of deteriorating relations

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    This thesis examines the role that the Cold War discourse themes play in informing and structuring the American and Russian newspaper narratives in the time period of 2014-2017. It uncovers whether the portrayal of the contemporary relationship between Russia and the US in newspaper discourse can be traced back to the historical roots of Cold War struggles. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the thesis seeks to identify the contexts interwoven in newspaper narratives examined in this study, and how their interactions with themes of the Cold War discourse work to create meanings for these newspapers’ audiences. The study does a qualitative textual analysis of newspaper discourse within the frame of two case studies: the 2014 conflict in Ukraine and the 2016–2017-time frame that is associated with the U.S. presidential election pre-election period and the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. This thesis fills a gap in the New Cold War discourse where no thematic comparative U.S.-Russia newspaper discourse study has been done thus far. The findings indicate that particular elements of the Cold War discourse continue structuring the narratives that different Russian and American newspapers produce while reporting events occurring in the post-Cold War time, raising critical questions about the persistence of powerful historical discourses, and about the ability of media in Russia and in the US to rearticulate and regenerate discourses of global politics in the post-Cold War world

    The Caretaker: Bearing Witness in Public Art an Examination of the Role of Contemporary Artists Addressing the Effects of Environmental Injustice within Michigan Communities

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    This paper examines public art and the role of contemporary artists in context of their relational experience in communities effected by environmental injustice. As a Michigan resident or as an out-of-state guest invited into an urban neighborhood, each of the twelve artists in this study participates within community through a unique cultural lens. Informed by historical and sociopolitical complexities, the public art bears witness for artists that care about the effects of a city’s water crisis, harm resulting from breached oil pipelines, generational loss of Indigenous traditions, and the inability to breathe unconditionally within certain neighborhood Zip Codes. Engaging in public art in the emerging role of ‘caretaker,’ the artist addresses evolving social narratives in such a way that the aesthetic form through its visual dialogue, becomes a catalyst for change. Current discourse on public art and environmental injustice regards a broad range of social contexts whereby the art performs a certain aesthetic or practical function relevant to location, however, the figure of the artist is rarely discussed. This paper focuses on the figure of the artist. In posing the question, How does public art bear witness for the artist in the role of caretaker?, I argue that the artwork reveals the role of caretaker through the artist’s 1) aesthetic practice, 2) gentleness in form, and 3) particular elucidation that personifies ‘caretaker’ as assessed through aspects of Witness, Testimony, Shelter, and Call, whereby the four categories become markers within the art for attributing the artist’s relational experience within community. The public art fosters consideration for the viewer to gain new insight through aesthetic form that bears witness for the artist as caretaker and to reflect on one’s own role in an environmentally just community.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1045/thumbnail.jp

    Iterative musical collaboration as palimpsest: Suite Inversée and The Headroom Project

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    Suite inversée is a musical work, co-composed by the two authors asynchronously online by means of file transfer alone and digitally presented using a self-made web app called The Headroom Project. The Headroom Project mediates the compositional project during creation as well as allowing the listener to browse a historical thread that weaves through the developmental process: through this app, each audio file that was shared between the two composers can be heard and considered both in and out of the context of its creation. The framework of the project provided the opportunity for the authors to reflect on issues of remote digital collaboration and the palimpsest nature of a work revealed in varying stages of evolution through a novel mode of presentation. This paper discusses the mode of creation by situating it within narratives of composition and technology

    The Living Archive as Pedagogy: A Conceptual Case Study of Northern Uganda

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    The Living Archive as Pedagogy emerges from Northern Uganda’s experience of war 1986- 2008, between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Uganda People’s Defense Force previously named the National Resistance Army. This period of war and post-war has been a difficult experience where finding solutions and mechanisms for transition or justice remain complex, restricted, delayed and consequently concealing the reality of lived marginalization from below. The Acholi of Northern Uganda went through predatory atrocities, painful humiliation and unwilled cohabitations with their oppressors during war and post-war. The study explores how the interlinking of archives and pedagogy as independent disciplines can extend possibilities for more transformative education horizons in bottom-up, post-conflict expressions. The study is immersed through a conceptual and theoretical framing in the boundaries of archiving and pedagogy, to understand how the war constructs Acholi’s lived experience in multiple complex ways. While the Acholi re-orient their lives post- war, we recognize their attention in affirming their human agency, ordering of new and different meanings, desiring a different liberation in post-conflict where responsibility in contexts of “up againstness” validates their dwelling and being in spaces that exclude them. The research acknowledges that pedagogy and archiving studies in post-conflict, needs restructuring to challenge the preserving of external and dominant epistemological purviews that order post-conflict reconstruction life. These traditions exclude the experiences of survivor-victims, are tone deaf to community-based groups articulations of post-conflict repair, and neither does lived experiences of the everyday gets organized as an outcome for knowledge. This is discussed at length, as the research responds to its central question of how living archive as pedagogy can offer a transformative education discourse. The conclusion of the study emphasizes self-representation through transformative knowledge positions of I am whom I am, Where I am, Where I Speak, and Where I think. These positions articulate a self-understanding that supports rehistrocizing of post-conflict society as a body resisting exclusion in dominant knowledge formation and institutional omissions. There is evidence of the research foregrounding the formation of person-hood from experiences of ‘up againstness” and knowledge/under-stand[ing] from below. The research facilitates a hermeneutical encounter with specific inscribed bodies of post-conflict experience, the Acholi and Wanjiku whose bodies archive a horizon of possibilities if a different and difficult reading vii of the world is done from locations of struggle to produce consciousness of re-becoming, or returning to the human. These pedagogical experience positions Acholi and Wanjiku as educators, and their lives a living archive. We the readers are invited to a learning process as willing ‘hearers’ of Acholi and Wanjiku testimony, to own responsibility as our practice to ensure they appear in the world to say their truth, as they defy conditions of their oppression.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Education, School of Education Research and Engagement, 202

    The Tragedy of the Self:Lectures on Global Hermeneutics

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    Why do human beings interpret their overall experience in terms of selfhood? How was the notion and sense of self shaped at different times and in different cultures? What sort of problems or paradoxes did these constructions face? These lectures address these and related questions by sketching a roadmap of possible theoretical avenues for conceiving of the self, bringing to the foreground its soteriological implications, while also testing this theoretical outlook against insights offered by various disciplines. Exploring the crosscultural spectrum of possible ways of conceiving of the self invites the more existential question of whether any of these possibilities might offer resources for dealing with the tragedies of today’s world, or maybe even saving it from some of them
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