Hop, Skip or Leap? Issues of Accessibility in the Literature of Rachel Carson, Janisse Ray, and Terry Tempest Williams

The last half of the twentieth century was a period when American women finally became able to use their voice to instigate political change. In the field of environmentalism there are notable examples of women successfully doing just that. From Rachel Carson whose seminal text Silent Spring (1962) warned a generation of the wider implications of indiscriminate pesticide use, to contemporary regional writers like Southern activist Janisse Ray and Utahan Terry Tempest Williams, the strategies that they have employed in their writing in order to instigate political change are often risky, bold, and innovative. But they are also democratic, seeking always to move the broader public to activism on behalf of the environment

Dinosaurs: A Comparative Study of Eurocentric and Indigenous Perspectives

The concepts about non-avian dinosaurs have been presented almost exclusively from the context of discoveries and studies by Europeans and their descendants in various parts of the world, with seldom mention of Indigenous knowledge of dinosaur fossils that have been known to Indigenous peoples throughout their long history and integrated into their culture and folklore. In this research project, I compiled data from a broad range of sources relevant to Indigenous and Western knowledges of dinosaurs, and conducted a comparative study of various concepts, such as the history, identifications, and environmental factors related to evolution and extinction of dinosaurs. I find that while there are some marked differences from the Eurocentric approaches, several Indigenous groups have incorporated dinosaurs into their knowledge databases and in their oral histories, which, to various degrees, paralleled Western academic research. The result of this study reinforces the unfortunate reality that Indigenous perspectives and concepts of dinosaurs are largely absent compared to Western publications, of which there are hundreds of thousands of works. Coupled with ongoing colonialism in the field of palaeontology, the expression of Indigenous voices when discussing non-avian dinosaurs is a necessary step in decolonizing both palaeontology and the natural sciences to a broader extent

ME 780 Spiritual Warfare in Mission and Ministry

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the place of spiritual warfare in mission and ministry. During the course topics such as the warfare perspective in scripture; the role of spiritual warfare in Christian history; warfare, worldview, and world religions; spiritual warfare in contemporary world mission; and the practice of ground level and strategic level spiritual warfare will be discussed. A wide variety of teaching methods (lectures, group discussion, videos, guest speakers, etc) will be used during class sessions.https://place.asburyseminary.edu/syllabi/1294/thumbnail.jp

Washington University Record, March 10, 2006

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/2065/thumbnail.jp

Finding the Meaning in Ceramic Patterns from a Chaco Canyon Burial

The focus of this research considers the culture of the Ancestral Puebloans from the American Southwest region. This project reflects and examines the cultural arts and practices in relation to funerary aspects of the ancient Puebloan society that flourished in Chaco Canyon, located in present-day New Mexico. While investigations of historians and archaeologists have concentrated on findings within the Great House of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, research focused on the structures and objects within rooms. The base of this research examines a collective set of vessels from burial room 33, excavated from the original exhibition of George H. Pepper, and observes the patterns to identify how they relate with an elite society in mortuary aspects. Emphasis is given to the painted markings on the forms to interpret the association of these ceramic vessels with the funerary practice of elites in Ancestral Puebloan culture. To further consider the customs and cultural influences of Ancestral Puebloan people, this study examines images of Ancestral Puebloan ceramics with contemporary Puebloan culture to interpret a more in-depth understanding of the underlying dynamics of the culture

Representing the Museum and the People: Rhetorical Sovereignty and the Representational Genres of American Indian Museums

This study addresses questions surrounding American Indian representations, specifically how Native nations use standard museum communicative structures to forward those communities' needs and goals, thus enacting what Scott Richard Lyons terms "rhetorical sovereignty." Using rhetoric studies' genre theory as the methodological tool, the genres of publicity/orientation literature, exhibits, and gift shops at three sites, the National Museum of the American Indian, Haskell Cultural Center and Museum, and Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways, are analyzed for how Native peoples employ these genres for their own purposes for multiple audiences. The analysis suggests these genres are retailored depending upon the cultural and rhetorical context of each site, revealing that "rhetorical sovereignty" grounds itself in the context of an individual community. Furthermore, while positive changes have occurred in American Indian representations through the adaptation of museum genres by Native communities, the potential for communicative contradictions across genres and audiences still occurs