Master of Fine Arts

thesisThe collection consists of thirteen artist books in text form. The artist books explore the transfiguring power of loss, grief, love, forgiveness-all a kind of knowledge. Each textual piece in this collection represents a three-dimensional artist book. These books study how space, fold, and physical structure or architecture affect meaning. To see these forms, please contact the author

Trading Kidneys for Prison Time: When Two Contradictory Legal Traditions Intersect, Which One Has the Right-of-Way?

This Article analyzes the criminal justice market and the human body market and their respective rules, theorizes on the assumptions underlying each, and applies the rules and assumptions to SB 480 to determine which long-standing tradition, as a legal matter, should have the right-of-wa

The Analysis Of Contact-Era Settlements In Clay, Lowndes, And Oktibbeha Counties In Northeast Mississippi

The goal of this project is to compare the spatial distribution of sites across Clay, Lowndes, and Oktibbeha counties between the Mississippi and Early Historic periods using site files from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), sites were mapped chronologically to examine change through time to investigate how people reacted to European contact and colonization. Site locations and clusters also were used to evaluate possible locations of the polities of Chicaza, Chakchiuma, and Alimamu discussed in the De Soto chronicles. Sites in Clay, Lowndes, and Oktibbeha counties were chosen due to the existence of the large cluster of sites around Starkville, and because these counties have been proposed as the locations of Chicaza, Chakchiuma, and Alimamu (Atkinson 1987a; Hudson 1993). The distribution of settlement clusters indicated possible locations for polities similar to those proposed by Atkinson (1987a:65). Based on the robust data, informed by work done by David Hally, three clusters and three potential polities have been located in northeast Mississippi. The most robust of these clusters is likely the location of the polity of Chicaza. This thesis serves as a means to direct future research in the area for both archaeological and ethnohistoric work

The clinical utility of MLU and IPSyn for AAE-speaking children

The purpose of this study was to examine the clinical utility of two assessment measures for one group of nonstandard English dialect speakers, that of African-American English- (AAE) speaking children. The measures were mean length of utterance (MLU) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn). The clinical utility of these measures was examined by comparing MLU and IPSyn values of three different groups of AAE speakers to determine if these measures are influenced by a child’s socio-economic status, dialect status, and/or clinical language status. An item analysis was also completed for IPSyn to determine if the items on this tool are appropriate language targets within AAE. Fifteen AAE-speaking children participated. They ranged in age from 66 to 79 months. Five were typically developing and solicited from middle-income families, five were typically developing and solicited from low-income families, and five were classified as specifically language impaired and solicited from caseloads of speech language clinicians. The latter group of children was drawn from both middle-income and low-income families. The findings indicated that the children’s MLU and IPSyn scores did not significantly differ as a function of their SES levels or dialect status. Unfortunately, the children’s MLU and IPSyn scores also did not differ as a function of their clinical language status. This finding suggests that these two tools, while unaffected by a child’s SES and use of a nonstandard dialect, are not sensitive to childhood language impairment when children reach the age of six years. Results from the item analysis, however, showed that 83% of the items on IPSyn received a score of 1 or 2 by at least one child in each group, and only 1 item (i.e. use of tag questions) earned a score of zero by all participants in the study. This finding indicates that items on the IPSyn are appropriate targets for speakers of AAE and suggests that this tool may be useful for younger AAE speakers