Reel Queer: Emergent Discourses and Contexts of Queer Youth Identity Constructions and Experiences in Digital Video Projects

My thesis examines the discourses present in digital video projects created by queer youth, ages 13-20, who participated in The Reel Queer Youth video mentorship program between 2009 and 2012. I used textual analysis, specifically discourse and critical technocultural discourse analysis to explore constructions of identity in youth and experiences present in digital video projects and the contexts these discourses were produced within. I identified three overarching discursive themes: (a) call for more complex understandings of queer youth identities and experiences; (b) concern regarding gender binaries; and (c) change and self-responsibility. In addition to the discursive themes, I identified and discussed four contextualizing elements. The elements consist of: (a) culture, the larger media discourses concerning the experiences of queer youth; (b) environment, the RQY video production workshop where the videos were produced; (c) production, the actual production process needed to produce a digital video project; and (d) platform, Vimeo, the video sharing site that hosts the RQY videos. I placed the themes and contextualizing elements identified into conversation with each other. I was able to identify four conversations: (a) sexual and gender identity labels; (b) unspoken discourses: reinforcing queer universality; (c) cyberqueer materiality and technolcultural space; and (d) queer technological progress. These conversations reveal that culture and environment had an impact on what how the youth conceptualize and construct gender and sexual identities, as well as what discourses are silenced. Production and platform influence what is actually able to be captured and shared through the use of digital video, while platform affects who can access the videos and the potential negative ramifications of making the RQY videos public

Sewing Glossary

This publication includes a glossary of terms used in sewing

Clothing Care Symbols

This publication listing clothing care symbols and their meanings

A Piece of My Heart: Examining Healing Facilitated by the Performing Arts

Undergraduate Performing Arts - Theatr

Psychological Approaches to Pediatric Pain Relief

This chapter details the evidence-based psychological interventions for pediatric procedural pain. At the outset, appropriate assessment of children’s medical anxiety and pain will be briefly discussed. Correlates of children’s pain will be presented to provide some context and nuances to consider when considering preparation and procedural intervention approaches. Subsequently, psychological approaches that focus on pre-procedure preparation are highlighted. Lastly, the focus will turn to the research base of psychological approaches to intervening during children’s medical procedural distress

Timely Permanency for Children in Foster Care: Revisiting Core Assumptions about Children’s Options and Outcomes

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA, 1997) represented an emerging consensus that foster care should not be a long-term solution for children. Foster care is intended to provide a temporary living arrangement until permanency can be achieved, but, at the time ASFA was passed, some children were spending large proportions of their childhoods in temporary homes. In many cases, these children had a permanency plan of reunification that had little chance of being realized. Thus, the overarching goals of ASFA were to reduce the amount of time children spent “in limbo” and to promote permanency, while maintaining explicit preferences for family preservation and reunification

On the deck groups of iterates of bicritical rational maps

A rational map on the Riemann sphere $f:\widehat{\mathbb C}\to\widehat{\mathbb C}$ is said to be {\em bicritical} provided that $f$ has exactly two critical points. In this note, we give a complete description of which groups (up to isomorphism) arise as the groups of deck transformations of iterates of bicritical rational maps. Our results generalize those from a previous paper by the authors.Comment: 14 page

Bicritical rational maps with a common iterate

Let $f$ be a degree $d$ bicritical rational map with critical point set $\mathcal{C}_f$ and critical value set $\mathcal{V}_f$. Using the group $\textrm{Deck}(f^k)$ of deck transformations of $f^k$, we show that if $g$ is a bicritical rational map which shares an iterate with $f$ then $\mathcal{C}_f = \mathcal{C}_g$ and $\mathcal{V}_f = \mathcal{V}_g$. Using this, we show that if two bicritical rational maps of even degree $d$ share an iterate then they share a second iterate, and both maps belong to the symmetry locus of degree $d$ bicritical rational maps.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure

Effects of age, timbre, pitch contour, and background noise on melodic contour identification and sentence recognition by children

The researchers collaborated together with the help of Dr. Yingjiu Nie in the Lab of Auditory Perception in Children and Adults on the four research studies completed there. Through these projects, they were involved in all areas of the research process. While they cannot claim the research project as their own, by assisting the graduate students and Dr. Nie, they exposed themselves to how research is conducted in this field and gained valuable knowledge in the process. To conclude the project, they each wrote individual personals reflection to summarize and review the experience

Making Kin with Trees: Three Educators and Children Entangled with Treescapes

In this article, three educators from one small U.S. city draw on Donna Haraway’s feminist, posthumanist idea of making kin to explore their personal relations with trees and their work as educators to support children’s entanglements with trees. Working in three very different contexts with children: a working-class neighborhood, a public school kindergarten, and a forest kindergarten, the three authors illuminate the “magical” emergences of making kin with trees that fundamentally shifts what becomes possible to do and be. Their writing contributes to the fields of critical childhood geographies, feminist posthumanist pedagogies in early childhood education, and writing in affect and spirit, to argue for the importance of making kin with more-than-human others within a particular place