Investing in Native Youth: Grantmaking Trends from the Native Youth and Culture Fund

In this report, First Nations highlights a snapshot of grant requests under our Native Youth and Culture Fund from 2010 through 2014

Success Factors for Minority Small Business Sustainability

Minority small business owners significantly contribute to national and local economies. Only 50% of small firm owners sustain their businesses longer than 5 years. The purpose of the multiple case study was to explore the management strategies that minority small business owners used to sustain their businesses for longer than 5 years. The study\u27s population consisted of 4 minority small business owners in the midwestern region of the United States to explore management strategies necessary for maintaining minority small firm operations. The conceptual framework for the study was general system theory. Data sources included semistructured interviews, social media information, company documentation, and company website information. Based on the methodological triangulation of the data sources, analytical coding, and analyzing the data using a qualitative data analysis software, 3 themes emerged: networking with other small business owners, strategic planning, and building strong customer and employee relationships. The study findings might contribute to positive social change by providing knowledge about effective management strategies to minority small firm owners, thereby creating jobs, augmenting local and national economies, and increasing profitability

Human Cloning for Personal Gain

Most students in their grade school career have learned about Dolly the cloned sheep. While this process was a scientific endeavor, would cloning humans be for the same purpose as Dolly or for personal gain? Whatever the answer may be, most people have their own agenda behind their acts of human cloning which range from a variety of desires. The most common begin with trying to suffice with personal loss to attempting to advance science. Every reasoning is different, but both rely on this process to accomplish their goals. My research will include many academic journals, films, and literature to explain the current society’s interests in pursuing human cloning to suffice personal loss. In my presentation, I will be focusing on the scientific process of cloning, and different case studies about this topic. Human cloning appeals to those who want to have eternal life as well as an eternal life for a loved one, save a dying person, and bring someone back from the dead.This topic contributes to the presentation because it introduces the process of cloning, and shows how personal gain is more popular amongst today’s society than furthering our knowledge on the limits of cloning. I hope to appeal to the audience that does not know much about cloning, but also to activists who have a desire to make cloning legal, which includes the general public

"Any Search for an Origin is Hysterical": Summoning the Ghost of J.L. Austin

As the father of the concept of the “performative utterance”, British philosopher of language J.L. Austin is regularly cast as the point of origin in a genealogy tracing the influence of linguistic theory on performance theory. Based on extensive research into Austin’s writing praxis, this paper demonstrates that the philosopher produced and disseminated his research orally, dialogically, and pedagogically through contexts that privileged the inter-subjective exchange. It frames Austin’s self-described practice of “linguistic phenomenology” as a pragmatic one in which philosophy is context. I demonstrate that this mode of “doing” or “performing” philosophy is also at play within the dramaturgy of Austin’s texts, which restage his thought processes and invite his readers to become spectators to the dramatization of his ideas. My analysis offers up a portrait of a J.L. Austin who enacted his philosophy about the performative utterance in a performative manner. In so doing, it exposes the inaugural texts about performativity as hybrid objects that trouble the concepts of “authorship” and “origin”. It also shows that these texts are infected, at their inception, by parasites, by literature, by the Other, and by the ghosts that Austin tried so hard to exorcise, yet that—on some level of consciousness—he simultaneously allowed to haunt his philosophical voice.

Coffee Pot

Tawny Chamberlain, VCU Interior Design MFA 2023, selected the Coffee Pot for the 2021 Colonialism And The Americas, Object Analysis Project. Entertaining in the home was also important and high society wished to emulate silver tableware from London in particular. Only the affluent could afford silver coffee pots and their elite status would have been marked by how many pieces they used to serve their guests. Tea and coffee rituals were also associated with elite femininity, as depicted by two Boston women in the painting to the right (Jamieson, 2001). We can imagine their parlor had elegantly framed mirrors and paintings, a plaster ceiling, and comfortable furnishings typical of the Georgian Era (Pile & Gura, 2014).https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/oap/1000/thumbnail.jp

Covid-19: Archive Project

Student generated description: “Photos of my cover-19 experience. (restaurants, eating out, etc.)