Honors Projects

Eating Spaces and Places: Examining the Latin@ Barrio, Chinatown, and Black Urban Space as Sites of Collective and Social Imagination

Kathlynn E. Hinkfuss — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:10:23 PDT

I focus on three specific neighborhood tropes that are commonly understood and accepted in the American social imagination: the Latin@ Barrio, Chinatown, and Black Urban Space. I examine how these three neighborhood tropes show up in and play out on physical examples of these spaces. I identify three currently existing neighborhoods in the Upper Midwest: the South Side of Milwaukee, Chinatown in Chicago, and North Minneapolis. To more specifically interrogate the connection between the abstract and concrete, I argue that specific sites of analysis in each neighborhood are symbolically and physically consumed: the Mexican restaurant “La Perla” in Milwaukee, the Chinatown Gate in Chicago and the music video “Hot Cheetos and Takis” from Minneapolis.

Faces of the Future: Race, Beauty and the Mixed Race Beauty Myth

Clara Younge — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:05:19 PST

The RED Revolution from the Perspective of Visual Cultural Studies: A New Chapter in Art, Commerce and Corporate Social Responsibility

Caroline Karanja — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:20:20 PST

This honors project is a critical examination of Project RED, a corporate campaign designed to heighten the appeal of a set of consumer products to a transnational youth demographic by associating these products with the eradication of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The project seeks to understand Project RED in the context of visual cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham School, and also of critical work on the use of culture as a tool for corporate growth. The project rests on a close reading of visual texts, including a HBO documentary and a set of advertisements, that constitute Project RED.

Trans(nacional) Bodies in Motion: Reframing Violence and Resistance in Mexicana Performance and Chicana Theater

Gabriella Deal-Márquez — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:25:15 PST

This project considers how Chicana playwrights Cherríe Morgana and Josefina Lopez, as well as Mexicana performance and video artists, Astrid Hadad and Xomena Cuevas, use performance as a space of cultural and political resistance. These cultural and racialized constraints, social marginalization, as well as real physical violation and pain. I interrogate performance through a feminist lens as a site for understanding violence against women. This thesis seeks to generate reactive dialogues that grant women agency by giving a voice to existing silences.

Can We Laugh? Jewish American Comedy's Expression of Anxiety in a Time of Change, 1965-1973

Emily Schorr Lesnick — Wed, 04 May 2011 07:40:00 PDT

This Honors project is a site of intersection of my academic and activist interests in interrogating Whiteness, my social identity as a cultural Jewish American, and my creative passions in comedy performance. The tragicomic films The Graduate, Goodbye, Columbus, and Annie Hall of the 1960s and 1970s articulate the painful process of Jewish self- and group-definition in relation to dominant culture amidst fractures amongst Jews and external hostility and invitation. The collision of Jews’ long history of humor as a cultural practice and the turbulence and ambivalence of the post-World War II moment facilitated a space for Jewish tragicomedy in popular culture, a space that allowed for a release of painful tensions of assimilation and identity formation.

What Lies Beneath? Contemporary Notions of Multiculturalism and Their Impact on Irish and American Immigrant Communities

Amanda Nelson — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 09:48:07 PDT

This thesis explores the contested contemporary political and social uses of the term "multiculturalism" in American and Irish rhetoric and public policy, and interrogates how its multiple uses have influenced immigration law and created tensions among immigrant enclaves and communities in both countries. The concept of multiculturalism is an overused explanation for massive waves of immigration and the various multi-ethnic and multi-national communities that inhabit local and global communities. Many individuals assume multiculturalism's popularity in contemporary discourse is a positive indication of less racist and more culturally inclusive societies. The term is often treated as a political and/or social agenda for many governments, corporations and academic institutions to promote a "politically correct" and ethnically tolerant space. Yet, this objective has ultimately created new political ideologies that serve to reinforce the racial status quo. There is minimal scholarship in the U.S. and abroad that acknowledges the links between America's contentious historic reputation as a "melting pot" and the recent wave of immigrants that contributes to Ireland's "Celtic Tiger" image and its multiculturalism. In this study, I refer to "multiculturalism" as a social phenomenon and a corrupt political project of various governments and institutions to underpin the racial status quo and strategically overlook and ignore racism by masking multiculturalism as a representative term of social justice and cultural solidarity. My spring 2009 study abroad experience in Dublin, Ireland helped to create this special project that brings insight into the connections between Ireland's challenges as a new immigrant society and America's political and historical legacies of unlawful immigrant exclusion, cultural conflict, and racism.

Eugenicism: The Construction of Queer Space in the Works of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany

Freda Fair — Tue, 22 May 2007 07:06:51 PDT

Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century United States eugenic history is saturated with nature-nurture debates concerning human character and social development in relation to the institutionalization and popularization of genetics and biology. By interrogating eugenic testing and experimentation on those identified as sexual, racial, and national others this work will utilize eugenicism, an analytical and discursive tool developed from the history of U.S. eugenics, to perform close readings of works by Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. As eugenics constructs subjects by imagining what they will contribute to a fitter future society, science fiction, as genre, (re)imagines the world that we live in and introduces different ways of knowing and seeing to readers. From the theories of Sir Francis Galton to Delany’s short story “The Star Pit” this work investigates not only the scientific and political projects of eugenics, but also the ways in which Delany and Butler use modernist and postmodernist tools of (re)fashioning identity and environment in order to construct a future of progress. Finally, it is the reality of the legacies of eugenics present in medical, educational, and political spaces today in the U.S. that prompts us to remember the thousands of victims of sterilization, lobotomies, and violence. It is with hope that the process of dismantling the presence of eugenics in society today might also encourage us to search for alternative ways of knowing and belonging that work against our entrenched histories of hierarchy and oppression.

A Piece of Land: Black Women and Land in South Africa and the United States of America

Alessandra Williams — Tue, 01 May 2007 05:41:14 PDT

Despite some social and political changes in the post-reconstruction and post-apartheid eras of the United States and South Africa, land has remained a commodified and privatized resource that has enabled capitalism to flourish in an individualistic, highly competitive, and profit-driven manner. The modern land reform processes of the Western Cape, South Africa demonstrate how neo-liberal land policies pose numerous constraints to the financial development of historically disadvantaged groups such as women. However, black women during the sharecropping era of the Mississippi Delta (1877-1950), reveal the ways in which disenfranchised women have the ability to be grassroots activists and change agents in the most capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist communities. These research methodologies in South Africa and the U.S. differ in regards to their historical and geographical location, but feminist epistemology provides the analysis needed to bridge these studies in women’s livelihoods and land ownership.

Civil Rights in Black and Green: Towards a Transatlantic Understanding of the Civil Rights Movements in the United States and Northern Ireland

Mollie Gabrys — Thu, 04 May 2006 06:45:19 PDT

Due to the lack of recognition for the solidarity between movements for civil rights, little formal scholarship acknowledging the relationship between African Americans and Nationalists in Northern Ireland exists. Nationalists in Northern Ireland, however, have long identified with African American civil rights activists in a cross-cultural quest for equality. From Northern Ireland’s very first protests against discrimination, civil rights campaigners firmly aligned themselves with the ideological framework modeled in the United States. In this thesis, I explore the interconnectedness of civil rights struggles in the United States and in Northern Ireland through the use of scholarly, primary, and secondary documents.