Search

This doctoral dissertation examines Simplification and Explicitation translation shifts within the context of simultaneous conference interpreting from Arabic to English. Traditionally considered distinct alterations in linguistic features, these shifts are redefined in this study as adaptive strategies that interpreters might employ to manage the inherent challenges of real-time language transfer. Simplification, typically characterized by reduced sentence length and simpler vocabulary, and Explicitation, the explicit rendering of implicit information, are the focal points of this research. By integrating advanced machine transcription and corpus analysis tools, the research systematically quantifies these shifts, providing a rigorous examination of their frequency and impact. Four key indicators were employed: Average Sentence Length (ASL) and Lexical Density (LD) to assess Simplification, and Wordcount (WRDC) and Readability (READ) scores to measure Explicitation. The findings reveal that, for Simplification, there were no statistically significant differences between the R-corpus (reference) and T-corpus (target) in terms of ASL or LD. For Explicitation, the WRDC comparison between the T-corpus and S-corpus (source) similarly showed no significant difference. However, a statistically significant difference was observed in the READ scores, with the T-corpus demonstrating lower readability, indicating that the target texts in the T-corpus are generally easier to read and more accessible compared to the texts in the S-corpus. These findings complicate the expected patterns of Simplification and Explicitation in simultaneous interpreting. While translation studies often link Simplification to ASL and lower LD, the T-corpus did not show significant differences. For Explicitation, the significant difference in READ scores suggests that interpreters in simultaneous interpreting may prioritize readability and accessibility, rather than increase complexity. This challenges conventional assumptions in translation theory and highlights the unique cognitive strategies interpreters employ under real-time conditions. The findings offer valuable insights for interpreter training and professional development, while also opening new avenues for research on language patterns in conference interpreting.

Environ is a collection of prose primarily concerned with human connection, disconnection, and the myriad ways we respond when life surprises, shocks, or challenges us.

This dissertation begins with a critical introduction which examines a concept that the author has termed “causal exteriorization,” a phenomenon which occurs when ideas that matched thoughts one has only experienced privately are corroborated and validated when they are encountered in a poem (or story, film, song, etc.) These thoughts are then raised from the private to a conscious acknowledgement because of the encounter with the poem. The author distinguishes between poems that specifically seem to mine the unspoken interior psyche from poems that are pleasurable or meaningful because they frame a familiar idea within a new context, or they add a new perspective or angle to a familiar idea, or they say something familiar but in a fresh or an elegant way. These moments communicate shared unspoken, idiosyncratic thoughts, which are distinguished from confessional poems, which are also self-focused and achieve extraction of interior thoughts, because the ideas in confessional poems typically arise out of accessible experience, not necessarily the unconscious or unacknowledged. This critical examination is followed by a collection of poems divided into two sections. The first section is comprised of poems that were written over the course of this doctoral program and included in the author’s first published poetry collection, and the second section is a collection of poems that were written after the publication of the author’s first book.

The media industry apprehended the importance of diversity within representation in the audiovisual space through commodifying identities and affects, such as nostalgia. When observing social realities through an affective gaze, diversity in media has the immense power to offer dignity and respect for all people, especially those in the face of constant and sometimes unimaginable violence. Documentary films can play a crucial role in mobilizing diverse audiences by encouraging and promoting ethical sustainable alternative realities. Contemporary crises in the climate, public health, and politics, especially on the American continent, require mobilizations around local perspectives, community knowledge, and ancestral memories. Theorizing through the interplay between underdevelopment and nostalgia, writing in the intersections of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian epistemologies, and observing how they have shaped popular culture, I offer resources to a plural imaginary during the digital revolution.Cheering strategies of resistance mended in the genealogy of different documentary films, I shed light on the power of postcolonial spaces and narratives in redefining Brazil's future based on the subjectivities of subaltern and marginalized communities. In a nation where cinema stands as one of the most influential aesthetics of the Global South, Brazilian media production offers dynamic modes of expression that design natural environments to coexist within polarization.

This dissertation, Examining Programmatic Practices of First-Year Writing at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), focuses on the various ways writing programs at HSIs and emerging HSIs (eHSIs) serve and support their minoritized student populations. Because federal law (Higher Education Opportunity Act, 2008) defines HSIs based on enrollment percentages alone, writing program administrators (WPAs) can experience challenges when seeking to enact policies and practices with an explicit aim to serve and support their students. The scholarship of writing studies at HSIs has typically examined what it means to serve students at the classroom level (Baca, Hinojosa, and Wolff Murphy, 2019; Kirklighter, Cárdenas, and Wolff Murphy, 2007); however, my research focuses on what servingness means at the programmatic level through various practices that WPAs employ across their programs. Using a mixed-methods approach such as an Explanatory Sequential Mixed Methods Design (Creswell & Creswell, 2018), I conducted an analysis of archival materials, recent surveys from 98 WPAs from HSIs and eHSIs across the country, and 42 one-on-one semi-structured interviews. I present research-driven narratives of writing program administrators (WPAs) who discuss existing program-level practices related to placement procedures, program goals, culturally relevant and sustaining curricula and instruction (Paris & Alim, 2017), instructor training activities, and program assessment structures in the context of their HSI or eHSI designation. Overall findings reveal that possessing an HSI or eHSI designation does not mean that a first-year writing program supports students equitably and inclusively. It is up to the individual choices and leadership decisions that administrators make to make meaning of their designation and take action through program-level practices. With the ongoing shifts of student demographics in higher education and with more students entering such institutions, I expand upon writing studies scholarship to include the perspectives that WPAs at HSIs and emerging HSIs bring to our professional scholarship.

This thesis investigated the interplay between foreign accent and social judgments of stuttering with a particular emphasis on American-English monolingual and Arabic-English bilingual speakers. This project underscored the importance of linguistic diversity and how speech disorders and differences are perceived by native speakers of American English. The study aimed to uncover potential biases toward and challenges faced by Arabic-English bilingual non-native speakers who stutter. To do this, an experimental design was used to evaluate contrasting perceptions of stuttering among American-English and Arabic-English bilingual speakers. It was theorized that the foreign accent may intensify negative judgments towards stuttering, potentially due to linguistic prejudices or lack of exposure and potential additive effects associated with multiple out-group features (i.e., accent and stuttering). Findings contributed to the broader discourse on language, stigma, and inclusivity, highlighting the necessity for a more precise understanding of speech disorders and differences within multicultural contexts.

SCRATCH is a poetry collection that explores risk, desire, and the body in relation to family, to friends and lovers, and to insects in a self-critical, sonically playful voice that asks what, who, and why we care for the things we do. It’s split into five sections. Section 1, called “BACKWATER,” introduces us to the speaker’s panic, their depression and self-harm tendencies, their family dynamics, and their relationship to their body. In section 2, “UNSET IN STONE,” the speaker reaches out for connection and explores both caring and being cared for. “HURTING KIND,” the third section, delves into the speaker’s malice, anger, and capacity to harm both themselves and others. This section serves as a climax for the collection, following risk and violence to its peak. Section 4, “WHAT I TEND TO,” explores the aftermath, when the speaker crawls free of debilitating hurt and starts searching for cohesion, goodness, and care. The final section, titled “HOME,” serves to show us where the speaker goes from here and how they now see their connections to the body, to others, and to the world.

The Rural Surreal is a poetry collection that explores the concept of liminalspaces and what it means to live in rural Ohio, which is a life constantly in-transit in moreways than just travel. While it features classic depictions of liminal spaces, like dim hotelrooms and empty, long corridors with flickering security lights, it also highlights otherinstances of in-betweenness, such as driving in the dark, feeling stranded in adolescence,and loneliness. This collection shows audiences what it is like to constantly beanticipating destinations, in all their shapes and forms.Sequenced chronologically, these poems appear in two parts. Part one is centeredupon adolescence, loneliness, and decay, while part two features creepier, moredreamlike settings with themes of the paranormal, solo travel, and hallucinations.However, this collection ultimately comes to a satisfying conclusion with three lovepoems that resolve the loneliness and desolation felt throughout the book, leavingaudiences on an optimistic note.

At the crossroads of Middle America and the Appalachian Mountains, there is a smalltown called Hallowed, West Virginia, where the veil between worlds thins. Over 123years, many different people of this town realize that this place that should be their safehaven is a breeding ground of horrors, all while combating the typical worries of ruralAmerica.

My thesis titled, The Spaces in Between, is a series of essays and multidisciplinary works that center around connection through the process of writing from the body and explore places of liminality in the human experience, particularly of a female identifying human. The works within this collection highlight personal reflections and stories of connection to other people, identities, place, nature, body, time, and space through nonlinear journeys of discovery.

In this literary essay collection, I reconstruct experiences from my life that required the use of humor to mediate the human and contradictory feelings of rage and compassion. The manuscript begins and ends with essays that consider themes of socio-economic class and race, both of which shaped my identity, but remained virtually invisible to others. The first essay introduces a narrative, mostly chronological, form while the last essay breaks from Western narrative tradition by imitating the Japanese associative form, Zuihitsu. The narrative essays that fill the rest of this collection all, in some way, explore feelings of disempowerment and how we choose to console ourselves during difficult times. This collection showcases essays that traverse between heartbreak and hilarity, favoring humor and wit to quell the “quietly seething” feeling that, I suspect, exists in many of us.

This dissertation examines the effectiveness of blogging to improve student writing fluency and writing self-efficacy in ninth-grade English courses at Mount St. Mary Academy. Utilizing a case study approach with convergent mixed methods, a paired samples t-test found no statistically significant changes in pre- and post-assessments of general and writing self-efficacy over an eight-week period. A bivariate correlation revealed a moderately positive linear and statistically significant relationship between SESAW (pre- and post-assessment) and WCVALUER scores—indicating a strong association between initial self-efficacy and writing fluency development. Furthermore, specific blogging activities, such as reflective pieces following a communal class retreat, showed significant correlations with the SESAW and WCVALUER. The qualitative analysis revealed both positive and negative perceptions of writing among students, highlighting areas of stress and anxiety alongside opportunities for engagement and growth. Implications for practice include program refinements and tailored interventions to meet student needs, supported by ongoing faculty development programs. Future research could explore unique correlations observed in this study, particularly relating to communal experiences like the class retreat. While this study adds to the understanding of blogging as a tool for enhancing student writing outcomes, continued research and refinement of instructional practices are essential for maximizing its effectiveness in educational contexts.

Scary Movies and Love Stories takes you through the journey of a first-generation Africanwoman obsessed with “House Hunters,” “WrestleMania,” and other forms of pop cultureas she navigates the intersections of illness, race, and gender in America. In this hybridmemoir, the speaker uses critical theorists and dark humor to comment on everything fromterrible interviews, to psych wards, to bad sex, to “Teletubbies.” This is a book thatexamines (and laughs in the corner about) the experience of being caught between twolocations—the United States and Nigeria—never feeling enough for both.

Career-technical education (CTE) is essential in training and educating young people in the United States and has purposefully served a distinct role from comprehensive schooling models. However, the conceptualizations of career-technical education in common perception and in academic research typically reinforce the academic-vocational divide, a pervasive binary that has been maintained throughout history and into today. There is limited empirical research that explores literacies in CTE without the confines of the academic-vocational divide or outside of deficit perspectives of the students in CTE.In this study, I seek to speak to these gaps and dispel the academic-vocational binary by (re)conceptualizing literacies in a career-technical program, pharmacy technician, and an academic course, English language arts. During the 2020-2021 school year, I conducted a multiple-case study with an ethnographic perspective at Northside Area Career Center, a career-technical high school on the outskirts of a major Midwestern city. With a frame of social and sociomaterial perspective of literacies, I drew on theory of figured worlds, including positioning, personhood, and social imagination in order to understand literacy events and practices as they were used and positioned within the pharmacy technician program and ELA class. I primarily constructed data as a participant-observer in these spaces as I collaborated with veteran teachers: the pharmacy technician teacher, Ms. Lark, and the ELA teacher, Ms. Sims. Data collected included fieldnotes, audio and video recorded classroom lessons and lab work, artifacts, and interviews with both teachers and students.I share findings from each case and a comparison across them, arguing that students in both classrooms were learning to be citizens in a democratic society through the teachers centering collaboration, valuing multiple perspectives, and enacting a range of figured worlds. In the ELA class, Ms. Sims established seminars as a touchstone literacy practice, which she intentionally planned for and implemented regularly. In the pharmacy technician program, the students learned how to be/become pharmacy technicians through literacies in figured worlds. Across the cases, in so doing, the students and teachers embraced a stance of agency and solidarity across the pharmacy tech program and the ELA class.This study provides insight into a (re)conceptualization of literacies in a career-technical high school beyond the academic-vocational divide. There are implications considering the sense of purpose, relevance, and mattering the students experience in the career center. It also suggests the re-consideration of the teacher as mentor and the role that the teacher plays in enacting and shaping students’ experience of figured worlds within their school setting. As such, through a robust theoretical orientation and a humanizing perspective on CTE, I show how simplified conceptualizations of students in CTE using literacies merely to get “ready” for the workforce are reductive and false.

This dissertation aims to expand how LCYA scholars think about and use narrative theory in the context of YA literature. It also aims to demonstrate the literary quality and merit of YA literature featuring gay characters, advocating for its uses in classrooms. To achieve these aims, I will conduct narrative analyses of three contemporary, award-winning books of young adult fiction featuring gay characters: Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2012); David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing (2013); and Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End (2017). Specifically, I will use narrative theory to identify, analyze, and discuss various narrative elements and techniques in the three texts, using the process and findings to model specific interventions in LCYA research.The study finds that these books’ narrative situations create distinctive themes and rhetorical dynamics, implicating their implied readers and authorial readers uniquely; however, their broader narratives and rhetorical situations converge to articulate a general rhetorical purpose of LGBTQ+ YAL, too. As examples of LGBTQ+ YAL, these books suggest the wider genre can and should be defined by its rhetorical situation, in particular a rhetorical purpose these three narratives seem to share: loving the implied reader and authorial reader. As discussed in Chapters Three, Four, and Five, these narratives as examples of books featuring gay characters and of LGBTQ+ YAL are purportedly defined by the sexual and romantic orientations of their narrators and/or characters. Instead, my framework and broader analysis show that these books actually define love, family/community, and connection as the central themes and purposes of their rhetorical situations and that they articulate them in rhetorically and ideologically robust ways. This re-emphasis on love, family/community, and connection as the books’ major rhetorical themes and purposes should inform how LCYA researchers and the public at large discuss these books.

This study examines how literary heroism can be taught in secondary literacy learning classrooms using Black girl protagonists navigating the fantastical worlds of young adult science, speculative, and fantasy fiction. Students’ interaction with White boy and man heroes shapes their understanding of literary heroism. The depiction and characterization of these White boys and men heroes reproduce and reinforce societal issues, including White supremacy, individualism, and other neoliberal concepts. The duplication of these harmful messages helps to further societal issues that malign Black girls in educational spaces. This work provides an alternative to the traditional White boy and man-based literary heroism, instead shifting the perspective to uplift the literary heroism of Black girl heroines that literacy educators can use in their classrooms.The study examines a selection of five Black young adult science, speculative, and fantasy fiction that includes Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015), Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn (2020), Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer (2020), Namina Forna’s (2020), The Gilded Ones (2020), and Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation (2018). The selection of novels was coded using eight tenets of Black Feminist Thought as a lens and Critical Content Analysis methodology. The codes and data gathered include Black girl epistemological demonstrations of knowledge, resistance, and agency. The literary analysis uncovered thematic connections across the Black girl protagonists’ narratives, including mothers as conduits of knowledge, protectors, mysteries, and trauma-makers, using knowledge of society to navigate unfamiliar places, relying on Black girls and women as friends and mentors, engaging in altruism, reclaiming personhood, and displaying Black cultural identity in hostile spaces. The analysis also revealed a pattern in each story, a Phoenix Journey, which is, in essence, a Black girl heroine’s journey.

Night-Sides is a novel in which I explore various facets of chronic illness, chronic pain, the evolution of the American healthcare system, and the isolating experience of being young, sick, and incurable. It is a fictional, speculative response to Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor with elements of my own research into the history of healthcare and contemporary American ideals surrounding illness and selfhood.

Sunny Runs is a coming-of-age road trip novel that follows two teen female protagonists. It explores home abortion, sport, sexual abuse, and female friendship.

1001 Nights Preparing to Die: Meditations in Song and Verse is a memoir in short essays that explores the transformative power of music, spirituality, and the indomitable human spirit. Born with a congenital heart condition obscured by the courts during her adoption, the author's life is marked by countless medical procedures, hospital visits, and the constant shadow of mortality. The author navigates the intricate worlds of chronic illness, adoption, substance misuse, and mental health while discovering the profound healing potential of Kirtan chanting—a form of devotional music originating from the ancient traditions of her husband’s home country of India. Through personal anecdotes, introspection, and HinDruid spiritual practices, the memoir explores how the author's engagement with Kirtan becomes a lifeline that reconnects her to her body and provides solace, hope, and acceptance of her mortality. Shedding light on the broader significance of meditative practices in the context of chronic illness and the human experience—and providing a platform for raising awareness and fostering empathy—this work offers compassionate and insightful perspectives on the challenges faced by individuals who are adopted, who live with congenital heart disease, and who live with and love family members with substance misuse disorders.

In this lyrical childhood memoir, I reconstruct my experience of my parent’s explosive divorce. The manuscript begins and ends in court, where at 12 I testified I no longer wanted to continue my relationship with my father. It is a moment that exists outside of linear time for me. To mimic the experience of trauma, I loop back to this scene throughout the book, each time getting closer to the moment I speak my truth. Between these courtroom sections, I flash back (and forward) to examine the relationship I had with both my parents and the relationship they had with each other, trying to make what sense I can of the way things fell apart. Written from the perspective of my younger self, I elevate the child’s voice because, during all this, that voice was often not counted. As subtly as possible to avoid disrupting the reader’s occupation of the child’s point of view, I invite my adult perspective when necessary to provide context or future insight. At its heart, this book seeks to show that, while lacking language or the ability to articulate an experience, a child is a full person whose experience of situations is no less complex or human than that of the adults around her.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of Flipgrid-based discussion activities with student-selected nonfiction texts on middle school students’ motivation to read. The study investigated how teacher training affected teachers’ comfort and confidence in using Flipgrid. While various discussion-based activities have been used with students, including Flipgrid, very little research has been done on its use with middle school students. Following a qualitative research design, this study obtained teacher perceptions through open-ended interviews on their Flipgrid experience and training and students’ reading motivation. Student perceptions on Flipgrid, reading motivation, and student-selected texts were obtained through a Google form survey. Main findings indicated high teacher confidence due to the training they received and positive perceptions of Flipgrid-based discussion activities and student-selected text on students’ reading motivation. Overall student perceptions were mostly positive about using Flipgrid and reading choice. Conclusions and implications showed positive effects with comprehensive training, which could be used with teachers training other teachers. With adequate training, teachers may be able to utilize student-centered learning, such as Flipgrid and student choice, to positively impact students’ motivation to read.

This collection has ten stories exploring queerness, religion/apostacy, family/estrangement, and how we react in the face of complete upheaval. Eschewing traditional forms, the collection crosses genres, consisting of fiction, non-fiction, and hybrid stories, making it not all one thing or another, but a non-binary collection, if you will. In several of the stories, we encounter monsters; in others, we plot to kill them. “The Path” follows a Mormon missionary caught in a liminal space between believing and doubting, though “Lessons From the Grave” plants its feet firmly outside of religion, detailing Mormon violence against queer people. The stories progress from grief to rage to acceptance, a record of emotions through two years of estrangement and shunning.

Some perspectives of educators and community members in small rural school districts fail to see the academic benefits of music education and the importance of integrated forms of study, despite the many clear connections that can be seen between the general music curriculum and other content areas such as math and language arts. Interdisciplinary studies in general music education are essential for student growth across content areas. This study reveals the importance of music integration and interdisciplinary music studies in small rural elementary schools. It gives example lessons of mathematics and language arts in the elementary music curricula. Guided by literature and observational data, this qualitative case study explores interdisciplinary studies in elementary general music classrooms. Findings on interdisciplinary music connections across content areas, music integration, and music and the brain have emerged as themes through exploring existing literature and observations of music classes in small rural elementary schools. Since music education longs to be understood, this study and the interdisciplinary lessons provided could benefit elementary general music education teachers and advance elementary teachers’ knowledge and understanding across content areas. This project exemplifies the intersection between music education and learning across content areas, specifically mathematics and language arts. Further, this study and lessons encourage further research by music educators to find lessons and connections that increase student learning across content areas. Further research could also seek information regarding the perceptions of community members and educators towards music education in small rural elementary schools.

Google Docs is a web-based word-processing application known for itscollaborative features and accessibility. It allows for real-time document creation, editing,and sharing among users, making it suitable for group work, peer review, and providingfeedback. However, there are limitations to its formatting options, which may not fullysupport specialized formatting needs for assignments such as APA or MLA styles.Accessibility features could also be improved, particularly in creating more accessibletables and adding closed captioning to videos for users with disabilities. The commentingsystem can be clunky and difficult to follow, and the revision history feature can bechallenging to navigate. Additionally, tracking changes and revisions, especially in largedocuments, can be improved to facilitate the evaluation of student work and groupprojects. Google Docs could also enhance mobile optimization features for smallerscreens and integrate with plagiarism detection software to address plagiarism concerns.Furthermore, improving support for non-English languages and providing guidance tostudents unfamiliar with the platform can enhance its effectiveness in college-levelcomposition classes.

This is Chris Leidig's MFA poetry manuscript.

As learning gaps have widened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increased need for research-based strategies to improve student academic achievement and engagement. This study explored the integration of creative dance as a form of storytelling in a kindergarten language arts classroom. Students were introduced to an element of dance and used it to create short dance phrases in a unit on retelling. Both qualitative and quantitative data was collected using pre/post tests and student interviews measuring students’ engagement and enjoyment. Students involved in this study showed significant growth in their ability to orally retell a story (p < .05) and analysis of student interviews suggested that students were highly engaged in the unit.

In this semester-long study in a high school English class that was online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a class of ninth graders engaged in communication with people outside of their classroom about their collectively chosen project topic: racism. The transliteracies framework was used to explore students’ participation in multimodal events and texts, as well as the teacher and students’ views of the projects. This study helps to complicate, contribute to, expand, and bring together the related pedagogies of youth participatory action research (YPAR) and critical literacy. More specifically, the findings of this qualitative study were that students used a variety of transliteracies practices to move with and against the projects. Self love and skepticism were themes that emerged and deepened the projects, while the teacher grappled with issues of control, legitimacy, and representation. More research and collaborative practice is needed that explores limitations and the role of emergence in YPAR.

This dissertation examines theater, performance, and music in twenty-first-century Spain in order to theorize how the artistic and the mimetic have an impact on the moral, political, and legal limits of freedom of expression. I reflect on the role of activist, political, and abject stances, and argue that art and the imaginary have broadened the legal and moral limits of freedom of expression. To explain this process, I deploy the work of Julia Kristeva on the abject as a perverse violation of norms, prohibitions or laws, a transgression that the subject needs to expel in order to remain a subject. This work also incorporates theories of art and the mimetic dimension regarding the imaginary that draw from Aristotelian theater as well as from the pragmatic approach to literature. I show how activism that can be regarded as art and rests on an almost total taboo, has the potential to loosen a strong social consensus on the limits of freedom of expression. I call these manifestations “aesthetics of the maximum abject” and illuminate how they are a consequence of the Spanish historical period following the social-protest movement known as15-M, a period marked by challenges to the structures of state power and by the Catalan secessionist crisis. This research expands on studies of artistic activism and activist art that have been penalized by the courts and that have been mostly analyzed in the context of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. Thus, the aesthetics of the maximum abject can be regarded as artistic activism in which, paradoxically, the mimetic dimension matters. It is fundamental to understand the role of art as a vehicle for sociopolitical transformations that have an impact on the limits of what can be said and which, in turn, affect one of the pillars of liberal democracies.

This dissertation looks at nostalgic songs written in Mexico during the first half of the 20th century, with the purpose of reflecting on the origin of these nostalgic expressions, describing the characteristics and transformations that the nostalgic repertoire undergoes over time, as well as understanding the role that nostalgia had in the generation of the sense of belonging to different communities, including the imagined community. Through an interdisciplinary analysis, I observe and describe the poetic, musical and nostalgic characteristics of the corpus, in relation to the development of the migratory, cultural, and socio-political context of Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. I argue that it is possible to observe three major phases of the nostalgic musical repertoire written during the first half of the 20th century, which I have named: modern nostalgia, nostalgia ranchera, and national nostalgia. The repertoire of modern nostalgia is testimony and memory of internal migration and the emotions caused by this migratory displacement. The songs of this phase were characterized by their musical and literary heterogeneity and by expressing longing for abandoned lands due to rural-urban migration caused by the project of national modernization. The repertoire of nostalgic songs was used in comedia ranchera films, for which it was closely linked to the nationalist ideology of mestizaje and is usually considered as canciones rancheras. I argue that in the adaptation of nostalgic songs to the comedia ranchera, the longing, previously felt for the yearned-native lands, was transferred to the cinematographic locus of Mexicanness "el rancho". In addition, these songs were characterized by the tendency to homogenize their musical elements. The nostalgic expression took a turn in the 1940s when new cinematographic and ideological influences compelled composers to create nostalgic songs, whose object of emotion was the nation. In my dissertation I demonstrate that the nostalgic musical compositions made possible the generation of different communities during the first half of the 20th century: the modern nostalgia songs, through the sharing of emotions caused by the rural-urban migratory experience; the nostalgia ranchera songs, by enabling individuals to imagine themselves as a result of the idealized national past; and the national nostalgia songs, by allowing listeners to define themselves as part of the imagined national community.

Paper House is a collection of creative nonfiction essays about coming of age as an Asian American biracial and bisexual woman in China. The narrator goes to China to teach English in rural Shanxi Province for 2 years and struggles with her own loss of Chinese culture, and the loss of her Chinese grandmother who died before she was born. Through her daily life in China and visiting places her grandmother lived, the narrator tries to understand a homeland that she’s been displaced from. Additionally, she attempts to navigate her in-between identities — biracial and bisexual within cultural contexts she is largely unfamiliar with, endeavoring to find a place where she feels like she belongs. Being perceived as an outsider, and the growing distance from her U.S.-based girlfriend amplifies loneliness. Ultimately, the narrator learns to accept care from strangers, her cat, and a constellation of women, and gains knowledge of self from family and ancestors. The prose holds tension between absence and abundance and moves patiently through scenes and images with a lyrical voice.

While the current practice of digital scholarly editing was originally envisioned as a method of providing data interoperability of editorial encodings, the actual realization of this ideal has proven elusive, at best. Overlapping hierarchies of editorial perspective plague the practice, making digital editions not only unusable in any context beyond their own, limited display of the text, but also limit the number of different editorial perspectives that can be represented within the original encoding. Historically, this failing has been laid at the feet of the de facto standard of the practice, the TEI Guidelines and its XML schema. However, I contend that it is not so much the technology or the standard that is to blame as it is the model of text which informs both, a model which sees text as a solitary ideal predating any document witnesses. Instead, I propose a different model of text to inform our encoding choices, a model which sees text as the product of our interactions with documents, the result of documents and not their cause.

When I enter the glass studio I think about my body. I think about how my body can feel itself belong and fit into a space or how it can feel isolated from it. I think about your body and how it moves in unison with the glass, my body, and the space that surrounds it. Together we must find a way to fit into the curves of the studio in that moment, we must find our place in that space. As I push forward towards the artwork, this idea of finding your body fitting or not fitting into different spaces is explorative. The installations exploit instances that grow and shrink the viewers physicality in relation to another object or space. Often playing with the moment of finding the world larger than life through the over exaggerated architecture. I have recently found myself caught in a look, one that permeates all my being. The kind of look that doesn’t bounce off, and doesn’t seem to disappear, though it only lasted a moment. I am questioning my gaze, my looks and the gaze and looks that come my way. Through co-opting the AWOOGA moment of a look, the look that juts out from the eyes of Tex Avery’s character Wolfy. I am processing these looks within my own cartoony constructions that are comprised of paint, wood, glass, and textiles that form an installation. The AWOOGA is cringy, crinkly, playful, and funny. When I watch the two eyes jut out from Wolfy’s face I sit back relax, laugh or my whole body tenses up and freezes as I remember too many unwanted looks that have shot my way.

Frankie and Drew are two friends, living mundane lives, which are abruptly interrupted by the appearance of the past. A mysterious girl appears in the dumpster outside of Frankie’s apartment, and the two form a friendship. It becomes increasingly clear that this girl is not all that she seems. Frankie will be forced to remember a painful memory, and the tragedy that she witnessed and felt responsible for. While at the same time, Drew visits the mother who abandoned him in the hospital. Frankie and Drew are both on a healing journey, that is both painful and necessary, and support one another along the way.

As much embodied practice as a manuscript, Full Moon Soup invites us to engage in the ancient technologies of Jewish magic, prayer, and mystical text to locate present-day ancestors and create new rituals. The book begins with a folktale ushering us into a world where lagoons speak, flowers pray, and angels sit at the kitchen table. Fragrant and intoxicating, it is a world filled with honey, lemon, garlic, and salt. Through the use of fabulism, folklore, and lyric prose, Full Moon Soup swirls the reader into reverie with recipes, spells, prayers, and plant remedies. The poems trace a nonlinear journey through a world left by Jewish feminine ancestors, plantcestors, and priestesses, asking en route what it means to heal lineage, to honor women’s magic as community care, and to create space for an authentic relationship with a feminine God. In this asking, we are invited to lean into our own sacred longings.

the deadbook is a journey through the underworld of the self, named “Aperstia.” At its core, deadbook depicts the psychological journey towards self-love and Truth as a trans human. What is the self vs. what is the impostor planted in us by society? The trans journey, for me, has been equal parts mystical and torturous. The former is natural; the latter is human-made. I have treated the deadbook as a text to be discovered, rather than created. It comes from a primordial pool. I describe the process of writing it as putting my hands into a pond and grasping at wild fish. It’s in the structure of a play because the events in this book did occur in a psychic reality. the deadbook dips into the idea of self-deaths, and offers an alternative perspective, the syntheses of selves. the deadbook outstretches a hand to any reader with places to go.

Fluidity is defined as “the state of being unsettled or unstable” and also “the quality of being likely to change.” Welcome to Cactus Country captures the lived, embodied experience of growing up in gender that is unsettled and unstable, following a journey toward embracing an identity that is likely to change. Throughout its narrative, the child speaker’s perspective rests on uncertain footing between boy and girl, school and the trailer park, the desert and the outside world—liminal environments undergoing constant change, in flux with the seasons as well as an endless rotation of characters. In this way, life in Cactus Country both mirrors and shapes the child speaker’s genderfluid experience, becoming a metaphor for their ever-evolving conception of self.

Worm Elegies is a collection of poems that works through themes of grief, gender identity, family, touch, and rebirth of the body. Through the use of vivid imagery, sometimes grotesque, these poems blur the line between the beautiful and ugly. The themes of gender identity and rejection of the feminine body work below the surface through a series of imagery based in memories. The thread of a dead mother parallels the speaker’s journey of self-discovery and rejection of their feminine body. While many may think of grief as something that works in stages, this collection works actively against this idea. We are always grieving, actively our whole lives, through longing for the love from people and things we are doomed to miss.

The transformative process of adolescence plays an enormous role in shaping personal identity and worldview. Cultural celebrations, like the quinceañera, contribute to this transformation and provide a framework for understanding how the process of growing up is informed by ethnic heritage, socioeconomic status, and family relationships. I examine Sebastian Kadlekic, Emma, Steinkelner, and Kit Steinklener’s comic book Quince, in which a 15-year-old girl receive superpowers at her quinceañera, as a representation of the transformative potential of the quinceañera, and suggest that it can and should be read as a piece of visionary fiction, as popularized by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne marie brown: it is work that creates a new reality paves the way for the physical manifestation of such a reality. Using writings about quinceañeras as a background for visual and textual analysis of the comic itself, I hope to demonstrate the significance of Quince as a cultural product and representation of the future.

Repeated sound sequences in language occur all the time, but we reliably notice them in popular poetic devices like alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. We leverage their sound structures in acquiring our vocabularies as children, and in our most prized literary works. Verbal sound patterns can even serve to scaffold music-like structure within language. Indeed, humans seem to find music-like verbal patterns compelling and productive enough to spend effort including them in rhetoric, poetry, lyrics, and advertisements throughout history. Yet, understandings of their forms and dynamics are still quite limited. In particular, rap rhymes often sport dense phonological patterns whose complexity has been shown to increase over time, yet commensurate analysis has not followed. Lyrical data from rap will therefore serve as the target of much of the current investigation. Much like producing language or music, producing complex phonologically patterned speech is a skill that, in and of itself, is worthy of investigation. I will introduce visualization and computational tools to explore various exemplar data and their sound structures, framing many of the findings in terms of cognition.

The purpose of this qualitative, arts-based research study was to understand new arrival students’ experience, meaning making, and opportunity for developing intellectual self-trust during an illustrated memoir project. The project was set during the school day, in a high school, English Language Learners classroom with the aim of centering new arrival students’ lived experience and unique funds of knowledge in their academic setting. A year long pilot study informed the design of the final research study. The dissertation study engaged 13 students from 10 different countries ranging in age from 14-19. All 12 participants who remained throughout the school year completed a minimum 24-page illustrated memoir. Narrative analysis and visual analysis of student memoirs, combined with thematic analysis of researcher journals and informal interviews provided insight into participant experience, meaning making, and the project’s potential to foster intellectual self-trust. Recommendations for future research in this area include scaffolding additional curricular activities to reinforce and enhance intellectual self-trust, adopting illustrated memoir making and hands-on visual art learning as a classroom pedagogy, and planned opportunities for peer-to-peer mentoring. The study provides an example of how an illustrated memoir-making project can further the development of intellectual self-trust on the part of new arrival high school students.

This collection of essays ranges from the personal to the cultural, from early childhood memories to the World’s Largest Ball of Sisal Twine, dealing with beauty, truth, depression, and transcendence.

This project studies the effects on transfer of a learning-centered, co-constructed first-year writing course. By having the students voice and cross-examine their writing visions, the course helped them come to voice and acquire writing artistry, generative writing identity, and artistic vision of writing as inquiry, assessment, and transfer. Transfer transcends use of prior learning but encompasses continual growth in preparation for future writing. Through reflective practice, transfer fosters growth as non-automatic writing behaviors become automatic—“lower-road”—and writers reinvest freed resources. The course’s pedagogy was a hybrid of such pedagogies as critical, co-creative, relational, feminist, student-voice, and social-justice so as to promote co-inquiry, learning together, and independence by all members of the learning community. It relied upon three principles: respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. In the course studied in the project, the instructor and students discussed, negotiated, and co-constructed the assessment dimensions of the course so as to think like writers and acquire an identity of “self-authorship.” Assessment, for the purposes of this project, means the explicit and tacit assessment processes of inquiry, evaluation, and transfer all expert writers employ. To let the participants tell their stories, the project employed qualitative research consisting of teacher research during the course, which included document collection, formative weekly feedback from the students, and a teacher’s journal. Data collection continued during the following semester with five student participants participating in short-answer surveys, semi-structured interviews, and discourse-based interviews. Employing an “actor’s perspective” resulted in three categories of codes: tendencies to inquire, assess, and transfer. All five student participants demonstrated tendencies to inquire, assess, and transfer while drafting their spring projects. All continued learning through transfer in their own idiomatic ways but demonstrated how the transfer situation can have a generative or disruptive impact on transfer of learning from a prior course, dependent upon the latter course’s optimism, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. The study’s implications, include the importance of 1) creating a generative writerly identity, 2) telling and showing teacherly optimism, 3) validating learners as knowers and creators of knowledge, 4) mutually constructing meaning, and 5) bridging students’ prior knowledge to new learning outcomes.

Capacity building for globally competent educators is a 21st Century imperative to address contemporary complex and constantly changing challenges. This action research project is grounded in positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, relational cultural theory, and relational leadership practices. It sought to identify adaptive challenges educators face as they try to integrate globally competent teaching practices into their curricula, demonstrate learning and growth experienced by the educators in this project, and provide guidance and solutions to the challenges globally competent educators face. Six educators participated in this three-phase project, which included focus groups, reflective journal entries, and an exit interview. Data were collected, grouped into emergent themes, and organized into cohesive categories. The data from this project supported the creation of two foundational models for educating for global competence. The first is pedagogical and the other, coaching. Both models are in developing stages and are grounded in key theoretical frameworks and the data shared by the participants. Globally competent and globally responsive pedagogy tasks educators with examining their practice through a global and cultural prism to gain clarity of perspective, build social capital, improve relationships, and meet ever-changing local and global challenges. The approaches honor and respect diversity so as to dismantle systems of oppression and fight policies and social norms rooted in cognitive biases. The model integrates theory and key findings from this study to support educators to integrate and implement global competence. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA, https://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/etd.

This thesis is a memoir that explores my journey of grief, loss, and recovery. Itweaves in themes of motherhood, parenting a child with disabilities, my own childhoodmedical issues and mental health struggles, intimate (and formative) interactions with mymother including our growing relationship, and how I now view her relationship with mydaughter, Evelyn. These topics strongly contribute to the kind of mother I am today; it isthat influence and trajectory that I investigate. The essays are presented in a nonlinearfashion, following a path of self-reflection. I braid medical terminology with my ownnarrative reflection, reconsidering the experiences I had while I was navigating thesemoments. I also explore elements of religion—as both my husband’s and my faithchanged over time—whether faith provided comfort or was challenged throughout ourlosses—and I examine where my journey has left me spiritually

The English Language Arts (ELA) canon has been continuously replicated in K-12 education due to the tendency that teachers frequently teach what was taught to them. Current national and state curricula as well as the Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate guidelines and suggestions do not dictate specific texts to be taught, yet many of the suggestions given to high school English teachers perpetuate the use of the Western canon. Outside of the classroom, the world in which our students live is becoming increasingly multimodal which is a contrast to “verbcentric” classrooms. Graphic novels are one answer to integrating the increasingly multimodal world into the classroom; however, they have not been systematically embraced, especially in advanced-level, high school English classrooms. The purpose of this study is to use a qualitative case study to explore perceptions and practices relating to the use of graphic novels in advanced-level high school English classrooms. When teachers persist in using curricular choices such as graphic novels that may not be widely accepted, they are also reshaping how the ELA canon is used in classrooms. By challenging the ELA canon, teachers become change agents by providing students with more diverse literature and creating new pathways of cultural capital.

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers,” Joan Didion states, “by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the `ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” If this “shifting phantasmagoria” also involves the often fragmented, blurry, and contradictory experience of war, what formal and stylistic modes do nonfiction writers implement to represent this experience? By tracing first-person nonfiction narratives from WWI, Vietnam, and the more recent “forever wars,” Martin examines how writers have captured the experience of war by adopting craft techniques rooted in Modernist collage and cinematic montage. Documenting the rise of the “blockbuster” film, along with the influence of visual media, Martin argues that—since the American War in Vietnam— some of the most stark and affecting personal narratives of war succeed through fragmentation, collage, and polyphony. Martin also includes his dissertation, a collection of essays centered around his military experiences and service in Iraq.

In the darkest night of the Russian Civil War, in an unknown village on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg, the Russian imperial family is gathered in a basement and shot. The heir, Alexei Nikolaevich, miraculously survives bullets and bayonets, and in the aftermath of this hideous and extraordinary happening, the soldiers and villagers face strange furies they cannot seize or understand.

Enterprising Young Man is an exploration of memory and the self in the context of the landscapes of the American West and beyond. These poems question the dichotomy between manmade and natural objects, the self and landscape, and imagination and perceived reality. Objects like trash become the subject of pastoral meditation as the poems cast a wide gaze across landscapes desolated by human intervention and human lives desolated by environmental forces. Enterprising Young Man tracks a journey towards new belonging in and understanding of the natural world by delving into the mind as a landscape to be explored. Possibility and perception are braided into moments of transcendent environmental beauty. The poems find moments of oddity in the banal and stillness in ever changing landscapes. The speaker searches for the boundaries of the pastoral and finds a new sense of self in the process.

For centuries, stinging nettle, a common worldwide weed, has been harnessed for its medicinal properties. Sharp to the touch, the nettle’s barbs are a defense mechanism that causes a burning rash when the plant is mishandled: “Pain is capable of surprise even when expected,” the poet reveals in this collection’s title work, an ars poetica about hurt and its transformative effects on creating art. Peering inside private lives, Caverhill explores what is both domestic and wild through a series of poems that examine the origins of family tradition; the breakdown and unification of family systems in response to serious illnesses, a natural disaster, and a global pandemic; and the insights that can occur when we give voice to difficult emotions.