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Title: "A place to call home" : the rhetoric of Filipinx-American place-making
Creator: Mahnke, Stephanie
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this dissertation, I analyze the place-making efforts of the Philippine American Cultural Center of Michigan, a space for Detroit's Filipinx community. By looking at the place-making process from the center's earliest conception to later development, this study aims to determine the negotiations and factors that influence the production and sustainment of space based on the group's cultural ideology. To gather and analyze data, I coded the center's planning minutes from 1980 to 2001,...
Show moreIn this dissertation, I analyze the place-making efforts of the Philippine American Cultural Center of Michigan, a space for Detroit's Filipinx community. By looking at the place-making process from the center's earliest conception to later development, this study aims to determine the negotiations and factors that influence the production and sustainment of space based on the group's cultural ideology. To gather and analyze data, I coded the center's planning minutes from 1980 to 2001, followed by interviews with members of the original planning committee and center's leaders. All findings are validated by the community through the Filipinx indigenous interviewing method of pagtatanung-tanung. Through analysis of the documents and interviews, I conclude the distinct rhetoric of this center's Filipinx-American place-making is a result of negotiated Filipinx values to prioritize beliefs in unity and reciprocity, creating a materially and symbolically malleable cultural center to accommodate different forms of members' "giving back". Results of the study may inform cultural rhetoricians' methodology and fuller treatment of place-making as a rhetorical process, and community organizers of the importance of accounting for distinct cultural ideologies which influence place-making efforts.
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Title: "A ray of hope for liberation" : blacks in the South Carolina Extension Service, 1915-1970
Creator: Harris, Carmen Veneita
Date: 2002
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "A single finger cannot lift a stone" : local organizations and democracy in Mali
Creator: Davis, John Uniack
Date: 1999
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "A study in urbanization" : progress report on Obuasi project
Creator: Ampene, E. K. (Emmanuel K.)
Date: 1966
Collection: Research Review

Title: "Accepting and embracing my disability" : describing the life experiences of Latinas/os with physical disabilities who have abused substances
Creator: Córdova, David
Date: 2010
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Afrographie" : l'écriture comme sites de conflits identitaires dans l'œuvre romanesque d'Ahmadou Kourouma
Creator: Nzokizwanimana, Pierre
Date: 2006
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "All of us would walk together" : the transition from slavery to freedom at St. Mary's City, Maryland
Creator: Brock, Terry Peterkin
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "ALL OF US WOULD WALK TOGETHER": THE TRANSITION FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM AT ST. MARY'S CITY, MARYLANDbyTerry Peterkin BrockIn 1840, Dr. John Mackall Brome inherited his father's plantation along the St. Mary's River in St. Mary's County, Maryland. Over the ensuing decades, Brome built his plantation into one of the largest in Southern Maryland, both in acreage and slaveholdings. By the Civil War, his plan- tation landscape had been entirely rebuilt, and was home to over 60 enslaved African...
Show more"ALL OF US WOULD WALK TOGETHER": THE TRANSITION FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM AT ST. MARY'S CITY, MARYLANDbyTerry Peterkin BrockIn 1840, Dr. John Mackall Brome inherited his father's plantation along the St. Mary's River in St. Mary's County, Maryland. Over the ensuing decades, Brome built his plantation into one of the largest in Southern Maryland, both in acreage and slaveholdings. By the Civil War, his plan- tation landscape had been entirely rebuilt, and was home to over 60 enslaved African Americans. This dissertation examines how Brome managed his plantation during and after slavery, and how African Americans used, reused, modified, and changed the plantation landscape to survive their bondage and define their freedom after slavery.Examining the transition from slavery to freedom has received limited attention in archaeo- logical analysis, and this research introduces a model for understanding the transition through the plantation landscape. The landscape was a critical form of control developed by planters to ef- ficiently produce archaeological crops and manage enslaved laborers. This system, in place for centuries in the American South, was entirely reformed after the emancipation of African Ameri- can laborers. This study will examine how Brome's strategy for managing his labor changed over time, and how African Americans leveraged their newfound freedom to define their freedom and establish independence.This transition is particularly unique in Maryland, which sided with the Union during the Civil War, and which underwent multiple changes in its agricultural economy throughout the 19th cen- tury, transitioning from tobacco to wheat to meat and dairy production. This complicates the traditional narrative of post-Emancipation agricultural relationships between blacks and whites, as Marylander's began producing less labor intensive crops. Meanwhile, African Americans used their new freedoms to change the way they used space to organize their households, build families, and establish communities on and off the plantation.A number of spheres will be interrogated to understand how space was used before and afterslavery. The plantation will be considered as a whole to understand the way the built environment changed through time, including Brome's plantation redesign during the 1840s and its decline through the rest of the century. Brome's use of this landscape to establish control of his slaves and demonstrate his power to his peers will be examined, and how this was effected by the Civil War and Emancipation. For African Americans, a number of spaces on the plantation will be examined, including the plantation proper, the African American domestic sphere, work areas including the manor home, and the wilderness to provide insight into the way that African Americans used space differently after Emancipation. These spaces will be considered in the context of household formation and community building, extending to areas off the plantation.This research demonstrates that Brome used his landscape as a means of controlling his en- slaved laborers and to demonstrate his power through a performative space to his peers. The regular presence of Union soldiers during the Civil War, crippled his control, and provided the necessary cracks for enslaved laborers to resist their bondage and gain freedom. After the War, Brome's agricultural pursuits transition from large sharecropping towards less labor intensive crops and investments in the railroad, resulting in the reduction of his plantation size by the 1880s.Enslaved African Americans reused plantation spaces to create alternate plantation landscapes. They modified their households to mitigate the effects of slavery, and used space on and off the plantation to build communities. After the Civil War, African American reconstituted their fam- ilies into households, and began to separate their community spaces from the white landscape. Instead of reusing space on the plantation, they instead created independent spaces where they could practice family, household and community interactions.
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Title: "All the forms today are merely parades and arrangements" : the relationship between the music and film of "Le Ballet Mécanique" and their influence on time
Creator: Baumgart, Emily Michelle
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACT"ALL THE FORMS TODAY ARE MERELY PARADES AND ARRANGEMENTS"THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MUSIC AND FILM OF LE BALLET MÉCANIQUE AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON TIMEByEmily Michelle BaumgartThis paper offers a structural and cognitive exploration of Léger, Murphy and Antheil's Le Ballet Mécanique of 1924. Though much recent literature has addressed the iconic and groundbreaking film by concentrating on the audio or visual elements separately, this paper addresses both as a unit; specifically, it...
Show moreABSTRACT"ALL THE FORMS TODAY ARE MERELY PARADES AND ARRANGEMENTS"THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MUSIC AND FILM OF LE BALLET MÉCANIQUE AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON TIMEByEmily Michelle BaumgartThis paper offers a structural and cognitive exploration of Léger, Murphy and Antheil's Le Ballet Mécanique of 1924. Though much recent literature has addressed the iconic and groundbreaking film by concentrating on the audio or visual elements separately, this paper addresses both as a unit; specifically, it explores the form and structure, or lack thereof, inherent in the abstract nature of the film. While some analyses have claimed there is a clear sense of organization within either film or music (Lawder, 1975; Oja, 2000), this paper takes the opposite approach by theorizing that there is no coherent form to be found in either. Instead, there is a focus on the use of irregular repetition found in both the visual and aural media: looping in the visual element and ostinato in the aural. Furthermore, this study places an emphasis on the effect these unusual techniques will have on an audience. Drawing on the cognitive literature regarding perception and attention, this paper investigates the role that non-narrative video plays in time perception and disorientation. It uses principles of Gestalt psychology and previous timing experiments to accomplish these aims, postulating that the lack of structure, repetitive nature, and disunity between visual and aural elements will lead to a distorted sense of time.
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Title: "Am I my brother's keeper?" A historiography of twentieth century Black-Jewish relations
Creator: White, Amaris J.
Date: 2008
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Between 1920 and 2007, approximately one hundred articles and essays, twenty monographs, and six anthologies have been published on the intriguing relationship between Black and Jewish Americans. This body of scholarship is dense, wide-reaching, analytically sound, and is often times a reflection of changes in American history and society. This essay critically surveys the significant scholarship published on the relationships between African Americans and Jewish Americans during the...
Show moreBetween 1920 and 2007, approximately one hundred articles and essays, twenty monographs, and six anthologies have been published on the intriguing relationship between Black and Jewish Americans. This body of scholarship is dense, wide-reaching, analytically sound, and is often times a reflection of changes in American history and society. This essay critically surveys the significant scholarship published on the relationships between African Americans and Jewish Americans during the twentieth century. This comprehensive historiography serves as a tool for exploring how various historical interactions between Blacks and Jews were influenced by the rules, conventions, and protocols of a broader American culture. By critically studying the intersection between race, class, economics, politics, education, and identity formation, I am better able to assess historical interactions between African Americans and Jewish Americans. Looking at the associations between these two historically marginalized groups we can better understand the implications of categories such as ethnicity on intercultural coalition building and how we can overcome barriers that have strained and divided Black-Jewish relations.
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Title: "Am I my other's keeper?" : alterity, dialogic representation and polyphonic ethical discourse in later antebellum American fiction
Creator: Gaertner, Stephen Andrew
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Hayden White argues that to create a narrative is to “moralize.” As historicists assert, the moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural and political discourses in which it is constructed as well as the ethical value systems that such discourses contain. However, context does not reveal the entire story. Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narratives are polyphonic, that is, they contain multiple, competing discourses, at times represented through singular idiolects. But what are these...
Show moreHayden White argues that to create a narrative is to “moralize.” As historicists assert, the moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural and political discourses in which it is constructed as well as the ethical value systems that such discourses contain. However, context does not reveal the entire story. Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narratives are polyphonic, that is, they contain multiple, competing discourses, at times represented through singular idiolects. But what are these various voices talking about, and to whom? Polyphonic or “carnivalesque” narratives rehearse and contest contrasting ethical paradigms, exposing their discursive limits as well as their transcendent possibilities in a given milieu. Thus, the text manifests the emergence of a dialogic exchange between ethical discourses, the yield of which is a creative destabilization that that resists the archaeological confinement of time, place and ideology. Therefore, I engage an ethical formalist rereading of a selection of antebellum narrative fictions in order to probe the discursive possibilities latent within the texts’ moral imaginaries. In addition to deploying Bakhtin’s work on polyphonic narrative, I use Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical theory of alterity that stresses the moral agent’s duty to respond on behalf of an individualized subject otherwise totalized by an oppressive, thematizing discourse. Whereas Levinas describes the moment of this ethical demand as the face-to-face encounter, I argue that the responsive duty suggested by the instance of inter-subjective recognition is represented within fiction as dialogue, in addition to the more subtle discourses that the narrator adds. Beyond exposing the text’s ethical tensions, these dialogic moments reflect the discursive polyphony theorized by Bakhtin, multi-vocal eruptions often signaled by a perichoresis of distinct idiolects. The works I discuss—James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Trilogy, Herman Melville’s Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno,” Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig—all contain ethical discourses elaborated through idiolectical dialogic structures and polyphony. Furthermore, the context of their production—the late-antebellum United States—situates them within ethical conversations on totalization and interpersonal duty for the Other in that the modernizing republic was struggling with the moral implications of Indian removal, African slavery, urban labor, poverty and gender oppression. Yet, a Levinasian reading of antebellum U.S. literature invites looking beyond ideological power discourses. In addition to reflecting how American republicanism and capitalism of the mid-1800’s totalized, confined and dehumanized disempowered Others, these texts evidence rhetorical ambivalence respecting the status of the differentiated Other and the moral subject’s duty to the Other in a capitalist republic obsessed with categorical ordering and uncomfortable with ambiguity. Despite their concerns with political, social and ethical regulation, though, these polyphonic works contain transcendent ethical counter-discourses on duty and Otherness that expose a symbiosis between radical Others, peoples otherwise divided by contrasting ethical, political, cultural, racial or socioeconomic alignments.
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Title: "And they lynched him on a tree" : a critical analysis
Creator: Williams, Brandon (College teacher)
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves meant, at least in theory, that these newly freed individuals could begin to make the transition toward integration into American society as full citizens. White citizens opposed to the abolition of slavery were determined to assert their dominance and control and did so through a series of violent measures and discriminatory laws. Lynching was a primary way to demonstrate power and incite fear in...
Show moreThe end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves meant, at least in theory, that these newly freed individuals could begin to make the transition toward integration into American society as full citizens. White citizens opposed to the abolition of slavery were determined to assert their dominance and control and did so through a series of violent measures and discriminatory laws. Lynching was a primary way to demonstrate power and incite fear in Black communities. Anti-lynching campaigns supported by both Black and White citizens took root in response to the violence. While literary and visual protest art that protested lynching seemed to flourish, there were surprisingly few musical counterparts. Despite years of what seemed like no hope for the resolution of racial turmoil and no models on which to base such a piece, William Grant Still and Catharine Garrison Chapin broke new ground by creating And They Lynched Him On A Tree, the first piece of concert music that protests lynching. This dramatic choral work for orchestra and racially divided choirs was well-received at its premiere, but the provocative title, intense subject matter, and atypical vocal forces have rendered it a less than desirable piece for performance. Its message is evermore resonant in today’s sensitive climate of race relations, social injustice, and perceived police brutality. And They Lynched Him On A Tree deserves to be performed not as a “token” work by an African American, but as a well-crafted American masterpiece and a plea for justice and peace. This study will present the historical and social context in which the work was composed; explore prominent artistic contributions to the anti-lynching campaign of the 1920s and 1930s; discuss the creative forces that merged to create this groundbreaking work; give a structural overview of the text and musical ideas; and provide suggestions that address some inherent performance and programming challenges.
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Title: "As if by accident." Nurturing cognitive skills in the U.S. and Finland : an intercultural exploration of two televised learning environments
Creator: Jackson, Jacqueline L., II
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This study is an intercultural exploration of programming for early learners in the televised learning environments in America and Finland. It aims to demonstrate that what is observable in schools and classrooms – pedagogical philosophy, instructional strategy, cognitive target and underlying cultural allowances and provisions which forward learning – is also evident in the brief space of the televised learning program. My thesis adheres to the broader theory of opportunity to learn (OTL),...
Show moreThis study is an intercultural exploration of programming for early learners in the televised learning environments in America and Finland. It aims to demonstrate that what is observable in schools and classrooms – pedagogical philosophy, instructional strategy, cognitive target and underlying cultural allowances and provisions which forward learning – is also evident in the brief space of the televised learning program. My thesis adheres to the broader theory of opportunity to learn (OTL), which suggests that formal learning is contingent upon student engagement, which is constrained by limited classroom and content coverage time (Schmidt et al., 2001, 2011; Schmidt & Maier, 2009). My interpretive approach demonstrates how OTL operates through cultural and social systems by example of the televised programs selected for study; and shows how these programs provide multiple encounters with cognitive content that reinforce and reproduce culturally preferred cognitive capabilities. I derive the proposed cognitive targets through qualitative analysis of problem-solving scenarios in one episode of each of the selected programs. The two programs present the occasion to 1) identify the cognitive skills targeted in the episodes studied; 2) to characterize the instructional strategies applied to reinforce the dominant cognitive task; 3) and to consider the underlying sociocultural assumptions in these two national settings that inform the pedagogical approach to shaping naturally developing, cognitive proclivities distinctively targeted in the two episodes. Findings suggest that Finnish play-based instructional strategies support the dynamics of children’s play space and heighten self-awareness, a central component of metacognition, by example of the problem-solving scenarios of the early learning program, Sana-Arkku. I suggest that the play-based deductive teaching strategies in these scenarios employ a challenge course intended to strengthen learners’ self-control. In contrast, the lesson from the problem-solving scenarios of the U.S. early learning program, Between the Lions, is cooperative work and cooperative inquiry. The teamwork approach in the problem-solving strategies of the characters Click, Cliff Hanger and Opposite Bunny emphasizes group projects in a K12 public education which expects prosocial skills, in particular, benevolence. While this pedagogical approach may have a strategic advantage in promoting democratic goals, it may present a strategic weakness for achieving academic excellence. The American focus in this comparative analysis raises the following vital question; what – in terms of cognitive development – the costs and benefits of this prosocial emphasis on group work may be to the individual learner. The implications for both the classroom and the televised learning spaces are clear: first is the need to design and test the effectiveness of metacognitively enriched exercises for classroom instruction aimed at enhancing individual cognitive development and, based on positive outcomes, to design, produce and test the effectiveness of metacognitively enriched children’s educational television programs across early learning student demographics. Positive outcomes would warrant policy revision in the recommended pedagogical approach in K12 classrooms, and a re-visitation of key legislation governing the level and type of cognitive content required in children’s educational television programming. This research has sought to find the missing element in the U.S. televised children’s learning experience, which could be helpful, specifically, to the academic achievement of low-income early learners; I believe that missing element is the effective promotion of metacognitive development.
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Title: "As long as I get to be me" : the formative experiences of early career female jazz instrumentalists
Creator: Penno, Anna
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: With the goal of helping to create a more inclusive environment in which jazz education can flourish, the purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of female early career jazz instrumentalists. Four female jazz instrumentalists whose college experiences were based at the same large university in a Midwestern state served as the participants for this qualitative instrumental case study. Data sources included individual interviews, a focus group interview, and field notes based on...
Show moreWith the goal of helping to create a more inclusive environment in which jazz education can flourish, the purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of female early career jazz instrumentalists. Four female jazz instrumentalists whose college experiences were based at the same large university in a Midwestern state served as the participants for this qualitative instrumental case study. Data sources included individual interviews, a focus group interview, and field notes based on observations of two participants' rehearsals and performances. Six major themes with sub-themes emerged from this study: (1) Perceptions of the influence of gender, (2) Influence of perceptions of place, (3) Influence of supportive relationships, (4) Resilience through personal characteristics, (5) Beneficial dispositions for improvisation, and (6) Salient improvisation teaching and learning approaches. Based on the findings, I recommended that music educators be cognizant of the overt and nuanced ways that gender can impact their students' experiences. This awareness could help educators recognize and minimize gendered preconceptions that could be perpetuated within their classrooms and facilitate an informed approach toward addressing gender-related challenges. Particular attention to the social dynamics among students may help to cultivate mutually respectful peer relationships. Students could benefit from both theoretical and aural approaches to improvisation learning as well as extensive opportunities to apply and enhance their abilities through performance.
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