Browsing by Author "Wicker, Kent"

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Open Access
Fluidity in Women's Sexuality
(2016-08-09) Johonnot, Karli
Sexual fluidity has been proposed as a key component of women’s sexuality. However, not all women acknowledge or experience fluidity in their sexual attractions and behaviors. Because this is the case, what proportion of women are experiencing sexual fluidity? Research has concluded that a “sizeable minority” of women are experiencing sexual fluidity, with the highest levels found among those that identify as a sexual minority. Furthermore, certain individual differences have been found to be associated with a heightened (or weakened) likelihood of experiencing or embracing sexual fluidity. Through extensive literature reviews on women’s sexuality and sexual fluidity, it has been concluded that sexual orientation identity status, as well as psychological, biological, and social factors, all play roles in the expression or degree of sexual fluidity experienced. This means that certain personal and environmental factors have the ability to both hinder and/or nurture fluidity in a woman’s sexual attractions, behaviors, and experiences. Accepting that women’s sexuality is fluid and teaching about the variability sometimes observed in women’s sexuality allows us to not only see that experiencing same-sex attractions, desires, or experiences is not necessarily abnormal, but also that it may be more common than originally assumed, which has the potential to reduce societal stigma associated with homosexuality.
Open Access
Forecasting Consumer Preference of Film Genre
(2019-04) Holesh, Michael
Central to the decision of filmmaking and a film’s success is the consumer response to a film. Specifically, in a market with multiple varied alternatives based on genre, plot, and other film attributes, the subject matter and the preference of the movie going public becomes paramount to attempt to predict. The performance of films is unique in that results vary widely, and, like most art mediums, consumer response is assumed to be largely unpredictable. The research undertaken in this study used past box office returns across difference genres to project whether an expected return can be predicted with relative confidence.

This study attempts to uncover a pattern of film performance correlated by genre to understand if these correlations can be relied upon over time and into the future. The method employed in this study examines the 100 largest film releases as measured by box office performance for each year over a 20-year period, their economic performance and the trending returns over time by genre. This study then charts these performances by genre and by year, then employs a regression analysis for each to confirm if these trends are reliable. The results of this approach show a statistically significant result indicating that consumers do have an expected response to certain genres over others. Chapter six illustrates correlations of performance in some genres that are over twice as strong as alternatives. The resulting correlation coefficient scores are as follows: adventure had a score of .667, action had .780, comedy had .358, thriller/suspense had .681, and drama had .457. This study, the approach and these results conclude that a predictable measurable performance can be applied to something as abstract as “film genre” to forecast a consumer response.
Open Access
Patent Pledges: Private Tool For Public Good
(2016-05-03) Tracy, Nils
Patent pledges are undertakings by patent owners not to enforce their rights in order to innovate around the intellectual property embodied in their patents. They are a relatively new instrument for promoting open-innovation, and have yet to be utilized widely, but they have the potential to accelerate technological progress: by pledging not to enforce a patent its
Open Access
Split
(2024-02-29) Coleman, Douglass
The beginning of the 21st century comes off as familiar, the remake of a violent and divisive time in our history. Like we are all on a slippery, rapidly accelerating slide into increasing civil strife, neighbor against neighbor. Political, economic, and racial differences feel like they create extreme world views which cannot coexist, especially in the United States. As a Black man, the world feels increasingly anti-Black. How can we make alliances, build coalitions, or create unity, if we do not trust each other’s intentions? For those of us who are believers in people, we have faith in a brighter day. I have utilized speculative fiction short stories to explore these issues. What if things got worse before they got better? What if the United States split apart, how would we rebuild and reorganize society? Speculative fiction can suggest some practices and visions of a possible future? My stories navigate a dystopian world, where characters reach toward a utopian reality. Speculative fiction can serve as practice, a trial to examine issues of division, alliance, and coalition, given the current, divisive historical moment. We have all had the conversation a thousand times: what is to be done with this world we live in? We can be better informed by utilizing the fictional exploration of real-world social challenges. This piece will serve as part of the unfinished conversation with my father, my friends, and those whom I would call allies.
Open Access
The Diary of Mary McKeon, an Irish American Domestic Servant in Nineteenth Century America
(2016-08-31) Pawlak, Patricia
What did young, single, unaccompanied Irish women experience when immigrating to the United States in the late nineteenth century? In this final project, I will explore primary and secondary sources that address their experiences, focusing on a diary written in 1883 by a young Irish domestic servant working in New Haven, Connecticut. Mary McKeon, a sixteen-year-old girl from County Leitrim, Ireland, recorded her experiences as a domestic servant for two different families, as well as her own personal thoughts. Mary wrote down her personal experiences, providing a glimpse of what her life was like both inside and outside of her employer’s home. Though much of my research will show that many young women like Mary would be subjected to prejudice and discrimination due to their lack of understanding middle-class American values, which would give rise to the “Bridget” stereotype of a brutish, ill-mannered and incompetent domestic servant, not all Irish women experienced that discrimination and prejudice. Mary is one example of a domestic servant that was treated kindly by her employers and her story documents a more positive and supportive environment for this newly arrived young, single immigrant. Her diary also reveals her to be a young woman who worked to improve her language skills and her situation. And, through her diary, we get a glimpse of her strategies for ensuring an active social life, including access to courtship and marriage. By analyzing Mary’s diary and sharing my results in this final project, I hope to provide a more comprehensive view into the lives of these young women.
Open Access
The Eastern Shore in Robert de Gast’s Wake
(2017-04-25) Greenaway, Kristen L.
When any space becomes familiar, it becomes a place. Thus, place is a uniquely personal concept. This project began with a passion to explore this place I now call home—the Eastern Shore—and find a way to best define that sense of place. Evoked by one specific text, Western Wind Eastern Shore: A Sailing Cruise around the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia (1975), written and photographed by Robert de Gast, I discovered the means to achieve both goals: follow in his wake, by circumnavigating the Eastern Shore by boat; and to capture that experience via writing a personal essay, including photographs, of the places we visited—just as de Gast did. Through this process, I discover that sense of place cannot be easily defined except through being conscious of one’s experiences as one inhabits or moves through a range of natural, built and social environments. Putting myself on a boat, with particular companions, on a planned route, provided me with a range of such experiences, a narrative for making sense of them, and the focus necessary for that consciousness. In performing my own engagement with place, I found I was able to create my own personal definition of place in relation to the Eastern Shore. This interdisciplinary project also includes an examination of academic literature from 1965 to present day dedicated to defining sense of place, revealing a critical consensus that describes places as those locations that have been given meaning by human experience. I then examine the relationship between photography and stories about place—two of the primary tools for recording facets of sense of place—which help provide evidence of the human experience in a landscape. Finally, I review nine books that—via their authors’ personal narratives and photography—attempt to explore sense of place on the Eastern Shore.
Open Access
The Embodiment of Death and Life: Artistic Influences on Carlos Saura and Victor Erice in Three Films from Late Francoist Spain
(2017-05-18) Molotiu, Razvan
In this project I explore how Spanish visual culture (in addition to select works of art from other European nations), especially but not solely Spanish Baroque painting and the works of Francisco Goya, inspired the filmmakers Carlos Saura and Victor Erice in their depiction of late Francoist Spanish society. Additionally, I interpret how these two directors, whose acclaimed work changed Spanish cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically embody Francoist Spain in their characters and settings. In my exploration of artistic influences on Saura and Erice’s embodiment of Francoism, I analyze three films, in order of their theatrical release: The Garden of Delights (1970), directed by Carlos Saura, The Spirit of the Beehive (1972), directed by Victor Erice, and Cria Cuervos (1975), directed by Saura. My method for analyzing each film includes my allusion to specific works of art that I consider as influential to Saura and Erice, whether on a conscious or subconscious level. Each film, in my view, evokes images that play an important role in Spanish visual culture, and the nation’s collective memory. I discuss The Garden of Delights primarily within the context of Hieronymus Bosch’s eponymous painting, as well as Goya’s Duel with Clubs. I analyze The Spirit of the Beehive, the film which I see as most evocative of painting, primarily within the context of Baroque and Romantic painting, and how the two styles’ contrasts are evoked in the film’s indoor and outdoor scenes, respectively. I show how Cria Cuervos, filmed as Franco lay dying, primarily evokes Goya’s Saturn and Velazquez’ portraiture. I conclude that (primarily) Spanish visual culture influenced Saura and Erice’s embodiment of their repressive society and effectively aided the auteurs’ symbolistic subversive filmmaking.
Open Access
The Gaze of the Other: Acknowledging Autofiction
(2023-05-01) Frye, Tiffany
Autofiction, an emerging subgenre of contemporary literary fiction, has received attention in the last fifteen years for its depiction of the author’s life in a so-called fictional context. There are many viewpoints arguing for what makes something autofiction, but they tend to revolve around the level of factual truth contained in the work. This project argues that the question of how much a work of autofiction resembles an author’s life has critics and readers stuck in an unhelpful picture of what autofiction is. Importantly, this picture obscures the type of response these works demand from the reader. This project argues that we can better understand autofiction by examining the philosophical concepts it brings to life. Through examining the works of two exemplars of autofiction, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, this project shows how concepts of subjectivity, acknowledgement, and a rejection of skepticism combine in autofiction to steer away from a way of thinking rooted in narrative and towards something new.
Open Access
Who am I in English? Language as the Face of Identity in Bilingual Individuals
(2018-08-31) Larson, Andrea J.
How does switching to a life in a foreign language and culture affect one’s identity? Specifically, I ask: Do I have a true self unaffected by language and culture, or am I merely a construct of my environment? Studies in sociolinguistics overwhelmingly point to our sense of self as being largely informed by our place in the world: language, culture, gender and society weave together the intricate fabric of our being. The social and linguistic constructs available to us at any given time form the margins to who we think we are. For bilinguals like me, life in a foreign culture and language stretches these margins, as new experiences and linguistic concepts gradually alter accessible constructs and impact our sense of self. To many of us immigrants, living in an unfamiliar place and speaking in a foreign tongue can also pose a threat to our identity: the fabric of our being comes apart, forming gaping holes where cultural and linguistic concepts have fallen away and new ones have yet to be discovered. This two-part project examines the connection between language and identity creatively as well as academically. In an extended personal essay, I consider how my immigration experience and linguistic assimilation affected my sense of self. Loosely connected memories and reflections weave together into a cohesive storyline of being and changing and becoming, thus documenting the simultaneous sense of lightness and loss, of reinvention and confusion frequently felt by immigrants. The second part of this project consists of an academic research paper examining the unique qualities and struggles of bilingual individuals’ identities and how they are echoed in literature by immigrant, exiled and translingual writers.

Browsing by Author "Wicker, Kent"

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