Browsing by Department "Graduate Liberal Studies"
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Item Open Access A Caribbean Coupling Beyond Black and White: The Interracial Marriage of Catherine and Edward Marcus Despard and its Implications for British Views on Race, Class, and Gender during the Age of Reform(2014) Gillis, Bernadette M*Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15
British Army colonel, Edward Marcus Despard, and Catherine Despard, a woman from the Caribbean and most likely of African descent, were married some time during the late eighteenth century. Their marriage was quite unusual for its time, yet their union appears to have been successful and went unchallenged by the government and many individuals they encountered. This project explores the social and political environment that made their unlikely union possible and demonstrates how their interracial marriage serves as a marker of the more fluid and tolerant character of racial attitudes in the Age of Reform. An examination of the Despards’ political activity in London also offers insight into multiple social and political issues affecting Great Britain and its colonies during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, including race, class, gender, freedom, and human rights.Item Open Access A Comparative Study of the Chinese Trickster Hero Sun Wukong(2016-04-20) Lou, HuanliangSun Wukong is a fictional hero from the Chinese classic The Journey to the West. As a well-known trickster, Wukong has a lot of similarities with several other tricksters around the world. In order to analyze him, I try to explain both his similarities with, and differences from, other tricksters, especially in the Ancient Greek folklore and myth traditions. The first half of the paper focuses on the general characteristics of tricksters. As a very distinctive group in global mythology, tricksters have particular features. The definition and symbolization of tricksters are illustrated by comparing Wukong and major Greek tricksters, such as Hermes, Odysseus, and Prometheus. The second part of the paper is concentrated on the heroic features of tricksters and the cultural values reflected in the Wukong narrative. How tricksters become cultural heroes is the main theme of Chapter Three. I explain their evolution by elaborating on the change in their nature mentioned in the second chapter. The fourth chapter illustrates the reason why Wukong is an East Asian cultural hero.I explore the personalities of Wukong and see how they fit the dominant philosophy and cultural values of the region. The last chapter briefly shows how popular Wukong is in Chinese and the entire East Asian culture.Item Open Access A Defense of the Role of History in Education Through the Analysis of the Chilean School Curriculum(2017-01-17) Brahm Rivas, Maria TrinidadIn 2010, the Chilean Government tried to cut the school hours per week of social sciences in the 5th to 10th grade school curriculum in order to increase the hours of language (Spanish) and mathematics. This reform tried to follow the trend of “successful” schools and the recommendations of the OECD based on the experience of countries that have more hours of language and mathematics and higher scores in national and international quantitative standards of measurement. The example of the Chilean case represents how humanities and social sciences have been left aside since a “humanistic” approach to education is less amenable to testing. This research project develops a qualitative analysis of the contradictions between the current objectives of education and the role of the subject of history in the school curriculum. The goal of this work is to understand 1) how the benefits of history education might be recognized within the current discussion about education and its objectives, and 2) what has been the role of the history subject in the Chilean schools´ curriculum. To develop this purpose, the paper is organized in three different chapters that explain why the study of history is important during high-school years and how the Chilean government has been modifying the history school curriculum considering the political evolution of the country. The last chapter examines the tenth and eleventh grade Chilean social studies programs in order to analyze if the current way history is taught helps students to develop higher learning outcomes and abilities, such as critical thinking, analytical and creative abilities, and social consciousness. The inconsistency between the history school programs and how they are put into practice is a key element to understand the design of educational policies to develop students´ effective learning outcomes.Item Open Access A Journey Chronicling Memories of Grief and Loss(2018-04-18) Shanahan, MaryanneAbstract Storytelling is a natural and necessary human behavior. Stories connect us to our past, our present, and, most importantly, to each other. They tease our imaginations and stir our emotions. Certain stories are gifts to those who listen. Such is the case with those gifted to me on this journey exploring the grief and loss of motherless daughters. Inspired by a photograph of my grandmother, the story of her death after childbirth, and my own mother’s lifetime sadness over having lost her mother when she was very young, I conducted audio interviews with women in similar situations. I interviewed women, like myself, whose mothers lost their mothers. I also interviewed women who themselves were left motherless at a young age. In this paper, these separate stories are connected within the overarching story of my personal journey to find, listen to, and document them. I also include my own reflections on grief and loss in the context of the story of my mother and grandmother. Within the stories, I have interspersed treasured photographs and written memorabilia. I conclude the paper with a description and analysis of my process: the preparatory research, the training in audio interviewing and documentary, my approach to the interview process (including the failures, successes, and surprises along the way), and my conclusions about what I learned and accomplished as I pursued and completed the project. A twenty-minute audio documentary titled Conversations: Mothers and Mother Loss accompanies this written work. In the documentary, culled from sixteen hours of audio interviews, the nine women who lost their mothers at early ages or whose mothers lost their mothers at early ages grant us intimate connection with their stories through their voices.Item Open Access Adventures in Everyday Life(2015-05-07) Fennell, GregoryThe following project consists of three sections. The first section is an analytical essay which discusses the role of culture in intimate relationships as depicted in literature. Two original, fictional short stories follow the analytical essay. The narrator of these stories has the same cultural background and life experiences as myself. In both stories, the narrator is the same character, though portrayed at different points in his life. The central question of this project is “What role does culture and cultural difference play when two individuals come together to try to form a long-term intimate relationship?” The analytical essay explores this issue in depth, looking at novels written by Moshin Hamid and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as at my own two short stories. My primary definition of culture comes from Edward Burnett Tylor’s seminal work Primitive Culture. Hamid and Kincaid depict relationships that navigate complex social and cultural issues. My short stories are meant to accomplish the same objective.Item Open Access Against the Grain: Reclaiming the Life I Left Behind(2015-06-12) Brill, Margaret* Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15*
Against the Grain revisits a period of my life long neglected: the 20 years between my graduation from London University with a BA in African history in 1964 and my professional reinvention as an academic librarian. In keeping with second wave feminism's emphasis on professional life, I had dismissed this period of my life as subservient to "patriarchy": I was the dependent wife of a Foreign Service officer. At this point in my personal and professional history I have come to recognize this was anything but a prelude to a more real existence. With the benefit of historically informed insights, I recognize that I lived for extended periods in hotspots throughout Africa and beyond in the nineteen sixties and seventies, at moments of world historical significance: Ghana, Burundi, South Africa, Bulgaria, and Zaire. Moreover, because of my relative independence I was able to develop relationships that continue to shape my understanding of this complex period in US foreign policy. In classic feminist fashion, the personal and the political were inextricable. Somewhat more against the feminist grain are the rich experiences and examined life of an adventurous, independent woman in a traditional marriage. I eventually regained my independence; when I remarried and moved to North Carolina in 1984, I put those years behind me. Viewing that part of my life in historical context has revealed that, even without a career, I led a full and rich life that has helped to shape my identity today.Item Open Access Ambiguously Human: Questioning the Dichotomy between Human and Object(2016-04-25) Henderson, Kaitlin*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*
How can bringing together different investigations of defining “human” as opposed to “object” generate new ideas and questions? I looked at a small group of publicly accessible explorations to examine this question from my own perspective and what I could learn of others’. I curated an installation at the Nasher, “Humanized Objects,” looking at objects featuring the human figure and questioning whether they thereby occupy an intermediary position between fully human or object, and gave several gallery talks. I also organized a film series showing “Wall-E,” “Ghost in the Shell,” “The Stepford Wives,” and “Ex Machina,” each of which contributed a unique angle on the question. The website, sites.duke.edu/AmbiguouslyHuman, framed the project and served as a central hub for information. It also hosted the blog where I offered more extended analyses of the components and highlighted other connections to the question. My findings have been informed by readings across several areas, particularly posthumanism and critical disability studies, as well as connections participants brought. The project met my hopes; I saw a reshaping of my understanding and sharpening of my questions. The generic human-object separation across investigations in this project, which I looked at largely through the body, is hierarchical as well as dichotomous, which contributes to the false insistence on a clean conceptual separation between the two categories. I had focused narrowly on the separation of “human” and “object,” but I found that boundary to be more overlapping than independent from other ones I excluded, such as human versus animal or the dehumanization of particular groups within humanity. The human-object boundary is indeed ambiguous, in many ways.Item Open Access An Amorous Prehistory of Hong Kong Queer Cinema(2016-06-08) Zhao, ManjunDepiction of homoerotic relationships among women in commercial costumed films was a unique phenomenon in 1970s - 1980s Hong Kong cinema. What are the possible cinematic meanings of lesbian images that we can perceive in these films? How should we evaluate the exact representation of a sexuality that had been perceived as deviant in that society? In this essay, I close-read homoerotic scenes and trace through the trajectories of cultural and industrial changes enabling the emergence of two representative films: Intimate Confessions of A Chinese Courtesan (1972) and An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty (1984). I do this with a continuous concern for historical context in order to provide an in-depth understanding of how lesbian images are constructed in cinema.Item Open Access An Analysis of Shaping of Female Characters in Films Directed by Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Chinese Diasporic Female Directors(2021-04) An, HongyuThis thesis intends to examine the shaping of female characters in films directed by Chinese female directors. Six films are selected as examples: The Crossing (Guo chun tian, Bai Xue, 2019), Angels Wear White (Jia nian hua, Vivian Qu, 2017), Love Education (Xiang ai xiang qin, Sylvia Chang, 2017), Dear Ex (Shei Xian Ai Shang Ta De, Mag Hsu and Chih-Yen Hsu, 2018), Song of the Exile (Ke tu qiu hen, Ann Hui, 1990), and The Farewell (Lulu Wang, 2019). The selected films are divided into three groups: those directed by mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Chinese diasporic women. By comparing the female characters with their counterparts and by analyzing the character shaping and identity formation of the female protagonists in these films, this thesis will discuss the commonalities and differences among the protagonists. The project is not intended to make general and mechanical conclusions, but to show how a variety of female characters have appeared in recent Chinese films directed by female directors, and how these characters epitomize different groups of women or female identities in the current Chinese society.Item Open Access An Analysis of the Potential Democratizing Effects of Social Media: A Chinese Experience(2015-05-08) Wu, DanqiThis paper analyzes the democratizing potential of Chinese social media. The Chinese government’s media restriction always lies at the key core of international criticism. The rise of Chinese social media, and citizen journalism in particular, has been regarded as the key battleground for China’s future. However, the democratizing potential of Chinese social media in general and citizen journalism in particular stand in need of investigation in China’s unique context. The same holds true for the cross-cultural applicability of a Western-style democratic path in the Chinese context. This paper analyzes China’s current socioeconomic reality and ideological shifts, and agrees that these changes qualify China as a more liberal society. However, this study also suggests that collective traditions in Chinese society are still strong at both grassroots and authoritative levels. Therefore, it is mistaken to assume that China has been ideologically prepared for undertaking a reform at a structural level. In a similar vein, although Chinese social media, and citizen journalism in particular, is on the rise, demonstrating the power of breaking down both the technological and ideological barriers for deepening China’s political transformation, its contribution to the dawn of democracy is not nearly as much as we have wished for. Over-anticipation, over-reliance and over-interference by the Chinese government may undermine its democratizing potential as a transformative tool and finally result in reversing the process of its growth and development.Item Open Access An Education of Feelings: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the Art of Fiction(2015-05-01) Zhu, Bing*Designated as an Exemplary Final Project for 2014-15*
In my thesis I set out to discover and interpret Thomas Hardy’s views on the art of fiction. I focus specifically on three literary essays written by Hardy during the late 1880s and the early 1890s and corroborate my conceptual analysis of these essays by researching their historical context, which further illuminates my understanding of the essays’ significance. The historical context includes the widespread censorship of fiction from vigilant Victorian publishers and circulating libraries, and the fashionable discussion of French realist novels. Finally I use Tess of the d’Urbervilles to demonstrate how the novel embodies Hardy’s artistic vision. I hope such discussion of the novel will enhance the reader’s appreciation of it according to Hardy’s understanding of the benefits of fiction reading. I show that the fastidious Victorian preoccupation with morality and propriety blinded the critics to Hardy’s ability of rendering with force and sincerity human emotional delights and sufferings. Unlike the French realist authors, who were devoted to the objective explanation of human behavior, Hardy believed that the unique persuasive power of fiction resides in its appeal to the reader’s intuitive conviction. However, there is a fundamental difference between sentimental novels and Hardy’s conception of great fiction. The latter’s claim of superiority lies in the author’s sincere and personal engagement with the concrete and tangible details of real life.Item Open Access An Interpretive History of the Lower Deep River Region, NC(2022-04-15) Wicker, Cole W.How can interpreting the regional history of the lower Deep River region of North Carolina inform land conservation for future generational use, education, and recreation? I explore the Lower Deep River Region, NC, and its mining heritage in hopes of understanding how land conservation efforts can use interpretive history as a guiding framework. With the approval of a regional state trail, ever expanding public parks, and the threat of impending commercial development, the region sits at the precipice of change. In the paper, I examine the region's past, including its indigenous and early histories, as well as its coal mining and industrial heritage, and I contextualize these stories alongside available interpretive resources. I explore themes of race and labor in a temporal and spatial manner as a guiding methodical framework. Using historic maps and spatial sources, I reconstruct the Deep River’s history and bring the buried, lost, and disappearing past into the present. The river’s past informs how certain places, markers, or seemingly naturalized objects become integral in the regional conservation dialogue. In addition to the written component below, I include a website (deepriverhistory.com) that allows the public to engage with the material at an individual pace.Item Open Access Architectures of Memory(2014) Jansen, Candice DonnahWhat does it mean to feel at home? And how would this be photographed? These questions inspired this creative project, Architectures of Memory, which is comprised of a photographic series, Living Rooms (2013), and an accompanying essay, Landscapes of My Remembering. Living Rooms was made in the community where the author was born, called Retreat in Cape Town, South Africa. The 17 color photographs depict interior home spaces of iconic “council houses” which are identical detached, double, or often, triple storied structures built by the British and Afrikaner regimes for people of color. Landscapes of My Remembering is a 3,553-word essay that reflects on an event which inspired the photographic series. It includes an analysis of the photography book, Innenwelt- Inner World, Photographs of Romania and Exile (2007) by Beatrice Minda. Minda’s collection of 70 color photographs of rooms were made inside homes belonging to Romanians and Romanian exiles, emigrants, and itinerant workers in both Romania, and in Germany and France. The paper concludes with a list of the works cited and with portraits of the participants whose homes were photographed in Retreat.Item Open Access Are Older Adults Ready for Wireless Physical Activity Tracking Devices? A Usability Quality Improvement Project(2015-05-15) Tocci, FrancescaBackground: Physical activity tracking devices (PA-TDs) are becoming increasingly popular but their use among older adults is unknown. Objectives: We present results of a quality improvement project on wearable physical activity tracking devices (PA-TDs) examining the acceptability of PA-TDs to remotely monitor activity. Methods: 30 of 63 participating Veterans, ages 65-91 had a smart phone; 7 compared 4 PA-TDs for 2-7 days. One in-person session was needed to introduce each device. Results: Average daily step counts were low for this group, ranging from 800-5,000 steps. Monitored activity revealed patterns of increased activity, from 4682 to 6159 steps, when using the device. Conclusions: Barriers and positive aspects to widespread use of PA-TDs are highlighted and need further investigation.Item Open Access As the Fairy Tales Unfold(2016-05-05) Geng, YangyangThis project consists of two parts. The first part is a photo book, which includes my photographs of children and an accompanying text of individual stories of childhood, including my own. The second part is an analytical essay, which explores my process in creating and editing my photographs in the larger context of how other artists have approached the depiction of childhood. Specifically, I look at the work of photographers Wendy Ewald, Sally Mann and Olive Pierce, as each of these artists chose to depict the days of childhood by giving individual voice to the children who are most often overlooked or ignored. Over the summer of 2015, I worked with and photographed children in an orphanage school in China. I continued to make photographs of children in Durham, North Carolina and in Cuba in 2015 and 2016. As the photographs pulled me back to the past of my own childhood, I discovered that in a child’s world, ordinary things became magical vehicles and that childhood is often about the awkward process of learning to inhabit a newly bulky, changed body with aggressive needs and intensified fantasies. As a photographer, I am drawn to the beauty and pathos of the moments, when, for example, a boy, in his games, becomes a pirate, a soldier, or a sailor, or a little girl plays with a doll and imagines she is the princess. I have tried to capture and evoke the daydreams and the feelings of being lost that are specific to childhood. With my writing and in my photo book project, I have also tried to create spaces in which I allow other’s perceptions to surface with my own.Item Open Access Beethoven’s Shifting Reception in China, 1910s–1970s(2016-05-16) Wu, BanbanSince the late 1970s, Beethoven has remained the best-known Western composer in China. His music has been written into China’s music textbooks and is frequently played by orchestras all around the country. However, this popularity among the Chinese was not always the case. This project explores how and why Beethoven’s music experienced ups and downs in popularity in China from the 1910s to the 1970s. Specifically, I examine how the Chinese people’s attitudes toward and interpretations of Beethoven’s music underwent several dramatic shifts between the 1910s, when his music was first introduced to China, and the late 1970s, when the Chinese ultimately came to admire his music in a way similar to Western audiences. The Chinese people’s shifting attitudes toward Beethoven throughout the twentieth century serve as a cultural index in two respects: by indicating China’s relationship to the West, especially to Western art; and by indicating the cultural effects of China’s own political exigencies. This paper draws on both primary and secondary sources to examine the causes of the shifting perception. The primary sources, which will be used to reconstruct the stages of Beethoven’s reception in China and the distinct historical context of each period, include Chinese newspapers and magazine articles, Chinese government documents, and the biographies and essays of Chinese authors. Secondary sources, which will be used to frame the analysis of the primary materials, will include scholarly works from the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural history, China Studies, aesthetics, and Beethoven studies. One possible explanation for the dramatic fluctuations in the reception of Beethoven’s music in China may be that the Chinese people mainly treated music as a tool, valuing it only for its usefulness at any given time. The Chinese people’s overvaluation of music’s utility—of its capacity to meet the nation’s core needs at any given time—may explain why, from the 1910s to the 1970s, the popularity of Beethoven’s music in China experienced such ups and downs.Item Open Access Beyond the Diagnosis: A Photographic Inquiry of Chronic Illness(2017-05-23) Monroe, AlexandraThe old adage for authors is to ‘write what you know,’ and I believe the same can be said for any other artistic medium. I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome about four years ago and it has been a life-altering experience for me. I now have to shape the rest of my life around the management of a medical condition that forces me to locate the nearest bathroom whenever I go somewhere new, carry medication with me at all times, and cook everything I consume. I have struggled with this new way of life, and wanted to help remove stigma while building connections with others. It finally occurred to me that I could use my passion for photography to document the experiences and stories of myself and others with chronic illness. The main portion of this project is a website, www.monroephotos.com, that shows photographs I made with each individual as well as a portion of the story behind their illness. I struggled to give a name to this project but I ultimately decided on Beyond the Diagnosis because it implies that there is a story to tell after a diagnosis of chronic illness, and that an authentic life can be lived in the face of illness. And, as I will outline in the paper component of this project, there is real world evidence and scholarship that examines the need for a reclaiming of the self after facing a life-altering diagnosis. The project provides a window into the lives of five survivors of chronic illness beyond what is detailed in their patient charts – they are more than their diagnosis. With the contributions of my collaborators- Kevin, Eleri, Sam and Alex, as well as my own story- the website and paper explore the ways in which chronic illnesses impact the daily lives of each participant.Item Open Access Beyond the Towers: September 11, 2001 Watching the Past & Present to Understand the Surveilled Future(2023-12-22) Shubrick, JordynSeptember 11, 2023, marked twenty-two years since the tragedy of 9/11. In this project, I examine the stories that are told and remembered to date about the September 11 attacks on the United States of America and the subsequent events that followed. After the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were tragically attacked on September 11, 2001, many media outlets began highlighting the significance of the attack, capturing the magnitude of the events. This project will look at what is memorialized, remembered, and cemented across the 22 years in our social memory of 9/11. I will further explore what is rooted in politics and memorials, shaped through the media. Through the historical narrative of celebrations of 9/11, looking at memory, memorialization, fear, and what lies ahead for the surveilled future ultimately assesses the forever remembrance of 9/11 in media and memorials and how memory operates to influence Americans' view of safety.Item Open Access Bloomsbury and the Natural World(2014) Capaldo Traylor, CherylThis thesis explores the role that the natural world played in the art and writing of the Bloomsbury group. Very little academic work has been done on this topic beyond the coffee-table books on the gardens of Charleston Farmhouse and Monk’s House. Most serious work has been on the various themes of nature found in Virginia Woolf’s more popular novels. Nature is a prolific theme in the Bloomsbury Group’s painting and literature and they devoted much time to it. Their attitude towards nature was one of respect, not veneration like that of the Romantic period. They viewed man as a part of nature, not outside of nature, or controlling nature. Holding a biocentric view of nature, they eschewed the prevailing attitude of anthropocentricism. They were concerned with the idea of civilization and wrote extensively about what it meant to be civilized. Another major Bloomsbury theme was the contrast of nature wild versus nature tamed. These ideas were discussed, written about, and depicted in their artwork. This paper investigates the aforementioned Bloomsbury topics and also includes man (and woman’s) relationship to nature, terror in the garden, joy in the garden, and the protection of nature.Item Open Access Book of Harriet: The Disambiguation of Five North Carolinian Siblings 1840-1941(2016-05-03) Smith, Kim*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*
This paper is a work of creative nonfiction that adopts the first-person narrative voice of Harriet Smith (c. 1819-1873) in order to recount the biographies of her five children, all of whom were born slaves belonging to the Smiths, a prominent Orange County, North Carolina family. The four youngest siblings were simultaneously Smith slaves and Smith progeny who continued to live and work on the same plantation post-Emancipation as did many enslaved children who were fathered by their American owners. However, the interrelationships between Harriet, her children, and the Smiths were atypical of the era and region. Harriet’s four daughters were reared in the main plantation home by their white aunt, the very mistress whom they—and Harriet—served. History marginalized all of them until Harriet’s great-granddaughter, the Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray, published her 1956 familial memoir Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. Murray’s memoir chronicles the life of Harriet’s eldest daughter and the family into which she married with contextual mentions of Harriet, her other four children, and the people with whom they made families. Despite their collective historical significance in North Carolina’s Piedmont region, little scholarship exists regarding these individuals, their interrelated lives, and their remarkable life stories. Written to reflect Murray’s seminal example, this narrative spotlights Harriet and all five of her children, illuminates the many accomplishments of a disremembered family of color, and contextualizes their inimitable lives during a divisive yet transformative century.