Matching Items (17)
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- All Subjects: Identity
- Creators: School of Politics and Global Studies
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Status: Published
Description
Only in the world of acting can an individual be denied a job simply on the basis of their appearance, and in my thesis, I sought to explore alternatives to this through the concept of nontraditional casting and casting against "type", which included the presentation of a full-length production of the musical "Once on this Island" which I attempted to cast based on vocal quality and skill alone rather than taking physical characteristics into account. I researched the history and implementation of nontraditional casting, both in regards to race and other factors such as gender, socio-economic status, and disability. I also considered the legal and intellectual property challenges that nontraditional casting can pose. I concluded from this research that while nontraditional casting is only one solution to the problem, it still has a great deal of potential to create diversity in theater. For my own show, I held the initial auditions via audio recording, though the callback auditions were held in person so that I and my crew could appraise dance and acting ability. Though there were many challenges with our cast after this initial round of auditions, we were able to solidify our cast and continue through the rehearsal process. All things said, the show was very successful. It is my hope that those who were a part of the show, either as part of the production or the audience, are inspired to challenge the concept of typecasting in contemporary theater.
ContributorsBriggs, Timothy James (Author) / Yatso, Toby (Thesis director) / Dreyfoos, Dale (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
The process of playwriting is much more than merely writing the script itself; it is a process of outlining, writing, rewriting, and rewriting some more. This project explores that process from the very beginning to the late stages of final rewrites on a full-length, two-act stage play, Forget Me Not. Thematically, the play addresses issues such as legacy, ambition, the limitations of memory, and the complex relationships between women. It also speaks to the possibility of hope and revolves around twenty-something characters who are not nihilistic or pretentious as in the frequently-dominant portrayal of that demographic, but rather witty, intelligent, and layered. The play applies techniques of playwriting with a focus on character development as the element that drives the story, while also playing with conceptions of memory and time through the framing device, structure, and narration. A craft essay follows the script of the play, detailing the process of conceptualizing, writing, and revising the play.
ContributorsPrahl, Amanda Catherine (Author) / Sterling, Pamela (Thesis director) / Campbell, Corey (Committee member) / Jennings-Roggensack, Colleen (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This study examines sustainable development concerns as an essential part of the Costa Rican national identity. Interviews with ecotourism industry workers and an analysis of pertinent news articles shine light on the Costa Rican citizen's perspective of sustainable development, showing that in spite of current initiatives industry workers still have unmet environmental and economic concerns, and that the general public is both passionately interested and personally invested in the topic.
ContributorsHoward, Kalyn Marie (Author) / Puleo, Thomas (Thesis director) / Larson, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Hunter, Joel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
On December 28th 2012, immigration authorities arrested my father and mother while grocery shopping. As soon as they stepped outside, immigration officers stopped them to be questioned. Jeopardizing my university graduation, I took on the challenge to fight court and petition my parents to not be deported. As a first generation born American, I have the power and the right to petition for the freedom of my parents. I was fortunate to be born in this country as a citizen and take advantage of all the opportunities given to me. Up until today, my family and I have done nothing but participate as good citizens. What I failed to realize is that one day our family would become deportation victims of the broken immigration system. There are currently between 11 to12 million undocumented people living in the United States with no pathway to citizenship. My father and mother were humiliated in jail, separated from the family for three months and suffered from emotional distress. It is imperative for me to share our family experience so others know the reality about illegal immigration. In this paper I aspire to leave the reader with knowledge and understanding about illegal immigration. The main purpose of my thesis is to retell my family's experience and the struggle we are still currently facing. The fate of my family was decided on March 25th 2013, and my family has been forever changed. We learned the valuable lesson that as Latinos in the community, we need to fight for freedom and speak on those that are undocumented and afraid.
ContributorsCalderon, Rudy (Author) / Larson, Elizabeth (Thesis director) / Ovando, Carlos (Committee member) / Sanchez, Marta (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
We endeavored to begin the process of writing a musical. We composed a total of three songs, 30 pages of script (non-consecutive) with an outline summarizing the remaining uncompleted pages, seven character summaries/analyses, and a reflection on the process and next steps, and presented them in a “Producer Pitch” format to our readers. In our paper we discuss the birth of inspiration for Girls And Boys—namely philosophical conflicts about the role of biology vs. society in gender identity and real, local events of public districts reevaluating their sex education program—as well as the challenges we experienced during the process and our intentions for continued work towards the completion of the material. In our written script we span the opening of the show to the climax through sporadically completed scenes, with the outline serving to fill in the blanks. In our music, we composed three pieces—a solo ballad, an ensemble number, and an emotional trio—that we converted into an audio file format, and performed live for a small audience. Ultimately, we seek to use the elevated drama of a musical to convince the audience that empathy is the truest, ageless, and genderless expression of humanity.
ContributorsDoering, Emilie (Co-author) / Moylan, Megan (Co-author) / Yatso, Toby (Thesis director) / Mills, Robert (Committee member) / Harper, Robert (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Mizungo is a work of lyrical creative nonfiction with an interactive braided essay format that plays with place and time melding culture, experience, and memory. It weaves the threads of sexuality, loss, depression, privilege, and family between photographs. This develops the themes of otherness and identity while exploring the settings of Uganda, Tempe, and small-town Utah. The piece explores the identity of "mizungo," the name given by the locals to any white person who travels to Eastern Sub-Saharan Africa. In Uganda, a region known for both hospitality and homophobia, this identity overtakes the author's name and sense of self propeling the mizungo to near celebrity status simply because of skin color and the privilege it promises. For McGovern, this attention creates otherness and the isolation that forces self-reflection, which propels self-healing. "Mizungo" provides her a mask in the homophobic region, that not only protects, but promotes self-acceptance. It also forces her to face her grief over familial tragedies and contemplate the settings of depression, loss, and the makings of family around the world. The timeline of Mizungo flows nonlinearly, and does not stick to one setting. Along with her mental state, the narrative explores the world and the beginning and ending of the "mizungo" identity. The narrative drops the reader onto the streets of Kampala where McGovern is first branded as "mizungo" and ends with the exploration of a different meaning of this identity. In between these scenes, the narrative pulls from memories of childhood and summers spent in Utah up through nine years later in Tempe, a few months before the story was published, and a year after traveling to Uganda.
ContributorsMcgovern, Sophia Odonnell (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Hoyt, Heather (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
The purpose of the study was to learn more about the Albanian-American community in Arizona and questioned Albanian-American participants on the reasons for migrating to Arizona, their feelings towards their identity, how they remain connected with their heritage, and how/if they are ensuring that future generations of Albanian-Americans will maintain their culture. The study carried out a qualitative ethnography. I interviewed 15 Albanian-American participants living in Arizona. The term “Albanian-American” was defined as someone who identifies ethnically as an Albanian but lives in the United States. Participants in this study who identified as ethnically Albanian were either born and raised in or have parents who were born and raised in Albania or Kosovo, meaning they were either first-generation Americans or second-generation Americans. The written work is an oral history of these 15 participant’s personal experiences and stories, which also includes photographs to provide imagery to each participant’s account. The study found that the Albanian-American participants came to the United States for either economic, social, or political reasons. It also noted similar patterns and themes that have been separated into chapters on the Albanian value of hard work, the Albanian value of altruism, and the Albanian-American dual identity. The Conclusion summarizes the various ways in which the Albanian-American community in Arizona is ensuring the preservation of the heritage among younger generations who are becoming more Americanized. I conclude with two main ways that the Albanian-American community in Arizona are preserving their heritage: through Albanian language education initiatives, and cultural preservation initiatives and events hosted by the Albanian-American organizations of Arizona.
ContributorsJames, Tatum Lenore (Author) / Brown, Keith (Thesis director) / Sivak, Henry (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
For my thesis I wrote CoriolanU.S., a brand new play based on the storyline of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. It is in modern English and could stand alone as its own work if one was not familiar with the original play. It follows Coriolanus, a police officer who decides to run for mayor after becoming a hero in his city for helping quell a protest. Running against him is Brutus, a white, female neoliberal who represents a seemingly different, but sometimes similar, political side. Coriolanus is meant to be symbolic of the modern day Republican party and show how difficult it can be for people of color to interact with the political scene. The play also features Aufidius, a flawed but determined political activist in the city. The work deals with themes of immigration, over policing, and what people are willing to do to implement their version of a better world. In addition to writing this piece, I also directed and produced a production of it at a local arts collective; the show ran for three nights. I worked with a cast of twelve students for a period of seven weeks. We had rehearsals on the Tempe campus. When casting the play, I had to pay attention to race because many of the roles in my new play are written specifically for people of color. Thus, putting together this thesis involved research not only into adapting Shakespeare's work, but also research into adapting his work for people of color actors and audience. From start to finish, my thesis involved reading Shakespeare, conducting research, writing the play, getting feedback on it and rewriting parts, the rehearsal process of the play, and staging the production.
ContributorsCabral, Angelica (Author) / Sandoval, Mathew (Thesis director) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Comm (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
This thesis explores the dialogue between William Shakespeare, Central and Eastern Europe during the Soviet experiment, and the power of performance as protest. Politically inflected plays that are transnational appropriations of Shakespeare were aimed to subvert state-sanctioned censorship in order to enforce public socio-political interrogations of the Communist Party. My research first established a foundation for the site-specific historical and political context from which the interpretations stem, before examining the texts themselves as pieces of cultural resistance. I focused on four appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays, one being a rewrite of Richard III and three being rewrites of Hamlet: Nedyalko Yordanov’s The Murder of Gonzago from Bulgaria, Matei Visniec’s Richard III Will Not Take Place or Scenes from the Life of Vsevolod Meyerhold from Romania, Géza Bereményi’s Halmi, or the Prodigal Son from Hungary, and finally Boris Akunin’s Hamlet, A Version, a contemporary example of the lasting strength of Shakespearean appropriations. My research essentially followed the question of how countries from the Soviet bloc viewed its own contexts through the Shakespearean prism, as well as the phenomenon of political indictments being historically communicated through theater. I also examined how cultural representatives, for the purpose of this project being playwrights and dramatic performers, employ historically separate material to address the present issues. Ultimately, by researching pre- and post-communist dramas written within the architecture of Shakespeare, an understanding of the role and power of the artist in the political landscape can be attained.
ContributorsEllison, Amber Nicole (Author) / Orlich, Ileana (Thesis director) / Goggin, Maureen (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This paper explores whether American football player Colin Kaepernick and other athletes’ refusal in 2016 to acknowledge the national anthem symbolizes a form of nationalism in the United States. At first glance, the rising support of “un-American” acts that reject traditional patriotism would imply that American nationalism is faltering. If one observes the colloquial understanding of nationalism as extreme commitment to a country, this may be true. But after closer examination, the pattern instead depicts a polarization of two distinct forms of nationalism — ethnocentric nationalism and what I call multicultural nationalism, both intensifying away from each other.
As opposed to colloquial understanding, there is no standard scholarly definition of nationalism, but it is widely seen as zeal over an identity that strives to manifest into an organized state. Despite this minimal consensus, nationalism is usually equated with an ethnocentric conception of the nation-state, what I recognize to be ethnocentric nationalism, the commitment to a linguistically, racially, and culturally likeminded nation. I argue that this traditional, ethnocentric understanding of nationalism is only one interpretation of nationalism. Ethnocentric nationalism has and continues to be in tension with a more recently established interpretation of the nation, which I call multicultural nationalism: the commitment to a country’s principles rather than to its racial, cultural, and religious ties.
A common acceptance of difference is growing in the United States as shown by Kaepernick’s public support in the face of patriotic conformity. This perspective draws from the United States’ ideological roots that argue for one nation made up of many, e pluribus unum, so that foreign backgrounds should not just be accepted but also embraced to form a more diverse nation. The passion for a progressive, multicultural America can be translated into its own movement of multicultural nationalism. In this context, the support for Kaepernick’s actions no longer appears to represent increased dissent from the United States, but instead seems to be an attempt to challenge ethnocentric nationalism’s claim to the nation.
This paper will begin by contrasting the reactions to Kaepernick’s protest and to protests before him in order to contend that nationalism is no longer characterized by only ethnocentric tradition. I will analyze theoretical studies on nationalism to dispute this common understanding that nationalism is solely ethnocentric. I will argue that nationalism, rather, is the intense manifestation of a community’s identity within a political state; the identity of which can be either ethnocentric or multicultural. The Kaepernick ordeal will be used to signify the greater division in the American public over whether a multicultural or ethnocentric conception of the nation should be supported in the United States. Lastly, this paper will observe how the Kaepernick protest suggests multicultural nationalism’s viability in today’s politically progressive environment, and how multiculturalism should embrace nationalism to advance its platform.
As opposed to colloquial understanding, there is no standard scholarly definition of nationalism, but it is widely seen as zeal over an identity that strives to manifest into an organized state. Despite this minimal consensus, nationalism is usually equated with an ethnocentric conception of the nation-state, what I recognize to be ethnocentric nationalism, the commitment to a linguistically, racially, and culturally likeminded nation. I argue that this traditional, ethnocentric understanding of nationalism is only one interpretation of nationalism. Ethnocentric nationalism has and continues to be in tension with a more recently established interpretation of the nation, which I call multicultural nationalism: the commitment to a country’s principles rather than to its racial, cultural, and religious ties.
A common acceptance of difference is growing in the United States as shown by Kaepernick’s public support in the face of patriotic conformity. This perspective draws from the United States’ ideological roots that argue for one nation made up of many, e pluribus unum, so that foreign backgrounds should not just be accepted but also embraced to form a more diverse nation. The passion for a progressive, multicultural America can be translated into its own movement of multicultural nationalism. In this context, the support for Kaepernick’s actions no longer appears to represent increased dissent from the United States, but instead seems to be an attempt to challenge ethnocentric nationalism’s claim to the nation.
This paper will begin by contrasting the reactions to Kaepernick’s protest and to protests before him in order to contend that nationalism is no longer characterized by only ethnocentric tradition. I will analyze theoretical studies on nationalism to dispute this common understanding that nationalism is solely ethnocentric. I will argue that nationalism, rather, is the intense manifestation of a community’s identity within a political state; the identity of which can be either ethnocentric or multicultural. The Kaepernick ordeal will be used to signify the greater division in the American public over whether a multicultural or ethnocentric conception of the nation should be supported in the United States. Lastly, this paper will observe how the Kaepernick protest suggests multicultural nationalism’s viability in today’s politically progressive environment, and how multiculturalism should embrace nationalism to advance its platform.
ContributorsFite, Owen Gunehame (Author) / Suk, Mina (Thesis director) / Voorhees, Matthew (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor, Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05