Matching Items (11)
Description
MOVE was a choreographic project that investigated content in conjunction with the creative process. The yearlong collaborative creative process utilized improvisational and compositional experiments to research the movement potential of the human body, as well as movement's ability to be an emotional catalyst. Multiple showings were held to receive feedback from a variety of viewers. Production elements were designed in conjunction with the development of the evening-length dance work. As a result of discussion and research, several process-revealing sections were created to provide clear relationships between pedestrian/daily functional movement and technical movement. Each section within MOVE addressed movement as an emotional catalyst, resulting in a variety of emotional textures. The sections were placed in a non-linear structure in order for the audience to have the space to create their own connections between concepts. Community was developed in rehearsal via touch/weight sharing, and translated to the performance of MOVE via a communal, instinctive approach to the performance of the work. Community was also created between the movers and the audience via the design of the performance space. The production elements all revolved around the human body, and offered different viewpoints into various body parts. The choreographer, designers, and movers all participated in the creation of the production elements, resulting in a clear understanding of MOVE by the entire community involved. The overall creation, presentation, and reflection of MOVE was a view into the choreographer's growth as a dance artist, and her values of people and movement.
ContributorsPeterson, Britta Joy (Author) / Fitzgerald, Mary (Thesis advisor) / Schupp, Karen (Committee member) / Mcneal Hunt, Diane (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation addresses the tendency among some disability scholars to overlook the importance of congenital deformity and disability in the pre-modern West. It argues that congenital deformity and disability deviated so greatly from able-bodied norms that they have played a pivotal role in the history of Western Civilization. In particular, it explores the evolution of two seemingly separate, but ultimately related, ideas from classical antiquity through the First World War: (1) the idea that there was some type of significance, whether supernatural or natural, to the existence of congenital deformity and (2) the idea that the existence of disabled people has resulted in a disability problem for western societies because many disabilities can hinder labor productivity to such an extent that large numbers of the disabled cannot survive without taking precious resources from their more productive, able-bodied counterparts. It also looks at how certain categories of disabled people, including, monsters, hunchbacks, cripples, the blind, the deaf and dumb, and dwarfs, which signified aesthetic and functional deviations from able-bodied norms, often reinforced able-bodied prejudices against the disabled.
ContributorsParry, Matthew (Author) / Fuchs, Rachel (Thesis advisor) / Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava (Committee member) / Wright, Johnson K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In 1890, the State of Nevada built the Stewart Indian School on a parcel of land three miles south of Carson City, Nevada, and then sold the campus to the federal government. The Stewart Indian School operated as the only non-reservation Indian boarding school in Nevada until 1980 when the federal government closed the campus. Faced with the challenge of assimilating Native peoples into Anglo society after the conclusion of the Indian wars and the confinement of Indian nations on reservations, the federal government created boarding schools. Policymakers believed that in one generation they could completely eliminate Indian culture by removing children from their homes and educating them in boarding schools. The history of the Stewart Indian School from 1890 to 1940 is the story of a dynamic and changing institution. Only Washoe, Northern Paiute, and Western Shoshone students attended Stewart for the first decade, but over the next forty years, children from over sixty tribal groups enrolled at the school. They arrived from three dozen reservations and 335 different hometowns across the West. During this period, Stewart evolved from a repressive and exploitive institution, into a school that embodied the reform agenda of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s. This dissertation uses archival and ethnographic material to explain how the federal government's agenda failed. Rather than destroying Native culture, Stewart students and Nevada's Indian communities used the skills taught at the school to their advantage and became tribal leaders during the 1930s. This dissertation explores the individual and collective bodies of Stewart students. The body is a social construction constantly being fashioned by the intersectional forces of race, class, and gender. Each chapter explores the different ways the Stewart Indian School and the federal government tried to transform the students' bodies through their physical appearance, the built environment, health education, vocational training, and extracurricular activities such as band and sports.
ContributorsThompson, Bonnie (Author) / Iverson, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Thesis advisor) / Green, Monica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
As a form of bodily modification, female circumcision has generated unprecedented debates across the medical community, social sciences disciplines, governmental
on-governmental agencies and activists and others. The various terminologies used to refer to it attest to differences in knowledge systems, perceptions, and lived experiences emerging from divergent cultures and ideologies. In the last two decades, these debates have evolved from a local matter to a global health concern and human rights issue, coinciding with the largest influx of African refugees to the Western nations. Various forms of female circumcision are reported in 28 countries in the African Continent; Somalia has one of the highest prevalence of female circumcision and the most severe type. The practice is antithetical to Western values and poses an ideological challenge to the construction of the normal body, its bodily processes and its existential being-in-the-world. From the global health perspectives, female circumcision is deemed to be a health hazard--especially during childbirth--though the scientific evidence is inconclusive from studies conducted in post-migration. Yet, Somali refugee women have higher childbearing disparities in host nations, including the U.S. They are also perceived as difficult patients and resistant to obstetrics interventions. Although their FGC status and "cultural" differences are often cited, there is a lack of adequate explanations as to why and how these factors shape patient-provider interactions and affect outcomes. The objectives of this dissertation study are to quantitatively and qualitatively explore these questions within and between Somali refugee women and their healthcare providers in Arizona. Two theoretical frameworks and methods--culture consensus and embodiment-- are applied to identify variations in childbearing knowledge and to explore how the cultural phenomenon of circumcision is subjectively and intersubjectively embodied in the context of childbearing. Culture consensus questionnaire (N=174) and ethnographic interviews (N=40) using phenomenology approach were conducted. Analyses suggest cross-cultural disagreement hinged on: faith in science versus God, pregnancy/childbirth interventions, language challenges, and control-resistance issues; intra-cultural disagreement underscores that Somalis are not culturally homogenous group. Preconceptions of female circumcision body as a cultural phenomenon has different and conflicting meanings that may adversely impact patient-provider interactions and outcomes.
on-governmental agencies and activists and others. The various terminologies used to refer to it attest to differences in knowledge systems, perceptions, and lived experiences emerging from divergent cultures and ideologies. In the last two decades, these debates have evolved from a local matter to a global health concern and human rights issue, coinciding with the largest influx of African refugees to the Western nations. Various forms of female circumcision are reported in 28 countries in the African Continent; Somalia has one of the highest prevalence of female circumcision and the most severe type. The practice is antithetical to Western values and poses an ideological challenge to the construction of the normal body, its bodily processes and its existential being-in-the-world. From the global health perspectives, female circumcision is deemed to be a health hazard--especially during childbirth--though the scientific evidence is inconclusive from studies conducted in post-migration. Yet, Somali refugee women have higher childbearing disparities in host nations, including the U.S. They are also perceived as difficult patients and resistant to obstetrics interventions. Although their FGC status and "cultural" differences are often cited, there is a lack of adequate explanations as to why and how these factors shape patient-provider interactions and affect outcomes. The objectives of this dissertation study are to quantitatively and qualitatively explore these questions within and between Somali refugee women and their healthcare providers in Arizona. Two theoretical frameworks and methods--culture consensus and embodiment-- are applied to identify variations in childbearing knowledge and to explore how the cultural phenomenon of circumcision is subjectively and intersubjectively embodied in the context of childbearing. Culture consensus questionnaire (N=174) and ethnographic interviews (N=40) using phenomenology approach were conducted. Analyses suggest cross-cultural disagreement hinged on: faith in science versus God, pregnancy/childbirth interventions, language challenges, and control-resistance issues; intra-cultural disagreement underscores that Somalis are not culturally homogenous group. Preconceptions of female circumcision body as a cultural phenomenon has different and conflicting meanings that may adversely impact patient-provider interactions and outcomes.
ContributorsFawcett, Lubayna (Author) / Maupin,, Jonathan N. (Thesis advisor) / Brewis Slade, Alexandra (Committee member) / Johnson-Agbakwu, Crista E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the role of bodies and bones and the politics of display at memorial sites, as well as the construction of space, I explore how practices of statecraft often rely on an exclusionary logic which renders certain lives politically qualified and others beyond the realm of qualified politics. I draw on the Derridean notion of hauntology to explore how the line between life and death itself is a political construction which sustains particular performances of statecraft. Utilizing ethnographic field work and discourse analysis, I trace the relationship between a logic of haunting and statecraft at sites of memory in three cases. Rwandan genocide memorialization is often centered on bodies and bones, displayed as evidence of the genocide. Yet, this display invokes the specter of genocide in order to legitimate specific policymaking. Memorialization of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border offers an opportunity to explore practices that grieve ungrievable lives, and how memorialization can posit a resistance to the bordering mechanisms of statecraft. 9/11 memorialization offers an interesting case because of the way in which bodies were vanished and spaces reconfigured. Using the question of vanishing as a frame, this final case explores how statecraft is dependent on vanishing: the making absent of something so as to render something else present. Several main conclusions and implications are drawn from the cases. First, labeling certain lives as politically unqualified can sustain certain conceptualizations of the state. Second, paying attention to the way statecraft is a haunted performance, being haunted by the things we perhaps ethically should be haunted by, can re-conceptualize the way International Relations thinks about concepts such as security, citizenship, and power. Finally, memorialization, while seemingly innocuous, is really a space for political contestation that can, if done in certain ways, really implicate the high politics of security conventional wisdom.
ContributorsAuchter, Jessica (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines the influential relationships between popular culture depictions of superheroes and the substantive, malleable, and real possibilities of human body transformation. Cultural discourses condition and constrain the ways in which identity and bodies are formed and expressed. This includes popular culture texts that, through their evocative narratives, provide guidance or solutions for dealing with real world problems. From the perspective of communication studies, this project involves examining ways people project and perform fantastic future versions of humanity in relation to popular culture artifacts, like superheroes, but also examines how such projections are borne out of and get expressed through our everyday, less than extraordinary experiences. Key theoretical tensions regarding identity and culture are elucidated. These tensions are then developed discursively into a genealogy of body transcendence that features the historicizing of social functions to determine from where such tensions and changes manifest, and how they ultimately affect us. Several key artifacts are introduced to help inform the investigation, including eight specific superhero body types that provide an ideal perspective through which transformative power can be observed. The superhero discourse is particularly relevant because it offers a utopian/dystopian tension regarding how the splendor and seduction of the discourse materializes in both liberating and problematic ways. Another aspect of this embodied approach involves adopting the alternate superhero persona of Ethnography Man. By undertaking my own identity transformations, I am better able to investigate spaces that encourage such identity slippage and play, such as the annual San Diego Comic Con International. The once strongly held perception that our bodies are fixed and stable is fast disappearing. In bridging the body with culture through a genealogy, it becomes much more apparent how body transformations will continue to manifest in the future. Therefore, from the experiences and analysis contained herein, implications regarding powerful discursive conditions and constraints that influence our ability to change take form in revealing, problematic, and sometimes unexpected ways. More specifically, implications of who has power, how it is exercised, and the effects of power will materialize and indicate whether or not everyday humans have the potential to become superheroes.
ContributorsBoras, Scott Daniel (Author) / McDonald, Kelly (Thesis advisor) / Goodall, Jr., H. L. (Committee member) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study explored the perspectives and experiences of eight women active within a particular location of the collective social media landscape. One aspect of the research centered around critiquing mainstream media diets for encouraging fat stigma and deepening the negative effects of stereotyping larger bodies. The research questions centered around transgressive media diets, specifically those that were body positive, and focused on if they could help to eradicate fat stigma and educate the masses on false stereotypes. To examine this, eight plus-size fashion bloggers and/or plus-size models were interviewed following a semi-structured format. These women, as bloggers and Instagrammers with a strong presence in the plus-size fashion industry, were both content producers as well as consumers, and their personal narratives enabled the study to better understand the complex interconnections between production and consumption, self-expression and the politics of self-representation, the cooptation of these self-representations by profit-oriented media interest, and how commodification shapes the transgressive potential of these representations. The research also found that many content creators came to transgressive media diets because they saw a lack of representation and decided that they must make that representation for themselves. The study also examined what community building meant within the porous landscape of social media platforms and the relationship between identity building and community building as social processes. Many of the participants brought up examples of fat discrimination yet many defined themselves as "confident" or "badass", thus finding ways to empower themselves despite the pressure of societal norms. Some of this empowerment came from finding a community online. Finally, these plus-size models and fashion bloggers moved through a thin ideal industry by demanding and being examples of diversity.
ContributorsValentine, Erin (Author) / Katsulis, Yasmina (Thesis advisor) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / McGibbney, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The majority of trust research has focused on the benefits trust can have for individual actors, institutions, and organizations. This “optimistic bias” is particularly evident in work focused on institutional trust, where concepts such as procedural justice, shared values, and moral responsibility have gained prominence. But trust in institutions may not be exclusively good. We reveal implications for the “dark side” of institutional trust by reviewing relevant theories and empirical research that can contribute to a more holistic understanding. We frame our discussion by suggesting there may be a “Goldilocks principle” of institutional trust, where trust that is too low (typically the focus) or too high (not usually considered by trust researchers) may be problematic. The chapter focuses on the issue of too-high trust and processes through which such too-high trust might emerge. Specifically, excessive trust might result from external, internal, and intersecting external-internal processes. External processes refer to the actions institutions take that affect public trust, while internal processes refer to intrapersonal factors affecting a trustor’s level of trust. We describe how the beneficial psychological and behavioral outcomes of trust can be mitigated or circumvented through these processes and highlight the implications of a “darkest” side of trust when they intersect. We draw upon research on organizations and legal, governmental, and political systems to demonstrate the dark side of trust in different contexts. The conclusion outlines directions for future research and encourages researchers to consider the ethical nuances of studying how to increase institutional trust.
ContributorsNeal, Tess M.S. (Author) / Shockley, Ellie (Author) / Schilke, Oliver (Author)
Created2016
Description
So far, love and desire have preoccupied scholarly inquiries into the emotional landscape in late imperial China. However, the disproportional focus diminishes the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the emotional experiences during this period. Alternatively, this dissertation seeks to contextualize the understudied emotion of anger and uses it as a different entry point into the emotional vista of late imperial China. It explores the stimuli that give rise to anger in late imperial Chinese fiction and drama, as well as the ways in which these literary works configure the regulation of that emotion. This dissertation examines a wide range of primary materials, such as deliverance plays, historical romance, domestic novels, and so forth. It situates these literary texts in reference to Quanzhen Daoist teachings, orthodox Confucian thought, and medical discourse, which prescribe the rootedness of anger in religious trials, ritual improprieties, moral dubiousness, and corporeal responses. Simultaneously, this dissertation reveals how fiction and drama contest the presumed righteousness of anger and complicate the parameters construed by the above-mentioned texts through editorial intervention, paratextual negotiation, and cross-genre adaptation. It further teases out the gendering of anger, particularly within the discourse on the four obsessions of drunkenness, lust, avarice, and qi. The emotion’s gendered dimension bears upon the approaches that literary imagination adopts to regulate anger, including patience, violence, and silence. The body of either the angry person or the target of his or her fury stands out as the paramount site upon which the diverse ways of coping with the emotion impinge. Ultimately, this dissertation enriches the current understanding of the emotional experiences in late imperial China and demonstrates anger as a prominent nodal point upon which various strands of discourse converge.
ContributorsXin, Zhaokun (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Thesis advisor) / Oh, Young Kyun (Committee member) / Hedberg, William C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Eating disorders are complex psychiatric illnesses often resulting in severe disturbances in eating behaviors and body-image related thoughts. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, nearly 30 million Americans have an eating disorder at a given time (2017). There are various types of eating disorders, the most common being anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), and binge-eating disorder (BED). Moreover, eating disorders are diagnosed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
This review paper analyzes the current research on eating disorders. Some potential causes of eating disorders include the media, familial influence, and peers (Hogan & Strasburger, 2008). Also, college students are a high-risk population for eating disorders, with athletes and nutrition-related students being more high-risk than others (Arnett, 2004). The potential warning signs of an eating disorder may include (but are not limited to) weight fluctuations, excessive exercise, avoidance of food/functions with food, skipping meals, and evidence of disordered eating behaviors (such as purging) (2017). Moreover, acute medical complications may include amenorrhea (in females), dizziness, dry skin, brittle nails, unhealthy gums and teeth, lanugo, hair loss, muscle weakness, stomach cramps, poor wound healing (2017). Chronic complications of eating disorder behaviors may include osteoporosis, infertility, poor oral health, and cardiovascular abnormalities (2017). Furthermore, this paper also outlines how I have spread awareness of the topic at Arizona State University.
This review paper analyzes the current research on eating disorders. Some potential causes of eating disorders include the media, familial influence, and peers (Hogan & Strasburger, 2008). Also, college students are a high-risk population for eating disorders, with athletes and nutrition-related students being more high-risk than others (Arnett, 2004). The potential warning signs of an eating disorder may include (but are not limited to) weight fluctuations, excessive exercise, avoidance of food/functions with food, skipping meals, and evidence of disordered eating behaviors (such as purging) (2017). Moreover, acute medical complications may include amenorrhea (in females), dizziness, dry skin, brittle nails, unhealthy gums and teeth, lanugo, hair loss, muscle weakness, stomach cramps, poor wound healing (2017). Chronic complications of eating disorder behaviors may include osteoporosis, infertility, poor oral health, and cardiovascular abnormalities (2017). Furthermore, this paper also outlines how I have spread awareness of the topic at Arizona State University.
ContributorsDaryanani, Anita Sonu (Author) / Kniskern, Megan (Thesis director) / Vargas, Jenna (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05