Matching Items (85)
Description
Personal histories are deeply rooted into my way of existence, far before my brain became ready to challenge such notions. While Americans have been witnesses to the splintering effects of colonialism and patriarchy on socialization, I ask two questions: (1) Where to stand within a society that promotes the marginalization of both women and brown bodies? And (2) how to combat these harsh realities and protect those most affected?
Being both Black and woman, I decided to embark upon a quest of self-actualization in this document. “Ain’t She Sweet: A Critical Choreographic Study of Identity & Intersectionality,” tracks the creative process and concept design behind my applied project for the Master of Fine Arts in Dance. Developed in extensive rehearsals, community engagement, journaling processes, and lived experiences, the physical product, “Ain’t She Sweet,” explored concepts such as identity, socialization, oppression, decolonization, sexuality, and civil rights. The chapters within this document illustrate the depth of the research conducted to form the evening-length production and an analysis of the completed work.
Being both Black and woman, I decided to embark upon a quest of self-actualization in this document. “Ain’t She Sweet: A Critical Choreographic Study of Identity & Intersectionality,” tracks the creative process and concept design behind my applied project for the Master of Fine Arts in Dance. Developed in extensive rehearsals, community engagement, journaling processes, and lived experiences, the physical product, “Ain’t She Sweet,” explored concepts such as identity, socialization, oppression, decolonization, sexuality, and civil rights. The chapters within this document illustrate the depth of the research conducted to form the evening-length production and an analysis of the completed work.
ContributorsCarney, Laina Reese (Author) / Schupp, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Weitz, Rose (Committee member) / White, Marcus (Committee member) / Fitzgerald, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
It’s Not That Simple: A Complex Journey of an MFA Applied Project discusses the experience of graduate student, Molly W. Schenck. Schenck’s applied project, It’s Not That Simple, was an interdisciplinary dance theatre performance piece that challenges rape culture on college campuses. While the focus of the applied project was this performance, it was the obstacles and highlights that were related to the project that made the journey memorable. This paper will discuss the history and evolution of It’s Not That Simple, the creative process, the research, the trajectory of the project, and reflections on the journey.
ContributorsSchenck, Molly W (Author) / Schupp, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Kaplan, Robert (Committee member) / Sterling, Pamela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This document analyzes the use of the Principles of Design within the applied project It’s My Party, a multimedia dance theatre production, as a means to address and overcome the stigmatization of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Through the orchestration of dance, music, props, acting, video, and spoken word, this interdisciplinary work investigates how these production elements synthesize into a transformative theatrical experience for audiences. Outlined in this document is the eight month design process. The process included concept design, assessing, processing, customizing the message, script development, rehearsals, and video production, and concluded with an evening length production. Analyzed through the structural narrative of The Hero’s Journey, this autobiographic work details the author’s HIV-positive (HIV+) coming out story from a restorative narrative perspective. By addressing the subject of HIV from a contemporary point-of-view, this project strives to reencode the troubling associations affiliated with HIV with an empowered and hopeful understanding.
ContributorsAlvarez, Ricardo (Author) / Schupp, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Magenta, Muriel (Committee member) / Rajko, Jessica (Committee member) / Standley, Eileen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This document outlines the formation and development of Worth the Weight, or WTW, a platform that seeks to sustain the Breaking community in Phoenix, Arizona and connect the generations by bringing them together in a newly and never before seen event in Breaking, an all weight class and division competition. In the last five to ten years there has been a noticeable decline in the local Breaking community, in part due to the introduction of new dance categories, economic and social changes, the cross over of academia and traditional studios in Phoenix; all combining to create a lack of longevity in veterans of the culture to pass on the tools of the trade to the next generation.
WTW is an event that occurs monthly for three consecutive months followed by a month off, totaling nine events and three seasons per calendar year. At each event dancers go head to head in battle in a single elimination style bracket, where they will add a loss or win to their overall season record. The goals of WTW are self-empowerment as well as ownership and investment in the community by those involved through participation in both the event and the planning process; all built on a foundation of trust within the Breaking community. This researcher has thirty years of direct involvement in the Breaking culture with twenty-two of those years as a practitioner in Phoenix, Arizona and co-founder of Furious Styles Crew, Arizona’s longest running Breaking crew. The development of WTW was drawn from this experience along with interviews and observations of Breaking communities worldwide. WTW intends to provide a reliable and consistent outlet during a time of instant gratification, allowing a space for self-discovery and the development of tools to be applied beyond movement. It is hoped that the format of WTW will be a model that can be adapted by other Breaking communities worldwide.
WTW is an event that occurs monthly for three consecutive months followed by a month off, totaling nine events and three seasons per calendar year. At each event dancers go head to head in battle in a single elimination style bracket, where they will add a loss or win to their overall season record. The goals of WTW are self-empowerment as well as ownership and investment in the community by those involved through participation in both the event and the planning process; all built on a foundation of trust within the Breaking community. This researcher has thirty years of direct involvement in the Breaking culture with twenty-two of those years as a practitioner in Phoenix, Arizona and co-founder of Furious Styles Crew, Arizona’s longest running Breaking crew. The development of WTW was drawn from this experience along with interviews and observations of Breaking communities worldwide. WTW intends to provide a reliable and consistent outlet during a time of instant gratification, allowing a space for self-discovery and the development of tools to be applied beyond movement. It is hoped that the format of WTW will be a model that can be adapted by other Breaking communities worldwide.
ContributorsMagaña, Jorge Edson (Author) / Vissicaro, Pegge (Thesis advisor) / Schupp, Karen (Committee member) / Gabbert, Kenneth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Microzooplankton, mainly heterotrophic unicellular eukaryotes (protists), play an important role in the cycling of nutrients and carbon in the sunlit (euphotic) zone of the world’s oceans. Few studies have investigated the microzooplankton communities in oligotrophic (low-nutrient) oceans, such as the Sargasso Sea. In this study, I investigate the seasonal and interannual dynamics of the heterotrophic protists, particularly the nanoflagellate, dinoflagellate, and ciliate communities, at the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series site and surrounding areas in the Sargasso Sea. In addition, I test the hypotheses that the community is controlled though bottom-up and top-down processes. To evaluate the bottom-up hypothesis, that the protists are controlled by prey availability, I test whether the protist abundance co-varies with the abundance of potential prey groups. Predation experiments with zooplankton were conducted and analyzed to test top-down control on the protists. I found distinguishable trends in biomass of the different protist groups between years and seasons. Nanoflagellates and dinoflagellates had higher biomass during the summer (28 ± 5 mgC/m2 and 44 ± 21 mgC/m2) than during the winter (17 ± 8 mgC/m2 and 30 ± 11 mgC/m2). Ciliates displayed the opposite trend with a higher average biomass in the winter (15 ± 9 mgC/m2) than in summer (5 ± 2 mgC/m2). In testing my bottom-up hypothesis, I found weak but significant positive grazer/prey relationships that indicate that nanoflagellates graze on picophytoplankton in winter and on the pico-cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus in summer. I found evidence that ciliates graze on Synechococcus in winter. I found weak but significant negative correlation between dinoflagellates and Prochlorococcus in summer. The predation experiments testing the top-down hypothesis did not show a clear top-down control, yet other studies in the region carried out during our investigation period support predation of the protists by the zooplankton. Overall, my results suggest a combination of bottom-up and top-down controls on these heterotrophic protists, however, further investigation is necessary to reveal the detailed trophic dynamics of these communities.
ContributorsWolverton, Megan (Author) / Neuer, Susanne (Thesis advisor) / Hartnett, Hillary (Committee member) / Elser, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This study intended to identify what children's perceptions and experiences are with contact improvisation and how these experiences relate to their education; their understanding of being an individual within a community; and their physical, social, and intellectual development. An interpretive phenomenological research model was used, because this study aimed to understand and interpret the children's experience with contact improvisation in order to find meaning relating to the form's possible benefits. The research was conducted over the course of ten weeks, which included classes, interviews, discussions, questionnaires, and journals. This study showed that contact improvisation empowered the children, opened the children's awareness, developed critical thinking, and created a deeper understanding and trust of the self and relationships formed within the class. The experiences found through teaching contact improvisation to these children showed that there are benefits to teaching children the form.
ContributorsCrissman, Angel (Author) / Schupp, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Dyer, Becky (Committee member) / O'Donnell, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
No Doors: A Personal Exploration of Movement and Technology, details the interdisciplinary strategies that were used in the making of a series of interactive/reactive/immersive (IRI) installations that drew audiences into an experience and encouraged active observation and/or participation. The interdisciplinary IRI installations described in this document combined movement, sculpture, production design, and various forms of media and technology with environments in which participants had agency. In the process of developing this work, the artist considered several concepts and practices: site-specific, various technologies, real-time processing, participant experience, embodied exploration, and hidden activity. Throughout the creative process, the researcher conducted a series of four focus labs in which a small audience was invited to engage with the work as a way of gathering data about the effectiveness of the installations in facilitating active audience observation and/or participation. The data collected after each focus lab informed the revision of the work in preparation for the next focus lab, with the ultimate result being the production of a final exhibition of five interdisciplinary IRI installations. The installations detailed in this document were loosely based on five elements: water, fire, air, earth, and spirit.
ContributorsMcCaman, Sharon (Author) / Schupp, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Rajko, Jessica (Committee member) / Pinholster, Jacob (Committee member) / Tinapple, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The greatest barrier to understanding how life interacts with its environment is the complexity in which biology operates. In this work, I present experimental designs, analysis methods, and visualization techniques to overcome the challenges of deciphering complex biological datasets. First, I examine an iron limitation transcriptome of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 using a new methodology. Until now, iron limitation in experiments of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 gene expression has been achieved through media chelation. Notably, chelation also reduces the bioavailability of other metals, whereas naturally occurring low iron settings likely result from a lack of iron influx and not as a result of chelation. The overall metabolic trends of previous studies are well-characterized but within those trends is significant variability in single gene expression responses. I compare previous transcriptomics analyses with our protocol that limits the addition of bioavailable iron to growth media to identify consistent gene expression signals resulting from iron limitation. Second, I describe a novel method of improving the reliability of centroid-linkage clustering results. The size and complexity of modern sequencing datasets often prohibit constructing distance matrices, which prevents the use of many common clustering algorithms. Centroid-linkage circumvents the need for a distance matrix, but has the adverse effect of producing input-order dependent results. In this chapter, I describe a method of cluster edge counting across iterated centroid-linkage results and reconstructing aggregate clusters from a ranked edge list without a distance matrix and input-order dependence. Finally, I introduce dendritic heat maps, a new figure type that visualizes heat map responses through expanding and contracting sequence clustering specificities. Heat maps are useful for comparing data across a range of possible states. However, data binning is sensitive to clustering cutoffs which are often arbitrarily introduced by researchers and can substantially change the heat map response of any single data point. With an understanding of how the architectural elements of dendrograms and heat maps affect data visualization, I have integrated their salient features to create a figure type aimed at viewing multiple levels of clustering cutoffs, allowing researchers to better understand the effects of environment on metabolism or phylogenetic lineages.
ContributorsKellom, Matthew (Author) / Raymond, Jason (Thesis advisor) / Anbar, Ariel (Committee member) / Elser, James (Committee member) / Shock, Everett (Committee member) / Walker, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The purpose of this qualitative study was to design and assess a dance pedagogy curriculum intended to cultivate private sector dance educators’ somatic perception. Research questions were framed to understand the nature of knowledge encouraged by the curriculum and each educator's experience of knowledge formation and application to each participant's pedagogical context. The study was conducted in four overlapping stages: 1) Philosophical inquiry, 2) Curricular design, 3) Limited case-study, and 4) Data analysis. The stages employed mix methodologies that included: action research, autobiographical reflection, ethnographic and phenomenological approaches. The limited case-study explored two private-sector dance educators’ experiences of the curriculum. Data collected during the limited case-study conducted with the dance educators revealed thematic clusters about the nature, cultivation, expression, and experience of somatic perception. The themes suggest that the nature of somatic perception reflects an individual educators’ lived experiences that shape values, movement patterns, and phrasing. The expression of somatic perception aligns with the individual educator’s narrative and was evident in patterns and phrasing of movement and learning. The cultivation of somatic perception is an ongoing process that requires active engagement to acquire, assimilate, and integrate the knowledge of content, context, self, and student. Finally, somatic perception manifested itself in each educator’s unique expression of confidence, empathy, creativity, and spontaneity resulting in skillful enactment of knowledge within an immediate pedagogical context.
ContributorsWisniewski, Stacy (Author) / Dyer, Becky (Thesis advisor) / Schupp, Karen (Committee member) / Hannah, Christina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
ContributorsLandes, Heather (Performer) / Schupp, Karen (Performer) / Creviston, Hannah (Performer) / Micklich, Albie (Performer) / Aspnes, Lynne (Performer) / Schuring, Martin (Performer) / Gardner, Joshua (Performer) / Kocour, Mike (Performer) / Hedquist, Ben (Performer) / Moio, Dom (Performer) / Landschoot, Thomas (Performer) / Kuo, Yi-Chun (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-02-18