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Ginanaandawi\u27idizomin: Anishinaabe Intergenerational Healing Models of Resistance
Get PDFSince the early 2000s, the opioid epidemic has had a devastating sweep across Indian Country. The White Earth nation declared the epidemic as a public health emergency back in 2011. Since then White Earth has developed community-based harm reduction and culturally grounded models of intervention for substance use disorder that continue to influence Native Nations across the U.S. This project centers on Anishinaabe approaches to the ongoing opioid public health crisis but also elaborates on Anishinaabe forms of healing and resistance. My primary method was conducting oral histories with White Earth community youth workers and advocates. My research project asks: what are the cultural frameworks and practices that inform and shape substance abuse interventions in White Earth, specifically for Indigenous youth? My research and interviews revealed that culturally informed, intersectional approaches to Indigenous wellness and healing— healing across generations—require continual resistance to ongoing settler-colonial and white supremacist, heteropatriarchal violence
Protected Places: Comparing Valuations of Public Lands in U.S. Conservation Legislation
Get PDFAcross American history, the federal government has chosen to protect over 600 million acres, nearly a quarter of the country’s total land acreage, as public lands. This paper considers the process of valuation — where institutions organize competing value frameworks to determine worth — and how new cultural formations prompt a new process of valuation. Through a comparative study of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Great American Outdoors Act of 2020, this paper analyzes which values justify the protection of public lands. I find that public lands are valued in their use for humans, which stems from their designation as protected. In the Wilderness Act, public lands were worth protecting because of their separation from the industrial landscape; in the Great American Outdoors Act, this worth came from the land’s integration into the post-industrial landscape. These acts represent two starkly different cultural formations, and, therefore, two distinct justifications for the worth of public lands
Beyond Vegan: Producer and Restaurant Involvement in the Mainstreaming of Plant-Based Meat
Get PDFInsights from organizational and economic sociology predict the emergence of new product categories is not simply a matter of developing something novel, but also the result of a cultural process making claims about these products. The recent pursuit of sustainable consumption exemplifies one of these processes, linking ethical qualities and claims to create connections between products and the people who consume them. Plant-based meat, as an emerging market contextualized by the ideas of ethical consumption surrounding the broader plant-based food movement, provides a unique opportunity to explore how lifestyle movements and novel ideas result in the creation of new product categories. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with plant-based meat producers and restaurants that serve these products, this project explores the emergence of plant-based meat as a set of products and as a market. I find that there is variation in how plant-based meat producers position their products based on the extent to which they connect their products to broader social movements. Despite these differences in production, restaurants understand these different products as belonging to the larger plant-based meat category and present them not on the ethical basis of producers but by using different standards of judgment based on how the restaurants position themselves to their consumers. Together, producers and restaurants engage in an interactive process to generate and integrate new products in the act of mainstreaming plant-based meat beyond an ethical project
Theater as National Memorial: How Angels in America Remembers
Get PDFApplying a framework of audience experience and scenographic analysis, this paper explores the connections between public memorials and performance. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. uses scenography to present itself as a “linking object,” gaining its meaning through audience projection. Millennium Approaches—part one of Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—produced at Macalester College in 2021, also functions as a public memorial. Its scenography situates the play in a heightened, and specifically American, space and time. It becomes a receptacle for audience memory, reconstructs that memory, and ultimately reconstructs ideas of American nationhood
Abolish Copaganda!: An ACAB Analysis of \u3ci\u3eSisters\u3c/i\u3e and \u3ci\u3eThe Wicker Man\u3c/i\u3e and the Ramifications of Abolitionist Spectatorship
Get PDFAfter the 2020 Twin Cities Uprising, the term “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) surged in popularity though it has been in circulation for nearly a century. Applying an ACAB lens to films suggests an intentional approach to spectatorship by integrating a critical consciousness about the systemic racism that the police embody. Portrayals of police are an omnipresent occurrence in media of all kinds and often function to cultivate trust in their authority. Brian DePalma’s 1973 slasher Sisters and Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man exhibit notable anti-police sentiment that may feel unexpectedly radical for a pre-Uprising world. Using a framework grounded in cultivation theory, discourse analysis, and abolitionist ideologies, I analyze these two 70s horror films to determine what has and has not changed in police terror and anti-police discourse in the US, almost 50 years later. This project interrogates how anti-police messaging can affect spectators’ beliefs and may help to build a world that is free of police and other white supremacist institutions. Film can generate communities that are aligned through both spectatorship and antiracist values and can be used as a tool to achieve an abolitionist future
Decentering the Gendered Whiteness of the Iconic American Cowboy: Media, Performance, and Race in the Rodeo World
Get PDFThroughout American history, cowboys have been a cultural fascination and iconic symbol of strength and masculinity. To this day, cowboys are readily present in popular culture and imagery, but are nearly always portrayed as an exclusively white character. This paper explores the historical inaccuracies of this portrayal, while decentering the whiteness of the cowboy by discussing media, performance, and race. Through this, case studies such as the Bill Pickett Rodeo, 21st century popular images of black cowboys, and the presence of horses in recent protests come to light as alternative images for a new American cowboy emerging in American culture. These images simultaneously represent a fruitful yet rarely discussed history, as well as a changing perception of who belongs as a cowboy in America
Driving to S-Town
No full textDespite podcasts’ rising popularity over the last twenty years, literary scholars are only beginning to focus on their affective potential as multimedia texts. In this thesis, I argue that even mainstream podcasts are productively intertwined with queer theories and aesthetics of belonging. Using the 2017 podcast S-Town as my case study, I examine the aural aesthetics of queer failure, temporality, archives, embodiment, and desire as key elements in this complex medium. Putting these theories and aesthetics into practice, I describe my process of research-creation and present a podcast I made about my road trip to Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town’s place of origin.
The full text of this honor\u27s project can be found in DigitalCommons@Mac
Finite-Difference-Time-Domain Simulation of Ultrafast Experiments
Get PDFThe Finite-Difference-Time-Domain (FDTD) method is a numerical method that calculates electric fields or magnetic fields by interleaving them in space and time. Using a python package called “MEEP”, I was able to write optical simulations of ultrafast experiments, especially the Terahertz Pump-Probe experiments. The goal of this project was to use FDTD simulation to measure the transmission of an electro-magnetic pulse passing through a thin film of conducting material on a dielectric substrate in order to study the characteristic conductivity of potential solar cell materials
