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From the Screen to the Self: How Feminist Video Transforms the Spectator
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/0003bac6-abd4-44cb-93c0-49813fb85f33/thumb/128.jpgIn this thesis, I focus on works of French, feminist video activism from the 1970s and 1980s and the different techniques used in order to transform the viewer’s experience. I then argue that this transformation provides the viewer with an alternative way of experiencing reality that exists outside of patriarchal power structures and norms. Moreover, I delve into how these videos curate multi-sensorial experiences that engage more than just the viewer’s eyes. To ground my study, I focus on videos made by Carole Roussopoulos and the feminist video collectives that she was a member of. In my first chapter, I use the documentary videos S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1976) and Maso et Miso vont en bateau (1975) in order to analyze the ways in which the vidéastes encourage critical spectatorship within the viewer and transform how the viewer interacts with mainstream media that arises from a patriarchal society. In my second chapter, I look at the documentary videos FHAR (Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire) (1971) and Les Prostituées de Lyon parlent (1975) and explore how both videos construct two ways of seeing that reflect a blend of theory and practice that is necessary within an activist movement. In my third chapter, I focus on the videos Les Travailleuses de la Mer (1985) and Profession: Conchylicultrice (1984) which capture working women in physically demanding professions. Specifically, I look at how these two videos create an embodied viewing experience through the specific ways in which they capture the women’s labor
The Clean Stain Stays Unclear in American Phrases
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/4a768717-ab94-4463-bd80-9549623120de/thumb/128.jp
Sacred Persistence: Huacas, Conversion, and Colonialism in the 16th and 17th Century Andes
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/74e91ac5-023f-4b97-ab99-312c7f60c971/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis examines the transformation of the huaca, a multi-signifying Andean term for sacred place, objects, and beings, during the period of Spanish colonization. Huacas, far from being inert objects, were dynamic sacred entities that structured social, political, and economic organization within Andean society. Spanish colonialism attempted to replace these structures by extirpating them, intending to eradicate them as obstacles to Christianization and imperial governance. However, the huacas' destruction was never absolute. Through a process of syncretism and adaptation, huacas persisted within colonial society. The first chapter sets up the huaca's position within pre-colonial Andean cosmology as a site of spiritual, social, and political power. Additionally, it addresses how huacas served as an instrument of empire for the Inca. The second chapter investigates how the Spanish viewed huacas as a threat to religious and political authority, and the methods they used to address this anxiety. The last chapter investigates the persistence and transformation of huacas in the early colonial climate as well as into the colonial period in the Andes, assessing the extent to which indigenous religious practices adapted, resisted, or merged with Christianity in acts of syncretism
Notebooks That Bear Witness to Life: Writing, History-Making, and the Marvelous Real in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/6ff5f781-d936-4b4f-a8d4-9880c9a4dbcc/thumb/128.jpgIn this thesis I examine the novels The House of the Spirits (1982) by Isabel Allende and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez, placing the two texts in conversation with one another to examine their conceptions of femininity and masculinity, fiction and history, and the ultimate power of creative writing. Allende borrows from Márquez’s landmark baseline magical realist text, rewriting it to redefine her conception of the genre and its relationship to the real. Allende’s text represents a change in the course of magical realist literary history, allowing the genre to tell untold stories and uncover lost, interior feminine modes of writing history. For Allende, the marvelous real is an ever-transforming tool that might be wielded to heal, reclaim, and conquer trauma, memory, and history
"Our History, Our Way": The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in the Social Movements of the Hawaiian Renaissance
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/db9d476c-5a34-47c1-9d91-1f38403bab45/thumb/128.jpgThe 1970s marked the beginning of the Hawaiian Renaissance, a period in Hawaiian history characterized by cultural revitalization, renewed interest in Indigenous art, language, and history, and social and political activism. Throughout the Hawaiian Renaissance, there was not a clear consensus on who the Hawaiian Renaissance was for; Kānāka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) only, people of color more broadly, or any local who wanted to lend a hand. Many multi-ethnic social justice organizations and resistance movements experienced tensions and disagreement based on who should be included. Tensions often arose when harmful systems like haole (white) domination or settler-colonialism was being recreated in the leadership or structure of these organizations. The racial and ethnic dynamics in these social movements differ slightly from similar movements in the mainland United States at the time, because of the ethnic diversity in Hawai’i. It was one of the most diverse states in the 1970s. Chapter One focuses on the history of resistance movements in Hawai’i and analyzes what aspects of past resistance movements influenced structures of the modern Hawaiian Renaissance. Chapter Two focuses on specific movements during the Hawaiian Renaissance: Save Our Surf (SOS), the voyage of Hōkūle’a, and the Kalama Valley Occupation. I explore how recreations of systems of domination bred tensions and resentment in these movements. Chapter Three focuses on the creation of the Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. I discuss the history of education in America and what bred the need for the creation of ethnic studies programs, and go on to examine the tensions in the creation of the Ethnic Studies Program at UH at Mānoa. I also explore the differences in their Ethnic Studies Program versus Hawaiian Studies Program, and why there was a need for this distinction. This thesis explores the racial and ethnic dynamics in the social movements of the Hawaiian Renaissance
Peering into the End of the World:Time Travel Science FIction
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/a8ad4c9a-02f1-4ca8-bb49-b3288d0e9f82/thumb/128.jpgMy thesis analyzes the representations of human history and earth history in fictions of time travel, and the use of a distant past to imagine a far future. The texts I examine engage with not only scientific frameworks of human extinction, but also the cultural stakes of humanity’s end, and the civilizational narratives associated with historical rises and falls. As a work that engages not with time travel by supernatural or divine means but through the use of a machine, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), dramatizes the promise of Victorian innovation. Yet the representation of a prehistorical past and the vision of human extinction and planetary change undermines the prowess of Victorian advances in art and science. My second chapter moves from the scalar jolt of the fossil record to the cultural crisis of nuclear annihilation and chemical warfare. Representing scientific innovation as cause rather than casualty of an extinction to come, Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder”(1952) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) use an imagination of deep time to envision a mid-century anxiety about the consequences of human action, only partially understood. In the final chapter I turn to Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War as a fiction of the Anthropocene imagination. Engaging with human extinction as not as an if but a when, the work shifts from the time frames of human history to the geological narrative of environmental crises. The work portrays the end of humanity as a non-linear, inevitable, and repeatable event, thereby focusing on technology and nature as anthropomorphized forces that transcend human time. The works collectively and repeatedly renegotiate the dynamic between human technological advancements and nature, ultimately emphasizing the importance of cultural preservation as a means of ensuring the longevity of humanity and addressing contemporary environmental threats
Decoding EEG Bifurcation Dynamics Around Visual Detection Threshold in No-Report
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/03a8adb9-8c25-44d4-af0a-23d58889ad73/thumb/128.jpgStudies aimed at isolating neural signals linked with conscious perception overwhelmingly utilize a binary contrastive approach, manipulating awareness to compare brain responses between conscious and unconscious conditions. This method, while informative, often yields numerous candidate signals – which can be further confounded by signals related to reporting. Seeking more precise isolation, Cohen et al. (2024) used a no-report visual masking paradigm in which stimulus visibility was parametrically manipulated such that perception was either below, at, or above perceptual threshold. Neural responses in the no-report condition were compared with the psychometric function of visibility obtained in the report condition. Decoding of stimulus presence revealed temporal generalization only in the report condition, complicating previous findings of metastability in no-report. Here, we present a variation of this experiment, with simpler stimuli and no masks, in which visibility was manipulated by varying stimulus contrast across five levels (2 below, 1 at, 2 above threshold). Multivariate pattern analysis was used to compare behavioral functions to scalp EEG data, decoding stimulus features both along a same-time training-and-testing diagonal and at all other time points using the temporal generalization method. Temporal generalization of stimulus presence decoding showed significant spreading from 200-400ms and 400-600ms at the highest contrast level, with non-linear increases in classification accuracy with increasing visibility, matching closely with behavioral functions. Seen versus unseen temporal generalization revealed similar results, confirming the link between metastability and conscious awareness. These results support a unified, two-stage theory of conscious processing in which both early and late metastable signals are required for awareness
How Many Mixtures? Frequentist and Bayesian Approaches to Inferring the Number of Latent Groups
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/43fb708e-78dd-44f6-8425-c959ca99a291/thumb/128.jpgMixture models are widely used for uncovering latent structure in heterogeneous data. Yet, a persistent challenge lies in determining the appropriate number of components, often denoted K. This thesis examines both frequentist and Bayesian approaches to this problem, with a focus on estimation, interpretation, and the limitations of existing methods. We compare classical model selection techniques — such as the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) — with fully Bayesian mixtures of finite mixtures (MFMs), which treat K as a random variable and avoid the need for separate model fittings across fixed values of K. Simulation studies demonstrate that MFMs have strong potential to recover the true number of components, but, like other estimators, can be sensitive to model misspecification. Beyond point estimation, we emphasize the importance of leveraging the full posterior distribution to capture uncertainty and explore alternative groupings in the data. We argue that current practices often underutilize the joint structure of Bayesian posteriors, and we outline open problems related to the interpretation, visualization, and summarization of posterior output. This work highlights both the promise and the challenges of using Bayesian mixture models in complex real-world applications and calls for further methodological development to make these models more interpretable and practically useful
Democratic Backsliding in El Salvador
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/9e3c81c0-0ddb-40da-85fe-a69046221746/thumb/128.jpgRecent political science scholarship focuses on democratic backsliding. Scholars discuss if the globe is in a state of democratic erosion, where democratically elected leaders use their power to remove or rollback essential democratic freedoms or institutions. Much of the evidence that supports the idea that this is not just a case-by-case situation, but rather a global trend comes from existing democracy indexes. However, a recent study by Little and Meng (2024) has challenged the findings of these large democracy indices and claims that the evidence of global democratic erosion is the result of bias in expert coders.. This thesis examines El Salvador, a country that has recently found itself as the newest example of democratic backsliding, under the context of the current academic debate caused by Little and Meng’s article. While this investigation does find a significant difference in the level of democracy reported in El Salvador between Little and Meng’s model and VDem, it does not find any evidence to support the idea that this difference is caused by bias among expert coders
Always Already: Visual and Scientific Queer Possibilities
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/dd04f9ac-d657-43fd-b671-981393faad28/thumb/128.jpgCreating links between the scientific, the artistic, and the social, this thesis explores ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality through multiple lenses. The assortative mating experiment with cichlid fish allowed me to document and explore behavior and mating patterns occurring between two species. Although the sister species of fish did not hybridize, the experiment showed that inter-species pair formation was possible, but that complex social systems and hierarchies likely prevented successful mating. Treating opposite sex pairing and same sex pairing with the same degree of interest, my work with these fish documents the expansive nature of pairing type and behavior, as well as differences in behaviors between the two species that may be relevant to future research with the fish. The series of paintings and sculpture is an attempt to reckon with canonical prescriptions of gender and sexuality. Here I engage deeply with critical queer, feminist, and scientific theory that complicates understandings of sex/gender, explores queer experience, and decenters the literal body as a logical point of departure for meaning making. This work attempts to both visually synthesize the theory I have engaged with as well as document the affective experience of inhabiting a body that is structurally coded as abject or unthinkable