Public Market to La Marqueta: Shaping Spaces and Subjects of Food Distribution in New York City, 1930-2012
Author:
Anne Babette Audant
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Program:
Earth & Environmental Sciences
From Public Market to La Marqueta: Shaping Spaces and Subjects of Food Distribution in New York City, 1930 to 2012
INTERPERSONAL RHYTHMS DISRUPTED BY A HISTORY OF TRAUMA: AN IN-DEPTH CASE STUDY OF ANALYTICAL MUSIC THERAPY
Author:
Tanja Auf der Heyde
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Abstract
The Rat Bastard Protective Association: Bruce Conner and His San Francisco Cohort, 1958-1968
Year of Dissertation:
2013
This dissertation is a theoretical and historical account of the art-making activities of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, a small, close-knit community living and working in mid-century San Francisco. Assemblage was a common denominator within the group, which included Wallace Berman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, and Manuel Neri, along with other, less constant members. The first book-length study devoted to the Rat Bastards, this project explores the political, social, and aesthetic concerns in their assemblages. It also reexamines the term assemblage, to take into account process and intent along with medium and technique. Allowing for this performative dimension impels a re-evaluation of these artists' works, its impact on subsequent developments, and its place among process-based practices in art since the 1950s.
Ethnicity in Hagiography: The Case of Darerca/Moninna/Modwenna/Modwenne in the British Isles, Seventh to Thirteenth Centuries
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Abstract
COMPARATIVE ADS AND THEIR AFFECTIVE CONSEQUENCES: THE EFFECT OF SCHADENFREUDE ON PURCHASE LIKELIHOOD AND ATTITUDES
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Comparative ads, in which a brand compares itself to a competitor brand, are frequently used in print and television media. When marketers compare their brands to others, they often show comical situations in which misfortunes befall those consumers who are using competitors' brands instead of theirs. Extant research has examined the impact of comparative ads without taking consumers' affective reactions into account, even though persuasive messages have been shown to elicit affective reactions that may mediate consumers' attitudes and behaviors. In the current research, I examine "schadenfreude," defined as the pleasure at the misfortunes of others, as an incidental emotional response elicited by comparative ad appeals. Across a series of studies, I show that more competitive individuals are likely to experience greater levels of incidental schadenfreude when they are exposed to comparative ads. More importantly, I examine the downstream implications of invoking schadenfreude and show that more competitive individuals are more likely to buy the advertised product when a higher-status brand uses comparative ads, since these ads make them experience greater levels of incidental schadenfreude.
INTANGIBLE HERITAGE'S UNCERTAIN POLITICAL OUTCOMES: NATIONALISM AND THE REMAKING OF MARGINALIZED CULTURAL PRACTICES IN TURKEY
Year of Dissertation:
2012
The scope of cultural heritage management has been extended from tangible to intangible products in the few last decades. Debates surrounding the field of heritage raise fundamental questions about its inherent political character, calling particular attention to the ways in which heritage programs are dominated by nationalistic concerns. This study examines UNESCO-initiated intangible heritage making in Turkey. I focus on the complex relationship between heritage and nationalism, and the various levels of heritage making of marginalized cultural practices by national governments. This study shows that global heritage protection mechanisms have diverse and uncertain outcomes even in the same country. Yet when examined together, these outcomes reveal how heritage mechanisms nonetheless continue to be dominated by nationalist government interests. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic research, and content analysis of the UNESCO documents, I offer three case studies of recent heritage management programs in Turkey launched by the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government to safeguard marginalized cultural practices. These are the Mevlevi Sema ceremony, Nevruz festival, and Alevi-Bektaºi Semah ritual. Radical differences in the Turkish government's methods of handling the heritagization processes of these three practices uncover a recent transformation in the official nationalist policy and discourse in Turkey, from secularist Turkish nationalism (of Kemalism) to Islamist Turkish nationalism (of the JDP). It is these shifting nationalist trends that make Turkey's intangible heritage practices not only an aspect of the politics of recognition (in the case of the Mevlevis), but also of nonrecognition (in the case of the Kurds), and misrecognition (in the case of the Alevi-Bektaºis) regarding the extent these marginalized ethnic and religious identities comply with the current government's nationalist agenda.
As Film is, so goes the Novel: The Image, Film Ekphrasis, and History in the Contemporary Novel
Year of Dissertation:
2010
My dissertation studies the use of the verbal representation of analog film in the novels of contemporary writers Paul Auster, Adam Thorpe, and Orhan Pamuk. I look at these authors' use of the moving image in relation to the existing poetics of the ekphrasis of still images and art objects. Film, understood as the "temporalization of space," informs the way in which I interpret film ekphrasis different from the ekphrasis of still objects that "spatialize temporality." In trying to emulate this temporal art form with words, these authors create a poetics of film ekphrasis, which constitutes a representation of the past in the present continuous. Their allusion to the analog image enables them to find creative means of constructing history and memory. My study also addresses the "digital" image and explains how its construction of time differs from the analog image. In order to grasp the tension between the analog and digital, and to reveal how visual artists are responding to emerging technologies, I turn to the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Gondry, and Wim Wenders, as well as to JoAnn Verburg's photographs and Sam Taylor Wood's mixed media art. Understanding current practices in the visual arts, I suggest, can produce interpretive strategies for the ekphrasis of digital films.
Dynamics of terrestrial water budget over Amazon and Mississippi basins using satellite data
Author:
Marzieh Azarderakhsh
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Reza Khanbilvardi
The components of the water budget and their spatio-temporal variability are diagnosed using monthly-averaged remote sensing-based data products over the Amazon and Mississippi basins. These two large basins are divided into 14 and 12 smaller sub-basins (SB) respectively, and for each of these SBs, fresh water discharge is estimated from the water balance equation using satellite data products. The purpose of this study is to learn how to apply satellite data with global coverage over the large tropical and mid-latitude regions; therefore several combinations of remote sensing estimates including total water storage changes, precipitation and evapotranspiration. The results are compared to gauge-based measurements and the best spatio-temporal agreement between estimated and observed runoff is within 1 mm/d for the combination of precipitation from the GPCP and the Montana evapotranspiration product. Mean annual precipitation, evapotranspiration and runoff for the whole basin are estimated to be 6.1, 2.2 and 3.0 mm/d respectively but also show large spatial and temporal variations at SB scale. Using the most consistent data combination, the seasonal dynamics of the water budget within the Amazon system are examined. Agreement between satellite based and in-situ runoff is improved when lag-times between SBs are accounted (RMSE from 0.98 to 0.61 mm/d). We estimate these lag times based on satellite inferred inundation extents. The results reveal not only variations of the basin forcing but also the complex response of the inter-connected SB water budgets. Inter-annual and inter-sub basin variation of the water components are investigated and show large anomalies in north-western and eastern downstream SBs; aggregate behavior of the whole Amazon is more complex than can be represented by a simple integral of the forcing over the whole river system. Moreover, the same approach proposed for Amazon for estimating the runoff is applied to large Mississippi basin. The results show that applying the proposed method can improve the estimation of runoff using the satellite information. Some limitations exist in this basin that will decrease the reliability of the results, as the uncertainty of estimated runoff is greater that the magnitude of runoff due to existence of dams, and smaller precipitation rate compared to Amazon basin.
Queer Environmentality: Thoreau, Melville, Cather, and Barnes
Year of Dissertation:
2009
My chief objective in this project is to draw some connections between queer studies and environmental studies within the more general context of literary studies. I will propose an alternative understanding of literary environmentalism, rich in tropological abundance, poetic complexity, and hermeneutic indeterminacy, and I will magnify a queer sensibility, present in varying degrees, in this history, or what I call "queer environmentality." In order to develop this queer-environmental literary theory, I perform careful exegeses of four key figures in the American tradition: Thoreau, Melville, Cather, and Djuna Barnes. Each writer problematizes conventional notions of the strange matrix between the human, the natural, and the sexual, and thus challenges the assumption that the subject of American environmental literature is essentially and consubstantially heterosexual. Each brilliantly demonstrates the ways in which the queer project and the environmental project are always already connected, that is to say, in which the questions and politics of human sexuality are always entwined with the questions and politics of the other-than-human world.
"Young, Brown and Down:" Second-Generation Indo-Guyanese Americans Constructing their Ethnicity in New York
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Hester Eisenstein
This study offers a new approach to understanding the role of nostalgic performances carried out by second-generation Indo-Guyanese Americans through ethnic institutions as a route into the American mainstream. The Indo-Guyanese are an Indian Diaspora group who arrived in the Caribbean during the Indian Indenture and who have been "twice removed from India." They have limited or no ability to speak Hindi, but their religious beliefs (Hinduism and Islam) have enabled them to maintain certain Indian traditions (e.g.. wearing saris). However, they have also adopted several Caribbean cultural practices, such as musical tastes, that have augmented their cultural hybridity. There has been a significant Indo-Guyanese migration to Queens, New York since the early 1990s, which has led to the creation of an Indo-Guyanese ethnic enclave which facilitates the provision of cultural goods, services and houses of worship. Taking Gans' (1979) concept of symbolic ethnicity a step further, my research shows how the American born children of this unique immigrant group carefully select traditions from their hybrid mix of Indian and Afro-Caribbean cultures to attain racial recognition in New York. Additionally gendered expectations significantly shape the Indo-Guyanese identity. Gendered pressures create and augment disparities between men and women in the second generation as they move towards negotiating their ethnicity within the American mainstream. Inter and intra-generational gendered expectations usually place women in the position of maintaining ethno-religious traditions, which may set limits on their ability to achieve an assimilation status similar to second-generation Indo-Guyanese men within the American mainstream. Therefore, I show how New York provides a space for ethnic navigation and negotiation with gendered constraints.