Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Program: Theses
Recent Submissions
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Becoming Pornography: White Women, Voyeuristic Surveillance, and Image-Based Sexual Abuse
This dissertation examines the gendered and racialized discourses that inform how we understand the problem of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) in the West. Specifically, it traces out the role that whiteness, and white ... -
Genocide Culture: From Everyday Cultural Doxa and Ethnic Engineering to Genocide of Kurds in Iraq
This interdisciplinary study reconceptualizes the dominant vision of how genocides begin, and the role civilians play in both cultural and physical forms of genocide. I coined the term “genocide culture” and reconceptualize ... -
Not a Joke: Women's work and feminist laughter in stand-up comedy
Live feminist stand-up comedy, and the shared laughter it generates, is a potent form of popular cultural performance that has become increasingly politically relevant and commercially successful in contemporary North ... -
Defiance, Reclamation, and a Call to Mino Bimaadiziwin/ The Good Life Through Ceremonial Performance Praxis
This MA thesis is a bundle that weaves time, space, and form. It includes personal narrative, considerations and reflections on creation and research as well as the production/ performance script, stage directions, and ... -
Between the Dreamtime and the GPS / The Metaphysics of Indigenous Mapping
Although many scholars have written about the relationships between land, mapping, power relations, and sovereignty, very few have explored the relationship between the imbricated fields of Aboriginal mapping, Indigenous ... -
Expert Tattooing: The Development of a Profession in Canada, 1891-1986
Expert Tattooing: The Development of a Profession in Canada, 1891-1986 examines professional tattooing in Canada from the late nineteenth century to the mid 1980s, a period that saw the practice’s emergence, expansion, and ... -
Du Pont's Wonder World of Chemistry: Corporate Culture as Public Culture in the Twentieth Century
During the twentieth century, business executives perceived a troubling trend amongst their employees and the general public: Americans appeared ignorant to the workings of the business system and were therefore susceptible ... -
Bien Orgullosx: Communicating Narratives of Pride from Youth in El Alto
El Alto is a young Bolivian city with a majority young population mainly formed by migrants of rural/indigenous origins. Historically, social research based on El Alto has focused on extracting pain narratives. Research ... -
Hays Gone By: The Proto-Feminism of Pre-Code Hollywood and the Films of Mae West
Pre-Code Hollywood has famously been described as an alternative universe of American cinema, as looser censorship restrictions allowed filmmakers to explore adult themes of violence and sexuality far more openly than would ... -
From The East And West Indies To The Mother Country: The House of Daljinder Kaur And Out Of Left Field
“From the East and West Indies to the Mother Country: The House of Daljinder Kaur and Out of Left Field” is a PhD research-creation project consisting of two outdoor installations and a written component. It takes as a ... -
One Bad Board Away from Bankruptcy: Housing Co-operatives, Self-Management, and the Landlord–Tenant Relationship
This thesis explores the development of the natural condition of co-operation into a large, apolitical movement and the effects of reshaping working-class people into co-operators. Semi- structured interviews, content ... -
The Order of Cybernetics: An Archaeology of User-Friendly Design
This dissertation evaluates the concept of user-friendliness not only as a preeminent philosophy of software design, but as an integral element of the metaphysics of software and the very conceptualization of both cybernetics ... -
How to Stay Connected in an ‘Offline’ Country? Stories of Cubans’ Internet Experience
Since 2013, Cuban authorities have taken significant steps towards the regularization of public Internet access in the Island. Before that date, policies regarding the Internet benefited specific sectors and limited the ... -
Queer Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary
This Ph.D. is an ethnographic-activist-based project. It first examines the genealogy of popular nationalist-statist and religious enforcements of postcolonial cisheteronormativity in Egypt through the examination of two ... -
Is Daoism Green? Engaging Daoist Responses to Environmental Challenges in China
This paper seeks to examine the role that Daoism is playing in environmental activism in China. It analyzes a variety of sources including academic literature, primary source material from Daoist groups and my own research ... -
Tracing Incense: The Affective Power of Objects
Incense has been an integral part of Chinese culture since before the introduction of Buddhism in the third century B.C.E. A rise in the popularity of Buddhist practice marked an increase in the importation, production, ... -
Post-Islamism Redefined: A Genealogy of Political Islam in Iran
Challenging the current academic conception of the term “post-Islamism,” this dissertation provides an alternative definition of the concept, having in mind the case of Iran. In contrast to Asef Bayat’s deployment of ... -
Unfinished Business: The New Wave of Women's Horror Cinema
My doctoral dissertation, “Unfinished Business: The New Wave of Women’s Horror Cinema,” responds to early considerations in feminist horror studies via the recent surge of horror films directed by women filmmakers for a ... -
Talking Plant
This doctoral research-creation project focuses on plants in the context of larger efforts by artists and scholars to denaturalize the anthropocentric and hierarchical ordering of species that objectify non-human life. ... -
“A New Race, Invincible and Vast”: An Exploration of the National Socialist Thingspiel Das Frankenburger Würfelspiel's Methods to Create Community
This project investigates the 1936 Berlin Olympics theatre production Das Frankenburger Würfelspiel, an example of the National Socialist theatre movement the Thingspiel. The goal is to explore the methods intended by Das ...
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