Narrating the Artic (original) (raw)

Doctoral dissertation: Unimagined Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era

Unimagined Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era, 1996

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“Who will sing the songs?” Language renewal among Puebloan adolescents

This study explores indigenous language revitalization among adolescents in a Puebloan community through examination of the patterns of language interaction in which young people participate, both in their homes and in a formal youth program. The study reveals that despite expressed desires by both adults and young people for broader use of the community language, English dominates in inter-generational interaction. When attempts are made to use the local language, repairs in English (through code-switching) limit opportunities for adolescent community language learning. The net results include decreasing use of culturally important kinship terms, names, and relations, and the potential ending of ceremonial practices. The community has initiated efforts to reverse the accelerating drift toward English, and these are also detailed. Particular attention is given to local learning theories, the re-introduction of traditional practices and beliefs, and the various components of a youth program developed to meet the expressed desires of local adolescents, including greater exposure to community language, history, and culture. Ridicule and teasing, peer-pressure, and the formation of identities emerge across all domains as core components for understanding the complex nature of adolescent second language learning in the context of language revitalization. It is argued that in order to study and reflect on this complexity, it is useful to embrace a new paradigm of thought: complexity/chaos theory, and its applicability to language revitalization is demonstrated through discussion of the reported findings. Finally, the study demonstrates that there are benefits to focusing research not only locally, but also on multiple broader levels. The findings reinforce the value of looking not only at the individual second language learner and his or her immediate setting, but also at the speakers of the target language with whom the learner interacts, the multiple layers of social settings in which interaction takes place, the local attitudes towards learning and language, and the attitudes of the broader society toward minority groups, diverse ways of living, and multilingualism. It is in this last area where academia can make its most important contribution if the detrimental societal practices of the past are to be avoided in the future.

Oklahoma Indian Women and Their Art

Oklahoma Indian Women and Their Art, 1993

The art works of Oklahoma Indian women have received no attention as a category in this century or in any other—no specific study describes the collective effect of these women upon the visual arts or their corresponding aesthetics. This work is a beginning step towards filling that void. Questions to be addressed are: What are the cultural values and corresponding aesthetics of Oklahoma Indian women artists? What were and are the influences on Indian women during this century which have impacted and shaped their lives? What has their collective contribution to their past, present, and future environments. Ultimately, the factor which determine the assessment are the women's sense of beauty and the cultural values placed other art by the community of which they are a part.

Open spaces and closed minds : a socio-environmental history of Rinderpest in South Africa and Namibia, 1896-1897

Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2007) This work examines the reasons for the spread of rinderpest in Southern Bechuanaland and Hereroland between 1896 and 1897. A febrile and highly contagious disease affecting livestock and wild ungulate populations, rinderpest exacted a heavy death toll on the populations it touched, killing upwards of 97 percent. Part of the larger African rinderpest panzootic of 1887-1897, the disease has been the focus of many historical inquiries assessing its economic, political, and social consequences. Absent from these accounts, however, is the disease itself. By glossing over the disease's beginnings, scholars have drawn an incomplete picture of this event. In their rush to examine its aftermath, many have portrayed rinderpest as a monolithic entity that moved on its own accord, swept over large territories, and destroyed everything in its path. This was not the case. As argued here, the spread of rinderpest was heavily moderated by human actions. Assisted by tenuous relationships among pastoral populations and governments as well as the built and natural environments, rinderpest was able to spread with relative ease. Humans assumed responsibility for the disease's spread by moving infected cattle into contact with susceptible populations and implementing policies that either protected wild ungulate populations or prompted pastoralists to flee or resist and thus further spread the disease. Humans were also indirectly responsible for the spread of rinderpest. As evidenced in the built environment, roads connecting watering points often attracted large numbers of infected and susceptible populations, thereby creating ideal conditions for transmission. The natural environment also influenced herders and their cattle. The change from rainy to dry seasons, for example, prompted cattle and wild ungulates to gather at a shrinking number of grazing areas, thus increasing the possibility for rinderpest transmission. Therefore, in their attempts to stop it, control it, move away from it, inoculate against it, cope with it, profit from it, or ignore it, populations in Hereroland and Southern Bechuanaland ensured rinderpest's spread.

Psychophysiological Responses of Type A and B Persons During Baseline and Task Conditions

Type A and B subjects (classified by the Jenkins Activity Survey) participated in three experiments. In Experiment 1 (36 male and female college students), physiological responses were recorded during rest; in Experiment 2 (30 male and female college students) and Experiment 3 (43 men with or without coronary heart disease; M age = 51 years), responses were recorded during both rest and a task period where subjects played race and sum video games. Heart period, heart period variability, respiratory frequency and amplitude, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, slow wave frequency and amplitude (a measure of slow oscillations occurring in heart period), V (a measure of fast oscillations occurring in heart period in the respiratory frequency range), and Cw (a measure of respiratory-heart period coupling) were recorded. Although clear physiologic changes were induced during tasks, there was minimal evidence of greater physiological reactivity according to Type or disease status.

Dissertation. Preview. Proliferation of Disease in Iberoamerican Fiction (©2003), Dr. Djelal Kadir, thesis director.

ABSTRACT “Disease” has become an emergent metaphor in describing, policing, and regimenting sexual, racial, and political difference. This study of narrative and disease in the Americas reveals how dissident, sometimes queer, bodies come to be regarded as viral threats to the state, and how such a construction of illness comes to be resisted in AIDS narratives. In moments of epidemiological crisis when governmental institutions enact states of emergency to counteract disease, regimens of biopower construct aberrant bodies as diseased and therefore as subject to state inspection, medical isolation, and criminalization. Reflecting characteristics of colonial and eighteenth-century narratives of an enervated New World, José Ricardo Chaves (Paisaje con tumbas pintadas en rosa, 1998, Costa Rica) depicts how AIDS in the Americas echoes colonial accounts of disease, race, and sexuality. With the emergence of AIDS, the Cuban government enacted states of emergency to contain and incarcerate its HIV-positive citizens. The literary manifestation of such detention wards is evident in works by Severo Sarduy (Pájaros de la playa, 1993, Cuba) and by Juan Goytisolo (Las virtudes del pájaro solitario, 1988, Spain). In addition to those writers, who resist statist medical treatments and quarantines, this study examines how Reinaldo Arenas (El color del verano o Nuevo jardín de las delicias, 1990, Cuba) and Silviano Santiago (Stella Manhattan, 1985, Brazil) use religious iconography, especially localized in homoerotic representations of saints, to challenge the mechanisms that create, maintain, and police the state. Furthermore, mystical adumbrations are evoked in Sarduy and in Goytisolo, who construct biomedical policing, approach medical protocols, and lastly, re-write invocations of the hereafter. Narratives such as these attempt to reify the sacred component of all life, but especially life that has been interpreted to be aberrant and diseased. Contemporary history and writing in the Americas both show that before bodies are excluded, quarantined, or exterminated, they are denaturalized as diseased, heretical, criminal, and dangerous to the state.