Contemporary theorists are still coming to terms with Michel Foucault's conception of power structures and how those relate to biopower, the State's control over its subjects. My research focuses on what Michel de Certeau calls heterology (logic of the Other) present within these structures. I use the theoretical work of Certeau to examine heterology and tactics (everyday ways of "making do") as well as Bruno Latour's framework of Actor Network Theory to chart the movement of actors within the structure. Latour also explains the "mediation" that happens, where the actor itself is changed through the process of action. It is this mediation, as part of an actor-network, that I will use to describe the photographs of Abu Ghraib, detailing the complex assemblage of military personnel, detainees, and even the non-human agency of the cameras themselves. I explore the contextual "framing" of the photography through a close reading of a number of the photographs released, an examination of their material reproduction through various news media (news outlets, Government publications, and the internet), and their reception in both American and British cultures and Iraqi culture. In addition, I use a number of secondary sources, such as the documentary film Standard Operating Procedures and the White House press release, to understand how the production and reproduction of these photographs might serve political reasons, either complicit with or subversive to the motives of State structures of power. Preliminary results suggest that the actor networks at Abu Ghraib engaged in politically subversive behavior through an intuitive combination of competing ideologies that norms of the State could not fully capture. The "framing" of the photographs both ideologically and culturally served to portray messages that the American Government, at the time of the photographs' release, could not have anticipated or intended.

While writing the first quarter of a Gothic fantasy novel titled Deathwatch, I also carried out analytical research examining Romantic Gothic themes appearing in my creative text. I was largely unfamiliar with Gothic literature while planning this novel and these themes appeared naturally in my text from the start as a clear example of intertextuality. However, in order to gain a better understanding of the tradition I was referencing and use it effectively as a framework, I began researching features of Romantic Gothic literature. Key to Romantic Gothic literature is its villain-hero model of the outcast who is unable to determine whether his alienation is his own fault or the fault of the larger world. This model in turn leads to the Gothic features of doubles and the dangerous lover, both of which allow the hero frightening insight through physical confrontation with his own self. By identifying these literary themes in both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and my own work over the course of my research, I was able to better understand and deepen my own intertextual framework. As a result, during Deathwatch’s writing process, I was able to both reference and alter these unique features of the Gothic genre in a knowledgeable way, significantly enriching the quality of my own text.

In The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin, the humans inhabiting the planet “Winter” are genderless, and through the monthly phase called “kemmer” choose to develop either male or female sexual reproductive organs. With one equal gender either member of a relationship can choose pregnancy, and “no one is quite so thoroughly ‘tied down’ here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be- psychologically or physically.” Since there is lack of gender subjugation on Winter, nature is not regarded as being connected to the womanly tasks of nurture and reproduction as it is here on earth. Nature is not viewed as an “other” and is instead an active part of a human ecology rather than something to abuse or command. In similar regard: “Winter is an inimical world; its punishment for doing things wrong is sure and prompt: death from cold or death from hunger.” On Winter humans better survive by working with Nature and not against it. Reading this novel as an ecofeminist text involves uncovering details regarding the relationship between feminism and ecology. Viewing the planet Winter as a utopian example of the absence of dualistic genders provides a fascinating scope into what the impact of a non-gendered society has on its environment: a planet where humans advance slowly and cautiously with respect for their natural world. This project examines the comparison between this model and that of ours on Earth. Winter’s slow technological development is accented by its low level of significant cultural change, whereas on Earth technology develops rapidly as culture blends, infuses, and diversifies. From this example I find that dualistic gender, or the lack thereof, greatly impacts not only the behaviors of a society, but determines its rate and quality of technology, egalitarianism, and ecology.

Ecofeminism is a movement which shows how the marginalization and subjugation of women by men parallels the domination and exploitation of nature by human beings. Interdisciplinary at its inception, ecofeminism draws from a wide range of fields including philosophy, ecology, english, and gender studies. Sometimes though, the values of these different fields conflict with one another in ways that question whether some theories can (or should) be put into practice. Queer ecocriticism, pioneered by Timothy Morton, is one such theory. Queer ecocriticism attempts to fuse ecological criticism with queer theory to challenge essentialist views of women and nature in existing environmentalisms. In Queer Ecology, Morton suggests that subjects only appear to fit neatly into stable categories like “women,” “humans,” and “nature” because we fail to perceive them on larger timescales. The best approach to environmentalism, he argues, is one which contemplates “ecology's unfathomable” and “almost unbearable” intimacies—that is, one which recognizes our world as a cacophony of interrelated, messy, and untotalizable “strange strangers” rather than a mere collection of discrete beings who can be categorized. What this “contemplation” means in practice, however, is unclear. Moreover, queer ecology appears difficult to reconcile with environmental activism, which often organizes strategically under essentialist labels like "women" or “human beings” to protect "nature." So what is the interdisciplinary-conscious ecofeminist to do? Drawing from the work of ecofeminists Sherry Ortner and Val Plumwood, queer theorists, and environmental activists, my project investigates ways in which ecofeminist activism might incorporate queer ecocritical theory into practice. If it’s true that, as Morton says, ecofeminism “is grounded on binary difference and [is] thus unhelpful for the kinds of difference multiplication that is queer theory’s brilliance,” activism informed by queer ecocriticism might be able to achieve its aims without relying on problematic, essentialist views of women and nature.

The work of tutors in the Odegaard Writing & Research Center requires continual adaptation of practices to accommodate and collaborate with writers who range from incoming freshmen to tenured faculty, come from more than 150 different departments and programs, speak more than 80 different home languages, and may visit at any stage of the writing process. Successful interactions require that undergraduate tutors thoughtfully enact writing center scholarship that itself tends to be quite abstract and axiomatic: for example “make better writers, not better papers”. As researchers, we asked: How might communication tools borrowed from other fields help tutors mediate the disconnect between writing center theory/pedagogy and writers’ (sometimes conflicting) expectations? We hypothesized that tutors’ ability to so mediate would be improved by acquisition of concrete active-listening and reflective-responding skills; such skills might enable them to more confidently navigate the endlessly shifting terrain of a tutoring session. To identify needed skills, we reviewed scholarship from legal mediation, nursing, psychology, composition, and social work. To assess the realities of tutor practices -- how practices do and do not align with the pedagogical mission of a writing center -- we surveyed tutors to assess their key concerns, observed tutoring sessions, and created transcripts. Our preliminary findings indicate a considerable gap between writing center theory and practice, despite tutors’ own articulated goals and best intentions. In response, we have undertaken additional research into non-defensive communication strategies and begun to develop and test new training and education materials for fellow tutors. We hope to offer better ways to practically enact ideals of collaborative learning. What we’ve learned through our research to date shows both considerable promise toward this end and value to myriad teaching and learning groups.

The idea of poetry as a literary practice that is concerned with its own ontology has developed through the device of the ars poetica poem—poetry about poetry. Beginning with Horace’s ancient treatise Ars Poetica, published in c. 18 BCE, poets throughout history have sought to explain the nature of their craft through the medium of their craft. In the past century, ars poetica poems have morphed into examples of metalanguage, in which the poems work as vehicles to carry the defining characteristics of poetry itself. In order to track the movement of metalanguage, I examine the progression of the ars poetica poem from the Classical era to the Enlightenment to Modern twentieth and twenty-first century works. My research traces and analyzes the trajectory of poetic modes that discuss language itself. Shifts from didactic to introspective to aesthetic have marked the rhetorical turn of ars poetica, thus exemplifying how poetry as heightened language creates the need for metalanguage. In poetry more than any other literature, each component element is significant, so the elements of a poem inevitably turn in on itself. Ars poetica poems demonstrate how images, rhetoric, narrative, and linguistic mechanisms can all be self-referential. The presence of metalanguage in poetry suggests that the types of poetic knowledge—sensory, emotional, and imaginative—are more than externally meaning-making about “aesthetic” and “ethic” subjects, but that they are intrinsically expressing the nature and value of poetic theory.

Matthew G. Lewis' Gothic novel The Monk (1796) has often been read as a representation of England's disapprobative response to the violence and chaos of the French Revolution.  The novel's subtle treatment of paranoia, which was a common theme during the Reign of Terror, and clear defilement of the virtuous feminine icon of ancient European government indicates a strong ambivalence toward revolutionary sentiment.  It is perhaps a result of its proximity to the events of the French Revolution that its location within the latter years of the Age of Enlightenment is often overlooked.  During the Enlightenment, reliance upon God as a source of meaning had dissipated in favor of understanding humanity through itself. I will argue that The Monk's depiction of intensely oppressive, Godless religious societies suggests the consequences of this shift.  Without a connection to the sacred, humanity spirals toward damnation; the extremes of unconscious desire are inseparable from the individual and activate supernatural forces within the novel.  Lewis creates a scene akin to that of Original Sin in the Book of Genesis, wherein the consequences of succumbing to temptation are not only inevitable but inescapable: the fall of humankind is unavoidable, and God's absence renders redemption impossible.  Ultimately, the novel offers a reconstruction of the Biblical parable in a way that expresses ambivalence about a secularized, post-Enlightenment world from which events like those of the French Revolution can only be expected.

Like their Victorian forebears, Modernist authors have always placed keen emphasis on women’s hair, often presenting their luscious locks in vivid and scrupulous detail. Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (1920) uses hair as a tool of social commentary and trope of the fairytale epic to challenge and even reverse traditional Victorian gender roles and sexuality norms. The tension between the private and public self is also explored; what Modernist women could not say aloud, they expressed through the style, color and length of their hair. Crome Yellow constantly alludes to the hair of the female protagonists Jenny Mullion and Mary Bracegirdle, yet the intentions behind the loaded descriptions of their physical appearance are left up in the air. The characterization of an infamous Fallen Woman and modern flapper girl allows distinctions to be made between the Victorian and Modernist eras that determine the emergence of new gender ideals. This paper will use a close reading of Crome Yellow and Freudian theories on sexuality to explore the multifaceted significance of hair in the Victorian era so we may fully appreciate the past’s influence on modernist eras. A woman’s hair became a phallic image used to engender fear in men, which posits a move towards gender equality and the emergence of the suffragette. Hair was no longer just a physical attribute but a body politic that reflected changes taking place in modernist British society of the entre deux guerres period.

The fear of being unimportant, being erased, and of being finite, grips humans and motivates us to prove that we matter, that we exist. In an attempt to create truth and authentic understandings, our society seeks evidence, proof, and facts, even while acknowledging (and often ignoring) that these “facts” may be hard to establish. In my paper I explore how post-modern novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, utilize multi-modal textual souvenirs to function as lodestones and guide readers through fictionalized versions of real historical traumas. These novels can be read as scrapbooks of memory which investigate the social importance and definition of “truth” in the face of traumatic events. My project questions whether or not truth can be found in fiction, non-fiction or even photographs as it looks at the way modern technologies have impacted how authors choose to create historical fiction. The multi-modal nature of these novels forces readers to reflect upon authorial intent and authority in the construction of memory and post memory. Furthermore, by looking at the narratives the authors create about traumatic events such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and the attacks of 9-11, my paper reveals the ways in which collective memories and national narratives can arise from trauma and how these events in turn create social identity for individuals within and across groups. An analysis of the postmodern methods the authors use in an attempt to create this authenticity, along with the expectations society holds concerning their construction, and the impact of individual and cultural desires on the creation of these narratives, uncovers the many fallacies and complexities that come with testimony and the social construction of authentic truth.

Many have demonstrated that Edmund Burke and other male writers contributed to, if not constructed, a gender binary in which males perpetually subdue and dominate the feminine. For instance, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft deconstructs passages from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, demonstrating that his ideal world is one in which sublime, masculine authority usurps the rights of women. For Wollstonecraft, Burke's efforts to counter revolutionary ideas are of no benefit to women. While these readings are certainly valid, some scholars have expressed the concern that in limiting our understanding of masculinity to its being a fixed institution determined to maintain power over women, we are grossly over-simplifying individual as well as collective masculine experience(s). Thus, I hope for this project to contribute to a more complex portrait of masculinity particularly in the late 18th century. Limiting my discussion to Burke's Reflections and Thomas Paine's Common Sense, I argue that however much these two literary works convey opposing ideologies, elements of their rhetorical strategy reveals that both writers understood that the success of their arguments largely depended on how effectively they controlled the semantic value of manliness. In order to provoke revolution, Paine seeks to assure his readers that engaging in revolution is an indisputable reflection of manhood. But unlike Paine, Burke wrote in order to prevent revolution. In the Reflections, Burke argues that the failure to sustain the pre-established order would result in the failure to retain masculinity. Ultimately, that Paine and Burke fought to control the meaning of manhood suggests masculinity was a loosely defined social institution--one consisting of males who lived in perpetual fear of losing, or failing to perform their masculinity; who were ever in need of affirmation that they were, indeed, men.

In 2007, filmmaker and journalist Christopher Redmond co-founded the Burundi Film Center in eastern Africa. This non-profit organization allows Burundian filmmakers and other citizens to engage with cinematic art forms and communicate their culture through film. Furthermore, the BFC opens avenues for Burundian artists to explore the significance of some cultural themes, such as family relationships and sexuality, in their works. My research will focus on the cultural themes presented in these films as they arise from a perspective on war and trauma. Specifically, I will do a close reading of each film to study the significance of family relationships, sexuality, and education within a framework of war and trauma. A close reading of these films requires a careful and critical analysis of the narrative and imagery onscreen. This method allows me to analyze each film with a focus on particular images, dialogue, and narrative elements. My close readings of these films will aim to offer explanations and conclusions on how war and trauma inform these cultural productions. This methodology benefits my research because the subject of war and trauma is not always overt in these films. Theoretical works that inform my analyses come from Judith Butler's work on vulnerability and affect, and David Eng and David Kazanjian's work on mourning. I will analyze these texts in relation to the BFC student films that I discuss in my research. To conclude my research, I will offer a thorough discussion and explanation of how these cultural productions contribute to Hutu-Tutsi cultures and to the nation of Burundi. Specifically, I will provide insight on the implications of filmmaking practices in Third World countries. 

Despite its negative associations with criminalized activities such as human trafficking, sex tourism, and prostitution, the modern mail-order bride industry continues to flourish – facilitating thousands of international marriages between “American men” (a category that includes all “Caucasian” or “Western” men) and foreign women (the majority of whom originate from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia). While there are legitimate factors tying the industry to the aforementioned criminal activities, my research will not dwell upon (nor will it altogether dismiss) a victim discourse in considering the life experiences of marriage migrants. Instead, my research will seek to recast women’s role in this international marriage-scape as agents who, despite institutional and structural limitations on their mobility and quality of life, manage to achieve forms of women empowerment through strategic participation in the international marriage market. In particular, I focus on women marriage migrants from the Philippines, a country of origin which, in being “formerly colonized by the United States, and currently neocolonized by U.S. corporate capital, best illustrates how colonial and military dominations are interwoven with sexual domination to provide the “ultimate Western male fantasy.” Part of an orientalist discourse, this “fantasy” posits Filipino women as politically passive, sexually exotic, and domestically compliant. My research utilizes the theoretical frameworks of Intersectionality and of Social Construction to examine how this “fantasy” combines sexualized racial stereotypes with racialized gender stereotypes to the harm of particularly Asian (and Asian Pacific American) women. Despite the various harm this colonial sexual mythology engenders, case studies, a literature review, and content analysis reveal Filipino marriage migrants to be empowered women who are strategically, creatively, and, oftentimes, successfully, utilizing the same colonial fantasy to their economic, social, and national advantage – a counter-narrative marked by processes of self-construction, participation in hypergamy, and the production of a corollary female fantasy.

What is the structure and effectiveness of our local bilingual education programs? Availability of effective bilingual education is still one of the most important issues Chicanos/as face today, especially here in the Yakima Valley. While we have become a majority minority district, bilingual services provided at many Valley public high schools have not advanced with the changing times. Additional support to our parents and limited-English students is needed to create strong parent engagement. By taking a closer look at flawed services provided by our public school agents, we can create awareness to aid in strengthening our education systems. Throughout this study, I will be looking for new ways of combating the lack of support to our parents and struggling English learners. A generalized view of this project includes analyzing my previous work experience at a local high school. The next step is to study the works of new and local agencies that support Bilingual Education including the work of Heritage University’s own, Patricia Valdez-Zontek. I also attempt to gather opinions from personnel of two leading supporters of Bilingual Education state wide: Migrant Student Data and Recruitment center (MSDR) and Secondary Education for Migrant Youth (SEMY). As a result of this study, I anticipate to deliver strong and detailed facts about what works and what doesn’t, and more importantly about what is lacking and what can be done to better involve parents in support of non-English speaking students in our schools.

The 1960s was an era of political and social transformation in America. Seattle, as most people do not know was a segregated city for most of its history. Racial discrimination applied not to just African Americans but also Asians, Chicanos, etc. People of color could not attend certain schools, restaurants, and could not live outside certain city boundaries. The Northwest African American Museum preserves local artifacts from the Civil rights movement in Seattle. Maid Adams, a Seattle C.O.R.E member during the 1960s donated two protest signs used during the movement. These posters were extremely crucial in the movement. They represent how protesting instigated social change and paved the way for future activism. 

How did the Indian English novel function within the Indian independence movement? Literature illuminates unique narratives not necessarily communicated by other forms of print media like newspapers and history books, and these stories exert a very different kind of influence. In the particular instance of Indian English novels around the time that India gained independence from Britain, literature established power through its inherent cultural capital, its role in imagining nations, and its critical abilities. These novels embodied traits of both the colonized and the colonizer, allowing them to occupy a position of notable political and cultural influence. Drawing on theories on literature and nationalism, this study employs close readings of novels by Rabindranath Tagore and Mulk Raj Anand within the context of historically evident politics and cultural phenomena of the time period to explain the role Indian English novels played in revolutionizing India. An understanding of the factors enabling the novel’s influence will illuminate how India’s independence was imagined and realized. Situating Indian English novels of the Indian independence movement in their historical and social context may yield further understanding to the way historical events played out and reveal more of literature’s effect on the societies in which it is produced.