Browsing by Subject "Activism"
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Item Common ground: performing gay shame, solidarity and social change(2015-02) Winn-Lenetsky, Jonah AriThis dissertation examines Gay Shame activism of the late 1990s and early 2000s through case studies of three distinct performance sites: Gay Shame San Francisco, Kvisa Shchora, a Tel Aviv based collective, and Euroshame (London). Analyzing the performance work and self-articulations of these three groups, I demonstrate how their performative and rhetorical use of shame attempts to both critique the "pride" of mainstream LGBT groups and to forge solidarity between queer communities and others marginalized by neoliberal economies and nationalist rhetoric through what I refer to as "hyperidentification". These performances can, at their best, be aesthetically challenging and creative interventions that reimagine and place queer identities in ideological and, at times, actionable alliance with marginalized others; while at their worst they imagine themselves in solidarity with other communities, but ignore or fail to account for the perspectives, agendas and values of those communities. My exploration of these sites examines the limits of solidarity and empathy and investigates the contributions of queer activist performance to debates regarding the ethics and efficacy of political performance within the disciplines of Theatre and Performance Studies.Item The Craft of Music: Women's Music-Making in Nineteenth-Century Norway(2023) Mebust, SolveigIn this dissertation, I investigate how music creation and performance wereintegral to the experience of womanhood in Norwegian life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Feminized musical labor is a necessary part of musical communities and economies, which critiques the question of professionalization in musical production. This labor promotes the careers and performances of individual musicians and musical organizations. This project focuses on women whose work would not be recognized as traditional music patronage because their support largely happens outside wealth networks and church or ruling class hierarchies. The actions under consideration afforded opportunities for musical production that reflected these women's values and aesthetic commitments. I also discuss and explore the lives of individual women for the particulars of their musical experience, including Gjendine Slålien, Nina Hagerup Grieg, Theodora Cormontan, and Agathe Backer-Grøndahl. Feminized musical labor has long been a necessary part of musical communities and economies, affording professional musicians the opportunities and support to create successful careers. Labor becomes feminized when work otherwise recognized as productive loses its value due to being performed by women. Feminized labor critiques the emphasis on professionalization in composition and performance by highlighting the dependence of professionals on the undervalued labor that supports them.Item The Emergence Of Human Rights In The Mayan World: Rural Church And Indigenous Activism In Guatemala, 1943-1983(2021-09) Tun Tun, HeiderThis dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach of History and Human Rights to discuss the organization and activism of Indigenous Catholic communities that preceded and shaped the human rights movement of the 1980s in Guatemala. By focusing on the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche from 1943 to 1983, I argue that the human rights movement in Guatemala that called attention to the country’s deep historical roots of racism and discrimination was the result of the activism carried out by Indigenous communities in connection to the Catholic Church. I use the term “Rural Church” to refer to these communities of Catholics from the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche that focused on enhancing the living conditions of the poor and marginalized; since the 1950s members of the Rural Church worked on organizing cooperatives, colonizing new lands, studying the structures of inequality, as well as advancing the teaching of the gospel. By tracing the concept of the Rural Church, this dissertation highlights the importance of rural society and the influence that marginalized and Indigenous communities had on the Catholic Church in Guatemala. This dissertation engages extensively with unpublished archival documentation including the local efforts of De Sol a Sol (“From Sunrise to Sunset”) and Ixim (“Corn” in Maya K’iche) which feature the efforts of Indigenous and local intellectuals to discuss the connections between race, ethnicity, class, and inequality. My archival approach is influenced by the Mayan cyclical view of time which highlights the survival of Mayan people despite numerous attempts of eradication and genocide against their communities.Item The Ethics of Occupation: Appropriation and Alignment as Spatial Practice Among Mapuche Activists and Student Protesters in Santiago, Chile(2015-09) McKay, KellyThis project is a choreographic and historiographic analysis of practices by which contemporary activists in Santiago, Chile create new embodied frameworks for the production of space. I study the relationship between the ongoing Chilean student rebellion and the Mapuche rights movement by examining divergences between the respective spatial practices of protest undertaken by student protestors and Mapuche activists. By spatial practices, I mean the embodied activities through which people produce and alter space. While student protestors frequently make performative and discursive connections to Mapuche, I question whether these connections constitute political alignments or appropriations of indigeneity. In order to investigate whether student protest practices align with Mapuche activist political projects, I analyze the ways that both student protestors and Mapuche activists enact radical reconfigurations of space in the city of Santiago through their embodied practices. I identify various performative mechanisms by which student protestors and Mapuche activists produce and change space, including (but not limited to) choreographic restructurings, sonic interventions, and embodied reimaginings. My ethnographic work focuses on case studies in order to show the distinct embodied frameworks for the production of space posed by students, often in contrast to those posed by Mapuche. My historiographic work historicizes the spatial practices I identify through an analysis of protest focused on spatiality. While most scholarly treatments of student and indigenous social movements conceive of protest as deliberative political enunciations addressed to a state apparatus, my project proposes an understanding of protest as spatial practice. This focus on space allows for a careful analysis of the differences between the everyday embodied practices of activists in the respective movements.Item #Explore: Outdoor Retailers, Indigenous Activists, and the Digital Battle for Public Land in the United States(2020-04) Whitson, Joseph“#Explore: Outdoor Retailers, Indigenous Activists, and the Digital Battle over Public Land in the United States,” uses digital marketing, activism, and representations of public land to analyze the impacts of the outdoor retail industry on Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous response to and engagement with the industry. Drawing conceptually and methodologically from Indigenous studies, new media studies, and environmental history, this project interrogates the ramifications of commercially driven conservation and public land policy for American Indian treaty rights, resource sovereignty, and cultural preservation. It positions social media as a space of ambiguity, revealing how Indigenous people challenge these representations and respond to these companies. I pay special attention to how Indigenous people unite western and traditional forms of activism and knowledge production to construct alternative narratives, adapting tools historically used against their communities - including corporation structures, social media, and political lobbying - to work for positive change. I argue that through their digital marketing and advocacy, the outdoor retail industry is complicit in settler colonialism, using social media to claim space in ways that erase Indigenous presence and invalidate their legal, cultural, and historical rights to land, while at the same time creating space for dissent.Item The Queer Threat: National Security, Sexuality, and Activism In South Korea(2018-06) Gitzen, TimothyThis dissertation is about the recent neoliberal, bottom-up practices of “national security” in South Korea, where citizens interpret their daily lives through the language and discourse of national security and contribute to the production of threats. I demonstrate how national security threats also emerge from within the nation-state, often in the margins and treated as national others. The experiences of gender and sexual minorities represent the complexities of these margins, national othering, and internal threats. Focusing on what I call the queer threat, I argue that the relationship between the nation and security is changing to account for emerging margins and Others in the nation. This change results not only in shifting practices and discourses of national security, but ultimately marks modes of governance that take aim at the queer threat. Specifically, the Korean state and anti-LGBT protesters bring gender and sexual minorities into unexpected relations with “threat figures,” including North Korea, Muslims, and viruses. The amalgamation of such threat figures produces unintended relations of national security, themselves queer productions, that come to form new matricies of social relations and meanings that disrupt enforcement of national security law. I argue the queer threat is dangerous because it is a threat to the nation and a threat to the institution, logics, and practices of national security.Item Sangtin Yatra: Saat Zindgiyon Mein Lipta Nari Vimarsh(Sitapur: Sangtin, 2004) Anupamlata; Ramsheela; Ansari, Reshma; Bajpayee, Vibha; Shashibala; Vaish, Shashi; Surbala; Singh, Richa; Nagar, RichaAuthored with eight activists of Sangtin, a small organization in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh, India, this book is a product of a collective intellectual and political journey that began in March, 2002. Based on autobiographical writings of seven authors and our collective analysis, the book examines the interplay of caste, gender, class, and location in the interrelationships among NGOs, grassroots feminisms, and the global politics of knowledge production.Item State Capture: Conservatives Are Winning the War to Influence States(2019-04-15) Hertel-Fernandez, Alex; Jacobs, LarryItem Talking difference: discourses about the Gypsy / Roma in Europe since 1989.(2009-08) Schneeweis, Adina Alexandra GiurgiuThis dissertation is a study of discourses about the Gypsies / Roma in contemporary Europe. It is positioned at the intersection of the disciplines of mass communication, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and Romani studies. It seeks to explain the construction, development, and social treatment of Gypsy difference in Western and Eastern Europe since 1989. The research, therefore, focused on discourses in the press, in Romania and the United Kingdom at critical conjunctures between 1990 and 2006, and in publications of non-governmental organizations of the emerging movement for Roma rights. The analysis asked what press and activist discourses contribute to what European cultures mean by Gypsy / Roma. How and why have these discourses changed - at a historical time of increased attention to human rights and minority political representation, of European Union enlargement and opening of borders, of politico-economic transformations and democratization processes throughout Western, Central, and Eastern Europe? Press discourses constructed "the Gypsy," whereas activist discourses formulated "the Roma." The analysis of newspapers identified competing representations of discrimination against the Gypsy, of deploring the Gypsy's perpetual victim status, and, to a smaller degree, of attempting to recognize the minority culture in its own right. Differently, the activist publications contributed and formulated discourses that recognize the discrimination against the Roma, the state's role in this process, the rights of the Roma, the need for integration of the Roma, the role of tradition in contemporary process of inter-ethnic living, and, in few rare cases, the inferiority of Roma cultures. Tensions, hesitations, and changes were inherent in each of these constructions of the Gypsy / Roma. While discriminating against the Gypsy / Roma and lamenting racism are both rather self-explanatory in post-World War II and post-Communist Europe, press and activist discourses illustrate that such communication institutions play their part in the dominant ideology-counter-ideology dance that maintains an anti-Gypsyist system in place - by over-ethnicizing the Roma peoples, by intentionally shying away from formulating a cohesive Roma identity, and by continuing to find solutions for the Roma instead of with the Roma (yet an improvement from earlier eras of solution-finding against the Roma).Item University student agency, representation, and activism: a case study of students studying English at Université Cheikh Anta Diop (Dakar, Sénégal)(2013-06) Stafford, CaseyThis study explores and interrogates dominant representations of African university students by examining how students conceptualize and act upon their own agency. Using a qualitative case-study approach, the author examines how students actively confront the ideological and material conditions presented by schooling.