Amarina Kealoha
Amarina will travel this summer to New York City, the cultural birthplace of hip-hop, to investigate this contemporary musical and cultural phenomenon, focusing on the films and videos made about the genre. Her stay will involve an intensive schedule of research, interviews and live events, as well as video documentation, which will form the preliminary visual and theoretical groundwork for her final creative endeavor. The purpose of her immersion in hip-hop culture is an inquiry into the ways in which hip-hop functions as a mode of resistance. During the 2001-2002 […]
Dafna Kory
Dafna, an Interdisciplinary: Globalization and Development major, will create a body of 50 documentary photographs depicting the impact of tourism and preservation efforts on the town of Bodhgaya, India. Bodhgaya, located in Indias most impoverished state of Bihar, is home to the Mahabodhi Temple, the most recent addition to UNESCOs World Heritage List. The preservation standards decreed by UNESCO require the creation of a buffer zone around the Mahabodhi Temple, which is likely to translate into the displacement of locals who live and work around the site. Contestations over the […]
Alex Omar Bratkievich
There are strong indications that the factors influencing the alternation between existential (“There’s a book on the table”) and canonical (“A book is on the table”) constructions might be the same cross-linguistically; for example, existentials across languages exhibit the definiteness effect: indefinite Noun Phrases are preferred in pivot (post-verbal) position. Mikkelsen (2002) proposes that the effect is a consequence of constraints governing the subject position. Since the definiteness effect can be overridden, she suggests an analysis within the Optimality Theory framework to model constraint interaction relative to a hierarchy of […]
Sabina Juneja Garcia
Sabina will travel to Los Angeles to examine historical evidence of the communication between the citizen and the politician to control the shape of the physical landscape of Chavez Ravine. Chavez Ravine was once a thriving Mexican-American community removed for construction of a massive public-housing site yet today Chavez Ravine is home to Dodger Stadium. Using the papers of prominent politicians, Mayor Norris Poulson and City Councilman Edward Roybal, she will examine the campaign rhetoric employed by these candidates who were at odds on the issue of public-housing and the […]
Sara Sol Linck-Frenz
Collapsing the Frame delves into the space between two categories contemporary and commercial dance to ask how the moving body functions as a site both for composing and deconstructing normative conceptions of embodiment, physicality, identity, and sociality. By researching the particular case of commercially produced choreographies, the project not only problematizes the categorical divide between high culture and popular/commercial culture, but intends to ask how dance productions that cross this boundary function as corporeal and public experimentations with collective identities. Through a comparative analysis of three sites of dance practice […]
Scott Leon Washington
Scott’s project examines the crystallization of the “one-drop rule” in the United States between 1890 and 1936: a relatively unique principle of racial classification which defines as “black” anyone with even the slightest trace of black or African ancestry. Over the summer Scott will be visiting the Schomburg Center for Research in Harlem, and, in order to investigate the internal workings of the United States Census Bureau, he will be conducting research at the National Archives in Washington, DC. In addition to explaining some of the more distinctive features of […]
Valerie Nguyen
Through an attempt to gain a sense of the significance of Plato’s extensive discussions concerning the nature of language, this study undertakes to understand how the dialectical representation of rhetoric and the regulation of sophistic epistemologies specifically play into securing the institutionalization of philosophy. Foregrounding the particular role of the sophist Gorgias, both as a recurrent figure in the Platonic dialogues and as a thinker in his own right, in establishing the disciplinary identity of philosophy, Valerie will set out to show how understanding Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen as the […]
Sylvan Guerveno
Sylvan will compose a symphonic poem in two movements, titled “L’Enfer en Soie” (Hell in Silk), based on “L’Hautontimoroumnos” (The Self-Tormenter)–a poem from the 1857 collection Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire. The dualism that is present in the poem becomes, in this piece, an exploration of the pain of psychological torment, and the relief that may also come with one’s own tormenting behavior. This alliance of pain and pleasure is realized in a musical texture combining unusual orchestral sonorities and music with vocal-like qualities. University Orchestra Director, David […]
Zeina Halim
Zeina, an English major, will write a novel of literary fiction that narrates the lives of three generations of Egyptian-Americans. It explores social issues such as cultural and gender conflict between old world Egyptian-Muslim values and more modern Western values. Intergenerational conflict is examined within the three generations of this family with the first having immigrated in their fifties, the second in their twenties, and the third being born in the United States. The characters struggle with defining an identity for themselves while straddling the cultural rift. The emotional core […]
Carrie Ann Bodley
Water is crucial to human existence and critical to social and economic development. What happens when this vital resource becomes enmeshed in a violent geo-political struggle? Israel has occupied the West Bank for thirty-seven years, maintaining control over West Bank water resources. Israel’s water infrastructure and technology are far more advanced than that of the Palestinians, which would seemingly benefit the latter. However the Palestinians and many in the international community argue otherwise. They argue that these policies are restrictive and prohibit Palestinian socio-economic development. Carrie’s project will take her […]