Browsing by Subject "narrative"
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Item Cosigning the Past(Baltimore Fishbowl, 2012-02-08) Delury, JaneIn the 1880s, my great-grandmother packed a steamer trunk and left her Alsatian village for the port of Le Havre, France. Anna had a glass eye — the result of a snowball fight when she was a girl — little knowledge of English, and the promise of work in San Francisco. She docked in New York and, having eaten her first orange, boarded a train to the West Coast. There, she met my great-grandfather, Albert, an immigrant from Germany. They opened a bakery that collapsed during the earthquake of 1906. My great-grandparents and their children survived that catastrophe, but not long after, their seven-year old son was run over by a carriage while playing in the street. A black wreath hung on their door for a decade. By the time I was a child, Anna and Albert had been reduced to these anecdotes, passed on by my father, and, more concretely, to their two steamer trunks.Item The Mischief of Created Things(Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2009-04) Oldenburg, AaronThe purpose of this project is to create new images of West Africa, through an interactive environmental narrative informed by philosophies of game design. The content draws on my two years as a development worker in Mali. The imagery revolves around the hybridization of traditional Malian and Western culture, and overlaps between magic and technology, with an interface designed to allow the player to find the magic in the mundane. My process involved creating a three-dimensional environment in Flash that the player could explore non-linearly. Within the environment are characters with whom to converse, and conversation is based on a fluid navigation system similar to the environment's exterior exploration. Stories are based on my diary entries and letters home and were chosen for their personal, surprising, and multilayered nature. Rather than use traditional game design methods I chose to start with narrative and imagery first and create the game structure from them. During play the user discovers narratives that build on one another throughout the course of the experience. The player uses these to form a meaningful picture of the environment as a whole. The order selected to experience the narrative changes its interpretation, as reading an event over another influences the understanding of subsequent events. The surprising and non sequitur nature of the narrative makes the non-player characters as well as the environment itself seem more plausible.Item Shifting Attention: A Feminist-Humanities Model for Social Justice Education(2022-01-01) Carter, Rachel L; McCann, Carole R.; Language, Literacy & Culture; Language Literacy and CultureI have developed a Feminist-Humanities model for social justice education that demonstrates pedagogical potency for building students' capacity for transformative social change. This dissertations presents the model, describes its theoretical framework, assesses its impact on student learning, and considers what the findings can offer to social justice educators at this critical historic moment. The Feminist-Humanities model is an epistemic project built through the confluence of feminist theory, feminist pedagogy, and the humanities ways of knowing. To move students beyond consciousness-raising and prepare them to act, the model teaches tools of analysis—knowledge, identity, intersectionality, power, structure, and affect—that connect individuals to the larger social landscape and guide students toward more expansive and more accurate knowledge about themselves, others, and the social world. My findings suggest these tools shift students' attention (Fisher, 2001) in ways that build their capacity for change. I taught the model in a one-semester general education diversity course with twenty-four student-participants. I used feminist narrative analysis to analyze four data sources: each student's first and final papers, transcripts of an end-of-semester focus group, and my teacher/researcher journal. I identified three shifts in attention related to the model's curricular goals. In shift one, students take up the epistemic project and enter a critically reflective learning mode (Fricker, 2007) to interrogate their knowledge and assumptions. In shift two, students use their new knowledge to connect the individual and the social through analyses of structure and power to recognize why people with different social identities view and experience the world differently (Gordon, 1997). And in shift three, students engage an affective analysis (Ahmed, 2004b; Gordon, 1997) that connects the head and the heart in a thrust of empathetic understanding that demands action. My analysis suggests these shifts are key to the success of the Feminist-Humanities model because they surprise students, help them look more closely at what they think they know well, and invoke their imaginations to consider what the world could be with their effort (Ahmed, 2004b). Particularly potent is the model's use of affective analysis, which critically examines the ways emotions inform our social interactions to reveal the lived impacts of social structures and their relations of power. Findings indicate affective analysis may be the bridge between consciousness-raising and action because it allows students to consider what emotions can tell us about how our society operates and what we could do differently. Findings demonstrate that social identities deeply inform the learning process, and further investigation of the complex ways students experience a social justice course could lead to more effective curricula. At this historic moment when educators are asking how best to teach the skills and tools of change, this dissertations contributes new techniques for institutions of higher education for educational pathways that prepare students to act. Findings suggest essential components of these pathways are cultivating the ability to talk across difference, a deeper recognition of the ways social identities and affects impact our attempts to change, and a better understanding of how change is made. Ahmed, S. (2004b). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge. Fisher, B. N. (2001). No angel in the classroom: Teaching through feminist discourse. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power & the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. Gordon, A. F. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. U. of Minnesota Press.Item Story Soup: Creating Contexts for Transformative Dialogue Across Borders(2017-06-09) Soble, Leslie; Eleuterio, Sue; Turner, Rory; Walker, Thomas; Cultural Sustainability; MA in Cultural Sustainability