Browsing by Subject "Humanities"
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Item THE 510 AND THE 93: THE INTERSECTION OF ARTISTS, URBAN EVOLUTION, AND PRESERVATION IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA AND SAINT-DENIS, FRANCE(2022-05) Fry, Julie M.; Bradley, Betsy; MA in Historic PreservationUrban areas need artists and cultural assets to thrive, and through adaptive reuse of historic buildings for artists, cities can both retain the histories and cultures of their people and provide solutions to gentrification, displacement, blight, and inequities in how cities develop. While arts and culture cannot mitigate all these issues, they can help to create a connective tissue among people, a connection that can make communities stronger and more inclusive. I found that it is imperative to meet the arts sector’s needs for safe, functional, affordable and stable spaces to live and work. Historic building stock (industrial, commercial, residential) can be adapted to meet those needs in an equitable way, while also helping to redevelop underutilized urban neighborhoods. This treatise examined the intersection of these components in two similar cities on the margins, Saint-Denis, France and Oakland, California, which provided a cross-cultural opportunity to consider new approaches and perspectives to the challenges both countries face at a time of particularly polarizing global unrest. The COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, and social justice issues are affecting how we live and how we relate to each other in a civil society, underlining the need to strengthen the places that people gather, a role that arts and culture fulfills. Progress in both countries requires joining financial resources, decision- making power, and the built environment in a sustainable way in partnership with artists and residents. A top-down, bureaucratic approach needs to be replaced by community collaboration. I made recommendations that address this critical urban need in a variety of ways through real estate and urban development models, funding models, historic preservation policies, and methods to better value the arts in public spaces. For example, cities can provide financial incentives to convert unused office space into artist studios, apartments, galleries, or performing arts venues. They can embed artists in municipal preservation offices so that local preservation policies can account for the needs of the cultural sector. Cities can create cultural/preservation zones to provide equitable capital and operating support for hyper-local arts engagements that revitalize marginalized communities through the built environment. By forging new links with each other while imagining in tandem new ways of equitable and creative city-building, both the French banlieues and diverse American cities will thrive.Item Against Objectivity: Philosophy and the Humanities(2022-04-13) Benchoff, Kate; Angello, Aaron; Hood College Arts and Humanities; Hood College HumanitiesThis collection of works examines how philosophical approaches have long been coded as "rational" and "objective" (and "male"), creating a rift between philosophy and other fields of study in the humanities and privileging masculine modes of thinking over feminine. The central argument is that first, philosophy doesn't have to be objective to be meaningful (as in the case of existentialism), and second, that insisting on objective interpretations of things like art and literature can result in a sort of "othering" of the work itself. Objective (formalist) approaches to art, for example, often depend on dismantling the work into discrete parts to be analyzed rather than examining the work as a whole. All of the articles in this collection deal in some way with Self and Other, either from a Cartesian perspective or from a Sartrean perspective, and analyze literature or art criticism through these lenses.Item The Dynamics of Objectification Within Individual Identity(2020-08-07) Caggiano, Nicholas; Hoffman, Karen; Hood College Graduate School; Hood College HumanitiesThis portfolio work focuses on the individual's experience of being seen as an object through society's gaze and the pressures to present themselves and perform in a certain way, knowing they are being watched. Though there are factors which can be perceived as negative by the individual, being seen can also be advantageous. The awareness of being seen by certain groups in society is a significant contributor to the construction of the individual's identity. This work looks at different perspectives and degrees through which individuals in certain scenarios navigate the weight of their community's gaze. Included in this study are perspectives and insights from Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault which also intertwine with the effects of modern day social media. This is also looked at through the various layers of philosophy, literature, and history, specifically concerning vanity, Racine's "Phaedra," and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.