Although working in two different mediums, Jackson Pollock, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham created works during the 1940s and 1950s that share several analogous formal characteristics, as well as a body-centered process that reminded viewers of both the corporeality of the artists and of themselves. My thesis identifies and interprets the formal analogies evident in each the artists' approach to asymmetry, repetition, gravity, and space. I argue that the common aspects among the works of the three artists resulted from their participation in a shared modernist discourse circulating post-war America, especially in New York. This discourse provided the artists access to common sources of inspiration, such as the writings of Carl Jung, Native American imagery, and Asian cultures. Each of these elements characterizes the work of all three artists, along with similar ideas concerning the individual, national identity, and modern technology. / Art History

The evolution and diversification of Young Adult literature (YA) in the last two decades have brought about significant changes, particularly in the representation of LGBT characters. Tropes have always been a staple in literature, but their use in YA has taken on a unique significance when it comes to LGBT representation. These tropes have developed in parallel with the political landscape of the USA and the rise of LGBT rights. In this context, the analysis of three popular YA series, Percy Jackson and The Olympians, The Mortal Instruments, and The Raven Cycle, and their respective sequels and spin-offs, becomes crucial. By examining the use of tropes and the treatment of LGBT characters in these series, we can better understand the changes that have occurred over time and the commonalities and differences among them. Moreover, this analysis will also shed light on aspects outside the novels that have contributed to these developments. While similar patterns emerge in all three series, each one handles LGBT topics differently, depending on the time of publication. Finally, we will also explore the current state of publishing and the role that communities play in shaping these popular series. By examining these issues, we can gain a better understanding of the role that literature plays in shaping our perceptions of LGBT individuals and the broader social context in which these works are produced.

Den här studien undersöker hur filmmusik har använts som ett berättande verktyg i Peter Jacksons filmer Hobbit: En oväntad resa (2012) och Sagan om ringen: Härskarringen (2001). Till totalt sex filmer har Howard Shore skapat musik för att beskriva miljöer, karaktärer och folkslag i en värld som baseras på J.R.R Tolkiens fantasyroman från mitten av 50-talet.  Då filmerna inom varje trilogi har släppts med relativt korta mellanrum så jämförs ett antal scener i den första filmen ur vardera trilogi där tidsspannet mellan utgivningsåren är betydligt längre. Urvalet av scener representerar liknande aspekter ur vardera trilogi och analyseras därefter utifrån ett audiovisuellt perspektiv där Johnny Wingstedts teorier om berättarfunktioner ligger som grund. Eventuella likheter och skillnader diskuteras i uppsatsens avslutande kapitel.  Resultaten visar på hur musiken används för att komplettera och förstärka scenerna i filmerna, men också hur musiken vägleder narrativet genom upprepade användningar av ledmotiv i olika versioner. Ledmotiven används på så vis som ett berättande verktyg utöver filmens dialog och visuella aspekter.

Frederick Jackson Turner was a prominent American Historian who lived during America's Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century. Turner's most seminal piece, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, commonly referred to as The Frontier Thesis, challenged the accepted assumption that American culture stemmed from European ancestors. Turner resisted conventional wisdom that did not take into account the struggles and advances of the pioneers of the West. Turner believed the experiences of the pioneers forced them to adapt and modify their European roots, thus developing a distinct and separate culture from Europe. As a university professor, training a plethora of doctoral students in the field of history, Turner embraced the changes in educational thought of the time; including the importance of lifelong learning and the need to continually re-evaluate previously held beliefs. To Turner, a university professor's priority was to facilitate learning experiences that helped develop students into independent and competent critical thinkers. One way Turner differed from his contemporaries was the way he studied and wrote about history. Turner subscribed to the ideal that all aspects of historical events, incorporating information that set a complete context of the event itself was essential. The historiography Turner employed is considered a standard today. The Progressive Era also brought a wave of reformation in political, social and educational thought. Adult education programs began to develop throughout the nation. Adults for the first time had low cost opportunities outside of collegial studies to expand their professional expertise, literacy skills, and appreciation for art and entertainment. Adult education thinkers also began to systematically research and study ways in which adults best learn. The impetus of this study was to examine Turner's educational and career efforts juxtaposed with adult learning theory, principles and practices as an embedded university elite and active planner and participant of alternative adult education programs. As such, this study investigated Turner as an educator outside the field of adult education, who emulated the principles, practices and value structure of adult learning theory. / Ph. D.

In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower charged an ad hoc advisory group with assessing the current U.S. Cold War effort and offering recommendations for an 'unified and dynamic' way forward. This work investigates the case of Eisenhower's Presidential Committee on International Information Activities and its role in the United States' approach to the Cold War. Problematizing that which is often taken for granted, this empirical, interpretive study uncovers the discursive conditions of possibility for and the discursive activities taking place within Jackson Committee decision making processes. Employing a constructivist discursive framework, this project builds on an understanding of policy making as a process of argumentation in which actors intersubjectively define problems and delimit policy and strategy options. Revealing discursive conditions of possibility enables a deeper understanding of the substance, tensions and discursive maneuvers informing subsequent U.S. strategy and policy choices during the Cold War and may offer insights into understanding and addressing geopolitical challenges in the 21st century. The thick analytic narrative illuminates the 'witcraft' involved in conceptualizing the unique threat posed by the Soviet Union whose practices challenged existing categories, and in extending wartime discourses to the post-war geopolitical environment. It examines discursive practices informing the nascent concepts of national strategy, psychological warfare, and political warfare, including arguments for constituent elements and relationships between them. In so doing, this dissertation conceptualizes national strategy as practices underpinning a prioritized drive for competitive advantage over adversaries. Additionally, political warfare represents practices intended to create and present alternatives to foreign actors that are in the U.S. interest through the integration and coordination of diplomatic, economic, military, and informational activities. Based on its conceptualization of a long-term adversarial competition with the Soviet Union, the committee recommended solutions for a sustainable national strategy of political warfare prioritizing the free world and liberal world order. Its recommendations sought to recast strategic panic into strategic patience. / Ph. D. / Within geopolitics, threats sometimes emerge that policymakers consider unique because of their goals and/or methods for challenging the status quo, including communicating directly with foreign populations to confuse or gain support. These can be periods of strategic panic and conceptual confusion as policymakers, the press, and even academics work to classify these new threats and develop appropriate responses. The reasoning process usually begins by using familiar categories which individuals extend through storytelling and debates as a means to develop a shared understanding and language to describe the new geopolitical situation and possible policy options. Today the Cold War seems like a familiar and well-understood competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, in the early post-World War II years, policymakers wrestled with understanding and addressing Soviet actions, including Communist propaganda activities throughout the world. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked an ad hoc advisory group to assess the Cold War situation and offer new “unified and dynamic” ways for securing the United States and advancing U.S. interests. This research examines the advisory Jackson Committee’s rhetorical activities informing its recommendations for a national strategy of political warfare that would create and offer alternatives to foreign populations that were in the U.S. interest. The Committee recommended prioritizing the development of a liberal world order as a way to gain a competitive advantage over the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. It offered solutions for directing and mobilizing integrated and coordinated national activities across diplomacy, economics, information, and the military. Additionally, the Committee envisioned the possibility of inspiring and guiding quotidian societal activities to reinforce the foundations of the aspirational world order. This study stems from the premise that understanding how recommendations come about are as important as the recommendations themselves. Illuminating meanings and practices considered during the policy making process can provide insights into subsequent substance and tensions within national security strategies and policies. To do so, this study re-creates a narrative of the storytelling and debates involved in defining workable problems, addressing conceptual confusion, and developing solutions deemed sustainable over the “long-haul.”

Cette étude analyse les modalités de l’inhabitable dans un monde hostile et instable, ainsi que les stratégies élaborées afin de contrecarrer les effets pervers de l’instabilité. La violence des affects en jeu est à l’image de la cruauté des relations sociales, et ne laisse que peu d’espace viable même au sein du cercle familial, lui aussi soumis à l’entropie de la méchanceté ontologique. Les héroïnes de Jackson, confrontées de diverses manières aux résurgences d’expériences traumatiques que la traversée du présent, odyssée physique et psychique, transforme en obstacles insurmontables, recherchent la demeure idéale où se réfugier et trouver l’ancrage que leur interdit le monde extérieur. Jackson utilise les tropes de la maison gothique, de la hantise et du surnaturel pour illustrer les rouages trompeurs qui se mettent en place dès lors que ses héroïnes pensent avoir trouvé un tel lieu. Le paradoxe du corps maternel, qui fait cohabiter la vie et la mort, sous leurs formes pulsionnelles les plus destructrices, est le principe fondateur de l’effondrement des personnages. La folie apparaît comme un des moyens de comprendre l’incompréhensible, et de contenir la fragmentation. Enfin, l’invention du nom constitue le dernier retranchement où construire une demeure intérieure. / Our study examines the modalities of the uninhabitable in the work of Jackson, where the characters are imprisoned in a world intrinsically hostile, as well as the strategies they use to thwart the instability it entails. The violence of the feelings at stake mirrors the cruelty of social relationships, leaving but little livable space even within the family circle, also affected by the entropy of ontological evil. Jackson’s heroines, variously confronted to the reemergence of past traumatic experiences that their odyssey through the present time transforms into unsurmountable obstacles, seek the ideal house, the haven that will anchor them into a world that rejects them. Jackson uses the tropes of the gothic haunted house as maternal space to illustrate the deadly deception such a place embodies. The cohabitation the most drastic forms of the death drive and vital impulses is the foundation principle of mental dissolution. Madness is one of the means to both embrace and understand the incomprehensible. We conclude by showing how the invention of one’s name is a way of elaborating an inner house.

This study is a consideration of the notion of the artist as a visionary. This perception of the artist is explored in relation to the work and ideas of three twentieth century artists; the American painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1952), the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1983) and the South African artist Jackson Hlungwani (1918 -). The work and ideas of these artists is discussed primarily in terms of the similarities and differences between their art and ideas and those encountered in traditional shamanism and the visionary aspects of Romantic and Gothic art and culture as represented by the work and ideas of eighteenth century English poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827). Each of the twentieth century artists who are considered represents a different strain of the idea of the artist as a visionary. Pollock is discussed in terms of his implicit identification with the artist-shaman. This identification is revealed by the influence Jung's writings and Native American (Indian) art and culture had on his work. Beuys is considered in relation to his explicit adoption of a shaman-like persona. Hlungwani is a practising healer in a traditional community whose art explores an apocalyptic vision of redemption. The comparisons between the artists under investigation and the visionary aspects of traditional shamanism and Gothic and Romantic culture entail an analysis of pictorial elements, subject matter and content in the work of these artists. The intention was to explore those properties in the work and ideas of these artists which correspond to the notion of the artist as a visionary. / Thesis (M.A.F.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1996.

Lilburn W. Boggs and the Case for Jacksonian Democracy Robert John Walker Department of Religion, BYU Masters of Religious Education Lilburn W. Boggs was lieutenant governor of Missouri from 1832 to 1836. He was governor of Missouri from 1836 to 1840. Political upheaval was the order of the day as Jacksonian democrats overthrew, through the power of the ballot box, the establishment of the patrician leadership in the United States. Issues of equity, slavery, religion, settlement of the West, and divisive sectionalism threatened the Union of the states. President Andrew Jackson was the representation of the common man and the enemy of the monied oligarchy that assumed the right to rule the common people. Jackson's leadership enabled a powerful change in party politics as he became the charismatic figurehead of the Jacksonian Democratic Party. Boggs was a protégé of Thomas Hart Bennett, the powerful ally of Jackson and leading senator from Missouri. Boggs, beginning as a young man, rode the coattails of Benton right into the governor's mansion in Columbia, Missouri. This thesis examines Boggs' life and political career to ascertain whether or not he was truly a Jackson man as he represented himself to be to the electorate.

This dissertation explores the inception, evolution, and history of the East Washington community, located in East Point, Georgia. This African American community was strategically created in 1912, when the city council passed its first residential segregation ordinance. This research uses oral histories and other documents to reveal the survival techniques that enabled East Washington residents to endure the turmoil of Jim Crow racial segregation from the community’s 1912 inception, through urban renewal, integration, white flight, and the return of African Americans in the 1980s that resulted in their population majority. First, it identifies the people who chose to migrate to this area, where they came from and what enticed them to settle in East Point. Second, it discusses the network of institutions that they built and depended upon, including businesses, schools and churches, in order to maintain their largely autonomous community. Finally, it demonstrates the methods East Washington citizens employed to build a community that educated, protected, and nurtured children who became elected city officials, fire chiefs, professors, attorneys, physicians, teachers, dentists, human rights activists, and productive citizens of society.

In 1930, A.Y. Jackson and Lawren S. Harris travelled to the Arctic Archipelago as members of Canada’s Eastern Arctic Patrol. The collaborative venture between the Department of the Interior and the noted Group of Seven artists, which followed Jackson’s 1927 voyage aboard the government patrol, was part of a mutual aim to generate popular interest in the Canadian North through art. This thesis examines the underlying political context of both the 1927 and 1930 collaborative efforts. It examines the government patrols in connection with the promotion of Jackson’s and Harris’s Arctic works as part of a larger process of advancing the Arctic as a Canadian possession during a period of increased foreign interest in the region. Drawing on primary source material as well as various print media reports and exhibition reviews, this study provides insight into how the contemporary framing of Jackson’s and Harris’s Arctic sketches and paintings from the government-supported expeditions—the ways in which the works were discussed and understood—contributed not only to the “imagining” of the Arctic as a Canadian possession, but also to the dissemination of Canadian sovereignty efforts in the North. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2012-12-05 15:24:52.546