Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of poems / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Macho Remixes: A Collection of Writings is a thesis containing short stories, poetry, and a personal essay that discuss the matter of toxic masculinity through the representations of male and macho sexuality in the Latinx culture. It covers depictions of how Latinx men have been stereotyped in today’s society. The works included here are my own perspectives of what masculinity means to me as a young multicultural male navigating life. Throughout these texts, I—my speakers and narrators—grapple with understanding the conflicting and oppressive expectations drawn from my roots, particularly those based in Latinx culture. The purpose is considering the negative and restrictive expectations and representations of Latinx men and redefining what it is to be a man.

This book is about what it means to enter the imaginary: In history. In body. On the page. What happens when, one day, we encounter in the streets, the lifelong friends of our imagination? Strange absurdities emerge: Empty coffins are raised. Selfies taken with soldiers. A belief in immortality confirmed. Then, when happens when those soldiers are shooting at friends and strangers in the streets; how do those moments come back to us then? These are the times we returned to and will keep returning to throughout our lives. These are our seasons. They exist beyond lines of latitude. They exist beyond lines of latitude because places, too inhabit the imaginary. “One million people live in Harare, but Harare exists as a ‘home' for many millions more, who exist somewhere else, but imagine the city into being every day with nostalgia,” wrote a friend, Helen Morris. Zimbabwean literature is full of leaving, of what it means to live in exile. But what does it mean to come back to a place? Which is to say, what does it mean to return to the places we left and continued to inhabit in our minds? Again, what does it mean to enter into the imaginary? On the page, this refers to writing a book that served its purpose before it existed. Hope, too, is a way of imagining.

Please note: creative writing works are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and fill out the appropriate web form. / A collection of short stories / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing works are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and fill out the appropriate web form. / A collection of poems / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing works are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and fill out the appropriate web form. / War and Pace Report is a collection of five short stories. / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

The politics of writing of the Caribbean Canadian writer Marlene Nourbese Philip and the Turkish German writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar show a crucial concern for the development of serious multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multilingual dialogue, a concern which will also be the focus of this thesis. The specific contribution this study of the two writers will provide to the field of ethnic minority and non-White women's writing in Canada and Germany consists of its comparative-interdisciplinary approach. Critical texts on the writings of Philip and Ozdamar or on cultural, literary and lingual hybridity are numerous, ' especially in the areas of minority discourse, post-colonialism and feminism. However, linkages of these three components are very rare. A major emphasis of this work is to reveal the significant similarities -an approach still carefully attending to the context-specific cultural and individual differences-that exist in Philip's and Ozdamar's writings and writerly positions and hence to motivate an intensification of comparative work and co-operation between the disciplines of Canadian and German literature. The introductory chapter clarifies and explains the choice of literary theory and tern1inology that builds the framework for the comparison done here. This involves a critical discussion of the concepts of cultural, literary, and lingual hybridity as well as the workings of permanent and intermittent, imposed and self-chosen salience in the process of identification. Chapter two compares Ozdamar's and Philip's writings in relation to the women's historical, social, political, and legal positions in the German and Canadian models of the nationstate and immigration. Building on this context, chapter three then discusses their public and critical-academic reception in Germany and Canada, their exclusionary position within mainstream literature, and their politics of resistance as "excentric" German and Canadian writers. Chapter four is most text-related as it specifically relates to the writers' intersecting strategies of lingual hybridity, embodied language and body-memory in Mutterzunge and She Tries Her Tongue. The conclusion re-evaluates the writers' "ex-centric" and yet integral positions at the border of single-nation literary studies, positions from which Ozdamar and Philip relocate literary, lingual, and cultural belonging in the German and Canadian nation-state respectively. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

A collection of poems by Abigail Stallings

This dissertation unites two seemingly unrelated fields, writing centers and technical writing, to study the feasibility of creating an online technical writing resource. Despite prolonged attention to multiliteracies and collaboration in both subfields, writing centers and technical writing do not commonly implicate one another in their shared mission of shaping students to become savvy writers with an awareness of rhetorical concepts and situations. This dissertation establishes how complementary these two fields are based upon their shared pedagogies of collaboration and multiliteracies. I suggest that a service design approach is beneficial to writing center research. Similarly, the technical writing field has little research and scholarship dedicated specifically to online writing instruction and pedagogy. Historically, writing centers have served students from all disciplines, but research demonstrates the effectiveness of specialist over generalist writing support. Taking a specialist perspective, I use service design methodology to gather input from student and instructor stakeholders about how online writing tutoring and web resources can address their needs. Using survey and interview data, I designed and piloted an online tutoring service for students enrolled in the Technical Writing service course at Virginia Tech. In student and instructor surveys, participants reported that they were highly unlikely to use online tutoring sessions but were more likely to use a course-specific website. Additionally, student interviews revealed that the Writing Center is not necessarily a highly-used resource, especially for upper-level students. Instructor interviewees indicated some misunderstandings and limited views of the Writing Center's mission. Nevertheless, a small number of participants in both groups spoke to a need for specialized tutoring in the Technical Writing course. In terms of feasibility, integration of online services for this course poses the greatest challenge because it relates to the amount of change needed to successfully integrate online tutoring or web resources into the curriculum. With some attention to how OWLs and synchronous online tutoring can be an asset to teaching technical writing online, I argue that the pilot project described in this study is relatively feasible. / Doctor of Philosophy / A feasibility study addresses whether or not an idea or plan is good. In the case of this dissertation, the idea is whether or not to offer online writing services—such as tutoring and a repository website—to students enrolled in Technical Writing at Virginia Tech. In order to study the feasibility of this plan, I first argue for bringing together the fields of writing centers and technical writing. Two strong reasons for uniting these fields are based upon their shared methods and practices of teaching collaboration and multiliteracies. Multiliteracies in this dissertation refers to critical, functional, and rhetorical computer literacies; each literacy is important for Technical Writing students to develop as they enter their future careers. Historically, writing centers are places on a college or university campus where students from all disciplines can go for tutoring; this is known as the generalist approach to writing tutoring. However, research demonstrates the effectiveness of a specialist approach—where a tutor is familiar with a student’s discipline—to writing tutoring over generalist writing support. Therefore, I take a specialist perspective in this study. I use service design system of methods to gather input from student and instructor stakeholders about how online writing tutoring and web resources can address their needs. Service design is commonly used in the service economy, such as restaurants and hotels, in order to design or redesign services. In particular, service design focuses on people and their needs. Using survey and interview data, I designed and piloted an online tutoring service and a website for students enrolled in the Technical Writing service course at Virginia Tech. In student and instructor surveys, participants reported that they were highly unlikely to use online tutoring sessions but were more likely to use a course-specific website. Additionally, student interviews revealed that the Writing Center at Virginia Tech is not necessarily a highly-used resource, especially for upper-level students. Instructor interviewees indicated some misunderstandings and limited views of the Writing Center’s mission. Nevertheless, a small number of participants in both groups spoke to a need for specialized tutoring in the Technical Writing course. In terms of feasibility, integration of online services for this course poses the greatest challenge because it relates to the amount of change needed to successfully integrate online tutoring or web resources into the curriculum. With some attention to how online writing labs and synchronous online tutoring can be an asset to teaching technical writing online, I argue that the pilot project described in this study is relatively feasible.