Graduating Critical Studies Scholars Present Their Theses
May 09, 2023
Tuesday, May 16
daelyn lambi
10:00–10:50 AM Room 413
Critical Studies MA, Visual Studies MFA
chimaera.site
A nonlinear, hyperlinked collection of essays, speculative prose inquiries, and text-based games, exploring how realities are constructed, grafted, mutated, glitched, disguised, and destroyed by/within new media.
Paola Coimbra Sanabria
11:00–11:50 AM Room 413
Critical Studies MA, Visual Studies MFA
Accessibility and the Museum
An exploration into the possibilities of how to design museums to be more welcoming to communities who have historically been excluded from them utilizing the framework of what I am calling cultural accessibility.
Michelle Brehmer
12:30–1:20 PM Room 413
Critical Studies MA
What Is It Like to Be a Swarm? : Affective Considerations of Emergence in Biological Collectives
A survey and critique of scientific investigations into complexity, this thesis analyzes "affective freeze responses" during experiences of emergent phenomena.
Ari Dinero
1:30–2:20 PM Room 413
Critical Studies MA, Visual Studies MFA
Goys and Dolls: Promises and Pitfalls in the ‘Unorthodoxy’ of Netflix’s Russian Doll
This thesis aims to explore and articulate the inscribed Jewish types and tropes which have become fixtures of on-screen entertainment. Centering on Netflix’s Russian Doll as a case study--its portrayals of theology, gender, and race-- this analysis considers possibilities for subversion of those calcified depictions, but also the seemingly unavoidable traps which hinder such nuanced renderings within the Hollywood machine.
Kiah Rogers
2:30–3:20 PM Room 413
Critical Studies MA
Riffs on Rifts in Space: Between Belonging and Non-Belonging
Using personal anecdote about the author’s experiences as a Black woman in a predominately white music scene in Cleveland, Ohio as a starting point for further personal reflection, inquiry into belonging, and the complication of space, this paper aims toward new understandings of belonging and ponders the possibilities that can come from embracing a sense of non-belonging.