College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Drawn from the Well of the People: The Living Stage Theatre Company and their Groundbreaking Community-Based Practice(2020) Crowley, Patrick Abram; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawn from the Well of the People is the first full-length history of the Living Stage Theatre Company. Founded in 1966 by Robert Alexander, Living Stage was the education and outreach arm of Arena Stage in Washington D.C. until their closing in 2002. A multi-racial, improvisational, and community-based company, Living Stage broke ground with many socially engaged theatre practices, and through their process-based approach they created theatrical engagements with, not just for their constituents. Famous for engaging the “forgotten” people of D.C. and beyond, Living Stage worked with young people besieged by poverty and segregation, seniors, the deaf and hard of hearing, disabled students, and inmates at correctional facilities like Lorton Prison and D.C. Jail. This project relies on the Living Stage Records at George Mason University Library’s Special Collections Research Center and is the first major work to do so. Additionally, long-tenured company member Jennifer Nelson donated her personal archive, which was gifted to her by Robert Alexander, to aid in the completion of this project. Oral histories from five company members were collected to supplement and enliven the written records. The dissertation also addresses the work of Haedicke and Biggs, the only extant scholarship on the group. Living Stage’s contributions force us to reconsider the intellectual history of socially engaged theatre in the United States, as they devised similar strategies to those found in Theatre of the Oppressed but did so before Augusto Boal created and published on his system. Similarly, how they obliterated the fourth wall and troubled the hierarchy between artists and audiences by engaging participants as co-creators expands the canon of radical and experimental theatre in the U.S. While their participatory approaches and commitment to marginalized communities radically democratized theatre practice, their institutional practices replicated systems of domination in important ways. For scholars and practitioners alike, Drawn from the Well of the People, offers potent models and philosophies of socially engaged theatre, case studies to illustrate the work in action, and some cautionary tales about failing to apply the ethos of the work to the internal workings of the company.Item Revisiting the Reservation: The Lumbee Community of East Baltimore(2020) Minner, Ashley Colleen; Williams Forson, Psyche; Pearson, Barry L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Revisiting the Reservation” is an analysis of the relationship between Baltimore’s Lumbee Indian community and the neighborhood where the community settled following the second World War. It is an inquiry into the roles of memory and place in the formation of identity. Vestiges of the Lumbee tribal homeland in North Carolina have become part of the built environment in East Baltimore as a result of the presence of Lumbee people. Tangible aspects of East Baltimore now also exist in the Lumbee tribal homeland. Lumbee people of East Baltimore are the living embodiment of both places. Over time, the community’s connection to the neighborhood has changed due to a complex set of factors ranging from Urban Renewal to upward mobility. This dissertation asks how the community’s identity has been affected. American Indian identity, constructed through a colonial lens, necessarily diminishes over time due to changing connections. The Baltimore Lumbee community illustrates that identity is actually an additive, adaptive process; heritage is living and culture continually evolves. This dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary framework synthesized from the fields of American Indian Studies and Public Folklore to consider questions of heritage using a decolonial lens. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is introduced via the tribal homeland and the social and economic conditions that prompted a mass migration to East Baltimore. East Baltimore is introduced via an abbreviated chronicle of the presence of American Indian people and other racial and ethnic groups leading up to the presence of Lumbee. Drawing primarily on oral history interviews and archival research, experiences of Lumbee arriving to Baltimore in the postwar years are highlighted, as are the safe havens they adopted, established and stewarded to exist freely and in community with one another away from “home.” The research process to map Baltimore’s former “reservation” and develop a walking tour to commemorate its sites is detailed as a project of reclamation of history, space, and belonging. An analysis of the expressive culture of subsequent generations of Baltimore Lumbee, including fashion, material possessions, food, and speech, reveals that memory and place play significant roles in the formation of identity. As connection to place changes over time, memory of place within identity prevails. Communities must share memory to understand how to engage in a future.Item “LABOR HAS A LONG MEMORY”: TRANSFORMATIONS IN CAPITALISM AND LABOR ORGANIZING IN CENTRAL APPALACHIA, 1977-2019(2019) Heim, David; Freund, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1989 the UMWA went on strike against Pittston Coal. In response to declining union power and corporate anti-unionism, the UMWA embraced community members and women as participants in its striking strategy. Although sometimes reluctant to do so, the union accepted the involvement of non-miners in non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience, and was successful because of the strategic shift. The victory against Pittston Coal in 1989 suggests that scholars cannot rule industrial unions as sites of resistance to capitalism after 1982. The union’s acceptance of community organizing in 1989 also suggests a link between the strategies and success of the Pittston Strike and more recent organizing victories in West Virginia—the West Virginia Teachers’ Strikes. More recent labor militancy in Appalachia has also built off of legacies of resistance dating back to events like the Paint Creek Mine War and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1912 and 1921.Item Talk Amongst Yourselves: Conceptions of “Community” in Transgender Counterpublic Discourse Online, 1990-2014(2017) Dame, Avery; King, Katie; Farman, Jason; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the mid-1990s, digital technologies have played a key role in major political actions and social movement organizations in the US and elsewhere. Newly widespread public internet access mitigated issues related to geographic limitations or cost-prohibitive print media, allowing otherwise-disparate groups to more quickly and easily communicate and organize. Transgender individuals were particularly well-positioned to benefit from the growth in digital technologies, which supported an active and growing transgender social movement throughout the 1990s. Both recent scholarship and popular media have focused on digital technologies as key sites of visibility, social support, and political organizing for transgender individuals. However, few scholars have also focused on the specific technological infrastructures that underlie these discussions. This dissertation remedies this gap through an analysis of digital communications’ impact on transgender social movement organizing from 1990 to the contemporary moment. Using critical and multi-modal discourse analysis, I analyze how users past and present develop their understanding of what “transgender community” should be, and the ways different platform-specific affordances shape these understandings. My approach is grounded in platform studies: focused on the interrelationships between platforms, platform design, and the discourse produced on these platforms, while also paying close attention to the social and cultural factors that influenced a platform’s design. I take a case study approach, with each chapter focused on a different platform or dataset, from 1990s transgender periodicals, archival data from Usenet newsgroups, ethnographic interviews, informational websites, to social media platform Tumblr. Throughout each of these chapters, I draw attention to how platform affordances inform users’ emergent understanding of “transgender community” as a homogenous entity—obscuring key differences, disconnects, and inequalities amongst users and within the identity category itself. Ultimately, I find that the possibilities for online political organizing are constrained by the digital platform’s modes of circulation and its encoded social norms, as power is channeled away from those who need it most.Item Museums, Social Media, and the Fog of Community(2011) Wong, Amelia Selene; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the early twenty-first century, museums increasingly turn to "social media" to engage audiences and in these efforts they routinely imagine them as "communities." This dissertation tends to the politics of that choice, which extends a long history of museums employing community as a strategy towards institutional reform. Museums invoke community in numerous ways but without typically articulating those meanings, even though they influence the implementation and evaluation of social media projects. I argue that this lack of articulation creates a "fog" over practices--an ambiguous and confusing context of work--in which community operates as a "self-evident good," but serves traditional interests as much as transformative ones. To expose the many ideas that lay within this fog, I examine how American museums invoked community throughout the last century, showing how they use it both to reinforce their power and alter relations with audiences. After exploring how community has been conceptualized through networked digital media and social media--technologies and a culture that emphasize openness, communication, collaboration, and the materialization of digital bodies--I show how museums continue to use community in complex ways. As social media conflate community with communication--specifically "face-to-face," or immediate, communication, I argue they influence museums to over-value visible acts of communication, which narrows their understanding of online visitor engagement and dilutes the potential of community to shape projects that more conscientiously serve audiences and institutional reform. To illustrate the complexity of these ideas at work, I present three case studies of museums using social media to construct community: the Getty Center's blog, A Different Lens; the Japanese American National Museum's website, Discover Nikkei; and the website of the Science Museum of Minnesota's Science Buzz. I expose the definitions of community at work in each, examine how they influence the use of media, and work to limit and serve the project's various democratizing goals. The conclusion offers a nascent problematique that suggests more critical approaches museums may take for invoking community and using social media towards democratizing aims.Item Women's Work & Other Stories(2009) Foster, Angella Paulette; Rosen, Meriam; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Born and raised in the Kentucky, Angella Foster explores her kinship with the strong women who shaped the land and the character of her home state with their bare hands. Inspired by her grandma's stories of growing up the daughter of sharecroppers, Women's Work captures the rhythm of daily labor and explores the emotional landscape of an imagined community of women in rural Kentucky. The piece also features an original sound score composed and performed live by School of Music students.