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 Disability, Embodiment, and Resistance: The Rhetorical Strategies of Disability Activitm(2018) Osorio, Ruth Danielle; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Disability, Embodiment, and Resistance: The Rhetorical Strategies of Disability Activism” argues that disability activists channel their experiences of disability at each stage of organizing and delivering activist rhetoric. This dissertation deepens rhetorical studies’ understanding of activism and citizenship by identifying collective caregiving and embodied difference as sources of activist invention and delivery. For my first chapter, “Disabling Citizenship: The Embodied Rhetorics of the 504 Sit-Ins,” I investigate the 1977 504 sit-ins, when one hundred disability activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco for twenty-four days to demand federal protection from discrimination. Examining personal and news photographs, oral histories, and news articles, I argue that disability activists displayed the civic power of disabled bodies by displaying the disabled body as resistant, connected, and resilient. In Chapter 2, “Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera’s Rhetorical Survival: An Ecological Perspective of Disability Activism,” I examine the disability activism of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two disabled transgender women of color and prominent activists in 1960’s and 70’s gay rights organizing. I assert that behind-the-scenes survival work and caregiving functioned as critical forces behind their enactment of disability activism within gay liberation. My third chapter, “I Am #ActuallyAutistic, Hear Me Tweet: The Topoi of Autistic Activists on Twitter,” explores the rhetorical implications of contemporary online activism in the autistic community. In my study of almost 2,000 #ActuallyAutistic tweets collected during Autism Awareness month in 2016, I argue that the #ActuallyAutistic activists on Twitter leverage the affordances and constraints of Twitter to challenge dominant, and often dehumanizing, perceptions of autism in popular discourse. For my fourth chapter, “Creating an Accessible Legacy: Professional Writing as Disability Activism within the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC),” conducted interviews with authors of the 2011-2016 CCCC Accessibility Guides, which notes the accessibility challenges and features of the selected conference city and venue. In my examination of these interviews, I argue that the guides’ authors craft and circulate a policy document that ultimately moves CCCC toward greater disability awareness.Item Barriers and Facilitators to Homeownership for African American Women with Physical Disabilities(2016) Miles, Angel Love; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation fills an important gap in the literature by exploring the social, economic, and health characteristics and experiences of members of a social group that has been otherwise under-examined: African American women with physical disabilities. It raises questions about homeownership to facilitate a better understanding of the relational aspects of gender, race, class, and ability related inequalities, and the extent to which African American women with physical disabilities are, or are not, socially integrated into mainstream American society. It uses grounded theory and develops a Feminist Intersectional Disability analytical framework for this study of homeownership and African American women with physical disabilities. The study found that African American women with physical disabilities experience barriers to homeownership that are multiple, compounding and complex. It suggests a research and social policy agenda that considers the implications of their multiple minority status and its impact on their needs.Item ABLE-BODIED WOMANHOOD: DISABILITY AND CORPOREALLY EXCLUSIONARY NARRATIVES IN BLACK AND WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS DISCOURSES, 1832-1932(2016) Temple, Heidi Anne; Struna, Dr. Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a feminist disability rhetorical analysis of US black and white women’s rights movements from 1832-1932. Guided by Disability and Feminist Theory, it works to identify the presence and use of patterns of disability tropes in women’s rights discourses. From Lucretia Coffin Mott to Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Mary Church Terrell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Addie Hunton, this project interrogates the rhetorical work of dominant narratives and lesser known voices in women’s rights discourses. I argue that early black and white women’s rights advocates often utilized and repeated a disability rhetoric that relied on disability metaphor, narrative prosthesis, and corporeally exclusionary narratives in order to construct definitions of womanhood. Their insistence on cognitive ability as a marker of “fitness” and “ability” provided the foundation for rights arguments based on ableist assumptions of autonomy and citizenship. I also argue that this use of disability rhetoric relied on and furthered a pervasive ableist ideology present not only in many of these movements, but in US society. In the process, US black and white women’s rights discourses have continually elided women with disabilities from women’s rights discourses because their bodies (physically, cognitively, and/or psychologically) did not meet the ableist prerequisites set for claiming women’s rights during this time period.Item "Nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer": Portrayals of Masculinity and Ideal Citizenship in World War II Combat Films, 1989-2001(2013) Cerullo, Michelle; Giovacchini, Saverio; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Traditional platoons of World War II combat films were visualizations of an America that could be, rather than a reflection of the America that was. One might assume that, had the trend toward inclusive representation continued, the World War II combat platoons of the films of the 1990s might have included women or homosexuals, since the military of the 1990s was fully integrated on a racial front. Instead platoons' compositions remained unchanged. And in this new context, rather than acting out of a desire to expand the terms of citizenship, these movies represent a closing off of the terms of citizenship. In the face of demands for a change in the terms of civic participation from women, from homosexuals, from disabled citizens, these movies represent a vision of a shared past that is easier than the one currently inhabited by viewers. What does it mean that this period, out of all the periods in the history of the United States is the one that is deemed most worthy of celebration?