Schedule at a Glance Speaker Index Room 1 Room 2 Room 3 Room 4 Room 5 Room 6 Room 7 Room 8 Room 9 Room 10 Room 11 Room 12 CAS Posters ASP Posters Special Events
‘What Moves Your Soul’ was a concert that took place in November of 2022. It provided a unique opportunity to view history through the lens of music, showcasing songs used as protest anthems. These powerful songs were used as a timeline to educate the audience about the deep-rooted systemic racism in America. The upcoming SSRD presentation will dive into the process of curating this production, exploring the journey from start to finish. In addition, the presentation will provide a short viewing of the concert and the process throughout it.
Faculty Sponsor: James Miley
Discipline: Music
This past summer I used the Shuchat Arts Fellowship to expand my acting practice into the world of voiceover. I assembled a home recording setup and took classes with Voice One and Sound On Studio, focusing on animation and audiobook narration. The product of my work has thus far been a collection of voice samples for animation, audiobooks, and commercial work, hosted on a website showcasing my work in voiceover and theatre. My hope is that these, and the personally motivated practice developed over the summer, will help smooth out the transition from school to professional life.
Faculty Sponsor: Rachel Steck
Discipline: Theatre
This Shuchat project functioned both as a way for me to continue to compose music, and as an introduction to sample libraries used to mimic acoustic instruments. I had originally restricted myself to string instruments, which evolved into orchestrating most of what I had already written. The result of this project was a couple of self-produced musical cues meant to mimic music found in video games. Part of this process involved revisiting popular gaming OSTs to see how they enhanced the narrative of the game. This project served as great practice in musical technologies, composition, orchestration, and mixing.
Faculty Sponsor: James Miley
Discipline: Music
“Ladybug: What More Can I Be?” is a reflection of what it means to be a queer person of color in our society that is steeped in white supremacy. This is a play that focuses on relationships, disconnectedness, and intersectionality of personal and cultural identities, focusing on the playwright’s Mexican heritage. Although this started as an autobiographical project, it has morphed into a working platform for the voices of all queer/transgender Latin Americans within the theater community.
Faculty Sponsor: Rachel Steck
Discipline: Theatre
Where can you go with $5,500? How might personal testimonies of sexual (mis)education make their way into public art? And what balances the stress of filling a gallery with work all your own? All this and more in the recapping of a Summer 2022 Shuchat Fellowship for Studio Art.
Faculty Sponsor: Chelsea Couch
Discipline: Art
As part of both the world of art and psychology, I've realized that both have the same basic aim to understand the human experience, much of which is explained by emotion. Art can help us move beyond what is explainable, uncovering the essence of an emotion. Fear, sadness, happiness, anger, surprise, and disgust are agreed to be the six most universal emotions. Over the course of three months I made work in short film, performance, claymation, and interactive sculpture. I invite you to join me in recounting the experiences and insights learned in my pursuit of understanding these emotions.
Faculty Sponsor: Chelsea Couch
Discipline: Art
Much previous queer theory scholarship has focused on camp: defining it, who can make it, and its impact on our wider society. Using this scholarship as a foundation, I argue that camp is a way for queer people to learn to self-love by rejecting the shame of not fitting into heterosexist power structures, analyzing Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” as an example. Further, I connect camp’s rejection of shame to the myriad writings of Black feminists about self-definition, demonstrating that loving and accepting the self is an essential step in any movement to resist oppression.
Faculty Sponsor: Rachel Steck
Discipline: Women's and Gender Studies
This presentation will focus on the process of writing about grief and the integration of my life experiences, specifically watching my mom battle and eventually pass away from cancer, with the concepts I have studied in the WGS major including concepts of the self, embodiment, and the personal as political. While my thesis project takes the form of a memoir, this presentation will take a wider focus on what I have learned by processing grief through narrative. I will discuss what prompted this project, insights throughout my writing process, and my life experiences as examples of what I have studied.
Faculty Sponsor: Leslie Dunlap
Discipline: Women's and Gender Studies
This project aims to explore the fields of queer ecology and environmental education, examine the interwoven histories of gender, capitalism, colonization, schooling, and the biological sciences, and take a step forward in queering ecological education. Through this workshop, we will look at our own preconceptions of the natural world, where they may have been learned, and the impacts they have on both our personal lives as well as our society as a whole. Your contributions will be used to begin to develop critical ecological teachings and create proposals for novel learning environments, both through a queer and decolonial lens.
Faculty Sponsor: Leslie Dunlap
Discipline: Women's and Gender Studies
This thesis will explore the virtues of disability. History tells us that disability has been and continues to be viewed in unfavorable terms. There are many instances within global society where pushes have been made to eradicate disability – usually for altruistic reasons. Peter Singer, a utilitarian, has argued in favor of infanticide and the sterilization of people with disabilities on the grounds that “we can no longer say that their lives are always to be preferred to those of other animals.” However, Singer and others with similar views fail to account for the societal good that people with disabilities contribute.
Faculty Sponsor: Ivan Welty
Discipline: Philosophy
This study focuses on uncovering the relationship between unity and cultural heritage using the philosophical frameworks of Confucius and Appiah. Han people are a numerous group in China. Confucius impacted China to adopt the new Chinese language policy, namely putting Mandarin as the standard language. The essence of modern Communist China is tied to its domination of modernized Chinese. Traditional Chinese associates with Han identity, while Simplified Chinese associates with the CCP. I argue that the Han people’s identity is inseparable from traditional Chinese. Han-ness should not be used as the identity of China or to exploit the cultural heritage.
Faculty Sponsor: Ivan Welty
Discipline: Philosophy
The regress problem challenges the possibility of a solid foundation for truth. This paper critiques common theories like foundationalism, coherentism, infinitism, and skepticism for not providing a satisfactory solution. It proposes a new approach, twin worlds, that combines foundationalist and skeptical principles. Twin worlds posits two distinct worlds, one internal and one external. The internal world offers a foundationalist approach to justification, while the external world takes a skeptical approach to testing and challenging our beliefs. This paper provides a critical analysis of traditional responses to the regress problem and offers an alternative solution.
Faculty Sponsor: Anthony Coleman
Discipline: Philosophy