The Philippines is experiencing a new kind of era ever since the onset of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency. Although the Philippines deems itself as a republic, the president exhibits an authoritarian nature. His tactics, rhetoric, and worldview have garnered attention and controversy, leading to a reevaluation of the country. Despite disagreement and condemnation from human rights groups and other entities, for many people Duterte stands as an effective leader in the Philippines. Even with his brutality, there is a strong presence of approval. In this project, I aim to explore and uncover what makes Duterte such a likable figure among Filipino citizens. A review of the literature reveals many plausible reasons. Duterte veils himself as a ‘common man.’ His efforts to combat the war on drugs are also admirable to many Filipinos; they feel much safer with some of his policies. Initially, my research was supposed to manifest in an academic paper. However, I found that one of my parents shared the same sentiments as other Filipinos. To highlight my findings, I chose to interview my dad and borrowing from the work of Ocean Vuong, I utilized the form of a letter to my father. With this project, I aimed to connect with my dad in hopes of understanding more about my people. Additionally, I was able to hear the genuine thoughts and background of my dad. This brought me closer to my roots, and my dad. This research contributes further to the broader question of what makes dictators and authoritative leaders, such as Duterte, ‘likable’ people to their citizens.  

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the United States galvanized millions of Americans to fight for a more free and democratic society, banding together to protest racial segregation and other forms of systemic racism such as police violence against minorities. Newspapers covered these actions extensively, spreading the message of civil rights across the US. People eager for change in cities far from the centers of civil rights activism in the South, such as Seattle, responded to this national political fervor by fighting for change locally. In Seattle, activists sought an end to job and housing discrimination, de facto school segregation, and police violence through non-violent direct action. Seattle’s major print newspapers, The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer covered these issues extensively, spreading news and controversial developments to their readers. In my research, I analyze newspaper coverage on activism and cases of police violence which garnered a strong public demand for justice. With the support of other sources, such as the biographies of Seattle activists, the histories of local civil rights organizations, and studies on media coverage of the police, I construct an analysis of how these newspapers shifted their coverage of civil rights activism and police violence throughout the 1960s as a response to community activism. This critical angle focuses on how the actions of Seattle’s activist community influenced newspaper media, prompting the newspapers to include more activist perspectives in their news coverage. This research, therefore, displays the power that local activists held in influencing print media coverage of their actions, and with that, the influence that activists had to shift the public perspective towards activism in the 1960s in Seattle.

Within the ethnographies, memories, and archives produced throughout a capitalist empire, the ‘gaze’ has generally been used against the subject, creating narratives which entrench the hegemony in defining the subject to accord with the needs of the dominating culture. The term ‘oppositional gaze’ was developed in 1992 by bell hooks in conversation with Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: the ‘gaze’ is a scopophilic act albeit with the potential to be a radical method for resistance; the oppositional gaze then refers to ‘looking’ as a defiant act to which the actors reclaim a sense of autonomy over the spectator and turn the gaze back upon their oppressors. What makes the act of ‘looking’ so defiant and how this looking translates to an oppositional gaze is the question this project attempts to answer through a close reading of various media and using an array of methods and theories from such disciplines as film studies, ethnography, and data ethics. I build upon the foundations of hooks and Mulvey while asserting that the definition of ‘looking’ goes beyond visual perception and into the act of understanding and perceiving. I apply these theories of the ‘gaze’ and my own explorations of ‘looking’ to juxtapose Rahul Jain’s Machines (2016) and Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) in analyzing its application and limitations. With this project, I hope to impel further discussion on the study of the gaze by compiling demonstrations of its application in various media and its disruption of prevailing narratives.

This narrative web experience invites readers to rethink their own relationships with the material world. The piece frames materials within Western monumental structures — the marble pedestal, the bronze figure, and the “living” rock carving — not as inanimate instruments in colonial systems, but as living victims and actors within those very systems. I examine how these materials are treated within the Western monument-making process through alternate frameworks—namely Neolithic, Queer and Indigenous material theories—in order to expose the violences inherent in Western material theory and practice. This piece, structured in a series of web pages, leads the reader through a research narrative strung together from conceptual images, academic text, and instructions for a tactile activity. By highlighting these non-Western and anti-colonial material lenses, I explore how the critical lenses we choose to apply to examine monumental materials can act to liberate them from the inanimacies inflicted upon them and highlight the resistances they mount against monumentalization, prompting a further “dematerialization” of the Western monument. This liberation will allow us rethink the physical and ideological standards that have been established for monumentality and to ideate alternate material forms for future monuments that do not contain, impose, and idolize such colonial violences.

Stereotypes around femininity, as presented to young Women, have historically not been inclusive. Often consisting of single-story one-dimensional white male ideals of femininity. Young Women could either lean into the stereotype or turn away, the dismissal often created new stereotypes due to a lack of strong feminist representation like the “I’m not like other girls” trope. The exposure to these white feminine stereotypes created cracks in a young Woman’s relationship with femininity and what it means to be girl. Causing a shift to anti-feminist and sexist thought while developing internalized misogyny. This presented externally as Women hating behavior that supported the learned mindsets of white men on the sexualization, degradation, and general treatment of other Women. The patriarchal system influenced this young Woman and others across the country in their homes, in their classrooms, each night on television, reinforced on the covers of teen magazines, through the eyes of their fathers and actions of their mothers. This young Woman functioned as a monument to the Patriarchy. Acting for the best interest of the heteronormative white male experience. I was the monument. With a lack of strong feminist representation, I instead turned into a living, breathing, and sometimes ‘preaching’ monument to the patriarchy. Through autoethnography and research of pop culture from the 1990s and 2000s, friends, family, members, and television shows. I will analyze my own experience to identify and understand my journey from anti-feminist to feminist. Answer how I was manipulated by the heteropatriarchy and colonialism to be antifeminist, to hate other Women, and actively cause harm to others based on their expression of femininity. Understanding the way in which I was once an image fighting for feminine oppression to help others unlearn too.

This paper and counter-tour will examine the relationship between tourism, the silencing of Martinican activism in international media, and the legacy of colonialism. Martinique is located in the southeastern Caribbean, and has been colonized by France since the mid-1600s. Victor Schoelcher was a French abolitionist who has received much more credit than he is owed for emancipation in the French Caribbean. The project explores the tourism industry and international media’s role in upholding dominant narratives around Schoelcher that are rooted in white saviorism. The questions this research seeks to answer are: What is the relationship between tourism and schoelcherisme, which is the glorification and mythologism of Victor Schoelcher? How does activism on Martinique that challenges white supremacy and colonialism bring to light truths that the tourism industry attempts to conceal in its messaging? The approach to answer these questions involves critical analysis of tourist websites and brochures. This project will also incorporate social media and publications of Martinican writers and activists. The counter-tour will illustrate how the tourism industry invisibilizes the work of activists to challenge Schoelcher’s material legacy, keeping their work from receiving international attention. This research project will challenge depictions of the island that are interwoven into the tourist industry’s advertisements and Western perceptions of Martinique, and highlight means of resistance to white supremacy and colonialism.

The United States established itself as a cohesive and internally policed nation-state through a process of exclusion through border making and racialized violence. Above all, the construction and regimentation of the state involved practices that sought to naturalize the borders of the United States in order to endow its barriers with an immutable solidity. This solidity was ratified through physical demarcation, legislation and violence directed at those deemed “other,” both human and non-human. By relying on a constructed archive that documents the federally organized Gray Wolf eradication programs in the borderlands of Arizona and new Mexico from 1880 until 1930, I demonstrate how the delineation of the United States/Mexico border was both preceded and continues to be perpetually defined by policies that enact precisely these kinds of exclusionary measures. I will show how this federally mandated dominance over the lives and the habitats of non-human animals was utilized by analogous procedures to surveil and police the border in their effort to bolster and sustain the United States as a settler-colonial state. By revealing otherwise concealed historical insights, I hope to undermine the prevailing conceptions of national boundaries by denaturalizing the illusion of fixed, constant, and enduring lines of demarcation and consequently offer opportunities to envision a world without such divisive separations. Such a vision would allow for the recognition of borders not as sites of inclusion, but as spaces built on methodical exclusion of both human and non-human beings.

The United States immigration system was created upon the ideas of white supremacy. There have been many instances of xenophobia and racism throughout history used as a ploy to justify anti-immigration policies. The US-Mexico border, Latin America, and the Caribbean play a significant role in the conversations around immigration due to the intersection of various racial identities; white supremacy plays a part in justifying discrimination and violence towards people of color. This research asks how racial differences influence US immigration incarceration and deportation. This is conducted by comparing the historical and contemporary contexts of border patrol and immigration policy to analyze the modern-day landscape of immigration and how it has or has not transformed over time. This was achieved through a literature review of historical sources around immigration policy and secondary research on the history of the US immigration system. Desired and achieved recruitment consisted of two academic professors who had extensive research and knowledge on the historical and contemporary framework of the US immigration system as well as two US community organizations focused on advocating for Black and Indigenous immigrant rights. They were identified through their research and activism, centered around the intersections of race and immigration. Drawing upon interviews and secondary research sources, our research group presents an in-depth series of podcast episodes, which feature candid discussions with professors and organizations heavily involved with the immigrant community. These interviews allow the listener to gain a deep understanding of how racial differences impact and shape immigrant incarceration and deportation. Overall, our research group hopes to demonstrate how immigration policy has disproportionate impacts depending on a person's race, leading to varying experiences and statistical differences in incarceration and detention rates. ​​Through this podcast, our research group hopes to inspire conversation around the intersection between race and today's immigration policy.

This project explores the history and power of language in relation to graffiti writer Rammellzee’s philosophy of Ikonoklast Panzerism as well as to his art. Using informal interviews, ethnographic engagement, and close readings relating to Rammellzee and the alphabet’s history, I investigate how the individual can claim the power of language back from colonizers and oppressors through subversive art. I question how Rammellzee’s work can be used to reimagine the alphabet as a tool to deconstruct monuments of oppression and imperialism that are pervasive to society. Rammellzee founded Ikonoklast Panzerism on the idea that each individual letter of the alphabet can be armored and weaponized in order to free themselves from the institutions which wield the power of language over the rest of society. He bases his beliefs in the medieval history of monastic illuminated calligraphy and uses his theories to create art which subverts structures of power. I argue that Rammellzee’s work reveals the potential of individualized power by reclaiming the almighty power of language and challenging the limitations of legibility and standardization. Drawing from concepts such as ethnographic refusal, and from the writing of scholars like Michel-Rolph Trouillot to inform my creative work, this project emphasizes the power of the written word in today’s world and investigates how language can be reimagined and repurposed by each individual. I synthesize my research findings into a creative form that touches on my own relationship to language in academia, and how I can apply Rammellzee’s ideas to my own life.

China’s rapid economic growth and urbanization in the recent two decades marked one of the most incredible speeds since human civilization, but the deeper social and environmental issues keep being exposed as relentless urban sprawl sweeps across the country. In 2012, under the nationwide “land-creation” movement, Yan’an, a major city in central China with a population of 2 million situated on the Loess Plateau, started implementing its 10-year plan to bulldoze mountains and build a “New District” on the hilltops to accommodate the exploding population. Despite mainstream narratives that feature it as a pioneer work of urbanization, I argue that the scarred land and the exploitative system in the “New District” cannot support the Plateau residents culturally and psychologically. This research draws on various theories and studies on anthropology, sociology, and urban planning to analyze the social, cultural, symbolic, and psychological impacts of the Yan’an “New District” project. The novel perspective proposed by this paper reconsiders urbanization as an exploitive and deceptive process and reexamines the future of rural-to-urban migration and urban growth.