Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

"Racism is Solved!" A Fake Conservative's Guide to Social Justice

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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Under the cloak of a character who is as ignorant as he is conservative, Stephen Colbert delivers snaps-worthy "truthiness"-insights that often shine a light to mainstream systemic forms of oppression by embodying their very nature. In my thesis, I acknowledge...

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American Jewish Summer Camp: Changing Identity in Community

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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I will explore how Eden Village Camp serves as a model of positive Jewish identity formation. Jewish identity is inherently dependent on social relationships, and Jewish summer camp provides a breeding ground of socialization where interactions happen in an intense...

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Art Is What We Say It Is: "Easy Art" and the Pragmatics of Interpretation

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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Since 2009, Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen have run the Jogging, a blog on the popular social media site Tumblr in which they and others post a variety of sloppily rendered and generally silly images to be viewed and shared...

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Assata Shakur: Embracing Community

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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Assata Shakur is a 65-year-old revolutionary. During the 1960s, Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. However, on May 2, 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), placed Assata Shakur on the...

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Black Women on the White Screen: How American Popular Culture affects the Visuality of the Black Female Body

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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In the past, poignant controlling images and stereotypes have run prevalent in the American historical framework. However, these tropes are routinely challenged by black feminists and black entertainers in contemporary popular culture. This thesis will garner a comprehensive analysis of...

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Branding the Globe: The Real Madrid Takeover

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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Real Madrid got its start in 1902, but it wasn't until the 1950s under Santiago Bernabéu as president and his squad of international superstars that the team began to make a name for themselves as the best, winning five championships...

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Built for speed: strain in the cartilaginous vertebral columns of sharks

Publication Date
2014-February-01
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In most bony fishes vertebral column strain during locomotion is almost exclusively in the intervertebral joints, and when these joints move there is the potential to store and release strain energy. Since cartilaginous fishes have poorly mineralized vertebral centra, we...

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Catching Herself In the Middle: How Chinese-American Adoptees and Their Parents Construct Narrative and Ethnic Identity

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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Since 1992, over 85,000 children have been adopted from China by U.S. citizens (Miller-Loessi and Kilic 2001:246; U.S. Department of State 2013). Most of these adoptees are girls. They were abandoned as infants due the combined factors of patrilineal culture...

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