Unpersons and Untruth: Reality, Photography, and the Manipulation of Stalinism
by Reese Finnigan
From the author:
During Stalin’s rule, the Soviet state, in pursuit of its own survival, sought total control over the lives of its citizens. Many of the methods of pursuing this control have been well explored, particularly the violent repression of any real or perceived dissent. More insidious, however, was the state’s attempts at control through the rewriting of reality. Under Stalinism, thousands of photographs were manipulated, defaced, or partially destroyed, both by the state, and by civilians themselves. Doing so was an act of survival for both parties, but it also contributed to a reality crisis within the USSR. Photographic collections in archives today contain a number of images of denounced individuals who have been painstakingly, fearfully removed from portraits. On their own, these images reveal a society that was in constant paranoia about the presence of certain individuals in photographs. When examined as a pattern, these manipulated photographs suggest that the existence of Stalin’s regime hinged on a contorted relationship to reality itself. This article, based on a larger undergraduate thesis, argues that the practice of manipulating and defacing photos was part of a cycle of performance between the state and the people. Through this cycle, multiple, contradictory, simultaneous realities were created, and upheld, by both sides. Understanding this contorted reality is key to understanding what existence was like during Stalinism.
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ART AIN’T DEAD, YOU ARE! An Analysis of how Capitalism has Warped Keith Haring’s Artistic Rhetoric
by Spiral Weber
From the author:
This paper was written for the final of my WRT181H course in fall of 2024. The assignment was to choose a figure or group of associated figures from history and analyze their rhetoric. It took me entirely too long to figure out who I wanted to write or even think about. When your frame of study is all of recorded history, you’ve got quite a lot to choose from. What eventually pushed me in the direction of Keith Haring was the rediscovery of the tweet I mention in the paper — a person who used generative AI to complete the intentionally left incomplete final piece Haring made. The piece, simply titled “Unfinished Painting”, was left as such because he died of HIV/AIDS while making it. It is often cited in the same breath as “Untitled” by Félix González-Torres or “Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers)” by John S. Boskovich, both of which exist as commentaries on HIV/AIDS-related death. For me, the decision to use genAI to complete Haring’s piece was incredibly disrespectful and showed a clear lack of understanding of the reason why he made it in the first place. Moreover, most of Haring’s art that has been profited off of post-mortem has been his less political pieces, which I thought was fascinating given how active he was for anti-apartheid, protesting the AIDS crisis, and other highly political movements. As an artist surrounded by other artists in a world increasingly defined by profit, I think this paper is a necessary look into the way that has been reflected throughout history.
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Free Your Voice: Protecting the Community of Curtis Bay against Air Pollution
by Jaida Rhea
From the author:
I wrote this paper for WRT320: Technical Communication at Goucher College, where the goal was to write about an issue local to Baltimore. I am very interested in environmental justice, and while I was doing research for this paper, I came across the youth-led movement called Free Your Voice based out of South Baltimore in Curtis Bay. Free Your Voice has been established for a little over a decade. While their current opponent is the massive freight transportation company CSX, who recently transported over 8 million tons of coal from Appalachia through South Baltimore, the first movement started at Benjamin Franklin High School in 2011. Their first fight was the proposal of the nation’s largest waste incinerator less than a mile from the high school, and through the students’ peaceful protests, the incinerator was never built. Today, they take on a much larger opponent. This story follows these young people fighting for environmental justice in their community, and highlights past studies that show just how important their fight is for South Baltimore.
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The Psychopolitics of Social Media: A Brief Investigation
by Sebastian Quiroz
From the author:
So this essay was originally what I had submitted as my midterm for PHL325: Neoliberalism and Biopolitics with Prof. Steve DeCaroli, with some slight edits and additional information included in this final version for the sake of added clarity. This class was primarily an exploration of the work of the French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault, in particular his formulations regarding the phenomena of disciplinary power, biopower, and biopolitics, and how he saw biopower and biopolitics shift in interesting ways beginning in the 1970s with the burgeoning paradigm of neoliberalism. Although now largely taken for granted, the novelty of neoliberalism for Foucault and others at the time meant that endeavors to trace out its possible developments in the realms of economics, politics, culture, society, and so on, proved to be a worthwhile endeavor, at least to the extent that it provided some interesting musings and theorizations.
Outside of the class around this time, I had recently begun coming into contact with the work of two different authors. The first author was Byung-Chul Han, a contemporary South Korean-German philosopher and theorist. Of concern for this essay is his text Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, wherein which he expands on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in ways that I thought were really interesting and relevant to our current moment in various ways. In particular, I found a lot of what Han was theorizing within Psychopolitics regarding the intersection of power, social interaction, and the realm of the digital to be worth exploring in more detail and with some specific examples that could potentially exemplify the theory well. To that latter end, the second author comes in; the Irish writer and journalist Roisin Kiberd, whose book The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet I considered to be a singularly captivating read, and one which I found to be ripe with particular examples of phenomena that could be interpolated through Han’s theories rather nicely. Though I only touch on the material in Kiberd’s text somewhat briefly, I would nonetheless consider her writing to be a jumping-off point of sorts for me to look into other phenomena within social media that could likewise be related to Han’s formulations. To that end, this essay closes with a brief exploration of the infamous Twitter shitposter dril and the potentially useful example that they set when navigating the online spaces of social media.
This is the first major essay that I had ever written for one of Prof. DeCaroli’s classes, and I am ultimately pretty satisfied with the end result. Consider this to be a synthesis of sorts of the dual interests that I have in both philosophy/critical theory and internet culture, and enjoy the read 🙂
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¿Cómo escapas al Laberinto del fauno?
by Madelynn Meyer
From the author:
¿Cómo escapas al Laberinto del fauno?” was written to analyze the complexities between a world of fantasy and the real world. In El Laberinto del fauno, the main character, Ofelia, is trapped between a reality where her world is falling apart and a fantasy that she isn’t allowed to enjoy because she is forced to fix her reality. Even though Ofelia is forced to think practically while working her way through the fantasy world, the presence of fantasy in her life is exciting and new – it gives her a purpose. This essay argues that the existence of the marvelous is complex, especially due to the real-life comparisons that can be made between the tests and monsters.
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The Development of Community and Resistance Through Traditional Music Culture
by Madeleine Kelly
From the author:
I wrote this paper as my final written work for my major in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I decided I wanted to work on a piece exploring the uses and strengths of music and dance in social movements. I used Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” to relate feminist theory to traditional music and dance and how they are utilized in protest music and cultural dance practices. I used Barabara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy” to provide the historical and anthropological context in which to ground my argument using Lorde’s theory. These were the two primary texts used to develop my analysis and research and they worked alongside each other seamlessly to exhibit how collective joy found in group song and dance creates an environment conducive for community building and change making.
I am very proud of this paper and everyday I am faced with the relevance of this project as political turmoil continues globally and footage is always circulating of crowds dancing, chanting, and singing together in protest. Social change work and music are two passions of mine that I have cultivated my whole life and I feel privileged to have been able to bring that into my academic career.
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Virtually Honest? Exploring the Relationship between Remote Testing and Academic Integrity in College Students
by Kate Conrad
From the author:
This paper was written for my Quantitative research methods in Psychology course from Fall 2024. It was based on my final project for the class, which was a survey-based study looking into the relationship between remote testing/assignments and academic integrity in college students. I worked with two other students in the class to develop and carry out this research. We were specifically looking to see how students enrolled in in-person courses use outside sources during closed-note assignments and tests/quizzes. The survey was anonymous and we asked students a variety of questions about their use of tools such as Google and AI. Our hypothesis was that students enrolled in in-person courses would report frequent use of unauthorized resources during unsupervised assessments. However, the results were more complex than this, and not exactly what we thought we would see, likely because this was a self-reported survey. Nonetheless, we collected valuable and insightful data that helped us better understand the factors of academic dishonesty, and develop ideas for future research that can provide educators with insights for upholding academic standards.
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What Really Slays: Exploring How the Meaning and Usage of “Slay” Has Evolved From 1850 Through 2023
by Jupiter Berrysmith
From the author:
This paper was originally written for WRT 285: Analyzing Linguistic Data. When thinking of a word I wanted to research the usage of, my mind quickly went to “slay,” as it is a word whose meaning has changed during my lifetime. Through prior knowledge, I knew that it was originally coined in the ballroom drag community, and has eventually been co-opted by mainstream media and the general population, primarily young femme people. I remember hearing the word used by people a few years younger than me, and then witnessed it becoming a common phrase among my peers as well, until all of a sudden it became a staple of my vocabulary. So I thought it would be interesting to try to determine when the meaning of slay developed into its modern usage, and when it started catching on in the mainstream. I ended up coding and analyzing 360 usages of “slay.” While it was a time-consuming commitment, I had so much fun exploring the different meanings and coming up with a coding system. I really enjoyed the moment of discovery, when the goal of my research came to fruition, and eventually putting all of my thoughts together in this paper.
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The Impacts of the Invasive Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis) on Ash Trees (Fraxinus spp.) in the United States: A Review
by Jaida Rhea
From the author:
I wrote this paper as part of an independent study on the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) and ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) that I completed with the environmental studies department at Goucher College. The emerald ash borer is an invasive insect that has caused the death of millions of ash trees, and if emerald ash borer populations are not contained and eventually eradicated, the North American ash resource could be depleted. This is a generally understudied topic, so it was interesting to dive into the current research to learn more and to write a review on the interactions between the emerald ash borer and ash trees in the United States. This paper provides an overview on the ecology of both the emerald ash borer and ash trees, their distributions across the United States, their interactions, and lastly, I talk about current management strategies of the emerald ash borer and conservation efforts of ash trees.
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