Capstone 2020 Cohort

We are excited to feature our Class of 2020 capstone projects! Students carried out their research and executed their projects in the context of an approved upper-level capstone seminar, or, under the direction of an advisor as an independently designed project (one-semester project or two-semester Latin Honors thesis). These multidisciplinary research projects are the culmination of their studies and we proudly present their work.

 

Ayanna Arrington: Corporate Interest in Radio in The 1930s. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Histories of Media Convergence with Professor Reem Hilu.

 

Rebecca Bowman: “Why Don’t I Have Teachers That Look Like Me?”: Improving Recruitment Efforts for Black Teachers in Boston Public Schools. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Sociology of Education with Professor Jason Jabbari

Molly Calvo: Ruptured Ecologies in Contemporary Border Art. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Contemporary Art Discourses of the U.S.-Mexico Border with Professor Ila Sheren.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

For my senior capstone seminar, I took Contemporary Art Discourses of the U.S.-Mexico

Border with Professor Ila Sheren. In my final paper, titled Ruptured Ecologies in Contemporary

Border Art, I explored how three artists reckoned with the imposition of a militarized border

zone, and what that means in terms of natural place value. The pieces I included were Gilberto

Ezparza’s Plantas Nomadas, Laura Aguilar’s Grounded #114, and Postcommodity’s Repellent

Fence. I began considering this topic after researching the conviction of four female

humanitarian activists who had compromised the “national decision to maintain the refuge in its

pristine nature” when they left water jugs out in the Puerto Cabeza Wildlife refuge to aid

migrants. The conviction was later reversed, but the deployment of the US Wildlife Act to indict

immigrant activists is an act symbolic of the appropriation of environmental policies and

geographic features to further violence against immigrants. The broader implications of this are a

ruptured relationship between border landscapes and peoples, reflective of the imperial colonial

roots which claimed that land after the Mexican-American War. It was interesting to me to

analyze the works of contemporary border arts through this lens.

 

While this paper represented my capstone in AMCS, the most impactful experience I’ve

had in the major was studying abroad in Samoa. Much like in the Contemporary Art Discourses

course, I was able to apply my interest in socio-environmental interactions, performing my

research on contemporary climate actions undertaken by villages. I interviewed leaders of local

villages and environmental organizations, and coded them to uncover patterns to answer the

question- why do some villages undertake actions to mitigate climate change while others do

not? After the coding, I adapted a model in cognitive-psychology using the Pacific Indigenous

Paradigm to identify where barriers to implementing mitigative actions exist.

 

At WashU, every semester is full of academic excitement. In AMCS especially, I’d

continuously uncover new ways to explore my favorite topics. Doing independent research in

Samoa gave me the opportunity to put together the pieces of these explorations, reflecting on the

many concepts, methodologies, and lenses I had learned and selecting the ones that fit my design

for the project. I am excited to continue learning and exploring these topics in my career.

 

Brady Delgadillo-Arellano: Tax Increment Financing and the Legacies of Blight: Developing the Central Corridor in the Era of St. Louis’s Creative Economy.  Latin Honors thesis advisors: Dr. Andrea Murray and Dr. Heidi Aronson Kolk.  

Capstone Author’s Reflection

St. Louis’s Central Corridor is a 4.5 mile stretch spanning across the city from Forest Park to the Gateway Arch. Its modern developmental history has been driven by contentious initiatives including mid-twentieth century urban renewal projects, which led to the demolition of the city’s largest Black neighborhood called Mill Creek Valley, and today’s use of tax increment financing (TIF), a municipal tax incentive for real estate developers. In both situations, the project areas were designated as “blighted,” which is a fraught term that establishes a site as abandoned and unable to attract investments. Through a comparison of mid-20th century and contemporary media archives, my thesis bridges the Central Corridor’s history of urban renewal to its contemporary TIF-driven development by analyzing how blight has been weaponized by the public and private sector as a legal and publicity tactic to move their projects forward. Additionally, I analyze the cultural and spatial components of TIF projects in the Central Corridor, including the Cortex, City Foundry, and the Armory; these are new, adjacently located mixed-use districts marketed to creative class professionals. Through ethnographic work and visual analyses, I argue that today’s TIF development is catered to the creative class, while perpetuating the exclusionary design and weaponization of blight that has formerly shaped St. Louis’s urban development.

I became interested in TIF because I felt that it was fundamentally transforming the city’s landscape and economy through the large-scale development projects that I write about. However, when researching TIF, I found a need for academic work that documents how TIF is impacting the built environment and culture of cities. The literature on TIF was heavily in the realm of public policy and geared towards people with policy and public finance backgrounds. One of my goals was to make TIF an accessible, understandable concept, so that people of any background could read my thesis, understand how it is impacting the city, and formulate their own opinion on how TIF could best be better utilized. Furthermore, my hope is that my thesis will allow people to evaluate what progress looks like for cities and to push our local leaders to better evaluate how the development projects they are supporting, especially ones that use public funds and take up considerable space, can benefit St. Louisans and redress the consequences of classist, racist policies that previously influenced the city’s development. Through this thesis, I was able to contribute a new perspective to the existing TIF literature that combines an economic and cultural analysis. 

Throughout the process of formulating my project, my potential topics varied, however they were always within the scope of urban development and the built environment. This scope is representative of my approach to AMCS in taking courses that would allow me to understand the various stakeholders involved in development, the contemporary and historical issues faced by urban environments, and the roles of identity (including queer, racial, and socioeconomic) in the formation of cities. I did not start the major with these interests but gravitated towards AMCS because of the niche course topics available and the multidisciplinary approach to learning. I found that AMCS professors allowed me to approach courses through the lens of my interests. Over time in my AMCS courses, I realized that I loved writing about the histories of different neighborhoods, questioning how architecture and the built environment impact communities, and I simultaneously saw my career interests move towards real estate; these academic and career passions were certainly sparked through the writing and research I was able to pursue in my AMCS journey and culminated into my thesis.

 

Lizzie Franclemont: "I Love Rock and Roll": How Billy Graham and the Evangelical Church's Fear of Secular Music Paved the Way for Hillsong Church. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Reading Historical Figures: Cultural Analysis and Afterlives with Professor Paulo Loonin.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

For my AMCS Capstone, I wanted to explore the intersection of my two majors, American Culture Studies and Religious Studies. In particular, I was interested in analyzing the popularity of Western Christianity and the celebrity culture that exists within it; this fits perfectly with my seminar course, Reading Historical Figures: Cultural Analysis and Afterlives. The figure I chose was Billy Graham; a famous author and tele-evangelist who was acclaimed for his ability to fill Madison Square Garden in New York City for Crusades as well advise Presidents during their time in office. I argued that Billy Graham’s fame and celebrity status in the 1970s enabled him to lead the Evangelical and Pentecostal Churches’ resistance to the emergence of rock and roll music; the impact of this is still evident today through the youth-centered mega Church movement of Hillsong Church. Through this lens, I was able to provide evidence that Graham’s success was tethered to an ability to impact culture, and through his charismatic teaching and personality, he gained endorsements from celebrities, politicians, and church attendees in an unparalleled way. For his gatherings, Billy Graham hosted Crusades, which were held in theaters or stadiums and opened with musical headliners like Johnny Cash. Recently, there has been an emergence of young, trendy churches with pastors in thousand-dollar sneakers and conferences that are attended by celebrities like Justin Bieber and the Kardashians, much of that was inspired by Graham and his ability to unite different denominations of Christianity under the mission of a youth revival.

As I reflect on my capstone, I thought back to the 375A course and our discussion about the inclusivity of American Studies; the ability to study a diverse range of topics and to develop a multidisciplinary toolkit has been foundational to my interest in the field. The first course I took in AMCS was The Black Athlete in American Literature with Noah Cohan who later became my advisor. I have always loved the humanities and I was intrigued by our class discussions on how the visual arts informed the socio-cultural aspects of sports and how that perspective enabled me to engage with the texts in a new manner. This aligns with my other interests as I started in Sam Fox viewing the humanities as inspiration for visual art and non-written communication. I have noticed that these same skills were applicable outside of studio courses as my focus remained on what I was conveying to the audience, how I could do that best, and why it was significant.

One of the ways I was able to incorporate these skills was through my methodology. To understand the impact of both Billy Graham and Hillsong Church, I created an archive that relied on interviews and sermons of the late Billy Graham, testimonials from his Crusades and sociological analyses of the demographics that attended. While researching Hillsong I was able to find information from their social media accounts and to analyze their reach as a church and brand. Lastly, my seminar concluded with a conference-style presentation and I was able to show visual comparisons of how similar the two gatherings were. In brief, this project looked at tele-evangelism and its musical influence, but it also made a compelling point, while religious institutions aim to separate the sacred from the profane, there are also examples of how religious spaces are drawing from “secular” culture to gain a larger following. I am not sure if this is what I imagined my capstone would be on, yet, I found the process and my research to be insightful and a fitting conclusion to my academic studies.

 

Claire Grindinger: “The Stranger” Myth and the Media. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Gender Violence with Dr. Jami Ake.

Gabrielle Jung: DIY Asian America. Latin Honors thesis advisors: Professors Leland Tabares and Rebecca Wanzo.

 

Rachel Kleinhandler: 13 Reasons Why to Consider Intent Versus Impact. Capstone advisor: Professor Cynthia Barounis.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

My experience within the American Culture Studies major has been an incredibly fulfilling one. The opportunity to take such a thoughtful and interdisciplinary approach to my academic studies has allowed me to garner skills in a variety of topics and avenues of learning. With a major concentration in Social Thought and Social Problems, as well as a minor in the Olin Business School in the Business of Social Impact, each facet of my academic experience has allowed me to delve deeper into current, complex issues that not only affect my own life, but also the lives of others I care so deeply about. My capstone project entitled, “13 Reasons Why to Consider Intent Versus Impact”, sought to investigate the question of ‘intent’ versus ‘impact’ utilizing an interdisciplinary approach of disability and psychology in tandem with media and ethics. My understanding was that the original intention of 13 Reasons Why was to draw awareness to the lived experience of those who struggle with suicidal thoughts and ideations. Ultimately, I found through the capstone project that while the intent was meant in one way, the harmful emotional and social impact of the show outweighed this promising potential for positive social change and impact. Through my research, I hoped to understand why in fact the show was created in the manner it was and the potential for businesses to neglect potentially harmful repercussions of their work in order to turn a profit. With mental illness and suicide filling up much of our current news cycle, as well as a personal connection to the topic, this issue felt particularly salient for me to explore in my capstone. By looking at the television series itself, primarily the first season, as well as the media rhetoric surrounding pre and post-production and community reactions to the impact, in both the general and in the psychological research field, I was able to explore the various ways in which this topic was relevant. While I found that this way of creating awareness was originally intended for good, I learned that there are, in fact, other ways in which mental health professionals and experts can collaborate with the media to dispel stigma, while remaining ethical in the approach. This project took a multidisciplinary approach by combining my various interests and passions for abnormal psychology, mental health advocacy, and corporate responsibility and ethics. By incorporating these seemingly unrelated viewpoints, this project took on a more holistic view rather than focusing on one or the other. This sentiment has long been my approach within the major and this project has certainly been a culmination of my studies in AMCS in a very insightful and meaningful way. Despite not taking a direct approach of studying psychology or film and media studies, I feel as if my time in the American Culture Studies major and program has allowed me to better understand people and the communities we inhabit, which ultimately was my goal and helped me to understand my broader interests in a new light.

 

Max Lichtenstein: “Politainment”: Navigating Politics, Entertainment, and Celebrity Culture in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Histories of Media Convergence with Reem Hilu.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

To fulfill my capstone requirement for the AMCS major, I took Film 423: Histories of Media Convergence. The final project was open-ended, offering students the opportunity to launch an independent research project on a particular case study of media convergence of their choosing. For my own project, I set out to explore the convergence of politics, news coverage, entertainment, and celebrity culture by examining how The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (1995-2015) both operates within and complicates this convergence in the larger context of late-night talk shows. Does Stewart’s more deliberative and confrontational approach successfully disarm his guests and undercut the superficial aspects of celebrity politics? How does Stewart create a power dynamic between himself, the at-home and in-studio audience, and his political elite guests? What is the impact of the celebrification of politics on the larger American political landscape?

Ultimately, I make the point that Stewart operates both inside and outside the realm of celebrity politics; he complicates the late-night space by switching between comedic levity and confrontational interviewing and at times obstructing politicians’ efforts to use the show as a platform to tailor their image. Yet at the same time, the presence of these interviews as a Daily Show mainstay grounds the show’s focus in the political individual, and despite Stewart’s apparent manipulation of stately guests, his dynamic with both his at-home and in-studio audience makes these interviews a performance in their own right. Stewart may appear to be the voice of reason amid the noise of the politics-entertainment convergence, but perhaps more accurately, he subtly brought the same “politainment” to a generation of skeptics. To support this argument, I place secondary sources of media scholars discussing entertainment politics, satire, and the multi-channel transition period in conversation with clips from The Daily Show featuring some of Stewart’s more inflammatory interviews. The analysis of audience dynamics sets this capstone apart from its scholarly peers and inspirations. A major crux of my argument includes the cues the live studio audience offers to create a performance from Stewart, and echoes his appeal to a specific liberal patriotism under counter-culture imagery.

While Histories of Media Convergence was my first official film class at Washington University, my approach to the class and final project felt like a fitting culmination to my American Culture Studies major and allowed for a multidisciplinary approach. Through coursework like Visual Culture and Visual Literacy and the Cultural History of the American Teenager on one side, and those such as the Long Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, and the Concept and Culture of American Exceptionalism on the other, my studies have been driven by the intersection of popular culture with 20th century political and social movements. When offered the opportunity to complete a final project for this seminar, taking an approach that centers on electoral politics seemed fitting. Even still, using a media-theoretical approach was new to me, and allowed me to continue learning and growing in the AMCS field. The mere existence of The Daily Show begs questions of which space it primarily positions itself in: comedy and entertainment or disruptive political statement in a mainstream space? Grappling with this question allowed me to examine not only popular culture’s response to the political zeitgeist (which had been my primary focus up until this point), but the extent to which certain forms of popular culture can drive politics themselves.

 

Lauryn McSpadden:  Omission and Sacrifice in Film Adaptations of James Baldwin’s Work. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Reading Historical Figures: Cultural Analysis and Afterlives with Professor Paulo Loonin.

 

Ariana Savramis: St. Louis: Suburbanization, White Flight and Concentrated Poverty. Capstone Seminar and Instructor: Poverty and the New American City with Professor John Robinson.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

For my capstone requirement, I took the seminar course, Poverty and the New American City with Professor John Robinson. This course explored the structural changes: gentrification, immigration, and social policy reform that are transforming the American urban landscape, especially for low-income populations. We studied several classic theories of urban poverty and applied them in the context of a modern landscape. For my Capstone project, I was primarily interested in the effect of white flight on uneven urban development in North and West St. Louis. St. Louis has a distinctive urban history as it was once a booming industrial city, commonly referred to as a Rust Belt City. However, when St. Louis was faced with deindustrialization, the city experienced major economic and social decline. Those who had the economic means, which were majority whites, were able to flee the city, leaving behind many low-income, predominantly African Americans. This process of suburbanization has contributed to the growing numbers of racial inequality and concentrated poverty in St. Louis’ inner city and Northern suburbs. As whites move out of St. Louis’ inner-city neighborhoods and suburbs, they deplete inner cities of their tax base, increasing poverty rates and widening racial inequality.

As a result, these cities and neighborhoods that are robbed of their tax base are subject to disinvestment, leading to uneven development. The lack of capital investment in these neighborhoods contributes to the suburbanization of poverty, where low-income individuals do not have access to safe and affordable housing, employment, education, healthcare, contributing to the viscous cycle of poverty. This process of capital disinvestment has dramatic consequences for St. Louis’ low-income populations; therefore, my project focused on unpacking how these suburbs developed and offering a solution on how to invest in these areas in order to combat this urban crisis. My research primarily relied on archival materials, such zoning laws, policy reports, and local studies, which was then supported by scholarship on housing segregation as well as social theories. One study I used to support my claims was conducted in St. Louis and collected data through surveying St. Louis’ community members, living in suburbs to the North of St. Louis. This study was extremely fundamental to my research as it allowed for residents of these neighborhoods to have a narrative. My project was multidisciplinary as it combined archival and historical research and abstract cultural theory analysis to reveal the economic, social and political consequences of concentrated suburban poverty.

This project is ultimately a culmination of my work in American Culture Studies as it is a reflection of my interests in racial inequality. My coursework in AMCS reflects my interest in the study of race and ethnicity and social thought and social problems (my prime concentration area). Since I am studying in St. Louis, it was important for me to better understand how issues of race, ethnicity and class manifest themselves in the historical, societal, political and economic context of St. Louis. Being able to learn about issues in class and going out into the community to see how these issues manifest in space was an essential skill for me to better understand my community. My capstone project was an integral component of my intellectual growth as it focused on studying the implications inequality. This understanding of inequality is important to my future career in medicine, as concentrated poverty has huge implications on education and health/healthcare. Housing is closely linked to one’s health. As those who are living in poverty are too often attempting to secure more immediate necessities such as housing and food; therefore, health care is often neglected.

The AMCS major has proved to be not only important for my intellectual growth but an essential component that has allowed me to better understand the community that I live in and myself. The thing that I love so much about this major is not only that it offers many different perspectives it allows you to put yourself into the equation. This ability to self-reflect is important not only in academia, but to strengthen and build a community. This process of introspection is important to live a meaningful life as it requires one to learn more about their fundamental nature and their essence. Further, this ability to reflect is important when we think about a culture or society. How do our lived experiences affect us? How do others lived experiences affect us? This is a crucial form of dialogue that must occur to better humanity and our understanding of the world

 

Rebecca Shaevitz: Mourning Racial Violence and Inspiring Activism: Exploring the Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum. Latin Honors Thesis advisors: Dr. Noah Cohan and Dr. Goeff Ward.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

My senior Capstone honors thesis, "Mourning Racial Violence and Inspiring Activism: Exploring the Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum", explores the material composition of the Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum. The two sites comprise a two-part visitation experience in Montgomery, AL, conceived and created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal organization which fights against mass incarceration, false convictions, and excessive sentencing. The memorial acts as a space of remembrance and mourning of the victims of lynching in America between 1877-1950 while the Legacy Museum grounds itself in the contemporary struggle against mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. The thesis came out of the AMCS Capstone Workshop, which I took with my peers also writing theses.

This thesis asserts the significance of these sites as spaces of personal reflection, community engagement, material complexity, and promotion for the Equal Justice Initiative. These sites do not just represent the politics of history or commemoration, they signify contemporary forms of American identity and power. They challenge the white hegemonic power structures that have devalued the histories of Black trauma, and which have sought to coverup the rootedness of continued racial inequity and injustice. They act as signposts, marking the path of personal and national reckoning with these phases of history as well as the contemporary moment, in order to stake a claim and assert the necessity of protecting those marginalized, forgotten, and harmed.

My methodological approach is grounded in material analysis; within the thesis I analyze key pieces of the two sites’ material components, how they function as built environments, and how visitors interact with them. This material analysis emerges from two visits I took the EJI’s sites, both in November 2019. During these visits, I kept detailed field notes, logging the material elements of the site and my impressions. I noted how fellow visitors interacted with the sites and their respective spaces, as well as my own emotional and ideological reaction. In addition to material analysis, my arguments are informed by historical texts on lynching’s history, the history of Black museums and memorials, sociological approaches to making space and engaging with the public, and journalistic accounts of Black experience in America.

The project is multidisciplinary in regards to methodology, which built off of material analysis and historical analysis. I also relied heavily upon my work from my second major, Sociology, as a means of analyzing fellow visitors, and reflecting on the sites’ interactions with structures of social life and dominance that effect all aspects of American life. I see the project as a culmination of my studies in AMCS, as I began mapping out the project my the fall semester of my junior year, in the Methods and Visions course. The course helped me to understand and work through issues of scope, my perspective as a researcher, and the various historical and methodological questions I needed to understand and answer before embarking on the project. The project bridges all of my interests within the major, namely racial justice, social thought and social problems, narrative and perspective, and the built environment, all of which I engaged with in various courses throughout my time in the major. That I was able to create a personal narrative within the thesis reflects the major’s focus on flexibility, and pursuing one’s interests and ideas. I was able to bridge many different layers of analysis, methodology, and personal meaning because of the major’s focus on the interdisciplinary, and its valuing of both classic academia and contemporary modes of story-telling and research.

 

Sydney Shaiman: The Perfect Victim: How Anita Hill’s Speaking Truth to Power Defines and Rejects the Expectations of Sexual Harassment Victims in American Culture: Capstone advisor: Dave Walsh.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

In September 2018, I watched alongside the entire country as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her as a teenager. I knew that her precise words would be misconstrued, misrepresented, and torn apart in the coming days and weeks, and I couldn’t help but wonder about how we treat victims of sexual assault, harassment and rape in American culture. Why do we collectively lean towards doubt, disbelief, and blame?

Dr. Ford’s testimony inspired me to dive into this question, and as my independent capstone project developed, I decided to use Anita Hill and her 1991 testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas as my case study. The Hill-Thomas hearings were monumental because they represent the first time that a woman’s testimony of sexual harassment was displayed so publicly in the United States, and of course, Hill is a Black woman, which added another dimension to how she was received by the public. As I continued my preliminary research, I encountered a wealth of cultural artifacts: countless news reports, the government transcript of the hearings itself, and Hill’s 1997 autobiography, Speaking Truth to Power.

My love of autobiography led me to focus on Speaking Truth to Power. While reading it, I noticed a distinctive narrative thread: Hill defines and fights back against the expectations of what I began to call “the perfect victim of sexual harassment.” In American society, we place the onus of blame for sexual harassment on the victims themselves. We require that the perfect victim is completely traumatized by her experience, feels responsibility, and confesses what she wishes she had done differently in order to prevent it. Moreover, we expect that her retelling be a “tell-all”— a detailed account of a harrowing experience that follow a singular storyline of unwanted harassment and subsequent trauma. A perfect victim must meet these guidelines in order to be believed, but throughout her book, Hill refuses to abide by these standards.

My main methodology was literary analysis, but my project spanned many disciplines; I contemplated how one represents themself in autobiography, looking to literary and feminist theories of autobiography. I gained insight into what constitutes a normative autobiography and how Hill subverts this standard by both using and reinventing previous models of “women’s autobiography.” I studied Foucault’s philosophical theory of discourse and subjectivity, and contrasted the transcript of the hearings with Hill’s autobiographical voice in order to contextualize how the Senate Judiciary Committee acted within the discourse of the perfect victim. I greatly enjoyed using these diverse sources to conclude that Hill’s autobiography is both a reinvention of the genre and a work of cultural critique. I see it as a precursor to the #MeToo Movement; Hill writes for herself and for all victims of sexual harassment and violence.

My Capstone gave me the opportunity to incorporate so many of the topics that I love: feminism, philosophy, literature, and modern American history. Throughout my time at Wash U, I have been drawn to AMCS classes that examine American culture in the 20th century and that use modern-day literature as primary sources. I have always loved reading autobiographies and memoirs; I remembered recently that my Writing 1 research paper also used a memoir as its primary source! Pursuing this project allowed me to find something personally meaningful and contextualize it, showing me what it means to really “do” American Culture studies. It revealed to me a new understanding of how we judge victims in this country, and it is my hope that this project follows in Anita Hill’s footsteps in beginning to dismantle these judgements in American culture.

 

Kayla Smith: Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality and Resistance in Progressive Era New York City. Latin Honors thesis advisors: Douglas Flowe and Jeffrey McCune.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

My Capstone project is a perfect culmination of my studies in AMCS, my academic interests, and my personal interests. In the beginning of my academic career, I started taking courses that tackled issues like history, criminality, and race because I was fascinated by people’s reasons for committing crimes, and I wanted to see black people being represented in historical narratives I never learned about in primary and secondary school. I noticed that criminality went hand in hand with the social/cultural environments where norms controlled and stigmatized people’s lives. Thus, I wanted to know how the criminalization of black people changed over time, and in this learning process, I fell in love with the historical method. I also became interested in American culture because I have always loved theater, music, dance, art, and literature in my personal life.

In my AMCS courses, I learned multidisciplinary approaches and methods that helped me critically analyze these topics. Finally, I became interested in black women’s sexuality because of my own experience encountering the stigmatization. I noticed how black women’s sexuality was a topic of silence in my own community, yet, sexual stereotypes about black women as “jezebels”, “hoes, and “hoochie mamas,” were overrepresented in popular media. In academia, black women’s injury, trauma, and abuse are largely emphasized while topics about black women’s sexuality, including pleasure, intimacy, desire, and agency, have been under-analyzed and stigmatized. I was inspired by Audre Lord’s concept of “erotic power” where black women embrace their sexuality as a source of power. Eventually, my project came to fruition. I sought to unearth a traceable history of black women constituting their own sexual subjectivities in spite of these harmful, criminalizing stereotypes.

Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality and Resistance in Progressive Era New York City traces a history of policing and criminalizing of black women’s sexuality in Progressive Era New York City. My argument is that black women in New York City embodied sexual subjectivities within public and private spheres in order to resist against debilitating and harmful stereotypes about rampant, uncontrollable, and/or invisible black female sexuality. This project provides a historiography of respectability politics and the sociocultural norms and practices that limited American society’s freedom of sexual expression, and it illuminates black women’s lives in the midst of this sexually restrictive culture. It includes interdisciplinary methods such as visual analysis, popular culture analysis, and archival analysis. These methods were appropriate for me to gain an understanding of how black women represented themselves in vaudeville posters, joke books, blues music, newspapers, vice committee records, and reformatory records. This project also engages with multidisciplinary fields such as History (social and urban), African-American Studies, Criminality Studies, and Sexuality Studies. I would not have been able to do this project without using multidisciplinary approaches and combining multiple fields because it would have limited my scope.

My findings include how working-class black women engaged with commercial, public, and private urban spaces normatively associated with vice, deviancy, and disreputability in ways that subverted these expectations of respectability and empowered them. These women used creative ways to express their sexuality within multiple spaces including vaudeville stages, saloons, and prostitution houses. However, black women were disproportionately arrested and sentenced to serve time in reformatories like the Bedford Reformatory in New York. In these reformatories, they were forced to conform to the respectable norms that previously restricted their sexuality. Ultimately, this paper disrupts the discourses about black female sexuality that defined it as absent from or harmful to the African-American experience and illustrates how these historical constructs have material effects on the lives of black women today.

 

Erica Wei: Intention, Dialogue, and Difference: Neoliberalism and the Form of University Diversity & Inclusion Statements. Capstone project advisor: Phil Maciak.

Capstone Author’s Reflection

My independent project for the American Culture Studies major, under the guidance of Dr. Maciak, represents a culmination of my academic and cultural-club experiences as a student of color synthesized and theorized through the medium of an academic paper. It also marks the culmination of my American Culture Studies Race and Ethnicity centered courses where I developed an intellectual framework to critically examine my student experience at this university as a student of color.

Entering WashU as a first-year student, I eagerly anticipated participating in politicized student groups that organized in direct action, hosted educational workshops, and consolidated student power through cross-movement coalition building. I understood that not every organization would meet my standard of radical politicization and action, but I had hoped that within the spectrum of grassroots organizing on one side to volunteerism on the other, there would be variation of student action and political orientation of the different clubs on campus. Instead, I served as an executive board member of the two most prominent East Asian cultural groups on campus, Chinese Students Association and Taiwanese Students Organization, spending my time and energy engaging in logistical or organizational preparation for events where an essentialized, more consumable aspect of my culture was exploited and marketed for a wider audience. While these cultural groups are necessary to create community amongst the student body, the overwhelming representation of apolitical, culturally-dominated clubs on campus forced me to acknowledge its inherent institutionalization, situate it within the larger history of Asian American activism and ethnic studies, and examine the positionality of institutions of higher education within larger national and transnational frameworks and its perpetuation of institutionalized antiracist possibilities, particularly through diversity and inclusion statements. 

Through an investigation of diversity and inclusion statements published by Washington University and its peer institutions, I argue that institutions of higher education are not only imbricated in neoliberal antiracist ideologies that depoliticize movements and exploit minority difference to maintain a façade of political action, but also perpetuate these exact knowledge bases through its academic authority and namely, diversity and inclusion statements. To contextualize my research, I drew from secondary sources that tracked the historical and theoretical trajectory of global and national antiracist and decolonial movements. This history provided greater clarity in the university’s positionality and stake within structures of racial ordering and capital. I also read secondary sources particularly outlining the absorption of neoliberalism at institutions of higher education and how these institutions embody and perpetuate these politics. It clearly demonstrates how politics rooted in the material realm became abstracted by universities and other institutions as activism became relegated down to representational politics where the term diversity and inclusion became popularized.  Most of my project consists of close readings of Washington University’s diversity and inclusion statement along with other peer institutions. Through these close readings, I establish a literary genre and style amongst these statements to demonstrate the performativity, lack of definitiveness, and abstraction of material conditions by focusing on individual emotions of these diversity and inclusion statements.

Understanding the positionality of universities within larger systems of global capitalism and transnational racial ordering reveals the intentions and stake of institutions of higher education in reinforcing the political possibilities for antiracist action. It also uncovers the mechanisms in which these institutions reabsorb and rearticulate antiracist movements of the past, curbing momentum and coopting previously radical thoughts and actions. Overall, as a student organizer, I wanted to understand my experience as a student of color, navigating the academic and political realms of this institution, to provide other organizers the political, historical, and economic contextualization to understand their surroundings and act accordingly. I hope this project reminds others to proceed cautiously within the academy and continuously fight for the communities you love and are a part of.

 

Hannah Wheaton: Invisible Empresses: Women of the Ku Klux Klan and the Normalization of Hatred in Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s; Latin Honors thesis advisors: Professors Iver Bernstein and Karen Skinner.