"Look What the Bride Has Got On!": A Visual Discourse Analysis of Uganda's Wedding Industry

Uganda's leading newspaper, New Vision, showcases images of men and women dressed in crisp tuxedos and white wedding dresses proclaiming their "eternal love" for one another alongside advice columns on how to create the perfect wedding. Exploring images of the wedding industry in Uganda has important political implications through which one can analyze the ways that conceptions of femininity and gender are constructed and perpetuated within the space of the newspaper. Due to Uganda's neoliberal reforms of the past thirty years, a growing middle class has emerged along with an increase in the consumption of luxury goods and services. The white wedding has been and is increasingly a space for middle class Ugandans to highlight their wealth through luxurious venues, extravagant cakes, and designer dresses and tuxedos. As such, it is intimately tied to neoliberal shifts and a state-sponsored quest for capitalist growth. My research focuses on images of the Ugandan wedding industry, including advertisements and advice columns in New Vision, storefronts, fashion shows, and the Bride & Groom Expo in Kampala. Drawing on Rose (2001), I conduct a visual discourse analysis on these images to analyze what and who appears in these images, how the subjects of the images are positioned/represented, and what is absent from the images. Furthermore, I ask what the form and nature of this growing industry is and what ideals of race, class, gender and sexuality are embodied in the bodies of featured brides.Geography and the Environmen

“An Altercation Full of Meaning”: The Duel between Francis B. Cutting and John C. Breckinridge

“A Duel!” In late March of 1854, the northern press burst with the news. A duel had allegedly taken place between two members of the House of Representatives—Francis B. Cutting of New York and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Confusion and anticipation reigned, and a flurry of rumors circulated. Had Breckinridge been shot in the neck? Was he killed or wounded? Did Cutting emerge victorious? Or was the entire affair a mere hoax? The situation became so dramatic that it even appeared in a theatrical advertisement, beckoning people to see a play that promised to be just as exciting as the alleged duel. By early April, it had become clear that despite the conflict between Cutting and Breckinridge, an actual duel had been averted. Although their misunderstanding had been amicably settled, the affair still left many questions unanswered. Why did these two Congressmen feel compelled to resort to arms? And how did Cutting, a northerner, nearly become embroiled in a duel—a violent ritual typically understood by historians today as an archaic institution that was confined to the Old South? These questions can be partially answered by examining the Cutting-Breckinridge affair within the context of nineteenth century dueling culture generally and the increased sectional tensions that emerged during the Kansas-Nebraska debate specifically. However, the near-duel was given meaning and political staying power only through interpretation and manipulation by the northern anti-slavery press, which used the conflict to indict dueling as a product of violent southern slaveholding culture. The Cutting-Breckinridge affair was part of the larger sociopolitical phenomenon of dueling that has been discussed by historians of early and nineteenth century America. In her critical study Affairs of Honor, Joanne B. Freeman explains that duels in early America stemmed from a commitment to “sacrifice one’s life for one’s honor,” or a sense of self-worth tied up with manliness and, in some cases, ability as a political leader. [excerpt

Militarised violence in the service of state-imposed emergencies over Palestine and Kenya

States of Emergency are declared against the disorder-ing of state sovereign power by acts of resistance, rebellion and revolt and are characterised by the technologies of control, containment and punishment. Through spatial, archival and visual encounters with emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance, the essay considers the historic and contemporary operations, provisions, regulations and practices authorised under state-imposed emergencies. It does so in order firstly, to bring attention to the practices authorised through state-imposed emergencies and the currency and saliency of their ongoing effects, and secondly to re-frame the militarised violence of settlement/occupation as an integral part of state-imposed emergencies in which all that is necessary will be done to protect the sovereign state from the resistance of the colonised/occupied and to effect a return to ‘order’.   Through encounters with the archival record, and the architectures, remnants and territorial arrangements found in post-colonial Kenya and across the multiple geographies of Palestine, the essay draws out seven clusters of state imposed emergency practices and effects. The work grapples with a number of questions: what is it that a declared state of emergency performs for the state? Does a state of emergency enable particular forms of militarised violence? Are there common practices to be found across different modes of state-imposed emergencies? What is the genealogy to the states of emergency across Palestine and Kenya? Does our excavation of the practices of state-imposed emergency shed light on the ways we apprehend state violence in colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial geographies?

Unpacking the logic of mathematical statements

This study focuses on undergraduate students' ability to unpack informally written mathematical statements into the language of predicate calculus. Data were collected between 1989 and 1993 from 61students in six small sections of a “bridge" course designed to introduce proofs and mathematical reasoning. We discuss this data from a perspective that extends the notion of concept image to that of statement image and introduces the notion of proof framework to indicate the top-level logical structure of a proof. For simplified informal calculus statements, just 8.5% of unpacking attempts were successful; for actual statements from calculus texts, this dropped to 5%. We infer that these students would be unable to reliably relate informally stated theorems with the top-level logical structure of their proofs and hence could not be expected to construct proofs or evaluate their validity

Bodhi Path Buddhist Center: Buddhist Temple

Student perspectives on worship services from Instructor Jennifer Garvin-Sanchez\u27s Religious Studies 108 Human Spirituality course at Virginia Commonwealth University

Methodology paper transmitting Yup'ik knowledge through the art of skin sewing

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 201