'Tis the Season to be carreling

JOSEPH JUNG: SOCIOLOGY

“Foodies” and food activists are everywhere. For savvy urban eaters, it is no longer sufficient that food is simply tasty or economical; increasingly, it must also be locally grown, organically farmed and sold directly by small farmers at the now-ubiquitous farmers market. However, participants of this movement toward simpler, slower and more sustainable food embody a key tension that perhaps exemplifies problems in the larger Slow Food movement. They are at the crux of two competing and contradictory pursuits: a democratic one that eschews elite cultural standards and valorizes the products of “everyday” non-elite people, and a parallel pursuit that valorizes standards that are rare and economically inaccessible, reflecting a high level of cultural capital.

For my research, I will work behind the scenes at several farmers markets in New York City, and San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., while building relationships with shoppers and small farmers. I will conduct interviews and observe social interactions between vendors and shoppers, exploring the tension between how consumers identify with small farmers while constructing them as a sort of panacea for their ideological concerns. I suggest that farmers markets are somewhat contradictory arenas that reproduce social inequality while striving to combat it and that the larger Slow Food project is perhaps a problematic vehicle for advancing its professed goals of sustainability and equality.

JESSICA CABRAL: ENGLISH

I’ve found that often when people think of “texts,” they think solely of written, printed words, of chunks of language as the be-all, end-all definition of what a text is and should be. But my time as an English major has taught me that the same practices of close textual reading can, and should, be applied to realms outside of literature. For my thesis, I wanted to read music, lyrics and the relationship between the two by looking closely at the emerging musical genre, the mash-up.

A “mash-up” is a musical composition generated by “mashing” together two or more songs both musically and lyrically. While matching music to text is an important aspect of the mash-up, well-constructed mash-ups can do more than replace one musical line with another chord progression. They can complicate and add depth to both songs by putting those two songs in conversation with one another.

Mash-up lyrics, because they often come from rap genres, frequently carry complex song histories. Like an author making literary allusions to previously written works, rappers often incorporate lyrics from others’ songs and, in so doing, add contextual layers to those phrases. The result is a chain of lyric allusions being put into various contexts, a process which is highlighted through sampling. The bulk of my paper will analyze the relationship between lyrics and music and will aim to legitimize the mash-up genre by revealing how lyrics interplay with music to create new and significant meanings.

JONATHAN GOH: VISUAL ARTS CERTIFICATE

For my visual arts thesis, I am essentially going to turn the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau Street into a workshop, where I will build ridiculous creations, make a huge mess and then light it with really bright strobe lights and saturate the room with really loud techno music.

One of the planned ridiculous creations is the Very Large Subwoofer Array. It will feature 3 10” subwoofers mounted in cardboard-core carbon-fiber horn-loaded enclosures—it will be very loud. There will also be four full-range speakers mounted in long-tube bass reflex enclosures, which will be attached to VLSA by giant steel clamps. The entire assembly will be mounted on 2-rotational-axis drill-motor-powered pan/tilt mechanism, and probably using ultrasonic sensors will seek out the closest object (i.e., human) and blast belligerent music at them. This mechanical functionality should also allow it to boogie.

It is possible that I might expand the project to make it mobile, by attaching it to an old tracked robot from a previous class, and then I will automate it to hunt for hipsters. It will hunt hipsters and exterminate them with loud non-pretentious music.

The show opening will be a very large techno party in 185 Nassau Street. Stay tuned!

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OLIVIA STOKER: ITALIAN

I am creating and performing a one-woman play with songs titled “A Broad Abroad.” It will be a series of episodes from the life of a (strangely familiar) character named Olivia Quinn Stabile Stoker. Olivia learns Italian while living in Italy, and she travels around Europe encountering bizarre people in ridiculous situations as she faces the Italian and Irish heritage embedded in her four names.

The stories are simultaneously autobiographical and fictional. I was inspired by the people I met while studying abroad in Italy and England and while traveling to France and Ireland. All the stories and characters in “A Broad Abroad” are based on Commedia dell’arte ideas and character archetypes, which I learned this summer when I spent a month in Italy.

Creating “A Broad Abroad” has been challenging and time-consuming but always fun. I created each episode by improvising around the characters and situations that I wanted to include in that section. Some of the scenes include poetry readings for the pope, cooking pasta alla carbonara, a fantasy romance and kissing the Blarney Stone. Of course I play all the characters, and thus I must interact, converse and even sing duets with myself!

CAROL DREIBELBIS: ANTHROPOLOGY

My thesis will be an ethnographic analysis of the place of vegan bakeries in American culture. Given the abundance of food choices in the United States, I am interested in the way that vegan bakeries view their own work, as well as the ways that vegan bakery customers understand their purchases and the impacts of these purchases. Do vegan bakeries consider their products to be healthier? Do they seek to promote a more sustainable food system? Or do they just produce tasty treats? On the other side of things, do we see our purchases as more “responsible” when they are vegan, or is a rich, fattening brownie always just a brownie? Who buys these products, and why? I spent the summer doing participant-observation fieldwork at a vegan doughnut bakery in Seattle, and I plan to continue my research by speaking with customers in New York City over winter break.

JUSTINE LI: ENGLISH

My thesis is very tentatively titled: “The Intergalactic Saga: A genealogy of extraterrestrial folklore since the second century A.D.”

I am writing a poetic space opera in the style of Queen, Die Antwoord and the opera scene from The Fifth Element. It follows the heroic escapades of Panzimar, intergalactic cowboy extraordinaire, and his pet roboctopus, Pegegagegasus Squared. Irrelevantly, that’s not really his name, and Panzimar is not exactly a cowboy. Everything is provisional at this point.

Drawing upon more contemporary works of science fiction, I will extract a critical interpretation of how alien bodies and landscapes subvert religious, scientific, economic and political hierarchies. To address the evolution of alien narratives throughout the mid to late 1900s, I will be reading UFO conspiracy theories as a form of contemporary folklore. This reading will be supplemented by textual and visual artifacts of our scientific exploration in space: Apollo 11 flight transcripts, videos of the moon landing, the Arecibo Message and Hubble Space Telescope images. I may also attempt to engage religious perspectives with critical analyses of L. Ron Hubbard’s space operas and Claude Vorilhon’s literary contributions to the Raelian Church.

An autopsy of alien narratives reveals a complex framework of subversion beneath extraterrestrial landscapes that symbolically map the human condition. Ultimately, my goal is to present a coherent rendition of mankind’s futuristic response to humanity’s oldest questions regarding the origins and profound purpose of our existence.

RENA CHEN: ANTHROPOLOGY

EDIBL

My thesis is called "Bird's Nest Soup: The Impact of an Ancient Cultural Delicacy upon the Ecology and Economic Development of Malaysia." Called "Caviar of the East", bird's nests are made from the hardened saliva of cave swiftlets cemented to the side of cavernous walls and are dangerous to harvest. My travel to Malaysia during winter break will attempt to assess the ecological impact of the harvest of nests from both natural cave sources and farmed sources, the sustainability of the farming of these nests, the consumption of the dish as a possible socio-economic status indicator, and the reasons for why it is consumed — whether it is nutritive, medicinal or some other reason entirely.