My interest for this hybrid project dates back to my experience abroad. I put aside my major and heavy literature workload to study art and art history in Florence. My own artwork before that time had been entirely naturalistic, wanting to capture every detail perfectly. My many trips to museums, meetings with my painting professor, and experimentations with paint opened my eyes (and brain) to the conceptual side of art. I experimented… Read More

  My initial goal for this project was to reconfigure poetic ekphrasis through ecstasy, a term which I used to describe the ekphrastic word/image relationship. Honestly, I was surprised by how receptive my commenters were to my theorizing in both the draft and the final project. However, my peers didn’t seem keen to hear more about how I persuade the reader to feel ecstatic in the traditional sense and by my definition…. Read More

Erasure Mapping: A Reflection In deciding the subject of my hybrid project, my mind immediately jumped to the two aspects of our class that I had found most fascinating: semiotics and erasure. After pondering over these two topics, I eventually made the connection between erasure poetry and the symbolism of an “upside-down” map as discussed in Hall’s This Means This, That Means That. I’ve always considered myself a bit of a poet,… Read More

This project required lots of reflection and evaluating goals and personal motivations through out the process. Specifically on the positionally of three white middle-class students opening a race centered hack to the public. We struggled to find the line between conversation and cultural appropriation as we felt the mere presence of our white identities could be construed as appropriate. We felt this especially after we found the Waheed quotation, where she states… Read More

Universal iconic language is a big and tricky thing. I enjoyed wrestling with it and think I planted the seed for this concept and its possibilities in the minds of some of my peers.     When I first started my project I didn’t have too much direction. I knew I wanted to examine emojis and the way we read them but I didn’t know the way to best do so. Enter… Read More

The hybrid project experience took me on a complicated journey. Initially, I wanted to look at multiple types of self-representation, including expression in writing, but eventually found that topic to be overwhelming in scope. Instead, I just focused on selfies, narrowing further to personal Snapchat selfies for the case study. This specification allowed me to hone in on the classification of selfie types, which was the most fun part of the project… Read More

My interest in exploring mental images was sparked by W.J.T. Mitchell’s discussion of mental images in “What is an Image?” I am proud of how my hybrid project turned out. My project idea and project proposal were a little directionless and vague, but the format came together once I rewrote my proposal. I struggled with the scope of the project and Dr. Churchill suggested that I approach mental images as though I… Read More

    Having the time to look back and reflect on the course that this project has taken, I must say I am impressed with what I have achieved, given the extremely huge parameters I had set for myself.  I was juggling film, adaptation theory, ekphrasis, the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus, and 21st century themes–all of which are extremely broad categories. This paper could easily be turned into a thesis!… Read More

For my hybrid project I selected a topic that I am doubly passionate about: feminism and Beyoncé. My initial goal was to provide concrete evidence that Beyoncé is a feminist through the songs she releases. Eventually, this task seemed to be too much, so Summer and I decided to focus on one song cited as proof that Beyoncé is not a feminist. Summer and I decided to fuse our critical and creative… Read More