Browsing by Author "Taylor, Jessica"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    A Hard Job to Quit: Camaraderie, Crabbing, and Change on the Chesapeake Bay
    Taylor, Jessica; Daglaris, Patrick (University of North Carolina Press, 2022)
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    Ideologies of Intelligibility Onscreen: The Sociolinguistics of Intralingual Subtitling
    Yu, Jessie; Purtill, Molly; Carroll, Lily; Carter, Sara; Taylor, Jessica; Walker, Abby (2022-11-15)
    Intralingual subtitling—specifically, translation of audio in one language into non-optional text of the same language—can be used when a speaker’s dialect is considered difficult for target audiences to understand. Thus, these subtitles and the commentary surrounding them offer insights into ideologies of within-language intelligibility. In the present study, we investigate such ideologies from two approaches: by documenting how intralingual subtitles are being used in practice in two reality-based, US cooking shows, and by looking at published complaints about intralingual subtitles (primarily in US/UK English contexts). We find more subtitles for L2-English vs. L1-English speakers in the shows, and metacommentary around subtitling similarly suggests that L1-English subtitling is perceived as more salient and offensive, reflecting broader associations of unintelligibility with non-native speech. The use of subtitles for L1 English outside of noisy environments appears to be limited to certain varieties, such as Scottish or Indian English, suggesting that some L1 varieties of English can be acceptably codified as unintelligible. While the purpose of intralingual subtitles is ostensibly to facilitate communication and have been framed in the literature as tools for breaking down boundaries, both the practice and commentary around these subtitles highlight the largely negative connotations of marking someone as unintelligible.
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    Labor, Landscape, and Four Virginia Watermen
    Taylor, Jessica; Daglaris, Patrick (Southern Historical Association, 2022-05-31)
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    Negotiating Sovereignty: Resistance and Meaning Making at the Bear Mountain Mission in Early-Twentieth Century Virginia  
    Blake, Erica Nicole (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-16)
    In 1907, the Episcopal Church established a mission in the heart of the Native Monacan community on Bear Mountain in Amherst County, Virginia. The Bear Mountain Mission operated a church, day-school, and clothing bureau until 1965, when the day-school closed after the integration of Amherst County Public Schools. This thesis investigates how Native Monacan congregants negotiated sovereignty, enacted resistance against the assimilating efforts of the Episcopal Church, and maintained group identity and safety at the Mission during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Monacan congregants utilized the inherently colonial nature of the Mission's structure in ways that allowed them access to influential white Protestant networks, as well as validation by the mission workers who lived in and around the Bear Mountain community. I argue that Monacan people used strategies such as the refashioning of Mission teachings, anonymous and signed letter-writing to the Bishop, and communal protests to ensure that the Mission remained a safe space that worked for their Native community during a time of immense racial animosity. Using the personal correspondence between women mission workers, church leadership, and Monacan congregants, I examine the inner workings of the Bear Mountain Mission, and the beliefs and actions of mission workers and Monacan people alike. This thesis challenges the history of Bear Mountain Mission, and Native missions within the United States more broadly, to consider the unique and numerous ways that Native peoples enacted resistance strategies in order to ensure that Protestant Missions worked in ways that benefited their communities.
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    Objects in Protest: Bread and Puppet Theater's (Non)Human Solidarities
    Plummer, Sarah E. (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-17)
    Bread and Puppet Theater's use of performing objects offers an aperture to contemplate complex assemblages that blur lines between the human and the nonhuman. Drawing upon cultural studies, feminist materialism, circus studies, and puppetry studies, I consider both the bread and the puppets as they intersect with various assemblages and fields of interpretation. These configurations demonstrate how the objects embody (non)human, material, and conceptual aspects. Because of this ability to exist within the meshes of binaries, performing objects are well suited to challenge and expose other binaries and hierarchies through three categories of analysis — movement, difference, and intra-action — based on Karan Barad's work on matter. In addition to the theoretical framework, I conducted ethnographic interviews and rely on my own experience as an apprentice at Bread and Puppet in 2004, considering myself as co-constitutive actant within the scope of analysis. I examine the way the theater uses sourdough bread and puppets as performing objects to create meaning, express ideology, apply tension within constructs of power, and demonstrate a model for co-dependent living between humans and objects
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    The Story of His Life and Work: Public History at The Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial (1945-1956)
    Evers, Sara L. (Virginia Tech, 2023-05)
    In 1945, Black leaders gained political and financial support from the governments of Virginia and the United States to establish the Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial at the site of Washington’s birth in Franklin County, Virginia. The Memorial organization undertook public history work that emphasized Washington as a significant figure in United States history and provided needed education services to Black Southerners. In pursuit of their goals staff, of the Memorial navigated the political and social context of Jim Crow Virginia; this thesis discusses how the history of Booker T. Washington was represented during the founding and operation of the Birthplace Memorial (1945-1956), a time of upheaval in Virginian race relations.
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    Unruly Sisters: Moravian Women, Dissent, and the 18th Century North Carolina Piedmont
    Flanagan, Savannah Jane (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-07)
    This thesis is about how Moravian women in the community of Salem, North Carolina, challenged the policies of the church in order to gain more autonomy in the late 18th century. Settling into the Piedmont, these women encountered excessive materialism and a widely accepted racial hierarchy, which challenged the simple life of the Moravian community. I argue that although historians of Moravians have explored the dissent in the Salem community, they have not considered the desires of Moravian women and how their environment shaped them. Moravian Elders struggled to keep their congregation in line and were greatly concerned with the conduct of women. Young women running away with outsider men reflected poorly on their patriarchal control. Married women who conducted their households in a way that contradicted the guidance of the Elders, seemed to threaten the future of their community by corrupting the youth. Despite the efforts of the Elders to contain dissent, they were sometimes pushed to adjust their policies. Using the disciplinary records of the Elders, memoirs, the Single Sisters Diary, and various documents from the congregation, I examine the experiences and actions of Moravian women prior to their arrival in Salem and shortly after, the dissent and desires of Single Sisters, and how Married Sisters navigated the rules of the Brethren to run their own households. Despite the attempts of the Elders to curb disobedient behavior, many women were successful. Moreover, the disobedience of Moravian women exemplifies how women were involved in changing the Moravian church and the development of the Piedmont culture by challenging the policies of the church and seeking opportunities for freedom.
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    Unsettling Stories: A Settler Reflection on Narrative Phantasies of Land
    Heth, Rebecca Audrey (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-25)
    Modern political and market structures have normalized colonial violence into economic and social realities, while imperial powers still dictate modes of labor and resources extraction that benefit them in the present, but send the physical world hurtling into a future of crisis. Justifying this activity are Western mindsets based in rational exclusivity, which fail to recognize the constructed elements of their reality, instead subjugating and historicizing those with different ontological perspectives. In particular, Western logics have persecuted indigenous populations and their cultural connection to ancestral homelands in order to appease colonial paranoia and reassert exclusive claim to stolen land. This is not materially, ethically, or spiritually sustainable. This thesis examines the ways in which colonial and indigenous ontologies interact in the past, present, and future through identifying the reality-shaping narrative phantasies which shape encounters surrounding land. Phantasies of land and the ecosystems humans are a part of are especially central to how individuals and societies relate to the self, as well as human and non-human others. Through an analysis of the 1843 Thomas Gregory-Pamunkey petitions over claims to the Pamunkey reservation land, this thesis studies how colonial and indigenous phantasies of land interact. It demonstrates that the colonial inability to recognize personal and cultural phantasies often leads to conflict, but an ability to recognize the power of narrative and communicate through alternative ontologies than one's own can lead to successful communication and meaningful relationships, ones which can help those with settler backgrounds to live more ethically and support indigenous resurgence. This thesis offers a theoretical, historical, and practical guide to begin the process of unsettling the self by way of recognizing the constructed narrative phantasies settlers have been accustomed to interpreting the world through, and reflects on ways for settlers to move forward by engaging with land-based ontologies.
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    Voices of Virginia: An Auditory Primary Source Reader
    Taylor, Jessica; Stewart, Emily (Virginia Tech, 2020-01-21)

    Voices of Virginia pulls together stories from oral history collections from across decades and archives to create an all-audio source companion for Virginia’s high school and college students. The "album" is only two hours long, but contains dozens of short oral histories from eyewitnesses to key moments in American history, from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s. The excerpts are downloadable, accessible by smartphone, and accompanied by a transcript. Audio clips are also available on Soundcloud. You’ll also find a brief introduction to each narrator, historical context adapted from experts at Encyclopedia Virginia, American Yawp, and Public Domain sources, and helpful classroom tools like discussion questions, activities, and lesson plans that fit into both the Virginia high school and college U.S. History curriculum. By following the larger national story with narratives from across the Commonwealth, Voices of Virginia grounds students in how history guides and is guided by everyday people and their experiences. Voices of Virginia is a winner of the 2020 Mason Multi-Media Award from the Oral History Association. Over twenty archives across Virginia and beyond have generously donated segments, and granted permission for their oral histories to be reproduced and publicly shared under a CC BY NC SA 4.0 license, which ensures that the content remains free to use and re-purpose for all listeners. These archives include: - African American Historical Society of Portsmouth - Amherst Glebe Arts Response - Archives of Appalachia (Eastern Tennessee State University) - Cape Charles Rosenwald Initiative - Center for Documentary Studies and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Duke University) - Charles City County Richard M. Bowman Center for Local History - Chuck Mauro, private collection (Herndon, VA) - Clarence Dunnaville (American Civil War Museum) - Desegregation of Virginia Education Project (Old Dominion University) - Digital Library of Appalachia (Appalachian College Association) - Eastern Shore of Virginia Barrier Islands Center - Friends of the Rappahannock - George Mason University - Grayson County Historical Society - Greene County Historical Society - Mountain Home Center (Bland County Public Schools) - Old Dominion University Libraries Special Collections and University Archives - Oral History Archives at Columbia (Columbia University) - Roanoke Public Library (Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project) - Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (University of Florida) - Southern Foodways Alliance (University of Mississippi) This material is aligned to the History and Social Science Standards for Virginia Public Schools - March 2015. The collection was curated by Jessica Taylor, Ph.D. with Emily Stewart. Feedback regarding this collection is welcome at https://bit.ly/VoicesOfVirginia This work was made possible in part by a grant from University Libraries at Virginia Tech’s Open Education Initiative. About the editors
    Jessica Taylor is the Director of Public History and an Assistant Professor of Early American and Oral History in the History Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) where she has been a faculty member since 2018. Jessica completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Florida and her undergraduate and master's studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research and work focuses on the history of social change in Virginia and the American South, from the colonial period to the present day. Dr. Taylor collaborates with preservation and historical groups across the South to collect and share oral histories, teaches Public History and Native History classes, and is the author of multiple journal articles about historical memory in the South. Her manuscript, Certaine Boundes: Borders and Movement in the Native Chesapeake, explores the lives of Indians and non-elites in seventeenth-century Virginia. Beyond writing, she works to provide opportunities for and be a better teacher to every kind of student. She is always looking for hands-on experiences and conversations about activism, history, archaeology, preservation, museums, and liberal arts education.
    Emily Stewart is a student in Virginia Tech's History MA program. She will earn her Master's degree in May, 2020. Emily completed her undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech where she majored in History. Her current research focuses on Virginia educational history in the twentieth century. Her master's thesis focuses on the relationship between standardization and segregation of Virginia public education in the early twentieth century. Throughout her studies at Virginia Tech, Emily has always been interested in oral histories. The Voices of Virginia project presented her with an ideal opportunity to further cultivate her interest in the field of oral and public history.