Carpal Tunnel Crick Cracks in the Tendons of My Flexors: These Hands Will Never Be the Same is a chronological retelling of personal hair experiences that lead to an artistic practice based on hair experimentation, collaboration, and manipulation. Using the mtDNA as a guide and braiding as a conduit, JAX creates a growing conversation between the past, present, and future.

This dissertation examines the participation of adult English learners in a community college ESL course. The research synthesizes phenomenological views of human action with recent findings in cognitive sciences and cognitive linguistics to create a framework for understanding how learners' ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, and educational histories shape their patterns of participation in the course. By using the learners' sense making as a lens, the study connects relevant structural and biographical factors to how students perceive and engage with language and instructional practices. The data collection relied on ethnographic techniques of participant observation and interviews coupled with extensive use of video and audio recording. Transcripts of students' interview responses and classroom interaction were analyzed through a combination of thematic and conversation analysis with an attention to metaphor and gesture. The findings indicate that a series of factors conspires to discourage students from focusing on unknown language, and that the needs of the language learner may at times conflict with norms of classroom interaction. The students' focus on saving face and attending to procedural aspects of course assignments often overshadowed purposeful engagement with language and literacy. Students who immigrated to the United States during their middle and high-school years were less likely to attend to language that they needed to learn and more concerned with presenting themselves as competent actors. The findings suggest that schools must better understand and address the emotional needs of adolescent English-language learners and build a school climate where limited English proficiency is not stigmatized. They further suggest that educators cannot rely on learners to draw attention to language that they need to learn. The instructional focus on process and strategies in ESL courses needs to be critically examined, particularly in regards to how it may detract from meaningful language and literacy use. Several of the conclusions of this research contrast with earlier empirical findings and point to the importance of investigating actual classroom behavior to balance the potential biases of experimental and interview only studies.

Endurance is a mode of resistance that also drains and debilitates its actant’s lifeforce. It is a state of survival that trans of color folks are well acquainted with, and to which not all of us are able to endure. At endurance art’s core is an exploration of mortality and death that debilitates its performers. Performers like Datong Dazhang and Qi Li explored death to its extreme by taking their own lives in what can be interpreted as a final performance of death. How can endurance work confront existential questions without valorizing pain and treating bodies as sacrificial material? Does choosing to live mean giving up knowledge about death? As a performer, I am seeking the balance between dying and living to find an endurance practice that endures. To explore this, I apply a trans reading to non-trans identifying Asian performance artists who work from a space of alienation to envision endurance not as athletic resilience but instead as a queer yearning for a futurity worth enduring for. Subsequently, I also explore trans eggs’ qualities of enduring and argue for the need to reach towards trans of color eggs to commit towards a decolonial trans of color practice. Finally, I use these findings to develop my own performance art practice of exploring death through life and usher a way to bring love and care into performances of pain by implicating the audience in a symbiotic exchange of vitality.

IMMANENT emerges from the iconography of the Federation for Feminist Women's Health Care Center's publications and the works of feminist artists of the 1970s. IMMANENT represents repressed emotions by placing art objects made today by the DIA PHANO collective in conversation with images made by Maria Mathioudakis referencing feminist aesthetics of past generations.