Morgan Dunnigan
Faculty Sponsor: Shyam Gouri Suresh
2019
Cave Temples of Asia
Mimi Schrimsher, Maggie Cushman, Mateo Alzate-Rodrigo
Faculty Sponsor: Rosaline Kyo
The goal of our museum exhibition, Cave Temples of Asia, is to provide viewers with a visual history of the construction of cave temples across Asia. The construction of cave temples originated in India around the 3rd century BCE as a means to promote Buddhist practices and worship. Eventually, as the Buddhist religion spread Westward through Buddhist images and depictions traded by way of the silk road, the construction of Buddhist cave temples became a popularized practice in China during the 5th century BCE. During this time, while Buddhism was spreading West towards China, cave temples were becoming a popularized architecture style among the Hindu religion. Although many Buddhist cave temples occupied sites of worship in India, as Hinduism grew in prominence the practice of constructing cave temples became associated with forms of Hindu worship as well. As cave temples became associated with both Buddhist and Hindu forms of worship, the construction of cave temples spread throughout countries of Central Asia. Within our exhibition we will focus on the spread of cave temples from India, to the Himalayan regions of Central Asia, and eventually on to China.
Proliferation of Gold
Cynthia (Xinyi) Fan, Anna French, Adrienne Lee, Jonah Lane
Faculty Sponsor: Rosaline Kyo
Gold has always been considered as an object of value, and this was certainly not an exception in earlier periods of time. Through our virtual exhibition, we hope to explore the diverse paths the use of gold took over the years in Asia ranging from 4th to 19th centuries. We will be overviewing the following eight countries: China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Indonesia, and Cambodia. We have delineated some of the most noteworthy and significant uses of gold within our cultures and assembled them under relevant, descriptive categories. In our virtual exhibition, the viewer will be maneuvered through the following subsections: ceremonies and rituals, royalties and burials, objects (such as jewelry and pottery), and wearables and paintings. By proceeding in this order, we aim to emphasize the use of gold in terms of its versatility, as it branched out of its common realm of royalty and became much more diversely employed in individual countries.
Expressions of Nature in Asian Art
Ben Santiago, Viraj Garewal
Faculty Sponsor: Rosaline Kyo
In this virtual exhibition, we will teach our audience about how this interaction between humans and nature is expressed in Asian art (for example, depicting nature as a source of aesthetic pleasure or as a destructive, threatening force), and how these various expressions and viewers’ reactions to them are informed by surrounding cultural phenomena. These include concepts such as gender roles, religion, and perceptions of daily, mundane life. To investigate this topic, we divide our exhibit into the following sections: Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese and Japanese ink paintings, Buddhist and Hindu rock/stone art, and Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian (corresponding with the geographic locations of the preceding sections) contemporary art.
Conduct the Orchestra
Student conductors: Sarah Austin, Matt Begley, Clara Hare-Grogg, Jack Lovelace, Isaac Mervis, Will Messner, Morgan Potter Orchestra students: Manny Abiad, Sanzari Aranyak, Laura Auberry, Kami Beardsley, Claire Brantley, Henry Brooks, Richmond Brautigan, EJ Canny, Hannah Cha, Corey Cochran, Maggie Cushman, Sophie Eichelberger, Katie Frank, Danielle Gabriel, Anna Gilbert, Madeline Goosman, Caleb Grenko, Ben Haden, Yunah Han, Clara Hare-Grogg, Alanna Horton, Genevieve Husak, Hartlee Johnston, Nathan Jordan, Jejun Kang, Matthew Kennedy, Léonie Kirchgeorg, Bryan Kirk, Braden Kronheim, Jennifer Lee, Brando Leggott, Simon Lowen, Sneha Mahesh, Erin Mansell, Caroline Matawaran, Emily Modlin, Elena Propst, Max Rollfinke, Madeline Seagle, Bradford Shin, Caroline Sigl, Blake Skelton, Carlyn Strang, Alyssa Tirrell, Cole Warlick, Emma Wilson, Nina Yao
Faculty Sponsor: Tara Keith
Student conductors from the MUS 312 Conducting class demonstrate their conducting skills with the Davidson College Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra will also invite anyone in attendance to conduct them! The student conductors will help guide any courageous, novice, conductor-wannabes through their first wielding of the baton.
Peace by Peace: Education’s Role Towards Peacebuilding Efforts in Post-Conflict Countries
Jack Salt, Blair Nagell, Amelia Willingham
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Chris Marsicano
We seek to understand how education systems and curriculums promote or hinder the peacebuilding process in post-conflict countries. In the intersection of education and human rights, scholars frame education as a main facilitator in understanding human rights through teaching regarding equity. On the other hand, research notes that education can intensify ethnic tension by forcing contact between groups and promoting objective standards. Broadly, current education scholarship lacks full closure regarding the most effective means to facilitate peacebuilding and reconciliation in post-conflict education structures. We chose the case studies of Kosovo, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Northern Ireland given the different points in history at which they experienced conflict and because their societies reflect various cleavages throughout the world. We examine how education intersects with the ethnic divisions in Kosovo and Nigeria; religious differences in Northern Ireland and Nigeria; and the ethnic and indigenous split in New Zealand.
The methodology involves a qualitative study of curricula or curriculum frameworks within each country: the Kosovo Curriculum Framework (KCF) and the parallel education system in Kosovo; the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) and the Religion and National Values (RNV) curriculum; the relationship between the Te Whariki Early Childhood Curriculum and the New Zealand Curriculum; and the Northern Ireland Council for the Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA). The results of the paper center around the elements in the curriculums that directly connect with peacebuilding.
In the Kosovo case, the KCF humanities curriculum encourages students to cooperate and promotes a sense of multiculturalism, but the restrictive parallel system and limited access to mother tongue instruction hinders the peacebuilding process. In New Zealand, both the indigenous Te Whāriki curriculum and the New Zealand curriculum foster peacebuilding ideals such as community partnership and global citizenship respectively. However, the two curricula remain split along ethnic and cultural lines. Likewise, the national curriculum in Northern Ireland promotes values of cultural acceptance and understanding through various humanities subjects, yet leaves the implementation of such values to the discretion of teachers. In Nigeria, NERDC combined Islamic Religious Studies and Christian Religious Studies into one curriculum resulting in the RNV. The themes of the RNV that foster peacebuilding include social behaviors, national consciousness, and culture and social values; however, the combined teaching of two faiths may result in increased tensions.
We evaluate all four case studies’ curricular contribution to peacebuilding using three areas: instruction in the mother tongue, humanities, and classroom culture. Access to mother tongue instruction is vital for the inclusion of minority groups. Humanities curricula often incorporate peacebuilding themes such as cooperation, cultural diversity, and multiculturalism. Classroom culture encompasses issues such as teacher agency, overcrowding, segregation, and lack of funding. Our research contributes to the emerging field by identifying the imbalance between policy and classroom implementation, in order to examine the relationship between education and conflict, specifically through the role education plays in peacebuilding efforts.
Music Production and Recording Projects
Angelina Gurrola, Scott Stegall, Victor-Alan Weeks, Amelia Willingham
Faculty Sponsor: William Lawing
Four students who have pursued independent studies will discuss their recording and composing, and will play examples of their work. The genres include hip-hop, singer-songwriting, and traditional music field recording in the Piedmont.
Ill Conceived and Well Drawn: Comics Made by Students from ENG 110 Graphic Medicine: Drawing Disability
Enitan Awe, Isabelle Bradberry, Taylor Burey, Itzy Cuellar, Tristan Cummings, Liza Daniels, Trinity Davis, Maya Eggert, Cynthia Fan, Joe Gallinghouse, Emma Goodman, Cam Hall, Mia Hodges, Lisset Jarquin, Anna Jones, Patrick Kelly, Ethan Landen, Katy Lawlor, Alexis LeMone, Clare Mackie, Jared McDonald, Brigham McKee, Luis Montero-Lopez, Meghan Rankins, Jack Robinson, Andrea Shill, Claire Sibold, Liz Small, Lucy Smith, Kianna Speight, Cassie Stoltenberg
Faculty Sponsor: Ann Fox
This display shows the range of comics made by the thirty-one students enrolled in ENG 110 Graphic Medicine: Drawing Disability. Over the course of the semester, students read a range of graphic novels depicting the experience of navigating illness and medicine as patient, caregiver, or medical practitioner. In combining visuals and text, such novels are an important way to show the social and economic contexts of medicine, the lived experience of disability and illness, and push back against old stereotypes of stigma, shame, or fear. Students wrote their own disability narratives and then turned them into comics of their own. They were able to write about any disability experience they liked: it could be something that they witnessed, something that happened to them, or something that happened to someone they loved. In translating those stories into comics, the only stipulation was that the work be original and drawn by their own hand (i.e., no comics-generating programs). They each had to make decisions including: how can I push past worrying about virtuosity to make a visually meaningful comic? How should I sequence my narrative? What visuals convey the tone and ideas I want to share about this experience? What tropes can I lean on — and which do I want to reject? What materials do I want to use? Should I color my comic? Ink it? Use photographs or other archival materials? What do I want to leave my reader thinking about beyond my own experience? What work is this comic meant to do in the worlds of medicine, illness, and disability?
