Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies

Winter 2022

In this twelfth issue of Carleton’s Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies, we are very pleased to present the following four papers that explore art, politics, and media influences. Spanning disciplines from Cultural Studies to Legal Studies, these innovative undergraduate research pleased to present the following four papers that explore art, politics, and media influences. These innovative undergraduate research papers provide us with new angles from which we think about our relationship with history and society.

In “Queerness and Validation: A Study of Gender Expression and Perception,” Maxwell Cornett (Christopher Newport University) brings a new light to the narrative of gender as the essay uses the voices of queer-gender individuals to explain social phenomenon and investigate the theory of validation. Through the research, Cornett concludes that validation is much more than signals and necessitates internal and external validation in order to be felt as “complete”. Thus, queer-gender individuals define and experience validation through their own view as well as others.

In “Gencebay and his Arabesk: Contesting Modernity through Popular Culture,” Yuanhao Zou (Carleton College) studies modern Turkish history as it looks into the interplay between Turkish politics and Turkish music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrating how the subversion of Gencebay and his Arabesk music against the official understanding of modernity in Turkish music took place in both the musicality of the Arabesk music and the person of the artist himself.

In “Just Statistics: In the Dark, Statistical Analysis, and the Failure of the Justice System,” Abigail Loe (Carleton College) uses statistical methods and models to reexamine the Curtis Flowers’ case, showing that data has the potential to reveal bias inherent in U.S. society.

In “Why do They Treat us This Way?: Supervised Consumption Sites, Racialized Geographies, and Notions of Belonging in Southern Alberta,” Amy Cran (the University of Lethbridge) utilizes a discourse centered approach and a historical perspective to explore local narratives on Canada’s supervised consumption sites (SCS) of a small Alberta city. Cran finds that, while raising concerns over a number of issues, including needle debris, crime, child safety, and the proper use of public property, local residents often conflated the clients of these sites with local and surrounding Indigenous populations, revealing both the enduring quality of racist ‘ignoble savage’ tropes, as well as a powerful and historic racialized geography that has racialized the city as white and nearby reserves as Indigenous.

In “Fan Studies Must Be on Crack: Anti-Fandom, Fan Convergence, Crackvids, and Riverdale (2017-),” Clare O’Gara (Smith College) focuses on the “Riverdale Bad Writing Compilation” phenomenon and the wider context of YouTube-hosted Riverdale video edits, positioning “crackvids,” in all their contradictory variations, at the ambiguous intersections between fandom, anti-fandom, fan objects, and fan works to reveal how fan convergence pervades audience-generated content, including media traditionally associated with fan devotion.

We are thrilled to have received submissions from colleges across the country and internationally, expanding our reach and readership to a broader audience; we appreciate every one of our submitters. We are grateful for the ongoing guidance and support of Professor Jessica Keating, our current faculty advisor. In addition, this issue would not have been possible without the expertise and patience of the Digital Humanities Team, who turn a collection of papers into a journal.

We hope you enjoy reading the Winter 2022 issue of the Journal.