Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2016-2017: Translation

Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Research Fellows

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  • Publication
    The Insidious Network: Translating the Invasive Biology of the Cuban MarabĆŗ Tree into a Model for Radical Politics
    (2017-05-01) Servin, Gerardo Cedillo
    A species native to Africa, the marabĆŗ tree was accidentally transported to Cuba in the form of seeds the transatlantic slave trade. Since then, it has been described as a weed that hinders agricultural development of the island with its dense rhizomatic thickets. Particularly during periods of agricultural stagnation, marabĆŗ spread with ease over the colonial legacies of sugarcane monocultures, becoming an insidious threat to the utopic agrarian policies of the Castro regime. Yet this sprawl prevented erosion and extinction of native species, reconfiguring the industrialized agricultural landscape with no regard towards political and colonial paradigms. As a network woven into the landscape, the marabĆŗ tree materializes the relationships between issues of migration, environmental decay, state failure, and decolonization. Tracking references in Cuban agronomical reports from the early 19th century and Fidel and RaĆŗl Castroā€™s speeches, this project interprets marabĆŗ as a material-discursive system that imposes itself with a biological drive. How does marabĆŗ employ tactics of (in)visibility and insidiousness to reshape the landscape and its social, cultural, and political paradigms? How does marabĆŗ operate as an agent of dissent and resistance against totalitarian politics and colonial legacies?
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    The Language of Reputation and Scandal: Translations of Lived Experiences in Spanish, English, and Spanglish Oral Narratives
    (2017-05-01) Cabrera, Juan Diego
    The aim of this study is to understand a framework for the structure of oral narratives that operate in different languages, cultures, and topics as translations of lived experiences. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, and Spanglish in North and Latin America about gossip and scandal. Oral personal narratives are translations of lived experiencesā€”coded information that negotiate, build, or destroy credibility, relationships, or the self; they manage reputations. This examination is framed under Labovian narrative analysis and the pragmatic implications on the management of reputation in narratives about gossip and scandal are addressed.
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    Go Ask the Midwife: Professional Identity in Cape Town, South Africa
    (2017-05-01) Cerulli, Mary L
    The legacy of gendered professionalization, the racial hierarchy of apartheid, and profound health care policy changes in the post-apartheid era, facilitated a specific scrutiny of maternity nurses working in the public sector in independent Midwife Obstetric Units in South Africa. Within scholarship on the quality of maternity care in South Africa, the professional identity of nurses is used to explain issues of rudeness and abuse faced by patients (Jewkes, Abrahams & Mvo, 1998). However, the perspective of nurses themselves on their experience of identity and how it shapes their work is notably absent. It is the aim of this paper to connect the social forces that have shaped the nursing profession and its narratives to original data about nursesā€™ experience of profession and identity. I will argue that three factors ā€“ the valuation of autonomy as a practitioner, a close connection to community, and intentional distancing from the private obstetric standards of care ā€“ provide an alternate narrative of how professional identity is experienced by nurses working in primary, public maternity care as a factor that promotes rather than denigrates quality care.
  • Publication
    The Lebanese M Community: Identities Lost (or Found) in Translation
    (2017-05-01) Karam, Michael
    The first time I was exposed to the word ā€œgay,ā€ I was watching television at home. In the Arabic subtitles, the word shādh appeared. From around that time, I have a vague memory of one of my teachers at my Lebanese Catholic School explaining what shādh meant. The word easily translated into English as deviant ā€“ my teacher had been clear: the norm is a straight line, and anything that deviates away from the line is a shudhÅ«dh min al-mujtamaā€™ (deviation from society), whereby the adjective shādh becomes the noun shudhÅ«dh in that expression. The naĆÆve first-year student I was who left Lebanon to attend college in the U.S. was quick to discover that there are words in English to talk about these nonnormative identities ā€“ I will address that term soon ā€“ that allow for the existence of the multitude of identities within language. Stepping out of the US and back into Lebanon, I question how the discourse forms around nonnormative identities in Lebanon? What words do people use to describe themselves and what do they not use? What terminology do local advocacy groups employ? This paper begins this research with contextualizing the linguistic fabric of Lebanon. Then, I explain the specific dilemma of putting this research together, in writing, in English. Finally, I partition the state of queer language in Lebanon into the imagined intersection of Arabic and English, or which is critically constructed within the confines of Arabic, to exemplify incongruent equivalency in queer (nontextual) translation.
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    Finding Mons Graupius
    (2017-05-01) Lahiri, Ray
    Revised and Excerpted from: ā€œSchoolboy Commentary and Tacitusā€™ Agricola in 19th Century England,ā€ a Senior Research Paper submitted to the Department of Classical Studies of the University of Pennsylvania in partial fulfillment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors.
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    Cicero as a Source for Epicurus
    (2017-05-01) Tebo, Kyle