ABOUT THIS BOOK

Claiming Space examines the growing tradition of decorating mortarboards at college graduations, offering a performance-centered approach to these material sites of display. Taking mortarboard displays seriously as public performances of the personal, this book highlights the creative, playful, and powerful ways graduates use their caps to fashion their personal engagement with notions of self, community, education, and the unknown future.

Claiming the space of these graduation caps is a popular and widespread way that individuals make their voices heard, or rather seen, in the visual landscape of commencement ceremonies. The forms and meanings of these material displays take shape in relation to broader, ongoing conversations about higher education in the United States, conversations grounded in discourses of belonging, citizenship, and the promises of the American Dream. Integrating observational fieldwork with extensive interviews and surveys, author Sheila Bock highlights the interpretations of individuals participating in this tradition. She also attends to the public framings of this tradition, including how images of mortarboards have grounded online enactments of community through hashtags such as #LatinxGradCaps and #LetTheFeathersFly, as well as what rhetorical framings are employed in news coverage and legal documents in cases where the value of the practice is both called into question and justified.

As university administrators and cultural commentators seek to make sense of the current state of higher education, these forms of material expression offer insight into how students themselves are grappling with higher ed's promises and shortcomings. Claiming Space is a meaningful contribution to folklore, cultural studies, media studies, and education.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sheila Bock is a folklorist and associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is an award-winning teacher and coeditor of Narrative Culture and has published numerous articles and book chapters.

REVIEWS

“The collection of voices that have been brought in throughout this book offer a beautiful contribution to cultural analysis that is inclusive of diverse communities and creates a shared space to see how these diverse communities intersect through practice. It’s a gem that I look forward to teaching with.”
—Rachel V. González-Martin, University of Texas at Austin

"If folklore is to be valued as evidence not available in other forms in the present of a pivotal, and threatened, institution of American life, and looking to the future, of the society inhabited and shaped by graduates, then indeed a priority of research should be the kind of scholarship pursued by Sheila Bock. . . . Claiming Space can serve as an exemplary case study in folklore courses to show students the meaningfulness of their own traditions—and designs."
—Journal of Folklore Research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Crafting Performances of Self

3. Dress and the Visual Rhetorics of Belonging and Exclusion in the Commencement Ritual

4. Into the Public Sphere: Countering, Rearticulating, and Reimagining Dominant Narratives of Citizenship

5. Undisciplining Graduation

6. Conclusion: A Brief Reflection on Trivial Matters

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.