Digital Commons Network^™

Witches On The Wind: Weather Magic In New England Folktales, Zephyros Quinn Craven

Thinking Matters Symposium

The English language folktales collected from coastal New England in the 19^th and 20^th centuries display a prominence of weather magic motifs compared with folktales from other regions of the United States. This paper aims to explain the success of the weather magic theme in New England folklore collections and to serve as a starting point for scholarly discourse on the subject, which has hitherto been sparse. This study utilizes climate research, both scholarly and popular collections of folktales, local travel guides, and colonial and labor histories. Through a combination of historical analysis, comparative study, and textual analysis, …

Economic Empowerment Through Art, Ava Ellis

Thinking Matters Symposium

Economic Empowerment Through Art: Final Abstract

Ava Ellis, Shaw Innovation Fellow, USM, MSW graduate student

My research project focused on using drawing and one-to-one art workshops as a way into discussing money habits. Participants shared their beliefs about money and responses to questions about money. They considered ways they may want to alter habits related to money within the 1 hour workshop, art was used as a scaffold to envision future-oriented economic goals. Participants mentioned uncertainty regarding financial planning and a lack of education regarding money in childhood. All felt they often needed more financial insight, in terms of developing …

Women And Gender Studies And The Potentiality Of Feminist Leadership, Clara Perka

Thinking Matters Symposium

Graduates of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) programs gain skills that aid in the development of a feminist leadership, a leadership practice that is committed to challenging oppressive structures and institutions and empowering others to reach their full potential. Through semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study explored the experiences of five graduates of WGS undergraduate programs in the Northeast region of the United States whose post-graduation work across a variety of professional fields has offered them opportunities to practice feminist leadership. While research on both WGS and Leadership is abundant, this research addresses the gap in the literature on feminist leadership …

The Invisibility Aspect In Language Acquisition Among Native American Ells, Nadine Bravo

Thinking Matters Symposium

What impact can generational trauma have on language acquisition in L1 and L2 in Native Americans? What culturally appropriate methods in teaching literacy to Native American ELLs, essential to cultural identity formation, have been investigated, and what improvements can be made? This poster will shed some light on those questions.

East Germany And Its Unheard Of Skeletons In The Closet- Generational Trauma And Sexualized Violence In The Gdr, Nadine Bravo

Thinking Matters Symposium

This presentation attempts to address the impact of generational trauma, sexualized violence and abuse in family systems and institutions, and its expression/suppression in the Totalitarian East German regime from an auto ethnographic perspective as a trauma survivor. I will highlight historical aspects as well as what it was like to grow up in East Germany under those conditions. Generational trauma and sexualized violence are not an East German phenomenon but a cross-cultural phenomenon, used as a tool of control and demoralization of a culture during war. Refugees and immigrants often are trauma survivors. By addressing trauma, identity healing and/or formation …

Timing Comparisons Across American Sign Language And English, Jillian Bartlett

Thinking Matters Symposium

American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English differ in modalities, but prosody can be found in both. Previous studies show that the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) (an established component of an Event-Related Potential [ERP]) occurs in response to acoustic stimuli indicative of prosodic phrasing (Pannekamp et al., 2005; Steinhauer et al., 1999). Prosodic processing in relation to these two modalities was studied using EEG. Sixteen Deaf ASL speakers and 34 hearing English speakers participated in the study by watching video or listening to audio recordings of stimuli while a portable electroencephalogram, or EEG (a device that detects abnormalities in brain …