Digital Commons Network^™

Comparing City Park Perspectives: Users Vs Organizers, Kalli Hull

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Green spaces and parks are an essential aspect of a healthy community. Incorporating parks into the landscape of a city can benefit the community. Understanding the relationship between park management and park users is important for creating the most effective use of space and accessibility. This project looks at the comprehensive viewpoints of both park managers and park users through a series of interviews and reviews of previous research and literature. Logan City, Utah is used as the location of interest for collecting and determining outcomes. This project displays the key findings of the priorities and viewpoints of both park …

Instrumentality: How We Develop Relationships With Objects And People, Nathaniel Bee

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

There are many different types of relationships a person will have throughout their life, each being given varying levels of authenticity, weight, and care. One’s attention is primarily placed upon the meaningful relationships in one’s life, but often deeper consideration of one’s “lesser” relationships is neglected. Networking and professional relationships are often impersonal. Family members will often lie to each other in favor of avoiding conflict. The emotional labor of service workers often goes underappreciated and undercompensated. Careers in the political sphere revolve heavily around maintaining a positive public image, and there are well-observed disparities between politicians’ stated values and …

Connections For Success: Social Networking In Virtual University, Clara K. Cook

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Online learning has experienced an unexpected increase in the last two years in response to the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying mitigation efforts. As universities engage in discussions regarding whether to keep offering a wide selection of online courses or transition fully back to traditional course modes, it is important to understand the extent to which students are able to network with their instructors and classmates in their online courses and the ways in which it differs from in-person courses. This paper explores the differences in networking between in-person, synchronous online, and asynchronous online courses. Additionally, it …

Grounded In Reality: An Exploration Of Acceptance In Relational Conflict, Audrey Johansen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Acceptance work encompasses “the processes that allow us to be fully grounded in reality” (Canfield, 2023). It allows individuals to embrace what truly is, both the good and the bad. It enables them to be at peace with what they can’t control, so that they can put their energy into changing what is within their power.

This project explores how acceptance work connects with other aspects of conflict process, including grieving, emotional regulation, and other concepts. Research was conducted by studying materials on communication and conflict processes, and by applying the materials to the author’s life. The author explores how …

Detecting Accurate Emotions In Faces, Marisa Pualani Davis

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Anger race bias is the tendency to misidentify expressions of emotion, specifically anger, in Black or racially ambiguous faces that are fearful or neutral (Hutchings & Haddock, 2008). Anger is often associated with aggression (Murphy et al., 2005). Therefore, the inaccurate perception of anger and threat may lead to an inappropriate response and could increase the likelihood that a police officer will shoot at a suspect (Correll et al., 2007). From 2015 to 2020, police officers shot and killed over 100 unarmed Black males (Washington Post, 2020). This study examined if anger race bias could be reduced through emotion identification …

Adversity And Leader Development: Mindfulness As A Potential Moderator, Isaac V. Dixon

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Why do some leaders respond to adversity by becoming more empathetic, impactful, and resilient — while others do not? Since the Covid-19 pandemic, suffering has gained personal relevance to each one of us. Although many researchers have explored why some individuals – when faced with trauma – grow as a result, little work has been done to understand this process specifically within the context of leaders and leader development. As such, the primary purpose of this paper is to explore what allows some leaders to respond to adversity/trauma with leadership development. Based on the mediators of productive framing, cognitive engagement, …

Shifting The Paradigm With Wednesday Addams: Why Nuanced, Intersectional Portrayals Of Autistic People Matter, Camille Alyse Bassett

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

For decades, Autistic people have been portrayed in the media through dehumanizing stereotypes such as the robot, the superhuman savant, and the empty shell. Through these stereotypes, Autistic people are construed as non-human, above-human, and sub-human but never as human beings with complexity, authenticity, and dignity. In addition to being stereotypical, depictions of Autistic people have historically featured white and male characters, a longstanding pattern that erases Autistic women and people of color, among others. In 2022, however, Netflix’s spinoff series of The Addams Family, Wednesday, brought to the screen one of the very first autistic-coded …

The Levant: Climate Change’S Effects On Domestic And Foreign Security Policy, Mary Mckenna Kump

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This project applies a comparative analysis of climate effects on security perspectives in the Levant (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon) with evidence from historical events and modern processes. In other words, how do the effects of climate change threaten states’ core national security interests? What areas of the system are likely to be impacted by climate effects? Researchers project that climate change will affect current and future global conditions, so how does it impact how states perceive the environment in relation to their national security interests? To examine these questions, I have developed a relatively informal cause-and-effect relationship between climate …

Oppression In Xinjiang: Rhetorical Parallels To The Causal Mechanisms, Christina Elizabeth Anderson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This paper compares the framings of ethnic conflict with theoretical political science explanations of the causes of such conflict. Framings are statements used to portray the who, what, and why of an issue through the emphasis or exclusion of information to create a specific agenda. The theoretical expectation from social science is that ethnic conflict is a result of a commitment problem, where the two parties in the conflict cannot credibly guarantee the protection of the other. This arises from situations where there is a large minority group population that is underrepresented from government and has grievances from economic disparities …

Ethics, Fashion, And Film In The 1950s And 60s, Sara Miner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

To truly understand the nature of identity, autonomy, and morality in the 1950s and 60s, one must look at what artifacts of humanity have been left behind. More specifically, clothes and fashion capture, represent, and immortalize the human experience through each stitch and seam. By analyzing clothing from an anthropologic lens, one can discover the socio-cultural reality of a time long past. Known for intense culmination of social and political movements, the 1950s and 60s contain many radical shifts. Ranging from social movements like Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, Black Feminism, and others, to the political metamorphosis as a result of …