Digital Commons Network^™

The Otherworlds Of Men, Aaron Morris

English Theses & Dissertations

The Otherworlds of Men is a collection of short stories that draws equally from the traditions of speculative science fiction dystopias and western noir. The stories often have a plot grounded in gritty realism, similar to the stories of Annie Proulx, Daniel Woodrell, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Harrison; however, the main character typically is typically injured by a psychic wound that leads to a speculative, otherworldly occurrence. The characters experience time travel, out of body experiences, wormholes to other worlds, spaceflight, distortions of relativistic physics, and, in one case, a character is haunted by Geronimo’s ghost. The characters experience these …

Exploring The Relationship Between Media Influence And Policy Output: A State Comparative Study, Stephanie Savas Joannou Menefee

School of Public Service Theses & Dissertations

Through the years, various forms of media have become political institutions able to influence the public policy agenda. Analyzing policy helps to promote a better understanding of how the policy process works, how problems appear on the political agenda, and why governments choose to act or not to act on particular policy problems. This research utilizes Baumgartner and Jones’s (1993) Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (PET) to examine the ways in which media attention influenced public policy on marijuana in the states of Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Vermont between 1996 and 2016.

Using qualitative research methods, the researcher conducted an exploratory, comparative …