Digital Commons Network^™

Representations Of Transgender Murder Victims In Digital U.S. News Media: A Framing Analysis, Karlynd June

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Transgender murder victims are routinely mis-identified, misgendered, misrepresented in news media. GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), the main media watchdog for LGBTQ+ rights and advocacy, reports that transgender people, particularly transgender women of color, are disproportionately affected by hate violence and these tragedies are often compounded by reporting that does not respect (or exploits) victims’ gender identity [misgendering] (2016b; June, 2016).

This project is a qualitative framing analysis of digital U.S. news media representations of transgender and non-binary (bn)/gender non-conforming (gnc) murder victims. The framing analysis was informed by a general content analysis of the artifacts. …

Historical Black Press Newspapers And Technology Adoption: The Weekly Challenger, Daytona Times, And Florida Courier, Indhira Suero Acosta

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

According to the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), there are more than 200 local and regional publications directed to the African-American community in the United States. On its website, the NNPA lists a total of 157 members from 29 states. Currently, there exists no research on how these publications have adopted technology throughout time, or if the adoption of new media contributes to their growth and survival in the publishing industry. In Florida, The Weekly Challenger, Daytona Times and Florida Courier, 3 of 13 historical newspapers directed at the African-American population, are connected in history and structure and apply different …

Between Two Empires: Life In Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Augustine On The Eve Of Evacuation, T.E. Bryant

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

St. Augustine’s 1763-64 evacuation was a ten-month event that ended Spain’s two hundred year rule in Florida. A careful review of Spanish records produced during the evacuation reveals that mid-eighteenth century St. Augustine was a cosmopolitan city, where immigration was a key component to social mobility. St. Augustine’s role as Spain’s bastion against the expanding British North American colonies meant that the city was a key piece in British and Spanish imperial maneuvering. Both St. Augustine’s strategic location and military function allowed diversity to flourish in the city. St. Augustine’s diverse community adapted to the constant immigration by developing intricate …

Florida Entanglements: The 1791 William Augustus Bowles Rebellion, Clinton Hough

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Florida emerged from the Revolutionary War “entangled.” A pawn of the United States, British, and Spanish, Florida might have been nominally aligned politically, but was essentially a cultural and social borderland existing on the edge of empire. Historians have successfully traced individuals in Florida to demonstrate the influence of non-British Colonists living in the South during the Revolution and Early Republic. This approach uses case studies to illustrate the challenges faced, some of which include economic independence versus interdependence, loyalty, citizenship, and international diplomacy. William Augustus Bowles is one such individual who stood “entangled” in Florida, between greater Caribbean, Atlantic …

The Polarization And Civility Of Hong Kong Political Discourse On Facebook News Pages, Leung Kiu Fok

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

This content analysis research investigated the content and quality of political discourse generated by online news media’s Facebook pages in Hong Kong. First, the focus of this study was to examine how Hong Kong’s online news media frame the political relationship between Hong Kong and China by analyzing the news postings on the Facebook pages of the top three online news media organizations in post-handover Hong Kong. The three online news media being analyzed were Stand News, Post 852, and Hong Kong 01. The results suggest that some online news media have a tendency to embed partisan, pro-democracy perspectives in …

Informant Discrepancies In Transactive Memory System Scoring, Lovia Feliscar

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

A transactive memory system (TMS) refers to a psychological phenomenon in which two or more people share, encode, and retrieve knowledge (Wegner, 1987). To develop, this system requires communication between those within the dyad or group. Through communication, individuals within dyads and groups can share their knowledge and encode new retrieved knowledge from others. The importance of a TMS lies in the fact that it reduces the labor for learning new tasks and materials by allowing each individual within a group to only memorize certain information; Hollingshead (1998a) describes it as a cooperative division of labor for joint tasks. Research …

Local And Diverse Economies As A Driver Of Sustainability: A Perspective From Us Cities, Alita M. Kane

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Across the nation cities are currently seeking new methods of economic development that fit into the sustainable development framework. This search is due in part to the recognition that traditional methods of economic development have left many cities vulnerable to economic downturn and environmental deterioration. The question is what types of economies can foster sustainability in a city? This research explores the concept that localized and diverse economies could be a potential driver of sustainability. The ability of localized and diverse economies to increase economic autonomy and viability has been explored by many researchers but their relationship with sustainability has …

Integration Of Terrestrial Source, Landuse, And Watershed Hydrogeology In Coastal Mpa Management, Kyle Flanagan

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), important for their ecology, ecosystem services, and aesthetics, are portions of the marine environment set aside for limited or no extraction, close monitoring of resources, and protection from anthropogenic impacts. They are established based on ecological and economic characteristics and needs, and are assessed through adaptive management where success targets are set by comparison with control areas; a method considering ecological interactions within coastal MPA boundaries, but without integrating and incorporating the detrimental effects of runoff-derived inputs (sediments and nutrients) from adjacent watersheds. It is widely accepted that all organisms, humans included, live downstream of other …

Historical Sediment Record And Levels Of Pcbs In Sedimentsand Mangroves Of Jobos Bay, Puerto Rico, Lindsey Hanson

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were quantified in 18 surface sediment samples, 1 sediment core, and several mangrove tissue samples collected in Jobos Bay, Puerto Rico in September 2013. Total PCBs in surface sediments ranged from 0.42 to 1232 ng g-1 dw. Generally, higher levels were observed near the shore, close to urban and industrial areas. The levels suggest significant pollution in Jobos Bay with respect to PCBs. Two-thirds of the sites were dominated by lighter PCB congeners (tri- to penta-chlorinated PCBs) while one-third had heavy PCB congeners (hexa- to octa-chlorinated PCBs) dominant. Total PCBs in a sediment core indicated levels fluctuating …

Task-Dependent Fluency And Devaluation Of Gender-Ambiguous Faces: The Effects Of Categorization Disfluency On Hireability, Ilona Nemeth

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

The evaluation of faces is an automatic process that involves perceiving facial features. The allocation of attention towards certain facial features can enhance the processing of faces; however, previous research has shown that evaluating ambiguous features makes faces more difficult to process resulting in lower ratings of likability and trustworthiness. Our research tested the extent to which individuals, when primed to focus attention on gender, would experience difficulty in the categorization of faces with ambiguous gender. Further, we examined how cognitive fluency impacted the devaluation of these faces, especially within the context of hireability for genderstereotyped jobs. Our first prediction …

Neural Activation In Bilinguals And Monolinguals During A Word-Recognition Task, Rebecca Porzig

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

The purpose of this study was to investigate speech recognition among Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual individuals and to examine blood-oxygenation changes in the prefrontal cortex during the speech recognition task. Twenty-six English-speaking monolingual adults and 10 fluent Spanish-English speaking bilingual adults participated in the study. All participants completed a gating task incorporating monolingual sentences and code-mixed Spanish-English sentences while wearing a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) band to measure changes in blood-oxygenation. Bilinguals performed equally well to monolinguals when identifying words in both monolingual and code-mixed sentences. Monolinguals identified English words in monolingual sentences more quickly than English words in …

Sadomasochistic Fantasy In Dickens’S Great Expectations, Daniel G. Lauby

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is a perpetually repetitive sequence of abjection, mastery, and failure that contrasts with Victorian wish-fulfillment cinder fantasies. As an orphaned laboring boy from the marshes, Pip begins a failed attempt to compensate for his lack by possessing Estella, a love object who equally tortures and titillates. Thus, he enters into a fantasy that appropriates the Petrarchan mode of Shakespeare’s Sonnets through masochistic disavowal, fetishization, waiting, and suspense, shaping Great Expectations into fantasy narrative that refuses resolution. As Pip attempts to refashion his identity from laborer to gentleman, he is forced to inhabit the space between past …

Who Should Manage Red Snapper (Lutjanus Campechanus) In The Gulf Of Mexico?A Study Of The Social Dynamics Of The Red Snapper Fishery, Sydney A. Alhale

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

There have been many studies of the biology of red snapper; however, there are few studies addressing the social dynamics of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) red snapper fishery1 and its effect on stock management. The GOM red snapper fishery was in decline from the 1950s through the 1980s from years of rampant overfishing. A rebuilding plan was established in 1984 under the Magnuson-Stevens Act guidelines, placing stringent regulations on red snapper fishing. To successfully rebuild the fishery by 2032, federal seasons and quotas have been shortened to allow the stock to grow. Recreational fishermen have become increasingly unhappy with …

The Role That The Quantity Of Sampling Wells Has On The Groundwater Quality Analysis At The Savannah River Site (Srs), Jerry J. Cantrell

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Savannah River Plant was created to produce nuclear-weapons materials during the Cold War. After the end of the Cold War, Savannah River Plant has become Savannah River Site (SRS) with emphasis on environmental stewardship. This research serves as baseline data to contribute to a better understanding of the spatial distribution of the background-groundwater system at the SRS. The methods of this study systematically linearize analyte parameters and establishes rank values, weight values, and aggregates the parameters. The aggregation value establishes a means to determine groundwater quality based on the analytes sampled as a comparison to their respectively recognized Environmental Protection …