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Biblical Literacy And The Creative Mind, Michael Farrell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Biblical Literacy and the Creative Mind will explore interpretation tracing the history of English literature back to biblical aspirations and its continued profound influence on Western human perspectives. It will examine the decline in adults reading literary texts and the diminishing number of English majors among prospective students. I am arguing for poetic interpretations over hermeneutic ones, which analyze what is structurally in a sentence to make a reader feel a certain way. I will use the theory of intertextuality, meaning a text comprises the consumption of past texts, to aid my argument. This theory underscores the importance of celebrated …

Texas Gothic, Taryn Uribe Turner

Art Theses and Dissertations

The emotional and the ecological combine to create my body of work titled, “Texas Gothic.” My thesis tells the stories of my oil paintings created through personal connections to a variety of landscapes, animals and experiences that share the setting of Texas.

Desire and regret take shape as animals and figures not fully formed or real. Unreliable narratives of the past are entangled with present tensions to create a painting that haunts and stalks.

And yet, there is hope!

Through nostalgia and sweetness and burdens, my paintings confront a shrouded future. The contradictions of time passing are explored in my …

Fragmented Bodies, Lauren Careese Alexander

Art Theses and Dissertations

Through Memory Webs and fragmented ceramic vessels, I express what it feels like to grow up living in a biracial body. I utilize mixed media to emulate a mixed-race experience. My Memory Webs are fashioned by painting on scraps of canvas and attaching them with crocheted wire and ribbon to speak to how my memory has impacted my identity. My fragmented ceramic vessels are cut up and stitched back together to represent disjointedness and un-belonging. All of my work is contextualized through the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and what the Monster may represent for people of color. I also …

Radical Explorations Of Radical Empiricism: William James’S Transmissive Theory Of Mind In The Context Of Visionary Experience, Rita Spellman

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

The dominant ontology in science is a form of materialism and it filters down into the social sciences in ways I will touch on throughout this paper. The influence of the current dominant ontology is especially apparent when it comes to experiences and phenomena that challenge its underlying assumptions which is why I will primarily focus on visionary experience and psi phenomena as studied by radical empiricists throughout the ages.

The philosophical position of William James challenges materialist assumptions by championing the idea that the only world we can speak of is the world of our experience. William James affords …

School Leaders Supporting Undocumented Asian And Black Students, Lorena Tule-Romain

Education Policy and Leadership Theses and Dissertations

There are 5.6 million K-12 students who are either undocumented or living with at least one undocumented parent (Passel & Cohn, 2018). In 2021, FWD.us estimated that approximately 620,000 K-12 students are undocumented; 34% of these students migrated from countries in Asia, sub-Saharan African, and Caribbean countries. These students have unique needs in schools, such as support for lower frequency language services, wraparound supports, and classroom curricula that should account for their cultural heritages and traditions. While scholars have conducted research on the largest group of undocumented students, Latinx, existing knowledge of the students coming from Asian and African countries …

Accounting For The Gift: Theology And Ethics In Accounting, Daniel Sebastian

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

Accounting is often assumed to be a neutral presentation of the facts of economic activities and actions. Its double-entry system means that it is always in balance and comports to the rigor of mathematical formulas, and it is taken to be a matter of empirical counting that lends it certainty as well. The dissertation argues that this description of accounting is inadequate. Accounting is better seen as a political tool and technology for producing trust that can help resolve social conflicts. As such, accounting is not value-neutral but carries within it a particular sociality that has moral implications. These moral …

Visual Thinking Strategies (Vts) In The Clinic: How The Humanities Affect The Way We Make Visual Diagnoses Within Medicine, Mitchell Smith

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a system of humanistic critical analysis that was developed in the 1990’s by Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine, affords viewers of art the opportunity to have an increased level of interaction with artwork through the use of questions posed by an instructor. For viewers, such a process of critical analysis affords greater visual literacy. The same is arguably true of medical personnel who have trained to use said process in the making of medical observations and diagnoses. The purpose of this study is to understand if VTS has direct application within the realm of medicine, and …

Todo Sobre América Latina, Kayla Madeline Schwartz

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to inform a Spanish-speaking audience about the humanities of Latin America. The format is a blog which solicits more engagement with the embedded research and written text. Colorful photos and informative videos attract the attention of a general public that may otherwise not be interested in learning extensively about history and culture. Such focus is important because Latin American past has great bearing on the lives of much of the Latinx community today—in many regions.

Specifically, this blog contains articles about history, literature, movies and shows, dance, and travelling. The audience can learn about a broad timeline …

Correlates Of Immunization Timeliness In Three South Asian Countries: Secondary Analysis Of Demographic And Health Surveys, Tanzir Ahmed Shuvo

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the availability of effective vaccines, 1.5 million children under the age of 5 years die every year because of vaccine preventable diseases. Improvements in vaccine delivery infrastructure have resulted in relatively high coverage of vaccines, but many children are not receiving their vaccines on a timely basis. Timely administration of routine vaccines recommended by the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) ensures maximum efficacy. It is vital to explore rates of vaccination timeliness and the correlates of timely vaccination among children to design targeted interventions for improving both coverage and timeliness. We conducted a secondary data analysis of the Demographic …

Trans-Formation: Establishing Interdisciplinary Support For The Transgender Experience Through Historical, Biological, And Religious Lenses, Gaymarie Vaughan

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

Quite frankly, nothing could be more relevant to a modern discussion about what it means to be human than the emergence of discourse on transgender identity. By looking at the long history of human evolution, the impact that the progressing fields of science and medicine have had on human development, and the human need for bodily autonomy, it should be taken for granted that transgender issues belong in public discourse and that transgender people deserve to enjoy the same rights and freedoms all other humans share. This research advocates for best and most inclusive societal practices for transgender individuals by …

A Feminist Approach To Solutions In Urban Development, Lourdes Yessenia Gracia Cantu

Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering: Sustainability and Development Capstone Projects

Are there ways of occupying space and producing places that somehow contest, challenge, and problematize the dominant modalities of organization, of space and place?

A Feminist Approach to Solutions in Urban Development presents an exploration and proposal of a more equitable and diverse urban design that guarantees the use of public space as a place for economic development. With a focus on the recent theory and social movement concerning the impact of the built environment on women, children and older adults, urban feminist, comes across as a participatory planning process that ensures the involvement of multilevel agendas, to react and …

Grammatical Triples Extraction For The Distant Reading Of Textual Corpora, Stephanie Buongiorno, Stephanie Buongiorno

Multidisciplinary Studies Theses and Dissertations

Grammatical triples extraction has become increasingly important for the analysis of large, textual corpora. By providing insight into the sentence-level linguistic features of a corpus, extracted triples have supported interpretations of some of the most relevant problems of our time. The growing importance of triples extraction for analyzing large corpora has put the quality of extracted triples under new scrutiny, however. Triples outputs are known to have large amounts of erroneous triples. The extraction of erroneous triples poses a risk for understanding a textual corpus because erroneous triples can be nonfactual and even analogous to misinformation. Disciplines such as the …

Analyzing The Rhetorics Of Wine: Ethnographic Research Of Wine Community Narratives, Bailey Mcalister

English Dissertations

In this dissertation, I explore the effective communication and rhetorical practices of sommeliers and wine professionals. Using interdisciplinary work and ethnographic study, I analyze the general narrative of the wine community in order to draw conclusions about the rhetorics of wine. Specifically, I argue that professionals in the wine community utilize a unique expertise founded on managing relationships between the wines, the experiences, and the wine community, and that these rhetorics are crucial to the industry's success. To support my argument, I conducted personal interviews with seven wine professionals during the summer of 2022. These primary sources inform my rhetorical …

“Þer Watz Mete, Þer Watz Myrþe, Þer Watz Much Ioye”: The Manipulative Sotilte Of Middle English Romance, Kelly Evans

English Theses and Dissertations

The Middle English sotilte and its Middle French counterpart, the entremet, refer to the elements during a feast that conjure wonder. Like “feast” and “banquet,” both terms have been used interchangeably, with the entremet coming to signify a sweet dessert at the end of a meal in modern usage of the term. In Middle English romance, the sotilte of the feast builds upon the connotations that “subtlety” carry—guile, artifice, craft, even deceit.

Perhaps the most well-known of all Middle English sotiltes is the sudden intrusion of the Green Knight during the Christmastide feast in Sir Gawain and the Green …

Potential Benefits Of The Campus Outdoor Built Environment On Student Stress, Leading To Improved Retention, Kevin Dilliard

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

University landscape managers often ask themselves, are they making a difference? Since what they do is not a revenue-generating department, how can they validate their true worth beyond making the campus beautiful, which is excellent, but what added value do they bring? As is common practice, when economic times get tough, the landscape department budget is one of the first to be cut, but is that the wisest thing to do? This research was intended to explore the concept that the services landscape managers provide have a return on investment by providing an environment in which students can thrive and …

Toward A More Humane Public Policy: How The Humanities Can, And Should, Inform The Creation And Analysis Of Public Policy, Eric Celler

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone investigates how the methodologies of the humanities can inform the creation and analysis of public policy. Since the mid-twentieth century, public policy has increasingly turned away from humanistic questions and toward technical questions. The result has been a public policy regime that focuses too much on manipulable variables and not on the humans that the policies are impacting. By applying humanistic methodologies to public policy, we are more likely to appreciate the inarticulable elements of human social organization and therefore devise public policy that is less harmful and more humble.

The International Academy Of Language And Culture: The Global (Pre)K-12 Charter School Network, Dree-El Simmons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The International Academy of Language and Culture (IALC) is a charter school based on the original concept of charter schools by Ray Budde and Albert Shanker, as an academic environment dedicated and designed to improving the educational outcomes for its students through innovative pedagogy. Committed to American (and global) education reform, the IALC incorporates elements from higher education into the early childhood and adolescent settings. We accomplish this by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach in our language and culture-based program.

The IALC is a multilingual, full-immersion program. Food Studies (including culinary arts), the Arts, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Martial Arts …

Unified Philosophy For Music Therapy: Solving The Identity Crisis Through Interdisciplinary Analysis, Janice Lindstrom

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the feasibility of a unifying philosophy for music therapy and to offer an identity for the music therapy profession that is appropriate for the various ways in which music therapy is practiced throughout the world. A systematic review of published music therapy approaches informed this investigation. The central research questions for this dissertation were: (a) Is it possible to articulate a unifying philosophy of music therapy that is inclusive of the diverse ways music therapy is currently practiced; and if so, (b) What might be that resultant integrated philosophy of music therapy? …

Scenes Of Screens, Scenes Of Sodomy: The Role And Impact Of The Folding Screen In Eighteenth-Century French Erotic Novels, Katherine Delony

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project provides an analysis of the folding screen as a literary agent and signifier which reflects the cultural happenings of the eighteenth century with specific emphasis on new ideas about queerness which arise in France during the eighteenth century. I will focus primarily on the Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814) Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) (as well as La Nouvelle Justine, 1797) and John Cleland’s (1709-1789) Le Fille de Joie (translated 1751) with reference to Jean-Louis Fougeret de Monbron’s (1706-1760) Margot la Ravaudeuse (1753), Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir Jean-François de Bastide’s (1724-1798) La …

Life Beyond Bars: Nine Prisoners And Their Families, And Faith-Based Efforts To Recognize And Avoid-Cross-Generational Criminal Habits., Alfreda Reese

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

The aim of this study is to examine prisoners’ firsthand experiences and their underlying family issues to bring awareness and delete current cross-generational criminal habits. Through analyzing a series of individual experiences and exploring underlying family issues, the study intends to bring awareness and exposure to the implications of the criminal justice system on prisoners and their families. This study will analyze personal stories of prisoners and their families to identify, interact, and intervene in best practices to avoid criminal habits. The research gathered aims to empower prisoners and their families in suggested ways to delete repeated criminal patterns and …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Does Co-Speech Gesture Support Children’S Analogical Reasoning? An Investigation Into The Differential Effects Of Gesture On Learning, Amy Michelle Wilkinson

Dissertations

A well-established conceptualization of academic capitalism is rooted in the marriage of economic theory and critical social. Significantly, academic capitalism links economic dimensions with the political-ideological transformations of U.S. society associated with the fall of communism and the rise of neoliberalism. Academic capitalism is based on a recognition of the paradoxical nature of higher education and offers a lens through which to examine the ways in which institutions in the United States have come to prioritize learning for the labor market as a private good within the new global economy, while also becoming less beholden to the notion of learning …

Science And Sadness: Critiques On How We Handle Alzheimer’S Disease And Dementia, Katherine Martinez

Honors Theses

In our society, an individual’s worth is tied to the state of their cognitive function which affects the discourse about neurodegenerative illnesses, causing it to mostly fall under two branches: “The Dread” and “Science as the Holy Grail”. “The Dread” addresses how Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and other dementias are typically perceived as devastating illnesses to be feared. “Science as the Holy Grail” represents the hope and faith that is invested into potential technoscientific developments without the guarantee of any consequential results. Limiting the narrative to these two categories negatively impacts the quality of life (QOL) of AD patients, caregivers, and …

Points Of Reference: Humanities Content For Media Studies, Carolyn A. Mcdonough

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Points of Reference: Humanities Content for Media Studies is a proposed research method designed for students to help them analyze humanities content encountered in undergraduate media studies courses, specifically within commercial advertising. The project is informed by Critical Theory developed by The Frankfurt School as well as by contemporary digital humanities scholars. Points of Reference theorizes a digital pedagogical training tool as a browsing gallery that helps student separate humanities references embedded into media, and to contravene the dominance of Google Search.

A Text Analysis Of British Welfare Debates, Emily C. Maanum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This white paper details the process of conducting a textual analysis of three British parliamentary debates. It also discusses the development of Tableau visualizations to display the results of the analysis, along with the creation of a GitHub repository for documentation of the procedure and code, as well as a GitHub Page for displaying the visualizations. Through text analysis, this capstone project examines the rhetoric used by British members of parliament (MP) while debating the creation of a welfare state during three specific parliamentary debates in 1944: National Health Service, Social Insurance Part 1 and 2, and Employment …

"I Can't Breathe": Toward A Pneumatology Of Singing And Missional Musicking For Racial Justice In Jacksonville, Florida, Thomas Shapard

Doctor of Pastoral Music Projects and Theses

This thesis develops a philosophy of musicking that intersects with missional ecclesiology and expands the role of music-making beyond the church walls. The central hypothesis assumes that predominantly white congregations in the Free Church tradition located in the southern United States incorporate ways of singing that reinforce, albeit inadvertently, attitudes toward others that buttress white ethnocentricity. Musical practices arising from a Western European heritage can promote cultural exclusivity as well as a perceived—yet false— sense of superiority. Is there an implicit theology of singing in white churches that engenders a culture of complicity and apathy in matters of racial injustice, …

Using Big Data To Facilitate A Lyrical Analysis Of Poetry And Rap, Remington Yve Giller

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

Poetry and rap are dissected using text mining techniques in order to determine overall trends in the words used by both. With this data, the way in which ideas and concepts are expressed can be compared and contrasted as a way of showing the legitimacy of rap as a form of literary expression. Other topics within the paper are: a background of the history of rap and the digital humanities, and an example of a close reading featuring a medieval poem and a rap by Eminem. This demonstrates how even in a traditional way of handling texts, both poetry and …

Food Security In Ancestral Tewa Coalescent Communities: The Zooarchaeology Of Sapa'owingeh In The Northern Rio Grande, New Mexico, Rachel Burger

Anthropology Theses and Dissertations

Food security, the measure of access to safe and sufficient food, is a critical global issue, not just because of its effects on health, but also because of the potentially negative consequences that food insecurity can have on mental and social well-being. Archaeology is uniquely situated to inform and articulate with global food security studies by focusing on past lived experiences of social and environmental conditions and events. The experiences of and responses to those conditions, in turn, inform present day policy and humanitarian efforts.

This study examines how residents of Sapa’owingeh, a Classic Period (A.D. 1350-1600) Tewa pueblo in …

When Half The Neighborhood Is Missing: How To Overcome Systemic Poverty And Gentrification Following The Models Of Dudley Street And Mission Waco, Kevin A. Brown, Kevin A. Brown, Kevin A. Brown

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

Abstract

By following the examples of Mission Waco and The Dudley Street Initiative, it is possible to renew a sense of beloved community by changing the narrative of poverty and gentrification by rebuilding the village through empowering the poor and marginalized.

Mission Waco and The Dudley Street Initiative are comprehensive sustainable communities because they combine numerous social and economic interventions under developed strategic plans. The principal question that this dissertation seeks to answer is whether these models can be implemented in local communities to help overcome gentrification and poverty. Implementation can be successful if we can identify the problem, rethink …

Three Prongs Of Knowledge For Black/African American Parents To Prepare Them To Assist Young Black/African American Children Navigate Through Systemic Racism, Diane R Miles, Diane R. Miles

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This dissertation focuses on three prongs of knowledge in parent education programs for Black/African American parents. These three prongs of knowledge fortify and enhance Black/African American parents' effectiveness in their role. This dissertation focuses on Black/African Americans' parenting experience because of the unique challenges they and their children face in a country that does not always value them or respects their humanity. Living in a country where systemic racism is foundational, Black/African American parents and their children have added challenges presented by this reality. It is systemic racism that creates the need for additional knowledge to ensure that Black/African …