Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Seeing And Believing: Philosophical Issues In Theory Of Mind Development, Joseph A. Hedger

Dissertations - ALL

All human beings understand the behaviors of others as causal results of their mental states. Philosophers call this ability folk psychology and developmental researchers call it theory of mind (ToM). My dissertation concerns how this reasoning works and how it is acquired.

First, I develop and expand a theory of how folk psychology develops in childhood. This is the Perceptual Access Reasoning, or PAR theory of the Fabricius lab. Contrary to the two views dominant in the field, I argue that ToM (belief reasoning or BR) is acquired around 6 years of age after undergoing two preliminary cognitive stages, reality …

Minimizing Co-Sleeping Disruptions: A Design Intervention, Yining Shi

Theses - ALL

A recent survey indicates that 30% of adults in the United States sleep separately from their partners because of co-sleep disruptions (Rogojanski et al., 2013). However, research suggests that sleeping together is good for couple relationships (Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010). While there are many products on the market designed to help individuals with sleep problems, there are few that address co-sleeping problems. This thesis addresses this gap in the market for co- sleeping products by exploring how a design intervention of bedroom furniture can help couples sleep together despite the disruptions to each other. This paper records the design …

From Religious Freedom To Indigenous Sovereignty: The Case Of Lyng V. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988), Dana Lloyd

Dissertations - ALL

In 1988 the United States Supreme Court declared constitutional the federal government’s development plan in an area (known as the High Country) that was considered central to the religious practice of three local American Indian nations. The Court admitted that “It is undisputed that the Indian respondents’ beliefs are sincere and that the Government’s proposed actions will have severe adverse effects on the practice of their religion.” Nevertheless, because the disputed area was on public land, the Court thought that the government should be allowed to manage its property in any way it saw fit, regardless of the severe adverse …

Theory And Practice: The Formation And Limitation Of Feminist Scholarship In The Study Of Religion, Hayden Elizabeth Hains

Theses - ALL

My thesis explores the methodological and political im/possibilities opened up by the incorporation of feminist theory and WGS into the study of religion. Drawing on intersectional feminist scholarship, my thesis will be organized around case studies of feminist and womanist scholarship in the study of religion and theological studies in order to examine the history of how feminist theory became institutionalized within the academic study of religion and theology, fields that are both masculine and hierarchical in structure, in order to locate the possible limitations this institutionalization has for creating space for political activism. In addition to religious studies, I …

All The Small Things: Contingent Mereological Nihilism, Naomi Dershowitz

Dissertations - ALL

Scientists and metaphysicians alike often accept that the best theory is that which best exhibits familiar theoretical virtues such as empirical testability, fruitfulness, conservatism, explanatory power, and parsimony. In this dissertation, I assume this naturalistically respectable methodology and explore whether it can help decide between competing metaphysical theories. I argue it can.

In chapter 1, I present my version of mereological nihilism, Minimal Truthmaker Nihilism (MTN). According to MTN, only the minimal truthmakers for all true sentences are included in the correct ontology and composite objects are not among the minimal truthmakers. I argue that the proponent of MTN can …

Stereotype Filter: A Digital Interface To Foster Cultural Awareness, Linghua Zhu

Theses - ALL

With the development of economic globalization, more and more people are immersed in a cross-cultural community. United States hosts the largest number of international students in the world. The cultural diversity of American college campuses makes them full of opportunity to learn about and from each other. However, huge portion of international students experience American colleges as culturally challenging. The cultural identities of international students are often stereotyped or misunderstood, causing barriers between students. Online questionnaires and analyzing related literatures suggests that the problem of stereotyping is a broad issue that is worth studying. Interaction design is a possible solution …

Celebrating Slow Movement: Design Of A Sensory Experience Through An Intergenerational Platform, Asal Andarzipour

Theses - ALL

This thesis explores the intersections between wisdom, happiness, and aesthetics through intergenerational experiences of older adults and younger individuals. Parallel to this, I have researched the virtues of Slow Cooking, Slow Design, and the Slow Movement to address wellness needs throughout our world. The original solutions explored for balancing these values focused on mindful activities. Case studies of relationships within families in comparison with alternative communities, such as Eco-villages, have guided my research and revealed meaningful efforts that engage individuals with shared environmental and moral values. The final idea that I envisioned is, in essence, a form of sensory experience …

The Third World Women’S Alliance: History, Geopolitics, And Form, Ariane Vani Kannan

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a women-of-color-led activist organization that maintained active chapters in New York City and the Bay Area between 1971-80. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews, I reconstruct how the group invoked, constructed, and circulated intersecting Third World histories and geopolitical analyses through political education, publications, and cultural events. In addition to this historical study, I seek to understand the ongoing presence of the TWWA in educational spaces through interviews with archivists and professors across disciplines. This project makes three contributions to the field of Rhetoric and Composition: …

Constructing And Applying Rubrics In College-Level Efl Writing Assessment In China, Chunhui Li

Theses - ALL

Assessment is a critical component in the teaching of writing and plays an important role in discovering and helping to address students’ writing difficulties. Therefore, it is essential for teachers to approach writing assessment in a reliable and valid way. Previous studies showed that assessment rubrics, used as a standard to describe performance evaluation, can help teachers effectively assess student writing. The reliability and validity of the use of rubrics for helping teachers in assessing writing fairly and improving students’ writing ability has received much research attention; however, less attention has been paid to teacher training in the area of …

Operating Outside Of Empire: Trading Citizenship In The Atlantic World, 1783-1815, Mark Dragoni

Dissertations - ALL

Operating Outside of Empire: Trading Citizenship in the Atlantic World, 1783-1815, looks at markets and ships as spaces for negotiation between merchants and the state. The dissertation follows the experiences of former British colonists in America who won independence and then immediately tried to find a way to get back into the British empire. For American merchants, such as Nicholas Low, William Constable, and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, the inconsistently-governed Caribbean provided an entry point to the greater British Atlantic and the markets of the empire. These merchants won access by exploiting the opportunities offered by environmental catastrophes, slave rebellions and …

Control As Multiple Agree, Deniz Satik

Theses - ALL

This thesis presents a new theory of control in which the control predicate establishes control between PRO and the controller by Agreeing with both of them and checking their semantics at a later point of the derivation. Each DP possesses its own index as a syntactic feature. As the predicate Probes for these two Goals, it keeps track of the indexes of the controllee and controller with the control calculus, a part of the narrow syntax. The calculus is sensitive to the semantics of these nominal phrases after transfer to LF. This derives subject control in (1), which Culicover & …

Religion In Contemplative Studies, Daniel J. Moseson

Dissertations - ALL

This project is about the new field of contemplative studies, a field that seeks to use “contemplative” practices, derived mostly (though not entirely) from religious traditions in academic settings, prominently including college pedagogy. First, this project seeks to understand how contemplative studies advocates persuade others (and themselves) that what they are doing is not “religion;” that is, how do they define "religion" in order to situate their own work as non-religious academic inquiry? Second, in the course of my textual and ethnographic research on contemplative studies, it has become apparent that this field adds to the growing rebuttal of religious …

Fierce: Black Queer Literacies Of Survival, Seth Davis

Dissertations - ALL

Influenced by Black feminist and queer scholars, my dissertation focuses on how Black and queer people have made interventions through language and performance to survive larger racist and homophobic forces. Despite critical scholarship on the literacies of both Black and queer communities, there has been limited research that brings together these two perspectives and bodies of research. The foundation of my study is based on audio/video interviews and participant observation: I interviewed participants from 2013 Washington, DC, Black Gay Pride and 2017 Harlem Pride, focusing specifically on their understanding of three terms: “reading,” “throwing shade,” and “pullin’ trade.”

The central …

To Plow A Lonely Furrow: Indigenismo And Mapuche Politics In Chile, 1920-1960, Henry John Stegeman

Dissertations - ALL

This study examines Mapuche political organization in Chile from 1920-1960 through the lens of transnational indigenismo. In that period, politicians, academics and social reformers across the Americas were questioning how to incorporate indigenous populations into modern national states. While many historical accounts of similar phenomena in other countries have drawn categorical distinctions between indigenismo (as a movement led by white elites) and indigenous activism (led by Indians themselves), this work places the two phenomena side-by-side to explore connections between them. That approach shows that collaboration, periodic conflict and strategic alliance making were important components of indigenous politics in Chile. It …

History's Perilous Pleasures: Experiencing Antiquity In The Postwar Hollywood Epic, Thomas Jefferson West Iii

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation focuses on the mid-20th Century historico-biblical epic—a film genre that flourished within Hollywood from 1949 to 1966 and which took as its subject the depiction of the ancient world—and reads this body of films as a mode of historical engagement. I argue that the historico-biblical epic takes the pressure of the terrifying possibility of the end of human history engendered by the atomic bomb and transmutes this into a series of dialectics, between agency and powerlessness, embodiment and transcendence, desire and punishment, imperial zenith and nadir. While antiquity seems to offer the modern world the ability to escape …

Resisting Borders, Resisting Control Examining The Multiplicity Of Identities In A Map Of Home And The Girl In The Tangerine Scarf, Zainab Abdali

Honors Capstone Projects - All

In this project I examine identities as they are expressed through the use of language in the novels A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf. Both novels are coming-of-age narratives of two Arab and Muslim-American female protagonists that depict their exploration of identity as they undergo experiences of war, migration, displacement, and racism in their respective contexts. I explore the protagonists’ negotiation of identity in the face of familial and societal pressure to conform to clearly demarcated categorizations of identity, arguing that the protagonists recognize clear borders between identities as …