Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Heteronormativity And Fair Housing: Comparing Housing Opportunities Among Cisgender And Transgender Women, Joseph E. Lara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the American housing market, gender norms regulate access to safe and stable dwellings. When looking for a home, transgender communities, plagued by multiple vulnerabilities and politicized by conservative politicians, endure vastly different experiences than their cisgender counterparts. Despite an ongoing housing crisis, civil rights laws have widened homeownership opportunities for cisgender women, but transgender women face multiple obstacles to owning a home. How have gender norms influenced the housing market, and how have socially embedded heterosexism and cisgenderism benefited cisgender women over transgender women? This manuscript explores the cultural norms regulating the creation and access to housing, the history …

Altruistic Imperialism: The Co-Optation Of Mutual Aid By The Nonprofit Industrial Complex, Kelly T. Waltz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis assesses the role of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) in neoliberalism’s material destruction of global community development and its exploitation of human benevolence. An examination of the institutionalization of high-profile social movements such as BLM and #MeToo demonstrates that the nonprofit industrial complex is built upon a misappropriation of feminist and liberation ideologies and practices, an insidious weaponization of our collectivist tendencies, and the systematic subjugation of mutual aid networks originally created and operated independent of systems of capital. The systemic and conceptual limitations of mainstream methods and the criteria by which nonprofit organizations’ effectiveness is evaluated are …

Black Food Geographies And The Politics Of Resistance In The Brick City. An Intersectional Analysis Of Black Food Provisioning Practices, Food Access, And Racial Food Inequities In Newark, New Jersey From 1666 – 2020, Angelika Winner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work studied Black food geographies in Newark, NJ, which represent alternative food provisioning practices and strategies working within but also parallel to traditional food geographies and exist within and despite of foodscapes of domination. Black food geographies not only include the spatial agency of Black residents but also entail the structural intersectionality and organized abandonment that Black residents currently experience as well as their historical production. Thus, food access of Newark’s Black resident was analyzed with a three-pronged mixed methods research design, a supply-centered analysis from a Positivistic perspective, a political economy-centered historical analysis from a Marxist perspective, and …

In My Softest & Most Liberatory Dreams: Reflections On Holding Complexity & Decentering Whiteness, Richard C. Clark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As the world contends with a global pandemic, climate catastrophes, white supremacy, coloniality, and concurrent genocides my attention splinters. In an act of futurity, or future making, I ask myself: What is needed to move from this place toward softer, more liberatory futures? This body of work finds its answer in exploring two interrelated concepts: Decentering Whiteness and Holding Complexity. Decentering Whiteness is the process of working toward a future where all the personal, spiritual, educational, epistemological, social, structural, psychological, financial, and systemic ties to white supremacy are unraveled. Holding Complexity weaves together knowledges of care, accountability, intersectionality, and …

Social Workers Working With Intimate Partner Violence Survivors: The Influence Of Trauma Work On The Social Worker’S Intimate Relationships, Claire T. Mccue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working therapeutically with trauma survivors, such as survivors of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) carries a risk of vicarious traumatization (VT) for social workers, as well as the potential for vicarious post-traumatic growth (VPTG). This phenomenological study sought to explore and understand how vicarious exposure to trauma affects social workers who treat survivors of IPV and their intimate relationships positively and negatively. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 15 social workers working directly with survivors of IPV in New York while being involved in their intimate relationships.

Utilizing the constructivist self-development perspective, the study found social workers experienced physical, emotional, …

The Cultural Complexity Of Immigrants And The Implications For Personality Assessment: Exploring The Role Of Frame Switching, Patrick Jay Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A significant body of personality research has focused on cross-national comparison, but less attention has been devoted to within-country subcultural complexity – especially with regards to the growing population of bicultural immigrants who subscribe to multiple cultural-value systems. Bicultural individuals have been found to view situations under distinct frames of reference corresponding to their heritage and host cultures, and their attitudes and behavior can vary depending on which frame is activated at a given moment. This dissertation investigates whether such frame switching effects can be caused by elements within a formal personality assessment setting, and in turn affect bicultural respondents’ …

Essays On Monopoly Power In Housing Rental Markets, Goncalo Filipe Pessa Figueiredo Costa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters on market power in housing rental markets. It introduces the concept of dynamic monopoly power in housing rental markets, develops methods to estimate that form of market power, and uses its analytical lense over the New York City (NYC) housing rental market.

In the first chapter, I formulate a search model in which market frictions give landlords rent-setting (dynamic monopoly) power. This model incorporates search frictions in the spirit of Manning’s (2003) monopsonistic labor market framework. In this setting, the demand faced by individual landlords (i.e., residual demand) results from an equilibrium between tenants’ …

Empirical Essays On Retail Investors, Institutional Investors, And Anomalies, Yuqing Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of five chapters on market efficiencies through retail and international mutual fund investors.

Chapter 1 This chapter briefly introduces this dissertation.

Chapter 2 This chapter Anomalies Never Disappeared: The Case of Stubborn Retail Investors delves into the “stubborn” retail investors and finds that anomalies traded against by retail investors never disappear in the long run, defying the conventional wisdom that anomalies are disappearing in recent years as market efficiency improves. Incorporating retail trading, I develop asset pricing models that surpass existing prominent models in explaining these long-run alphas. I hypothesize that retail investors exacerbate anomalies: the more …

A Journey To A Black Woman’S (Read Black Girl’S) Joy And Her Story Of Coming Home, Brittany Lauren Brock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an auto/ethnography about the self-actualizing journey of reclaiming storytelling as my native tongue and my journey to joy. Throughout, using my story and the stories of so many others, I not only lay out the wounds (the pain, the loss, then the hope that comes) within the academy and outside in the world but I also use storytelling as a tool of healing—my tool of healing—to show how I wrote myself free.

When Black women (read Black girls) go through The Reckoning (the moment we realize something isn’t right with how we are perceived by others) …

Exploration Of Phenomenological Geospatial Analysis For The Late Archaic In The Esopus Drainage Of The Hudson Valley, Glenn Kolyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Esopus Drainage of the Hudson Valley, New York, has been utilized by the Indigenous population for its vast resources embedded within the landscape. Consequently, the changing climate and warming trends of the Holocene transformed the landscape, shifting rivers, fauna, and floral resources. Relevantly, due to the prehistoric nature of these populations, the archaeological record is pointedly incomplete. The landscape’s geographical features are still within reach of archaeological and phenomenological study to fill in some of the interruptions.

This dissertation focuses on the Late Archaic hunter-gatherer population of the Snook Kill phase of the Esopus Drainage running west of the …

Chipping The Blue Wall: The Effect Of Dogs On Police Officer Receptivity To An Employee Assistance Program, Kenneth M. Quick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is substantial evidence that demonstrates the negative impact of stress on police officer mental health is increasing due in large part to perceived societal shifts in support for the police and trends in criminal justice reform efforts. While employee assistance programs (EAP) are the dominant mechanism for police agencies to address officer mental health, officers are reluctant to use them due to a combination of mental health stigma and organizational distrust. This dissertation studied police officer perceptions of an employee assistance program (EAP) and the effect of exposure to professionally trained dogs during an outreach session on indicators of …

Fornix Integrity And Reaction Time To Novel Scenes And Objects In Visual Recognition Memory, Melissa Elder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The fornix of the hippocampus may play an important role in working and long-term visual recognition memory. Data from a study on the role of hippocampal subfields in visual recognition memory was used here in conjunction with diffusion tensor imaging of the fornix to assess the relationship between the fornix integrity and behavioral performance, including percentage correct and reaction times. Two tasks were employed to separately evaluate working and long-term visual recognition memory, using a combination of indoor and outdoor naturalistic scenes and everyday objects. The subjects included 32 healthy adults, aged 18-44 years whose tensor imaging tractography was obtained …

Electoral Competitiveness And Legislator Responsiveness, Joseph Donza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Members of the United States Congress have a wide array of concerns when representing their respective districts and this includes re-election to office. Legislator responsiveness, a fundamental component to all democratic systems of government, plays a major role in the interaction that occurs between legislators and their constituents. However, many have argued that legislators are not responsive to their constituents when making legislative decisions. This study focuses on the election motives of members of Congress, with a special emphasis on competitiveness of a district as a driving force of legislator responsiveness. A quantitative analysis is conducted to search for correlation …

Me And Mathematics: “Doing What You’Re Talking About”: In Dialogue With My Family, Eden Morris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper is a philosophically oriented accompaniment to my audio project (accessible through the following link: https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/me-and-mathematics). Working together, the paper and audio collages form a call to action and a resource. My primary finding is the importance of doing what you’re talking about or exploring and implementing your ideas experientially. Doing what you’re talking about is important for effective teaching/learning and feeling in line with oneself. This working concept came to my attention during my research conversation with my oldest living relative, and then, again, with my youngest (non-baby) relative. This doing what you’re talking about is a way …

Computational Approaches To Linguistic Challenges In Arabic Speech Recognition, Enas Albasiri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to document the linguistic features of Arabic that pose challenges to speech and language technologies and advance these technologies by developing state-of-the-art computational tools focusing on automatic speech recognition (ASR), text normalization (TN), and corpus development. TN converts expressions such as numbers, dates, and times—named semiotic classes—from their written to their spoken domain, such as converting ‘$84.00’ to ‘eighty-four dollars’, while inverse text normalization (ITN) converts verbalized text to its written form. This conversion is an essential preprocessing step for text-to-speech (TTS), and post-processing step for ASR. Arabic presents a challenge for TN and ITN because one …

Expanding The Corpus Of Vocalized Hebrew Text: Compiling An Unvocalized Text Corpus And Building An Online Interface For Vocalization Annotation, Rachel Shanblatt Bloch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Written modern Hebrew presents a unique challenge for training computational models for language processing because modern Hebrew text often lacks vocalization. The lack of available vocalized Hebrew data can lead to ambiguity in training these models and generally hinders work on natural language processing problems. The goal of this project is to contribute to the collection of vocalized Hebrew text by collecting and preprocessing a large corpus of unvocalized Hebrew text and building an online annotation tool. The annotation tool allows people to upload unvocalized Hebrew text, to annotate by adding Hebrew vocalization, and to download comma-separated values files of …

Examining Book Banning Trends In The U.S., Amanda D. Filchock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a web application for users to explore book banning trends across the United States. It is intended to serve as a resource for students, parents, educators, librarians, and authors who are interested in understanding the ways that book banning attempts have changed between 2021-2023 in the United States. These audiences will be able to interact with data visualizations to inform their own research and deepen their understanding of this current topic. Interactive features include: the ability to search by the title or author of a book to learn where, when, why, and by whom the book …

Discourse Analysis Of Ethnonyms For Black Italians On Youtube, Kaithlyn Massiah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There have been various studies on the intersection of race and national identity for the African diaspora, but there has not been many on how language is used to evoke a stance on identity. This project focuses on the how ethnonyms, or names given to an ethnic group, are assigned to Black Italians in online discourse on YouTube. In this research, comments were analyzed from two YouTube videos that comprise of Black Italians who discuss their identity and the ethnonyms they prefer. ZERO is the first Netflix Italian series that centers the Black Italian experience. In the videos “Black [Italian] …

Cross-Linguistic Differences In Neural Encoding And Processing Of Stop Consonants: The Impact Of Language Experience On Attention Allocation, Aline Dos Santos Oliveira

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aims to examine the intricate relationship between language experience and the neural processing of stop consonant speech sounds. Previous research has shown minimal differences in amplitudes and latencies of cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials (AEPs) to speech sounds across listeners from various language backgrounds. It is only towards the later latencies (around the P2 peak at 200 ms), that there have been suggestions of cross-linguistic differences. In addition, a recent study, observed an AEP difference between monolinguals and bilinguals when processing speech, specifically an "Nd effect”. The Nd effect, which is an increased negativity of the AEP is proposed …

Unveiling Iolanta: Blindness In Nineteenth-Century Opera, Nafset Chenib

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the main tropes of representing and narrating blindness in nineteenth-century opera and fictional literature with a particular emphasis on Tchaikovsky’s 1892 one-act opera Iolanta, with its blind protagonist. Examination of the production history of Iolanta reveals that misrepresentations and misconceptions ingrained within Tchaikovsky's libretto and music have governed directorial choices, consequently giving rise to a homogeneous, predominantly unfavorable portrayal of blindness on the stage. I suggest an approach to the opera that is more consonant with the lived experience of blindness.

Pre-Stimulus Anticipation And Unconscious Fear Learning Disparities In Individuals With Varying Levels Of Anxiety, Anastasiya Rumyantseva Kharlamova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study employed a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm to investigate the influence of pre-stimulus unconscious threat anticipation on subsequent fear responses in associative learning. Additionally, we explored the differences in pre-stimulus anticipation among individuals with varying levels of anxiety. Electrodermal response (EDA) was chosen as a primary measure due to its robustness in fear conditioning paradigms. Moreover, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was utilized to assess anxiety levels in participants. Twenty-seven subjects were recruited to determine if pre-stimulus skin conductance responses (SCR) would exhibit stimulus-specific patterns influenced by implicit cues (L-shaped configurations) that indicated an upcoming face or a house …

Resilience, Resistance, And Nation-Building Among Internally Displaced Persons: Kites As A Means Of Transcending Displacement, Michelle Black

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Once a simple plaything, the kite has evolved into a symbol of hope and defiance. This study explores kite flying in Gaza, specifically among internally displaced people (IDPs), as an act of resilience and resistance. It investigates how kites, amidst conflict and displacement, rise as symbols of solidarity and identity, and contribute to nation-building efforts. The research process begins with an extensive investigation into IDPs, followed by an exploration of key concepts such as resilience, resistance, and nation-building. The study then delves into how these concepts manifest within the IDP population. Additionally, research was conducted on the history and uses …

The Efficacy Of Using Machine Learning Techniques For Identifying And Classifying “Fake News”, Muhammad Islam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In today's digital world, detecting fake news has emerged as a critical challenge, one that has significant effects on democracy and public discourse at large both regionally and globally. This research studies how diversity of news sources in training datasets affects how well machine learning models can classify fake vs true news. I used the Linear Support Vector Classification (LinearSVC) to create and compare two classification models: one was trained on a dataset that only had real news from a singular source, Reuters (Dataset 1), and the other was trained on a dataset that contained real news from Reuters, The …

The Core Of It All: From The Forest To The Concrete Jungle, Ayo Andra J. Deas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Core of It All is a component of principle within Fasaha. The mission of Fasaha is to implement programming directed toward development of one’s Core through self-actualization. Self-Actualization is defined as bringing forth the total essential qualities of one’s own consciousness, character, and identity through positive behavior. Throughout this manuscript, principle is defined as the standard of natural essential qualities determining intrinsic consciousness, character and identity. Programming is defined as providing with intrinsic instructions for the automatic performance of a task.

Fasaha is a support service that enhances the existing organization’s service. Throughout this dissertation, it will be apparent …

Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Ege Aksu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that investigate the effect of public health policies on health outcomes.

The first chapter evaluates the impact of the extensive health care reforms enacted between 2003–2013 under the Health Transformation Program (HTP) in Turkey on maternal and infant health outcomes for the poor. By focusing on a specific insurance program (Green Card) expansion that was a part of HTP, I explore changes in infant survival, fertility, and children’s vaccination status. Before 2004, all public health insurance beneficiaries (the control group) were covered for outpatient services, including prenatal and postnatal doctor visits, gestational diabetes screenings, …

Teaching In The “Home Language” Is Not Enough: Navigating Spanish Raciolinguistic Ideologies In A Dual Language Bilingual Program, Gladys Yacely Aponte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic case study examines how fourth graders in a New York City Spanish/English dual language bilingual public school navigate hegemonic language ideologies about Spanish. Drawing on the scholarship of raciolinguistic ideologies—those that position the language practices of people of color as inherently deficient (Flores & Rosa, 2015), I analyze the discourse of seven Kiskeyanx students to examine how they navigate the widespread raciolinguistic marginalization of Kiskeyanxs— a demographic that is racialized as more Black than other Spanish-speaking groups.

As a first-generation Kiskeyana-New Yorker, a bilingual teacher educator and researcher, and a former dual language bilingual public-school teacher, it …

How Do We Learn What We Cannot Say?, Daniel Yakubov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The contributions of this thesis are two-fold. First, this thesis presents UDTube, an easily usable software developed to perform morphological analysis in a multi-task fashion. This work shows the strong performance of UDTube versus the current state-of-the-art, UDPipe, across eight languages, primarily in the annotation of morphological features. The second contribution of this thesis is a exploration into the study of defectivity. UDTube is used to annotate a large amount of data in Greek and Russian which is ultimately used to investigate the plausibility of Indirect Negative Evidence (INE), a popular approach to the acquisition of morphological defectivity. The reported …

The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thematic project examines the notion of self-division, particularly in terms of the conflict between cognition and metacognition, across the fields of philosophy, psychology, and, most recently, the cognitive and neurosciences. The project offers a historic overview of models of self-division, as well as analyses of the various problems presented in theoretical models to date. This work explores how self-division has been depicted in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, Don DeLillo, and Mary Shelley. It examines the ways in which artistic renderings alternately assimilate, resist, and/or critique dominant philosophical, psychological, and scientific discourses about the self and its …

A Candidate Needs Approach To Job Advertisements, Yuliya M. Cheban-Gore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Organizations currently lack research-based best practice guidance on what information is most helpful for job seekers when deciding which jobs and organizations to apply to. This lack of guidance is a detriment because, typically, recruitment strategies are designed from the perspective of the organization’s needs –which is effective when the job market is organization, rather than candidate-driven. When the market is candidate-driven, it would benefit organizations to view the recruitment process through the lens of job seekers. The current studies focus on understanding one of the beginning stages of recruitment through the lens of job seekers: job advertisements. Through a …

Interracial Instagram: Depictions Of Interracial Couples On Instagram, Christie Sillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines depictions of interracial romantic relationships on Instagram, a popular photo- and video-sharing social networking site. Social networking sites like Instagram, whereby users connect with each other by creating, sharing, and consuming content, are prime sites for sociological study because ideas are constantly being (re)made on them. On Instagram, meaning-making is mainly done through the construction of a profile and the posting of images and/or videos. Using a mixed-methods research design of hashtag analysis, digital ethnography, discourse and image analysis, I critically analyze Instagram profiles that depict interracial romantic relationships. In doing so, I develop a contemporary, social …