Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor On The Early Modern Stage, Evan Alexander Hixon

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation, "Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor on the Early Modern Stage," builds upon critical scholarship pertaining to early modern service and political theory to interrogate the imagined economic and social functions of clandestine service in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Webster. Drawing heavily on the works of András Kiséry, David Schalkwyk, Elizabeth Rivlin, and Michael Neill, I look at the exchange of service between spy and spymaster as an accumulation of social and cultural capital. Thinking through spying in this light, this dissertation explores how playwrights represent these service relationships which fall outside of systems of patronage-driven …

Three Essays At The Intersection Of Child Welfare And Public Policy, Mattie Mackenzie-Liu

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is comprised of three essays which examine policy relevant issues in the child welfare system. In the United States the goal of the child welfare system is to protect the well-being of children by ensuring their safety and promoting permanency. Children typically become involved with the child welfare system due to an allegation of neglect or child maltreatment. If the allegation is substantiated, the government can take custody of the children, remove them from their homes, and place them in foster care. All three of these papers examine foster care outcomes. Removing a child from their family is …

The Politics Of Security: Syrian Refugees In The Middle East And Western Europe, Sefa Secen

Dissertations - ALL

Under what conditions do governments view and respond to the arrival of refugees primarily as a security threat? Comparatively analyzing the securitization of Syrian refugees in two pairs of countries, Turkey and Lebanon and Germany and France, this dissertation proposes a domestic political context-based theory and typology of securitization. Based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the media data including mainstream national newspaper articles, political speeches, and policy documents, this research differentiates between different levels of securitization. It finds that moderate securitization was present in Lebanon during the early years of the refugee crisis (2013–2014) and coincided with …

American Transcendentalism Contra Contemporary Political Philosophy: Applications Of Thomas Carlyle And Ralph Waldo Emerson To Liberal Democratic Capitalism, Platonism, Islamism, Technology, And The "End Of History", Brian Wolfel

Dissertations - ALL

I construct Thomas Carlyle's political philosophy in the contexts of twentieth-century and contemporary political philosophy by dialoging and contrasting Carlyle with the work of John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Ellul, and Sayyid Qutb, among others. I also focus my attention on Carlyle as a philosopher who is an intermediary between ancient Platonism and nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is a Platonic text that provided a foundational inspiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and American Transcendentalism writ-large. Despite Carlyle being a chief source of inspiration for American Transcendentalism, his political theory did not inspire the development of a …

Three Essays On Partial Identification For Applied Health Economics, Giuseppe Germinario

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation consists of three chapters which explore the usefulness of partial identification methods for estimating treatment effects in applied health economics research. Each one applies the methodology to different settings in which establishing causality has traditionally been difficult, and seeks to demonstrate when a bounding approach can—and cannot—aid researchers in learning about causal relationships.The first chapter studies the Housing Choice Voucher program in the United States and estimates bounds on the effect that receiving this form of housing assistance has on self-reported health status and the likelihood of hospitalization within the eligible population of renters. The second chapter aims …

Three Essays On Globalization, Structural Change, And Political Economy, Nam Seok Kim

Dissertations - ALL

Re-allocation of labor from less productive sectors to more productive sectors is essential in attaining economic growth. Because only some developing countries achieve productive labor re-allocation, it is important to address the determinant of productive labor re-allocation. Based on this motivation, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 focus on the role of unionization in structural change. In Chapter 1, I provide detailed dynamics by constructing an index for the degree of unionization for each sector in each region of South Korea and Taiwan. The magnitude of growth-enhancing structural change was lowered when a sector in a region had a higher degree …

Toward Extended Situational Crisis Communication Theory: Include Visuals, Prior Performance, And Framing Devices, Mohammad Ali

Dissertations - ALL

Human brains are inherently capable of receiving and processing visual messages faster than written text messages. The recent proliferation of internet use, social media platforms, smartphones, and online news media sites facilitated the spread of visual content (e.g., pictures, videos, and data visualizations) online much higher than before. However, visual contents have been largely ignored in crisis communication research, leaving the crisis managers to devise strategic crisis responses and deal with a crisis without sufficient research evidence. Responding to a recent research call to fill the gap, this dissertation conducts a 2 (picture: action vs. damage) × 3 (distinctiveness: high …

Essays On Strategies For Increasing Repayment Rates Of Digital Microloans, Alain Rutayisire Shema

Dissertations - ALL

Access to credit can act as a highly effective tool for poverty reduction and economic growth. The ability to borrow increases the propensity of low-income people to start and maintain businesses, educate their children and withstand financial shocks. These factors, in turn, can help them to move out of poverty and lead to more sustainable economic development. However, traditional financial institutions have inherent limitations that have impeded their ability to serve the poor.

Digital lenders are able to leverage the widespread adoption of mobile phones and mobile money to extend credit quickly and conveniently to more people, especially in developing …

The Problem Of The "Virtual": Virtual Reality, Digital Dualism, And Religious Experience, Jordan Brady Loewen

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation uses resources from religious studies to critique the problem of digital dualism haunting notions of the "virtual" in the discourse of contemporary virtual reality technologies (VR). Digital dualism is the idea that digital or "virtual" worlds are fundamentally distinct from the "real" or physical world. Digital dualism is a problem because it mischaracterizes how we experience the spatial and temporal connections to our body in digital-virtual worlds and contributes to a false sense of subjective singularity rather than multiplicity that destabilizes how we relate to ourselves and others. Using the study of religion, philosophy, and aesthetics, we can …

Coparenting Quality In Separated American Parents Of Children Ages 1½ To 5: Anxiety, Social Support, Self-Efficacy, And The Associations With Coparenting And Child Outcomes, Greg Kovacs

Dissertations - ALL

The purpose of this research was to examine the mechanisms determining coparenting processes in parents following divorce or separation and the implications for the emotional and behavioral outcomes for their young children. The complex associations between parental anxiety, parental self-efficacy, social support, coparent relationship quality, and child problem behaviors were examined. Participants were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk and completed a survey regarding their coparenting dynamics. The sample consisted of 322 residents of the United States who had a child between 18 months and 5 years of age and who were no longer living with the child's other parent. Results …

If We End, I Lose Part Of Me: The Influence Of Dissolution Consideration On Perceived Self-Contraction, Abigail J. Caselli

Dissertations - ALL

Romantic relationships provide people with the opportunity to change who they are and how they come to think of themselves. This process, known as self-concept change, is generally positive and creates a perceived sense of closeness between romantic partners. However, not all romantic relationships remain intact, regardless of the benefits associated with self-concept change. Thus, people experience breakups, which impact how they perceive themselves. But before leaving their relationship, people have thoughts about leaving (i.e., dissolution consideration). People will likely perceive changes to their sense of self before leaving the relationship. Specifically, I predicted and found in Studies 1-2 that …

Three Essays On The Economics Of Education, Rachel Jarrold-Grapes

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is comprised of three essays on the economics of education. The first and third chapters examine marijuana legalization and its effects on students, while the second chapter examines the impact of pension incentives on teacher quality.The first chapter examines the extent to which there are negative spillovers of recreational marijuana legalization on underage marijuana use and educational outcomes. I use two complementary identification strategies that rely on plausibly exogenous spatial and temporal variation in access to marijuana in Oregon. In November of 2014, Oregon passed Measure 91, a referendum to legalize recreational marijuana. Unlike other legal states, Oregon …

'Play The Book Again': Towards A Systems Approach To Game Adaptation, Johnathan Sanders

Dissertations - ALL

Situated at the interstices of game studies, adaptation scholarship, and literary theory, this dissertation puts forth a theoretical framework for effectively analyzing literary game adaptations (that is, playable digital or analog systems that are based upon a work or works of literature) as expressive intertextual systems which facilitate aesthetic experiences. By integrating contemporary game studies with filmic adaptation studies and literary theory, I argue that game adaptations allow us to see how games, adaptations, and indeed all texts can be productively conceived of as Barthesian networks of meaning: collections of interacting formal, narrative, intertextual, and contextual elements from which a …

Mental Health Service Use Disparities Among Latinx Communities: An Intersectional Examination Of The Role Of Skin Color, Acculturative Stress, Racial Discrimination, And Mental Health Literacy, Kirsis Allennys Dipre Montes De Oca

Dissertations - ALL

This study utilized logistic and hierarchical regression to examine the impact of skin color, acculturative stress, mental health literacy, and experiences of racial discrimination on the lifetime use of mental health services through an intersectional lens. More specifically, the current study examined the Latinx ethnic identity, US-born status, across the skin color spectrum to better understand mental health service use disparities. Participants' (n = 173) mental health service use was measured at two levels, first, the overall number of hours of sessions attended and second overall hours of sessions of specific types of mental health services attended. Results indicated skin …

Receiving A Queen: A Queer And Trans Feminist Classical Reception Rhetorical Historiography Of Elagabalus, Thomas William Passwater

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation studies representations of Elagabalus, the sovereign of Rome who ruled between 218–222ce, after her assassination to examine how depictions and historical accounts of Elagabalus's life make rhetorical decisions about Elagabalus's identity and being that can foreground the composer's relationship to history and the function of history as a rhetorical force. Thus, this project, through studying Elagabalus's composers, raises questions about the nature of figure studies and history. The project draws on trans, queer, and feminist theories and rhetorics which help highlight the contingent and conflicting nature of Elagabalus's identities across representations without settling them into a singular narrative …

Fragmented Landscapes: An Archaeology Of Transformations In The Pra River Basin, Southern Ghana, Sean Hamilton Reid

Dissertations - ALL

This doctoral archaeological research examines the Pra River Basin in southern Ghana through lenses of landscape, temporality, and transformation. Drawing on the Annales school and the writings of Tim Ingold, this study moves away from binary constructions of natural and cultural landscape features toward a more integrated view of the landscape's long human history. The primary temporal focus of this research is the past three millennia but evidence recovered of even more ancient eras is also examined. The artifacts and features documented while surveying this landscape allow us to glimpse pre-Atlantic (pre-1450 CE) settlement patterns, subsistence, and technology, as well …