Digital Commons Network^™

Cultural Humility In The Workplace: A Causal-Comparative Study Of Foreign And Local Hire Employees In International Education, Natalie A. Ortiz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cultural humility is recognized as a framework for fostering respectful relationships in culturally diverse workplaces. However, limited research has examined cultural humility within international education in regard to workplace dynamics and power imbalances that may exist between foreign and local hire educators. The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to examine differences in perceived cultural humility levels between foreign and local hire employees in PreK-12^th grade private international schools in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The study also examined whether years of international educational experience and the number of international educational assignments influenced perceived cultural humility levels. Data …

Grief As A Constitutive Shadow Of Queer Joy: Reclaiming Negativity And The Ethics Of Staying For Education Research, Akira Sawata

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

In education scholarship, authors have increasingly called to center queer joy to disrupt the conventional deficit model that normally accompanies queer communities. However, in this paper, I argue that an exclusive emphasis on joy may risk instituting and normalizing a happiness duty that marginalizes negative affects and subjects. I propose queer grief not as an opposite, but as a constitutive shadow of joy. Drawing on theories of queer, trans, and crip negativity and the studies on loss, grief, and mourning, I critique the imperative to mobilize affect solely for future utility and teleological meaning. I contend that such mobilization-driven …

La Santa Muerte And The Characteristic Damage Of Canonization, Ellen Webber

Journal of Global Catholicism

Devotion to La Santa Muerte, a Mexican folk saint who personifies Death, has

been condemned by the Catholic Church for its affiliation with Mexican drug

cartels. This article challenges mainstream interpretations of La Santa Muerte

devotion using the theological framework of characteristic damage, as defined

by Lauren Winner and Paul J. Griffiths. This framework understands liturgy

as celebrated by sinners in a damaged world, and therefore necessarily damaged

itself. As much as liturgy and Christian practice form us for good, they also per-

petuate damage. I argue that the sins present in La Santa Muerte veneration are

an expression of …

Fashion, Lifestyle, And Symbolic Capital: Identity And Resistance In Eka Kurniawan’S Beauty Is A Wound, Dewi Meyrasyawati, Cysakaren Diva Pratiwi, Nisar Ul-Haq

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This study examines how fashion culture and lifestyle, understood as modes of self presentation, social performance, and everyday practice, operate as tools of identity construction and resistance in Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound. The objective is to reveal how beauty, personal choices, and public perception function as symbolic capital in negotiating gendered power relations, class hierarchies, and political constraints. Using close textual analysis, the research explores how female characters, particularly Dewi Ayu, mobilize appearance, behavior, and life decisions to challenge dominant ideologies and redefine their roles in society. The findings show that fashion culture in the novel extends beyond …

Determinants Of Antenatal Care Utilization: A Community-Based, Cross-Sectional Study In Morang And Sunsari Districts, Eastern Nepal, Sunil Shah, Chandra Jha

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

This study examined the factors influencing antenatal care (ANC) utilization in the eastern region of Nepal, focusing on the Morang and Sunsari districts, with the aim of identifying key determinants affecting ANC uptake and assessing the extent of ANC service utilization among mothers. Using lot quality assurance sampling, a community-based, descriptive, cross-sectional design was employed, surveying 164 mothers who had given birth within the previous 12 months; data were collected from June through November 2023. Data were collected through a semi-structured questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS, with descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and logistic regression. Findings revealed that 80.5% of respondents …

Mountain Development In Nepal: Settlements, Infrastructure, And Economic Transformation, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

As Nepal urbanizes, expands infrastructure, strengthens local governments, and explores deeper connectivity with India and China, climate change is increasing floods, landslides, heat, and water insecurity. Rapid internal migration, rising disaster risks, youth outmigration, and dependence on remittances are also revealing the limits of conventional urban development, especially in the mountainous region. The central challenge for Nepal is no longer just to accommodate growing towns and cities, but to build settlements that are safe, productive, environmentally resilient, and capable of sustaining long-term prosperity.

This paper argues that Nepal's urban future must be guided by a new development paradigm centered on …

The Legend Of The Bear Lake Monster, Melissa Anderson Asay

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

The Bear Lake Monster is a legend that has persisted for centuries. This monster is rooted in Shoshone oral traditions and hold the potential to be based off of fossils found in the Shoshone territory. This living legend was later amplified by Mormon settlers. One settler in particular, Joseph C. Rich, played a significant role in shaping its narrative. Though he eventually admitted to fabricating sightings to encourage settlement, belief in the creature remains alive today. The serpent’s presence in local lore has undeniably influenced the Bear Lake region, shaping both its identity and tourism industry. This legend serves as …

Hunger, Famine, And Eating Habits, Robert Dirks

Faculty Publications – Sociology and Anthropology

This paper explores how hunger and famine affect various eating habits, including commensal relations within households, shared attitudes toward eating with unfamiliar people, and typical ways of expressing appetite. Drawing on data collected from 124 societies worldwide, it provides a comparative perspective on the influence of food insecurity and nutritional stress on common, everyday eating habits. Analysis shows that chronic nutritional deficiencies and historical experiences with famine are associated with less inclusive, less amiable mealtime behaviors. Discussion offers explanations for the occasional persistence of such patterns despite ample food supply and considers the impact of nutrition alongside other factors likely …

Contested Borders And National Identity In Southeast Asia: An Analysis Of Thailand– Cambodia Dispute Through Nontawat Numbenchapol’S Documentary Film, Boundary, Mirwan Andan

International Review of Humanities Studies

Southeast Asia remains a region marked by numerous interstate border disputes. Among these, the Thailand–Cambodia border dispute surrounding the Preah Vihear Temple, located between Sisaket Province in Thailand and Preah Vihear Province in Cambodia, represents one of the conflicts with the greatest potential to affect regional stability and harmony in the region. This dispute extends beyond questions of territorial sovereignty, encompassing the construction of national identity, historical memory, and the domestic political dynamics of both countries. This article examines the representation of nationalism in Boundary (2013), a documentary film directed by Thai independent filmmaker Nontawat Numbenchapol. Drawing on perspectives interdisciplinary …

Performing Disobedience: Critical Spatial Heritage, Counter-Memory, And The Rewriting Of Medellín’S Public Space, Laura Balán

Interiority

This article examines the radical street performance practice of Bernardo Ángel Saldarriaga in Medellín, Colombia, as a site of political and epistemological transformation. Through ethnographic engagement with Saldarriaga—an ascetic artist who stages trance-based interventions in public space—the study analyses how his performances disrupt dominant narratives of history, identity, and citizenship. Drawing on political ontology, decolonial thought, and critical heritage studies, the article argues that Saldarriaga's work functions as a hybrid forum for negotiating plural knowledges and social imaginaries. His refusal of institutional funding, his embodied critique of state power, and his use of trance and possession rituals generate both affective …

Childbirth Experiences Of The Bangladeshi Immigrant Women In South Florida, Tahsina Ferdous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

This qualitative research was conducted among Bangladeshi immigrant women living in South Florida who have given birth here. Twenty Bangladeshi immigrant women were selected using the snowball sampling method from various cities in South Florida. The unit of analysis was the individual Bangladeshi immigrant woman, focusing on her experiences and behavior during pregnancy and childbirth. Semi-structured interviewing and case study methods were used for data collection. The results reveal the coping strategies and the navigation process of socio-cultural transition from non-mother to mother, and the Bangladeshi traditional views regarding beliefs, rituals, and practices of Bangladeshi immigrant women regarding their pregnancy …

Contributors

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

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Surviving And Thriving: The Indigenous Migrant, Danna Guzman-Rodriguez

Honors Theses

This literature and cultural study highlights the generation of children of indigenous immigrants and the relationship with their indigenous identity and culture. This unique experience is complex and encapsulates issues such as indigenous cultural survival, homogeneity, globalization, and lack of cultural identity. Exploring the Totonac community in La Chaca, Veracruz in Mexico, allows for a deeper explanation of this experience. Speakers of Totonac and other indigenous languages often migrate to countries such as the United States and carry such cultural ties with them. What happens to these ties after moving to a Western-dominated country where globalization favors English and Western …

Social Innovation In The Peacebuilding Sector, Michelle Helman, Phd, Katherine Ronderos, Mariafernanda Burgos-Ariza

Peace and Conflict Studies

Social innovation is an expanding practice in the peacebuilding sector. In this article, three peace scholar-practitioners reflect on our experiences as peacebuilders and consider the utility, tensions, and possibilities for peace and social innovation in theory and in practice. We draw insights gleaned through a focus group workshop with peacebuilding colleagues and highlight three case study examples from Colombia, the Philippines, and Kenya, each demonstrating the challenges and opportunities of social innovation in the peace sector. In doing so, we offer a reimagining of- and recommended action steps to engage innovation through a collaborative, feminist design approach. This article contributes …

Kicau Kericau: The Chirps And Warbles Of A Bird-Human Story, Airien Ludin

Masters Theses

This thesis tells the tale of bird-human relationships and what it means to live alongside one another, subverting the hierarchical view of humans as above birds inherited from colonial history. It asks how the practice of illustration can function as a site of Two-Eyed Seeing, where scientific and local knowledge are held together as an entangled narrative. It also examines how mendongeng (storytelling), as I have experienced it within Indonesian culture and everyday contexts, can help us understand birds as a companion species with their own agency.

This project takes two forms: first, a picture book titled Sun Bird …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

I Believe, Rusudan Dushuashvili

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how products become believable and desirable through the stories that surround them, and how design enables the continuous cycle of desire that defines consumption. Drawing on  the underlying structures of myth-making, identity, and belonging that allow consumer culture to function, it argues that consumer culture operates through the same instruments older systems of belief have always used — narrative, ritual, sacred objects, and shared language — and that design is what makes the story stick to the object.

“I Believe” is an archive of objects collected from contemporary consumer culture. Half are products found in the marketplace; …

Living Archaeology: A Comparative Perspective On How Archaeologists Can Study And Document The Present, Alia S. Moran

Honors Capstones

Archaeology has long remained a social science that has tended to exclude sustained consideration of contemporary societies in the analysis of material culture. In recent decades, approaches such as ethnoarchaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary have expanded the field to include the study of present-day societies through material culture. Inspired by my involvement in the Thais in Illinois Project, which focused on documenting the Thai American immigrant experience in the greater Chicago area to produce an oral history collection, alongside other goals, this thesis intends to further explore how archaeological practice can be used to understand everyday issues in …

Objects In The Sunset, Iskander Guetta

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

This research explores everyday design practices in the Maghreb shaped by economic, political, and ecological struggles amid transnational debates on decolonizing design. To do so, it looks at objects in, through and with the sunset. Taking المغرب — the place where the sun sets — as a conceptual lens, Objects in the Sunset illuminates the savoir-faire born from dispossession, scarcity, and epistemic violence. Working across different scales of the built environment — infrastructures, spaces, objects, and materials — it shifts design away from Eurocentric conceptions: from rationalization to resourcefulness, homogeneity to heterogeneity, optimization to adaptation, disposability to repair, and universal …

Who Can Dance If They Want To?: Intersections Of Dance, Gender, And Political Control In Late Archaic And Early Classical Athens, Adeline P. Strickler

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

This thesis investigates the evidence for women's public choruses in the polis of Athens and the wider Greek world prior to the 6th century BCE and their decline in Athens following the Kleisthenic reforms of 509/508 BCE. Emphasising analysis of visual sources through Athenian fabric vases in the Beazley archive, and supporting literary evidence, this research seeks to establish a base of evidence for a neglected area of dance and women's research in the classics. Additionally, by analyzing the significance of choral dance in polis social and political life, this research seeks potential reasons for the lack of a culture …

Féminicide: Institutional Silence On The Screams Of Murdered Women In France, M. Afif Alfadin Syarif, Airin Miranda

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Rising awareness of women's homicide in France has challenged the government to provide an adequate legal response, as feminist groups began advocating and expressing the discourse on women's homicide since 2014 through the term féminicide. The nature of this crime remains contentious in legal discourse, particularly given the significant rise in féminicide cases in 2019. This study, therefore, aims to examine the phenomenon of féminicide in France, exploring both the discourse surrounding it and the legal responses from the government. Drawing on 46 cases recorded in 2023 by the feminist collective #NousToutes, and with particular attention to relevant legal …

Appreciative Commoning; Musical Knowledge-Sharing In Earhouse Songwriting Club, Arya J. P. Adyuta

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

This article develops the concept of “appreciative commoning” to focus on the importance of appreciation in musical community practices. By examining the practices of musical knowledge-sharing in the Earhouse Songwriting Club (ESC), a songwriting community, this article argues that greater attention should be paid to the roles of appreciation and support in facilitating media and cultural commoning in Indonesia. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Earhouse, an initiative space located in Pamulang, South Tangerang, established by the musician duo Endah N Rhesa. Exploring three main activities of the community: weekly meetings, monthly showcases, and afterparties, I show how embracing …

The Dialectics Of Preservation And Renewal In Traditional Dance: Bedhaya Saptongkara As A Development Of The Bedhaya Genre, Syahrial Syahrial, S. Sriyadi, Angga Febri Wibowo

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Bedhaya is a traditional Javanese court dance that embodies ethical, aesthetic, and sacred values. Following Indonesia’s independence, restrictions on its performance gradually eased, allowing the dance to be presented beyond the court and fostering its development within arts education. This shift generated a dialectic between cultural preservation and creative innovation, exemplified by Bedhaya Saptongkara, which integrates Balinese dance elements into the Javanese framework to produce an innovative form. Using a choreological approach and comparative method, this study reveals that although Bedhaya Saptongkara retains core principles of bedhaya, it does not fully adhere to the classical structure. Instead, it …

Pengantar Dari Editor Vol. 16 No. 1 (April) 2026, Rahayu Surtiati

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This edition of Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya Vol. 16 No. 1 (2026) presents a range of studies that affirm culture as a dynamic domain continuously shaped by processes of negotiation, transformation, and reinterpretation across diverse social, historical, and political contexts. The articles explore the creation and innovation of artistic practices as representations of collective identity, the dialectics between preservation and renewal of tradition, and the strategic role of culture in national development. In addition, issues of historiography and colonial legacy are examined through postcolonial perspectives that offer new readings of Indonesian art, while discussions on values and social structures address …

Beyond Green: Re-Reading "Wicked" As Anthropological Text, Tan Gia Bao Huynh

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper examines "Wicked" through the lens of cultural borderlands, revealing how the musical dramatizes the creation and navigation of social boundaries. By analyzing Elphaba's journey, the research demonstrates how her green skin serves as a powerful metaphor for cultural otherness, while her experiences at Shiz University and beyond illustrate strategies of resistance, accommodation, and identity formation familiar to those navigating between dominant and marginalized spaces. Particularly significant is the paper's examination of Oz's propaganda system, which demonstrates how cultures manufacture monsters and heroes through selective storytelling and public ritual. This analysis offers fresh insights into "Wicked's" enduring appeal, suggesting …

Editor-In-Chief's Note, Surekha Rao

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Res Historica, Volume 5, Alpha Rho Epsilon Phi Alpha Theta, Lindsay Rae Smith Privette Phd

Res Historica

The 2026 journal of historical research by Anderson University students, Res Historica.

The editorial team for this edition of Res Historica was Dr. Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, Julia Ackerman, Callyn Wright, Logan Davis, and John Hinton. Cover art by Mary Beth Lee.

Computational Analysis Of Immigration Discourse And Political Polarization: Evidence From U.S. Political Podcasts During The 2024 Presidential Election, Reishiro Kawakami , ‘26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This study examines how immigration is discussed across the U.S. political podcast ecosystem during the 2024 presidential election cycle, with a focus on differences across the political spectrum. While prior research on immigration attitudes has relied heavily on survey data, this study shifts attention to naturally occurring political communication by analyzing large-scale podcast transcripts. Drawing on a novel dataset of over 48,500 episodes (approximately 40,000 hours of audio) from the top 100 political podcasts ranked on Election Day, this paper combines keyword search, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis to investigate both the thematic structure and emotional tone of immigration discourse. …

Critical Roles And Critical Rolls: A Frame-Analytical Perspective Of Self-Making, Safe Spaces, And Worldbuilding In Tabletop Role-Playing Games, Cal Quayle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many gamers prefer to play tabletop roleplaying games, or TTRPGs, in order to a) join a community, and b) tell a story collaboratively with friends and acquaintances. This thesis discusses selfhood-making, safe spaces, and allegory in imaginary worlds from the perspective of Erving Goff man’s frame analysis. It relies on a theoretical framework of imagined communities, the magic circle, and subcreation. This research culminated in the understanding that people play TTRPGs for a variety of reasons - collaborative storytelling and exercising critical thinking skills, but respondents overwhelmingly reported that they enjoyed the ability to socialize with friends and strangers, and …