Digital Commons Network^™

Inviting Hospitality : An Incarnational Model Of Pastoral Care For Chaplains, Martha M. Cramer

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Church Revitalization Through The Practice Of Spiritual Disciplines, Emmanuel Afful

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of The Black Womb: How Education And Power Reinforce The U.S. Black Maternal Health Crisis, Foluke Akinkunmi

Honors Scholar Theses

This study investigates the alarming maternal mortality rates among Black women in the U.S. today first by exploring the historical exploitation of Black maternal bodies during enslavement and with the rise of professionalized gynecology. It challenges the narrative that attributes these outcomes to individual choices or supposedly inherent biological factors, arguing instead that the devaluing of Black women’s well-being and authoritative knowledge have been constructed along with the United States itself. To advance a constructive response, the paper analyzes curriculum competencies for obstetric and midwifery healthcare providers, surveys of Black women's birthing experiences in the previous 20 years, and interviews …

Nudging Creativity In Typography With Font Pairing Prompts, Thomas Jockin

Masters Theses

Graphic designers face an overwhelming abundance of font choices in the digital marketplace, leading to difficulties in creating innovative typographic pairings and a tendency to rely on familiar options. Current industry practices and typography education lack effective methodologies to foster creative and diverse font use. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap by introducing Font Flow, a web application designed to enhance typography creativity through randomized font pairing prompts.

The proposed system leverages structured constraints to challenge designers, prompting them to work with unexpected font combinations that may initially appear incompatible. By engaging in this problem-solving process, designers develop a deeper …

Unveiling Perspectives: Young Adults Banned Books Critical Content Analysis, Tiffany Ladonna Jarebica

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation conducts a critical content analysis of seven banned young adult novels—All Boys Aren’t Blue, All the Things We Do in the Dark, Almost Perfect, Ask the Passengers, The Bluest Eyes, The Hate U Give, and The Kite Runner—within one Texas school district. Using intersectionality theory as a lens, the study explores how intersecting identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and trauma are portrayed in these narratives and examines the role these portrayals play in the censorship process. The analysis investigates the socio-cultural, political, and institutional factors that influenced the removal of these texts, considering how their …

Forced Sterilizations And Reproductive Control: A Legacy Of Eugenics And White Supremacy In The United States, Bshara Alsheikh

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Women of color have suffered racial reproductive abuse by the hands of government-funded white supremacist institutions. From federal government agencies to the highest court of the land, they have all played a crucial role in the reproductive oppression of women of color and have failed to protect their bodily autonomy. This thesis examines legal cases like Buck v. Bell, Madrigal v. Quilligan, and Relf v. Weinberger to showcase how the bodies and reproductive capacities of women of color have been targeted and controlled under the guise of public health, to advance supposed economic stability, and through a racially charged eugenics …

Beyond Stereotypes: Exploring The Intersection Of Feminist Identity And Societal Expectations In Ama Ata Aidoo’S Changes: A Love Story (1991), Grace Adutwum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo explores the intersection of feminist identity and societal expectations of African women, specifically Ghanaian women. This work examines how Esi and other characters struggle for love, autonomy, and independence, and reveals how tradition often limits African women’s choices and agency. This research also highlights how Aidoo presents a distinct, context-specific approach to gender roles and pressure from society, rather than viewing feminism as a strict opposition to patriarchy. By using African feminism as a theoretical framework, this work analyzes how marriage, career, and independence shape Esi’s identity. The depiction of polygamy, independence, …

Literature As A Tool For The Introduction Of Mental Health To Children, Kira Ott

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In childhood, literature is a quintessential learning tool, so it is imperative it is used in the introduction of mental health. Around the ages of seven to nine children begin to become aware of their own needs and comprehend others' perspectives (Short et al., 2017, p. 13). At this time non-fiction books can be used to present information when it is organized, accessible, and informative (Short et al., 2017, p. 13). This can be effectively paired with fiction which can help contextualize abstract ideas, and develop self-monitoring skills (Gunawardena, 2023; Short et al., 2017). Mental health, which encompasses thoughts, feelings, …

Anthropology Of An American War Veteran, Madelyn Teresa Robinson

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Trophic Cascade, Nicole Callahan

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Gandy Dancer 13.2 (Spring 2025), Gandy Dancer

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Student Performance And Course Modality: The Relationship Between Outcomes, Modality, And Course Subject, Olivia Baxley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this quantitative study was to identify if a significant relationship existed between teaching modality and student performance outcomes while also considering the factor of course subject being taught during the 2021-2023 academic years. Three courses were included in the research: Math 1630 Finite Mathematics, English 1010 Composition I, and Biology 1110 General Biology. Each of the three courses are introductory level courses in the math, English, and science subject. The study also included statistical analysis on gender as related to student performance outcomes.

The findings presented of this research showed a significant relationship between teaching modality and …

#Helpplz: Mental Health Representation In Theatre For Young Audiences, Kate Elizabeth Dirrigl

Theses and Dissertations

#HELPPLZ is a play for young theater audiences that depicts four teenagers with various mental health challenges. It’s target audience is for children ages ten to fifteen and should be performed by actors of similar ages. #HELPPLZ is an immersive theatre experience, as a audience members watch four actors perform from four different lifestyles and point of views, all while broadcast on screens behind the actors. Every seat is a good seat in the house. This play follows a shift in trends of mental health depiction in contemporary theatre. No longer demonized and much more accessible, plays such as Dear …

The Value Of Holidays In World War I America, Laura Kathleen Neis

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

World War I affected what people valued, which in turn impacted American celebrations of the Fourth of July and Christmas. These two holidays became patriotic ways to demonstrate unswerving loyalty to the U.S. government, with charitable pursuits, parties, and even meals altered due to the need for victory. These holidays impacted the war in turn by bolstering morale on the homefront and overseas, and strengthening Americans’ emotional connection to the war.

Surprisingly, the Fourth of July became an international holiday which emphasized the United States’ historical ties to France, and the shared values between the United States and Great Britain. …

In Memoir And Memory: Us Servicewomen Narrating 21st Century Combat, Kelly A. Taylor

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

Over twenty years after the initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, much work remains to uncover the stories of US servicewomen. As the collection of oral histories continues and in the absence of letters, postcards, and other mail for analysis, their memoirs provide some of the first glimpses of the ways 21^st century warfare impacted their experiences in the US military. With shifting “front lines,” the prevalence of improvised explosive devices, and the need for new search tactics, women participated in high rates of combat. Nevertheless, the combat exclusion policy remained in place until 2015. …

Queer Hope And Asexual Desire In Nella Larsen's Passing And Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Jeremy Buckner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

This project examines Nella Larsen’s Passing and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse together as queer artifacts in hopes of shedding new light on how race and sexuality can be reexamined across national modes of thinking. Although these writers’ backgrounds provide them with different bodies of knowledge, Larsen’s Irene and Woolf’s Lily have much more in common than might first appear. For one, even if racialization is more explicit—and presents more of an obstacle—for Irene, race is an important factor for both characters. Additionally, Irene and Lily both express profound discontent with marriage, Irene in her marriage to Brian and Lily …

Working To Achieve Flow, Vincente D.A. Fischer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

This paper is a thesis for the body of work I created over the last 3 years called Working To Achieve Flow. In the following pages, I will discuss what inspired me to create this body of work, which entailed personal reflection on my own mental health and how it affects my art practice. I will also go over who my influences are: Eva Hesse, Willem De Kooning, and Jenny Saville. Each of these artists inspires me to think about my work in different ways, which has helped me develop into the artist I am today. Finally, I will break …

“África Es Nuestro Corazón, Nuestra Sangre”: Cuban Revolutionary Internationalism In Africa During The Inter-Conference Period, 1966-1979, Nathan C. Sommer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cuban foreign policy demonstrated continuity in Africa between the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 and the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1979. I look at Cuban involvement in African liberation movements of the mid-1960s to characterize the initial launch of Cuba’s yet-to-be fully developed Africa policy. Next, through the lens of the Ogaden War, I examine at the evolution of Cuban foreign policy in the late 1970s. By the time representatives from 82 countries came to Havana in January 1966, Cuba was heralded by the majority of non-aligned countries for their bravery and selflessness. By the late 1970s, significant …

Graphic Design 101: Creating Conceptual Literature To Aid In Art Education Access And How I Learned From My Experience Creating It, Kylie J. Roark Miss

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this thesis, I will attempt to address several issues that individuals, such as students within the upper middle school to freshman high school range, have in accessing art education. These issues include but are not limited to public schools not receiving enough funding for artistic learning material, the loss of artistic learning programs, and the increased demand on students to focus more on curriculum-based learning. Considering this, I wanted to tackle this problem by creating a prototype of an 8th-12th grade level booklet that contains information and interactive lessons about Graphic Design that are also fun and engaging to …

Redeemed: A Dance Composition And Analysis On Transformation, Kasia D. Oliver

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I have created a film entitled Redeemed, which utilizes the medium of dance to explore emotional devastation and restoration present throughout life. My experience as a kinesiology major with an exercise science concentration, dance minor, and fine and performing arts student at East Tennessee State University from 2021-2025 has ignited my desire to connect kinesthetic awareness, somatic movement, dance choreography, and improvisation in a way that is cathartic for both me as the choreographer/performer and the audience. My goal is to touch viewers on a soul level by embodying how it feels to truly and fully exist. This film consists …

Black Events As Narrated By Black People: Contextualizing America’S Framing Of Progression In News, Social, And Academic Writing, Tyrina Horton

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This paper is a critical examination of collective and public memories of public events that impact Black lives as constructed in news, social, and academic writing. Using Black mundane life to explore and build localized context and attitudes towards these events, I examine whether the collective memory of an event, as framed by public discourse, accurately portrays how Black communities experienced them. This paper explores what it means for Black people, to experience a disconnect with written accounts of public events that do not properly account for the many layers of Black experience, highlighting where there’s a failure to tell …

The Masc Of Masculinity: Multimodal Analysis Of Contemporary Punk Music, James L. Stanfield Iii

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis establishes a multi-genre framework of various theories from different academic fields that is then used to view the multimodal elements of punk and hardcore music performances. The analyses are tailored towards the dissection of traditional masculinity with the goal of constructing masculine avatars that are prosocial and moral. Reworking traditional masculinity is a portion of the larger fight for social reform that is taken up within the field of the humanities. Existing critical approaches to masculinity often establish the need for a rewriting of normative masculinity in society but often do not provide methods for such a rewriting. …

Community Media Coalitions: Best Practices To Support Healthy Local News Ecosystems, Stepfanie E. Alfonso

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Local U.S. journalism is in crisis. Communities across the country are suffering from a loss of local outlets, journalists, and a shortage of original coverage that addresses critical information needs. Yet, community media coalitions (CMCs) offer a promising solution. These coalitions bring together media outlets, educational institutions, and civic organizations to collaboratively support local news ecosystems. However, little is known about these coalitions or how to effectively build and operate them from the perspective of their creators.

To address this information gap, a guidebook was created titled A Best Practices Guide for Community Media Coalition Building: How to Wrangle All …

Reading Music: An Interdisciplinary Method To Analyzing Songs, Matthew King

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In growing times of hardship for education in the music space, I believe there needs to be a more user-friendly approach to evoking meaning from sonics. Researchers have shared the difficulties in teaching music-analysis skills in recent years, and I argue that, through more accessible means, a meaning-making process in music can be learned, and utilized in analyzing songs. This thesis explores the ways in which music and literature can be intertwined and made meaning through an interdisciplinary analysis of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s song “Flamethrower.” In this thesis, I am arguing that musical works can and should …

The Hodgepodge Creation: Amalgamated Adaptation In Video Games, Tom Chen, Tom Chen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Amalgamated adaptation is a concept that involves blending multiple sources into a hodgepodge creation. This practice has become commonplace among game creators in recent years, yet it is neither readily covered nor explicitly mentioned in current video game scholarship. My previous research highlights the profound application of amalgamated adaptation to older texts, particularly myths and sacred texts from various cultures or communities. This method grants creators the autonomy to reinvent these texts in bold and extreme ways, achieved by melding borrowed ideas that complement and, at times, synergize with one another. I argue that single-source adaptations of myths, when reshaped …

Rhetorics Of Vigilance: Refracting Discourses In Technologies Of Self-Managed Health & Wellness, Haley Swartz

All Dissertations

Rhetorics of Vigilance explores the limits of feminist health rhetorics by examining technologies that promote women’s self-managed health and wellness practices. By establishing a corpus of personal health technologies and associated texts including mobile health applications, pelvic floor training devices, and perimenopause information shared on social media, this dissertation analyzes how discourses refract––redirected and often distorted––to implicate women in persistent self-monitoring. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship on women’s health from feminist rhetorical studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, science and technology studies, and digital studies, I theorize rhetorics of vigilance as a framework through which women understand and interpret issues …

Step To Freedom : A Lament And Grieving Redemption Experience, Anitta K. Tilly

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

"Death Is The Fifth [Season], And Master Of All": Necropolitical Violence And/As Environmental Violence In The Fifth Season, Mason T. Goodrich

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

While many scholars have already described N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning speculative novel The Fifth Season as one that highlights intersections between race, settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and, most frequently, climate change, I apply a necropolitical lens to The Fifth Season in order evaluate a relationship that exists between systemic violence and environmental degradation. The Fifth Season depicts a socially inscribed relationship between an othered race of humans, called orogenes, and the land, anthropomorphized as “Father” Earth. Orogenes have a paradoxical social status: they are simultaneously feared and revered for their ability to control the Earth. This paradox is the impetus for many …

She: The Shadow Self, Mya Bethers

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This multimodal poetry thesis explores the Female Shadow, an adaptation of Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow that focuses on women’s experiences, through the themes of silence, abuse, and generational trauma. Incorporating multimodal forms such as video poetry and visual poetry alongside traditional print poetry, the collection mirrors the fragmented nature of trauma and the instability of memory. This collection draws from feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, as well as poets engaging with Jungian concepts such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Bly, and Châtillon Coque. This work examines repression, voice, and the unconscious. Formally, it …

Projects In Lighting Design And Technical Direction, Hannah Rose Whorton

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

A report of realized lighting design, projection design, and technical direction theatre projects.