Digital Commons Network^™

Ai As An Amplifier: A Structural Account Of Theory-Driven Research Collaboration, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper specifies the cognitive conditions under which AI functions as a research instrument in theory-driven writing. AI use capability is not a technical skill. It is a structural condition. The decisive condition is whether the user possesses an internally stabilized, coherence-preserving theory prior to engagement with AI-generated output. In Core-foregrounded (CF) cognition, the Modulation layer does not intervene between Core processing and articulation. Theory is not assembled from external elements but expanded from a pre-integrated constraint configuration. This internal structure makes it possible to evaluate AI-generated conceptual branches against fixed constraints and to terminate branches that violate structural coherence. …

Termination Of Conceptual Search: A Structural Account Of Meaning Stabilization And Conversion, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

Conceptual definitions form a recursive structure: words are defined by other words, which themselves require further definition. Traversing such definitions produces an open-ended branching process. Because the lexical system contains no intrinsic endpoint, conceptual understanding requires a termination operation that stabilizes meaning. This paper proposes that conceptual processing functions as an open-ended search over a definition graph and that stabilization occurs when this search is terminated. The termination mechanism depends on which cognitive layer is foregrounded. When Empathic modulation is foregrounded, termination occurs through contextual translation: concepts are stabilized once they can be mapped onto socially recognizable meanings. When Core …

Why General Ai Inherited The Body: A Structural Account Of Embodied Modulation Under Monolithic Imitation, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

General AI has pursued the replication of human-level intelligence without first decomposing human cognition into structurally distinct components. Human cognition, however, is shaped by embodied constraints such as mortality, survival pressures, finite lifespan, and physiological states. This paper argues that when cognition is treated as a single undifferentiated whole, embodied modulation is not accidentally introduced into AI systems but structurally entailed. Any attempt to imitate “human intelligence” under a monolithic model necessarily incorporates variability shaped by mortal embodiment. The tensions observed in contemporary AI systems are better understood as consequences of copying an undecomposed target rather than isolated implementation errors. …

Multimodal Construction Of Ideational Meaning On Opening Pages Of English Textbooks In China, Yudie Wei, Uti Aryanti

Jurnal Pendidikan: Teori, Penelitian, dan Pengembangan

This study aims to examine how ideational meaning is multimodally constructed on 31 opening pages through the interaction of theme images and Look and Share questions in four newly published junior high school English textbooks by People’s Education Press. Adopting the multimodal discourse analytic approach, the study analyzed representational processes in 32 images using Visual Grammar and ideational processes in 97 verbal interrogatives through transitivity patterns. The findings show that opening page images are predominantly narrative, frequently foregrounding action and reactional processes. The verbal questions, in contrast, show a strong tendency toward mental processes, while material and relational processes also …

The Emotional Construction Of Religious Experience: Senitmentalism And Moral Motivations, Yvonne Candelario

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper addresses the growing prevalence of reported religious experiences across diverse religious and spiritual traditions, alongside the persistent absence of such reports among many adherents within the same communities. This asymmetry poses a challenge for both supernaturalist and reductively skeptical accounts of religious experience. I develop a naturalistic constructivist framework to explain why some individuals choose to interpret and report some human experiences as religious experiences or report having religious experiences at all, while others do not. Drawing on a post-modern revision of moral theory, an account of constructive sentimentalism, I argue that religious experience is shaped by socially …

Full Issue

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

No abstract provided.

Primordial Recognition And The Structure Of Human Cognition: Toward A Quranic Epistemology, Jana El-Boustani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reconstructs a Qur’anic epistemological architecture grounded in narrative rather than abstract system-building. It argues that the Qur’an articulates a unified account of human cognition in which intelligibility is grounded in divine instruction, recognition is affirmed through primordial testimony, and knowledge is exercised within finite yet accountable faculties.

Through close analysis of the story of Adam in Surat al-Baqarah, the primordial covenant in Surat al-Aʿrāf, and the verse of the Amanah in Surat al-Aḥzāb, the study demonstrates that the Qur’an presents human knowing as structured, oriented, and morally conditioned. Revelation functions not as the introduction of wholly new knowledge, …

Construction Of Chinese Identities And Community: A Linguistic Ethnographic Study Of A Chinese Culture-Sharing Club At A Us University, Yuxuan Mu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chinese identity has been viewed as a debated and contested notion in sociolinguistics (Wong et al., 2021). Existing sociolinguistic research, which has centered on Chinese identity-related questions, such as “Who can be or cannot be Chinese?”, has been closely involved with the current political tensions between mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as their associated linguistic tensions between simplified Chinese writing and traditional Chinese writing, and Cantonese and Mandarin. Building on these studies, this dissertation goes beyond the scope of Sinophone contexts traditionally examined in prior research (e.g., mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) to examine how US …

A Collostructional Approach To The Concealed Passive Construction In English, Rok Sim, Jungsoo Kim

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the English concealed passive construction (CPC), as in the car needs washing, using authentic corpus data. While previous research has explored certain aspects of the CPC, little attention has been given to strongly associated matrix verbs (or verb types) and interactions between matrix verbs (or verb types) and other elements of the construction. To address these issues, we apply three types of collostructional analysis, and our findings indicate that no single, straightforward pattern emerges with respect to real-life grammatical properties of the CPC. We then show that the well-known distinction between raising and control constructions, formalized …

From Divine Absence To Eternal Presence: Reframing The Jeremianic Temple-City Abandonment Motif From Its Ancient Near Eastern Roots To Its Fulfillment In Christ As The Ultimate Yahwistic Temple, Patrick Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation offers a canonical-theological and comparative study of temple destruction, divine absence, and the logic of return by tracing a five-stage “temple-city abandonment” motif across two corpora: the Sumerian City Laments (and related balag̃ material) and the biblical canon. The Sumerian laments depict the catastrophic loss of temple and city within a deterministic world where divine decisions often appear opaque, emotionally volatile, and only tenuously repairable through ritual lament and reconstruction. By contrast, the biblical narrative interprets the same crisis within a covenantal grammar: Jerusalem’s fall is grounded in articulated covenant breach, responsibility is named and confessed through prophetic …

Sacred Space, Divine Presence, And Covenant: A Theological Trajectory From Eden To The Indwelling Spirit Across The Pentateuch And The Book Of Joshua, William C. Merry

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation thesis is that sacred space, divine presence, and covenant are a theological triad that gives form to the canonical progression from Eden through the Pentateuch into Joshua and finds its eschatological orientation in the indwelling Spirit. The project as a whole, and its treatment of Genesis–Deuteronomy and Joshua in particular, maintains that the presence of God is never conceived independently of a covenantal relationship and is thereby always concretized, i.e., spatialized in and through the site or locale of the sacred space: Eden, the tabernacle, the land, and the sanctuary at Shiloh. Each of these stages in the …

Aging In The Shadows: Szekler Cemeteries And The Case For Recognizing Elderly Populations In Bioarchaeology, Katie M. Mcgrath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The study of aging in past populations lies at the intersection of bioarchaeology and paleodemography, offering insight into both biological processes and lived social experience. Despite this potential, older adults are often rendered “invisible” in skeletal assemblages due to methodological and cultural biases. This thesis addresses this gap through a rare, community-based study of aging among the Székely population of Transylvania. By integrating osteological analysis of individuals (11th–19th centuries) from the archaeological Papdomb church cemetery with demographic data derived from the modern cemetery headstones (ca.1850–present), this research examines patterns of aging, longevity, and elder visibility across a culturally and spatially …

Welsh On Wagons: Tolkien’S Introduction To The Welsh Language, Clive Shergold

Journal of Tolkien Research

This photo-essay explores the history behind Tolkien’s discovery of the Welsh language on coal wagons in Birmingham. It displays typical wagons, and explains the meaning of the Welsh names.

Flisser, Miriam, Philip Chan

Bronx Jewish History Project

Miriam Flisser was born in Europe right after World War II to Jewish partisan parents. They fled danger and arrived in New York as refugees, settling in the Bronx. She grew up in safe, lively neighborhoods like Mott Haven and Pelham Parkway, speaking Yiddish at home until she learned English from kids on the street. Her dad was a skilled kosher butcher who later bought apartment buildings; the family kept a warm, traditional Jewish home.

Miriam excelled in Bronx schools, went to Bronx Science, then NYU’s Bronx campus and Albert Einstein Medical School (graduating a year early). She became a …

Beyond The Sayable: Wittgenstein, Theory Of Mind And Affective Simulation Of Llms, Haomiaomiao Wang, Lili Zhang, Tomás E. Ward

Women+ in Early Career Research Symposium

Wittgenstein’s distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown frames a limit of propositional language. Affect and aesthetic are not primarily matters of correct description but of how expressions function within shared forms of life. Large language models (LLMs), however, increasingly produce fluent language that resembles such understanding by reproducing the patterns through which people ordinarily talk about emotion and perspective.

This paper argues that apparent Theory of Mind (ToM) in LLMs is understood as competence in the publicly shared patterns of mental-state language, rather than as grounded understanding. Using abstract artworks, we show that LLMs …

Simulating Rewriting Style: Algorithmic Reproduction Of Camus’S Literary Voice In Machine-Generated Texts, Peter Akongfeh Agwu Ph.D

Department of French Studies Graduate Student Association Conference

Virtual Presentation

Strategic Theory And Clausewitz’S Trinitarian Test, Lukas Milevski

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

Carl von Clausewitz’s trinity represents a qualitative test for strategy in both theory and practice. With the trinity, Clausewitz transforms competing influences into a mark of theoretical quality. Synthesizing several translations of Clausewitz’s On War and interpretations by experts such as Hew Strachan, Antulio J. Echevarria II, and Frank G. Hoffman, this article suggests that Clausewitz believed that good theory encompasses and accounts for all fundamental forces of war, whereas bad theory emphasizes the extremes of one force. The trinity compels mandatory considerations for students of theory, war planners, and practitioners.

Engaging Underrepresented 11- To 14-Year-Olds In Music: An Autoethnographic Case Study Of A New Inner-City Afterschool Group Piano Program, Eden A. Brown

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Research in music education has documented the underrepresentation of Black students in formal music study in the United States, shaped by economic and cultural barriers (Elpus & Abril, 2024; Alegrado & Winsler, 2020). Access to piano instruction is often limited by the high cost of lessons and instruments, inequitable school funding, and the absence of culturally responsive curricula that reflect the experiences of minority students and families. Traditional piano pedagogy rarely addresses this absence, leaving the piano both symbolically and practically distant for many potential musicians in the United States. This autoethnographic case study chronicles the development, launch, and first …

Adapting Identities: Multimodal Expressions Of African Women’S Agency In Francophone Film​, Alicia M. Hilaire

Department of French Studies Graduate Student Association Conference

No abstract provided.

The Art Of Jussi Björling, Conrad L. Osborne

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

Hello, everybody. Thanks to all of you looking in, and special thanks to Janel Lundgren, who extended the invitation to speak, to Walter Rudolph for hosting our event, to Steve Fischman for handling the sound fragments we’ll be hearing, and to my wife, Molly Regan,for all her help getting the fragments out to Steve. I’ve been following the activities of the Society at one degree of separation for many years, and have met or corresponded with several of you along the way, so I know I’m on home ground, among people as devoted as I am to keeping alive an …

Significance Of Relationships In Navigating Disability, Shivani Bhalla Dr

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

I have addressed the theme of movement and momentum by referring to the importance of relationships and seeking community in navigating through the challenges of disability experiences. In this paper, I will explore how my relationships with my family members, fellow disabled artists, educators, and scholars helped me learn from my disability experiences and gave me the courage to come out as a person with disability (PWD) and explore disability as a sight of knowledge production.

Artist Statements As Colectiva: Informed By Lived Experiences And Anzaldúan Theories, Christen Sperry García, Elizabeth Gonzalez, Alexis Marie Ramos

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

As visual artists, our ability to explain process and convey meaning in our work is very important. Our BFA and MFA studio art programs trained us to write clear, concise, and universal artist statements. We were encouraged to highlight the concepts behind our visual work and discouraged from including our personal narratives or employing Chicane or Latine bodies of knowledge. In response, we apply theories and methodologies by Gloria Anzaldúa to our artist statements. First, we offer a framework of testimonio, Borderlands theory, and autohistoria-teoría. Using the methodology of nepantlando, a creative doing of existing in-between worlds, we …

Bot-Theology: Inviting, Prosperous, And (In)Authentic Community, Daniel Jesse

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

The paper analyzes the theology, emotions, and community formation of the bots who post on YouTube and the people who respond to them. The paper finds that the bots’ theology is evangelical, charismatic, and prosperity-oriented. The paper also finds that the people who respond to the bots are sincere, supportive, and expressive, and that they create a virtual community of faith that is joyful, hopeful, and trusting. The paper suggests that virtual gatherings of Christians need more scholarly attention and that more research is needed on the emotional formation and theological implications of these online interactions.

Korean Words In The Oed: Race, Gender, And The Modern English Speaker, Elaine W. Chun

Faculty Publications

This article examines representations of the Modern English Speaker of Korean (MESK) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as lexicographers listened to and documented the language of this figure over the past century. I show that, until the early twenty-first century, the most salient type of MESK was the Koreanist, a white, masculine expert on and translator of Korean, the language of a racial other. By contrast, more recent Korean entries, influenced by the global spread of hallyu, have invoked the Korea Fan, a figure that potentially unsettles longstanding ideologies of language, race, and gender. I …

Triste Souvenir Et Sombre Avenir, « Lettre À Ma Sœur » (2006) De Habiba Djahnine, Boualem Khelifati

Regards

This article explores how Letter to My Sister (2006), a film by director and poet Habiba Djahnine dedicated to her sister Nabila, a democratic and feminist activist who was murdered by Islamist terrorists in Tizi Ouzou in 1995, revisits the fate of the direct and indirect victims of Algeria’s dark decade of the 1990s and the repressive religious and state policies towards women. It employs a narrative structure that combines several film genres – film-letter, film-journey, film-poem, and film-archive – showing situations in which memories and pain are shared, as well as the necessary perpetuation of a struggle that is …

Language Game And Material Design Creation By Future Romance Languages Instructors, Simone Gugliotta, Sophie Burkhardt, Monia Marie Bamina, Ella Comfort-Cohen, Naomi Piper-Pell, Mikayla Parrales, Suha Khan, Giulia Laurenza, Sarina Duffy, Hillary Connor, Xinhe Li, Andrea Magaña, Dayana Caluna, Kokwe Dadzie, Alex Herrera

Spanish and Portuguese: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

From Doctrine To Practice: Shūrā-Centred Islamic Ethics For Sustainable Ecological Solutions, Fatima Dhanani, Cecilee Glaus Jones

Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Paper Series

This paper examines how Islamic ethics, when translated into lived practice, generate both moral frameworks and scalable solutions to pressing ecological challenges. Focusing on shūrā, tawḥīd, khilāfa, and taʿaddudiyya, and drawing on case studies of Stewardship Canada and the Aga Khan University’s Carbon Management Tool, the authors show how Islamic values move beyond doctrinal abstraction to guide institutional decision-making, programme design, and community engagement. More than treating ethics as fixed theological propositions, they frame them as negotiated, context-sensitive processes that align with ecological resilience, distributive justice, and economic viability.

Grounded in shūrā …

Sermon-Sounding Synoptic: A Literary Analysis Of The Sermon On The Mount Throughout Matthew, Garrett T. Redstone

Senior Honors Theses

Scholarship has rowed over redaction to determine how much of Matthew is in the Sermon on the Mount. This analysis evaluates the opposite: how much the of Sermon on the Mount is in Matthew. After establishing a narrative-literary method that centers on Sermon-discourse intertextuality, Matthew’s fivefold structure which the Sermon occupies and the narrative, and literary disciple-focus the discourses share, this analysis traces themes and vocabulary through Matthew and back to the Sermon, which influences much of Matthew’s sound and prepares disciples both in and abreast of the story to better learn from Jesus’ teachings in Matthew’s Gospel account.

Hegemonial Nationalism And The Role Of Religion: A View From The Perspective Of The Western Balkans, Semir Halilović, Tomislav Tadic

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

This paper points to the problem of hegemonic nationalism, with an emphasis on the role of religion, in the context of a social understanding of the situation in the Western Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia). The question of the “Eastern and Western models of nationalism” is articulated, and the social role of religion in their construction is examined. In relation to this framework, the possibilities for applying the thesis of the Eastern model of the nation are considered in light of the current war situation between Russia and Ukraine. The paper highlights some of the theoretical configurations …

On Some Temporal Values Of The Verb Kan (To Be) In Moroccan Arabic, Zahra Zaid

Faits de Langue et Société (FLS)

The expression of tense is a universal characteristic of natural languages. Each one has a linguistic resource to locate the process on the tense axis in relation to the speaker's present or in relation to other processes. In this contribution, we propose, from the description of a corpus of simple verbal sentences, to identify some temporal values rendered by the verbal forms composed of the auxiliary kan (to be) and the verbal predicate in Moroccan Arabic (AM). The aim is to show that other categories can provide details on the functioning of temporality in Moroccan Arabic, such as the verb …