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Artificial Ignorance: Understanding The Role Of Ai In Modern Agnotology, Amit Ray, Michael Nolan

Articles

This paper explores the concept of agnotology, the deliberate production of ignorance, within the context of modern scientific endeavors, particularly in the corporate and technological sectors. It examines how industries use various tactics to manipulate public understanding of scientific issues, often to protect profits and limit liability. The rise of private sector funding and the increasing reliance on technologies like AI and machine learning have exacerbated this process by making scientific inquiry more opaque and less accountable. Ultimately, we argue that as knowledge production becomes more entangled with corporate interests and technological systems, traditional methods of oversight and regulation are …

She Chose Her Fate: The Genderqueer Women Of Tolkien And Freedom Beyond The Patriarchal Binary, Alicia Fox-Lenz, Grace Moone, Leah Hagan

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

“The Gift Which Was Withheld I Take”: The Rape Of The Sun Maiden In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Kristine Larsen

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

“Her Hair Was Held A Marvel Unmatched”: The Significance Of Long, Blonde Hair In Tolkien’S Imagination, Sara Brown

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

"Things That Were, Things That Are, And Things That Yet May Be": The Matter Of Time In The Faërie Realms Of Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Noelia Ramos

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien’s feelings and relationship to Celtic themes are more nuanced than a simple binary of aversion versus passion. As he professed to Stanley Unwin—"Needless to say they are not Celtic!" (Letters #19)—his stance encompassed both resistance and fascination. His essay On Fairy-Stories, originally delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939, can be seen as an early foundation for concepts later developed in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). In this context, the concept of fiction and the secondary world—particularly regarding the nature of time—is notably prominent, drawing parallels to the Celtic Otherworld.

This study aims to analyze …

Gender Role Conflict In Women, Candyletta Lewis

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines gender role conflict (GRC) in women within the context of feminine norms, with a focus on developing a scale designed to measure GRC derived from feminine ideology that may contribute to gender related stress. The primary research questions address the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Gender Role Conflict Scale for Women (GRCS-W). Additional research questions examine the relationship between feminine gender role conflict and psychological well-being, and whether any racial differences exist in self-reported GRC. Participants include 132 women aged 18–70 from diverse educational backgrounds. Findings revealed a three-component solution for the GRCS-W. The internal …

Между Тенью И Рассветом; Between Darkness And The Dawn: A Photographic Understanding Of Memory And Society In Eastern Latvia And The Baltic States, Bryce Maloney, Sean Rego

Summer Research Program

In the small nation of Latvia, the eastern city of Daugavpils has been left behind. Three hours from the bustling European capitals of Riga, Vilnius and Minsk, it was historically the trade hub between Russia and Western Europe, once giving it a fascinating ethnographic makeup as well as an important regional position. It remains the largest majority Russian-speaking city in the European Union and NATO, but suffers from its geographical and economic isolation on top of a declining and aging population. Daugavpils’s people– now economically and socially neglected– ardently feel abandoned in modern-day Latvia, with each setback feeding their disillusionment …

An Application Of Vocal Pedagogy For Thai Singers, Phitchaya Klimov

Dissertations

Vocal pedagogy incorporates diverse techniques and methodologies that aim to maintain longevity of the voice and to improve vocal performance, range, and tone. While vocal pedagogy has been extensively studied in Western music traditions, its application in the context of Thai singers remains unfamiliar. This dissertation will investigate the application of vocal pedagogy for Thai singers, with a focus on understanding the unique challenges faced by them. It will outline pedagogical approaches to address these challenges and will therefore lead to more authentic performances. “Complete mastery of the voice as an instrument is an idea toward which every singer must …

Challenging The Gaze: A Feminist Interpretation Of The S.M.S. Mail Art Collection, Karissa A. Krievins

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

In the late 1960s, many people called for radical, immediate change to America’s political, societal, and cultural structures. The artistic practices of the time reflected the social and political realities of the moment and played a crucial role in advocating for change. The title of the 1968 S.M.S. (Shit Must Stop) subscription art portfolios was a bold and urgent call for action, challenging artists and audiences alike to confront the pressing injustices of the era and inspire a collective awakening to the necessity of transformative change across the United States. Despite a fifty-six-year gap, today we are …

Incarcerated Women: Gendered Rhetoric From The Outside And Reality Inside Prison Walls., Taylor Riley Geiser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how formerly incarcerated women navigate and resist gendered media portrayals through digital platforms, focusing on the “mad” and “bad” woman tropes that shape public perceptions. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theory—particularly Royster and Kirsch’s methodological practices and Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening—this study combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of mainstream headlines with Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) of TikTok content. CDA of media coverage surrounding Lori Vallow Daybell, Casey Anthony, and Andrea Yates reveals how language, imagery, and cultural logics sustain harmful binaries that portray women who commit crimes either as depraved or as excused by madness, obscuring the …

My Achilles Years., Ash William Bittner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a historically and rhetorically grounded creative project exploring the traumas of war. This project is divided into three broad chapters, each using a different (and relevant) approach to cover the content contained within that chapter. The first chapter relies on that historical grounding, exploring the history of PTSD as it is currently understood, before exploring ancient Greek poetry and theater and both the historical and military contexts for each, before finally discussing modern warfare and the “Forever War” of the American War on Terror that lasted for nineteen years. With the historical grounding set, it moves into …

The Automation Of Aesthetics: Artificial Intelligence And Commercial Artists In North Brooklyn, Devin Sudweeks

Theses and Dissertations

Corporate elites expect generative AI to replace commercial artists but overlook their social and aesthetic expertise. This ethnographic study explores how Brooklyn-based commercial artists narrate their value amid automation, emphasizing embodied presence in cultural scenes, visual language, style, and authenticity, skills not easily mechanized but vital to aesthetic economies.

Reverse-Chinoiserie: Qing Imperial Porcelain And The Reappropriation Of European Rococo, Yifan (Mia) Ye

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis introduces “reverse-chinoiserie” to describe the Qing court’s reappropriation of European Rococo aesthetics in imperial porcelain. Through case studies of 18th-century ceramic diplomacy and design, it reveals how cultural imitation was reengineered into visual sovereignty. It examines how China responded to, absorbed, and redirected European fantasies of empire.

Analysis Of Popular Songs In The Us Market, Michael Myers

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In today’s digitally driven music landscape, understanding what drive’s a song’s popularity requires insight not only into its acoustic and lyrical content, but also into patterns of listener engagement across platforms. This thesis explores the predictive and descriptive dimensions of song popularity by applying supervised and unsupervised machine learning models to a multi-source dataset integrating audio features, sentiment analysis, and temporal consumption behavior. Drawing from a novel, multi-platform dataset that includes Billboard Hot 100 rankings, Spotify acoustic features and popularity scores, streaming, airplay, and sales metrics as reported on Luminate’s Music Connect, and lyrics from AZLyrics, the study investigates the …

76 | Maresha Iv: The Subterranean Complexes Of The Hellenistic City, Ian Stern

IAA Reports—Monograph Series of the Israel Antiquities Authority

This volume provides an archaeological study of 152 subterranean complexes at ancient Maresha, including an overview of the site, geological background, typological analysis of chamber types, and documentation of all surveyed installations. Two brief excavation reports offer insights into material culture and daily life during the Hellenistic period. Carved decorative elements—such as niches, altars, reliefs, and betyls—highlight religious diversity and cultural syncretism among Maresha’s residents. Twenty-one inscriptions, mostly Greek with three Semitic, provide rare direct evidence of the activities, identities, and experiences of individuals who used these underground spaces, adding a human dimension to the material findings. Special attention is …

The Case Against Finean Essentialism, Miles Thibodeaux

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I survey, critique, and add to recent arguments against Finean Essentialism: the view that all de re modal facts are metaphysically explained by essences. Arguments against Finean Essentialism generally fall into two categories: (a) Finean Essentialism risks contradicting commonly held views or suppositions, or (b) Finean Essentialism involves an explanatory gap, vicious circularity, or a vicious regress. While the details of the arguments within each category differ significantly, it is useful to group them in this way given the relevant implications they have for one another. I will argue that the proposed critiques from category (a) are …

How To Do Things With Little Talking Tubes: Nonideal Speech Acts In The Digital Age, Anthony Holdier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I develop a view about what it means to share a social or conversational context with others, as well as what is normatively entailed by doing so. Working from a broadly Austinian perspective about the moral foundations of language use and how we use words to position ourselves within social space, as well as from a generally Stalnakerian social ontology (demarcating groups by dint of aligned or overlapping sets of commitments), I present three papers demonstrating how nonidealized, ordinary language philosophy can make sense of complex, real-world phenomena. Through analyses of heretical utterances, context collapse, and chatbot …

The Effects Of Background Child-Directed And Adult-Directed Singing On Reading Comprehension Performance, Agnes Yeboah Amfo-Adu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although music features in speech, such as those found in child-directed speech and song, are known to enhance language processing, the underlying mechanism of this benefit remains unclear. Prior research has primarily compared verbal materials presented in a musical, child-directed style to those in a less musical, adult-directed style, leaving it uncertain whether the benefit stems from the music style of verbal presentation or mere exposure to musical features. This study examined whether the language benefits of child-directed input persist when it is presented as background auditory stimuli rather than the primary focus of cognitive tasks. Experiment 1 found that …

Modifying Italian Consonants In The Voice Studio: An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Study, Elisa Ramon

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The body of lyric diction literature, particularly on Italian, has grown substantially in the second half of the twentieth century. Lyric diction courses are now a required part of many voice programs across the United States. The widespread use of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and transcription rules has significantly contributed to the field. However, relatively few sources focus on the pedagogical strategies needed to teach and modify Italian consonants effectively.

This two-phase exploratory sequential mixed methods study identifies the features of Italian consonants that differentiate the lyric diction of novice singers from that of native speakers. It also proposes …

Partition, Passport And The Documentary Life Of Belonging, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

As India and Pakistan emerged as two new nation-states after 1947, questions around nationality and citizenship animated official and public discourses. While there were constitutional and legal pronouncements to clarify these matters, this article suggests that particular documents governing mobility became central to how such issues were framed and understood. In particular, this article focuses on the Indian passport and similar documents of mobility control, such as the domicile certificate, permits, and so on, to examine how they worked singly and in conjunction to frame the documentary life of belonging. The article also focuses on particular mobile groups, Muslim minorities …

Taming The Wild Tongue Of Frida Kahlo: An Analysis Of Translation As Adaptation In Personal Narratives, Alyse K. Deatherage

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis discusses topics of adaptation and translation theory by looking at the way Frida Kahlo’s diary has been transformed through both adaptation and translations of it in the texts The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait and The Diary of Frida Kahlo: A New Perspective. Scholars have paid much attention to the connections between Kahlo’s diary and her portraits, focusing on artistic critique and the painter’s diary as a drafting space for what eventually became her famous self-portraits. Researchers have also documented Frida Kahlo’s artistic and cultural influences in Mexico and abroad. However, none have addressed the …

Predicting Music Origin With Deep Learning, Fruzsina Ladanyi

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project explores the usage of a late fusion deep learning architecture to predict the geographic origin of music. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and the language of the music sample are used as features. MFCCs were extracted from audio files to capture sound features. The language was identified using OpenAI’s Whisper model to provide additional context. A late fusion neural network architecture combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers for sequential MFCC input and dense layers for non-sequential language features were employed to support both classification and regression tasks. The classification model achieved an accuracy of 33.03% across 56 countries or …

Projecting Echoes: Valeria Luiselli's Writing On Immigration, Jacob C. Cisneros

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The growing concerns of immigration has been a fraught topic in both U.S. society and the American political landscape. Certain political narratives are formed which fuel the debate for and against immigration. This coincides with how immigrants are treated and how legal processes change throughout each term of presidency within the United States. This has sparked outrage from both advocates and adversaries of immigrants coming into the United States. Papers, speeches, news articles, and more have been created from both sides of the argument concerning how to handle the immigration crisis along with the question of how immigrants and asylum …

Spectacle And The Archipelagic Void: Mark Justiniani, Simulacra, And The Poetics Of Repetition, Luisa L. Gomez

Literary and Cultural Studies Program Faculty Publications

This paper examines the tension between spectacle and meaning in the immersive installations of Filipino artist Mark Justiniani, whose mirror-and-light works produce illusions of infinite regress. While Jean Baudrillard warns against the flattening of meaning in the era of simulacra, I argue that Justiniani repurposes the tools of spectacle to resist simulation. His “void of spectacles” stages not emptiness but layered depth, offering a spatial metaphor for archipelagic thinking—fragmented, entangled, and relational. I read Justiniani’s recursive visual structures alongside the poetics of repetition in the Filipino language, where reduplicated forms such as alaala (memory), guniguni (phantasm), bulong-bulong (rumor), or halakhak …

Intersecting Realities And Evolving Landscapes: Mapping Generative Ai Within The Framework Of Digital Rhetoric, Joshua Troy Nieubuurt

English Theses & Dissertations

The increased usage of [Generative] AI technologies (GenAI) in the 21st century has called into the question the rhetorical agency of these digital things. [Gen]AI has historically been framed within a Heideggerian “readiness-to-hand” dynamic in which it has been unilaterally conceived as a tool to be used by humans. This dissertation proposes that the GenAI assemblage is capable of being a co-actor in rhetorical spaces. To provide evidence for this stance This dissertation utilizes Actor Network Theory to map the actants within a GenAI assemblage. In doing so it allows for an understanding of the stakeholders (both human and non-human) …

Resemblance In Meaning Between Explicit Linguistic Evidence And Omitted Word: An Approach To Syntactical Recognition Pattern, Emad Ahmad Alzabin

Journal of Arts and Social Sciences

The study aims to address a scientific problem in Elision that can be summarized with a central question: Is the resemblance required in the meaning between the explicit linguistic evidence and the Omitted Word? The subject of this study interviews a question on the issue of Elision that is decided in two levels: Theoretical level, and Procedure in the of efforts of ancient grammarians. This contrast is undoubtedly generating a grammatical argumentation that clarifies the issue. And the importance of this attempt comes from the impact of its results on Theories of text reception, this study also relates to the …

Girls Of Riyadh Narrating The “Velvet Class” In Saudi Arabia, Yahya Hassan Al-Wadhaf

Journal of Arts and Social Sciences

Banat al-Riyadh, translated as Girls of Riyadh, is a Saudi controversial novel which was initially published in 2005 and appeared as an English version in 2007. The narrative gives a detailed and an inside view to the domestic and ‘private’ part of the Saudi society. It gives an access to that ‘velvet class’ as the narrator describes the women that occupy the narrative space of Girls of Riyadh. The novel addresses in a revolutionary manner issues pertaining to women’s rights, dreams, hopes and aspirations The novel addresses in a revolutionary manner issues pertaining to women’s rights, dreams, hopes, and aspirations …

Carrying Light In The Shadows: Four Portraits Of Critical Literacy Teacher Agency In Unlikely Contexts, Cassandra Schroeder

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This qualitative study utilizes portraiture methodology to explore how educators in politically conservative and predominantly White schools enact critical literacy teacher agency. Using a theoretical lens of critical literacy and second-wave Whiteness studies, this research examines the lived experiences and instructional moves of four veteran English/language arts teachers. Through cross-case analysis, the study traces how teacher agency is contextually responsive and dependent on their professional identity, awareness of sociopolitical issues, and traditional school curricular expectations. The findings highlight how educators assess risk, navigate community norms, and maintain critical literacy through dialogic pedagogy and strategic adaptation. The four teachers in the …

Rhetorics Of Encounter: Toward A Biocentric Theory Of Discourse, Matthew D. Whitaker

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Encounters with more-than-human identities are transformative moments that stand to affect dispositional and bodily change in individuals. From close brushes with wild animals in National Parks to everyday interactions with local ecologies, encounters invite us to feel and think differently about the nature of our realities. In Rhetorics of Encounter: Toward a Biocentric Theory of Discourse, I draw from interdisciplinary perspectives to disrupt the idea of rhetoric as a representational medium, arguing that rhetoric occurs not just through textual exchanges of words and symbols, but through embodied moments of contact with other responsive beings. Invoking George Kennedy’s theory …

"That’S Not A Meal, Bestie”: Humor, Identity, & Feminized Consumption In “Girl Dinner”., Claire Tudor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the viral “Girl Dinner” trend as a case study in how gendered consumption, digital identity, and feminist humor intersect in digital spaces. Using “Girl Dinner” as a rhetorical artifact, this thesis explores how women use gendered trends to navigate visibility, labor, and autonomy in online spaces. Through thematic analysis of TikTok content, media coverage, and branded adaptations, the research traces the evolution of the trend from a lighthearted joke to a site of cultural negotiation. This study reveals that while “Girl Dinner” may appear empowering and relatable on the surface, it often reinforces traditional gender expectations under …