Digital Commons Network^™

Ontological (Free) Agency: The Erasure, Commodification, And Autonomy Of Black Athletes, Abraham Yabar Salinas

English Theses - Archive

The National Football League wields a powerful influence on American society and holds an authoritative sway over various sociopolitical discourses, each influencing the degrees of interaction between people of different origins, cultural backgrounds and identities. The purpose of this research is to examine how the NFL is product of a network of racial discrimination directed at Black people within the league. This research examines how the National Football League functions as a white-dominated structure of power in order to manipulate, exploit, and erase Black bodies for the benefit of multi-billion-dollar profits. This study focuses on how Black players are subject …

Crip Mothering: Representation Of Disability And Motherhood In Post-1980 American Films, Mohammed Ali H. Sumili

English Dissertations - Archive

Most scholarship on the topic of disability and motherhood tends to be of an empirical nature common to social, education, and psychology studies (Landsman 2008; Wilson and Cellio 2011, Filax and Taylor 2014). Despite the appearance of movies, novels and especially memoirs that deal with the subject, disability as it engages with motherhood has received scarce attention by feminist, motherhood, and disability scholarship (Prilleltensky 2004; Landsman 2008). Existing literature indicates a gap in studying the joint representation of mothers and disability. This study aims to address this gap by analysis of a selection of post-1980 American movies. Concentrating on the …

Examining Health Inequity In Ancient Egypt, Samantha Rose Gonzalez

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores the history of medicine in ancient Egypt between the Middle and New Kingdoms, and offers a case study highlighting the use of religion and magic in healing and analyzing health inequity. I am interested in medical practices, treatments, diagnosis methods, and access to healthcare in the ancient world. I seek to bridge the gaps and help unify the knowledge surrounding ancient Egyptian medical practices and contribute to the studies in the history of medicine. I explore types of diseases that commonly affected the ancient Egyptians and how they integrated religion and magic into their understanding and treatment …

Improving Sight Reading Through Beginning Band Instruction, Joshua Earl Kohl

Masters Theses

Aural skills training needs to be included in the beginning band curriculum. Educators strive to help students reach their potential. At the same time, they continue to use method books that emphasize a visual approach to music education. To fully engage with music, students should not just see the music written on a page but should be able to hear it as well. Through aural skills training, such as audiation, students will be able to internalize and hear the music they see without the need for an audial stimulant. This study defines the current amount of aural training included in …

The Importance Of Sight-Singing To Ear-Training And Musicianship Of Neurodiverse Students, Courtney Marie Stinson

Masters Theses

This curriculum project aims to recognize the importance of teaching students music with ear-training. The goal is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of ear-training methods. This paper will review existing ear-training methods research. The literature will be reviewed regarding the biology of how listeners hear music, how geographic location influences elements of sound, how emotion influences communication, and why people like the music they like. The second chapter of this article discusses how singing on solfège creates stronger musicianship in all musicians as ear-training is essential for teaching music. Ear-training helps students recognize sounds and sonic events they have …

Invasives In Our National Parks: How Tourists Can Help Stop The Spread Of Invasive Species, Alexandria Elivira Marci

Masters Theses

Invasive species are a major issue around the world and more specifically in our U.S. National Parks. Ranging from plants to insects to animals, invasive species are a greater threat than many may imagine. The impact that invasive species have on an ecosystem encompasses more than taking over a native species’ environment; it includes competing for food, water, and other resources, as well as having an adverse effect on our economy and threatening us with deadly diseases. Many factors lead to the cause of spread of invasive species, but all point back to human interference, from purposely spreading invasive species …

Foot-Ball! Turning Colombian Boys Into Patriotic Men: How Sport And Education Developed With Early Twentieth-Century Colombian Nationalism, Brandon Todd Blakeslee

History Dissertations - Archive

In 1948 a collection of ten football (soccer) teams from across Colombia joined together to form the División Mayor (Major League) the culmination of a thirty-year-long process to form a national league. Colombian sports enthusiasts were not motivated by their love of the game, but rather saw football, and sports in general, as a means to modernize their country. Journalists and enthusiasts wrote that the practice of sport, as part of physical education programs or participating in the spectacle of a match were essential to the “modern man” and “modern women.” Colombian nationalists also embraced sport, and a national league, …

Alcohol Use In Women: Resources And Recommendations For Counselors, Samantha Haling

Educational Specialist, 2020-current

The research shows that alcohol use is rising rapidly among women, resulting in devastating consequences that have not been sufficiently explored in counselor education and training. This paper aims to address this by providing a review of the literature which shows that women are more vulnerable to many of the physical and mental health consequences of alcohol use than men, and that they have unique treatment needs and face gender-specific risk factors and barriers to treatment. The review examines the interaction between gender and alcohol use, summarizes the existing research on the physical and behavioral health consequences of alcohol use …

Risk Management In Translation: How Much Does It Really Explain?, Daniel Gile

International Journal of Interpreter Education

While risk has always been part of translation, it was taken up as a distinct topic recently, with some confusion as to what the term actually covers and some problematic claims about its central role as a determinant of translation behavior and the links between risk and translation effort. It is argued that risk is more often a constraint than a driver of decisions, that the correlation between the magnitude of risk-associated loss and the number of problem-solving efforts can be weak, and that achievement-oriented decision making explains translatorial behavior better than risk management and is more compatible with professional …

The Veins That Lighten Dearth: Documenting Hidden Collections In Rural California, Jillian M. Ewalt

Marian Library Faculty Publications

This case study discusses an archival consulting project to document and preserve hidden collections in rural northern California. The paper provides an overview of the collecting institution (the Mother Lode Land Trust), the collections and their historical context, and the consulting process. The author highlights processing strategies to improve preservation and description while developing a post-custodial approach to managing collections in a rural, community-based archives setting.

A Whole New (Eastern) World: Ramy Youssef’S Role In The Undoing Of Orientalism In Modern-Day Media, Mary Hanna

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In 2019, writer and director Ramy Youssef debuted his semi-autobiographical television series, Ramy. Youssef’s series is a coming-of-age story that documents the typical trials and tribulations of entering adulthood all while navigating these issues as a young Muslim Egyptian American. The creation of the show in part serves to address common Orientalist misconceptions regarding religion, customs, and gender roles that exist in mainstream media, especially in a post 9/11 world. Youssef’s intention is to derail the trajectory of this discourse by offering an often overlooked first-hand portrayal of a diasporic Arab and Muslim experience in America that defies the predominant …

Mic Check : Finding Hip Hop's Place In The Literary Milieu, Victorio Reyes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The study of Hip Hop poetics has been slowly gaining momentum as an area for scholarly inquiry. Accordingly, Mic Check rests on one critical assumption: Hip Hop is the most significant American form of poetry ever invented. To back up this claim, this project investigates Hip Hop lyricism from five critical angles: tradition, form, tone, medium, and practice. I argue that music’s foundational position in African American literature clarifies Hip Hop’s experiments with language, which operate within and extend an ongoing, centuries-old tradition of linguistic, rhythmic, and poetic experimentation. Comprehension of the longstanding literary/oral territory from which Hip Hop is …

Uncle Tom's Women : Slavery And Black Female Sexuality, Natalia Davila

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the United States, Black women grapple with harmful cultural representations of their womanhood and sexuality that are rooted in the minstrel tradition. Specifically, Black women are represented as objects of consumption or hypersexual. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin reveals an engagement with the minstrel tradition that has demonstrated both a perpetuation of negative portrayals of Black women but also a departure from these images. This paper focuses on the responses to Stowe’s characterization by the authors Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl Jones in Corregidora that reclaim the minstrel tradition to reveal the …

Sexual Identity, Mental, Emotional, And Religious Stability: A Phenomenological Study Exploring The Religious Lived Experiences Of Heterosexual Men Who Once Identified As Gay Or Bisexual, Mccay Martin Moiforay

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study aims are to fill the gap in research with regards to how to successfully provide religious support to men who once identified as gay or bisexual, who currently identify as heterosexual and religious. The research purpose is to share these men lived experiences regarding their sexual identity journey from gay or bisexual to heterosexual within the religious setting. The research plans to help understand what religious support is needed to provide those who desire sexual identity change from gay or bisexual to heterosexual and how this same religious support can be used in maintaining their heterosexual identity. These …

Almost Speechless: Representations Of Womanhood And Female Voices In Turn­-Of-­The-Century American Novels, Carmen Sylvia Smith

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, I close read four turn-­of-­the-­century American novels by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and Willa Cather to analyze how the voices and silences of fictional women characters work to disrupt cultural ideals about womanhood. Examining which aspects of the characters’ identities are expressed in direct dialogue and which traits are conveyed to the reader through narrative devices reveals how cultural ideals about womanhood restrict women’s self-­expressive autonomy and work to exclude female voices from the public sphere.

Chapter One examines Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) and how erotic rivals Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom compete to …

The Co-Requisite Collaboration: Building Self-Confidence, Self-Efficacy, And Rapport Through Dialogue Journals In A Basic Writing Course, Timothy Jacob Pyatt

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Research on dialogue journals has grown in the last fifty years, but a gap exists in understanding how and why these dialogue journals work. During the fall of 2020, I conducted a study utilizing quantitative data to examine how dialogue journals impact student’s self-confidence, self-efficacy, and rapport. The data has confirmed that dialogue journals are effective classroom tools and that various aspects such as word count and purpose can be impacted in connection to student’s perceptions of themselves. This project responds to the gap in the literature and provides data to support how and why dialogue journals promote growth in …

Género Y Sexualidad En Seis Novelas Del Siglo Xxi, Sandra Chang Raak

Dissertations

From its inception Latin American literature has used gender and sexuality as rhetorical devices to approach the topic of cultural identity. For instance, Hernán Cortés in his Cartas de Relación embodies a type of masculinity that overdetermined the lives of the Amerindian people. Centuries later, the modernismo movement headed by Rubén Darío reacted to a Latin American societal shift towards the prevalence of a materialistic culture brought about by the advent of industrial civilization. During the 1960s Latin American literature experienced a rapid blooming that has come to be known as El Boom. Both landmarks, modernism and El Boom …

Exploring The Relation Between Musical And Dance Sophistication And Musical Groove Perception, Samantha R. O'Connell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Listening to groovy music is an enjoyable experience and a ubiquitous human behavior in some cultures. Specifically, many listeners agree that high-groove songs are enjoyable, familiar, and likable compared to low-groove songs. While the pleasurable and dance-inducing effects of musical groove listening seem omnipresent, what is less known is how subjective feelings towards music, individual musical or dance experiences, or more objective musical perception abilities are correlated with the way we hear music with groove. Therefore, the present online study aimed to evaluate how musical and dance sophistication relates to musical groove perception. One-hundred and twenty-four participants completed an online …

It’S Not You, It’S Me: Measuring Erotic Self–Focus, Evan Fertel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research suggests the presence of a non-relational aspect of women’s sexuality wherein a focus on oneself may be linked to elevations in sexual desire/arousal. Some theorists have even asserted that women may be, in some ways, their own sexual objects. Building on a previous exploration of what is now termed Erotic Self-Focus (ESF; Fertel, 2015), the present study developed a refined measure of ESF to further assess the validity and nature of this new construct. An exploratory factor analysis revealed four factors: Arousal to Own Body, Self/Own-Gender Focus vs. Partner/Other-Gender Focus, Self-Focused Arousal – Physical, Self-Focused Arousal – Mental. Although …

Approaching Trans Debates As Fascistic Sites Of Engagement., Sarah Jump

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the past decade, trans rights issues have been a legal topic of discussion and are still discussed publicly in 2021. This thesis researched how arguments surrounding anti-trans issues were successful in the United States. The arguments surrounding these issues are important to study to see how they pass within society and if traditional rules of argumentation are changing. This thesis proposes that traditional dialectical argument is no longer occurring and has taken a post-dialectical turn. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the kinds of arguments used in these issues and build the case that they are evidence …

The Little Devil, Stefan Peña

Theses and Dissertations

The Little Devil is a series of moments in the life of a character named Boy. The story follows a loose plot that jumps around different time periods and states of mind of the protagonist in an imaginary town that has elements of both a small midwestern town and a semi-arid desert.

Mr. Crow, a local entrepreneur, and Irene who owns the local diner are both heavily involved in the lives of other citizens and use secrets as a form of currency. However, Mr. Crow uses his knowledge for personal reasons while Irene simply wants to know truth.

Although it …

Psychedelic Drugs And Atheism: Debunking The Myths, Wayne Glausser

English Faculty publications

Two recent surveys of people who took psychedelic drugs and reported “God experience encounters”, along with successful clinical trials using psychedelic therapy for depression, have given rise to public misconceptions about psychedelics and atheism. Specifically, three inferences have been drawn: (1) that the psychedelic experience tends to dissolve atheist convictions; (2) that atheist convictions, once dissolved, are replaced with traditional monotheist beliefs; and (3) that atheism and depression somehow correlate as afflictions for which psychedelic drugs offer relief. This paper argues, based on analysis of the studies and trials along with relevant supplemental evidence, that each of these popular inferences …

Is Pristine Inner Experience Linked To Biology? An Examination Of Experience Across The Menstrual Cycle Among Women With Premenstrual Distress, Alek E. Krumm

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The link between mind and biology is intuitively known: We notice changes in our mood and behavior when hungry, in pain, or under the influence of substances. Yet, the specifics of this link—for example, how changes in biology affect directly apprehended conscious experience— are not well known. The present study was an exploratory attempt toward filling that gap by using a state-of-the-art, beeper-driven method for exploring directly apprehended conscious experience (Descriptive Experience Sampling; DES) across one of the most predictable and wellknown biological cycles: menstruation. We screened approximately 300 college women to identify those who reported clinically significant symptoms of …

Iluqata: All Of Us, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The field of technical and professional communication (TPC) is solidly within the social justice turn that encourages TPC practitioners and scholars to consider how their work, if left unchecked, could perpetuate oppressive societal norms, such as racism. Increasing awareness of how technical communicators can combat oppression through coalitional action and through centering multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) voices and experiences through inclusive research methodologies are important components towards equity in TPC. This dissertation presents five accepted publications that demonstrate how narrative methodologies and coalitional work function to enhance scholarly activism and work towards equity. These five publications are thoroughly introduced …

The Reality Of Aging Out Of The Foster Care System: Informing The General Public Of The Issues Associated With Aging Out Of The Foster System And The Leading Causes Behind Them, Katerina Suther

Masters Theses

Nearly half of youths aging out of the foster care system find themselves homeless due to a lack of systematic programs and public awareness. Due to unawareness of the resources available to foster children in the United States, much foster youth end up uncertain how to navigate their lives after emancipation, which often results in homelessness. This project uses literature reviews, diary studies, and mind mapping to identify the leading causes behind homelessness amongst emancipated foster youths. Reviewing first-hand accounts of children and adults associated with the foster care system provides insight into how youth in the foster care system …

Haunted And Hunted: The Gothic And The Ghostly In The Light And Asylum, Adam Dunnells

Master's Theses

Young adult Gothic horror fiction acts as a coming-of-age story wherein the protagonists must confront the metaphorical and literal ghosts while simultaneously attempting to establish a sense of identity. Applying Gothic theory and ghost theory to the ghostly stories in young adult Gothic horror demonstrates how certain young adult Gothic stories represent the struggle of adolescents as they mature into adulthood and search for their identities. I use Madeline Roux’s Asylum (2013) and D.J. MacHale’s The Light (2010) as case studies to analyze how ghostly antagonists directly oppose adolescent protagonists on their coming-of-age journeys. Analyzing these young adult Gothic horror …

Migration And Identity In Host-Communities: Global North And South Influence On Ecuadorian Identity, Jefferson F. Cruz Ruales

Graduate Masters Theses

In the South American region that encompasses Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, patterns of human mobility have been predominantly influenced by various forms of internal conflict and limited economic prospects. The relative political, social, and economic stability which Ecuador has experienced in the region since the beginning of the 21st century, however, has made it a desired destination for many of its neighbor’s displaced populations and opportunity seekers. Similar factors have also enticed certain populations proceeding from areas of higher global development to settle into the nation’s tranquil environment. These Ecuadorian circumstances allow two very distinct groups of individuals, who exist …

Participant Reference In Colombian Sign Language Narrative, Martha Lois Gateley

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the research on discourse in sign languages thus far has been carried out on American Sign Language. With this thesis, I add to the current research by comparing what is known about participant reference in American Sign Language with Colombian Sign Language.

This thesis analyzes six separate stories totaling 72 minutes, signed by 5 different native signers of Colombian Sign Language. ELAN (a computer software for annotation) was used to mark all of the referring terms in the subject position and categorize the terms by type (nominal reference, pronominal reference, zero-anaphor, and classifier) and by function (introduction, reintroduction …

Star Wars: The Clone Wars And Popular Culture In America, Ubaldo Zermeno

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

The Clone Wars animated series is part of the Star Wars storyline taking place before the original Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. The central premise of The Clone Wars is that of war, one being waged by a biologically manufactured clone army. George Lucas’ intent for the original Star Wars was to create a social dialogue reflecting the ideological reasons for, and effects of, the Vietnam War. The Clone Wars continues Lucas’s examination of American wartime policies and their effects on society.

The themes in The Clone Wars are diverse; however, this analysis will cover the …

Inclusivity In Practice: A Queer Examination Of The Acceptance Of Trans Communities From The Standpoints Of Trans University Students, Sean Maulding

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Despite attending the same universities and working toward the same degrees, trans students and cisgender students do not always have the same experiences during their college years. In addition to the hardships associated with being a university student, members of trans communities often also face gender-based discrimination and challenges that their cisgender counterparts do not. Although the mid-size Southern California university at which this research took place has taken steps toward fostering an accepting climate for all students, the transmale, gender nonconforming, and gender nonbinary students who participated in this study continue to experience a layer of rejection due to …