Digital Commons Network^™

Elsewhere: Impressions Of Sense & Nonsense, Madeline Woods

Masters Theses

I’m not going to give it all away up front, but here are a few things you’ll find inside: a flower that tastes like peppermint, a book that smells like sunscreen, a silver orb that purrs, a woman becoming a tree, a shy rainbow, and a hat that is also a disguise. There are lists, letters, dreams, and notes. I hope there aren’t typos, but I’m only human, after all. There is sense, and there is also nonsense.

If you decide to join me here, we will wander elsewhere — across different kinds of terrain, into sensory experiences, between mediums, …

Fossil Morphology, Leah Zhang

Masters Theses

Fossil Morphology is a multi-media art project based on my research on the coal mining area in East Pennsylvania. It consists of a film, a series of photographs, and a sound installation. Together, the three works form a dialog among each other about the ecology and aesthetics of the region’s coal mining landscape and its underground.

For a long time, coal, as an raw material for mass production, has been understood and examined from its economic values and social meanings. The gradual abandoning of this material by our industry therefore leads to the seemingly inevitable decline of the coal mining …

Zoomorphic Extended Body, Nicholas Tamas

Masters Theses

My thesis work is built around emerging technologies within the fields of prosthetic and robotics. The end result is a speculative proposal with how to expand the potential modes of use with these emerging technologies to extend and build upon their potential uses.

Spirits In The Dark: Black Community Education And The Light It Bears, Sydoni A. Ellwood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Spirits in the Dark” is a digital space dedicated to the efforts of Black community education. It memorializes the commitment and strategies of spirits, light bearers like Mary McLeod Bethune and Huey Newton – people who devoted their lives to the fortification of their communities via education. This project also presents a variety of answers to one specific question: What lessons can school leaders and educators incorporate from community-controlled education programs to make learning spaces affirming and engaging for Black students? In totality, the digital space contributes to conversations in urban education and sociology, specifically the ones being held around …

Vulnerability: Sensation And Subjectivity In The Late Victorian Novel, Michael Shelichach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Vulnerability: Sensation and Subjectivity in the Late Victorian Novel” explores how developments in the science of psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century destabilized the genre of literary realism in Britain. Prominent mid-Victorian psychologists theorized a subject with a highly impressionable brain and nervous system. This new understanding of the mind’s potential vulnerability to external influence impelled contemporary novelists to contemplate the extent to which subjective interiority could be altered by the environment. Through close readings of canonical realist novels like Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone …

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

Critical Climates: Stimmung, Voice And Mythopoesis In German Literature From 1950–1989, Marc Cesar Rickenbach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Critical Climates examines the interest in myth among a number of literary figures from 1950 to 1989 in relation to the concurrent re-emergence of the German aesthetic concept of Stimmung. At once referring to atmosphere, milieu, mood, disposition and harmony, while carrying along its root Stimme, or voice, this dissertation shows how Stimmung informed a literary practice among German-language authors that engaged the relationship between narrative, ideology and collective moods in a way that can be spoken of in terms of a mythopoesis. This project builds upon contemporary scholarship that focuses on Stimmung as a way to refigure …

Prophecy, Emanation, And The Mediterranean Middle Ages, Alberto Gelmi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the notion of prophecy as a semiotic construct in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on a chronological span that runs from Late Antiquity to the 14^th century. It argues that theories of prophecy offer useful insights in the domain of rhetoric and not just in epistemology, as scholarship has predominantly contended. The first two chapters survey the trendsetting work of Augustine, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides, arguing that their semiotic angle on prophecy depends on a structural affinity with the metaphysical template of emanationism as formulated by Plotinus and Proclus, whose teachings went often misrepresented or …

A Critique Of Scanlon On The Scope Of Morality, Benjamin A. Elmore

Between the Species

In this essay, I argue that contractualism, even when it is actually used to construe our moral duties towards non-human animals, does not do so naturally. We can infer from our experiences with companion animals that we owe moral duties to them because of special relationships we are in with them. We can further abstract that we owe general moral duties to non-human animals because they are the kinds of beings that we can have relationships with, and because of the capacities that make possible this relational capacity. This type of approach better explains our duties to non-human animals and …

The Gravel In Her Voice, Swiss (Kierra) B. Mccall

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This work explores the relationship between oral poetry and written poetry, and is written with a heavy blend of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This work seeks to interrogate the notion that there should inherently be a rigid dichotomy between written poetry and spoken word poetry, but rather aims to show there is a relationship of mutual seepage between the distinct entities. There is also an aim of interrogating the belief that within American English there are not a multitude of dialects that are, too, worthy of academic study and poetic focus. Upon defense, this collection serves as a language …

Signs Of Ghost Appearance In Short Stories In Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad (1936-1939): Semiotic Analisys, Rufaida Rufaida, Fajar Muhammad Nugraha

International Review of Humanities Studies

In 2018-2019 the production of the Indonesian ghost story is much in demand and favored, even in 2020 the ghost content on YouTube is still lively and salable in the Indonesian market. The existence of ghosts cannot be separated from the daily lives of Indonesians.The author is interested in exploring further how the signs of the emergence of a ghostly figure believed by the people in the colonial era. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method with an approach using the analysis of language semiotics from the perspective of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics theory. 5 ghost stories published by the …

Down At The Crossroads: Letters From The Regions Of Myself, Téo E. Chesney

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A collection of eight epistolary nonfiction essays by Téo Chesney concerned with the challenges of understanding the intersections of their identity as a Brazilian, transmasculine, adoptee. The letters contend with constructing new meanings of family, race, gender, and belonging. Through evocative imagined scenes and childhood fantasies, this collection can truly be called a personal mythology.

Global Exploration On Bibliometric Research Articles: A Bibliometric Analysis, Nisrutha Dulla, Sugyanta Priyadarshini, Sumita Mishra, Sukanta Chandra Swain

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Objective Bibliometric analysis is one of the profound instruments to measure the research output quantitatively based on geometrical and statistical evaluation. The objective of the current study is to provide structural overview of the voluminous research work done so far via bibliometric analysis to access the significance of this tool in academic research.

Methods A bibliometric analysis is performed by extracting 842 documents from Scopus database in CSV form from 2000 till April 5, 2021. The retrieved data analyzed via Vos viewer reveals about the significantly contributing authors, countries, author keywords, cited references, total link strength, and co-occurrence of author …

Revisiting Prehistoric Archeological Sites: Envisioning First Built Environments To Repossess Geographically Specific Approaches In Architecture, Alisa Mohammad Kheir Abdulghany, Marwan Halabi, Maged Youssef, Bahaa El Dine Abou El Khoudoud

BAU Journal - Creative Sustainable Development

Since Prehistoric times, architecture had been a human response to an occurring natural setting. Starting from places of dwelling to buildings that no longer only serve physical requirements for survival. Architectural languages were approached initially as an expression of culture, evolution, and growth of a community within a natural setting. This response resulted in the creation of built environments, humanity’s decision to become sedentary. This decision took place in the Late Stone age, a key phase in our timeline. First built environments were born in a time known as the Neolithic revolution, which shown itself as humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer …

Empathy And Fairness In Nonhuman Primates: Evolutionary Bases Of Human Morality, Colt Halter

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

Darwin offered an evolutionary perspective on the origins of human morality, suggesting that humans share a biological foundation with nonhuman primates. This paper reviews the current literature on moral and prosocial behaviors of nonhuman primates, specifically examining whether nonhuman primates exhibit behaviors that are typical of empathy and fairness. The literature documents that nonhuman primates exhibit empathetic behaviors regarding emotional contagion and sympathetic concern. There is also evidence that nonhuman primates have a sense of fairness, seen in their reciprocal behaviors and aversion to inequity. Taken together, this suggests that there are evolutionary roots of morality, lending empirical support to …

Teaching Eighteenth-Century English Coercion, Seduction, And Consent In Twenty-First Century India: Eliza Haywood’S Love In Excess, Sumi Bora

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Classroom teaching informed by the #MeToo movement is widespread and diverse. This paper evolves from classroom discussion with Third Semester English Major students at Lokanayak Omeo Kumar Das College, Dhekiajuli, Assam, India. The paper engages itself with #MeToo Movement and scrutinizes the depiction of seduction in Eliza Haywood’s novel Love in Excess. The paper records the students’ connections between Haywood and their own desire to build consciousness among the marginalized section of women so that they voice issues of harassment in any form.

Volume Cxxxx, Number 8, May 28, 2021, Lawrence University

The Lawrentian

No abstract provided.

“We Planted Rice And Killed People:” Symbiogenetic Destruction In The Cambodian Genocide, Andrew Woolford, Wanda June, Sereyvothny Um

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In recent years, genocide scholars have given greater attention to the dangers posed by climate change for increasing the prevalence or intensity of genocide. Challenges related to forced migration, resource scarcity, famine, and other threats of the Anthropocene are identified as sources of present and future risk, especially for those committed to genocide prevention. We approach the connection between the natural and social aspects of genocide from a different angle. Our research emanates out of a North American Indigenous studies and new materialist rather than Euro-genocide studies framework, meaning we see the natural and the social (or cultural) as inseparable, …

Biodiversity Monitoring And Volunteer Motivations: A Case Study On The Imagined Communities Of Citizen Scientists In Meinung, Taiwan, Serena May Calcagno

Master's Projects and Capstones

The Asia Pacific’s biodiversity is under threat. One significant step that can improve conservation is gathering data on what species exist in different areas over time, which can provide insight into ecosystem health. This is especially important in biodiversity hotspots, where high levels of endemism and anthropogenic risk overlap. Though it is one of the few places in the Pacific not classified as a biodiversity hotspot, Taiwan has an unusually high saturation in terms of biodiversity data points. Investigating the motives of biodiversity monitoring volunteerism is already a topic of growing scholarly interest, but relatively few studies have focused on …

Mixed (F)Ixed Messages, Lauren A. Verrett

LSU Master's Theses

Many individuals have an understanding that our lives have a timeline, and this timeline is full of objectives that we perceive as absolutes. Through personal observations it has become apparent that there are many amazing men and woman that are stagnant because they were raised to believe that meeting these goalposts are a priority. In an age of individualism, it is evident that every individual has control of their own life through their actions. However, in this same age of technology and social media, the anxiety of not meeting certain requirements or standards is even more apparent than previous generations. …

Body/Mind:Matter, Mary Ellen Ratcliff

LSU Master's Theses

Body/Mind:Matter presents the unfiltered experiences of living in a period of momentous instability. Three life-sized figurative sculptures stage my emotional journey towards mindfulness as a direct response to the pandemic and my growing concern for our collective future. A winding network of crocheted yarns and growing vines interweave the troubled figures to signify our complex dependencies upon one another and our environment.

The condition of the encumbered bodies is a result of the worried mind. Revitalized matter proposes reconciliation by introducing a sense of hope; decaying surfaces reveal new life; fused wires hold up under immense pressure; and soft woven …

Wild Animal Suffering And The Laissez-Faire Intuition, Beka Jalagania

Between the Species

Are we required to assist wild animals suffering due to natural causes? The laissez-faire intuition (LFI) says that we are not. On this view, although we may have special duties to assist wild animals, there are no general requirements to care for them. In this article I critically examine the origins of the LFI and assess its reliability. In particular, I attempt to provide answers to the questions such as how people who have come to endorse this intuition form it and whether it is a genuine moral intuition. I conclude that the LFI is the result of various external …

Making Meaning Of The Family's Immigrant Experience, Distress, And Help-Seeking: A Critical Inquiry Of Mental Health Support For Second-Generation Korean Americans, Kristin Kim-Martin

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The Korean American community is a predominantly immigrant population with a long history of historical and cultural trauma, including the continued losses, hardships, and violence endured through the immigration process, that continues to impact the well-being and functioning of individuals and families today. Second-generation Korean Americans play critical roles in establishing and maintaining the livelihoods and security of their immigrant families; however, they have been underrepresented and under-researched within the literature on immigration and its effects on the mental health and help-seeking patterns of this population. Although there is strong evidence for the influence of culture in the intergenerational patterns …

Reflections From The In-Between: Visualizing The Mental Thresholds Of Dissociation, Katherine Virag

Theses - ALL

I am fascinated by the state of being in-between; by the mental spaces that are somehow neither here nor there, but also somehow both here and there. At a young age, I began to experience depersonalization and derealization, and this dissociated state left me feeling trapped somewhere on the threshold of reality and non-reality. My artistic practice is concerned with the psychological antitheses of dissociation – comfort vs discomfort, safety vs danger, and reality vs non-reality, and the continuum of space between these polarities. Often through large-scale installations, I create a physical space for the viewer to enter. These spaces, …

The Art Of Reconstruction, Kristina Starowitz

Theses - ALL

The objective of this thesis paper is to highlight my artistic process, current projects, and research strategies emerging from my studio practice. First, this thesis describes and elaborates my practice of "reconstruction," the reasons I find it effective, and the personal history behind it. I also discuss the goals of my work and how I intend to carry it forward into the future. Throughout my work I seek to tell a story that resonates with my personal history, communicating to audiences both the vulnerabilities and transitions of life experience. My work invites the viewer into a collective space where the …

Immanent Technologies: Posthuman Digital Religion In America, John William Borchert

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation offers a posthuman theory of the digital mediation of religion, divided between theoretical chapters on posthumanism, ritual, and new media before two case studies: one on death, one on play. First developing conceptual relationships between posthumanism and religious studies and methodological connections between new media and ritual theories, it then asks questions in the playful and experimental ritual spaces of video games and the profoundly material and ecological spaces of digital mourning objects. For example: how do digital readouts on the health of a plant fed by cremains reposition living and dead bodies? Or, how do video games …

Tale As Old As...Feminism? The (Re)Making Of Beauty And The Beast, Cara Doreen Hardman

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I investigate Disney's positioning of the live-action Beauty and the Beast as feminist. Up to this point, Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast has both been hailed as presenting audiences with an empowered princess and criticized for the Beast's aggressive behavior and the positioning of Belle as a woman meant to propel the Beast's story forward. I provide an assessment of the gender politics depicted in Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast, and I problematize the tendency to classify texts as either entirely feminist or utterly antifeminist. As a whole, this thesis provides an in-depth analysis of …

The Art Of Reconstruction, Kristina Starowitz

Theses - ALL

The objective of this thesis paper is to highlight my artistic process, current projects, and research strategies emerging from my studio practice. First, this thesis describes and elaborates my practice of “reconstruction,” the reasons I find it effective, and the personal history behind it. I also discuss the goals of my work and how I intend to carry it forward into the future. Throughout my work I seek to tell a story that resonates with my personal history, communicating to audiences both the vulnerabilities and transitions of life experience. My work invites the viewer into a collective space where the …

Situationships: Creating Situations And Relationships For And With Material, Catherine Spencer

Theses - ALL

The ability to heal, adapt, and evolve is essential to thriving within new circumstances. These characteristics, which are so easily observed in nature, have been the visual guide to not only the methodology behind my practice but also in how I have learned to make sense of unimaginable emotional pain. By examining each visual and material ingredient that goes into my process, I reveal my imagined world and the systems of power that influence the “situationships” between each object. This paper aims to reflect the essence of my process and art, where chaos is embraced and the precarity of life …

Reflections From The In-Between: Visualizing The Mental Thresholds Of Dissociation, Katherine Virag

Theses - ALL

I am fascinated by the state of being in-between; by the mental spaces that are somehow neither here nor there, but also somehow both here and there. At a young age, I began to experience depersonalization and derealization, and this dissociated state left me feeling trapped somewhere on the threshold of reality and non-reality. My artistic practice is concerned with the psychological antitheses of dissociation – comfort vs discomfort, safety vs danger, and reality vs non-reality, and the continuum of space between these polarities. Often through large-scale installations, I create a physical space for the viewer to enter. These spaces, …