Digital Commons Network^™

Otherness And The Trinity: Toward A Critical Reimagining Of Christian Divinity From A Postcolonial Ethos, Taylor Muma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I address the Trinity’s potential as an emancipatory relational archetype in the philosophy of religion, while at the same time recognizing the complicity of Christian doctrine in colonial conquest. My dissertation will be a reimagining of trinitarian theology as an ecotonal paradigm of multiplicity and alterity that provides a generative means of moving beyond the enmeshment of divinity with constructs of mastery.

The post-structuralist and postcolonial methodologies in this project emerge from the work of such scholars as Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Gloria Anzaldúa. They foreground critical ideations of otherness and multiplicity in ways …

Reseeding Relations: Comparing Museum And Indigenous Seed Sharing & Rematriation Protocols In The Midwestern United States, Madeline G. Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) paved the way for the repatriation of ancestors and certain cultural objects to Indigenous communities, museums still struggle to address other forms of cultural returns. Heritage seeds, those which hold cultural significance to Indigenous peoples, held within museum collections perpetuates the colonization of Indigenous lifeways. This research examines rematriation as an Indigenous form of cultural return better suited to address these needs than limited repatriation models. I analyze how museums are working to create rematriation processes for their collections which reflect diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies through a three-tiered approach: …

Becoming The Phoenix: Black Women’S Experiences And Leadership Growth Through Humanized Black Feminist Action Learning, Jovan Keith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the workplace learning experiences of Black women professionals in corporate leadership contexts. Leadership development programs often rely on standardized models that overlook the lived realities shaping Black women’s professional experiences. In response, this study introduced Humanized Black Feminist Action Learning, a leadership development intervention that integrates Black feminist scholarship, humanizing pedagogy, and critical action learning.

Using a qualitative case study design, the research examined a cohort of midcareer Black women professionals who participated in four facilitated learning sessions structured around workplace dilemmas. During these sessions, participants engaged in reflection, dialogue, and action as they examined workplace dynamics …

Defying Impossibility: Critical Qualitative Reorientations To Black Lgbtqia+ Sense Of Belonging, Olivia H. Hunte

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Belonging is a human need central to survival and can be cultivated within all spheres of life. Social environments are vital for experiencing a sense of belonging. In some social environments, Black LGBTQIA+ people encounter greater impediments to their daily lives with consequences for survival, including threatening their belonging needs. Within the United States, systems of oppression create and inform conditions within social environments that can potentially thwart pathways to belonging for Black LGBTQIA+ people. Thus, fulfillment of belonging needs for Black LGBTQIA+ people is one of nuance, pain, resilience, hope, harm, trauma, resistance, and healing; scant research is available …

Women And Wars: Understanding Women’S Political Empowerment Post- Conflict In France, Lebanon, And Sierra Leone, Alaa S. Sayed

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to discusses how conflict can be a time of change for women and how conflict can be a crucial aspect for change and improvement. Conflict provides a chance for the women to witness and experience the disruption of gender roles, which was a common practice during wartime, as women were placed in roles that were not officially theirs, according to what society adheres to or ascribes as acceptable roles for women. The conflict is presented as a “window” of opportunity. However, the reality of the situation of this “window” is not uniform across all post-conflict societies; the …

Marginality As Lens: Abū Ḥāmid Al-Qudsī’S Writings And Mamluk Urbanism, Moaaz Lafi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis takes the life and works of Abū Ḥāmid al-Qudsī (also known as al-Maqdisī), a Shāfiʿī jurist and Cairene historian who died in the late ninth/fifteenth century, as a point of entry into a central question: how was knowledge about the city produced in Mamluk Cairo? Addressing this question requires engagement with the multiple contexts, political, social, and religious, that shaped and conditioned the production of knowledge in that period. Moreover, a critical engagement with the author’s own biography, through a careful reading of biographical dictionaries and historical chronicles, is essential for uncovering further dimensions of how such knowledge …

Breaking The Silence: A Content And Expert Analysis Of The 2025 Ramadan Series Lam Shamseya's Framing And Subversion Of Child Sexual Abuse Discourse In Egypt, Maya Abouelnasr

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how the 2025 Egyptian TV series Lam Shamseya served as a sociocultural intervention and awareness platform for reframing and subverting the typical child sexual abuse (CSA) discourse in Egypt. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study triangulates framing theory and two complementary tools of the critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the circuit of culture model through a scene-level content analysis of 304 scenes across all 15 episodes of the series and ten semi-structured interviews with media experts, media practitioners, and psychologists. Key findings include reported corroboration of subversion of traditional tropes and archetypes, as well as reframing of …

Will Beauty Save The Brain? Exploring The Relationship Between Eudaimonic Reels Exposure And Egyptian Gen Z'S Mind And Motivations, Petra Zaky

Theses and Dissertations

Social media entertaining content includes a mixed bag of the meaningful and the trivial. For Generation Z, whose favorite daily entertainment is shallow yet funny short-form videos (reels), there is often an invisible price paid. The loss of ability to watch long meaningful videos, distractedness from self, “Brain Rot”, glamorizing of hedonism are among the maladies left behind the attractive rabbit hole of their daily media diet. This study explores the relationship between exposure to meaningful reels, in contrast to pleasurable reels, and Gen Z’s reflective thinking, “Brain Rot” symptoms, motivation to watch long meaningful videos and life motivations between …

The Case For The Exclusion Of Exclusion: Intellectual Property, Masculine Legal Reason, And The Ethics Of Care, Ragya Shoukry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that current legal ideals of objectivity and neutrality are historically gendered and inseparable from the development of capitalist property relations and imperial expansion. It traces origins that begin with early modern witch hunts and Francis Bacon’s empiricism, where a new “scientific rationality” emerges alongside intensified patriarchal violence. The thesis then examines John Locke’s labour-based justification of property and the figure of the rational individual, showing how this framework legitimizes enclosure, dispossession and colonial appropriation under the guise of improvement and development. Building on this foundation, the analysis turns to moral psychology and how its allegedly universal stage …

Making, Remaking: India’S Museums And The Imagination Of Citizenship, Deepti Mulgund

Socio-Legal Review

The National Museum of the Indian republic, in Delhi, is slated to overtake the Louvre, Paris as the largest museum in the world, as per its expansion plans. Elsewhere in the country, too, a growing interest in seen in displaying, showcasing and deploying culture in the form of mega museums, many backed by private funding. The interest and investment in museum-making, only seems to be growing. Since at least the late-18^th century, the art museum in modern polities has been tasked with the project of schooling peoples into citizens. Evaluating the premise that museums produce citizens, this article reflects …

Documenting Death: A Question Of Sovereignty In The Cairo Geniza, Thomas Adkins

Theses and Dissertations

How can death offer a case study for the question of sovereignty in eleventh to thirteenth century Egypt as it was performed by sovereigns, officials, and subjects alike, and, in this context, how can the documentary practices preserved in the Geniza be understood as an instrument to perform sovereignty? This thesis uses death as a case study in the same way that scholars of the medieval Islamic world have studied taxation, administration, and ceremonials to understand sovereignty as it was performed by the state, officials, and subjects. This performance of sovereignty by each implicated actor left a rich documentary trail, …

"Il-Lingwa Tal-Kċina": The Advocacy For The Maltese Language, 1930s–1940s, Elisabeth Fiorini

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In this project I investigate the understudied history of Malta and the Maltese language, focusing on the period of the Second World War. Going through newspaper archives and survivors’ accounts, I untangle the complex cultural shifts occurring in the British Colony of Malta, specifically with language. I argue that it was the intense bombing campaign of Fascist Italy––and later Nazi Germany––that led to the Maltese people to finally reject the Italian language and embrace their indigenous language along with British influences. This paper goes into the complex political and colonial history, looking at the British led breakdown of the diglossic …

Lack Of Effects Of Autistic Traits On Adjunct Control Processing, Alyssa Crezee

Theses and Dissertations

Autism has effects on social, communication, and information processing factors (American Psychological Association, 2022; Happé & Frith, 2006). Sentence processing is a type of information processing that synthesizes both discourse and local information (e.g., syntactic and morphological). This thesis explores potential effects of autistic traits on sentence processing in the context of adjunct control structures. In a two-part study, adult English L1 participants (n=118) were administered a self-paced-reading (SPR) task with comprehension and acceptability questions for task 1. Task 2 consisted of an online survey containing three standardized autism questionnaires: the Autism Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001), the Broad …

The Welfare System To Prison Pipeline In America: How Media, Policy, And Surveillance Extend The Reach Of Mass Incarceration Through Child Welfare Practices, Delaney A. Painter

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Scholarship across youth social policy, child welfare, media studies, and criminology has documented media driven moral panic, racial disproportionality in child welfare involvement, and foster-care-to-prison pathways as related but individual, distinct phenomena. Similarly, critical frameworks by Alexander and Ritchie trace how mass incarceration unfolds across marginalized communities, yet often begin analysis at points of formal criminal legal contact.

This paper builds on an integrated framework that identifies child welfare as a distinct and underrecognized branch of mass incarceration operating at an earlier stage of the life course. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, this analysis demonstrates how fear based media narratives shape …

The Verge, Reconsidered: Love, Salt, Seed, Time, Origin, Interweave––Triptychs In Conversation Across Time, Marna Hauk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Sparked particularly by the poetic and the emergent data conversation analysis from an earlier Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal article (Hauk & Kippen, 2020) piece, which discussed data from 2016, the author creates a contemporary “conversation” from visual and poetic material, in 2026, and imagines forward a further 10 years to 2036. The three-plated visual-poetic artworkings speak also back and forth across the verges of spacetimemattering, riding the dip and wave, tide and weave, of deeper time and meaning sensing, with visual and poetic material. The original article proposed collaborative workings with other researchers. This work imagines the artworkings and …

The Technology Of Tradition And Biology Of Narrative: New Analogies For The Study Of Homer And Epic, Eunice Kim

Open Access Fund Publications

In two separate, timely books Bozzone and Christensen draw from a wide range of scientific disciplines and modern parallels to consider how Homeric language and epic stories are in some ways living and alive. For Bozzone, who analyses the various formal features of Homer’s poetic technique by incorporating cognitive and linguistic frameworks, Homeric language is ‘living’ insofar as it operates on mechanisms analogous to those a speaker uses for natural languages and other kinds of speaking performances. Christensen, on the other hand, applies a series of biological analogies to epic poetry and imagines that the narrative of Homeric epic is …

Techwork: Developing And Validating A Reflective Tool For Impact-Aware Design, Sihui Wu, Marirena Kladeftira, Kim Helmersen, Gudela Grote

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Most assessments of technology impact occur only after its deployment, limiting the ability to address unintended social, cultural, and organizational effects. This paper introduces TechWork, a prospective and reflective tool for evaluating emerging technologies within existing work systems. Grounded in reflective practice tradition, socio-technical systems theory, and contemporary work design research, TechWork guides interdisciplinary teams through structured prompts and impact mappings to examine how their own design choices influence autonomy, skills, collaboration, and job demands. The tool was tested through design-education workshops in an architectural studio, applied to vernacular construction practices where embodied expertise and cultural knowledge are central to …

Opening Portals To The Posthuman: A Pedagogical Framework For Materializing Philosophy, Carlos Henrique Araujo De Aguiar

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper critiques dominant design pedagogies for their alignment with positivist and modernist paradigms, which limit design’s capacity for serious philosophical inquiry. It argues that Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) pedagogy offers an alternative philosophy, functioning as a powerful method for fomenting critical engagement by enabling students to materialize abstract concepts. Drawing on a case study from an undergraduate course on human-robot-cyborg relations, the paper employs the metaphor of 'portals' to analyse three thematic case studies. Each portal opens onto a distinct philosophical debate: the nature of reality and the self, the biopolitics of the body, and the networked subject. …

Learning From Inexperienced Users’ Early Engagement With Food Tracking, Isil Oygur, Saadet Tikac Andic

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Current food tracking applications are largely designed to support behaviour change among users who track their food intake to meet predefined goals. As a result, individuals who are curious about food tracking but do not have specific goals remain underserved, limiting the potential of these tools for preventive care. To address this gap, we conducted a three-phase interview study using an existing food journaling application as a probe to reimagine food tracking experiences for inexperienced users. Thirty-one participants used the app for 14 days and discussed their views on healthy eating, food practices, and their tracking experiences. Our analysis identified …

A Researcher And A Guide Talk Into A Paper: A Dialogue On Being Many Things At Once, Ranjani Balasubramanian, Shweta Srivastav

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper argues that the positionality of the practitioner-researcher often remains centered in the self-reflective question “Who am I?”, fixing identity at the core of a relational web. We propose shifting this inquiry toward “Who can I be?” and “Who can I be in relation?”, recognising identity as fluid, contextual, and co-constituted through relationships. The paper unfolds through a conversational method that unpacks the ongoing PhD research of the first author. The authors navigate this landscape of lived research and practice in dialogue with two simultaneously held identities - the Practitioner-Researcher and the Scholar-Provocateur. Drawing from decolonial praxis, we conceptualise …

Ddenso: An Evaluation-Driven Methodology For Information Visualisations, Michele Mauri, Elena Aversa, Anna Cattaneo, María De Los Ángeles Briones Rojas

DRS Biennial Conference Series

When designing Information Visualisations for Media and Information Literacy (MIL) initiatives, a significant challenge lies in ensuring that they effectively transmit and consolidate knowledge, particularly when the Information Visualisation literacy of the audience is unknown. Applying a Research through Design approach, this article describes a meta-process: the reflective and iterative path that led to the definition of DDENSO, a replicable design methodology for creating and evaluating Information Visualisations that allow for knowledge retention. Grounded in prior theoretical and practical experience in Information Design, DDENSO emerged through the development of the artefacts for a MIL exhibition exploring the social implications of …

Exploring Common Understandings And Bodily Experiences Of Vulnerability In Design Researchers In Sensitive Contexts, Bhakti Moghe, Roberta Antognini, Sofie Dideriksen, Zhuochao Peng, Francesca Toso, Maarten Houben

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design researchers are increasingly being exposed to stressors while empathizing with their participants such as feeling emotionally charged, leading them to feeling vulnerable. Currently, there is a lack of clear consensus on how this vulnerability arises and manifests, hindering both individual and collective awareness and support. To address this gap, we conducted an empirical investigation into the vulnerability of design researchers. We conducted exploratory workshops with PhD students working in the field of design research in sensitive settings. The workshops consisted of three approaches to understand researcher vulnerability: (1) Reflecting on individual and collective vulnerability, (2) Exploring embodied experiences, and …

The Memory Loom: Reweaving Curatorial Power Relations With Source Communities In Virtual Reality Cultural Heritage Exhibitions, Ning Zhao, Ziqiang He, Shijie Ming, Haopeng Yuan, Furui Sun, Ke Jiang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines how to redistribute curatorial power in VR heritage exhibitions by designing actionable governance mechanisms. We conceptualize VR heritage exhibitions as political curatorial infrastructures rather than neutral storytelling media. We employ a two-stage RtD framework: first building a baseline VR stage, then embedding two mechanisms: Parallel Weave (narrative authorship) and Asynchronous Governance Lock (publishing/veto rights). With N=32 participants, analysis reveals four tensions: (1) community narratives increased affective engagement and epistemic recognition, yet (2) parallel inclusion also risked narrative segregation; (3) a visible veto established accountable workflows, but (4) this power redistribution also transferred sociopolitical risk onto community representatives, …

Designing Motion Identity: Exploring The Aesthetic Expression Of Brand Style Through System Motion, Xinyi Xie, Yinman Guo, Zican Chen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study investigates how system motion enhances aesthetic experience and shapes users’ interpretation of brand style. Using Windows 11, macOS, and HarmonyOS as representative cases, the study analyses four categories of system animations through a motor-level framework comprising temporal, spatial, and transformational attributes. Twelve motion samples were coded, and participants evaluated each sample using perceptual adjectives. The results show that consistent attribute patterns across functional categories lead to stable aesthetic tendencies, while differences emerge from how each system repeatedly applies these attributes. These attribute biases create distinct perceptual profiles, indicating that motion can function as a subtle medium for expressing …

No One Knew. They Came. Exploring Photo-Elicitation In Societal Development, Jennie Schaeffer, Mira Karlsson, Andreea Strineholm, Erika Andersson

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Citizen dialogues strive for inclusivity but often exclude marginalized groups. New participatory and creativity-based approaches are needed to be evaluated and become a part of the skillset repertoire for public officials to foster an inclusive dialogue. This paper reflects on photo-based conversations as a dialogic method for societal development and inclusion. The results show that the method provides possibilities to creatively involve participants, strengthen relationships and open a space for diverse narratives between different actors in society. However, the challenges of internal exclusion, lack of strategies for impact, and the need to build competence in handling conflicting stories, without depoliticizing …

Enframing Creativity: Speculations On Design Education's Transformations In The Age Of Generative Ai, Alireza Sharifi, Michael Hohl, Fredrik Skatar

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The rapid advancement of AI technologies necessitates a shift from reactive adoption to speculative inquiry into long-term consequences for educational systems. Grounded in Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," this research examines the epistemology of AI in design education. Methodologically, it employs speculative futurology, integrating speculative design, critical design, and scenario planning to explore possible futures, culminating in a philosophical mapping framework based on Heidegger's critical stance. The findings reveal a critical temporal mismatch between rapid AI capability growth and slower educational adaptation, creating urgency for human-centered frameworks. The research concludes that design education's future depends on consciously cultivating Critical …

Reframing Practice: Architectural Design Research And The Expanding Role Of The Architect, Manuela Triggianese, Juan Sádaba, Lee Moreau, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Kees Kaan, Georg Vrachliotis, María Risueño

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Architecture extends far beyond the design of buildings and cities, engaging with environmental, technological, and societal challenges. As practice evolves, so must the research that supports it. This theme track examines architecture’s expanding role in collaboration, communication, and service, positioning it as a research-driven discipline and a tool for inquiry, innovation, and responsiveness to communities and stakeholders. Operating across systems, social processes, and technological infrastructures, architecture is increasingly understood as an interdisciplinary practice. The track strengthens Architectural Design Research by addressing its evolving methodologies and its role in knowledge production. Contributions explore co-creation, artificial intelligence, data as design material, and …

Playing With Possibility: Exploring Materiality, Affordances And Forms Of Participation Through Construction Play, Jesper Falck Legaard

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Material exploration is central to both play and design, where imagination unfolds through tactile and social engagement. This study examines how materials participate as agents in creative exploration through three video-recorded construction-play sessions involving children aged five to six. Using reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies three key findings: (1) expressive form elements augment material agency; (2) affordances are encountered through two distinct relational mechanisms — Affordance Emergence and Affordance Orientation — which mediate between imaginative states and material properties; and (3) participation shifts dynamically between contributing, cooperating, and collaborating. By clarifying how affordances bridge psychological engagement and material structure, …

Weaving Relational Dynamics: Civil Servant Agency In Service Design Collaboration, Annukka Svanda, Martina Čaić, Tuuli Mattelmäki

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines relational dynamics within a programmatic service design collaboration shaping public service development in Espoo, Finland. Over two years, a service design researcher collaborated with civil servants to co-create more inclusive employment practices. Drawing on iterative design interventions, observations, interviews, and informal everyday communications, reflexive analysis identifies three conditions that enabled collaborative design agency: relational alignment, infrastructuring coherence, and reflexive reconfiguration. These relational conditions highlight how civil servants actively advance design work and institutional learning. By bringing forward the concept of collaborative design agency, the study highlights how design in public services is an emergent capacity calling for …

Default Bodies: Challenging Gendered Norms In Fighting Games Through Participatory Design, Shalom Taiwo, Laura Pruszko

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The over-sexualisation of female characters in video games peaked in the 1990s and 2000s and fighting games have been slow to move away from it. Their reliance on visual exaggeration to convey identity and fighting style makes this harder to change. With 48% of players today being women, this raises questions about how these portrayals persist. This paper examines how participatory approaches can be used to explore how women players respond to these designs through a survey, a within-subject evaluation task, and a co-design workshop. Participants recognised exaggeration as part of the genre’s identity but criticised its association with sexualisation. …