Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring Multicultural Competence Among Mental Health Workers When Providing Treatment To African American Males, Ashley Hightower

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

African American men experience disproportionately low rates of mental health service utilization and often report negative perceptions of mental illness. Despite documented mental health disparities, limited research has explored how mental health workers understand and apply multicultural competence when providing treatment to African American men. Grounded in the theory of planned behavior and social identity theory, the purpose of this qualitative descriptive phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of mental health workers regarding multicultural competence in their work with African American men. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with seven mental health workers recruited through purposive sampling. Interview …

Protective Factors Among African American Offspring Of Teen Parents, Janelle Ewing

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Adolescent pregnancy remains a major public health and social issue, but research has primarily focused on risk factors and not the protective factors that contribute to resilience among those who successfully break the cycle. This qualitative study explored protective factors that African American adult offspring of teenage parents identified as supporting them in avoiding teenage pregnancy and parenthood. The study was theoretically grounded in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which was used to explore the role of influence across environmental systems in participants’ developmental outcomes. The primary research question was “How do African American adult offspring of teenage parents describe the …

Unsex Me Here: Gendered Psychology In Shakespeare's Major Tragedies And Comedy, Md. Abu Bakkar

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This study examines how gender shapes psychological experience across five of Shakespeare’s major plays: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Existing scholarship treats Shakespeare’s tragic women, tragic men, and comic heroines as separate problems; this article asks whether one framework connects them. Its starting point is the reversal in psychological positions between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: he resists killing on moral grounds and then grows recklessly violent, while she plans the murder with cold resolve and is later overwhelmed by guilt. The study asks whether this pattern recurs more broadly, and why. Drawing …

Ai-Supported Analysis Of Jury Deliberation Impact Factors, Jennifer Siciliani Phd

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students conduct a controlled, two-run generative AI jury simulation to examine how a single socio-legal variable affects simulated jury deliberation. They compare and manually code the AI-generated outcomes against peer-reviewed human jury research to evaluate the model’s accuracy, limitations, and potential biases.

Harmonicthreads: A Formative Evaluation Of A Fabric-Based Digital Musical Instrument Toward Inclusive Music-Making, Ellie Nguyen, Franceli L. Cibrian

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Background:

Inclusive music-making requires instruments that support varied bodies, abilities, musical backgrounds, and forms of participation. Digital musical instruments provide diverse approaches to sound creation, and fabric-based interfaces offer an alternative interaction modality that may support participation for some users and contexts. Their tactile and deformable properties enable forms of interaction that differ from conventional rigid or screen-based controllers and may offer inclusive possibilities in particular settings.

Objective:

This paper presents HarmonicThreads as a formative interaction-design case of a fabric-based digital musical instrument. The prototype explores how tactile cues, fabric deformation, projected visual feedback, and assisted accompaniment can support low-barrier …

Fast Discovery Of Motivic Patterns In Symbolic Music Via Lossy Compression, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

Generative systems that react to live musicians require rapid analysis of musical data, which rules out deep learning models: they cannot be trained within the time constraints of live performance. But because analysis results are often transformed before use, we are free to reduce the parameters that undergo transformation to a small set of primitive states. We address this coincidence of constraint and opportunity with an algorithm for online discovery of maximal musical motives that achieves speed through lossy compression: the pitch and inter-onset-interval deltas for all pairs of events in a potential motive are reduced to two-bit values, conceptualized …

"Our Heritage From The People", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Writings

A lecture presented to a history seminar at the University of North Alabama in March of 1979. The lecture addresses the geography and geology of North Alabama, removal of indigenous people, cultural influence of settlers, and development of the Tennessee Valley into contemporary settlements.

Short Reflections: Production Of Mega Fäuna's Lp Softmore (2026), Guy Fenech

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This reflective practice journal documents my role as producer, recording engineer and mixer for softmore, the debut album by Sydney-based band Mega Fäuna, released through Blossom Rot Records in March 2026. The central focus of the reflection is the production methodology developed for the project, particularly an extensive pre-production phase using a compact, mobile recording setup that allowed compositional and arrangement decisions to be tested before entering a professional studio. This approach is considered against the five-day tracking session at Stranded Rec Studios, and against overdub sessions completed in a non-studio environment using contemporary restoration software to address environmental …

Impact And Utilization Of Asl Lab Spaces In University Settings, Nathan J. Dutra, Michele Vincent

Journal of Interpretation

American Sign Language (ASL) is a challenging yet rapidly growing language taught at both secondary and higher education levels. Despite its increasing popularity, there is limited literature on utilizing ASL labs as learning centers. This quantitative study examines the implementation of a new ASL lab at a large four-year university in California. It investigates the factors influencing participation, the motivations behind students' involvement, and their perceptions of the lab's effectiveness. Results indicate significant associations between course modality, instructor influence, and lab participation. The study suggests that ASL labs function as cultural and educational spaces that promote visibility of Deaf culture …

Shadowless In A World Of Shadows: Diminishing The Refraction Of Light Via Nanoconfinement, Vuk Uskoković

Administration and Staff Articles and Research

This paper presents a physicochemical study that merges science and art in the context of exploring the refractive index of water under nanoconfinement. Using a simple and economical experimental approach, it is shown that confinement within the micropores of a zeolitic structure, characterized using electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction, paradoxically reduces the refractive index of water, bringing confined water droplets closer to a shadowless state. Counterintuitively, water under confinement, as indicated by vibrational spectroscopic analyses performed in the transmittance mode in the IR range and reflectance mode in the near-IR range, exhibits greater structural freedom than in its bulk or …

Comparing User Experiences Of Teleportation, Slide-Walk, And Walk-In-Place Locomotion Across Two Virtual Reality Games, Shane L. Rogers, Brett Ryder, Stephen Palmisano

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Virtual reality (VR) locomotion methods differ substantially in their implications for usability, presence, and comfort. Although previous research has compared a range of locomotion techniques, relatively little attention has been given to whether locomotion experiences generalise across different VR experiences. The present study compared user experiences of three locomotion methods (teleportation, slide-walk, and walk-in-place) across two VR applications (Nature Treks VR, an exploration-focused environment, and Ancient Dungeon VR, an action-oriented game). Sixty-three participants were recruited, with analyses based on the forty-five participants who completed all study conditions. During each 10-min condition (comprising a 2-min familiarisation period followed by an 8-min …

The Analysis And Conservation Of Hodínöhšö:Ni:H Basketry At The Seneca- Iroquois National Museum, Elena L. Best

Art Conservation Master's Projects

This master’s project documents the analysis, conservation, and collaborative stewardship of Hodínöhšö:ni:h basketry at the Seneca–Iroquois National Museum (SINM), housed within the Onöhsagwë:dé Cultural Center. The project represents a continued partnership between SINM and the Garman Art Conservation Department at SUNY Buffalo State University and addresses both immediate conservation needs and long-term collection care planning.

The multi-phased study included: (1) a condition survey of 115 mold-affected baskets (2) elemental analysis of selected pigments and materials using handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF); (3) microbiological sampling and preliminary identification of fungal species present on select baskets; (4) the development and implementation of a …

A More Perfect Union: An Examination Of The Film, Salt Of The Earth, And The American Labor Movement, Amber Montgomery

Say Something Theological: The Student Journal of Theological Studies

This paper examines the film, Salt of the Earth, which is based on the actual events of the Mine-Mill strike that took place in Hanover, New Mexico, in 1949. The strike was organized by Mexican workers with the help of their wives. The fight was over workers’ rights, as well as their dignity. At the same time, another fight was taking place. The wives of these miners were also seeking equality within their marriages, serving as a parallel narrative to the strike. To understand the environment at this time, this paper will also analyze American politics during this period, …

Why Did Medieval Chroniclers Copy Other Histories?, Christopher Berard

Humanities Program Faculty Publications

Medieval chroniclers sometimes borrowed entire passages from earlier works, adapting old words to describe new people and events. Christopher Berard examines this understudied practice and shows how such borrowing could be more than a shortcut, allowing writers to draw meaningful connections between the past and their own times.

Vibe Diggers: The Sampling Of Brazilian Music In Hip-Hop, Romulo De Carvalho Moraes Barbosa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the trend of musical borrowings of 1970s MPB (música popular brasileira) by contemporary American hip-hop producers, especially in terms of what they have called a “Brazilian vibe.” A lot has been said about sampling already from legal, sociological, and historical points of view, but less has been said about its aesthetic procedures, and even less about the wider implications of a tendency for using transnational sources. In the case of MPB, hip-hop artists seem to understand the music they sample through an often vague, intuitive representation, which fuses qualities of those recordings with an intersubjective mood, a …

Possibilities Of Being: Black Women's Storytelling As Archival Undoing, Dasharah Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a discursive genealogy of Black women’s storytelling, positioning its art and aesthetics as a form of colonial archival undoing. Each chapter explores how transmission and documentation can transform—and circumvent—traditional colonial archives. Beginning at the start of the twentieth-century to present, this project traces the discursive legacies of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Staceyann Chin, examining each writer as a site of becoming as they individually (and collectively) seek to articulate an expansive idea of a Black world that constitutes a broader understanding of Black freedom. They each share a common goal of creating a …

Analyzing Harmony In Bulgarian And Bulgarian-Influenced Choral Arrangements From The Radio To The Screen, Annie Beliveau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates developments in arrangements and compositions made for Bulgarian choirs between 1950 and 2025. Arrangements from Bulgaria’s communist period (1944-1989), when musical radio broadcasts were tailored to promote nationalist sentiment, eventually reached the ears of foreigners on the other side of the Iron Curtain via recordings and ensemble tours. These obrabotki (arrangements of folk tunes) became popular in the “world music” boom of the 1980s, and foreign composers soon began to create new compositions for Bulgarian choirs to sing on albums and in scores for film, television, and video games. Over time, the uses of Bulgarian choir in …

Panopticism And Pan-Oticism: Sound-Power From Foucault To Deleuze, Eric Dillenberger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From Muzak to long range acoustic devices (LRADs), the contemporary proliferation of sonic technologies for governing moods, behaviors, and potentialities complicates the virtual absence of sound within Michel Foucault's primarily visual modality of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish, exemplified by his central conceptual model of the panopticon. This thesis develops the corollary concept of pan-oticism to theorize the transformation of sound-power and its political function within administered sonic ecologies from Foucault's disciplinary societies to Gilles Deleuze's societies of control. Within the enclosed spaces constitutive of disciplinary societies, sound-power remains subordinated to Foucault's visual logic of panopticism, extending …

Performing Hybridity: Solo Cello Works By Diasporic Korean Composers Isang Yun And Younghi Pagh-Paan, Sarah Song

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation follows my personal exploration of solo cello works by Korean diasporic composers Isang Yun and Younghi Pagh-Paan. While the study of postwar Korean music has long been discussed within an “East meets West” framework, my research aims to abandon such divisive binaries and explores the activity between two musical cultures during learning and performance. By engaging with a wide network of meaning (e.g., score-based, extra-musical knowledge, historical context), I track cumulative layers of discovery while considering a multitude influences from Korean and Austro-Germanic cultures as a second-generation Korean American. My methodology includes a reflective approach categorized in two …

Object (Im)Permanence: Toward A Hauntology Of The Violin, Pala Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Object (Im)permanence goes looking for the violin’s ontological uncertainties, its persistent historical specters, and its relation to things not fully present, no longer, or yet to come. Drawing on the history of the author’s own instrument as an inherited object, this study explores the violin’s strangest affordances: its capacity to hold a psychic charge, sustain absent presence, remotely activate somatic memory, and invite reciprocal relationality. Adapting the Derridean concept of “hauntology” as a framing for the violin’s spectral vitality, Object (Im)permanence imagines how a hauntology of the violin can account for its ontological uncertainties, logic of absent presence, and persistent …

Curated Spaces: Cognition By Design, Sydney Harvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Curated Spaces: Cognition by Design” is a dissertation that considers the connection between designed spaces and cognition. This work combines philosophy of mind and aesthetics. The dissertation introduces the term “Curated Cognition”, which builds on the concept of situated cognition ( Brooks, 1991; Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman,  2003;  Sterelny, 2010; Krueger, 2015; Colombetti, 2020 ). The dissertation argues that the environment is essential to cognition, and all environments are curated; therefore, the way we think, feel, and act is curated as well. Some non-human animals may inhabit worlds that are not curated. For example, an octopus may find shelter in …

Modeling Large Language Model Cognition, Eleni Angelou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project builds three core directions in a philosophy of cognitive science for large language models (LLMs): 1) interpreting LLM behavior, 2) analyzing the system in terms of Marr’s three levels, and 3) mapping the correspondence between behavioral outputs and the internals of the system. It consists of the following three chapters accordingly:

Dennettian Stances and Large Language Models

The aim of this chapter is to argue that there are convincing grounds for applying Dennett’s framework of stances to LLMs against worries that doing so produces “counterfeit people”. After introducing the intentional and design stances, I take sycophancy as a …

Modern Youth Or Moral Decadence: Discourses On South Korea’S “Youth Culture” In Magazines Of The Late 1960s And Early 1970s, Thibaut Diverchy

Asia Pacific Perspectives

The cultural phenomenon known as “youth culture” (ch’ŏngnyŏn munhwa) emerged in South Korean society at the turn of the 1970s. It encompasses Western fashion trends, music genres, leisure and nightlife. Labeled as a foreign and decadent trend by the authorities, this so-called counterculture was the target of repeated crackdowns. It is sometimes perceived as a force of protest or resistance, but it had more ambiguous relations to the regime. Popular entertainment magazines such as the Sunday Seoul or the Chugan Kyŏnghyang helped propagate youth culture and provided resources about new trends to young people, but also kept a certain distance …

Theology As The Queen Of The Sciences? Kuyper, Bavinck, And Dooyeweerd, Steve Bishop, Renato Coletto

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Finding Home: How Richard Mouw And Dordt's Community Healed My Heart, Brad D. Hickey

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Brooding Upon The Waters: A Memoir Of Farming, Fishing, And Failure In America's Lost Landscape (Book Review), Abby De Groot

Pro Rege

Reviewed Title: Brooding Upon the Waters: A Memoir of Farming, Fishing, and Failure in America's Lost Landscape by Howard Schaap. Slant Books, 2025. 238 pp. ISBN: 9781639822096.

Model-Theoretic Arguments In Philosophy, Peter Susanszky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on model-theoretic arguments in philosophy, especially those of Quine, Davidson, and Putnam. In the first part, to ground the debate, I give a rigorous introduction to the salient parts of first-order model theory. I start the second part by giving an introduction to Quine's philosophy, and how the model-theoretic arguments fit into it. After considering how Donald Davidson adopted the Quinean lesson, I move on to Putnam's model-theoretic arguments. Putnam's spin on these model-theoretic considerations significantly departs from Quine and Davidson, while retaining many of the core ideas. Most importantly, I argue that the target of Putnam's …

Theoretical Analysis And Performance Interpretation In Thomas Adès’S Traced Overhead, Han Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While many post-tonal composers avoid any inkling of tonality by embracing dissonance or breaking tonal resolutions, Thomas Adès does not shy away from the traditional harmonies that strongly relate to tonal music, such as the circle of fifths, major and minor triads, and the horn-call motif, but adopts several intervallic systems that govern all the notes, including aligned cycles, parsimonious voice leading, and the twelve-tone aggregate.

To examine how Adès uses these intervallic systems to repurpose traditional harmonies, this dissertation presents a close tonal analysis of his solo piano work Traced Overhead. Integrating historical, pianistic, and extramusical contexts, this …

The Game Within: An Anthropological Approach To Games And Play, Nehal Maged Mohamed

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is based on an eighteen-month ethnography of El Ghawasa, an Egyptian play-based organization that designs educational games, tools, and services. Claiming that El Ghawasa, with its ethos of play, seeks to create an alternative to the capitalist corporate structure. Through tracking how this organization navigates ruptures, negotiates constraints, and experiments with different practices and internal restructuring, I explore the possibilities and limitations of El Ghawasa, while attempting to resist absorption by the very system it opposes. I ask: when the rules keep changing (while the logic of the capitalist corporate structure remains the same), and the boundaries of …

Investigating How Personal Values Shape Tourism Experiences: A Case Study Of The Irish National Stud And Gardens, Amy Monahan, Ann T. Conway

International Journal of Tour Guiding and Visitor Attraction Research

This Paper explores the relationship between personal values and tourism experiences  that are  satisfying. A case study of the Irish National Stud and Gardens was undertaken in order to explore this concept. Interviews were conducted to investigate how qualities of the attraction appealed to the visitors’ personal values, thereby enhancing the overall visitor experience. A set of personal values were identified which were specific to the destination. The research demonstrated how an understanding of personal values can assist attractions with various aspects of their operations, with context specific recommendations provided at the end. This approach was taken was taken to …