Digital Commons Network^™

Disney Princess Films Representation Of Food And Their Effects On Teenage Girls' Eating Norms, Addison Benninghoff

InnovateHER Meeting 2026

Media portrayal obviously have some profound impacts on our society. The problem at hand is that there have been and will continue to be body image and eating habits linked to the media in teenage girls' lives. A mainstream example of this can be seen early on in young girls' lives when they are first exposed to princess films, which have representations of both femininity and the idealized female form. Disney maintains these body ideals whether the heroine is Asian, Scottish, African-American, or Native American.  How are these body ideals broadcast through eating habits? What messages about normative eating might …

Approval Motivations In Sharing Humorous Tiktok's, Mariam Al-Areedy

InnovateHER Meeting 2026

TikTok is a short-form video platform where users create and share content that is often centered around humor, trends, and everyday social experiences. In face-to-face interactions, people typically rely on immediate feedback to navigate conversations, often using approval seeking behaviors to gain positive reactions and rejection-avoidant behaviors to reduce the risk of negative judgement. While these motivations are well-established in in-person settings, less is known about how they function in digital environments like TikTok, where teens privately share humorous content without immediate social cues to guide their interactions. My general hypothesis was that both rejection avoidance and approval-seeking behaviors will …

The Influence Of Social Media On Body Image, Self-Esteem, And Eating Disorder Risk In Adolescent Females, Nestanet A. Molla

InnovateHER Meeting 2026

• This literature review explored how appearance-focused social media affects adolescent girls. The studies showed that social media is linked to body dissatisfaction, comparison behaviors, lower self-esteem, and unhealthy eating behaviors, especially when use is intensive, problematic, or strongly appearance-focused^1–4

• At the same time, protective factors such as media literacy, family support, and body-positive interventions may help reduce these negative effects^4,5

Politainment And Celebrity Officials In Online Journalism: A Study Of Kompas.Com And Public Discourse In Indonesia, Dewi Y. Cahyani

JURNAL KOMUNIKASI INDONESIA

This study examines how politainment shapes the news coverage of public officials with celebrity backgrounds (celebrity officials) in Indonesia's post-electoral governance context. Focusing on Kompas.com during the first six months of the Prabowo–Gibran administration, the study integrates theories and concepts of politainment, celebrity politics, and the public sphere to address a gap in global scholarship. Existing research has largely focused on Western democracies, electoral campaigns, and social media platforms, while paying limited attention to how politainment operates within professional online journalism in emerging democracies. Using a mixed-method approach that combines quantitative content analysis of 102 news articles with qualitative framing …

Improving Amber Alerts: Results From A National Experimental Study Of Wireless Emergency Alerts, Lauren B. Cain, Jeannette Sutton, Hugh Walpole, Micki Olson

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) are used to notify the public of abducted children. However, there is no established guidance for writing AMBER Alert WEAs, and the vast majority have been incomplete. Using three randomly assigned groups recruited via a Qualtrics survey panel, we test an incomplete message containing a link to additional information, which reflects baseline messaging practices, against complete ‘plain language’ messages written using the MEP Message Framework with and without links. We find that plain language messages outperformed the baseline message when participants did not click the link for outcomes including message understanding, belief, …

Corporate Sociopolitical Activism On Instagram: Brand Responses To Covid-19 And Black Lives Matter, Cynthia B. Hanson

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

No abstract provided.

From Chennai To Texas: Major League Cricket, Glocalization, And The Uber-Sport Assemblage, Glenn Houlihan

Journal of Global South Sport Studies

This article examines Major League Cricket (MLC), an American professional Twenty20 (T20) cricket franchise league which began in July 2023 with a sold-out match at Grand Prairie Stadium in Grand Prairie, Texas. The fans in attendance were predominantly immigrants from South Asia, a region where cricket is the dominant sport. MLC’s connection to South Asia, however, extends beyond domestic U.S. fandom, as four of the league’s six franchises are operated by Indian Premier League (IPL) teams. Here, the IPL is expanding operations into the U.S. market, leveraging the recognizable branding of the league’s teams to offer the nascent MLC a …

Tiktok And The Brain: Neuropsychological Correlates Of Short-Form Video Consumption, Caty Enders

Psychology ETDs

Short-form video platforms like TikTok have quickly become the fastest growing segment of social media, thanks to powerful algorithms serving up personalized content driven by large quantities of user data. This study investigates the neuropsychological correlates of digital media use, with a particular focus on TikTok and smartphone screen time among young adults. Combining correlational analyses and an experimental design (n = 49; n = 44 included in final sample), we examined the relationship between digital media use and cognitive and emotional functioning across multiple domains. Objective measures of digital media consumption (daily average screen time and time on TikTok) …

Advertising Influence On Climate Change News Coverage: A Comparison Of The New York Times And The Guardian, Natalie L. Hamren

Communication ETDs

This study examines how fossil fuel advertising may influence climate change coverage by comparing The New York Times, which publishes fossil fuel advertisements, and The Guardian, which has banned them. Drawing on the Hierarchy of Influences and Social Responsibility Theory, the study uses ethnographic content analysis by analyzing (n=104) articles between 2022 and 2025 to examine framing, source usage, tone, and emphasis. Findings indicate that The New York Times more frequently framed climate change through political and economic lenses and relied heavily on government and business sources. In contrast, The Guardian more often employed scientific framing, cited researchers, …

War Photography & The Limits Of Empathy, Andrea Shi

Student Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of photography, particularly war and poverty photography, has had massive implications for the level of vividness with which Americans are able to picture suffering beyond their doors. The mass atrocities that have occurred since the advent of photography – that is to say, the last 200 years – are so relentlessly circulated that they feel, sometimes, as an inevitable byproduct of human nature. It’s not surprising, then, that a lot of media theory and analysis reduce the dilemma of atrocity photographs to a psychological level. Do they numb us, or do they incite empathy? Are they a call …

The Dehumanization Of Nfl Players In The Media, Destiny D. Farley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative thesis aims to bridge the gap in sports journalism by humanizing National Football League (NFL) players, showcasing their lives outside of sports, and exploring their nuanced relationships with the media. NFL players are objectified in the press in a variety of ways, with some common themes including coverage of drafting/trading, performance statistics, salary/contracts, and their overall celebrification. Through an episodic visual narrative podcast, the project grants autonomy back to the players by providing them with a platform to showcase their personalities, discuss media experiences, and share untold stories. This podcast series—featuring a blend of A-roll and B-roll—immerses audiences …

Digital Society: Media And Mental Health, James P. Sims

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examines how contemporary media environments especially algorithmic, mobile, and socially interactive platforms are shaping attention, identity, emotional regulation, and mental health in a mediatized society. While research has documented rising levels of anxiety, depression, social comparison, compulsive media use, and fragmented communication patterns, much of the existing scholarship is quantitative and clinical, leaving a gap in how individuals experience these effects subjectively. This project combines literature grounded in media effects theory with a qualitative documentary film featuring lived-experience narratives from media users, clinicians, and scholars. The thesis argues that the psychological, social, and behavioral outcomes associated with digital …

A Cross-Cultural Analysis Of Mukbang Influencers In China And The United States: Food, Identity, And Cultural Values, Anni Zhang

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Mukbang, a type of online eating broadcast which originated in South Korea, has become a widely popular form of digital media practice across different platforms. Although existing studies have examined Mukbang from perspectives such as audience psychology, health concerns, and platform economies, fewer studies have focused on how Mukbang influencers communicate cultural meanings and identity through food-related media contents in different cultural contexts. To address this gap, this study conducts a cross-cultural analysis of Mukbang influencers in China and the United States, focusing on how food, identity, and cultural values are represented in digital media environments.

This research adopts an …

Devuélveme A Mi Walkman: A Deep Dive Into Chicano Culture, New Wave And Punk During The 80s In Los Angeles, Michellas Baca

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Throughout this creative thesis/magazine, I explore and capture the essence of Chicano culture in the 80s and the role music played, in its simplest form. This project is heavily inspired by my dad and our shared love for music. Growing up in the 80's, pop culture was all around me, constantly; so much so, I never thought twice about it. As I got older, he told me more stories about growing up in L.A. He told me about breakdancing on Venice Beach and riding his bike under the L.A. River bridge. He would tell me stories about parties and how …

Picture Of Health: Visual And Textual Gendered Ideals And Media Framing On Men’S Health And Women’S Health Magazine Covers, Gracie Marquez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Magazines play an influential role in shaping cultural understandings of health, fitness, and gender, yet differences emerge in how health is framed across media outlets. This study examines how Men’s Health and Women’s Health magazine covers construct and communicate gendered ideals of health through visual and textual elements. Guided by gender role theory and framing theory, this research explores how these magazines frame health in ways that reinforce expectations of masculinity and femininity. Using directed qualitative content analysis, magazine covers published between 2014 and 2024 were coded across visual and textual categories, and chi-square tests of independence were conducted to …

Hope, Incorporated: Welborn Hope As B.A. Botkin's "Promising" Oklahoma Poet, Cullen Whisenhunt

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In 1927, a letter by then-professor at the University of Oklahoma, Roy Temple House, was published in the Ada Evening News complimenting Ada, OK, poet Welborn Hope and suggesting Hope get in touch with folklorist and literary scholar BA Botkin, also an OU faculty member. That same year, Botkin published “Oklahoma Poets, Inc.,” in which he detailed what he believed to be the three stages of a state’s literary development: the pioneer stage, the popular rhymesters stage, and finally, the union of art and life (30-31). In 1935, Botkin presented a lecture in Tulsa in which he cited Hope among …

A Survey Of Health Professions Learners’ Attitudes Towards Social Media In Medical Education: A Substance Use Disorders Education Case Study, Gregory A. Jaffe, Sarah Lawson, William Leach, Mallika Kodavatiganti, Erin Avanzato, Katherine Fesperman, Heather Klusaritz

Department of Family & Community Medicine Faculty Papers

BACKGROUND: Social media is a ubiquitous part of the modern world and plays a key role in the dissemination of information. While utilizing social media for educational purposes has been repeatedly demonstrated as feasible, it has been underutilized in medical education and remains a critical opportunity to integrate microlearning and stigma reduction curricula.

METHODS: A cross-sectional survey on social media usage, attitudes, and beliefs was sent to medical and nursing students at two large academic institutions within Philadelphia. Descriptive statistics are reported, and non-parametric tests were utilized for exploratory analyses.

RESULTS: Health learners were low consumers of social media, reporting …

Lindenwood Digest, May 13, 2026, Lindenwood University

Lindenwood Digest

• Event & Date: The St. Charles County Executive Debate on June 2, 2026; the 2026 Assessment Summit on May 14, 2026; and the Seeing the Unseen session on May 18, 2026. 

• Geographic Grounding: J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts and the Lindenwood Learning Academy (LARC), Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri. 

• Key Honorees/Awards: Candidates Steve Ehlmann, Bill Eigel, and Jason Law; Assistant Registrar Julie Owens; Academic Service Representative Alexander Otto; Director Teresa Cole; Staff Admin Coach Brittany Brown. 

• Institutional Context: The Lindenwood University Employee Digest for May 13, 2026, details a modified summer distribution schedule and facilitates university-wide review of the …

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Incorporating The Use Of Puppets And Puppetry-Based Approaches In Nutrition: A Scoping Review Of Interventions, Basil H. Aboul-Enein, Nada Benajiba, Majd Jan, Sarah Ali Alasmari, Patricia J. Kelly, Stephen F. Gambescia, Elizabeth Dodge

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

Puppetry-based activities could serve as a low cost and manageable intervention in improving health-related outcomes. This review aims to identify the research to date and gaps in practice of the role and application of puppetry interventions in nutrition education. A scoping review was conducted using the PICOS framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, identifying studies across eight databases between January, 1980 and July, 2025.Twenty-five studies were identified, with the majority (n = 19) aimed at pre-school and school-aged children. Fifteen studies used quasi-experimental, pre-post designs. The use of hand and finger puppets was common, as well as videos and puppet theatre. …

“Una Vita In Maschera”: Exploring Modern-Day Venetian Carnival Through Photographs, Amy Hecht

Honors College Theses

This project aimed to explore the historical and cultural significance of Carnival in Venice, the festival preceding Lent that is characterized by a temporary breakdown of the social order. The main elements of Carnival include mask-wearing, elaborate costumes, and artistic showcases, especially theater and street performances. In particular, the 16th-century practice of commedia dell’arte is revived during the Carnival, featuring iconic masked characters and humorous storylines. In the current global political climate, where people are more divided than ever, Carnival is an escape from the drags of everyday life. Masses of tourists visit Venice during Carnival to experience the unique …

Shimmer Methodology: May 2026 Cultural Studies Association Of Australasia, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This webinar presents an overview of the contemporary state of creative-practice research and autotheory before introducing Shimmer, an emerging methodological framework developed through creative practice, postgraduate supervision, and reflective inquiry. The presentation argues that while creative-practice research has successfully established creative work as a legitimate form of knowledge production, and autotheory has legitimised lived experience as theoretical material, both traditions leave relatively under-theorised the embodied moment through which insight first emerges.

The significance of the work lies in its contribution to ongoing debates around embodiment, affect, intuition, and knowledge production within creative-practice research. Shimmer proposes a language for understanding …

The Brain Breakdown: Bringing Neuroscience To A Broader Audience, Katharine Buehrig

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Neuroscience is a rapidly growing field, which needs to continue becoming more accessible and understandable to younger generations. Expanding access to neuroscience through different modes, such as podcasts, brings the discipline to a broader audience. Podcasts allow listeners to follow an outlined learning path they can pursue on their personal timeline. High school students often do not have access to neuroscience specific materials within their standard science curriculum. To address this knowledge gap, I collected questions about neuroscience from high school students across four schools in the United States to develop an understanding about what they are interested in learning. …

Carrying Home Across Oceans: Embodied Adinkra Memory, Decolonial Resistance, And Diasporic Life Of Sankɔfa And Gye Nyame, Anthoniet Essien Christian

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I explore how Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, particularly Sankɔfa and Gye Nyame, function as living expressions of memory, spirituality, and belonging within diasporic life. Drawing on autoethnography, story circles conducted at Pentecost International Worship Centre (PIWC) in Syracuse, New York, and embodied experience, the study examines how these symbols move beyond decoration to become active tools for remembering, resisting, and reconnecting with ancestral knowledge. Through everyday practices such as dress, ritual, worship, and digital expression, Sankɔfa and Gye Nyame carry memory across generations and geographies, shaping how diasporic subjects understand home, identity, and faith. The research shows that …

Feminization, Fetishization, And Gender Hierarchy: How Trans Women Are Represented In Porn For A Cishetero Audience, May Van Linden

Theses - ALL

Trans people, especially trans women, are a highly-targeted minority group and suffer rapidly-increasing discrimination, often predicated on the notion that trans women are dangerous sexual deviants. Further, trans women are often fetishized in their day-to-day lives, regularly manifesting as abuse. At the same time, demand for porn featuring trans women has skyrocketed, but literature about trans women in porn remains extraordinarily lacking in both quantity and quality. My research critically examined how trans women are represented in mainstream internet pornography consumed by a cishetero audience. I performed textual analysis of internet porn featuring trans women through a theoretical lens of …

Persuasive Effects Of Paired Synthetic Images In Online Branding: A Comparative Study Using Elaboration Likelihood Model, Cancan Yu

Theses - ALL

The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in brand visuals has prompted interest in whether presenting synthetic images alongside real counterparts changes how consumers engage with and evaluate them. This between-subjects online experiment (N = 211) tested whether paired versus single presentation of synthetic and real brand images affected engagement and attitudes, including perceived trustworthiness and perceived attractiveness, using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). Results did not reveal that presentation format affects engagement, engagement predicts either attitudinal outcome, or format moderates the engagement-attitude relationship. The strong covariance between trustworthiness and attractiveness may reflect a holistic mode of brand evaluation or …

Who Really Cares: A Critical Textual Analysis Of Television Portrayals Of The Fictional “Black Lady Therapist” Post-Pandemic, Tiara Johnson

Dissertations - ALL

Given television’s capacity to shape audience perceptions (Bryant & Oliver 2009) and help our cultural understandings of mental health (McMahon-Coleman & Weaver, 2020), both academic and industry research on mental health depictions and stigmas on television have increased. However, with the growing crisis and need for mental healthcare within the Black community over the past 15 years, this research uses a critical qualitative textual analysis to explore television's portrayal of fictional Black Lady Therapist (BLT) as a main character, and how these depictions counter and support stereotypical depictions of the Black woman and how these depictions can be used to …

Agency At The End Of History: Time, Terrorism, And Technologies Of Innocence In Engaging The Far Right, Gabriel Gr Herring

Theses - ALL

This thesis explores the way political rhetorics of time, morality, and political violence play out in visual representations of the far right in the United States via maps. In Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time, Nomi Claire Lazar argues that governments and political movements use temporal-rhetorical frameworks to generate political legitimacy by associating their movement with time, which is generally understood as natural. I argue that every temporal-rhetorical frame also implies a set of moral codes which are understood to be materially true, despite the fact that our experiences of time are only ever aim-dependent and …

Rewriting The Script: Representations Of Virginity In Teen Dramedies (2019-2025), Sophia Elizabeth Condemi

Theses - ALL

Over the past three decades, youth sexual activity has steadily declined, with members of Generation Z (those born between 1997 to 2012) reporting lower rates of sexual activity than previous generations, and in many cases, delaying their first sexual experiences. This shift raises the question of whether contemporary teen television reflects these changes in sexual behavior. This thesis examines ten popular teen dramedies that aired between 2019 and 2025 on streaming video services to see whether new scripts surrounding virginity emerge or if traditional narratives persist. Using qualitative textual analysis guided by sexual script theory and relational dialectics theory, the …

Laughing Through The Pain: How Dark Humor Meme Culture Normalizes Collective Trauma Among Young Adults, Rusul Abbas

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This paper examines how young adults use dark humor memes to cope with collective trauma, and whether that humor helps people process painful experiences or gives them a way to avoid dealing with them. Using qualitative content analysis and Huntington's (2013) visual rhetoric framework, three memes from Instagram were analyzed across topics including the COVID-19 pandemic and school gun violence. The analysis found that dark humor memes do not function uniformly. Some help people name and sit with fear, while others package trauma in ways that make it easy to consume and just as easy to ignore. The paper argues …

Resilience In Recreation: Stories Of A Changing Climate, Casey L. Auberle

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

As the impacts of climate change become increasingly prevalent, the outdoor activities that bond us to our local communities and environments are under threat. In Missoula, MT, drought, rising temperatures, and wildfire smoke change what it means to fish, ski, run, and recreate in our town. In a series of Q&A style podcasts, environmental philosophy graduate student Casey Auberle creates a platform to share stories of a changing climate through the lens of local recreators and climate activists. Capturing these voices invites us to consider our relationship with nature on both an individual and communal scale, to find unity in …