Digital Commons Network^™

Leveraging Critical Social Media Literacy To Safeguard Youth Against Violent Radicalization And Extremism, Muhammad Akram, Adeela Arshad-Ayaz, Muhammad Ayaz Naseem

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Social media is inundated with radical and extreme propaganda. Such information is often left unfiltered due to platform algorithms that are economically driven and socially unethical in design. It puts social media users, mostly youth, in danger of becoming radicalized and vulnerable to supporting and engaging with extremist beliefs. When young people lack sufficient critical social media literacy (CSML), radical and extremist information impacts their perspectives, affecting behavior in the real world. A PRISMA-guided systematic review of the Web of Science core collections and the Scopus database was used to find peer-reviewed articles about how CSML skills can be used …

Teacher Reflections On Media And Information Literacy In Vietnamese K-12 Schools: Current Practices, Challenges, And Pathways For Improvement, Tinh T.T Le, Minh Tran, Anh Dương, Huong T. Pham, Vy Tran, Daniel Jackson

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media and Information Literacy (MIL) education is widely recognized as essential, yet its adoption in Vietnamese K-12 schools is still at the early stages. This study examines the current state of MIL education in Vietnam from the perspective of teachers. Drawing on insights from a trial online MIL teacher training program, which includes teachers’ learning journals, lesson plans, and an open survey using SWOT forms, we explore the approaches they use, the challenges they face, and the opportunities in promoting MIL education in their school setting. Additionally, the findings highlight specific professional development needs to enhance teachers’ MIL instruction quality. …

Productive Disruptions: An Equityoriented Framework For Civic Media Literacy In The Digital Era, Carlos Jimenez, Lynn Schofield Clark, Johnny Ramirez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This article introduces Productive Disruptions as a framework for civic media literacy that centers equity and social justice. Past scholarship has emphasized understanding media content and gaining competence in media production. To center equity as a structural concern beyond individual behaviors, we argue for media literacy interventions that support disrupting racism in content, production, and digital media distribution systems themselves. Drawing on an ethnographic case study with young people experiencing marginalization, we examine how youth productively disrupted instances of systemic racism via TikTok and Instagram. We identify three distinct modes of intervention: creating counter-narratives that disrupt racist discourses, subverting adult-led …

Promoting News Literacy With Epistemological Beliefs, Ifla Checklist And Ai: Insights From A Teacher Training Program In Italy, Flavio Manganello

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This study examines the integration of epistemological beliefs, the IFLA checklist for evaluating news credibility, and the News Verifier, an AI tool powered by GPT-4, within a teacher training program aimed at enhancing news literacy. It explores the relationship between educators’ epistemological profiles and their ability to classify news using the IFLA checklist. The study also evaluates alignment between human classifications and those generated by the News Verifier, examining the potential of AI as a complementary resource for supporting practice and reflection in news literacy education. Results indicate that consistent application of the checklist improves alignment with AI outputs, although …

A Treatise On Tool Development: The Arthroscope’S Cultural, Technological, And Metascientific Translation, Montgomery F. Waterer

Honors Theses

The arthroscope was a revolutionary development in the fields of medicine, engineering, and ethics. There are many valuable lessons to be learned from the story of its development and translation that are relevant to the future of medicine and society. Beginning with a brief description of the tool’s design, this paper will examine a period within the history of the arthroscope. This window contains multiple innovators and ends with the life and work of Dr. Robert Jackson. In examining the relevant historical facts of its development, this paper will then briefly address the importance of sports medicine in the development …

From Collection To Documentary: An Eventful Journey Of Developing And Managing The Wan-Go H.C. Weng Film Collection, Jim Cheng

Journal of East Asian Libraries

Experience, challenge, lesson, reward, and inspiration of developing and managing a special collection: Wan-go Weng Film Collection in a major research library.

2026 Undergraduate Research Symposium Program, Coastal Carolina University

Undergraduate Research Symposium Programs

17th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, April 21-22, 2026.

The 2026 CCU Undergraduate Research Symposium included 72 oral presentations, 127 poster presentations, and 22 team pitch presentations comprising 50 students who participated in the Wall College’s Chant’s Tank Pitch Competition.

Presentations at the Undergraduate Research Symposium were judged by almost 90 faculty and staff, and prizes were awarded in three categories: Best Oral Presentation, Best Poster Presentation, and Best Chant’s Tank Pitch Presentation. Here are the following award winners and their mentors in their respective categories:

Best Oral Presentation:

• 1st Place: Ryan Ryan Avallone, Applied Mathematics. Faculty Mentor: Bong Jeong (Management …

The Fall Of Saigon And Its Legacy In The United States, Logan J. Kemp

The Penguin Review

The topic of South Vietnam has always been one close to home. My mother and grandma were evacuated from Saigon before the country fell to North Vietnam in 1975. They hopped on a US military helicopter, taking multiple stops on ships and islands before eventually landing in Orange County, California. Because of the evacuation, my family members were forced to start a new life; however, it was better than being sent to a re-education camp. My Grandma had done some business with an American, and she could have lost her life if she had been sent to the camps. Tens …

Annual Archaeology Update: The Valley Of Kings, Sophia Shapiro

The Penguin Review

There can be no contest for the Review’s annual archaeological highlight for 2025. Exactly one hundred years after Egyptologists discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun (King Tut) in the Valley of Kings, archaeologists discovered a series of steps buried by rockfall.

The War On War: Desensitization's Effects On Society's Moral Fabric, Chelsea E. Johnson, Andrew J. Cudden

The Penguin Review

In an era of constant connectivity, violence is no longer distant or intermittent. Wars, political repression, mass shootings, and humanitarian crises now unfold in real time, shared instantly through twenty-four-hour news cycles and social media. Never before has global suffering been so visible. Yet this unprecedented access has failed to produce sustained moral urgency or collective responsibility. Instead, violence becomes increasingly utilised as fleeting content–viewed, shared, and then displaced by the next trending event. This paradox raises a pressing ethical question: how can a world more informed of suffering become so morally disengaged from it?

Sanitizing Escape Lines: Memory Transmission Among Wwii Airmen, Darrah S. Thompson

Create@State

Through declassified archival documents, family archives, and oral histories of WWII airmen, this poster examines how memory was impacted by wartime and post-war secrecy. Using the American Air Crew of the B-17 Flying Fortress, “Baby Dumpling,” as my case study,  I explore how the containment of sensitive information through intelligence protocols during and after WWII led to different understandings of the same catalyzing experience among the ten man crew. Following their crash—resulting in death, POW capture, or evasion—I trace how Francis B. Cater and Jack R. Zeman shared different accounts of the same event based not only on their experiences, …

Gathering Places: Indigenous Resources, Economies, And Diplomacy In The Northeastern Great Plains, 1650 – 1806 Ce, Matthew D. Busch

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

Centuries before European arrival in the Great Plains region of North America, Indigenous exchange networks connected people within the continental interior to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf Coast. Throughout this vast Native Space, Indigenous peoples sought new resources and opportunities to create sustainable and successful lifeways by harnessing the spiritual, economic, and political power of place as they journeyed across the landscape.

The Coteau des Prairies centrally located between the Missouri, Mississippi, and Hudson's Bay watersheds within the Northeastern Great Plains represents a unique place of power. This imposing glacially modified landscape characterized by numerous lakes, fertile …

Lanthorn, Vol. 60, No. 15, April 20, 2026, Grand Valley State University

Volume 60, August 4, 2025 – April 20, 2026

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State's student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present.

America’S Nazis: Denazification, Operation Paperclip, And The Cold War, Oliver L. B. Marcel

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This essay examines how Operation Paperclip and the postwar recruitment of German scientists influenced American denazification policy during the Cold War. I argue that the United States’ pursuit of scientific and technological advancement repeatedly took precedence over moral and legal accountability. From the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to the Space Race and the creation of the Office of Special Investigations, federal policy reflected a consistent pattern of prioritizing progress over justice. The study demonstrates that Cold War imperatives fundamentally reshaped U.S. political identity and its relationship with former World War II enemies.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other: Differences Between The New Deal And Great Society, Brayden T. Gallagher

Harding Undergraduate Research Conference

This paper examines the differences between the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, challenging the prevailing interpretation that the latter administration was the logical continuation of the former. Through comparative historical analysis of policy and rhetoric, the research finds that, despite clear similarities such as expanded government involvement and social welfare programs, the two initiatives diverged significantly. The New Deal prioritized economic recovery through short-term job creation while often tolerating or reinforcing racial inequality. In contrast, the Great Society directly confronted systemic racism and struck at the roots of poverty through education, …

Loyal Sons: German-Jewish Patriotic Assimilation In Modern Germany, Yitzi Dear

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

The modern history of Germany’s Jews developed through two contemporaneous and parallel transformations across the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: first, the development of the German national identity and creation of the German state; second, the gradual emancipation of Germany’s Jews and their integration into society. As a result of these two simultaneous developments, the majority of German Jews increasingly defined themselves through their German nature and connection to the state. Assimilation became not only a path to survival but also a sincere expression of ideological and cultural conviction.

Amid the social, political, and economic crises of the Weimar Republic, a …

Beasts Of Burden: Human Dignity And Roman Slavery In The Silver Age Latin Literature, William Deloach

Ex Sapientia Loqui

This article evaluates rhetoric used to describe enslaved persons in Petronius's Satyricon and Statius's Silvae through the lens of human dignity. Human dignity is evaluated through ancient and modern lenses, drawing upon Cicero's conception of civilitas and contemporary views by luminaries such as George Kateb and Michael Rosen. Silvae and Satyricon utilize conceptions of dignity to uplift the value of slaves, though in some cases the opposite is also observable. Overwhelmingly, the two works lean towards recognizing enslaved persons' dignity rather than rejecting it.

Galen Of Pergamum: Life, Literature, And Legacy, Elyse Rogers

Ex Sapientia Loqui

Galen of Pergamum was a second-century physician whose work had an enduring impact on the field of medicine. His extensive writings were the primary reference and teaching materials for the medical community for over a millennium. While his ideas were revolutionary for his time, they were eventually outdated. Nevertheless, there was a continued reliance on his authority, which hindered scientific advancement. Galen both advanced the world of medicine with his emphasis on observational analysis and constrained its progress through the profound dominance of his theories.

This paper aims to understand the life of Galen and the significance of his work …

The Right-To-Work Debate In Louisiana: How A Moment Of Violence Changed Law, Emma K. Thigpen

LSU Master's Theses

These two projects focus on the rise of business communities in twentieth century politics of the South and how they shaped national visions of the United States’ economic future. Chapter 1, a primary source project about how labor violence led to a Right-to-Work law, examines the actions of the La. AFL-CIO, led by Victor Bussie, and the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, led by Edward Steimel, as they pursue alternate visions of economic progress and the “American way.” A major theme of this chapter is how violence was manipulated and refashioned to legitimize a lobbying organization and legislation intended …

Patriots And Protestant Dissenters: Early Religious Disestablishment In Revolutionary South Carolina, Nathan James Shull

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

In 1778, the newly independent government of South Carolina broke with more than a century of precedent and disestablished the Church of England by enacting Article XXXVIII of its State Constitution. This thesis weaves together the interconnected stories of Patriots such as William Tennent, Christopher Gadsden, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Oliver Hart, Richard Furman, and William Henry Drayton, demonstrating how they converged on disestablishment. While the historiography has focused on one or another religious or political group, this thesis asserts that an array of South Carolinians from across the political spectrum coalesced around disestablishment as a pragmatic solution to a variety …

Historians At War: A Comparative Analysis Between Thucydides And Xenophon's Accounts Of The Peloponnesian War, Juleeanna S. Fuller

Caroliniana Undergraduate Research Journal

This essay analyzes Thucydides and Xenophon's accounts of the Peloponnesian War, reflecting on the intersection of historical narratives, personal bias, and political perspectives. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War presents Athens’ decline through the lens of moral and political collapse, emphasizing human nature, rationalism, and realism. Despite his reputation for objectivity, his reconstruction of speeches and selective focus revealed an underlying critique of Athenian democracy, shaped by his own life experiences. However, Xenophon's Hellenica continues the narrative with a pronounced Spartan bias, depicting Spartan hegemony and the Thirty Tyrants in a largely favorable or justified light, while minimizing their brutality …

Keynote Address: The Dangers Of Institutional Silence In The War On Words, Hadley Drodge

Public History Symposium

No abstract provided.

Wesleyan Hall Work Preserves Part Of University's History, The Timesdaily

Documents

Preserving Wesleyan Hall at UNA

Where Do Policy Demanders Come From? Protestants And Party Formation In The Antebellum Period, John W. Compton

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

The early 1830s were years of intense religious fervor, when well-organized moral reform movements seemed destined to remake the political landscape. Curiously, however, the party system that emerged from this period was premised on the exclusion of moral issues from party politics. How did the early Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs manage to construct an essentially amoral party system during a decade marked by large-scale moral reform movements? And why did the resulting system unravel in the mid-1850s? Answering these questions requires shifting the focus from party activists and elected officials to organized religion. Specifically, I show that the nation's largest …

Rhetoric And Retrenchment: The Lore And Exploitation Of The Soviet 'Night Witches' In Wwii, Jessica Prather

Statewide Student Research Symposium

From the diary of Galina Duktovich: "Today I heard a new legend. The Germans called us Night Witches. They say that they give us some kind of injections after which we stop being women..."¹

The Sensationalizing Of Presidential Assassinations In Mass Media Throughout American History, Lindsay E. Smith

Undergraduate Theses

This project explores how mass media has shaped the public response to presidential assassinations across American history. By examining the deaths of Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963), we can trace how evolving media technologies – such as newspapers, yellow journalism, radio broadcasts, and live television coverage – have sensationalized violence, politicized tragedy, and transformed periods of national mourning into mass spectacles. The thesis analyzes reporting methods, narrative framing, and the news industry to show how each has influenced emotional response, political landscapes, and eventual presidential legacy. Ultimately, we find that …

Florence Gets Special Stage, Montgomery Alabama Journal And The Times

Documents

Memorial to Men Enlisted in World War Added to State Teachers College, 1930s

Advancing The Study Of Politics And The Brain: Targets For Research On Neurology And Political Behavior, Glenn W. Rainey Jr.

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

In this paper I argue that advancing research on neurology is creating important opportunities for political scientists to integrate its findings into their research, particularly with regard to the effects of emotional processes on political behavior.  I provide a general background on neural anatomy, genetics, and neurobiological chemicals, and I briefly review techniques of neurological research, the findings that have been developing, and the limitations on the research. I provide an overview of selected key neural anatomy, and neurotransmitters and hormones, that play a role in neurological functions, and particularly in the development and expression of emotions.  I then suggest …

President João Goulart And The Breakdown Of U.S.-Brazilian Relations, Jake Hall

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

The 1950s and 1960s were a tumultuous time for relations between the United States and Brazil. Following the Cuban Revolution and the rise of Castro in 1959, the United States felt vulnerable and feared that the Cuban Revolution would spread communism to other countries in Latin America. Meanwhile, Brazil was experiencing an economic crisis as former President Juscelino Kubitschek had engaged in expensive policies intended to grow Brazil’s economy and spur industrial development. These policies left the country with rampant inflation and an untenable amount of debt, which Brazil had no hope of paying off. President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance …

The Hypocrisy Of The Wizards—A Proposal To Correct Incentives In Higher Education Loan Financing, Caden Benedict

School of Public Policy Capstones

This paper explores the origins of the student loan debt crisis and proposes tying university incentives to graduates' repayment plans and disclosing median earnings for degrees before students apply. Specifically, while there are numerous factors explaining why the price of education has increased dramatically since the 1970s, this paper proposes solutions that will specifically target university moral hazards by requiring universities fund: (1) the current subsidies to federal student loan repayments under income-driven plans as the House of Representatives intended before the Senate removed "risk-sharing," and (2) bankruptcy law discharge amounts. Moreover, requiring universities to disclose the median earnings of …