Digital Commons Network^™

The Current - Volume 36 Issue 6, Nova Southeastern University

Student Newspapers

No abstract provided.

2026 February, Morehead State University. Office Of Communications & Marketing.

Morehead State Press Release Archive, 1961 to the Present

Press releases for February of 2026.

Finding Luis: A Creative Nonfiction Account Of Law & Society, Jason M. Leggett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay explores the contradictions in legal theory and human experience through creative nonfiction. Its main purpose is to argue that a truly just society requires acknowledging the profound influence of individual narratives on the law. This is supported by blending personal narratives, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry to reveal the gap between codified law and lived realities for marginalized individuals. This unique Legal Poetics methodology employs a series of six vignettes, such as the author's and Luis's shared experiences with traumatic brain injury and the denial of justice, as data. By integrating autoethnography, law as narrative, and performativity theories, …

Humanity Is Evolving Its Consciousness: The Role Of Archetypal Energies As Guides During An Unfolding Weeding Out And Alignment Process, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Humanity is evolving its consciousness at individual and collective levels.  Given these seemingly tumultuous times, as of this writing (January 2026), to make such a statement may sound like a strange thing to say.  However, I suggest that if you are alive today and if you are reading these words, these are the very times for which you were born—to assist Humanity as it evolves its consciousness with your unique gifts, whatever they may be.  That is, this period of our individual and collective human being-ness may be characterized as an unfolding period of weeding out and alignment with the …

Curious Objects: Form And Feeling In Mary Leapor's Thing Poems, James Metcalf

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

Mary Leapor (1722–1746) has long been recognized as something of a curiosity: a Northamptonshire kitchen maid with a rudimentary education who died at the age of 24, but who also wrote two volumes of poetry. In this essay I read Leapor’s “thing poems” to show how curiosity is also a supervening affective regime in her poetics. Minor and marginal, fixated by perverse objects which tend more to derail than deepen the production of knowledge, curiosity is an unsettling mode of inquiry because of its imaginative attachment to the strange stuff lurking within the ordinary as a diminished site of aesthetic …

The Killing Fields Of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, And Total Liberation, Steve Best

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, Fast Capitalism Editorial Team

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Critical Design And The Robotic Imaginary: Design Criticism And Critical Robots, Jörgen Behrendtz

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

This paper brings critical design and design criticism to critical robot studies. Critical design can be described as an umbrella term for approaches making use of speculative designs to highlight and challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions or even taken-for-granted truths about the role products play (in a wide sense) in everyday life. Design criticism refers to a reasoned procedure that investigates emancipatory and/or limiting potentials of designs, theorizes the roles of affordances, materials and embodied perception as epistemological resources in media interaction, and clarifies connections between specific design choices and their associated experiential qualities, seductive powers, ideological underpinnings, material operations, and …

The Antinomies Of Brexit, Paul Smith

Fast Capitalism

Author Biography

Paul Smith, George Mason University

Paul Smith was educated at Cambridge and at the University of Kent in the UK and has a PhD in American Studies. Most of his working life has been spent in the US, including posts at Miami University OH, and Carnegie Mellon before his appointment to George Mason University in 1996. Between 1999 and 2002 he was chaired Professor and department head of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK. At Mason he has been director of the Center for the Study of the Americas and currently teaches …

The Effectiveness Of Casual Group Learning In Introductory Finance Tutorials

Journal of Economics and Finance Education

Many universities require introductory financial management for undergraduate business majors. This study measures whether classroom study groups have a more positive effect on student perceptions and performance than traditional teacher driven classes. As an alternative to traditional tutorial teaching, Classroom Study Groups is an application of casual group learning and is consistent with Constructivist learning theories. The study reports significant differences between the two approaches, with student engagement and satisfaction reported at higher levels amongst those students involved in the traditional, teacher-led approach, and no significant difference between the two in regard to student performance. Interesting relationships are found between …

Uk And The 'Razor-Wire Humanitarianism': The Refugee Crisis And The Aesthetic Of Violence, Yasmin Ibrahim

Fast Capitalism

When the 'refugee crisis' in Calais became an issue of renewed concern in the summer of discontent in 2015, UK's reticent stance towards the crisis was captured through its measured approach. A notable riposte from the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, was to send in yet more security fencing to fortify the borders in Calais to assuage the disaffect from the truckers and the public. Dubbing this as UK's 'razor wire humanitarianism', the paper examines how the material artefact of the razor wire is implicated in the aesthetic of violence towards the refugee and migrant bodies in the camps of …

Panic Learning Off (And On) The Covid Campus, Tara Brabazon, Jamie Quinton, Narelle Hunter

Fast Capitalism

Online learning has been flooded with platitudes, promises and possibilities for twenty years. Oversold and undertheorized, online learning reached its "moment' through the Covid lockdown. Underprepared staff and underfunded universities implemented online learning in a crisis. This was a zombie apocalypse of a context in which to summon innovation. This article activates Paul Virilio's University of Disaster to explore the COVID campus and classroom, entering panic learning.

Author Biographies

Tara Brabazon, Dean of Graduate Research / Professor of Cultural Studies Flinders University

Tara Brabazon is the dean of graduate research and professor of cultural studies at Flinders University, Australia, fellow …

Who Wouldn't Get The Joke?: Vile Sovereignty, Vanishing Mediators, And Trump, Simon Orpana, Evan Mauro

Fast Capitalism

This article considers Trump as an example of "vile sovereignty," a concept Michel Foucault put forward in the mid 1970s to describe "the exercise of power through the explicit disqualification of the person who wields it" (2003b: 35)—a "childish discourse" that disqualifies the speaker at the very moment that they are being appealed to as a figure of authority (36). We argue that this concept helps illuminate contemporary US politics, where Trump's carnivalesque flaunting of political decorum and morality paradoxically seem to buttress the power of his Republican Party. Building upon our theorization of the role vile sovereignty has played …

Usage Statistics: Project Counter R5 Dr_D1 Report Fy2025 - Database Search And Item Usage, Andrée Rathemacher

Technical Services Reports and Statistics

Project COUNTER R5 / R5.1 Report DR_D1 for the University of Rhode Island for the period from July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025. The DR_D1 report is defined as "Database Search and Item Usage." This report presents an annual total only and only includes those platforms successfully configured for automated harvesting via SUSHI.

File for download is Excel spreadsheet generated by Alma Analytics.

Results:

Searches Automated - 38,089

Searches Federated - 1,810

Searches Regular - 1,304,882

Total Item Investigations - 933,864

Total Item Requests - 286,912

Macau Noir: Criminal Brotherhoods, Casino Capitalism, And The Case Of The Post-Socialist Chinese Consumer, Tim Simpson

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Facebook Killed The Reunion Star: How Facebook Is Changing Who We Are And What We Do, Sara Ridenour

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Western Mansions In The Gardens Of Perfect Brightness, Another History Of High Qing Sino-European Exchanges, Nicolas Woreth

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The Gardens of Perfect Brightness, the favorite residence of Chinese Emperors in the High Qing era (1683-1799), held mysteries that will remain forever concealed from the public eye after French and British imperialist forces looted it and burned it beyond repair during the Second Opium War (1856-1860). Behind the doors of the secret garden, scarcely open to anyone but the emperor, his wives, and servants, worked European artists and scientists. Most of them were Jesuit missionaries who served the emperor in the hope of gaining his favor and support for the spread of Christianity in China.

This paper aims to …

All The Rage: Digital Bodies And Deadly Play In The Age Of The Suicide Bomber, Carolyn Guertin

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

The Claustropolitan Society: A Critical Perspective On The Impact Of Digital Technologies And The Lockdown Imaginary, Tara Brabazon, Stefan Lawrence

Fast Capitalism

The imperative of this article is to develop the trope of the ‘lockdown imaginary.’ To enact this project, a diverse array of theories and theorist are summoned, including the tropes and trajectories from Jean Baudrillard, Benedict Anderson, and Steve Redhead. This – seemingly – odd intellectual combination is both timely and appropriate. It is necessary – as with the Matryoshka Dolls – to commence with a theorization of hyperreality, then we crack open the concept to reveal theories of the imagined and imagining, concluding with the smallest and most brutalizing theoretical Dolls: claustropolitanism and foreclosure. From here, a (post) pandemic …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: Personifying The South In Rural Queer Collegians’ Stories, Miranda N. Rutan, Leia K. Cain

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

In this study, we explore the complex interplay between queer identity and Southern cultural narratives among rural college students in the U.S. Bible Belt. We integrated narrative inquiry and arts-based research to examine how participants personify the South within their own stories, revealing nuanced understandings of belonging and identity. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, participant-created artwork, and discussions about these artworks. Our findings illustrate a dynamic representation of the South as both a source of support and a site of conflict, highlighting the dual roles of community and marginalization in shaping rural queer Southern identities. This research contributes to …

Cultivating The Creative Ecosystem Amid The Disruption Of Ai, Sarah Oconnell

Tradition Innovations in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education

Can humanity’s creativity, our artistic intelligence, thrive in symbiosis with the disruptive forces of technology’s Artificial Intelligence in work, media and education? “Who is responsible?” may be the more important question as we face a future infused with AI. Impacted individuals and industries cannot wait for ambiguous political powers to determine AI regulatory policy. They must develop strategies for critique and discernment in real time to prevent the technology’s disruption in society from devolving into oppressive dysfunction.

Who is responsible for cultivating the balance that sustains humanity? Scholars and practitioners with artistic intelligence are adaptive catalysts for collaborative problem solving …

روميو وجولييت: تعدّد النهايات – دراسة مقارنة لأربع ترجمات وفقًا لمقاربة لانس هيوسن, Nour Nasrani Snaifer, May Hobeika Haddad

Al-Kīmiyā

This article presents a comparative study of four translations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet produced during three major phases in the history of Arab theatre in general, and of Lebanese theatre in Lebanon and Egypt in particular. It focuses on the diversity of the endings chosen by the translators, which vary according to the sociocultural context of each period as well as the way both audiences and theatre practitioners have perceived the role of theatre. The article reports the results of a comprehensive analysis that is not limited to the endings and that follows Hewson’s approach to translation criticism. The …

A Phenomenological Study Exploring Christian Women Emotional Traumatic Symptoms Post Spousal Infidelity, Tracy Y. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The discovery of spousal infidelity has been recognized in the literature as a devastating breach of marital commitment. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe women of faith’s experiences with emotional trauma after discovering spousal infidelity in the Northeastern United States. This study’s theoretical framework is guided by Schlossberg’s transition theory, which aims to answer the following research questions: How do women of faith describe emotional trauma after the discovery of infidelity? How does infidelity affect the psychological, emotional, and physical functioning of women and their social systems? How do participants describe their spiritual relationship with God after …

The Profitability Of Racial Diversity And Gender Balance In Modern Hollywood, M. Garrett Roth, William Mcandrew

The Journal of Economics and Politics

This paper investigates the effects of racial and gender diversity in modern Hollywood. The primary objective is to determine if an objectively measurable increase in diverse casting over the last two decades has had a positive or negative impact on profits, and a secondary objective to measure diversity’s impact on critic scores. The study utilizes data focusing on the fifty most expensive films from 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2023. The findings indicate that profit is neither positively nor negatively affected by diversity, whether in ethnicity or gender. However, movie critic ratings are negatively affected by ethnic diversity when using …

Confluence, Vol. 4, Iss. 2, Full Issue

The Confluence

No abstract provided.

Lucy Wortham James And The Gospel Of Wealth: A Case Study Of Female Philanthropy In Rural Missouri During The Progressive Era, Jacob F. Rinehart

The Confluence

Various historical scholars have examined the role of Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth on philanthropic attitudes and endeavors of affluent Americans during the Progressive Era. Modern developments, driven by post-structural feminist theory, have shown that rural-born Missouri women, exemplified by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, acted as complementary equals to Carnegie through their humanitarian efforts by uniquely interpreting and implementing his social doctrines. However, the existing scholarship has focused substantially on coastal developments, neglecting the role of this benevolence in rural Missouri communities. By examining the philanthropic endeavors of Lucy Wortham James, both during her life and post-mortem through her endowment of …

A Review Of Alberto Toscano’S Late Fascism, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Zahi Zalloua's The Politics Of The Wretched: Race, Reason, And Ressentiment, Benjamin Davis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Exploring Chinese Elements In J.D. Salinger’S Works: A Response To Mccarthyism In The Early Cold War Era, Yixin Lu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Since the publication of “The Laughing Man” in 1949, various ideas about “China” have emerged in J. D. Salinger’s famously obscure works. This article aims to argue that Salinger’s incorporation of elements related to China and ancient Chinese philosophy in his works illustrates an artistic response to American anxieties during the McCarthy Era. The article uses “The Laughing Man” and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” as case studies to demonstrate how Salinger’s engagement with “China,” including the concept of indiscrimination from Zen Buddhist ideas, as well as notions of naturalness and non-action from Taoist ideas, develops not only a mystical writing …

Ginsberg’S China Experience And Its Influence On His Series Of Poems On China, Xiankai Ren

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As a renowned poet and representative of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg was invited to be a member of the US Writers’ Delegation to visit China in 1984. His China trip as well as his reading of traditional Chinese literature constitute his China experience, which is represented in Ginsberg’s poetry. This essay examines Ginsberg’s series of poems on China. It first shows that Ginsberg’s introduction to the Beat Generation poets and their poetics provided the inspiration for his poetry writing. Then it discusses Ginsberg’s observation of Chinese society during his visit and his reading of the Chinese poet Bai Juyi. …