Digital Commons Network^™

Coming Attractions

Insights

With the pandemic prohibiting in-person learning and campus visits, the college offered an assortment of creative online offerings this summer to give newly admitted DePaul students a taste of the LAS experience. Among the offerings were a mini-course, "Critical Perspectives on Our Current Moment," taught using Zoom, an introduction to the Center for Black Diaspora and the Center for Latino Research, and panel discussions with current students and faculty in the Honors program.

How Do Food Shopping Behaviors Differ Between High-Income And Low-Income Shoppers In The Grand Rapids Metropolitan Area?, Alison M. Cooney

Masters Theses

Background: The social determinants of health and health equity are influenced by access, environment, and socioeconomic status (SES). Health inequities are preventable and can be avoided with systemic policy change surrounding the distribution of wealth and resources. Few studies have researched the differences in different income levels and the influence income has on food shopping behaviors.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in food shopping behaviors between high-income and low-income shoppers living in the same zip code. Subjects Sixty-eight individuals who live in the 49341 zip code which represents a small city in Kent County, …

Nationalism In The Age Of Brexit: The Attitudes And Identities Of Young Voters, Emma Wolkenstein

Honors College Theses

The Brexit referendum marked the first time in the United Kingdom when political lines were drawn along distinct generational lines. In 2016, 73% of young people, aged 18-24, and less than 40% of older voters, aged 65 and over, voted to Remain. In comparison, over 60% of older voters and only 27% of young voters voted to Leave (Fig. 1). Voters aged 25 to 64 remained fairly split between two options, but the difference between older and younger generations is incredibly significant (Kelly 2016). Voter differences have historically been between socioeconomic classes; the urban and the rural, the wealthy and …

Racial Threat, Economic Resources, And Politics: How Local Structural Conditions Influence The Adoption Of Restrictionist Immigration Policy, Mario Marset Ehrle

Honors Theses

ICE has used their 287(g) program to target immigration enforcement at the county level. This program authorizes local police officers to carry out federal immigration work to meet arrest and deportation quotas. This has eroded civil rights and led to the criminalization of minorities, particularly Latinos. While previous research has examined the theories behind local anti-immigration work and the social factors affecting anti-immigrant policy adoption more generally, no large-scale quantitative analyses have been conducted as to why some counties adopted 287(g) while others chose not to do so. Addressing this gap in the literature, the following study uses a newly …

“We Didn’T Have A Lot Of Money, We Worked Hard, And We Ate Beans”: Examining The Narrative Inheritance From An Appalachian Father To His Son, Thomas Townsend

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The author contends that narratives, shaped not only by events but also by socioeconomic and geographic factors, are narratives that require exploration and analysis because these narratives build the lives in which individuals exist. By understanding narratives passed down with which they have built their lives, individuals can come to greater understanding of the narratives in which they live. To understand the narratives, he created and continues to craft about his life, the author needed to understand his narrative inheritance. When a proposed thesis study imploded, the focus of the study shifted to exploring the circumstances of a single interview …

Assaults On Law Enforcement Officers: A Spatial And Theoretical Analysis Through Social Disorganization., Brian Keith Simpkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to gain a better understanding of assaults on law enforcement officers to identify correlations and spatial concentrations related to theoretical constructs of social disorganization. The present study was based on official assault on law enforcement officer data from a major metropolitan area within a southeastern state for the years 2010-2019. In addition to bivariate and multivariate statistical testing (e.g., Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression), multiple spatial analyses were utilized to understand the statistical significance, visualize results, and compare to previous theoretical explanations of crime concentration. The findings revealed that assaults on …

Wandering Jews: Global Jewish Migration, Steven J. Gold

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Despite the importance of historical and contemporary migration to the American Jewish community, popular awareness of the diversity and complexity of the American Jewish migration legacy is limited and largely focused upon Yiddish-speaking Jews who left the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 to settle in eastern and midwestern cities.

Wandering Jews provides readers with a broader understanding of the Jewish experience of migration in the United States and elsewhere. It describes the record of a wide variety of Jewish migrant groups, including those encountering different locations of settlement, historical periods, and facets of the migration …

Meridians Twentieth Anniversary Reader, Ginetta Candelario

Sociology: Faculty Books

This critical anthology consists of thirty of Meridians's most frequently cited, downloaded, and anthologized scholarly essays, activists reports, memoirs, and poems since its first issue was published in fall 2000. The forty authors featured are a virtual who's who of internationally renowned feminist women-of-color scholar-activists (such as Sara Ahmed, Angela Davis, Sonia Alvarez, Paula Giddings, and Sunera Thobani) and award-winning poets (such as Nikky Finney, Laurie Ann Guerrero, and Suheir Hammad). Ranging broadly across geographies (North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East), diasporas (Black, Asian, Indigenous), and disciplines, the collection beautifully exemplifies the best practices of …

Rethinking Race In The 21st Century, A New Approach For Future World-Making: Looking Back To Move Forward, Dylan Tarleton

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Color blindness, the end of race, and white privilege are but a few phrases that begin to capture the messy confusion of a zeitgeist that is 21^st century discussions on race. At a time when race is such a necessary topic to delve into, it seems that there is a lack of history injected into the conversation. Race becomes an external motor of history, racism pathological and immovable. An unthinking decision. In other words, race and racism, from the standpoint of an organizer or academic in the 21^st century, becomes near impossible to break down and work against. …

Collaboration And Reflexivity In Wildland Fire Risk Governance In The Western United States, Brett Alan Miller

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation presents both quantitative and qualitative analysis on different aspects of wildland fire risk management in the western United States. Each of these chapters is framed by and examines the sociological concept of reflexivity, which describes a process of individual and/or collective reflection. This reflexivity is needed to identify and enact alternative management strategies that contend with the expected increases in the number and severity of wildland fires in the future due to the combined effects of even-aged forest growth after years of timber extraction, a legacy of fire suppression, climate change, and increasing human development in the wildland-urban …

Any Is Too Many: Impaired Driving In Santa Cruz County, Karena Brewington

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Too many people operate vehicles under the influence in Santa Cruz County (SCC) because of recidivism. DUIs cost dearly in human and financial terms. Financial difficulties and stigma pose barriers to providing DUI services. Community Prevention Partners (CPP) resides under the Public Health umbrella of SCC’s Health Services Agency. This Capstone Project represents an integrated effort to increase CPP’s DUI secondary prevention efforts through its Alcohol Initiative workgroup. Through the Alcohol Initiative, CPP administers the DUI Resource Center (DUIRC), a community space to support DUI offenders around completion of their sentencing components. This project proposes to decrease the recidivism of …

Gentrification And Income Segregation In Fayetteville, Arkansas, Willie Benson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Gentrification and income segregation are both poorly understood phenomena in terms of their causes and effects as is the relationship between the two topics. Even less is known in the context of small cities and over the time period spanning the last few decades. In this study public data from the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey and the Washington County Assessor's office has been used to measure economic gentrification in Fayetteville, Arkansas using an index based on property values and median rent prices and how much they have changed between 2000 and 2015. Then, using U.S. Census and American …

Environmental Factors Influencing Urban Homicide Clearance Rates: A Spatial Analysis Of New York City, Leslie W. Kennedy, Joel M. Caoplan, Eric L. Piza, Amanda L. Thomas

Publications and Research

In this paper, we explore the conditions under which clearance rates improve by looking at the experience across New York City. Using one agency provides a control on the administrative differences that appear across other jurisdictions that have been studied, usually through cross-national analysis. Our analysis uses Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) to identify environmental features that relate to closed versus open homicide cases using two years of New York City Police Department (NYPD) data. This analysis is supplemented with an investigation of precinct-wide social structure variables to examine how context matters in influencing closure rates.

Deaf Interpreters’ Perception Of Themselves As Professionals In Ireland: A Phenomenological Study, Noel P. O'Connell, Teresa Lynch

Journal of Interpretation

In the extensive literature on sign language interpreting, very little attention has been given to deaf interpreters’ understanding of themselves as professionals. This gap may be due to the fact that professional sign language interpreting is often seen to be synonymous with hearing people. The research therefore set out to gain an insight into how deaf interpreters’ view themselves as professionals, what their understanding of ‘being a professional’ is, and what issues are of concern to them. The authors present and discuss findings from an analysis, informed by professionalism theory, of data derived from interviews with 5 deaf interpreters in …

Enclosing Water: Privatization, Commodification, And Access, Daniel Jaffee

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter examines the global political economy of access to drinking water, with particular attention to the implications for environmental and social justice. After reviewing theoretical approaches to the privatization and commodification of drinking water, the chapter examines the institutional and ideological drivers, dynamics, and effects of the enclosure of municipal (tap) water supplies, and the substantial countermovements it has generated, drawing on case studies from both the global South and the North. The chapter briefly reviews the present status of municipal water privatization, and then turns to another major modality of water commodification: bottled water. It explores the dramatic …

Hidden Sacrifices: Narratives Of Select Filipina Overseas Workers In Southeast Asia, Axle Christien Tugano

Social Sciences and Development Review

In my essay “Chasing Waves: Reflection on Southeast Asian Fisherfolk (2021a),” I already featured the less documented experience of the socially marginalized. My essay focused on the personal narratives of Bruneian fishermen of Kampor Ayer, Brunei Darussalam (2016); the fishermen of Mui Ne, Vietnam (2017); and the Intha of Myanmar (2018), with whom I had the fortunate chance to converse with. However, my personal travel experience in the three countries only gave voice to “non-Filipino workers.” That is why in this current essay, I will highlight the unique experience of the Filipinos themselves – in the form of migrant workers …

Autoethnography As A Decolonizing Methodology: Reflections On Masta’S What The Grandfathers Taught Me, Dung T. Pham, June E. Gothberg

The Qualitative Report

As an Asian graduate student and a Native professor at a U.S. Midwestern Predominantly White Institution, we reflected upon Masta’s (2018) article, What the Grandfathers Taught Me: Lessons for an Indian Country Researcher, to examine the decolonizing aspects of autoethnography. Masta’s use of autoethnography to explore her experiences provides a deeply personal view into the phenomenon of living and researching Indigenous in an America that is inherently White in character, tradition, structure, and culture. The use of participatory and constructivist Indigenous autoethnography places the lived experience of an Indigenous woman at the center of the study, using the Indigenous …

Preparing For A New Kind Of Transition: Time To Cultivate Both Resiliency And Care, Mary Elisabeth Cochran

The International Undergraduate Journal For Service-Learning, Leadership, and Social Change

No abstract provided.

Education, Migration And Development Panel, Henri Boyi

Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020

8 graduate students/recent graduate presentations on education, migration and development. Moderated by Dr. Henri Boyi. Reporting of panel done by current GHS students of the 2021 class. Abstracts can be found under "Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020 Abstracts". Presenters as follows:

Jemima Nomunume Baada, "Experiences of Social Reproduction among Migrant Women in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana"

Elmond Bandauko, "This is a Good Place to Live! Narratives and Counternarratives on Territorial Stigmatization in Harare's Informal Settlements"

Chinelo Ezenwa, "A History of 19th Century European Missionaries in Colonial Africa with Specific References to the Impact of Missionary Schools"

Rebecca Jackson, Jade Rozal, …

Improving Access To Treatment For Opioid Use Disorder In High-Need Areas: The Role Of Hrsa Health Centers, Michael Topmiller, Jennifer Rankin, Jessica L. Mccann, Jene Grandmont, David Grolling, Mark Carrozza, Hank Hoang, Josh Bolton, Alek Sripipatana

Journal of Appalachian Health

Introduction: Despite the opioid epidemic adversely affecting areas across the U.S. for more than two decades and increasing evidence that medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is effective for patients with opioid use disorder (OUD), access to treatment is still limited. The limited access to treatment holds true in the Appalachia region despite being disproportionately affected by the crisis, particularly in rural, central Appalachia.

Purpose: This research identifies opportunities for health centers located in high-need areas based on drug poisoning mortality to better meet MAT care gaps. We also provide an in-depth look at health center MAT capacity relative to need …

Rural Community Toolbox To Help Battle Opioid Epidemic, Liz Carey

Journal of Appalachian Health

An online data repository and toolbox created by the Office of National Drug Control Policy is designed to provide communities with knowledge and resources to fight the opioid epidemic according to their unique needs.

Biden's Victory Due To Increased Support Along The Entire Rural-Urban Continuum, Kenneth M. Johnson, Dante Scala

Carsey Publications

Joseph Biden won the 2020 presidential election because Democratic support increased across the entire rural–urban continuum. The incremental gains at each point along the continuum were modest, but in a tightly contested election small changes in the vote matter.

In this brief, Carsey School senior demographer Ken Johnson and Carsey fellow Dante Scala conclude that voting trends in rural and urban America reflect a continuum rather than a dichotomy. At one pole of the continuum are large, densely settled urban cores, where Democrats have consistently been the most successful. At the other end are remote rural counties far from a …

Scholars And Sense

DePaul Magazine

Four DePaul alumni who were the recipients of McNair scholarships have gone on to careers of servies. Pedro Serrano is a public health researcher who most recently has been working on how COVID-19 is affecting people's emotional, physical and mental health. Pascale Ife Williams, a human ecologist, engages is culture and arts initiatives that lift up communities oppressed by institutional inequity. Peter Dziedzic explores interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism as a PhD candidate at Harvard University. Robert Vargas, a tenured sociology professor at the University of Chicago, is using geographic information system mapping software to help governments anticipate and reduce …

Three Essays On Variation In Intergenerational Mobility And Incarceration In The United States, Vikash Dangal

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The U.S. is often called the “land of opportunity” but there are substantial disparities in the opportunity and life outcomes of children depending on where they grow up. The structural factors that shape future outcomes of children can be traced to their childhood environment. This dissertation builds upon the existing literature on childhood environment and future outcomes of children and presents three essays on the variation in intergenerational income mobility and incarceration in the US.

In the first essay in chapter 2, I employ spatial regime analysis to study how the factors affecting absolute upward mobility vary due to local …

Tourism As Industry And Field Of Study: Using Research And Education To Address Overtourism, Kathleen M. Adams, Peter Sanchez

Anthropology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Purpose: The purpose of this article is (1) to highlight the dual, Janis-faced, nature of the study of tourism as an industry and as a field of study; (2) to discuss how education is used to promote sustainable tourism and prevent overtourism, both in the academic arena as well as where tourism occurs; and (3) to offer suggestions concerning the value of education as an avenue for harmonizing the Janus-faced character of tourism, in order to foster a tourism industry that can better achieve global sustainability.

Design/methodology/approach: This paper combines literature review with assessment. The authors use existing literature on …

Contextualizing Educational Disparities And The Evaluation Of Teacher Quality, Dara Shifrer

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Value added scores, statistical estimates of teacher quality, are representative of neoliberal logic. The higher average scores of teachers of socially advantaged students raise concerns that scores are inaccurate and unfair, and propagate decontextualized neoliberal understandings of the nature of learning and teachers’ work. This study uses longitudinal data from roughly 4,500 teachers in a large urban district between 2007–08 through 2012–13 to follow individual teachers as they switch into schools of different “performance levels” over time. Fixed-intercept models tracking individual teachers between 2007–08 and 2012–13 showed scores increased for teachers who switched into high-performing schools and decreased for teachers …

Are We Planning For Equity? Equity Goals And Recommendations In Local Comprehensive Plans, Carolyn G. Loh, Rose Kim

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings:

Social equity goals are supposed to be prioritized in planning along with economic and environmental goals, yet in practice they are often de-emphasized. We develop a publicly available plan equity evaluation tool to investigate to what extent and in what ways local governments include goals and recommendations that would advance equitable outcomes in their comprehensive plans. Using plan content analysis, we find that most plans do not talk about equity, nor do they include many goals and recommendations that would advance equity. More recent plans, plans in communities with more planning capacity, plans in …

Perceived Benefits And Barriers To Participation In Exercise Among Jordanian University Students, Khaldoun Hamdan

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

Insufficient physical activity is a risk factor for many non-communicable diseases, therefore; the purpose of this study is to examine university students’ perceived exercise benefits and barriers. This cross-sectional descriptive study used Exercise Benefits/Barriers Scale to examine perceived benefits and barriers to exercise among a convenience sample of 517 university students in Jordan. Participants reported significantly higher perceived barriers to exercise than perceived benefits from exercise. The most important perceived barrier to exercise was “I am too embarrassed to exercise”. Moreover, “I will live longer if I exercise” and “exercising increases being accepted by others” were the most important perceived …

Project Management: A Help Or Hindrance A Collaborative Research, Ayman Abu-Rumman

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

This small-scale mixed method study explored perceptions of how different project management approaches and tools are used by those working in industry and within academia, and how this may impact on collaborative research projects given their distinct and unique nature. The study also aimed to generate suggestions for how collaboration between industry and academia could be strengthened in the future. Underpinned by a phenomenological perspective, a survey and interviews were conducted with a sample of Jordanian professionals from different industry and academic organisations who had previous experience of working on collaborative research projects. The study identified, consistent with other studies, …

Build A Job Satisfaction Scale From The Views Of Aau Academic Staff In According With The Item Response Theory, Mohammed Marshoud

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

The study aimed to build a job satisfaction scale from the views of AAU academic staff in according with the item response theory, where the population study consisted of all academic members at Al-Ahliyya Amman University (AAU) for the year (2018/2017), and they approximately reach (257) academic members, the sample consisted of (154) academic members, which constituted 60 of the original study population, (92) males and (62) females who were randomly selected. The study tool was designed and built based on theoretical literature and scales on measuring job satisfaction at universities. the study tool consisted of (60) items which were …