Digital Commons Network^™

A Systematic Review Of Prejudice Against Immigrant Women In Organizational Leadership In The United States, Vanessa Ampofoa Boadu

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

This study examines how gender, nationality/immigration status, and ethnicity shape workplace experiences, impact professional advancement, and overall productivity

Navigating Oer Support Without Drowning In Ai, Lydia Burrage-Goodwin, Christine Moynihan

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

This was a presentation at the June 2026 Boston Library Consortium at Connecticut College.

UMB Healey Librarians Lydia Burrage-Goodwin and Christine Moynihan talk about what experiences they have had with faculty using OER and AI, which led them to develop ethics guidelines to support librarians who work with faculty authors. Attendees learned about creating AI use statements for OERs, using AI transparency logos, and applying open licenses to fully AI generated content as well as OER adaptations.

Using Environmental Scans To Help Direct And Sustain Local Best Practices, Emily Lapworth, Carol Kussmann

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

The digital landscape is in a state of constant change, and there is no one-size-fits-all formula for managing your digital assets, so understanding your local context is crucial to planning an effective digital stewardship strategy. Whether you are just starting out or have been at the same institution for 10 years, conducting an environmental scan can help. What are the internal and external changes you need to manage? What kind of stuff are you dealing with, and who are the stakeholders? Where is it located, and what systems are you using? What tools are available, and how have best practices …

The Delivery Dilemma: Unintended Consequences Of Cesarean Sections, Cecilia Odegard, Ellie Rose Piette

Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day (2018-)

Cesarean sections (C-sections) are a major surgical procedure intended to minimize the rate of maternal and infant mortality due to complications during birth. While they were originally intended to only be performed when medically necessary, rates of non-medically indicated C-sections have increased significantly. This poster examines the unintended consequences (UICs) that are associated with C-section delivery, focusing on both short-term and long-term effects. A major focus is how C-sections disrupt early microbial exposure during birth, which plays an important role in the development of the infant gut microbiome and immune system. Research has shown that infants born via C- section …

Esai Hernandez' Calling And Purpose In Society, Esai Hernandez

Symposium on Research and Creative Expression (SORCE)

This presentation reflects on the development of personal calling and purpose through the participation in the CAPS Fellowship at Valparaiso University. Grounded in a formative experience that integrates reflection, meaningful connections, and community volunteer work. This talk explores how intentional practices and having an open mindset can shape one's understanding of purpose. Drawing on personal experiences within the fellowship, the presentation highlights key moments of insight, challenge, and growth that contributed to a deeper awareness of calling. It examines how structured reflection, mentorship, and engagement with broader questions of meaning encouraged a more nuanced understanding of calling and purpose; not …

Steven Universe & The Phenomenon Of Family, Jabari J. Whipple

GS4 Student Scholars Symposium

This research analyzes Steven Universe, a modern animated television series created by Rebecca Sugar, through a sociological lens to explore how contemporary media redefines the concept of family. The study examines how nontraditional caregiving structures and emotionally based kinship challenge the boundaries of the nuclear family model. Using the theoretical frameworks of symbolic interactionism and feminist theory, this paper interprets family as a social construction formed through love, care, and shared experience rather than biology alone. A purposive sample of fifteen episodes across seasons one, three, and five was analyzed for depictions of caregiving, gender roles, and emotional labor. Findings …

Bringing Worlds Together: How Social Studies Teachers Make Content Meaningful, Harley A. Payne

GS4 Student Scholars Symposium

Secondary educators in social studies classes face the challenge of maintaining the attention of twenty to thirty students while they instruct them about content that often seems irrelevant or unimportant. These educators know, however, that the material these students are disinterested in is useful and crucial for developing adolescents who are learning to interact with the world. Research suggests that bridging the gap between the classroom and the real world has been linked to greater classroom engagement (Cooper 2014, Tagliaferro, 2012). Students who are engaged and exert more effort in class derive academic benefits, such as placement in advanced pathways …

Honoring Survivors’ Wholeness: Recommendations For University Offices Of Wellness, Maeve Jillian King

GS4 Student Scholars Symposium

Rates of child abuse are nationally significant, especially after considering how much violence goes unreported. Many college students have experienced sexual violence prior to arriving on campus, where incidents of sexual victimization are prominent. With this in mind, how can university offices of wellness support survivors wherever they are in their journey of survivorship? Previous research rarely considers both realities of victimization, but displays large concerns surrounding survivor’s mental health and educational obtainment. Additionally peer and social support play significant roles in survivor outcomes. This interdisciplinary literature review examines current university practices, mental health realities, and impacts of culture on …

Purr-Spectives: Connections Between Feline Coat Color And Human Preferences And Perceptions In Northeast Arkansas, Tiffany L. Batchelor

Create@State

Felines have played an important role in the lives of humans for thousands of years. This study investigated perceptions of felines and feline demographics in Northeast Arkansas (NEA). For Study 1, data on phenotype and health conditions was collected from 2,305 patient files from three NEA veterinary clinics. For Study 2, an anonymous survey generated using Qualtrics was published through College of Agriculture social media accounts to gather opinions from cat owners on feline coat color and ownership trends. Study 1 identified up to 6 pattern-based and up to 18 color-based phenotypes per clinic and a total of 129 unique …

250 Years Of Political Assassinations: An Exploratory Look Into Attacks On Political Figures In The United States, Jj Wesley

University of Montana Conference on Undergraduate Research (UMCUR)

Despite the salience of political assassinations in American history and culture, there isn’t a database that focuses on them, and those that do exist often lack detail and focus on broad trends over locations and time. This absence of centralized information has led to the creation of a database on these rare events, which contains political assassinations between 1777 and 2026.  The cases rely heavily on a variety of open-source data, which includes books, newspapers, databases, and other relevant information and documents. This presentation will be an exploratory descriptive analysis that emphasizes a general overview of contextual trends in these …

The Role Of Teacher Confidence In Shaping Student Outcomes, Riley J. Crews

University of Montana Conference on Undergraduate Research (UMCUR)

Teacher characteristics play a critical role in shaping students’ academic, social, and behavioral outcomes. Understanding which teacher characteristics or qualities support positive student development is essential for improving instructional practice and student success. Prior research suggests that teachers’ competence in key instructional processes and their confidence in implementing specific programs may influence student performance. The present study examined whether elementary teacher confidence in supporting students’ academic and social development predicted student academic and social risk behaviors. Archival data were analyzed as part of a larger study evaluating a collaborative social-emotional learning curriculum implemented in a primarily Indigenous elementary school. Linear …

"Transgender Insanity" And Scapegoating: President Donald Trump's Political Rhetoric Regarding Transgender Americans, Savannah Torres

Presentations - 2026

The political rhetoric used by President Donald Trump to refer to transgender Americans results in their scapegoating.

Lovecraftian Hybrids And Transgender Embodiment, Mari K. Newman

UM Graduate Student Research Conference (GradCon)

     While much of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s oeuvre has been analyzed by queer theorists for homosexual metaphors within Lovecraft’s monsters, less argued is the subject of his hybrids mirroring transgender embodiment. I posit the rise of transgender identities in the Western mainstream and access to breakthrough gender-affirming care in the United States during Lovecraft’s life lend to a reading of his hybrids as embodying gender queerness. The proposed research is a literature review which draws upon interdisciplinary texts ranging from scholars in the social sciences—such as sociology and anthropology—to the hard sciences such as ecology and health sciences.

In this paper, …

Scrolling For Meaning: How Social Media Influence Young People’S Spirituality And Trust In Scientific Authority, Archna Yadav

Undergraduate Research and Engagement Symposium

This project examines how social media and secular digital culture influence the spiritual growth, moral values, and trust in science among young people. My claim is that social media acts like a parallel source of authority, shaping ideas about meaning, morality, and truth. Evidence from studies shows that many young people now form personal belief systems by blending religious ideas, secular practices, and even pseudo-scientific claims. The warrant is that online algorithms, influencers, emotional content, and identity-based communities strongly guide what youth believe. As a result, spiritual and moral formation is increasingly shaped by digital platforms rather than traditional institutions.

Why We Must Commune: Rethinking The Role Of Marketing Communications In Turbulent Times, Javier Garcia

Publications and Research

“Communications” is often thought of as a noun, representing the messages we receive on a daily basis from people, brands, and institutions alike. 

"Communications" is also often associated with an industry that exists to produce such messaging in service of capitalism, with a commercial or otherwise actionable outcome desired from its receiving audience. 

This presentation, hosted by two-time CCNY graduate and senior marketing communications professional and Assistant Professor Javier Garcia, will examine the urgency and opportunity in rethinking the value and study of marketing and communications. 

In his presentation, Professor Garcia will offer suggestions on how to guide students towards …

The Automation Age: Why Universal Basic Income May Be The Necessary Next Step To The U.S. Economy, Raiden Francisco

Undergraduate Symposium

No abstract provided.

Still A Boy’S Club: Women Journalists & Political News Coverage, Khaleel Oudraogo, Elise Strain

Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher Program

We investigate the level of gender parity in political news reporting at the New York Times. We apply a media sociology approach to examine how gender stereotypes, women in media leadership, and women in political leadership interact to affect the extent to which women journalists appear in bylines about domestic and foreign affairs news. We leverage an original data collection of nearly 3,000 news articles published from 2007–2020. We find several key results. First, women are more likely to appear in bylines about domestic political news than foreign affairs news. Second, we find that during Jill Abramson’s tenure as executive …

Constrained Freedom: Economic Strain, Time Control, And Perceived Autonomy In Life, Lorena E. Black

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2026

Autonomy is often framed as an individual capacity rooted in personal choice, discipline, and self-determination, with dominant cultural narratives positioning freedom as something earned through effort and responsibility. This study challenges that assumption by examining autonomy as a socially structured and unequally distributed condition shaped by material and temporal constraints. Drawing on classical and contemporary sociological frameworks—including Marx’s analysis of labor and material dependence, Weber’s account of disciplined rationality, and Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony—this research positions perceived autonomy as an outcome produced through economic and institutional arrangements rather than solely through individual will. While existing literature has extensively …

How Do The Interrogation Strategies Of Women Detectives Differ In Style And Efficacy From Their Male Counterparts?, Sarah M. Quinones

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2026

This research proposal seeks to examine recorded interrogation footage and in-depth interviews of professional interrogators to analyze how their interrogation styles and efficacies differ between men and women. There is an imminent need for a reformed, standardized, and research-backed interrogation system to improve the efficacy and discriminatory habits of the justice system. The proposed hypotheses include:

• Transformational interrogation styles yield more cooperative and informative responses than transactional interrogation styles. 

• Because women’s interrogation styles more often align with transformational leadership patterns, their interrogations exhibit higher efficacies.

These hypotheses were drawn following an extensive literature review of the current academic contributions, both …

Cisheterosexism In Lgbtqia+ Health Resource Guides, Vanessa Kitzie, Olivia Reed, Amirezza Kalantari

Faculty Publications

Cisheterosexism in LGBTQIA+ Health Resource Guides Vanessa Kitzie, Amirezza Kalantari, Olivia Reed University of South Carolina, School of Information Science [email protected] Limited healthcare resources lead many LGBTQIA+ people to peer networks, often accessed via search engines to find community-created health resource websites [1–3]. Academic library guides benefit privileged LGBTQIA+ identities [4], but little is known about community guides, which may reinforce cisheterosexist narratives, causing stigma and stress [5, 6]. This study addresses this gap by scraping Google results for LGBTQIA+ health resources across US states, examining how cisheterosexism shapes health topics, geography, and representation of LGBTQIA+ populations. We hypothesize that …

Is Teamwork Influenced By The U.S. Subculture?, Amelia Terry, Alex Jackson

River Cities Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference

Work teams can be defined as groups that are “composed of individuals who (a) exist to perform organizationally relevant tasks, (b) share one or more common goals, (c) interact socially, (d) exhibit task interdependencies, (e) maintain and manage boundaries, and (f) are embedded in organizational contexts that set boundaries, constrains the tram, and influences exchanges with other units in the broader entity” according to Kozlowski and Bell (200, p. 334). Teams are a dynamic collection in the workplace that are able to undergo developmental changes and reformations in their duration of existence within the workplace. Tuckman’s (1965) Model of Group …

Understanding Ai Literacy: Implications For Practice​, Devon Olson, Janet Anderson, Sara Westall

Librarian Publications

Presentation from the 2025 Mountain Plains Library Association Tri-Conference, held in Grand Forks, ND. This presentation provides an overview of basic AI concepts and frameworks for AI literacy, discussing the impact of different patron and learner demographics on learner needs, competencies, and instructional strategies.

Government Expenditure On Education And Its Impact On Access To Higher Education In The U.S. And Germany, Miguel Barrero Garcia, Minh Anh Nguyen

OneUSF Undergraduate Research Conference

On the surface level there seems to be a discrepancy between access to higher education in the U.S. and Germany, so we would like to explore its connection with government expenditure on education. How does government spending on education in Germany and the U.S. differ and how does it shape access to higher education? The research is being conducted by going over different studies on how each country’s government treats education and spends on it. Research will also be done on access to higher education in both countries and what other factors, aside from government expenditure on education, could affect …

Social Media Fragility Indicators: A Framework For Evaluating Social Media As Fragile States, Caroline A. Haythornthwaite

iSchool - All Scholarship

Social Media Fragility Indicators: A framework for evaluating social media as fragile states

Presented at the Media Sociology Symposium, August 7th 2025

In the uncharted domain of cyberspace, social media platforms have stepped in and stepped up as state-like entities – social states – enacting governance structures supporting a variety of state services: security to safeguard user data, public services such as content moderation, regulations for civil behavior laid out in platform standards, and policing and sanctioning behavior. As social media has increasingly become the site for public discourse, platform policies are establishing these social media as ‘de facto regulators’ …

Shared Autonomy Open Logistics Systems: Definitions, Examples, And Related Literature, Jennifer Pazour

International Material Handling Research Colloquium

No abstract provided.

Navigating Difficult Conversations And Recognizing Persons Of Concerns: Confrontation, De-Escalation, And Threat Awareness, Mike Zegadlo

May Institute

A student angry about their grade, a peer not pulling their weight, a supervisor sharing criticism; all can trigger anxiety and stress. Human beings experience physiological responses to stressful encounters that inhibit our ability to communicate, problem solve and listen when it’s most important to do so. Targeted attacks, like active shooters incidents, are not spontaneous, sudden events which occur without warning. They are predictable and, consequently, preventable. Students, co-workers or others may exhibit risk factors or observable behaviors that would indicate they may be on the “pathway to violence.”

In this interactive presentation, participants will be introduced to methods …

Navigating Difficult Conversations And Recognizing Persons Of Concerns: Confrontation, De-Escalation, And Threat Awareness, Mike Zegadlo

May Institute

A student angry about their grade, a peer not pulling their weight, a supervisor sharing criticism; all can trigger anxiety and stress. Human beings experience physiological responses to stressful encounters that inhibit our ability to communicate, problem solve and listen when it’s most important to do so. Targeted attacks, like active shooters incidents, are not spontaneous, sudden events which occur without warning. They are predictable and, consequently, preventable. Students, co-workers or others may exhibit risk factors or observable behaviors that would indicate they may be on the “pathway to violence.”

In this interactive presentation, participants will be introduced to methods …

Investigating Ecomorphology Of Cervidae Astragli Using Geometric Morphometrics, Carly Wisner

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

This study explores the ecomorphology of Cervidae astragali using three-dimensional geometric morphometric analyses.

Building Community Power Using The Principles Of Mutual Aid, Cristina Chirvasa, Nicole Steinicke, Rivkah Haubner

Utah Conference on Community Engagement

Globally, many communities are fragmented and struggling to have their needs met. One strategy to meet local needs is to adopt a bottom-up approach, working within communities to build power. This strategy is especially effective because it allows people to make decisions around issues impacting them directly and forge critical connections with one another. Mutual aid offers a framework for establishing power by mobilizing community members to support one another based on solidarity and reciprocal relationships, which can be adapted to many different contexts. Here, we will turn the basic principles of mutual aid into an interactive roundtable in which …

Sevier County Adventures - Poster Presentation, Jori Kloosterman, Anna Gilliam

Utah Conference on Community Engagement

"The Sevier County Adventures is a community engagement series of events that are fun for all and center on 4 community-identified needs; mental health, substance abuse, suicide, and parenting/family relationships. Once a quarter in 2025, the USU Sevier County Extension Office and the Central Utah Health Department, in conjunction with other entities, will hold community events to provide resources and information that highlight a specific need from the 4 community-identified needs. 1-Mental Health Game Night – Participants will be given a resource packet with information on local providers and teams will play an escape room game box. 2-Home Run for …