Digital Commons Network^™

Opening, Michaela Velleno, Erin Robinson

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Cover, Owen Isachsen

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, Michaela Velleno, Erin Robinson

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Executive Committee - Agenda, 01/06/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Agendas

No abstract provided.

Executive Committee - Minutes, 01/06/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Minutes

No abstract provided.

Refusing To Run Away From The Hard Part: Notes On Reflexivity Towards Abolitionist Pedagogy & Teaching, Julissa O. Muñiz, Casey P. Wong

Feminist Pedagogy

In this critical commentary, we enter into conversation with educators who have practiced abolition, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and critical pedagogies, and consider what it means to sustain a learning community experiencing harm in real time. We assess a case involving a teacher-student interaction at a private minimum security women’s state prison in Texas. Following one of the author's critical reflections, we think about the importance of abolitionist educators giving benefit of the doubt, grasping at the roots of harm, and controlling their affective responses. We argue that community is a practice and a discipline that must be continuously sustained and …

In Vitro Investigation Of Myoblasts As A Cell Therapy Candidate And Their Effects On Macrophages, Olivia Armas, Erica Duffy, Arthur Klujian, Clara Markel, Franklin Ng, Elisabeth Stodola

Baker/Koob Endowments Awarded Projects

Human macrophage isolation was successful with a 10% yield. Isolations are being further refined using an autoMACS cell separator, providing students instructional training on industry-level equipment that is commonly used. Through the primary human myoblast and murine macrophage co-culture, a significant shift in phenotype was demonstrated. Macrophage morphology varies with polarization and was used to evaluate the impact of factors and myoblasts at polarizing macrophages. Macrophage morphology was measured using an Image J analysis that quantified the axial ratio of macrophages. Axial ratio was calculated using the major axis divided by minor axis. The results showed that all the pre-polarized …

Microwave Heat For Disinfecting Soilborne Pathogens In The Strawberry Fields., Jake Sporleder, Kaela Higgins

Baker/Koob Endowments Awarded Projects

The objective of the Baker–Koob research project was to design and assemble a laboratory testing device and to evaluate microwave radiation transfer through soils with varying moisture contents using thermocouples. The resulting findings were presented at the 2024–2025 ASABE International Conference.

Ecoplasticity – Development Of A Seaweed-Based Coating For Take-Out Containers, Michelle Cullen

Baker/Koob Endowments Awarded Projects

With growing concerns about climate change and plastic pollution, the food packaging industry has shifted towards the development of sustainable food packaging, like biodegradable polymers synthesized from renewable resources. Current sustainable options on the market either have a hidden plastic lining, present oil leaks, or can only be industrially composted under specific conditions. To address these issues, Ecoplasticity targets the industry-wide green initiative through the development of biodegradable and compostable coatings derived from an invasive species of seaweed, sargassum. It is intended to replace the hidden plastic lining, have grease and water barrier properties, and be composted in residential, industrial, …

A Literature Review On Ethics In Medical Diagnostic Ai & Analysis Therein, Connor J. Turetzky

Master's Theses

Artificial Intelligence presents a very promising future in medicine. Being able to diagnose and recommend treatments quickly is vital in ensuring positive patient outcomes. However, the new technology is not without risk. In this narrative literature review, the risks of AI in terms of bias, ethics, and environmental impact will be explored through existing research. This paper will focus on research published between 2019 and 2026, highlighting the major ethical and systematic problems currently facing diagnostic AI. Historical bias in medical data has led to AI that share those biases, and humans inherit that bias creating a potential negative feedback …

Childhood Through Motion: Reimagining Everyday Mobility Corridors For Learning, Independence, And Exploration, Olivia Liljegren

City and Regional Planning

This project proposes the Childhood Through Motion (CTM) Framework, which reimagines how everyday mobility corridors can support children’s development through repeated engagement with integrated interventions along key neighborhood routes. Building on existing approaches such as Safe Routes to School and Playful Learning Landscapes, the framework integrates mobility, play, learning, and social interaction into a connected system of corridors and nodes distributed throughout a neighborhood street network. Rather than treating mobility, play, and learning as separate, the framework explores how developmental opportunities can be integrated into the public spaces children use every day.

The framework is organized through five guiding principles …

Marine Heatwave Co-Occurrence Between Estuarine And Coastal Systems, Ricardo U. Nardi, Piero L. F. Mazzini, Ryan K. Walter

Physics

Marine heatwaves (MHWs), prolonged periods of anomalously warm ocean temperatures, pose significant threats to marine ecosystems. While MHWs in coastal and estuarine systems have been studied separately, their spatial coherence remains significantly understudied. Here we analyze over 2 decades of high-frequency in situ temperature data from 54 stations across 20 U.S. estuaries and 13 coastal buoys to assess MHW co-occurrences. We find that estuarine and coastal MHWs co-occur only ∼21% of the time, a 57% decrease compared to co-occurrence within estuaries (∼49%). Maximum co-occurrence occurs at zero lag, suggesting synchronous synoptic-scale atmospheric forcing, likely via air–sea heat fluxes. Co-occurrence shows …

Abolitionist Principles And Pedagogy: Teaching To Build The World Anew, Jennifer E. Potter, Elyshia Aseltine

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Toward More Just Futures: Abolitionist Pedagogy And Lived Experience In Criminology Courses, Curriculum And Degree Program, Simone Rowe, Michael Baker, Phillip Wadds, Ingrid Matthews, George (Kev) Dertadian, Andy Kaladelfos

Feminist Pedagogy

This paper discusses the collaborative and ongoing interventions to the Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice (BCCJ) programme taught on the unceded lands of the Bedegal people on which the University of New South Wales, Australia, is built. Abolitionist feminist positionalities (Davis et al., 2022, p. 2) are central in implementing transformative pedagogies that interrupt and dismantle mainstream criminological pedagogies and practices that cause and perpetuate carceral harms. Core to achieving these aims is our long commitment to working with and learning from those with lived experience of carceral systems and developing institutional systems that facilitate long-term support for this …

Centering “Ubuntu” To Build Research Confidence And Joyful Collaboration, Suyent Rodriguez Candeaux, Brandi Wells-Stone

Feminist Pedagogy

As feminist scholar-practitioners who are committed to an abolitionist teaching praxis, we are embracing the concept of Ubuntu, “I am because you are,” to build Black students’ research confidence through joyful collaboration. This critical commentary draws on our autoethnographic accounts to discuss how centering decolonial, critical, and Black feminist frameworks shifted how we support students in co-constructing knowledge through a cohort based undergraduate research program. Our collaborative approach to pedagogy has built students’ research confidence through culturally centered practices that value diverse ways of knowing and student contribution. Love (2019) argues, “abolitionist teaching is not sustainable without joy” (p. 120). …

"Be Like Water": Practicing Abolition On The Ground, Katie R. Horowitz, Taryn Johnson

Feminist Pedagogy

This Social Justice Strategy asks students to immerse themselves in abolitionist waters by learning abolitionist perspectives, strategies, and practices from a local abolitionist, transformative justice, or mutual aid organization while providing them a service or fulfilling one or more of their needs. This is a self-paced, term-long project scaffolded by abolitionist histories and best practices for working in community. The instructor uses a student survey as a basis for forming groups and matching them up with local organizations, then students create plans for working together, including how to address conflict restoratively. Groups research their organizations and collaborate with them to …

Walking The Walk: Centering Praxis In Teaching Abolition, Mei-Ling N. Malone

Feminist Pedagogy

Teaching abolition in the university setting from a theoretical standpoint often leaves students feeling disconnected from its real-world implications and does not connect or empower students to join this work. Bettina Love argues that “too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal.” As an assistant professor of African American Studies and an abolitionist feminist, who centers praxis in my pedagogy, my involvement in abolition organizing on campus is the real work that Love asks of educators. I organize with a small group of students and professors to …

Strategies For Seeding Police Abolition In A Minefield, Kaden Paulson-Smith

Feminist Pedagogy

A major challenge for abolitionist teaching is uprooting the assumption that carceral systems are natural and inevitable. This essay describes strategies for teaching about the colonial capitalist origins and white cisheteropatriarchal development of the police, and the critical theorization and abolition of policing, in a hyper-politicized minefield. These strategies emerged from teaching, “The Global Politics of Policing,” after the Summer of 2020 in the Midwest, where abolitionist critiques were frequently met with burning resentment. Three overarching strategies to facilitate learning about police abolition include: 1) consistent engagement with learning materials; 2) critical analysis as a learning objective and theoretical framework; …

Towards Abolitionist Media Studies, Beth Capper

Feminist Pedagogy

The reflections in this article are grounded in my experience teaching a graduate-level special topics course on media and abolition at the University of Alberta in 2023. In this article, I draw upon my experience teaching this course in order to offer a general framework for integrating abolitionist principles into the media studies classroom. In addition to tracing a critical genealogy of scholarly and activist efforts to delineate and intervene in the relations among prisons, policing and media, I propose two key abolitionist principles that challenge how we teach media studies: (1) an intentional centering of incarcerated/criminalized people and a …

Research For Structural Change: An Abolitionist Teaching Activity For Early-Career Scholars, Sophia Sarantakos, Shannon Sliva

Feminist Pedagogy

In recent years, social work practitioners, educators, and scholars have increasingly wrestled with the harmful history of the profession, and sought ways to align the field with the anti-oppressive principles it has long espoused. One expression of this struggle is a growing interest in prison-industrial complex (PIC) abolition, primarily among social work students and early career scholars, who are eager to study this critical theory of change and apply it to the various domains of social work practice and research (e.g., schools, family policing, healthcare, the legal system, and beyond). As social work educators and scholars whose work is centered …

Story Exchange Walls: Bridging Community And Carceral Spaces Through Writing, Tobi Jacobi, Braden Bomgaars

Feminist Pedagogy

The “story exchange wall” activity that follows expands the scope and accessibility of stories that can contribute to building infrastructures grounded in abolition-minded practices of care and relationality. Story exchange walls are built upon the premise that: a) not all community voices are heard; b) there is value in pursuing understanding across discourse communities; and c) writing is an engaging method for encouraging dialogue on social issues and dismantling misconceptions about system-impacted people and their community commitments and contributions. Through a series of written and displayed dialogues, mobile story exchange walls offer a dynamic tool for engaging social issues and …

Star Wars: Andor – An Abolitionist Study Guide, Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

This study guide provides a set of activities for teaching abolition through Season 1 of the speculative fiction TV series Star Wars: Andor (2022). Through the practice of critical literacy (viewing, reading, and analysis), we offer various ideas on how to engage Andor as a relevant pedagogical tool for studying and teaching abolitionist movement histories and methodologies. By guiding students through a critical analysis of this widely-circulated, mainstream cultural text, we seek to activate an abolitionist pedagogical lens that can be applied across various genres and media – making tangible connections between popular culture and political struggles writ large. These …

Restorative Justice Circles As Pedagogy: Enacting Abolitionist Values And Practices, Morgan Connor, Daniel Jasmine, Jerry Kennedy, Taylor Morganne' Price, Adrianna Provost, Nicole Rigoroso, Elizabeth L. Beck

Feminist Pedagogy

This article shares the experiences of seven peers from a university course on Restorative Justice (RJ). The authors describe their use of Circle as a pedagogical tool that created a learning environment which eroded traditional hierarchy, promoted open communication and togetherness, and challenged carceral logic(s). Their course readings and discussions built opportunities for members of the class—each coming from different backgrounds and spaces of understanding—to grow and find ways to be in community that did not rely on shame and punishment. Though the authors ended their experience in different places of understanding and commitment to abolitionist principles, they felt a …

Reimagining Carceral Spaces – A Guerilla Tour Of Hm Prison Pentridge., Bree Carlton, Liam Gillespie

Feminist Pedagogy

In this paper, we reflect on our experience of running a Guerilla Walking Tour of the now decommissioned and repurposed HM Prison Pentridge. This original teaching activity, conducted with Master of Criminology students, was grounded in traditions of critical and radical pedagogy, which stem from the broad recognition that education can never be neutral or value free, but rather, that it is a political process through which students can become actively engaged in the worlds they are learning about so that they can critique and transform them. To this end, our walking tour was designed to encourage students to examine …

Being Radical Community: “Pleasure Activism” In Higher Education, Misty D. Saribal, Taisha Mcmickens Dr.

Feminist Pedagogy

This paper argues for the necessity of pleasure in abolitionist pedagogy as a condition for sustaining movements toward collective liberation. Grounded in abolition feminism and radical pedagogy, it introduces the “Pleasure Activism Lineage” (PAL) as a tool for cultivating campus movement communities through joy, care, and collective resistance. Drawing on adrienne maree brown’s framework of pleasure activism, the PAL assignment invites students and educators to trace transformative influences, reclaim subversive forms of joy, and build solidarities rooted in liberatory traditions. By centering pleasure as a site of resistance, this project disrupts the pitifully punitive logics and pessimistically professionalizing ethos of …

Decolonizing Monopoly: Intersectionality, Abolition, And Fun, Faith Deschamps, Caroline Mullins, Elizabeth Sumoza, Vanessa Hildebrand, Veda Hyunjin Kim

Feminist Pedagogy

“Abolitionist teaching is not sustainable without joy” (Love 2019: 120). We propose a joyful classroom activity that recreates the game “Monopoly” to bring to the forefront the lived experiences of people in late racial capitalism. This re-creation is an exercise in which undergraduate students rewrite both the characters to represent intersectional identities in the United States and the chance cards to represent the contemporary context. Students then play the game with these characters and end with a reflection on the lesson. In this way students are able to exercise prior course learning on identity, privilege, inequality, intersectionality, social stratification, organizing, …

Creating Abolitionist Classroom Environments And Three Abolitionist Learning Activities, Marina Bell

Feminist Pedagogy

In this paper I describe some of the approaches I have developed over the past six years of abolitionist teaching in the classroom. I will focus on three activities for helping students grapple with abolitionist concepts, principles, and values experientially, with the goal of generating conversation about some of their most challenging aspects, and working through emotions around them. Specifically these exercises are: 1) Distinguishing between carceral and abolitionist reforms, 2) What do we do with “the dangerous people” and our feelings about them?, and 3) A mutual aid exercise in which I have students identify and choose together what …

Critical Prison Studies In Dialogue: Abolition-Feminist Pedagogy Within And Beyond The Classroom, Laura Ciolkowski

Feminist Pedagogy

“Critical Prison Studies in Dialogue: Teaching and Learning” is a multi- week, undergraduate project that combines critical thinking, collaboration, and an analysis of the social relations and material logics of carceral systems in the U.S. It consists of a series of carefully scaffolded activities that create space for students to imagine a world in which incarceration is not the logical answer to the political and social problems that plague us. It also asks students to theorize, experience, and reflect on the process of abolition-feminist movement building on multiple scales within and outside the classroom.

Co-Creating An Encyclopedia Of Abolition As A Method Of Abolitionist Instruction And Community Engagement, Kristen Maziarka

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

The Ethics Of “Educational” Prison Tours, Alessandra Milagros Early, Nicole Mckenna, Alison Colby, Lucas Alan Dietsche, Ashley Kilmer

Feminist Pedagogy

Research examining undergraduate student attitudes toward corrections suggests that criminal justice majors hold more punitive sentiments in comparison to their peers in other fields (Mackey & Courtright, 2000). While taking criminal justice courses can shift attitudes (Farnworth et al.,1998; Lane, 1997), how classes are taught can impact student sentiments. Experiential learning, for example, expands learning beyond the classroom (Stacer et al., 2017). Although disciplines have embraced this method, incorporations in criminal justice curricula sometimes manifest as tours of active correctional institutions (Smith et al., 2009) which can be extractive and dehumanizing for people who are incarcerated (C. Agans, personal communication, …