Digital Commons Network^™

“They Act Like We Are Going To Heaven”: Pre-Arrival Information Experiences, Information Crafting And Settlement Of Immigrants In Canada, Nafiz Z. Shuva

Publications and Research

Purpose

Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.

Design/methodology/approach

The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada …

An Intersectional Approach To Quantifying The Impact Of Geographic Remoteness And Health Disparities On Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy: Application To Australia, Peter Lee, Steven J. Bowe, Lidia Engel, Erica I. Lubetkin, Nancy Devlin, Lan Gao

Publications and Research

Objectives

Methods

The Influence Of Nature On Well-Being During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Views From New England Island Residents, Nicole Kras, Jennifer Keenan

New Community College

Researchers are beginning to explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on island populations, but little is known about the experiences of the residents of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in the Northeast region of the United States. In this study, islanders (N=41) provide insight into how spending time in nature influenced their well-being, especially their mental well-being, during this unprecedented time. For the majority of participants, the influence of nature on their well-being increased during the pandemic. Additionally, participants shared benefits of island living such as isolation from the mainland, as well as challenges such as food and supply shortages. …

The Puerto Rico Children Vulnerability Index, 2021, Jennifer Hinojosa, Laura Colon-Melendez, Jorge Soldevilla-Irizarry, Damayra I. Figueroa-Lazu

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Recent natural hazards and resulting disasters in Puerto Rico have drawn attention to the social vulnerability of children in the archipelago. We created the Child Vulnerability Index (CVI) to identify the scale and patterns of child vulnerability in the archipelago, and provide insights to mitigate the effects that hazardous events may cause. The index was created using 2017-2021 American Community Survey (ACS) data pertaining to three broad themes: Personal characteristics of children, Characteristics of households with children, and Overall household characteristics for all Municipios, Barrios, and Census Tracts in Puerto Rico. The CVI is a two-pronged tool consisting of an …

Archival Inversions: Rethinking Knowledge Infrastructures Through The Cuny Distance Learning Archive, Zach Muhlbauer, Stefano Morello, Travis M. Bartley, Nicole Cote, Matthew K. Gold

Publications and Research

In the spring of 2020, doctoral students at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center produced a collective intervention in the knowledge infrastructures of the largest public university system in the United States. The CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA) sought to document and bridge the lived experiences of faculty, staff, and students—particularly immigrant and working-class undergraduates—across the 25 campuses comprising the CUNY system. The archive’s three public-facing collections span the closure of the university, the transition to remote teaching and learning, and the resulting activism of the #CutCOVIDNotCUNY movement pushing against austerity in public higher education. These collections …

Ethnographic Activism And Critical Criminology, David C. Brotherton

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Pervasive Poverty In Puerto Rico: A Closer Look, Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Laura Colon-Melendez, Jorge Soldevilla-Irizarry, Damayra Figueroa-Lazu, Jennifer Hinojosa, Yarimar Bonilla

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

On November 15, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Housing, Community Renewal, and Insurance held a hearing entitled “Persistent Poverty in America: Addressing Chronic Disinvestment in Colonias, the U.S. Territories and the Southern Blackbelt.” Dr. Yarimar Bonilla, then CENTRO’s director, provided testimony concerning Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories. These jurisdictions the subcommittee focused on have historically had high rates of poverty, higher relative to other places in the United States. Puerto Rico’s poverty and overall economic conditions have fluctuated over the decades taking a clear turn for the worse beginning in 2006 with an enduring economic crisis, …

Expanding The Role Of The Temporal Dimension In Ecological Niche Models: A Study On Mexican Montane Small Mammals, Gonzalo E. Pinilla Buitrago

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecological niche models (ENMs) are commonly used to estimate the potential geographic distributions of species and have various uses, such as predicting invasive species' potential distribution, assessing vulnerability to climate change, or estimating paleodistributions. However, ENM developments have primarily focused on solving spatially related issues, underemphasizing the temporal dimensionality of occurrence and environmental data collected over the last century. One limitation of ENMs is the common practice of using recent environmental averages that fail to capture the gradual environmental change over the time span of the occurrence records and can hide trends in environmental variables, a critical piece of information …

Colonial Geographies Of Gendered Violence And Mental Health In The United States And Puerto Rico, Lorraine Lizbeth L. Torres Colon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As of January 2021, after years of community organizing and protests, the Puerto Rican island government announced a state of emergency due to the high rates of gendered violence on the island. At the same time, within the field of psychiatric epidemiology, consistent findings have indicated higher frequencies of mood disorders and substance abuse disorders among Puerto Ricans both on and off the island, relative to all other US Latinx ethnic groups. This dissertation frames Puerto Ricans experiences with psychological distress and gendered violence as public health issues nested within differing geographies of colonial divestment. I explore the relationships between …

The Archival Impulse: English Family Record Keeping And Archives, Ca. 1450–1700, Maura Kenny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

England in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of documents arising from a growth in literacy and an expansion of state administrative offices. Scholarship on the archival history of this period has grown recently but it has focused mainly on institutional and state archives. Very little has been written about family or personal archives and the uses made of them. Based on modern archival theory and extensive archival research, this dissertation seeks to fill this gap by addressing the creation of family records and archives as a whole, exploring early modern English families as a “community of records.” …

Freedom Song: Uncovering A Politics Of Dignity In Black Feminist Thought And Praxis, Abegail M. Dobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master's thesis delves into Intersectionality as an organizing framework and critical social theory, emphasizing the significance of Black feminist thought to social justice initiatives that challenge prevailing intersectional violence. The central inquiry of this project is uncovering a Black feminist conceptualization of dignity as articulated in foundational texts. I scrutinize the essence of dignity within Black feminist theory and praxis, particularly addressing the question: How valuable is a "right" when societal experiences consistently undermine one's basic needs and protections required to live a dignified life beyond survival?

Black feminist thought, encompassing praxis, is posited as a profound space for …

Theorizing Racial Democracy, Teófilo De Souza Carmo Reis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The critical philosophy of race has shown recent growth, but it tends to focus too much on the United States. This leaves many race-related concepts and phenomena from other parts of the world underexplored. I help to fill this gap by exploring the idea of "racial democracy" in Brazil, which is a form of racial ignorance that is prevalent in that country. Specifically, I am interested in the epistemic aspects of this mechanism of creating and propagating racial ignorance.

To achieve this goal, I begin by introducing Charles Mills' concept of white ignorance and other influential works in social epistemology. …

Flamboyant Abundance: Performing Queer Maximalism, 1960–1990, Jack Owen Crawford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation theorizes “queer maximalism” as an aesthetic of unmitigated flamboyance and voracious drag that appears in a constellation of performance-based artistic practices in the postwar United States. Queer maximalism brings together a historically grounded group of performers primarily based in New York City who have been variously described as theatrical, baroque, and Ridiculous and repositions them within an art-historical frame. Identifying drag and pastiche as central to queer maximalism, I show how artists salvage, assemble, and re-signify pop-cultural imagery, inflecting it with camp in order to fashion intimate community and openly flout societal norms of gender, race, and sexuality. …

Learning To Fly While Staying Grounded: How Forcibly Displaced Individuals Develop A Sense Of Belonging In Disempowered Cities, Janina L. Selzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite a growing interest in belonging, immigration and urban scholarship has yet to develop an empirically grounded, spatially sensitive, and complex theorization of the concept itself. Drawing on a comparative case study of two disempowered cities – Bielefeld, Germany, and Detroit, US, – this dissertation analyzes how and to what extent forcibly displaced Yazidi and Chaldean Iraqis develop a sense of belonging. By triangulating data from semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations, as well as a discourse analysis of policy documents, the following pages trace how politics of belonging are continuously produced, reproduced, and challenged through a spatially mediated and often contradictory …

Settling Into Inequality: Resettled Afghans In The Washington Dc Metro Area, Harry Frey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August of 2021, nearly 90,000 Afghans who had fled their country have been resettled in the United States, constituting one of the largest groups of refugee arrivals in the U.S. in recent history. Working from a database I created from the administrative records of a non-profit refugee aid group, I use data and spatial analysis to examine the demographics of Afghans resettled in the DC metro area, the characteristics of the census tracts and counties in which they have been resettled, and their access to public transportation. I find that the …

Colonial Investments: The Global Coordinates Of The English Political Imaginary, 1628–1668, Nathan D. Nikolic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The main question my dissertation attempts to address is: what role did the expansion of English colonial trades play in the transformation of English society and government between the Petition of Right and the early years of the Restoration (1628-1668)? My thesis is that during this period, colonial expansion rose to the level of a general national interest and that many early seventeenth-century texts index the complexities and tensions of this development. As a small but very organized group of merchants, peers, and MPs mobilized the military and financial technologies of colonization to support Parliament’s war against Charles I, their …

A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ancient Greek notions of topos, or place, and choros, or region, emerge from a an oral, narrative-based tradition that predates geography. These concepts remind us that that best source of material to study place is to be found in literary fiction. American fiction in particular will give us the evidence by which we can compile a qualitative, experiential understanding of the role of place in people’s lives. This dissertation inquires into the formation of the imaginative constructions that characters put upon place—such as through the process of consolidating and dwelling in places—and the way place puts …

A Difference Of One's Own: Race, Sex, Modernism, Ryan L. Tracy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Difference of One’s Own” demonstrates that deconstructive conceptions of race lie at the heart of the modernist canon’s experimental representations of selfhood. Drawing on recent and canonical scholarship in Modernist Studies, Black Studies, Deconstruction, Queer Theory, Critical Theory, and Feminist Studies, I look at moments in modernist-era literature where the need to represent racial blackness, whether as a descriptor that defines one’s self-identity or the identity of another person, fails to draw a coherent line of difference between people, communities, selves, and importantly, the literatures that are thought to adhere to hard and fast racial distinctions. “Part I: …

Uncertainties In Retrieval Of Remote Sensing Reflectance From Ocean Color Satellite Observations, Eder I. Herrera Estrella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ocean Color radiometry uses remote sensing to interpret ocean dynamics by retrieving remote sensing reflectance (������) from satellite imagery at different scales and over different time periods. ������ spectrum characterizes the ocean color that we observe, and from which we can discern concentrations of chlorophyll, organic and inorganic particles, and carbon fluxes in the ocean and atmosphere. ������ is derived from the total radiance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). However, it only represents up to ten percent of the total signal. Hence, the retrieval of ������ from the total radiance at TOA involves the application of atmospheric correction …

Cartographic Subjectivity In Fernand Deligny’S Lignes D’Erre, Anya Komar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) was a French thinker, writer, and social worker who dedicated his entire life to an abolitionist project of protecting “severely autistic” children from internment in mental asylums by allowing them to move freely through the mountains of Cévennes where he established a support network for neurodiverse children. He privileged children’s nonverbal state and let them “direct” the community.

This thesis aims to historicize the drawings made under the guidance of Fernand Deligny between the 1960s and 1980s. His drawing method of tracing children’s movement offered an unprecedented way of providing visibility to children with nonverbal autism, outside …

Brainwaves, Memory, And Reward, Rebecca Mccune

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The development of effective educational curricula for enhancing learning involves the crucial consideration of effort and rewards. In the realm of education, teachers commonly employ rewards as motivational tools. Traditionally, these rewards are given to students as a recognition of their successful performance. However, a thought-provoking idea emerges: What if we were to extend rewards to students not solely based on accurate answers, but also on the effort they invest, even in cases where their actual response might be incorrect? Our study explores the potential impact of this approach on the way information is absorbed and subsequently retained, specifically focusing …

Africa’S Coastal Archaeological Record And Climate Change, Michael Murphy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1980s, archaeologists have warned about threats from anthropogenic climate change (ACC) to the world’s archaeological record in coastal areas. Until recently, such warnings did not include Africa’s archaeological record. There is a persistent gap in research on climate change and Africa’s archaeological and cultural heritage stretching back before the U.N. established the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The purpose of this thesis is to assess the gap and help to narrow it. The approach is to take advantage of the availability of the dataset from the first geographically comprehensive study of climate change and coastal …

A Blackgirl Artivisionary Mosaic: Art-Based Participatory Refusals To School Punishment, Tyese A. Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study participants were co-research partners and engaged in a Project Based Learning six-week summer project in an urban northeastern metropolis community-based non-profit where they received stipends for participation. This dissertation explored how Blackgirls (aged 14 -21) express their experiences with disparate school punishment through community-based participatory artmaking. We called the photos, poems, collages, sculptures, storyboards, digital art, visual art, songs, spoken word, and videos Artivisions (art I vision). In the Jam Sessions, a subset of the partners we called curators discussed the pieces, shared their experiences, and offered insight into Blackgirls’ responses, coping skills, and decision-making regarding school punishment. …

Grand Strategy At The End Of History: Chinese Strategic Thought In The 21st Century And Its Western Perceptions, Daniel A. Rogers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Too often does the study of grand strategy, especially as it is conducted by academics based in the United States, take on an ethnocentric perspective which would lead American audiences to believe it is their country alone which possesses a coherent grand strategy that seeks to secure the national interest and nothing more. This chauvinistic approach not only leaves the majority of the world out of the conversation of grand strategy, but also results in the characterizing of the strategic approaches of non-Western states as disruptors of the foreign policy goals of the United States. The People’s Republic of China …

Publishing The Pan-Jewish: The First Hebrew Newspaper And Its Modernities, Philip E. Keisman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Publishing the Pan-Jewish emerges from a question about sites of synthesis between claims of sacred continuity and novel forms of communication. It centers on the first ten years of Hamagid (1856-1866), acknowledged within the historiography as history’s first Hebrew-language newspaper. Eliezer Lipman Silberman, an Orthodox butcher founded Hamagid in East Prussia as a bulwark of his vision of traditional Judaism. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the formal elements of the newspaper as a medium, demonstrating the myriad ways in which it presented novel experiences for its reading public. Chapter two narrates an untold history of the newspaper’s early …

The State Of The Unions 2023: A Profile Of Organized Labor In New York City, New York State, And The United States, Ruth Milkman, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

This report released by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, State of the Unions 2023: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, is a part of an annual publication series, documents recent trends in unionization patterns. The overall level of unionization in both the City and State has been roughly double the national rate over the past two decades. But recently, union density has fallen more in New York City and New York State than in the United States as a whole. In the mid-2010s, both the City and …

A Mixed Methods Approach To Understanding The Links Between Mining, Climate Change And Selected Health Outcomes In India, Mary J. Cheruvillil

Dissertations and Theses

Despite ample evidence of the significant role that mining activities play in determining health outcomes, in India there is a dearth of comprehensive health studies that draw linkages between mining and health. The purpose of the following study is to investigate the impact of mining activities on population health in India using three different methods: ecological multivariable regression, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and content analysis of government documents using a phenomenological approach. The first aim uses the ecological multivariable regression to examine associations between mining activities and children’s malnutrition outcomes at the district level. Census data, the Demographic Health …

Federal Climate Policy Successes: Co-Benefits, Business Acceptance, And Partisan Politics, Roger Karapin, David Vogel

Publications and Research

While most literature on federal climate change policies has focused on failures to adopt broad policies, this article describes and explains successes in two important sectors. Regulations to improve the fuel economy of motor vehicles and efficiency standards for appliances and equipment have produced substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions although they largely have other goals and hence can be considered implicit climate policies.

We synthesize existing literature with our analyses of case studies to offer three explanations for the adoption of effective sectoral policies in these two sectors. First, the policies delivered politically popular co-benefits such as reducing consumers’ …

Shifting Frontiers Economic Consequences Of The Polish Partitions, Andrew J. Fox

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses spatial regression discontinuity design to examine the impacts of historical border changes on economic development in modern Poland. Positive effects on institutions and infrastructure are found in the Austro-Hungarian zone of the Polish partition, while the Prussian zone suffer negative consequences due to 20th-century destruction and post-war expulsions.

Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …