Digital Commons Network^™

Micro-Metropolis: Space, Work, And Waste In The Maquettes Of Constant And Bodys Isek Kingelez, Shoshanah B. Rosen

Theses and Dissertations

Constant Nieuwenhuys and Bodys Isek Kingelez both create futuristic utopias in the form of architectural maquettes. This comparative study explores each artist’s reverence for technology, global connectivity, and new forms of economic production. It argues that these utopias represent desires endemic to late modernity and capitalism, including consumption, nomadism, automation.

In Place/Out Of Place Assignment, Peter Kabachnik

Open Educational Resources

This Geography assignment, ideal for Political Geography, Cultural Geography, Urban Geography, and so forth (and of course other related disciplines like Anthropology and Sociology), undergraduate courses, explores the concepts of in place and out of place. Based on a reading of the introduction of Tim Cresswell's 1996 book In Place/out of Place Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, this assignment is a great way to get students to think about these issues and connect them to their own experiences.

“The Amount Of Labor We Do For Free” And Other Contradictions: A Collective Inquiry Into The Pedagogical Choices Of Cuny Adjunct And Graduate Student Instructors Who Taught With Free Of Charge Materials During The Year 2020, Sami Disu, Joanna Dressel, Jamila Hammami, Marianne Madoré, Conor Tomás Reed

Publications and Research

A collective of five CUNY researchers developed and conducted a survey-based study of how CUNY adjunct and graduate student faculty taught with free of charge materials during the year 2020. A total of 152 respondents filled out the survey. Four themes emerged from the analysis of their responses:

1. Adjunct and graduate student faculty who taught with free of charge materials at CUNY in 2020 were motivated by economic, logistical, and pedagogical benefits. They invested considerable amounts of time in both creating and selecting material.
2. Their pedagogical choices about learning materials were formed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the …

Geology Online Lab Activities An Open Educational Resource For Community College Students And Instructors, Rondi Davies

Open Educational Resources

The online geology lab for community college students was developed by Dr. Rondi Davies, a faculty member at Queensborough Community College, City University New York, during two years of forced online synchronous learning brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This open educational resource collects many of Dr. Davies’ favorite open-access materials and supplements them with her own work within a single, cohesive laboratory manual intended for two-year, non-major college students from the New York area.

Dr. Davies wanted to develop labs that were fun, engaging, and that excited students about the subject, were relevant to their lives, helped them to …

Art History, Open Educational Resources (Oers), And Social Justice-Oriented Pedagogy: Adaptations To Introductory World Art History Survey Courses, Sara Ishii

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This essay considers the social justice benefits of adopting OERs in an introductory art history survey course. Following the events of the COVID-19 pandemic, instructors have needed to reevaluate pedagogical approaches and teaching materials. Coupled with this present need to foster accessible and flexible courses, for decades art historians have observed the overrepresentation of white Western art and subsequent marginalization of global art in survey textbooks. Centering the need for a social justice-oriented pedagogy that recognizes global contributions to art history, I first reflect on the potential to adapt open educational resources (OERs) to disrupt status quo narratives that privilege …

Dominicans In The United States: A Socioeconomic Profile 2022, Ramona Hernandez, Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz, Sidie S. Sisay

Publications and Research

This research report presents the first detailed study of the socioeconomic status of the Dominican population of the United States as we enter the second decade of the 2000s, including a discussion of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Library Wayfinding And Esol Students: Communication Challenges And Empathy-Based Intervention, Nora Almeida, Junior R. Tidal

Publications and Research

This article describes a wayfinding study conducted in an urban, academic library to better understand the experiences of multilingual student populations. The study, which incorporated traditional user experience methods and video ethnography, exposed communication obstacles and spatial challenges encountered by students of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) when attempting information retrieval tasks. After outlining the methodology and examining qualitative findings, the authors discuss how study findings prompted a reevaluation of local practices, service models, and staff training protocols. Finally, the authors explore the potential for qualitative, empathy-based wayfinding studies to transform library practices and spaces.

Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, And Method, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards allows us to perceive dynamics of racialized and gendered labor and laborers who, in an echo of their architectural focus on minor, peripheral spaces and shadows, hover between the underrecognized and oft-neglected, thereby allowing …

Diversity And Multiculturalism In The 21st Century, Oluremi "Remi" Alapo

Publications and Research

This is a presentation on Diversity and Multi-Culturalism in the 21st Century related to the individual and society based on responses from in-class assignments during various semester course sessions [from 2019 to 2021] taught by the presenter at the York College [CUNY]. In the course in addition to culture, students learned about norms, values, systems of beliefs, social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication, race and ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation and gender, technology and culture, cultural universalism and relativism, and how these affect our shared or distinct day to day cultural practices and social interaction in our various communities.

At the …

Spatial Downscaling Of Goes-R Land Surface Temperature Over Urban Regions: A Case Study For New York City, Abdou Bah, Hamidreza Norouzi, Satya Prakash, Reginald Blake, Reza Khanbilvardi, Cynthia Rosenzweig

Publications and Research

The surface urban heat island (SUHI) effect is among the major environmental issues encountered in urban regions. To better predict the dynamics of the SUHI and its impacts on extreme heat events, an accurate characterization of the surface energy balance in urban regions is needed. However, the ability to improve understanding of the surface energy balance is limited by the heterogeneity of surfaces in urban areas. This study aims to enhance the understanding of the urban surface energy budget through an innovation in the use of land surface temperature (LST) observations from remote sensing satellites. A LST database with 5–min …

Possibilities For Using Visual Drawing With Student-Teachers: Linking Childhood Memories To Future Teaching Selves, Debbie Sonu

Publications and Research

Drawing from memory-work, this study examines the relationship between childhood and the peda- gogical perspectives and practices of 16 pre-service student-teachers enrolled at one large university in the United States. In an analysis of their visual drawings and written narratives of childhood memories, student-teachers link childhood pasts with teaching futures in three distinct ways: 1) intimate con- nections with former teachers, 2) difficult life circumstances involving loss or trauma, and 3) the primacy of family and culture. Each set of memories is tied to a range of responsibilities that student-teachers vow to uphold, leading towards more re!exive practices in teacher …

Property In Pieces: Land, Oil And Uncertainty In A Mexican Ejido, Margaret Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pemex has been a symbol of Mexican nationalism and a steward of the nation’s oil patrimony for more than 75 years, but few scholars have studied the messy ways in which oil extraction has played out in rural communities. This dissertation does that, while also analyzing the way in which various forms of property—national patrimony, private property, and communal property—are articulated in three dimensions (3D) in an ejido (communal agrarian community) in northern Veracruz. Horizontally, land has shifted from being collectively owned and managed to being divided into individually held plots which are not always recognized. Meanwhile, a web of …

Hudson Yards: Hybrid Capital's New Home, Massimo D. Scoditti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on the material and metaphysical aspects of the Hudson Yards, the largest private development in US History. With its roots in the administration of Michael Bloomberg, the site is representative of neoliberal ideology. It is also one in which cultural production is central. This is in terms of the rationalization and mythos of the building of the space itself and the dreamworlds created to obscure the mechanisms of extraction and accumulation that make such a complex possible. The Hudson Yards is particularly interesting because, as Cindi Katz might suggest, topography lines connect it to transnational capital. And …

Staging The Ocean: The Emergence Of The Aquarium In Victorian England, Alaina Claire Feldman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a cultural history and analysis of the constructions and representations of nature through the apparatus of the saltwater aquarium, which I argue is historically embedded in forms of biocapitalist control that produce knowledge, difference and enclosure, and mediates a form of pedagogy used to extend empire into the ocean. I look to the origins of hobby and public aquariums in Victorian England to comprehend how imperial management of pristine environments gave rise to the aquariums that we know today. The marine aquarium examined here is a Western entity that reduces the world to dichotomies and oversimplifies vast …

Blockchain: Key Principles, Nadezda Chikurova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Blockchain: Key Principles” is an interactive visual project that explains the importance of data privacy and security, decentralized computing, and open-source software in the modern digital world through the history of the underlying principles of blockchain technology. Some of these key concepts have their roots in the time before the Information Age. By explaining the history of these principles, I want to present the fact that over the past centuries, humanity has been fighting for their privacy, security, and the ability to efficiently express themselves one way or another. Blockchain technology, which was introduced to the public in 2008 through …

Go Off: The Geography And Labor Of Off- And Off-Off-Broadway, Sean C. Mellott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Off- and Off-Off-Broadway remain ill-defined and misunderstood sectors of New York City’s theatre industry, at least when compared with Broadway. This capstone project examines these dual sociocultural spaces and defines some of their contours through a primary analytical lens of geography (the physical locations where Off- and Off-Off-Broadway are produced) and a secondary lens of labor (the professional contexts in which Off- and Off-Off-Broadway are produced). Both elements speak to the material conditions of theatrical production in New York City, offering clues as to Off- and Off-Off-Broadway’s position within the entertainment industry and their relationship to the larger social structure …

Essays On Labor Economics, Gabriel Movsesyan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first chapter, I evaluate the wage impacts from exogenous and endogenous peer effects within different metropolitan areas. I construct comparison groups for workers within the same industry and Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) residence based on support from existing literature on social networks, and estimate peer and network effects in a spatial auto-regressive model with a network structure that in- corporates group fixed effects. Inclusion of these effects reveals that both observed and unobserved factors within each network have significant effects on individual outcomes. This is the first attempt to estimate the social effects on wages using the …

Queer And Trans Prison Voices: A Podcast Archive On Prison Abolition, Josefine Ziebell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is located at the intersection of Critical Prison Studies, Gender Studies, Sound Studies, and American Studies. It highlights the importance of sonic modes of anti-carceral resistance by featuring the recorded voices of incarcerated people through the creation of a sonic archive of prison writings. By integrating that sonic archive into the podcast medium, this project functions as a digital archive for incarcerated voices, consisting of two tracks: a collection of short-spoken readings by queer and transgender incarcerated authors, and podcast-style interviews with activist scholars, organizations, and sound artists working towards prison abolition. In this paper, I establish …

Surveilling The Fat Disidencia: Policing The Bodies Of Plus-Size Black Women On Instagram, Daniela V. Verdejo Salazar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instagram has shaped how we network and share content with others, making interactions far more accessible for everyone who uses this platform daily. Unfortunately, it has also given space to some surveilling mechanisms that tend to police and norm how users and their bodies should present themselves to the rest of the world.

The body can be understood as a manifestation, a presence, and a performance. As Judith Butler argues, the body is also a political space where ideas of resistance and vulnerability take place, and I will understand the body as a combination of the physical manifestation of it …

The Life And Legacy Of Edwin Greenlaw: “Teacher And Scholar”, Mykelin Higham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from recently available archival documents, this paper traces the life, works, and influence of Edwin Greenlaw (1874–1931), a notable scholar of Spenser and the English Renaissance and a beloved and influential teacher. Information from a biographical manuscript authored by his brother is supplemented with contextual history of literary education in turn-of-the-century America and the debates between literary historians and critics of the early twentieth century in order to trace Greenlaw’s model impact as both a practitioner and leader. His exegesis of Spenser’s political allegory, his numerous edited literature textbooks for the general student, and his activism for a more …

Blurring The "Bright Line": Examining Age-Related Differences In Jail Incarceration Outcomes Using A Resources-Challenges Model Of Emerging Adulthood, Olive F. Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Jail incarceration represents an early and prevalent point of contact with the criminal legal system. While there is some evidence of age-related differences in jail incarceration outcomes such as rearrest and reconvictions, existing research typically only make comparisons between adults and adolescents. This bifurcation ignores the unique experiences of a third group: emerging adults aged 18 to 25. Evidence from developmental research combined with shifting social and cultural dynamics suggest that 18-25-year-olds, though adults by law, straddle the line between adolescence and adulthood while facing challenges that set them apart.

The current study incorporates a resources-challenges framework of emerging adulthood …

A House Of One’S Own: Challenges And Re-Definitions Of Female Subjectivity And Domestic Space In Italian Women Writers From The 1950s To The Early 2000s, Nicole Paronzini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With an in-depth analysis of selected Italian novels written by female writers from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this dissertation addresses and discusses the challenging relationship between female identity and the home, perceived both as constraining space and metaphor of human interiority. The projects aim to show that these characters, as representative of the female individual, are capable to use the domestic space as a privilege universe in which re-defining themselves, modifying their own and other perception as passive objects of patriarchal society to the one of subjects in fieri.

If, on one hand, the house has been …

K-12 Digital Pedagogy: An Open Educational Resource Designed To Build A Community Of Practitioners, Kelly Hammond

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic created the need for a necessarily steep increase in technology use among K-12 teachers around the world, as education shifted suddenly to remote learning in the early spring of 2020 and then to a mix of remote, hybrid, and in-person learning where it remains. Over the same time period, events in the United States sharply increased the visibility of systemic racism, particularly against Black and Asian American citizens—racism that, like all social biases, is often replicated or intensified through misapplications or uncritical uses of technology, data gathering, and analysis. The rapid development of teachers’ practical skills and …

Discrimination, Psychological Well-Being, And Racial Importance In U.S. Native-Born And Caribbean Black Americans, Jaime E. Mccaw

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: The present study examines the experiences of perceived discrimination and psychological well-being among two non-Hispanic Black American ethnic groups, Black Americans whose sole known country of origin is the United States and Black Americans with Caribbean heritage. Lifetime and everyday discrimination, life dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, hopelessness, and psychological distress are explored for each group. The impact of racial identity importance on each of these experiences is explored through self-identification with an identity that is defined racially or nationally (e.g., Black, American, or both equally), and the interaction between ethnicity and sex is considered.

Methods: Data are from adults recruited …

Alternative Food Production In Cauca, Colombia: The Value Of Agroecological Food Systems For Local Small Producers And Consumers, Andrea Negret

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis intends to offer an integral view of the reality of food production and distribution in the Cauca Department in Colombia, observing the different practices that have caused deep social and environmental struggles including systemic violence, displacement and environmental degradation. The first two chapters will offer a global and national context of food production to better understand the many challenges that rural populations endure in rural Cauca. Chapters four and five will explore some resistance strategies and movements that rural communities in Cauca and other Colombian regions have developed to fight against corporate agro-industrial dominance so they can protect …

Unraveling The Geographies Of The U.S. Public Education System: An Analysis Of Scale, Segregation, And Hegemony, Olivia Ildefonso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Other than one or two studies that focus on specific state-wide systems of public education, there has been no accounting for how the U.S. public education system came about in relation to space and scale. My dissertation research seeks to fill in this gap. Through focusing on the development of public education in the North and the South, I provide a foundation for understanding the grounded and contested processes of scale production that largely determined the U.S. public education system’s design and function.

In each of the seven chapters, I detail how fights over the structure and purpose of public …

Sweetness And Femininity: Fashioning Gendered Appetite In The Victorian Age, Michael Krondl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since at least the nineteenth century sweetness and a preference for sweet foods has been linked to femininity. Western, middle-class women learned and reproduced normative gendered dietary behavior due to both private and public pressure to control their appetites and those of their children. In performing their gendered roles, they came to embody them through everyday rituals such as teatime. Sugary foods and drinks served as necessary props in these performances. Theorists, most prominently Jean-Jacques Rousseau, began to propose a linkage of sweet foods with femininity in the seventeen hundreds. In the following century, the medical profession explained women’s tastes …

Neither Invisible, Nor Silenced: The India-Maghreb Connections In Female-Authored Cinema, Chandra Balkaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Third-World” women have long been excluded from center screen space, and positioned as stereotypical characters in liminal, coded spaces—such as harems, brothels, convents, ashrams, zawiyas or in domestic space. Yet, spatial organization is integral to the production of the social, not merely its result, and is fully implicated in both history and politics. Space is thus a crucial category of analysis in any cinema. My thesis examines how spaces, from the domestic to the virtual, socio-religio-cultural are reclaimed, redefined, and reformulated by women in politically engaged films made by Third-World women directors focused on women. Their struggles for space are …

Past-Futures Of Harlem: Black Urban Space At The Limits Of Spatial Justice, Dane C. Ruffin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The racial capitalist development of the U.S. metropolitan landscape has been shaped by the involuntary displacement and dispersal of Black communities. From the dispossession of the Half-Free Negro Lots around the Fresh Collect pond in the seventeenth century to the clearing of Seneca Village to build Central Park in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth-century police-facilitated “race riot” in the Tenderloin district of Manhattan, which fueled the move to Harlem, the four-hundred year history of Black Manhattan alone provides substantial evidence of this and is in no way unique in this regard. Incomplete, yet ongoing, is what …

Attitudes Towards Wearing Masks Among Young Adults, Diana Saiki, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Jay Kandiah

Publications and Research

The purpose of this study was to investigate attitudes about mask characteristics among young adults. Research questions included the following: (1) How do attitudes about: Do practical characteristics of masks influence mask-wearing? and (2) Does mask style and extrinsic characteristics influence mask-wearing? A mixed-methods approach was used. In December 2020, a survey was distributed online to fashion classes in the Midwest(rural) and Northeast (urban). The questionnaire contained a demographics section, open-ended questions about participants’ attitudes about masks, questions on mask-wearing behaviour, and a list of garment characteristics. The open-ended questions were analyzed for themes. The Likert scale questions were analyzed …