Digital Commons Network^™

Representaciones Ideológicas Del Lenguaje Entre La Población Mexicana En Nueva York, Maria Del Rocio Carranza Brito

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the linguistic ideologies that Mexican migrants bring when migrating and reproduce in their daily interactions with other Spanish and English speakers, as well as the representations of the language presented in their linguistic behaviors. This work presents an intersectional analysis where the factors of gender, migratory status, education, and work are determining factors in the adoption, maintenance, and reproduction of language ideologies, which affect the linguistic decisions of the speakers in their use of Spanish, learning of English and the support of bilingualism. Based on the stereotypical idea of Spanish as the …

Broadcasting La Presencia Latina: Tracing Identities Across Fields Of Interaction In Rural Minnesota, Anthony J. Harb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation project traces the concerted efforts of an emergent Latinx immigrant community in Westplain, Minnesota to construct and assert their individual and collective identities within the public sphere through a range of multimodal and face-to-face communicative resources. I address enduring questions within the fields of linguistic anthropology, language education, and Latinx (media) studies through a multi-sited ethnography centered around three focal field sites: (1) a Spanish-language community radio program I call La Gran Comunidad Latina (LGCL); (2) a college-level civic engagement Spanish conversation course titled Noticias Comunitarias (NC) designed and taught in partnership with LGCL; and (3) an antiracist …

You Don’T Even Need The Ghosts: A Writer’S Look At The Turn Of The Screw, Andrea M. Schenkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The novella Turn of the Screw by Henry James was first published in 1898 as a serialized novel in Collier's Magazine. The short novel is characterized by its concise language. James chooses words carefully and consciously. The linguistic compression forces the reader to deal intensively with the main protagonists of the novel: the Governess, the children, Miles and Flora, and Mrs. Grose. Nothing is as it seems. James aims to challenge the reader by forcing them to constantly question what they read.

Countless essays have been written about the text since the novel was published. The figures, especially those …

Social And Cultural Processes That Impact Physical Activity Among South Asian Americans Managing Hypertension: A Mixed Methods Study, Sugandha Gupta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), the number one cause of death in the U.S., disproportionately affects South Asian Americans (SAAs). Physical activity is a modifiable health behavior that can reduce cardiovascular risk. Health behaviors, such as physical activity, occur within specific social and cultural contexts and are influenced by multiple factors at multiple levels of the social ecological model. This dissertation aimed to provide a rich, culturally-informed understanding of the factors at multiple levels – individual, interpersonal, and cultural –associated with physical activity among SAAs at risk for CVD. A sequential exploratory mixed methods approach was employed to examine social and cultural …

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: …

Situating The Child’S Voice Within Children’S Fashion: An Interdisciplinary Examination Of The Child’S Engagement With The Clothing They Wear, Melinda Byam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines the child’s relationship with children’s fashion, the clothing they wear, and their fashion consumption practices. Using a wardrobe approach to fashion, and an understanding of the child as the expert in their own lives, the author questions how the child engages, interacts, and experiences children’s fashion considering that how they use, think, and speak about their clothing is minimally consulted. Situating this research within a theoretical foundation set by Goffman and Simmel (social behavior), Featherstone (consumer culture), and Merleau-Ponty and Entwistle (embodiment), this text examines fashion from the point of view of the child, hypothesizing how future …

An Affective Technology Of Heimat: Whiteness, Nation Building And Social Media In Germany, Friederike Windel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examined the patterns of attachments and affective investments in Whiteness, objectifications, and exclusions entrenched in the construct of Heimat, which is broadly defined as “homeland” in German-speaking contexts. It used computational social science and discourse analytical methods to analyze how Heimat was discussed, embodied, and made sense of in affective ways. Sitting at the intersections of critical psychology, critical race and feminist theory, and Heimat scholarship, this research asked how Heimat functions affectively to (re)produce and maintain ideologies like white supremacy and nationalism.

Using Structural Topic Modeling on a big Twitter dataset (611,609), I estimated a model …

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 …

Stock Stories Versus Counterstories: A Contemporary Retelling And Centering Of Disenfranchised Narratives, Karen C. Pitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the literacy narratives of disfranchised educators. It unveils the toll the “literacy myth” has taken on their educational pursuits in American institutions. Through these published narratives, the study explores the ways in which the Eurocentric ideology dominates academic institutions, noting the marginalizing effects this dominant ideology has had on minoritized students, teachers, and administrators. Understanding that the narrators have remained at the margins in their own stories, this study seeks to address this shortfall by exploring the author’s own literacy teaching narrative. It uses critical race theory (CRT) and CRT counterstory as an innovative methodology to retell …

Diagnosis And Management Of Adults With Hidden Hearing Loss: A Scoping Review, Chana Flohr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Adults reporting speech in noise difficulties yet have audiometrically normal hearing is a common finding in the audiology clinic and are a subject of a recently popular and expanding area of research. Yet, there is still no clear and decisive test battery to diagnose, validate, and manage this disorder in the adult population. The lack of a clear protocol can cause dissatisfaction for both the patient and the clinician.

Objective: The objective of this study is to comprehensively review the existing literature on Hidden Hearing Loss (HHL) in audiology. The study aims to address the lack of consensus and …

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 …

First Year Composition Syllabus, Krystal M. Orwig

Open Educational Resources

English syllabus for college level first-year writing students.

The Contribution Of Syntactic Awareness To Vocabulary Learning, Harry M. Steves

Theses and Dissertations

We explore the relationship between syntactic awareness and vocabulary learning, targeting parts of speech, punctuation, and relative clauses. Performance on a syntactic awareness questionnaire correlated with performance on low-difficulty vocabulary learning involving nonsense words. Base vocabulary had a significant effect on the contribution of syntactic awareness to vocabulary learning.

Covering The Beatles: Tribute, Tradition, And Transformation, Alexander J. Prezzano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on cover songs as they relate to the music of The Beatles. Before and after the 1969 break-up of the band, the number of Beatles songs that have been covered by artists of various genres and in different eras is immeasurable. The implications of the cover song phenomenon of the 20th century crosses musical, cultural, political, and global borders. From the view of cover songs, this thesis will analyze The Beatles' continued influence on popular music, and the way their music has become a template, or pedagogical device for composers and songwriters in the postmodern era.

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.

The Antagonistic Anatomy Of Anti-Shippers: A Thematic Analysis, Adrian A. Stone

Student Theses

Within the transformative fandom community is an ideologically-affiliated group known as anti-shippers, whose rhetoric contends that fictional interests are an indication of those held in reality. Anti-shippers focus solely on fictional material perceived to be sexual in nature and make frequent references to pedophilia. This rhetoric is used to justify harassment against individuals who do not share in their beliefs. As this population primarily operates on social media, this study was designed to conduct an exploratory investigation into themes gleaned from posts authored by anti-shippers on Twitter. Utilizing latent content analysis, a total of 187 posts from 222 unique users …

An Application Of The Coercive Control Framework To Cults, Sarah E. Feliciano

Student Theses

The present study utilized the coercive control framework to systematically assess coercion in cults. Former cult members (N=52) of various groups (e.g., psychological & self-help related) were interviewed via telephone for 1.5 to 3 hours. The sample was 67.31% female, 67.31% Caucasian, and 63.46% American; age ranged from 24-68 years old. An existing codebook was used by multiple coders with high intercoder reliability (89.66%). Coercive control tactics were present in all 52 narratives. Manipulation, intimidation, and microregulation were the tactics most frequently utilized. Sexual coercion/abuse, deprivation, and degradation were used least. Data also provided coercive subtactics specific to cults but …

Decolonization Of Knowledge Production In African Societies: Contextual Analysis Of Language Of Instruction, Oluremi Alapo

Open Educational Resources

A discussion on knowledge independence or knowledge-production decolonization with the assumption that an epistemological base for knowledge creation exists in most African societies by drawing from indigenous praxis which includes language and history.

The background to this study highlighted the usage of colonial languages by post-colonial African Societies as the language of knowledge transfer in schools and educational institutions, to the neglect of the mother tongue and local language. This prevents an intellectual dislocation that negatively affects the identity, creativity, and works of learners.

The two major theories at the base of this paper are postcolonial theory and Lev Vygotsky’s …

Lbsci 717: Digital Humanities, S E. Hackney

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a graduate-level introductory course on the Digital Humanities, primarily aimed at LIS students.

Lcd 720: Teaching English Sound Structure, Dana Calvet

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is part of a graduate teacher preparation program for English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Students learn about phonetics and discuss methods and approaches for teaching English pronunciation in NYC schools to multilingual learners. They also discuss current issues related to teaching pronunciation in schools, such as accent bias, accepting multiple Englishes, and English language hegemony.

Urban Space, Genre And Subjectivity In African And Latin American Cinema, Matthew Marcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project studies twelve African and Latin American films from a range of eras and countries, with an emphasis on their treatment of urban space, their manipulation of genre elements, and their approaches to character subjectivity. The analysis draws on major works of urban theory by Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Jane Jacobs, and others in order to investigate the relationship between cinema and the urban experience. As the films in the study are mostly set in cities that are not discussed by the theorists, the analysis entails testing their theories against the realities of these other settings, as …

Beat Construal, Tempo, Metric Dissonance, And Transgressing The Groove In Heavy Metal, Drew Fleming

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the relationship between the metric practices of heavy metal and the elements and processes of the musical quality known as “groove.” Although heavy metal is not often expressly associated with groove per se, it occupies a historical position within the stylistic milieu for which groove music has established the primary, referential conditions. In order to uncover this connection, then, I begin with an analysis of groove in relation to established groove-music styles, defining it as an embodied and encultured knowledge of a set of cognitive, social, kinetic, aesthetic, and musical behaviors extending in practice from African-American popular-music …

Barriers To Optimal Audiological Care For Members Of The Deaf Community, Joyce Orenshein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background:

The purpose of this study was to identify the barriers to optimal audiological care for members of the Deaf community from the perspectives of Deaf individuals compared to audiologists. The goal is to help bridge the clinical communication barriers that lie between audiologists and the Deaf community by identifying the perceived gaps in care specifically and by gathering suggestions for improvement. A survey was administered to both audiologists and members of the Deaf community, making the present study unique and essential in that responses from both communities are compared and suggestions for bridging the gap are made.

Methods …

Transnational Ritual Poetics Of Blackness In Performance, Nina A. Mercer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I investigate transnational ritual poetics of Blackness through a historical, cultural, and spatial lens, centering my exploration on the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and waterways. I show how these formal poetics activate Africana cosmologies, cosmogonies, and mythologies dramaturgically by centering contemporary New York City performance works that bring together dance, theatre, and music. I contextualize NYC performance case studies in relation to performance practices in contemporary Salvador da Bahia. I am particularly interested in how the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and water as formal poetics catalyze interventions along contested water-ways and landscapes marked by Black …

Ethnic Tensions In The Western Balkans And The Experience Of Ethnic Minorities, Nadina Resulani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Western Balkan has experienced a past of ethnic turmoil. From the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo to ethnic tensions in Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. Understanding that ethnicity itself continues to be a salient factor in Western Balkan, the question remains how Western Balkan states were able to remove themselves from the front light of ethnic tensions considering today these countries are known as being tourist destinations, cultural and academic meccas, and democratic candidates in line to join the European Union. In reviewing and comparing the geopolitical and social environment of three Western Balkan states: Montenegro, …

Does Political Advertising Persuade? A Quantitative Assessment Of The Effects Of Campaign Contact In The Context Of Race, Ethnicity, And Immigrant Origin In New York City Council Primary Elections From 2001 Through 2017, Laura M. Tamman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a quantitative analysis of the relationship between New York city council campaigns’ spending and election results between 2001 and 2017, controlling for key factors such as incumbency, I find substantial and statistically significant positive effects for radio advertising on election outcomes. I find small but significant effects for mail, and smaller sized effects for canvassing. My findings underscore the need for further study of the role of ethnic and community media outlets, such as radio, in shaping voter behavior. Moreover, I argue that the fixation of the current persuasion literature on television ads in presidential general elections misses critical …

Only For The Pleasure Of Telling: Filling The Void In Pasolini's Trilogia Della Vita, Courtney Munson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Pasolini deliberately cultivated an unrecognizable and illegible public image that embraced incoherence, much of the scholarship surrounding him is plagued by contradictions and mutual exclusivity. For some, Pasolini was a utopian prophet, for others apocalyptic, but most agree that he, through his transmedial and highly self-inscribed life-work, was responding primarily to the crises of neocapitalist consumerism, especially its degenerative effects on sexual conventions and the body. Through an investigation of Pasolini’s controversial essays on film theory, the details of his biography, and the films of the Trilogia della vita, this thesis argues that it is a mistake to …

Neural Network Vs. Rule-Based G2p: A Hybrid Approach To Stress Prediction And Related Vowel Reduction In Bulgarian, Maria Karamihaylova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An effective grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion system is a critical element of speech synthesis. Rule-based systems were an early method for G2P conversion. In recent years, machine learning tools have been shown to outperform rule-based approaches in G2P tasks. We investigate neural network sequence-to-sequence modeling for the prediction of syllable stress and resulting vowel reductions in the Bulgarian language. We then develop a hybrid G2P approach which combines manually written grapheme-to-phoneme mapping rules with neural network-enabled syllable stress predictions by inserting stress markers in the predicted stress position of the transcription produced by the rule-based finite-state transducer. Finally, we apply vowel …

The Effects Of Music Therapy On Elderly Adults With Dementia, Jeante J. Jackson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As people age, the brain is more susceptible to changes that diminish cognitive function. In recent years neuroscience has found convergent evidence between music therapy and brain architecture, as it has shown the generation of new connections in the brain or a reorganization and possible strengthening of existing connections already in the brain. However, the literature regarding music training’s effects on executive control, selective attention, and speech processing is lacking particularly when it comes to older populations.

This study investigated Verbal Working Memory, Visuospatial Attention and Task Initiation, and Auditory Selective Attention in a 91-year-old adult (B.P.) diagnosed with dementia. …

Evaluating Neural Networks As Cognitive Models For Learning Quasi-Regularities In Language, Xiaomeng Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many aspects of language can be categorized as quasi-regular: the relationship between the inputs and outputs is systematic but allows many exceptions. Common domains that contain quasi-regularity include morphological inflection and grapheme-phoneme mapping. How humans process quasi-regularity has been debated for decades. This thesis implemented modern neural network models, transformer models, on two tasks: English past tense inflection and Chinese character naming, to investigate how transformer models perform quasi-regularity tasks. This thesis focuses on investigating to what extent the models' performances can represent human behavior. The results show that the transformers' performance is very similar to human behavior in many …