Digital Commons Network^™

When Misclassification Is Misgendering: Gender Prediction In The Context Of Trans Identities, Sean Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a subdomain of author profiling, gender prediction (sometimes called gender inference) has received a substantial amount of attention—both as a task in itself, and for other downstream analyses. Throughout the existing literature various statistical and machine learning methods have been applied to extract features in order to either characterize and differentiate female and male writing styles, or simply to achieve maximum accuracy on gender prediction as a binary classification task. However, researchers often do not disclose how they conceptualize gender nor do they consider the implications that gender prediction has for non-binary and trans individuals. Along with an overview …

An Evaluation Of An Application Designed For The Ipad® To Measure Stimulus Overselectivity For Future Use In Autism Research, Adrienne A. Fitzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twenty-three college students participated in two studies evaluating an application designed to measure stimulus overselectivity in pictures depicting facial affect. We analyzed whether this application worked as designed by evaluating whether it could provide a robust analysis of the types of errors users make (e.g., by matching by the top features, the bottom features, or not by the top or the bottom features), and the extent to which the application worked to decrease selective responding in the event a user was not matching consistently by all features. We also evaluated if participant scores on the Autism Quotient and RAADS-14 could …

A Reflection On The Dialectical Relationship Of Librarian | Teacher: The Need For Pedagogical Training In Core Mlis Curriculum, Melanie C. Locay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis maps a shift in my understanding of knowledge production and teaching and learning. Teaching has a critical role in Librarianship, yet there is a glaring absence of teacher training across MLIS programs. Drawing from established literature on Critical Pedagogical theory, multiple logics of inquiry, and Critical Librarianship we can adopt practices of teaching and learning that elevate marginalized voices and center reflexive theory. This thesis includes a scope of applications of pedagogical theory to LIS practice and identifies an immediate need for an overhaul of the Master’s in Library and Information Sciences core curricula.

The Singing Self: An Exploration Of Vocality And Selfhood In Contemporary Vocal Practice, Emily C. Eagen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every vocal training technique relies on understandings of how a singer’s “voice,” both literal and metaphorical, participates in the act of interpreting the works of composers. Western classical singing, as codified by the early twentieth century, typically puts the singer in the role of the “medium” or “channel” for the composer. Later twentieth-century reactions promised liberation from the composer’s “voice” with a validation of the singer’s “authentic” or “natural” voice. This dissertation questions both sides of this binary and asks: what alternative models are possible? This work is in three parts. The first section provides an overview of pedagogical constructions …

The Effects Of Multisensory Imagery On Vocabulary Learning, Lawrence A. Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation research focused on how the mental imagery that college students created and associated with pseudo vocabulary words affected the degree to which they learned and remembered the meanings and pronunciations of those words. The following major questions were investigated: 1) Does having college students generate sensory motor images elaborating the meanings of pseudo words produce better memory for the words and their meanings than generating visual images? 2) Does having students generate images of either sort produce better memory for the words than having students practice verbal meanings of the words? The purpose of this dissertation research was …

Teaching Choral Music Of The African Diaspora In The United States: Toward A “Living Black History”, H. Roz Woll

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In higher education choral curricula, the opportunity to study the breathtakingly rich scope of music rooted in Africa and the African diaspora with rigor and depth is often marginalized, neglected, or missing. If studied, it may be framed in the context of “other music” in contrast to music of the Western European canon, creating an oppositional framework rather than an interdependent one. Moreover, opportunities to study the political economy of this music in relationship to race, class, gender, and religion are lacking. This has multiple ramifications for music students’ preparedness to engage in global habits of citizenship in support of …

Hybrid Ethnobotanical Practices: Afro And Indigenous Place-Making In The Contemporary Colombia Andean Pacific, Rafael A. Mutis Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnography of Indigenous and AfroIndigenous ethnobotanical practices in four communities in Cauca, in the Andean Pacific region in the Western Amazon of Colombia. Through collaborative field work, including interviews and active participant observation, I document the use of herbs and food as medicine, and agricultural and land tenure practices that depart significantly from those of racial-capitalist agribusiness. These ethnobotanical practices recuperate precolonial and ancestral knowledge as one of many efforts to build community autonomy and self-determination in Colombia as it fitfully enters the post conflict period.

Through an intersectional and topographic analysis, I show both the …

Recruitment Of International Students Through A Synthesis Of English As A Second Language Instruction, Social Justice, And Service Learning, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

Universities across the U.S. have increasingly emphasized internationalization, leading to rising numbers of international students attending U.S. institutions of higher education. However, these students tend to gravitate toward larger research-intensive universities with many other institutions seeing no increase in international student enrollments. Little is known concerning how to attract international students to regional institutions lacking name recognition. To address the above and promote internationalization through increasing the presence of students from abroad, an academic department at a regional public U.S. college used needs analysis to develop a pilot program for Japanese university students (N = 13). The program involved a …

Article 6.21, Tatiana Stolpovskaya

Theses and Dissertations

Article 6.21 is a short documentary film that aims to examine the state of censorship around queerness in Russia today and its effects on personal lives in the queer community.

Twenty years after Russia decriminalized homosexuality, on June 30th in 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values", also known as the "Gay Propaganda Law". Its broad and ambiguous wording allows the government significant leeway in deciding what kind of public queerness is punishable.

In 2020 Russia passed multiple constitutional amendments that affect many areas …

A Conceptual Replication To Investigate The Hostile Priming Effect, Charlotte Basch

Theses and Dissertations

The current study attempts a conceptual replication of Srull and Wyer’s 1979 study on hostile priming as part of a large-scale replication. The current study did not find that participants who were exposed to the hostile phrases rated the individual as more hostile as the original study did.

Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares the deer scenes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well.” Both raise questions about man’s right to hunt animals with impunity. Shakespeare’s Jaques superficially takes up the issue of animal rights whereas Wordsworth’s personification of the stag evokes the reader’s sympathy for the animal.

Ivan Puni's Berlin Period: 1920-1924, Elena Kakuriev

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is dedicated to the work of the Russian Avant-Garde artist Ivan Albertovich Puni (1892-1956): an artist, a theorist and writer, an organizer of exhibition, a teacher of art, and above all, an innovator. This thesis presents an account of the artist's Berlin period (1920-1924), which has so far lacked scholarly attention.

The thesis begins with a close analysis of Puni's Russian period (1914-1919). In this time span,

Ivan Puni demonstrated his ability to adopt a wide gamut of diverse artistic styles. Puni first elaborated works akin to Cubist constructions. However, starting from 1915, the artist became a major …

(Re)Imagining Eminent Domain: The Embodied Imaginaries Of The Atlantic Yards – Barclays Center Project, Gabriel Frey Schuster

Theses and Dissertations

Eminent domain is generally treated by legal geographers as a tool of the state. This thesis applies legal and feminist geographies to the case of the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn so as to reframe eminent domain as a spatio-legal intervention complicating traditional notions of scale and power.

The Alphorn In North America: “Blown Yodeling” Within A Transnational Community, Maureen E. Kelly

Theses and Dissertations

Musicians in North America have adopted the alphorn as a tool that builds community, enhances musical training, and interprets the Swiss tradition for a new generation. Meaningful combinations of experiences and identities combine to create a robust relationship and kinship among alphorn players in an intentionally international community.

Geometric Times, Linguistic Spaces, Johanna Strobel

Theses and Dissertations

If the loop is the trademark of our times and truthiness the reversal of the uncanny, what is the correlation between logic and information? This writing investigates the role of repetition and motifs in the production of meaning, how kitsch and neutrality function as modes of signifiers and how authenticity relates to the banal.

From Here And Now: Monuments Of Today And Everyday, Adam Shaw

Theses and Dissertations

The arc of my educational narrative was drawing to a close. I was a month out from my thesis exhibition, the culmination of a three-year experience. The studio was full of an energy I had been longing to feel. I was just beginning. Then came the Pause.

To Let The Shape Announce The Filling, Sydney Shavers

Theses and Dissertations

A hybrid text with reflections on confections, materiality, language, reality, virtuality, gourmand, celebrity perfume, olfaction, authenticity, cultural contamination, synesthesia, proprioception, positioning, navigating the gap, slippage, constellations, exhaustion, ontology, form, failure, and mindfulness.

The Teaching Zone: Square Pegs In Round Holes, Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This article explores six years of student data to discover why students who appear not to have read a lengthy book are able to execute a successful paper designed around that text.

The Communicative Function Of Gender In Italian, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

An analysis of gender in modern literary Italianbased on attested examples from various genres. The evidence-based hypothesis, thoroughly noncanonical, proposes a system of morphologically signaled meanings, and these are not the traditional categories “feminine” and “masculine.” Even the familiar and misleading term “gender” is replaced. The analysis concerns primarily what is typically called “gram­matical gender,” although it stands to inform too the use of Italian in communication having to do with human cultural gender. The analysis concerns primarily what is called here “variable gender” (essentially, adjectives) although it stands to inform too the problem of “invariable gender” (essentially, nouns).

Response To There Are No Hard-To-Serve Learners, Only Ill-Served Ones By Erik Jacobson, Montclair State University, Joni Schwartz

Publications and Research

A decade and a half ago, the community of adult educators to which I belonged called the phenomenon that Jacobson describes in There Are No Hard-to-Serve Learners as “creaming.” This is the practice of choosing to serve certain students, in this case those with high scores on their initial GED® practice test or students with advanced TABE® scores, so that we fulfilled our performance objectives and more easily demonstrated employability. We knew what we were doing. The reasons were economic; we needed to show outcomes that would continue to make our adult education program eligible for funding.

Belonging And Becoming In Academia: A Conceptual Framework, Maria Savva, Lynn P. Nygaard

Publications and Research

Establishing the conceptual framework for this book as a whole, this chapter looks at the process of developing an academic identity through the lens of ‘becoming’ a scholar, with particular emphasis on the challenges facing international, part-time EdD students. This process involves not only an intellectual breakthrough, but also an emerging sense of belonging. The inner journey – which intersects with and shapes academic progress – comprises a complex set of interactions between the social groups to which we belong, our beliefs about ourselves that come about through experience, the various contexts in which we operate, the position we hold …

Understanding The Personal Significance Of Our Academic Choices, Maria Savva

Publications and Research

Savva maps the intrapersonal journey that paralleled her academic journey as an international doctoral student based in Cyprus. She describes changes in her research question and how she used the solitude often associated with the doctoral journey to create a space whereby she looked inwards to better understand her academic choices and her relationship to those choices. Through critical examination, she was able to gain a deeper understanding of the extrinsic and intrinsic factors behind her decision to pursue a doctorate and her selection of research topic. This, in turn, allowed her to harness the qualities of agency and resilience …

The ‘Peripheral’ Student In Academia: An Analysis, Maria Savva, Lynn P. Nygaard

Publications and Research

Pulling together the various themes that emerged within and across the narratives, this chapter explores four broad categories of challenges and opportunities:

1. Demands associated with being a ‘peripheral’ student and the function of social networks in developing a sense of belonging.
2. Issues related to supervisory and other faculty relationships.
3. Struggles related to identity, language and/or culture.
4. The role of expert, novice and ‘impostor’ labels in internalizing a scholarly identity.

Each category is unpacked, while also examining the personal characteristics and institutional features that helped the authors along the journey to becoming scholars. After each section, implications for institutional policy and …

Wikipedia And Scholarpedia: A Comparative Case Study And Its Implications To Information Literacy, Junli Diao, Stefka Tzanova, Anthony Bishop

Publications and Research

The free online Wikipedia receives increasing attention from academic librarians; however, its counterpart Scholarpedia seems to be neglected. This case study selected two articles bearing the same title Intentionality from Scholarpedia and Wikipedia and brought them under scrutiny of their microstructure and macrostructure. Both microstructure and macrostructure analysis indicated that the addressed readership of the two encyclopedic articles is understandably different in terms of readability and content. The comparative case study concluded with empirical implications that both online, free encyclopedias provide academic librarians with pedagogical instruments to help students engage in authentic knowledge construction.

Assessment Challenges In Acquired Aphasia In Multilingual Individuals, Monica Norvik, Mira Goral

Publications and Research

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder resulting from damage to the brain, most typically a stroke in the left cerebral hemisphere. The degree and type of impairment vary depending on the site and size of the lesion, and the extent to which people with aphasia recover – with time and therapeutic intervention – their pre-stroke linguistic skills varies, depending on exogenous and endogenous variables. Multilingual speakers who acquire aphasia may exhibit comparable or different profiles of impairment in each of their languages. The present chapter explores the challenges associated with the assessment of all languages of multilingual and multicultural speakers …

Strengthening The Semantic Verb Network In Multilingual People With Aphasia: Within- And Cross-Language Treatment Effects, Aviva Lerman, Mira Goral, Lisa Edmonds, Loraine K. Obler

Publications and Research

In multilingual people, semantic knowledge is predominantly shared across languages.
Providing semantic-focused treatment to people with aphasia has been posited to strengthen
connectivity within association cortices that subserve semantic knowledge. In multilingual people, such treatment should result in within- and cross-language generalisation to all languages, although not equally. We investigated treatment effects in two multilingual participants with aphasia who received verb-based semantic treatment in two pre-stroke highly
proficient languages. We compared within- and cross-language generalisation patterns across languages, finding within- and cross-language generalisation after treatment in the less-impaired, pre-morbidly more-proficient first-acquired language (L1). This observation supports the theory that connectivity …

Aphasia In Multilingual Patients, Mira Goral, Zahra Hejazi

Publications and Research

Purpose of Review

We summarize recent published work concerning assessment and treatment of aphasia in bilingual and multilingual people and review current related models of treatment outcomes. As well, we discuss studies that address the recently debated topic of cognitive processes in bilingual individuals with aphasia, with a focus on the effects of bilingualism on aphasia recovery and its potential protective effects.

Recent Findings

Providing assessment and treatment tools that best serve multilingual individuals with aphasia and unpacking the variables and mechanisms that underlie response to treatment have emerged as goals of several recent studies. Additionally, while findings are still …

Beyond Crisis Moments: Mediating Instructor-Student Conflict Through Anti-Racist Practice, Amy J. Wan, Christopher John Williams

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Multimodality From The Multilingual Epicenter: Queens, “The Next America”, Eunjeong Lee, Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan

Publications and Research

Understanding that multimodality is a critical part of language work, this article
examines the conditions for uptaking multimodality. With a focus on the material
conditions and/of the labor crucial in building a culture of multimodality, we discuss how our context of Queens College (QC), a senior college in the public-serving CUNY system, where the majority of the students represents what Hall (2009) has described as the “Next America,” shapes the implementation and the impact of multimodal work for our students and educators. Particularly for multilingual students, whose multimodal meaning-making potential is often disregarded as irrelevant to their “language needs” (Sánchez-Martín …

The Dutch Atlantic And American Life: Beginnings Of America In Colonial New Netherland, Roy J. Geraci

Theses and Dissertations

The Dutch colony of New Netherland was one of the earliest attempts at a non-indigenous life on the east coast of North America. That colony, along with the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Dutch Atlantic as a whole, played crucial roles in the development of what would become the United States. This thesis project examines the significance New Netherland held in American history as well as explores topics which allow for new and inclusive narratives of that history to reach further exploration. Similarly to how individuals from various cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds all come to exist amongst one another …