Digital Commons Network^™

Hanne Darboven: Bismarckzeit (Bismarck Time), Lindsey J. Poremba

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines post-war German artist Hanne Darboven’s 1978 work Bismarckzeit (Bismarck Time). Bismarckzeit is a significant work where images, quotations, and equations meet and explore history. This thesis studies the different visual languages in Darboven’s installation, comparing her work with that of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

Containment, Quin Mittelstead

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores “containment" (the act of keeping something within limits) as both oppressive control and a mode of self-regulation, grounded in the author’s experience with epilepsy. Paintings deploy grayscale grounds, restrained palettes, and contrasting rapid/slow gestures; emergent color, texture, and altered substrates map psychological states, bodily impulses, and reactive processes. Research into witchcraft, remedial items, and eugenics (notably Buck v. Bell) informs works that link historical censorship and institutional violence to contemporary stigma. Sculptural installations (nets, jute, flawed Faraday-like enclosures) and cannibalized studio materials probe systems that restrain thought, media, and bodies. By introducing unpredictable variables with found supports, …

Another Inconsistency: A Collection, Christy Luong

Student Theses

A collection of stories.

Fascism Usa: Class And Identity Politics In The Age Of Trump, Marc Edelman

Publications and Research

This essay argues that Trump’s triumph in the 2024 presidential contest represents the consolidation of an oligarchical authoritarian project, backed by a multi-class and (surprisingly, for some) multi-racial electorate. It brought intensified state and freelance attacks on immigrants, labor unions, women, LGBTQ+ people, journalists, civil servants, assorted “political enemies,” and other groups that the MAGA movement targets. It is institutionalizing authoritarian governance structures in ways that will be exceedingly difficult to undo. The paper first addresses the experience of growing up in the shadow of fascism. It analyzes various sectors that supported Trump and the impacts of inflation, incumbency, economic …

Moderating Effects Of Defense Mechanisms On The Link Between Dark Triad Traits And Stress: A Replication With Addition Of Early Trauma, Ngayin Cheng

Student Theses

Literature suggested Dark Triad traits, comprised of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, are linked to adverse childhood environment and maladaptive coping that contribute to negative mental health outcomes, but Richardson and Boag's study (Richardson & Boag, 2016) was one of the few studies that first found Dark Triad traits are associated with immature defenses and higher perceived stress simultaneously. This replicated study aims to verify the original findings of their research by examining how defense mechanisms moderate the relationship between Dark Triad traits and perceived stress. A sample of 199 participants completed self-report measures assessing the Dark Triad traits, defense styles, …

Is Less More? An Analysis Of Microblogs Vs. Discussion Forums As Tools For Understanding The Public, Marco Castillo

Publications and Research

Social media platforms offer valuable tools for public administrators seeking to assess public sentiment on policy issues, especially in urban areas with diverse stakeholder interests. This study investigates how public administrators can leverage social media by comparing communications on Reddit’s discussion forum platform with X’s microblogging platform. I hypothesize that Reddit fosters more subjective, nuanced discussions, providing richer insights into public sentiment. To test this, sentiment and regression analyses are conducted on communications about urban cycling on both platforms. Results indicate that while Reddit facilitates deeper exploration of public issues, X also effectively assesses public sentiment. The study concludes by …

Sociology 250: Racial And Ethnic Communities In The United States Syllabus, Minglei Zhang

Open Educational Resources

This Open Educational Resources (OER) syllabus for SOC 250: Racial and Ethnic Communities in the United States provides a no-cost, adaptable framework for examining the sociological dimensions of race, ethnicity, and power in American society. The course is organized thematically across four modules, progressing from foundational concepts of race as a social construct through analyses of institutions, inequality, and historical movements for social change. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives including intersectionality, critical race theory, and racial formation theory, this OER syllabus emphasizes critical thinking, analytical writing, and evidence-based inquiry. All course materials, including academic readings, documentaries, podcasts, and digital resources, …

System Architecture: Self-Aware Room, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

This report presents the system architecture for the Self-Aware Room, an evolvable research platform designed to transform heterogeneous environmental signals into structured semantic representations for decision-making, simulation, and immersive media output. The architecture is organized as a layered mediation pipeline, beginning with raw data acquisition from diverse sensing modalities and proceeding through local processing, feature abstraction, cross-modal fusion, semantic interpretation, and output to digital twin and immersive audiovisual systems. Rather than defining the system through a fixed set of devices, the report emphasizes the transformation pathways by which sensor data becomes computationally tractable, interpretable, and actionable. The architecture also allows …

How Visual Art In Fatty Legs And A Stranger At Home Deepens The Understanding Of Historical Atrocities And Colonial Violence Inflicted On Indigenous Children In Residential Schools In The United States And Canada, Beth Rocco

Student Theses

“I can fix my own hair,” I protested in Inuvialuktun, but she held tight and, with the same motion a bird makes to pull a piece of flesh from a fish, clamped the jaws of the shears down on my braid and severed it” (Pokiak-Fenton 31). This scene in Fatty Legs by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton, was a deep cut into the soul of a child. The first slash was being taken away from her parents and family. Next was chopping off her hair, a symbol of identity and tribal pride for Indigenous people. The children began their residential …

Long Work Hours, Suboptimal Diabetes Management, And Differences By Sex And Race/Ethnicity, Nhanes (2011-2018), Tailisha Gonzalez, Margrethe Horlyck-Romanovsky, Terry T.-K. Huang, Sandra E. Echeverria

Publications and Research

In the United States (US), occupational segregation by sex and race/ethnicity can contribute to health disparities. Although work schedule characteristics have been previously linked to elevated cardiovascular risk, little is known about the effects on chronic disease management in women and minoritized workers. We examined the association between work hours and diabetes management among US workers, testing for differences by sex and race/ethnicity. We utilized 2011–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data on working adults (age ≥20 years) with diagnosed diabetes (n = 1041). Suboptimal diabetes management was defined as HbA1c ≥7%. Work hours were categorized per WHO …

The Other Tradition Of Modernism: Writing Contemporary Chinese Architecture, Guanghui Ding Dr

Publications and Research

The Other Tradition of Modernism emerges from a pedagogical experiment at the City College of New York, where the editor taught a course on modern and contemporary Chinese architecture to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Combining thematic lectures, student presentations, writing workshops, and intensive editorial mentoring, the course sought to illuminate an alternative trajectory of architectural modernism. Geographically, it introduced modern Chinese architectural practices that developed outside Western modernist paradigms; culturally, it foregrounded context-based approaches that resist the hegemony of iconic, spectacle-driven architecture under contemporary neoliberal market logics.

This edited volume, composed of student contributions, articulates several key insights. First, …

Cuny Oer Initiative Catalog (Ay 2024-2025), Jahanara Alamgir, Yujin Lee-Hwang, Rachael Nevins, Elliot Galvis, Rebecca Morofsky, Andrew Mckinney, Jojo Karlin

Open Educational Resources

This circulating catalog inventories the reusable teaching objects produced by CUNY campuses in AY 2024-2025! You’ll find textbooks, assignments, syllabi, videos, and more, organized by discipline and with brief descriptions of the resource. This publication (which links to all the resources) is supplemented by a by our online, filterable CUNY OER Initiative Catalog.

The CUNY OLS Research and Publishing Strategy team gathered, described and indexed the work of the campuses. OLS Fellow Hwang-Lee Yujin designed the publication.

Course Syllabus. Spn 415 Transatlantic Cinema, Álvaro Baquero-Pecino

Open Educational Resources

Course syllabus. SPN 415-Transatlantic Cinema.

This seminar explores the relationship between film, culture, and society in Spain and Latin America through a discussion of representative texts and films, and their historical and political contexts. The course provides an interdisciplinary survey of cinema as an art form, a component of the entertainment industry, and a medium of communication via screenings, lectures, and readings on modern and contemporary Latin American, Spanish, and U.S. Latino cinema. This class will be taught in Spanish

Funded in part by the CUNY OER Initiative.

Edu 30 Introduction To Special Needs, School & Society Syllabus, Propa Akter

Open Educational Resources

The syllabus for EDU 30 contains a course description, course objectives, course readings divided by week and a link to OER textbooks and ZTC readings.

Bridging Theory And Practice: A Criminal Justice Course Collection, Penny Geyer

Open Educational Resources

Dr. Penny Geyer compiled a full reading list, course calendar, set of weekly discussion questions, in-class experiential exercises, a death penalty case-study module, and a final paper assignment into a single, organized course packet that can be easily accessed, revised and remixed by other instructors teaching theory-to-practice criminal justice courses.

Resurrecting Natures With Charlotte Smith And Ebony G. Patterson, Leila Walker

Publications and Research

Recent scholarship on the botanically influenced poetry of the early Romantic period, particularly that of Charlotte Smith, has emphasized the genre’s formal engagement with the herbarium, treating botanical poetry as a non-extractive alternative to the violence of specimen collection. Yet such readings isolate the act of specimen collection and poetic return from the larger systems of extraction, translocation, and violence in which they participate. In this article, I read Smith’s Beachy Head alongside Ebony G. Patterson’s recent installation at the New York Botanical Garden, which artistically resurrected extinct species from herbarium specimens and “planted” them among living flora, in order …

Forever Young: Student Employee Unionization In Higher Education, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This article presents history and data about unionization among graduate and undergraduate student employees in the United States. It demonstrates that student employee unionization is not a new phenomenon and is part of a second curriculum for higher education students, which provides first-hand experience in workplace representational democracy and citizenship, including maintaining a majority coalition and making hard necessary compromises

What We Hear Shapes What We Fear: Public Discourse As A Determinant Of Health, Amanda L. Almond

Open Educational Resources

This resource presents a structured assignment designed for undergraduate health psychology and interdisciplinary courses. Students systematically collect and analyze public discourse as a determinant of health using a shared dataset, followed by instructor-led synthesis and application of scientific reasoning.

The assignment emphasizes mechanism-based explanation, including how communication environments shape stress, perception, and health behavior. A second phase explicitly integrates the scientific method, guiding students to evaluate claims, distinguish correlation from causation, and consider what evidence would be required to test observed patterns.

This assignment was developed and implemented in a Hispanic-Serving Institution during Spring 2026, in response to real-time conditions …

Structural Silence: When Ai Infrastructure Fails Speakers Of Underrepresented Languages, Avijit Roy, Proma Roy

Publications and Research

Artificial intelligence tools for education and language support are increasingly framed as scalable responses to access gaps in under-resourced communities. Yet the infrastructure underlying these tools—training corpora, tokenization schemes, evaluation benchmarks, and deployment architectures—encodes a set of assumptions that systematically disadvantages speakers of underrepresented languages before a single model is trained. This paper examines those assumptions through the lens of Bengali, one of the world’s most widely spoken languages with roughly 285 million speakers (Ethnologue, 2025; International Communication and Leadership School, 2026), and the structural barriers that emerge when attempting to build AI-assisted educational tools for Bengali-speaking learners in low-connectivity …

Introduction To Mexican American Studies: Course Syllabus (Oer), Luis B. Quesada Nieto

Open Educational Resources

This course studies the varied experiences of Mexicans in the United States from an interdisciplinary perspective. Through readings, lectures, media, and discussions, students will learn about the historical, social, and cultural contributions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The course will survey the history of Mexico and Mexicans in the United States at the same time that it explores issues of culture and identity. While the course emphasizes developments in the 20th and 21st centuries, students will also engage with developments before the 20th century. Students will study major political and social events that contributed to the incorporation of Mexicans into …

The Ghosts Of Times Square: A Zine Exploring Representations Of Times Square Through Film, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

My zines are often an extension of my research—either a jumping off point or a way to create a more visual project (or both). They are in their own way a form of excess - they are often too scandalous, too smutty, too much — everything that is spilling out of the margins.

My zines and research focus on lesser known queer histories, trying to highlight them and bring them to a new audience and new generations.

Using zines as a creative form of research, I am able to reach a broader audience both inside and outside of academia. I …

Engagement Patterns With #Naturalremedies On Tiktok: Formative Analysis, Apeksha Mewani, Corey H. Basch, Keanu Renne-Glover, Vincent Jones Ii, Cristiana Cordero, Adea Gutiqi

Publications and Research

This research letter provides formative evidence from a cross-sectional analysis of 118 TikTok videos under #NaturalRemedies, identifying content formats and expertise cues associated with higher engagement, while also demonstrating the feasibility of using engagement metrics and thematic coding to analyze health narratives on emerging platforms such as TikTok.

Don't Panic! Cuny Academic Works And The April Ada Deadline, Jojo Karlin, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

These slides equip libraries to advise authors submitting to CUNY Academic Works about document accessibility. Topics will include: How is CUNY Academic Works changing in response to the new ADA rule about the accessibility of web content, which has a compliance deadline of April 24? What are authors being asked to do differently? What tools are available for them to check and improve the accessibility of their submissions? Who is responsible for making our institutional repository more accessible?

As the expectations for institutional repositories change, the presentation aims to help librarians understand what the changes are and what they mean …

Invitation To Fractional Calculus, Lyubomir I. Boyadzhiev

Open Educational Resources

These lecture notes are designed to provide the students who wish to become familiar with the basic concepts and methods of the Fractional Calculus (FC). The following features can be pointed out:  This text is prepared to be easily read and understood by students making their first steps into this topic. The lecture notes do not presume a background beyond standard college calculus curricula. Readers needing extra help will find tools for bringing their mathematical maturity up in the references and companion links;  The writing style is aimed to be direct and pragmatic. Precise mathematical language is used without excessive …

Opportunities, Challenges, And Conspicuous Absences: An Integrative Review Of The Social Work Literature On Artificial Intelligence, Michael J. Massey, Ian G. Williams, Grace C. Polistina, Eathan A. Breaux

Publications and Research

INTRODUCTION: Social work discourse regarding artificial intelligence (AI) in practice, research, and education has proliferated over the last 5 years, reflecting both excitement over its potential and ambivalence about its ethical challenges. However, the extent to which social work is fully engaging with the structure of AI and its enormous impacts on the environment, labour, and distribution of power remains unclear.

METHODS: An integrative review of social work literature from 2020–2024 was conducted to address two research questions: 1) What is the nature of the social work discourse related to AI? 2) To what extent is the discourse …

Hss 295, Juline A. Koken

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus contains links to existing OER materials as well as additonal readings for our HSS 295 Community Organizing class.

Academic Freedom And Collective Bargaining: A Joint Report By The National Center For The Study Of Collective Bargaining In Higher Education And The Professions And The Aaup’S Center For The Defense Of Academic Freedom, William A. Herbert, Isaac A. Kamola, Timothy R. Cain, Erin Ward, Anita Levy, Kathryn Ritchie, Ariana Gonzalez

Publications and Research

This is a joint report by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College (National Center) and the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) at the American Association of University Professors. It presents excerpts from forty-five collective bargaining agreements in higher education to demonstrate the wide range of ways academic freedom is defined in contracts, or not, and how the negotiated definitions incorporate, quote, follow, mirror, or deviate from the principles set forth in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure (hereinafter 1940 Statement).

Spa 111 - Elementary Spanish I, Pablo Moraga

Open Educational Resources

This in-person course is designed to build a strong foundation in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish while fostering cultural and intercultural competence. Guided by the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, students will engage in basic spontaneous and rehearsed spoken and written communication on familiar topics, interpret multimodal texts related to everyday life, and express meaning in personally relevant contexts. The course emphasizes the exploration of practices, products, and perspectives from the Spanish-speaking world, including local Hispanic and Latinx communities, while encouraging reflection on individual language learning processes and the development of translingual and transcultural competences using digital tools and authentic …

Why We Must Commune: Rethinking The Role Of Marketing Communications In Turbulent Times, Javier Garcia

Publications and Research

“Communications” is often thought of as a noun, representing the messages we receive on a daily basis from people, brands, and institutions alike. 

"Communications" is also often associated with an industry that exists to produce such messaging in service of capitalism, with a commercial or otherwise actionable outcome desired from its receiving audience. 

This presentation, hosted by two-time CCNY graduate and senior marketing communications professional and Assistant Professor Javier Garcia, will examine the urgency and opportunity in rethinking the value and study of marketing and communications. 

In his presentation, Professor Garcia will offer suggestions on how to guide students towards …

Syllabus: Ece 302: Communities, Schools, Families & Children, Marilyn Stotts

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for the ECE 302 Course on Communities, Schools, Families & Children held at Lehman College in the Fall 2026 Semester. The course uses open educational resources and materials available through the Lehman College library, all available at no cost to students, in place of a textbook.