Digital Commons Network^™

White Supremacist Print Culture And The Creation Of White Working-Class Ideology In 1860s New York City, Anna Meyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

J. H. Van Evrie believed in the biological basis of white racial supremacy and Black inferiority beliefs which he spread in his publications throughout the 19^th century. He generated support for Copperhead politicians, pro-slavery Northern Democrats, who would enact his racial policies, in his newspaper the Weekly Caucasian, published in New York City during the Civil War. He adapted the presentation of his racial theories to appeal to the economic concerns of among working-class white men and Irish immigrants by using allegories about the Civil War. The newspaper created a sense of white nationalism and racial solidarity with …

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Posthuman Lessons For Writing And Well-Being: Reparative Practices, Anna A. Larsson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The influence of post-humanist interdisciplinary theories on Writing Studies has displaced its conventional preoccupation with the cultivation and management of subjects via First-Year Writing (FYC), to productive but at times artificially divisive ends. This project aims at an inclusive, anti-racist first-year writing ecology through theories of networked consciousness and digital “making.” I reread and recuperate earlier variants of posthumanist writing theory and draw from feminist materialism and mindfulness studies to establish a vision of well-being that I call networked reparative practices. To bring the abstract into the tangible, an often-valued endeavor in a field historically defined by teaching, I introduce …

Epistemic Virtue And Receptivity To Science In Policing, Braden L. Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the underexplored relationship between character epistemology and its potential to explain behavior, decision-making, and culture within the criminal justice system, particularly the police. Building on the existing theoretical framework of evidence-based policing (EBP) and the recognized gap in understanding police receptivity to science, this study hypothesized that intellectual character at personal and collective levels positively correlates with science receptivity.

Epistemic character was defined through the aggregation of four traits: open-mindedness, defensiveness, insouciance, and groupthink. Science receptivity was measured by openness to change, desire to learn, reliance on intuition, and mistrust of science. Data were collected through surveys …

Extreme E-Service Learning: Remote Learning For Undergraduate Students And Telehealth Intervention For Children With Autism, Madiha S. Muzammal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Extreme e-service learning courses in higher education, in which all components of the course including the instruction and service is provided online (Waldenr et al., 2012), offer rich educational experience as well as mutual benefits to the students, community and the higher education institutes. Very few studies have examined extreme e-service learning. We examined an undergraduate extreme e-service learning course in psychology; students learned through a virtual class and provided telehealth behavioral intervention services to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Utilizing mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative measures including student observations, assignments, and self-reports) and a mixed design (single subject …

Nursing Perspectives On Intimate Partner Violence Screening In The Emergency Department, Justin Cabrera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using descriptive and quality descriptive (QD) analysis, emergency department nurses from around the country completed a modified version of the Physician Readiness to Manage Intimate Partner Violence Survey (PREMIS) tool to gain insight on their attitudes, knowledge, and preparedness about working with patient survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) regarding their willingness to and comfort in engaging in IPV screening practices. In total, 1,523 responses were received from emergency department nurses currently or formerly in practice.

Findings show that there was no correlation between emergency department nurses’ education and training on IPV and willingness and comfort with IPV screening with …

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …

Pedagogies Of Reform: The Role Of Game-Based Learning In Recontextualizing Education, Hamad Sindhi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Game-based learning, the learning games industry, and the work of learning game designers is enmeshed in a neoliberalized education system and shifting educational, economic, and technological contexts in the United States. There’s a lot of discussion and debate about various educational technologies and learning games in schools, but how much do we look at the work that goes into making those products? Technology has been a key part of school reform in the United States for the last 50 years at least. This dissertation offers an account of tech-based school reform that centers the role of pedagogy vis-à-vis learning games …

Demarcating Psychopathologies: Nosology, Validity, And The Taxonomic Problem In Psychiatric Medicine, Julia Zentz Kolak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I argue that the discussion surrounding the role of values in the conceptualization of mental disorders is reproduced in critical debates surrounding the issue of reliability and validity in a psychiatric nosology. In so doing, I oppose the conventional separation of the demarcation problem and the crisis of validity in psychiatric classification, arguing instead that they are inextricably linked. After drawing out the intersection between these literatures in the conceptual history of the DSM and its much-maligned transition to an etiologically neutral taxonomy of mental disorders, I consider Carl Hempel’s proposed conciliation between descriptive and theoretical systematization …

Navigating The Unprecedented: A Behavioral Theory Of The Firm's Perspective On Covid-19'S Impact On Workplace Practices, Jeffrey Augugliaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the influence of COVID-19 induced uncertainty on the implementation and effectiveness of workplace practices, using the behavioral theory of the firm as the theoretical lens. Employing the Cube One framework as the set of practices to test, it hypothesizes that pandemic-induced uncertainty would reduce the frequency of management practices enacted, decrease variability across organizations, and diminish the relationship between enacted practices and organizational performance. Furthermore, the study posits that these relationships will be moderated by industry, given their variable levels of exposure to pandemic disruptions.

Contrary to expectations, the initial results revealed no overarching reduction or convergence …

Examining The Prevalence And Psychopathological Correlates Of Paraphilic Interests In A Non-Clinical Sample, Dylan H. Abrams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The paraphilias are among the most contentious diagnoses in contemporary psychological discourse. One of the major debates is over the extent to which paraphilic interests and behaviors should be considered “deviant.” To address this issue, extant research has examined the prevalence of paraphilic interests and their correlation with psychopathology. Though findings suggest that certain paraphilic interests are relatively common, existing data may misrepresent true prevalence rates due to racially and ethnically homogenous sampling. Additionally, though an association between paraphilias and psychopathology has been found in forensic and clinical samples, this relation may not generalize to all individuals with paraphilic interests. …

You Hurt My Feelings: Autonomic And Behavioral Responses To Social Exclusion And The Moderating Effect Of Psychopathic Traits, Liat Kofler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have a fundamental need to form and maintain social connections, and thus experiencing social exclusion is extremely distressing as it threatens this basic human need. Individuals who are socially excluded often respond aggressively, not only towards their ostracizers but also towards innocent bystanders, with ostracism being implicated in extreme acts of violence such as school shootings. However, individual differences in behavior exist within the context of social exclusion as not everyone responds aggressively after being ostracized. Identifying risk factors for retaliatory aggressive behavior following experiences of social exclusion may facilitate the development of targeted interventions aimed at mitigating such …

Attenuated Typicality Effect In Category-Based Inferences: Implications For Autism Spectrum Disorder, Janani Rajagopalan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often encounter challenges in assimilating atypical exemplars into their categorical prototypes, a cognitive hurdle that can impact their interpretative and integrative capacities. Addressing this problem, the present research sought to develop a robust methodological approach to reduce the effect of this disparity. We examined the elements embedded within the category's internal structure, with the intention of experimentally attenuating the pronounced typicality effect, which is often exaggerated in ASD.

Across four experiments, the thesis investigated the cognitive and neural underpinnings that shape the access to the typicality gradient intrinsic to a category's structure. The …

The Neural Correlates Of Bodily Self-Consciousness In Virtual Worlds, Evan A. Owens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bodily Self-Consciousness (BSC) is the cumulative integration of multiple sensory modalities that contribute to our sense of self. Sensory modalities, which include proprioception, vestibulation, vision, and touch are updated dynamically to map the specific, local representation of ourselves in space. BSC is closely associated with bottom-up and top-down aspects of consciousness. Recently, virtual- and augmented-reality technology have been used to explore perceptions of BSC. These recent achievements are partly attributed to advances in modern technology, and partly due to the rise of virtual and augmented reality markets. Virtual reality head-mounted displays can alter aspects of perception and consciousness unlike ever …

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 …

Understanding The Experiences And Associated Symptomology Of Disclosers And Non-Disclosers Of Sexual Victimization, Kaitlin Carson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 43% of women report experiencing some form of sexual victimization, with the highest rates occurring in emerging adulthood. It is estimated that 75% of survivors disclose this experience to someone else; the remainder of survivors keep the experience to themselves. While disclosure can be therapeutic, there are multiple factors that can complicate the disclosure process for sexual victimization survivors. There is limited research investigating why some women choose to disclose sexual victimization experiences and how their reasons may relate to psychopathology. Additionally, extant research primarily focuses on …

Genres Of Labor: Wageless Work And The Aesthetics Of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Genres of Labor identifies and explores a little-acknowledged fact about labor—that it appears to us in highly conventionalized forms that are subject to evaluation, appraisal, and interpretation. I call this appearance the “aesthetic” dimension of labor, and I show how it increasingly comes into view in the period since 1973, as a contracting economy pushes off work onto unwaged realms of human activity. In chapters on Andy Warhol’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), I demonstrate that literary texts participate in …

From Voting Rights To Voter Turnout: Three Papers On The Interplay Of Racial Resentment, Racial Threat, And Politics, Kevin Morris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Paper 1 begins by exploring the role of white racial anxieties in the formation and furtherance of narratives about election fraud. It argues that white Americans face a psychological dilemma: despite having a strong desire to reject the outcomes of recent elections that disproportionately benefit nonwhite Americans, they nevertheless seek to justify a political system that has long accrued benefits to their own racial group. This tension might be discharged by accusing nonwhite voters of fraud, thus maintaining the legitimacy of electoral politics. The paper uses three tests to show that this process is likely at play. First, public rhetorics …

Overview Of The Intern Position At Sexgenlab And The Importance Of Public Scholarship, Elizabeth S. Chapin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper represents a culmination of my time interning with SexGenLab and addresses the work I did from September 2022 to July 2023. This paper discusses the work that was completed, and why it is important, indicating how it contributes to the world at large outside of academia. I discuss my motivations and intentions relating to the internship, and how I was able to carry out my goals through the work I completed. In addition, this paper discusses the nature and importance of public scholarship, and how this internship contributed to that mission.

Health Care Providers' Attributions Of Blame For Unintended Pregnancy And Hiv Acquisition Among Cisgender Women, Alison J. Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unintended pregnancy and HIV are both possible but preventable outcomes of vaginal sex, and both can be prevented in similar ways (condoms, daily oral medication, etc.). Despite these similarities, providers more readily prescribe contraception to cisgender women, compared to PrEP (Guttmacher Institute, 2021; Raifman et al., 2019). Providers’ differential willingness to prescribe each medication cannot be attributed merely to differences in women’s need for pregnancy prevention vs. HIV prevention, as women account for nearly 20% of new HIV infections (CDC, 2021). Through three studies, I examined whether perceivers’ support for harm reduction (i.e., prescribing PrEP/contraception) and behavior reduction (i.e., discouraging …

Applying Structural Equation Modeling To Better Understand The Relationship Between Stressors, Social Support And Wellbeing In The Lives Of Spouse Dementia Caregivers, Craig Holden

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Applying Structural Equation Modeling to Better Understand the Relationship Between Stressors, Social Support and Wellbeing in the Lives of Spouse Dementia Caregivers considers the utility of Pearlin et al.’s (1990) stress process model in understanding the needs of spouse caregivers. Data were drawn from eight biennial waves of the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The final study sample comprised 774 spouses, average age 73, who were categorized based on Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD) and non-ADRD caregiver status. Results showed that for the study sample as a whole, social support …

Body Check: Transgressive Body Politics Of Gina Pane, Orlan, And Deborah De Robertis, Avant-Garde Performance Artists In France, 1960s–Present, Patricia Anne Winter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1960s, when Gina Pane and Orlan were trying to gain a foothold in the art world, it was very much a man’s world. This created obstacles for them, yet, at the same time, being relegated to the margins, they were free to experiment and were less visible as objects of the gaze.

The point of departure of my study is the realization that a woman’s body is what most defines her identity (Alcoff, Bordo, Butler, Gonzenbach, Mulvey, Spelman, Suleiman). The female body is the material site from which I discuss how, and to what ends, women avant-garde performance …

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 …

Collect Cosmic Dust, Make It Into Bright Stars: The Use Of Temporal Data In Regeneration Of Life Space And Time Via A Construction Of The Political-Sociological Theory Of Justice, Yi Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues for an argument-counterargument approach to the atypical classics of Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson. This approach to the literature is useful for a construction of the political-sociological theory of justice, which claims that the state of a just world is each individual’s lifetime moving in a dialectic-of-anti-violence-and-non-violence manner.

Wanting Under Surveillance: A Critical Analysis Of Young Women’S Sexual Desire, Jennifer Chmielewski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The negotiation of sexual desire is argued to be a vital part of the development of women’s sense of agency and well-being. Whereas desire is a concept that is widely used, measured, and diagnosed, women’s experiences of desire are poorly understood. Heeding the calls of feminist psychologists for conceptual analysis, and the need to examine desire within the multiple intimate and sociopolitical contexts in which sexuality develops, my dissertation is a critical feminist analysis of young women’s desire, centered on their subjective and embodied experiences. Moving beyond questions of what women desire or how much desire they have, I explore …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Truth: How Client Assertion, Perception Of Guilt, And Predictive Inaccuracy Influence Plea Recommendations, Anna D. Vaynman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past few decades, the largely hidden, secretive, and widely used system of plea bargaining has caught the fervent attention of scholars. The Shadow of the Trial model has been central to much of the plea-bargaining literature, despite significant critiques about its oversimplification. The model posits that defendants and their attorneys make plea decisions based largely on the estimated probability of conviction and the severity of the sentence to which the defendant could be exposed at trial.

The model, however, assumes that all actors are rational, equally risk averse, have no competing interests, and possess high predictive accuracy. It …

Examining Metacognitive Access To Low-Level Ensemble Representations, Vladimir Mudragel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ensemble perception is a process that allows our sensory systems to rapidly extract summary information about the stimuli in the environment. For example, we are able to get a sense of the average number of items in a group of similar items (Burr & Ross, 2008; Halberda, Sires, & Feigenson, 2006) or the average size of a group of similar shapes of different sizes (Ariely, 2001). It is theorized that the qualitative result of ensemble perception is that it provides a gist impression of the current environment, which then enables attentional processes in the brain to determine which parts of …

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 …

Effects Of Genes And Gene-Environment Interactions On Work-Family Conflict And Enrichment, Peter Yu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how macro-level issues can influence how we manage work and family responsibilities. Yet, work-family (WF) research at different levels of analysis is relatively scarce. To address this, I take a multilevel lens to study WF conflict and enrichment in the context of micro-level factors (in the form of genes), macro-level factors (in the form of family and community-level demands), and their cross-level interactions (i.e., gene–environment interactions). To study genetic main effects, I drew from the work-home resources model to identify four candidate genes associated with conditions that could impact the ability to accrue WF resources …

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 …