Digital Commons Network^™

Like A Hurricane: A Citation Analysis Of Emergency Management Scholarly Literature, Jennifer Noe, Julia M. Furay

Publications and Research

This bibliometric study used citation analysis to uncover citing characteristics in the burgeoning academic field of emergency management. Of the 281 degree programs listed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency nationwide, those at community colleges accounted for 17 percent of the total. Using the interdisciplinary database of Academic Search Complete, a sample of 5,099 citations was collected from 146 articles published between 2002 and 2012. The most strongly represented disciplines revealed by the analysis were Social Science, Science/Technology and Medicine. A majority of citations (45%) came from academic journals, with nearly half (44%) of those from Social Science. When citing …

Book Review: Lipman, P. (2011). The New Political Economy Of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, And The Right To The City., Norman Eng

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Teachers Working With Families: Natural Enemies Or Necessary Allies?, Kirsten Cole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The complex and crucial connection between families and schools is embodied in relationship between individual teachers and their students' families. Research findings demonstrate that high levels of family engagement lead to greater success for students. Such findings drive policy mandates that hold individual teachers accountable for cultivating this relationship. However, not enough is known about how such mandates are enacted on the ground. In an era when teachers are required to adhere to the standardization of curriculum and the uniform recommendations of "best practice" pedagogic models, teachers must still draw on their whole, complex, human selves when seeking to foster …

The Digital Diaspora In Sunset Park: Information And Communication Technologies In Brooklyn’S Chinatown, Sarah Wendolyn Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis is that, contrary to expectations that working-class Chinese immigrants would have less access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and fewer skills in using them, struggling immigrants to Brooklyn's Chinatown are skilled at using ICTs and do so on a daily basis, in ways that enrich their relationships and transnational participation. They are able to do this despite the severe limitations that ethnic enclave employment places on their time and opportunities, in part because of heavy use of affordable internet cafes in the neighborhood. Building on a growing body of literature on new media and diaspora, this thesis …

Contact-Induced Changes In Word Order And Intonation In The Spanish Of New York City Bilinguals, Carolina Barrera-Tobón

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions (Nicolás es feliz versus Feliz es Nicolás, Es Nicolás feliz, Es feliz Nicolás, ‘Nicolas is happy’) in the Spanish of first- and second-generation Spanish-English bilinguals in New York City (henceforth NYC). The data used for the study come from a spoken corpus of Spanish in NYC based on 140 sociolinguistic interviews (details of the corpus will be presented in Chapter Three). This dissertation addresses the question of whether secondgeneration bilinguals have a less flexible word order in Spanish …

Are Black Girls The New Number Runners? An Analysis Of Black Girls And High School Mathematics, Carolyn Denise King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), one out of every 100 employed scientists and engineers in the United States is a Black female. This statistic prompts the examination of Black females and mathematics. How do individual-level (educational aspirations), familial-level (support), and school-level (school characteristics) variables impact Black female students' proficiency in high school mathematics as well as predict their enrollment in postsecondary math courses?

Employing four waves from the National Education Longitudinal Study (1988, 1990, 1992, & 1994), this study seeks to add to the discourse on achievement in mathematics by examining factors which impact outcomes in mathematics for …

Cafeteria, Commissary And Cooking: Foodways And Negotiations Of Power And Identity In A Women’S Prison, Amy Brooks Smoyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study uses foodways theory to build knowledge about the lived experience of incarceration by analyzing women’s narratives about prison food and eating. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 formerly incarcerated women in New Haven, CT. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. Findings explain the different ways that inmates collect, prepare, distribute and consume food, and the centrality of these activities to incarcerated life. By shedding light on these daily routines, the world of prison life comes into greater focus.

Thematic analysis of the data further illuminates the prison experience by suggesting the positive and negative ways that food …

Queer Housing Nacional Google Group: A Librarian’S Documentation Of A Community-Specific Resource, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Beginning with a discussion of information access and its relationship to communities, this article is a first-person experience for creating a community-specific information resource, a queer housing listserv called Queer Housing Nacional. Written as a case study for how librarians may apply their skills to community as well as document the journey of this time capsuled listserv, one may find that this listserv may complicate librarianship’s promotion of open access, instead, encouraging closed participatory group structures, with collective distributions of power. Included are multiple email exchanges from the listserv, as well as Appendices of survey questions, notable responses, and …

Joint Utility Of Event- Dependent And Environmental Crime Analysis Techniques For Violent Crime Forecasting, Joel M. Caplan, Leslie W. Kennedy, Eric L. Piza

Publications and Research

Violent crime incidents occurring in Irvington, New Jersey, in 2007 and 2008 are used to assess the joint analytical capabilities of point pattern analysis, hotspot mapping, near-repeat analysis, and risk terrain modeling. One approach to crime analysis suggests that the best way to predict future crime occurrence is to use past behavior, such as actual incidents or collections of incidents, as indicators of future behavior. An alternative approach is to consider the environment in which crimes occur and identify features of the landscape that would be conducive to crime. Thanks to advances in geographic information system technology and federally funded …

Out On The Land: Income, Subsistence Activities, And Food Sharing Networks In Nain, Labrador, Kirk Dombrowski, Emily Channell, Bilal Khan, Joshua Moses, Evan Misshula

Publications and Research

In recent Inuit ethnography, a major concern has been how and to what extent contemporary Inuit participate in and depend on subsistence activities, particularly in the context of increasing wage employment and growing participation in the cash economy. This paper provides an analysis of these activities in the predominately Inuit community of Nain, Labrador. Using social network data and demographic information collected between January and June 2010, we examine the interconnections between subsistence activities—obtaining “country food” through activities such as hunting, fishing, and collecting—with access to the means of obtaining subsistence resources (such as snow mobiles, cabins, and boats), employment …

The Effect Of Personal Religiosity On Attitudes Toward Abortion, Divorce, And Gender Equality: Does Cultural Context Make A Difference?, Amy Adamczyk

Publications and Research

Across the globe, people differ considerably in their attitudes about abortion, divorce, and gender equality. These differences are reflected in the diversity of laws regulating divorce, penalties for women obtaining abortions, and differences in women's levels of political representation. While personal religious beliefs are often seen as having a significant role in shaping attitudes, economic development and political stability are also seen to be important predictors of attitudes about sexual morality and gender equality. This study draws on ideas from cultural sociology and the sociology of religion to address the interrelationship between personal religiosity and national cultural orientations to explain …

"These Illegals": Personhood, Profit, And The Political Economy Of Punishment In Federal-Local Immigration Enforcement Partnerships, Daniel L. Stageman

Publications and Research

Contemporary popular discourse linking immigration and immigrants to crime has proved extremely difficult to dislodge, despite clear evidence that immigrant labor provides broad and direct economic benefits to a significant proportion of the US population. The criminalizing discourse directed at immigrants may in part be functional, by leading to restrictionist immigration policies and practices and subjecting immigrants to intensified economic exploitation.

This study examines the economic context in which state and local governments adopt restrictionist immigration policies and practices, and implicates the political economy of punishment (Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and social structure. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) …

Stage As Street: Representation At The Juncture Of The Arts And Justice, E. Gabriel Dattatreyan, Daniel L. Stageman

Publications and Research

Arts educators working with court-involved youth face a set of complex and imbricated challenges. First, how do we gain the interest of the young people we would have participate in what we imagine are col-laborative and mutually generative projects? Second, how do we mediate representational tensions when the project is not solely therapeutic but has a broader public pedagogical purpose—to disrupt the simplistic and pathologizing discourses of poverty and violence that so often capture young men and women of color in the United States? (Bourgois, 2002; Noguera, 2008). Third, and not least, how do we navigate the institutional settings where …

Alchemy And Inquiry: Reflections On An Inside-Out Research Roundtable, Sarah Allred, Angela Bryant, Simone Weil Davis, Kurt Fowler, Phil Goodman, Jim Nolan, Lori Pompa, Barbara Sherr Roswell, Daniel L. Stageman

Publications and Research

In 2008, The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program convened a Research Committee to (1) facilitate a collective, critical, and professional consciousness about social justice, crime, and incarceration through the exploration of the Inside-Out program pedagogy, impact, and effectiveness; (2) develop and encourage proposals for various types of research that focus on The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program; and (3) establish ethical guidelines for inquiry that would meet and exceed the federal human subjects guidelines in research practices. In fall 2012, Research Committee members Sarah Allred, Angela Bryant, Phil Goodman, Kurt Fowler, Jim Nolan, Lori Pompa, and Dan Stageman joined with Simone Davis …

Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

"Scientificity" and appeals to political independence are invaluable tools when institutions such as the American School of Classical Studies at Athens attempt to maintain professional autonomy. Nonetheless, the cooperation of scientists and scholars with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), among them archaeologists affiliated with the American School, suggests a constitutive affinity between political and cultural leadership. This relationship is here mapped in historical terms, while, at the same time, sociological categorizations of knowledge and its employment are used in order to situate archaeologists in their broader social and political context and to evaluate their work not merely as agents …

Aplicabilidad De La Tipología De Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas Al Género De La Memoria De Máster En Un Contexto Transcultural De Enseñanza Universitaria, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

The aim of this paper is to compare the rhetorical functions gathered from the citations of (14) fourteen master´s theses written by seven Spanish and seven Philippine authors. A typology of nine categories was used in order to identify the cultural rhetorical differences that exist in the use of citation from the contrast between contrasting this element in the Philippine and Spanish cultures. The methodology used is textual analysis of the linguistic context of these citations and its subsequent classification within these nine categories. The results show that there are quantitative and qualitative differences between the cultural conventions of citations …

Popular Music Studies And The Problems Of Sound, Society And Method, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Building on Philip Tagg’s timely intervention (2011), I investigate four things in relation to three dominant Anglophone popular music studies journals (Popular Music and Society, Popular Music, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies): 1) what interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity means within popular music studies, with a particular focus on the sites of research and the place of ethnographic and/or anthropological approaches; 2) the extent to which popular music studies has developed canonic scholarship, and the citation tendencies present within scholarship on both Western and non-Western popular musics; 3) the motivations for two scholarly groups, Dancecult and ASARP, to breakaway from …

Greece In Crisis: An Interview With Despina Lalaki, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Blogging Chronic Illness And Negotiating Patient-Hood: Online Narratives Of Women With Ms, Collette Sosnowy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personal narratives about women's everyday lives with chronic illness are mapped onto the landscape of social media through blogging. Social media is facilitating an already-existing shift in patients' roles as they are increasingly enabled and expected to self-educate themselves about their illness, collaborate with providers, self-manage their care, and engage in health activism. The health care industry has seized on the widespread use of social media to bolster rhetoric that the accelerated knowledge development made possible through social media has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine. Critics, however, argue that responsibility and activism via digital technologies has become …

The Graying Of People With Intellectual And Developmental Disabilities: Organizational Efforts Of Community Service Providers In Adapting Facilities And Programming To Meet The Needs Of Older Adults, Donna M. Corrado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities are living longer, thereby creating unique challenges for the aging and disabilities networks. This qualitative multicase study explored the ways in which six community service organizations serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have adapted their facilities and programming in response to the growing cohort of older persons in their care. The study focused on the following adaptations: physical plant, financial models, workforce, medical care and programming. Twenty-two in-depth interviews were conducted with executive-level staff of the six participating organizations. Data was triangulated through examination of archival data, organizational documents, agency web sites, and …

From Property Abandonment To Predatory Equity: Writings On Financialization And Urban Space In New York City, Desiree Justina Fields

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Financial markets, actors and imperatives are increasingly central to today's global capitalism, even in areas of the economy traditionally distinct from finance, such as real estate. This financialization changes the role of mortgage capital in urban space from building place-bound wealth to facilitating the extraction of value from place. This dissertation addresses questions about how financialization operates in the rental market, specifically its relation to: earlier processes of urban disinvestment, ongoing social and political struggles around urban space, the meaning of home and social reproduction. These questions correspond to broader theoretical debates about the contingent relationship between today's urban context …

"Banding Together": Biosociality, Weight Loss Surgery, And Neoliberal Discourses Around Obesity, Zoë C. Meleo-Erwin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on post-structuralist and feminist theories about the relationship between knowledge, power, bodies, health, and subjectification, in this dissertation I critically analyze the experience of individuals who were medically diagnosed as obese or morbidly obese and underwent bariatric (weight loss) surgery. During the late 20th and early 21st century, the United States saw an explosion of discourse and anxiety about rising population body weights. In national public health addresses, obesity was commonly referred to as a threat to the nation state. During this same time period, anti-fat stigma significantly increased and the number of bariatric surgeries performed skyrocketed. I argue …

The Advantage Of Mapping Gentrification With Geographic Information Systems: Comparisons Of Three New York City Neighborhoods, 1980 - Present, Chung Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation adopts a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to map gentrification. It explores the combination of GIS and publicly available data as a new research tool to investigate gentrification at the Census Tract level within three New York City neighborhoods (Park Slope, Williamsburg and the Lower East Side). Results are compared to contemporary gentrification studies to argue the advantages of utilizing this methodology.

Since the term “gentrification” was coined (Glass, 1964), scholars with different research methods have produced a considerable body of literature. However, debates on causes and effects persist. While disciplinary differences could be the reasons for disagreement, …

Gender Relations Of Space: Impact On Women’S Leadership In Nigeria [Pilot Study], Oluremi Alapo

Publications and Research

This qualitative phenomenological research study examines women in Nigeria and how they continue to face enormous set-backs regarding development and leadership capabilities. The socio and economic roles that many women occupy in Nigerian society affects leadership roles, especially in the context of sexual division of labor and in decision-making. The national and family culture present prevents women to fully adapt to innovative 21st century leadership. Culture is socialized in a person through the shared values of social groups that in turn play key roles in a person’s cognitive, emotional, and social functioning. The national and family culture is one in …

Teaming Up For Safer Cities: A Report From The Implementation Assessment Of The National Forum On Youth Violence Prevention (2012), Jeffrey A. Butts, Caterina Gouvis Roman, Kathleen A. Tomberg

Publications and Research

The efforts inspired by the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention will take time to develop, but survey results from the first 15 months of implementation suggest that the initiative may be generating some important changes. In five communities, survey respondents report a number of potentially valuable improvements. The results imply that the cities involved in the National Forum may be increasing opportunities for youth and improving the extent to which violence prevention approaches draw upon the perspectives and expertise of a broad range of community members. There are also indications that some cities are developing better overall capacity to …

Vawa @ 20: Building The Knowledge Base: Research Funding Through Vawa, Claire M. Renzetti, Rebecca M. Campbell, Allison Adair

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

On The Social Construction Of Hellenism Cold War Narratives Of Modernity, Development And Democracy For Greece, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

Hellenism is one of those overarching, ever-changing narratives always subject to historical circumstances, intellectual fashions and political needs. Conversely, it is fraught with meaning and conditioning powers, enabling and constraining imagination and practical life. In this essay I tease out the hold that the idea of Hellas has had on post-war Greece and I explore the ways in which the American anti-communist rhetoric and discussions about political and economic stabilization appropriated and rearticulated Hellenism. Central to this history of transformations are the archaeologists; the archaeologists as intellectuals, as producers of culture who, while stepping in and out of their disciplinary …

Naturalization Ceremonies And The Role Of Immigrants In The American Nation, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

Although immigration is an essential element in the American national story, it presents difficulties for constructing national membership and national identity in terms of shared intrinsic values. In this article, I analyze speeches made at naturalization ceremonies during two time periods (1950 – 1970 and 2003 – present) to examine the evolving roles of immigrants, as articulated to immigrants themselves. Naturalization ceremonies are a unique research site because the usually implied nationalist content is made explicit to brand new members of the nation. I find a shift in the framing from immigrants as potential liabilities and weak links in the …

What Studios Do, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

This essay is focused around a seemingly simple question – what do recording studios do? First, a clarification. I am not primarily asking “what are studios” or “what do people do in studios,” two comparatively straightforward questions that are tangentially addressed in academic and trade writing. Rather, I wish to consider some of the ways in which the studio itself shapes the kinds of social and musical performances and interactions that transpire within. I contend that studios must be understood simultaneously as acoustic environments, as meeting places, as container technologies, as a system of constraints on vision, sound and mobility, …

The Latino Vote And Obama’S Reelection Possibilities: A Quantitative Assessment Of Its Possible Impact On Nine Swing States, Justine Calcagno

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines the potential impact of the Latino electorate on nine key swing states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) for the 2012 presidential election.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: Assuming that current polling data are somewhat accurate, Latino voter turnout and the direction of the Latino vote may not be as meaningful …