Digital Commons Network^™

The Crisis Of Safety, Well-Being, And Belonging Facing Lgbtq Children: Mad/Crip Of Color Critique Towards A Curriculum Of Radical Care, Jameson Goetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I turn toward the study of educational experience, defined broadly to include lived experiences both within and outside of formal schooling institutions. I approach curriculum as an ongoing project of self-understanding in which one becomes mobilized for engaged pedagogical action alongside others in the pursuit social justice. I am guided by the following question, foundational to the field of curriculum studies: for those of us who work alongside LGBTQ children, what knowledge is of most worth? Critically reflecting on ways of working alongside LGBTQ children in the pursuit of social justice, I formulate a mad/crip of color …

Non-Perturbative Aspects Of Gauge Theories Through A Complex Parametrization, Antonina Maj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores a complex matrix parametrization of four-dimensional non-Abelian gauge theories as a means of gaining analytical insights into (3+1)-dimensional QCD. The low-energy scale of non-Abelian gauge theories remains an elusive area of research even after decades of work. A key challenge lies in identifying physical, gauge-invariant degrees of freedom that are relevant to non-perturbative phenomena. In this dissertation we develop a complex parametrization of gauge fields on which gauge transformations act homogeneously, thereby enabling a manifestly gauge-invariant analytical formulation of the theory.

Chapter one constructs the complex gauge-invariant parametrization for gauge theories living on both complex projective space …

Investigation Of Motor Neuronal And Circuit Level Mechanistic Determinants Of Spinal Excitability Following Cst Injury, Thelma Bethea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The corticospinal tract (CST) is the primary descending motor pathway in mammals, essential for precise, dexterous movements, especially in humans and nonhuman primates. Damage to the CST, such as from spinal cord injury (SCI), impairs skilled motor function and triggers maladaptive changes including aberrant proprioceptive afferent sprouting and increased spinal excitability. These changes are closely linked to both muscle weakness and the development of hyperreflexia, compounding the functional deficits. Animal models of SCI are valuable for investigating mechanisms of injury and recovery, though traditional models often limit the ability to isolate circuit-specific contributions. To address this, I employed selective unilateral …

The Georgian Of Heritage Speaker Children, Cass Lowry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents three research articles united in the goal of describing the Georgian language as it is spoken by heritage speakers in the Brooklyn diaspora. The Georgian heritage speaker subjects recruited for these studies were children due to immigration patterns at the time when experimental data was collected. Their production of morphosyntactic inflection and pronouns is compared to adult and child homeland speakers.

Heritage speakers of Georgian demonstrate the following divergences from homeland and standard language comparisons. Nominal case inflection is most affected in heritage production, as heritage speakers use a default case or collapse Georgian's split-ergative and inverse …

The Evolution And Reproduction Of Andean Miconia (Melastomataceae), Juan Angulo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Understanding the factors that shape diversification and distribution in tropical plant lineages is central to explaining the origins of Neotropical biodiversity. Assessing evolutionary history with trait evolution and climatic niche dynamics provides key insights into the drivers of diversification and biogeography, while natural history data remains critical for these evolutionary studies. The Tropical Andes, with its exceptional biodiversity and environmental heterogeneity, offers an ideal setting to explore these processes. In this dissertation, I investigate how reproductive systems, climatic niche dynamics, and pollination strategies influence the evolution and biogeography of Miconia III, a large and ecologically diverse clade in the …

From Sequence To Allostery: How Amino Acid Differences Rewire Coupled Conformational Heterogeneity In The Ptp Enzyme Family, Shivani Sharma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Protein Tyrosine Phosphatases (PTPs) are critical regulators of cellular signaling, and their activity is often modulated through allosteric mechanisms. Allostery is defined as a chemical or conformational change in one site of the protein due to a binding event at another site. Although several studies have investigated aspects of allostery in PTPs, the mechanistic foundations underlying allosteric regulation remain poorly understood. Despite a highly conserved catalytic domain across PTPs, regions with low or no conservation suggest potential "rewiring" of allosteric networks. This raises key questions about the universality versus individuality of allosteric mechanisms across the PTP family.

In this work, …

Interoceptive Forecasting And Recall: The Role Of Anxiety Sensitivity And Disgust Sensitivity, David Lloyd Yap

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Predicting and remembering emotional states (affective forecasting and recall) are adaptive processes that allow individuals to engage with the future and past to guide behavior, yet these processes are prone to bias. Although affective forecasting and recall biases are common across healthy populations, more pessimistically biased affective forecasts and recall have been linked to greater anxiety and depression symptom levels and to emotional disorders. A crucially understudied aspect of affective forecasting and recall is the perception of the somatic (interoceptive) symptoms that accompany emotions. This study investigated forecasting and recall accuracy of somatic symptom levels (i.e., interoceptive forecasting and recall). …

Reduce, Replace, Reframe: How Civil Society Organizations Build Resilience In The Face Of Financial And Political Pressures, Merrill Sovner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order for civil society organizations (CSOs) to perform essential functions to support democracy and prevent democratic erosion, they must operate sustainably, maintaining resources and legitimacy to carry out their missions. CSOs experience financial and political pressures when resources and legitimacy are withdrawn. CSOs facing both pressures may reduce their activities, replace lost funding, or reframe their work to engage new audiences. How CSOs respond in the face of financial and political pressures has implications for their role in hindering democratic erosion. Yet civil society organizations weather these pressures in ways that are not straightforward; the most targeted organizations may …

Low-Resource Ecoacoustic Audio Classification, Enis Berk Coban

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecoacoustic monitoring via machine learning enables scalable analysis but is often constrained by labeled data scarcity, particularly in remote regions like the Arctic. This thesis confronts low-resource ecoacoustic audio classification by developing and evaluating complementary machine learning methodologies. We introduce EDANSA, the first publicly available, expert- labeled Arctic dataset of its kind, curated via novel active learning, alongside a baseline CNN. We systematically evaluate transfer learning, showing general audio embeddings effectively bootstrap classifiers for challenging Arctic sounds, significantly outperforming direct label mapping. Optimizing label utility, we investigate standard data augmentation and introduce novel audio data valuation via Shapley values, revealing …

Giving Voice To The Frames Of War: A Digital Humanities Framework For Evaluating War Crimes Databases, Leila Markosian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Developments in digital technologies have complicated existing debates around the ethics of cataloging war crimes and human rights violations. Digital humanities methods of evaluating digital scholarship can help to construct a framework for evaluating war crimes databases, a process which requires a fine-tuned critical analysis aimed towards understanding the purpose of compiling the database, the platform or media template through which the database is presented, and the communicative potentials of the database. The following paper presents a survey of the existing literature on war crime databases and the politics of memory; a model of how war crimes database analyses may …

Scripted For Surveillance: Parole Revocation Hearings And The Performance Of Procedure In New York, Kelsey G. Greeff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines parole revocation hearings in New York as complex performances that extend carceral control beyond prison walls. Drawing on a composite vignette from the Bronx parole court, it analyzes the interplay between procedural reform, constitutional due process, and neoliberal governance. Using a dramaturgical framework informed by Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, the study identifies four interrelated processes: the judge as director, who orchestrates hearings according to institutional priorities; normalization, where repetition embeds structural inequality as routine; type-marking, the classification of parolees into predefined roles through accumulated records and cues; and the extension of …

Transitional Justice And Counter-Productivity: A Case Study Of Serbia And Croatia, Michael F. Curry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the post-Cold War era, transitional justice emerged as a method to reconcile societies that had suffered large-scale human rights abuses through autocratic oppression and/or intra-state conflicts. During this time, the concept of what transitional justice meant and what problems it could resolve expanded exponentially. However, the empirical results of such initiatives have been mixed. Many states subject to transitional justice initiatives have failed to liberalize or develop domestic governance capacities. Why do transitional justice initiatives fail even under the most favorable conditions?

The most common answer to this question is that these initiatives are often ineffective, hindered by a …

Speaking From The Underground: Notes On Lois Elaine Griffith & The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Aesthetic, Joseph Anthony Cáceres

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Speaking from the Underground explores the work of Lois Elaine Griffith, an Afro-Caribbean diasporic visual and literary artist of Barbadian descent and one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a Puerto Rican cultural institution grounded in Afro-Caribbean traditions located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the common, cultural parlance, the Cafe has become synonymous with spoken word and slam poetry. Since 1973 it has been the place where artists of mostly African, Caribbean, Latinx descent gather to craft works centered around lived experiences to shape a language to counter a conventional understanding of history and a …

“Justice, Justice Pursue”: Coworker Reactions To Religious Workplace Accommodations, Joshua A. Nagel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines coworker reactions to religious accommodations in the workplace, a growing necessity as religious diversity increases, and recent legislation strengthens protections for religious observances. Religious accommodations can provoke perceptions of differential treatment, impacting coworker morale, cooperation, and organizational cohesion. While extensive research exists on disability accommodations, religious accommodations differ fundamentally as they often relate to moral beliefs and are viewed variably in terms of necessity and controllability. Drawing on organizational justice theories, this dissertation applies and modifies Colella’s (2001) and Colella et al.’s (2004) models for coworker perceptions of distributive and procedural fairness of disability accommodations to the …

Disability Theatre Communities: Engaging Artists And Audiences In Contemporary International Performance, Joseph Paul Hill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Disability Theatre Communities” examines how communities are constructed in, through, and around contemporary international disability theatre performances. It explores ideas of community formation and intersection across three case studies to elucidate the various ways in which disability theatre artists, productions, companies, and organizations attract, engage, and educate variable artist and audience communities. The project analyzes Rome, Italy’s Teatro Patologico and its Integrated Theatre of Emotion, a theatrical training program for neurodivergent performers; Wales-based writer, theatre-maker, and dramaturg Kaite O’Reilly, whose international collaborations center d/Deaf and disabled performers and foreground audience accessibility; and the biennial BIT (Blind in Theatre) International Festival …

Teaching And Technology: "You Can't Just Do The Same Thing Online", Sakina Laksimi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how faculty at the City University of New York navigated the abrupt transition to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing how pedagogy is shaped by technological, institutional, and social conditions. Drawing on twenty-two interviews with twelve faculty across eight disciplines, I use a grounded theory approach to analyze how instructors adapted courses, reimagined assessment, and sustained connection with students amid crisis. Three overlapping pedagogical orientations emerged: improvisational, relational, and design-based teaching. These approaches highlight how faculty balanced responsiveness, care, and intentional course design in environments mediated by digital platforms and marked by inequity. The study situates …

Leveraging Stellar Chemistry For A Global View Into The Atmospheres Of Brown Dwarfs And Giant Exoplanets, Emily Calamari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the era of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), it is now possible to examine substellar mass atmospheres in unparalleled detail and precision. However, unraveling the complicated thermodynamics and chemistry in these atmospheres remains a challenge. Atmospheric retrievals are a leading data-driven technique capable of recovering an object’s fundamental parameters such as mass, radius, effective temperature, gravity, cloud structure and composition and chemical abundances. However, in directly imaged or isolated worlds, constraining and/or interpreting these fundamental parameters can be difficult, particularly as retrieval models try to parameterize the overall impact of clouds.

For my dissertation, I turned to main …

Alerted And Anxious? The Effects Of Mobile Crime Alerts On Perceptions Of Personal And Public Safety, Amanda C. Benjamin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mobile crime alert platforms promise to enhance personal and public safety by delivering frequent notifications about nearby dangers—claims that, until now, have not been experimentally tested. For-profit applications like Citizen deliver real-time, geo-targeted push notifications about nearby crime incidents to over 9 million users, often operating outside the bounds of institutional oversight. Although marketed as tools to enhance awareness and protection, these platforms may simultaneously empower users through information while also potentially amplifying anxiety, heightening threat perceptions, and eroding trust in community. Despite their increasing prominence and integration into public safety communications, the psychological and behavioral impacts of mobile crime …

Asian American Artists, Improvisation, And Collaboration, Johnna Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of my dissertation is to explore how contemporary Asian Americans artist-performers have formulated their identities through collaborations with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The project addresses issues in the existing literature on this topic and provides an alternative framework of cosmopolitanism to understanding the multidimensional aspects of artistic collaborations. The dissertation examines the history of the AACM and the Asian American improvisers and reveals ideological differences among its members on how music should reflect their identities. These histories paved the way for the artist subjects of my three case studies: Miya Masaoka, Vijay Iyer, …

The Architecture Of Exclusion: Disability, Race, And The History Of New York City’S 600 Schools, Francine Almash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the largely erased history of New York City’s 600 schools—segregated public schools created to house students labeled as emotionally disturbed or socially maladjusted. These institutions, operating throughout the mid-20th century, disproportionately served Black and Puerto Rican youth, many of whom were placed in these schools under vague behavioral criteria and with little to no pathway for return to general education settings.

Combining archival research, longitudinal policy analysis, historical media review, and critical race and disability studies frameworks—including DisCrit (Disability Critical Race Theory)—this project situates the 600 schools at the intersection of institutional racism and ableism. It argues …

Bmp Signaling Co-Regulation Of Immune Response And Lipid Metabolism, Katerina K. Yamamoto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs) are secreted peptide ligands of the Transforming Growth Factor beta (TGF-β) family, initially identified for their roles in development and differentiation across animal species. They are now increasingly recognized for their roles in physiology and infectious disease. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the BMP ligand DBL-1 controls fat metabolism and immune response, in addition to its roles in body size regulation and development. DBL-1 regulates classical aspects of innate immunity, including the induction of anti-microbial peptides. We theorized that BMP-dependent regulation of fat metabolism could also promote resilience against microbial pathogens. We found that …

Between The Buffer And The Black Box: Ed(1), Invisible Text, And Delegation In Word Processing, Kai Prenger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis provides a media archaeological and theoretical examination of ed(1), the Unix line editor developed by Ken Thompson at Bell Labs in 1969, arguing that its approach to "invisible text" processing established lasting patterns of human-computer collaboration that persist in contemporary digital systems. Through historical research, technical analysis, and critical interpretation, this study demonstrates how ed(1) embodied a particular epistemology of text processing that appears alien in a contemporary context, but proves insightful in the age of generative text creation.

ed(1) emerged from the unique convergence of Bell Labs' collaborative research culture, severe hardware constraints of early Unix systems, …

Inhibition Of Return And Attentional Blink: Aspects Of A Singular Attentional Process?, Kathleen Rowe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Inhibition of Return (IOR) and Attentional Blink (AB) are two distinctly defined phenomena that display some intriguingly similar properties. They both describe suppression effects following a visual stimulus that has captured attention, both may be preceded by an enhancement, and both share partially overlapping effect time windows which can be manipulated by task difficulty. The current study attempted to measure the two phenomena simultaneously to test our hypothesis that behavioral indices of AB and IOR will display significant spatial and temporal overlap, suggesting the two phenomena may reflect, at least in part, different aspects of a singular attentional process. To …

Prerogative In Common: On The Emancipatory Potential Of Radical Mutuality Amid Sovereign Decisionism, Matthew Builes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In times of crisis, liberal democracies resort to authoritarian measures that undermine core democratic values. Dominant thought in the study of emergency-era law and politics appeal to a dichotomy of normal and exceptional times, to critique or justify the turn to sovereign decisionism. While this strategy seems clear-cut, the persistence of exceptional spaces and the crises that supposedly generate them challenge existing frameworks by blurring the line between norm and exception. This project explores the prospect of radical mutual aid, as a transformative response to the enduring crisis of modernity.

The Role Of Parent Psychiatric Symptoms In The Intergenerational Continuity Of Child Neglect: A Prospective Examination, Cody D. Stitzel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Parental history of childhood neglect is a risk factor for offspring neglect. When a parent and their offspring both experience neglect in childhood, the phenomenon is referred to as the intergenerational continuity of child neglect. Understanding how child neglect is continued from one generation to the next is essential for creating effective interventions and prevention strategies that may help break the cycle. Since links between childhood neglect and heightened risk for various psychiatric symptoms have consistently been identified in research, as well as links between various psychiatric symptoms and heightened risk for child neglect, it may be that parents’ psychiatric …

Structural Characterization Of A Tarantula Toxin And Its Interactions With Lipid Bilayers And Voltage-Gated Sodium Channels, Krishnakoli Adhikary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Voltage-gated ion channels are membrane protein complexes. They allow the selective flow of their respective ions down an electrochemical gradient through a central ion conduction pore surrounded by four voltage-sensing domains (VSDs). Various neurological and cardiovascular diseases are caused by mutations in voltage-gated ion channels (VGICs). One of the biggest challenges today is addiction to opioid medication. Coming up with non-opioid drug leads can be a real blessing for society. This is where voltage-gated sodium channel research comes in. Na_v1.7, Na_v1.8, and Na_v1.9 are responsible for pain sensations. Loss or gain of function in …

Crisis Narratives And The Vicissitudes Of Haitian Foodways: A Critical Comparison Of Three Food Items, Marc S. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Polities and media external to Haiti direct a lot of narrative focus on the country being the source of its own protracted crises. This represents a powerful narrative hegemony that casts the post-colonial nation as a zone of perpetual disasters or crisis. To maintain that narrative domination over Haiti, opportunistic observers of Haiti’s media spectacles of crisis only need to atomize the country’s newest crisis or natural disaster from the history that situates it. The elision of the Haitian memory – a memory of structural adjustment programs, systematic displacement, foreign-sponsored paramilitary violence, erosion of peasant foodways and agriculture – from …

Choreographies Of Care: Disability And Relationality In Performance, Kiera Bono

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation explores enactments of what I am calling “choreographies of care” in interdisciplinary performance practices in the 21^st century. Working across disability studies, race and ethnicity studies, queer theory, and performance studies, I investigate the ways in which chronically ill and disabled artists have generated multisensorial movement, sound, and performance works that resist normative understandings of time, space, bodies, and interactions between bodies. Focusing mostly on performances and events that I have attended in New York City or virtually over the past decade, my project engages directly with disability arts communities in which I have been deeply embedded …

Nonlinear Diffusion, Hydrodynamic Cascades And Jamming In Kinetically Constrained Systems: Insights From Lattice Gas Models, Abhishek Raj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates non-linear diffusion processes and emergent dynamical phenomena in kinetically constrained lattice gases. Two central models are considered: a one-dimensional lattice gas exhibiting a diffusion cascade triggered by hydrodynamic nonlinearities and a triangular ladder exclusion model that undergoes a jamming transition. The former demonstrates stretched exponential decay consistent with non-perturbative long-time tails, while the latter illustrates how classical-quantum mappings yield insight into glassy dynamics and mobility constraints. Through a combination of numerical simulations, analytical perturbation theory, and mean-field approximations, the work uncovers mechanisms underlying anomalous transport, jamming transitions, and the breakdown of perturbative hydrodynamics.

Mechanistic Insights Into The Neuroprotective Effects Of The Antidepressant Agomelatine In Alzheimer's Disease, Grace Terry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disease that has limited treatment options and no cure. AD is characterized by robust pathology including extracellular amyloid beta plaques, intracellular neurofibrillary tangles, neuronal and synaptic loss, neuroinflammation, and brain atrophy. AD presents with cognitive decline and memory loss but only years after neuropathology has started to accumulate. This robust pathology has made AD difficult to treat and highlights the need for therapeutics that modulate multiple pathways. Agomelatine (AGO) was selected by a high-throughput machine learning drug repurposing algorithm by our collaborator Dr. Lie Xie (Hunter College Dept. of Comp. Sci.) as having …