Digital Commons Network^™

Transmedial Econarratology: Environment And The Subject Of Science Fiction, Joseph R. Boisvere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that narrators are constructed by their interactions with diegetic space and time in an ecological relationship. This argument draws upon Erin James’s work on econarratology, particularly her book The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, putting her theories of narrating time and place in dialogue with contemporary “unnatural” narratology as theorized by scholars such as Jan Alber and Brian Richardson. Science fiction (SF) offers a rich complement to these theoretical stances. I also focus much of my dissertation on how narratology works across and is influenced by specific media, featuring literary, audiovisual, and digital media, including novels, …

The Origins Of German Industrialization: The Transition To Capitalism In Prussian Agriculture, Daniel C. Colligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to explain the origins of German industrialization. Historical accounts of German industrialization often chronicle the process of its development but leave reasons for its initiation unexplained. Theories that have attempted to locate the roots of rapid German economic growth have been found to be empirically unsatisfactory, and thus the accepted story has defaulted to a gradualist narrative which conceptualizes economic behavior as fundamentally unchanging throughout German history. This dissertation challenges this reigning view, attempting to provide an explanation for why Germany embarked on a rapid economic growth trajectory in the nineteenth century whereas many other similarly situated …

Belonging Against The Odds: Exploring Restorative Justice Practices As Pathways To Foster Belonging In New York City Transfer Schools, Miguel Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The U.S. education system perpetuates structural inequities that disproportionately affect Black students with the School-to-Prison Pipeline (STPPL) criminalizing them through Zero-Tolerance policies. Transfer schools are often a last resort for students pushed out of traditional schools provide a lens to examine the impact of Restorative Justice Practices (RJP) and Black student representation on belonging. This quantitative dissertation study analyzes secondary data from the NYC Department of Education using multivariate models to explore the relationship between RJPs and sense of belonging (SOB). Model 1 found that discussing feelings and emotions at school (Tier 1 RJP) had the strongest association with SOB …

Re/Inventing Desire: Asexuality As A Tool For Utopian Intimacies, Amaranta Martinez Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asexuality became widely known in 2001 when David Jay, launched the Asexuality, Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), however, it’s been just throughout the last decade that it has gained popularity among LGBTQ studies. This thesis explores asexuality beyond its conventional framing as a sexual orientation, positioning it instead as a theoretical framework with the potential to challenge hegemonic understandings of sexuality. It does so by tracing the historical construction of sexual desire through the discipline of sexology, demonstrating how its discourses helped reinforce compulsory sexuality—the expectation that individuals must experience and act upon sexual desire (Emens 2014). Building upon this …

Spirometry: For The Winds In Us, Kendall Allison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Spirometers are devices used to measure lung capacity. This capstone is a creative study of what restores our breathing aptitude as a response to the suffocating and alienating consequences of whiteness for people racialized as white. The project is a sequence of lyric essays. The first lyric essay frames whiteness as a condition of exile and examines the cultural and emotional currents that shore it up. I use exile as a frame to emphasize the intensity of the spiritual and cultural alienation that people racialized as white experience. I also contextualize the dis-ease of suicide in my own lineage, and …

The "Self" In Crisis: A Study Of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, Golnaz Salehkarimi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I focus on The Cancer Journals and explore how Audre Lorde articulates the chaos followed by breast cancer in her life: what is the nature of the crises? What aspects of her life are largely affected by it? How it unsettles her understanding of time and place, how her daily life, work, relationships, and future plans get affected, and how her self-image and her agency and subjectivity are threatened. Relying on theories of women’s autobiographies, women’s writings, and illness narratives, I explore Lorde’s ways of writing about her body and emotions to regain her sense of self …

The Incubus: Bourgeois Social Control And The White Racial Identity Theodore W. Allen’S Ontological Critique And Epistemological Breakthrough 1965-1975, Sean I. Ahern

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theodore W. Allen (1919-2004) was a proletarian autodidact, former coal miner, and member of the Communist Party from 1939-1958. Deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements and his reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in the early 1960s, Allen developed a critique of what he termed the “White Blindspot” in the eyes of most U. S. labor historians who had omitted the Black chattel laborers from the proletariat. This omission on the part of both Marxist and non-Marxists constituted, in Allen’s view, the original sin of U. S. labor historiography, which had inadvertently inhibited …

When Avatars Go To School: The Effect Of Virtual Reality On Learning And Error Correction, Lauren Barack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The pandemic in 2020 led to an increasing dependency on technology particularly in learning environments. National educational assessments in the proceeding years have indicated steep, measurable learning loss. While a fully virtual learning environment is not the norm today, we chose to investigate how virtual reality (VR) environments influence learning in college students.

Our primary research goal was to look at how students learn and remember information gathered in virtual spaces. In particular, we examined whether sensory inputs in the VR environment, including spatial audio and haptic feedback, such as vibrations felt in a handheld controller, would help to better …

The Long Arm Of The Law: The Far-Reaching Effects Of The Carceral State On Families, Madison Squiers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the extended consequences of mass incarceration in the United States, focusing on the social, economic, and psychological impacts on the nuclear families of incarcerated individuals. Through a comprehensive literature review of peer-reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2024, this study highlights how female partners and children of imprisoned men face significant hardships, including emotional trauma, financial instability, and social stigma. These burdens are most acutely experienced by low-income families and communities of color, reflecting broader patterns of structural inequality. The findings underscore how punitive criminal justice policies—especially mandatory minimum sentencing and the War on Drugs—have created ripple …

Love And Power: Narrative Resistance In The Contemporary Literature And Film Of The Americas, Tania Nicolaou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the ways in which narratives of love, care, and intimacy support sociocultural change through cinema, literary fiction, and memoir in Indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic communities in the United States, Haiti, and Cuba. The project’s intervention revolves around how we compare and examine narratives of the marginalized, underrepresented, and misremembered in a way that does not focus primarily on pain and trauma, but on experiences that embody radical change, healing, and a shift in the colonial matrix of power. The chapters consider love as constructed through family, identity, memory, and nationhood, all in relationship to what love looks …

Problems And Paradigms In The Central Sahel Of Africa, Georgia Graham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Africa’s Central Sahel region—comprising of the countries of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso—environmental hardship, historical trauma, and contemporary conflict intersect with profound challenges of nation-building, state construction, and economic development. Situated in the semi-arid transitional zone between the Sahara Desert and sub-Saharan Africa, these landlocked states suffer from extreme geographical vulnerability. From the colonial period through to the present, these nations have experienced recurring droughts, persistent food insecurity, and entrenched poverty. Population growth has dramatically outpaced economic development; youth unemployment, limited educational opportunities, and scarce resources fuel social tension and potential conflict. Islamist insurgencies and increasingly violent ethnic conflicts …

Placemaking And Belonging In Brooklyn: Bushwick City Farms, Marisa Cigliano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the spring of 2022, New York City has seen an increased rate of newly-arrived migrants from countries in Latin and Central America, Asia, and Africa. In accordance with the city’s “right to shelter” obligation, NYC has provided shelter for migrants by converting hotels, office buildings, and even tents, into make-shift lodging designed for temporary stay. Within a year, anti-immigrant rhetoric from Mayor Eric Adams sparked activism from both immigrant rights organizations and long-term residents who don’t want migrant shelters in their neighborhoods. These shelters lack the necessary food, privacy, social services, and structure that is owed to homeless residents …

Moving The Needle: The Policy Of Change On Syringe Access, New York City And State, 1988–2023, Joyce Rivera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

By the mid-1980s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic breached a longstanding consensus between the political class and its bureaucratic alliances that had relied for decades on attitudes and orientations that championed punitive prohibition toward drugs as a bedrock principle of policy making. This ‘focusing event’ created an opening for HIV/AIDS activists to build a movement that offered an alternative, a more effective and just approach to how government policies and practices can manage illegal drugs and the persons who use drugs.

The dissertation uses several theoretical and methodological tools to address the central research objective that highlights the critical role played by …

Black Incarcerated Veterans And Va Service Access, Kimona S. Spencer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates racial disparities in access to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) services among incarcerated Veterans, with a specific focus on Black incarcerated Veterans. Drawing from critical race theory and the minority stress model, the study explores how race, discharge status, military experiences, and mental health conditions intersect to affect potential eligibility for and receipt of VA healthcare and benefits. Utilizing a secondary analysis of data from the Survey of Prison Inmates (SPI), the research employs quantitative methods to examine whether disparities exist in discharge characterizations, potential eligibility for VA care, and service utilization by race. Findings highlight …

Hope By A Thousand Cuts: Fashion Ethics From Cutting Fabric To Cutting A Fashion Film, Sarah G. Porterfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I conducted an experiment during which I learned to sew, created a clothing collection, and wore nothing but my collection for a month. Additionally, I documented my collection and the process in a fashion film. The goal of my experiment was to investigate fashion ethics. To gain a greater understanding of the underlying theories that fashion materializes and to grasp their ethical implications better, I studied the texts of fashion theorists such as Marx, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Benjamin, and Merleau-Ponty throughout my experiment. Therefore, I gained insight into many aspects of fashion ethics, from the beginning stages …

Menstrual Math: The Price Of Bleeding, Gabrielle Langston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project examines the landscape of menstrual equity in the United States through a data storytelling lens, focusing on state-level policies regarding taxation and access to menstrual products. The analysis explores which states impose sales tax on menstrual products, if state schools provide free menstrual products, and which states ensure access for incarcerated individuals using publicly available datasets from advocacy groups. Additionally, there is an investigation into potential correlations between the gender wage gap and states that tax menstrual products, shedding light on economic and policy disparities.

Through its data visualizations, this project aims to provide a clear, although not …

Localization Of Music In Perceived Motion In Cochlear Implant Users, Madeleine Beyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Spatial perception contributes to music perception and enjoyment, yet it remains understudied in cochlear implant (CI) users. Spatial effects in music are often achieved through panning, a tool which redistributes an audio signal level between or among several outputs, creating a perceived sound localization. CI users typically perform worse than normal hearing (NH) listeners on tasks of horizontal localization and music perception when manipulating the actual location of the sound. However, despite the common use of panning in daily use and consumption of music, no previous studies were conducted to examine how panning impacts the listening experience for CI users. …

Path Dependency And The Politics Of U.S. Health Reform, Sophia Spadafore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the impact of path dependency on health reform efforts in the United States, specifically analyzing how past policy decisions constrain subsequent reform possibilities. Utilizing the theoretical framework of historical institutionalism, the study investigates two significant cases—the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 and the The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010—to illustrate how successful healthcare reforms embed institutional arrangements that limit future policy innovation. Through a comparative case study approach grounded in legislative records, historical texts, and scholarly analyses, the research highlights that major healthcare reforms in the U.S. have consistently been structured …

Streaming Instabilities In Class 0/I Disks, Shirin Gul Zaidi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While it is clear that planets form in protoplanetary disks, fragmentation and the radial drift of pebbles inhibit the growth of grains to planetesimals. To overcome these barriers, effective localized dust clumping on a short enough time scale is required. One promising solution to this problem is the streaming instability. Streaming instability is only triggered with a large enough dust-to-gas ratio and grain size. Though it is unknown when and where those conditions are met in protoplanetary disks, recent studies have indicated that planetary cores likely require early formation to match detected exoplanet system masses, so that we need to …

Vital Signs: Tibetan In The Linguistic Landscape Of Jackson Heights, Olivia Mignone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation critically examines neoliberal discourses of diversity surrounding the neighborhood of Jackson Heights in Queens, New York through a study of Tibetan in the linguistic landscape (LL). Neoliberal discourses of diversity view linguistic and cultural pluralism through a consumerist lens, centering the market value of minoritized languages and cultures and how they can be leveraged for economic benefit. Focusing on an exploration of Tibetan (in)visibility and hybridity in public spaces, this study contributes a view of diversity that is grounded in lived experiences and reflected in the linguistic and cultural exchanges of the Tibetan refugee population with other groups …

East Asian And “Extraordinary”: Intersecting Racial And Musical Identities In The Classical Music Solo Career, Audrey Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A performer’s success within the classical music industry is reliant not only on musical merit but also on extramusical factors like race, gender, class, and culture, all of which influence a musician’s upbringing. For East Asian musicians, distinctions of merit can be accompanied by racialized and often paradoxical narratives about Asian identity that essentialize their performance, personality, and background. This dissertation examines how Asian and Asian-American performers of Western classical music navigate this interplay of racial and musical identity within their careers, with a specific focus on string players and pianists.

Chapter 2 introduces five major racialized narratives used to …

Individual, Social, And Environmental Factors Associated With Patterns Of Parasitic Infection In Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus Imitator), Megan C. Henriquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Parasites, and the infectious diseases they carry, are thought to have significantly impacted our evolutionary trajectory for millennia. Exploring how parasites are acquired and transmitted by their hosts in wild, natural populations is integral to understanding how similar processes may have shaped host-parasite co-evolutionary relationships over time. However, parasitological studies in humans and in non-human primates have produced inconsistent results, highlighting the dynamic, nuanced, and unique relationships individual parasites have with their hosts. These relationships are largely regulated by variation in factors at host, social, and environmental levels. Characteristics unique to the host (e.g., age and sex), factors pertaining to …

The Invisible Hand Of Networked Repression, Thuy Anh Tran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

U.S. history is awash with contentious episodes involving a legion of governmental and non-governmental actors operating through an array of means and arenas to destroy the political opposition. Yet, there has been little systematic examination in the repression literature of how and why repressive efforts proliferate so far beyond the police, military, and intelligence agencies tasked and equipped to preserve the existing order. This dissertation presents a novel framework for studying the relational basis of repression—particularly as it is organized, mobilized, and extended through a networked social structure. Social network analysis and interpretive case studies are conducted on two historical …

Guardians Of The Iranian Revolution: Clerical Authority, Bonyads, And The Irgc In Iran's Economic Landscape, Chase M. Toscano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the ideological and institutional foundations of Iran's post-revolutionary political economy, focusing on the triumvirate of clerical authority, bonyads (charitable foundations), and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Drawing on Kevan Harris’s “subcontractor state” framework, this study argues that Iran’s political economy is simultaneously a decentralized yet state-dominated system, where semi-public institutions like the bonyads and the IRGC act as key subcontractors, enabling the Islamic Republic to further economic development and circumventing Western sanctions. This analysis examines the development of Iran’s political economy from the 1979 revolution to identify the influence of left-wing Islamic ideologues like Ali Shariati …

Fast Transients From Magnetic Disks Around Non-Spinning Collapsar Black Holes, Justin A. Bopp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most black holes (BHs) formed in collapsing stars have low spin, though some are expected to acquire a magnetic accretion disk during the collapse. While such BH disks can launch magnetically driven winds, their physics and observational signatures have remained unexplored. We present global 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of collapsing stars that form slowly spinning BHs with accretion disks. As the disk transitions to a magnetically arrested state, it drives mildly relativistic, wobbling, collimated magnetic outflows through two mechanisms: steady outflows along vertical magnetic field lines (“Blandford-Payne jets”) and magnetic flux eruptions. With isotropic-equivalent energy of E_iso ≈10 …

Issues Of Religious Dominance: The Temple Mount/Haram Al-Sharif And The Western Wall At The Center Of Islam, Judaism, And Failing British Mandatory Responses (1917-1931), Kyra Young

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores how religious space and symbolism became central to Arab and Jewish nationalist identities in Mandatory Palestine, focusing on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and the Western Wall during the transition from Ottoman to British rule. It argues that the collapse of Ottoman sovereignty, alongside British support for a Jewish national home, transformed Islamic institutions into arenas for political expression. Muslim notables, particularly the Husayni family, strategically engaged with British colonial notions of “tradition” to reassert influence, exemplified by the politicization of the Nebi Musa festival. At the same time, Zionism—both political secular and religious—began to attach renewed …

Counter-Hegemony In The Captive State: Recasting Katrina’S Carceral Legacy Through Conjuncture, Joseph S. Muratore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis traces the historical development and contemporary manifestations of carceral power in Louisiana, arguing that racialized systems of control—from slavery and convict leasing to mass incarceration—have been sustained through shifting alliances of political and economic elites. Using The Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) and its exhibit Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration as a foundational timeline, this study demonstrates how Bourbonism forged a regional bloc that institutionalized racial domination through incarceration and labor exploitation, later reconstituted through neoliberal policies of abandonment, privatization, and militarization. I chose to focus on Hurricane Katrina because its aftermath reflects many …

Seeing And Sanctioning Structural Unfairness, Grace Flores-Robles

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

People tend to explain wrongdoing as the result of a bad actor or bad system. In five studies (including U.S. online convenience samples, and one U.S. census-matched sample), we tested whether the way people understand unfairness affects how they sanction it. In Study 1 (N = 370), people interpreted unfair offers in an economic game mostly as the result of a bad actor (vs. unfair rules), which predicted costly punishment of individuals (vs. changing unfair rules). In Studies 2 (N = 500) and 3, (N = 470, census-matched on age, gender, and ethnicity in the U.S), we …

Beyond Country: Southern Language And Identity In North Mississippi, Meredith Hilliard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about the language of the US South and the identities of the people who inhabit it. Its purpose is twofold: (1) to explain, on micro- and macro-levels, the processes of enregisterment (Agha 2003) of Southern US English, drawing conclusions about the phenomenon of enregisterment more generally; and (2) to articulate the relationship of Southern redneck identity to this process of enregisterment. It uses a mixed-methods approach that relies primarily on a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology, adopting a stancetaking approach (Du Bois 2007) and an enregisterment approach to language and identity, with some quantitative elements, to analyze …

The Giants Of Coercion: Major Powers And The Mobilization Of Global Sanctions Coalitions, Louis Charbonneau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the conditions under which sanctions-sending states can successfully mobilize broad international support for coercive measures on a target state for violating international security norms. Using the case of international sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2016, I develop a theory of how sanctions senders mobilize support for, and cooperation with, coercive measures on target states. The theory has two parts. First, states seeking international sanctions against a target with broad participation and support need unity and cooperation on the part of major powers in the international system. Second, securing the unity and cooperation of major powers makes …