Digital Commons Network^™

A Municipal Modernity: Women, Architecture, And Public Health In Working-Class New York, 1913–1950, Jessica Fletcher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Municipal Modernity” is the first study to analyze the architectural history of the district health centers in New York City that women reformers and their allies founded to address poor health in working-class communities. It reveals that women’s philanthropic adaptive re-use was foundational to the architecture of the public health care in New York and led to a program of municipal district health centers. Philanthropic reformers adapted buildings in the 1910s and 1920s to provide affordable health care for low-income women and children in European immigrant and Black neighborhoods. During the New Deal, municipal officials followed the example set …

The Construction Of Victimhood In Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, Lauren Moton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Human trafficking intervention courts (HTICs), specialty courts in the US designed to connect trafficking victims to services when they are arrested, require defendants to identify as victims of human trafficking in order to qualify for HTICs' services and other social supports. However, some defendants may be autonomously trading sex, thereby raising questions about the meaning of the term "victim" within HTICs. Therefore, my study asks the following: a) at the institutional level, how do HTICs’ rules, norms, procedures, and stakeholders implement and give meaning to the “victim” label, and why?; and b) at the individual level, how do people who …

Clustering Of Patients With Heart Disease, Mukadder Cinar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heart disease, a leading cause of mortality worldwide, presents complex challenges in public health due to its varied manifestations. Accurate diagnosis and patient stratification are essential for effective management and improved outcomes. In response, this study employed machine learning techniques to analyze heart disease data obtained from UCI Machine Learning Repository, aiming to enhance patient care through advanced data analysis.

The study began with the application of K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classification, which categorized patients into 'Disease' and 'No Disease' groups. This preliminary step provided initial insights into the structure of the dataset. Subsequently, K-means clustering was applied in two rounds, …

The True And Only Technic: Technological Ubiquity And Its Critics, Heretics, And Zealots, Hampton A. Dodd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against technological ubiquity, the philosopher, the ecologist, the theologian, the psychologist, the radical, the reactionary, and the poet have each responded. This analysis seeks to explicate the nature of such responses, as well as to explore their contemporary form and elucidate what those presently publishing might offer as programs toward the future. In order to do this, what follows is broken up into a series of sections, each focused on what I have perceived to be the foremost themes present throughout technological critique: becoming, freedom, identity, faith, space, time, and progress. Prior to such thematic excavations, this analysis offers a …

Evaluating The Impact Of Desk Appearance Ticket Reform In New York State, Olive Lu, Michael Rempel

Publications and Research

This report addresses the extent to which reform led more people charged with low-level offenses to return home swiftly after an arrest, avoid overnight detention, and limit unnecessary system contact. We focused solely on misdemeanors and Class E felonies where the specific charge is subject to a mandatory DAT (excluding domestic violence, sex offenses, and select other charges) and the individual has not failed to appear in the past two years. Thus, we excluded most cases where police officers retained discretion; however, the data could not isolate all carve-outs, such as people who cannot prove their identity, appear to need …

Does New York's Bail Reform Law Impact Recidivism? A Quasi-Experimental Test In The State's Suburban And Upstate Regions, René Ropac

Publications and Research

This is the third report in Data Collaborative for Justice's Bail Reform and Recidivism Series. The study builds upon two previous reports examining the impact of bail reform on recidivism in New York City. This study estimated the impact of New York's bail reform on recidivism in the State's suburban and upstate regions. We compared re-arrest rates for people who had bail set or were remanded at arraignment in the first half of 2019 (before bail reform) with similar people who were released without bail in the first half of 2020 (after bail reform).

Normative Orientations To Housing Activism And The Uneven Path To Nonprofitization In New York City, 1964–1989, Andrew Wilkes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What are the distinct contributions of normative orientations (including theological and ideological ones) in the public policy process? While the literature on policy formation in the past three decades has embraced at least some idea that ideology matters, little has focused on whether the content of their specific normative orientations leads groups to contribute to, and engage in, a policy process differently. By examining Paul Sabatier’s advocacy coalition framework in conversation with Rev. Dr. Gayraud Wilmore’s tripartite, theoethical framework of liberation, elevation, and survival, this dissertation contends that the normative commitments of advocacy stakeholders within New York City’s tenant movement …

Park Use, Urban Environmental Justice, And Place Attachment In Parks In Low-Income Neighborhoods In New York City, Javier Eduardo Otero Peña

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This three-article dissertation brings environmental psychology themes and questions to a large-scale public health research project about a subset of community parks and park renovations in low-income neighborhoods in New York City (NYC). What attributes and perceived aspects of the physical and social environment of parks and their neighborhoods are associated with higher park use? How do residents of gentrifying low-income neighborhoods feel about park renovations that took place in their communities? What can be learned from parks, park renovations and place attachment from exploring user-generated content in the Google Maps platform? Each of the articles presented in this dissertation …

Multi-Perspective Analysis For Derivative Financial Product Prediction With Stacked Recurrent Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing And Large Language Model, Ethan Lo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study developed a multi-perspective, AI-powered model for predicting E-Mini S&P 500 Index Futures prices, tackling the challenging market dynamics of these derivative financial instruments. Leveraging FinBERT for analysis of Wall Street Journal data alongside technical indicators, trader positioning, and economic factors, my stacked recurrent neural network built with LSTMs and GRUs achieves significantly improved accuracy compared to single sub-models. Furthermore, ChatGPT generation of human-readable analysis reports demonstrates the feasibility of using large language models in financial analysis. This research pioneers the use of stacked RNNs and LLMs for multi-perspective financial analysis, offering a novel blueprint for automated prediction and …

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

Making And Unmaking Multiethnic Black Neighborhoods: Immigration, Race, And Gentrification In New York And Paris, Maura Mcgee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a transatlantic comparative study of gentrification in multiethnic Black neighborhoods in New York and Paris. It draws on neighborhood case studies conducted in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and la Goutte d’Or in Paris, home respectively to African ancestry immigrant communities from the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa. It looks specifically at the causes and consequences of changes in neighborhood social spaces—the commercial landscape and social institutions—rather than at shifts in residential patterns.

Three main questions guide this research. First, what roles do race and immigration play in the process of gentrification, which has historically been most prevalent in …

Spain's Vision Of Empire Through Conquest, Ideology, And Law In The Sixteenth Century, Penelope Yau-Wen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the process of exploration, discovery, conquest and colonization of the Americas by Spain developed along with a vision of empire that involved the formulation of political theories, laws and policies by the governing elites, while responding to the actions by the conquistadors on the field. Although events on both sides of the Atlantic were not necessarily coordinated, the interests of the Court and the conquistadors intersected and were justified through a discourse that had been shaped by Humanist intellectual currents.

The thesis intends to show how the Castilian imperial vision was an experiment that began to …

Teaching In The “Home Language” Is Not Enough: Navigating Spanish Raciolinguistic Ideologies In A Dual Language Bilingual Program, Gladys Yacely Aponte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic case study examines how fourth graders in a New York City Spanish/English dual language bilingual public school navigate hegemonic language ideologies about Spanish. Drawing on the scholarship of raciolinguistic ideologies—those that position the language practices of people of color as inherently deficient (Flores & Rosa, 2015), I analyze the discourse of seven Kiskeyanx students to examine how they navigate the widespread raciolinguistic marginalization of Kiskeyanxs— a demographic that is racialized as more Black than other Spanish-speaking groups.

As a first-generation Kiskeyana-New Yorker, a bilingual teacher educator and researcher, and a former dual language bilingual public-school teacher, it …

Nanoparticles For Applications In Specific Diagnostics And Precision Medicine, Naxhije Berisha

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heterogeneity is common in the expression of cancer and treatment response. Precision medicine enables healthcare providers to tailor medical care to an individual's distinct genetic and environmental makeup. This customization has the potential to result in more efficient treatments while minimizing side effects. We believe that by studying the interface of nanotechnology and cancer medicine we can elucidate innovative solutions that address the challenges of disease heterogeneity. This includes advancements in drug delivery, formulations development, and diagnostic sensing. We highlight three studies that use nanotechnology for applications in precision medicine. In Chapter 2, we highlight design optimization of drug formulations …

Stereospecific Cross-Coupling Reactions Of Enantioenriched Secondary Alkyltricyclohexyltin Nucleophiles, Meruyert Binayeva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Transition metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions have evolved into a remarkable instrument for the formation of new bonds, and have significantly impacted how we approach to access complex organic molecules. Palladium is currently one of the most popular elements for catalytic applications due to its ability to facilitate powerful carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom couplings. Traditional Pd-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions have primarily concentrated on C(sp2)-C(sp2) cross-couplings, yielding planar products. Considering the use of C(sp3) nucleophiles would offer a viable control of the three dimensional arrangement in molecules. Herein, the first chapter details the history and development of Pd-catalyzed Stille cross-coupling reactions. The use of configurationally …

Learning From Their Flocks: Analyses Of Power On Hudson River Valley Livestock Farms, Mark D. D'Alessandro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Livestock farming in the Hudson River Valley, and selling meat in New York City farmers’ markets, are activities bounded by a region, and heavily influenced by place. Farming is represented in this project as a material linkage between urban and rural, both shaped by power relations, and the respective places of production and consumption. Interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, this study investigates placemaking and power dynamics on farms, their marketplaces, and spaces in between, during normal market conditions, and those which are anything but normal. The findings expose the reader to the representations of place in a local, niche market, …

Equality, Solidarity, And Exploitation: An Essay On The Philosophical Foundations Of Socialism, Callum Zavos Macrae

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In popular consciousness and culture, equality is often considered to be the preeminent socialist value. Equality, on this view, sits at the heart of the socialist ideal, and those who ascribe great value to equality will, other things being equal, find themselves more predisposed towards socialism than those who do not. However, in recent years egalitarian accounts of the socialist ideal have increasingly come under criticism from defenders of an alternative, freedom-based approach to understanding the values that underpin socialist commitment. This dissertation proposes to defend the egalitarian account of the socialist ideal. By reconceptualizing equality, we can reconstruct a …

Law's Legitimacy: Lon Fuller In A Consequentialist Frame, Daniel L. Feldman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that Lon Fuller’s approach to jurisprudence offers more important support to the rule of law than has been generally recognized. It argues further that a consequentialist lens allows clearer views of Fuller’s strengths in this regard, despite Fuller’s own resistance to consequentialism and despite consequentialism’s blindness to some of Fuller’s depth and texture. This thesis supplies a formula, although one intended only as a guide to thinking, not for actual computation, to drive judicial decision-making. The inputs into this formula are six values widely shared in the United States, modified by case-by-case salience. Kantian deontology strongly influences …

Mechanistic And Engineering Studies Of Lov Photoreceptors In Yeast, Matthew M. Cleere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A variety of cellular biosensors have evolved which can translate electromagnetic radiation from the environment into biological functions. Light-Oxygen-Voltage (LOV) domains in particular, are a group of photoreceptors that respond to blue wavelengths of light and can become a cellular photoswitch by converting this stimulus through their attached effector domains. For instance, the Helix-Turn-Helix (HTH) DNA-binding activity of the bacterial transcription factor EL222 and the Regulator of G-protein Signaling (RGS) in the fungal membrane associating protein BcLOV4 are both induced by blue-light sensing LOV domains. While previous work has provided the field with a structural characterization of LOV proteins in …

Targeting Strategies To Optimize The Therapeutic Potential Of Gold Compounds Against Her2-Positive Breast Cancers, Afruja Ahad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The overexpression of HER2 accounts for 20-30% of breast cancer tumors and not only serves as a marker for poor predictive clinical outcomes but also as a target for treatment. Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) combine the selectivity of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) with the efficacy of chemotherapeutic drugs to provide targeted treatment without toxicity to normal tissue. Most of the ADCs currently in the clinic for cancer chemotherapy are based on complex organic molecules. In contrast, the conjugation of metallodrugs to mAbs has been overlooked when there is enormous potential in this area with the resurgence of metal-based drugs as prospective cancer …

Values In Evidence-Based Policy: Bridging Socio-Political, Moral, And Epistemic Domains, Karyna Pryiomka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Values constitute an inescapable constant of any policymaking or evidence-production process. In this dissertation I explore ways in which socio-political, moral, and epistemic values inform evidence production and use in public higher education policy. In “Chapter One: Introduction and Literature Review”, I provide a brief overview of evidence-based policy as a practice. I then discuss three major categories of values, focusing on higher education examples whenever possible. Finally, I present the central study of this dissertation. The central question of my dissertation is In what ways do epistemic, socio-political, and moral values frame the production and deployment of evidence in …

From The Outside Looking In: Transmasculine Narrative Identity, Experiences, And Larger Narratives On Social Media, Micah Roldan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Narrative identity development is an essential process in how individuals perceive themselves and the world around them. Often, narrative identity is studied in cisgender heterosexual individuals and applied to others without the acknowledgment of individuals that fall outside of these categories. Drawing upon existing literature and autoethnography, this thesis aims to meaningfully bridge this gap by studying the narrative identity development of transmasculine individuals through the lens of social media. This thesis proposes that the use of social media to share gender transition journeys has created a new digital trans and queer narrative for users and viewers. This narrative is …

The Black Map Project: A Black People’S Epistemology Of Healing, Britton Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work is a love letter to Mary Turner and her descendants, by which I mean all Black people, that lifts recipes and roadmaps of Black creative healing and liberatory praxes. It is a freedom dream (Kelley, 2002) that dares to (re)imagine mental health care by holding Black healing and liberation centrally in mind. I do not seek to prove through this work but rather to provoke [thought|action|repair]. In this work, I unsettle prescribed notions of therapy that have long dismissed/erased/ignored the needs and [therapeutic] practices of Black people. The Black MAP Project resists epistemologies of ignorance (Mills, 2022)—born in …

The Role Of Glutamate In The Medial Prefrontal Cortex In The Acquistion And Expression Of Conditioned Approach, Rudolf Nisanov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A series of experiments were conducted to assess the role of glutamatergic stimulation in the dorsal and ventral regions of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in both the acquisition and expression of reward-related learning using a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm, the conditioned-approach paradigm. Rats with surgically implanted cannulas were exposed to Pavlovian conditioning sessions that occurred on three alternative days (acquisition) or seven consecutive days (expression). These 60-min conditioning sessions consisted of 30 pairings of light (CS) and food pellets (US) presented under a random time schedule. After a two-day break, rats underwent a session with no CS or US and …

Trees In Urban Environments: How Soil Quality Impacts Tree Performance, Saidan Qi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cities around the world are increasingly investing in reforestation and afforestation efforts to mitigate impacts from climate change and population growth. However, urban soil conditions can be unfavorable for tree growth. Street trees are widely known to suffer from poor soil quality, but there has been no comprehensive review of this topic so far. Clean soils can be transported from nonurban areas to support cities’ green projects, but this approach is not sustainable. Artificial (constructed) soils can be created from various materials and have been proposed as an alternative medium for urban tree growth, but no research has been done …

Racial-Sexual Normativity In/As Narratives Of “The Human”, Jeri Brand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis synthesizes Sylvia Wynter’s and Judith Butler’s models of identity-formation to analyze discourses of racialization and sex/gender difference in normative scientific theories of “the human.” I argue that eugenicist white supremacism and sex/gender normativity form a single conceptual framework – what I call “the racial-sexual matrix” – throughout these scientific narratives. I then trace an epistemological consistency across 18^th- through 21^st-century scientific literature as evidence for the ongoing legacies of coloniality, white supremacy, and eugenics in current hegemonic sex/gender ontologies. Finally, I contend that the racial-sexual matrix functions as an index of proper humanness not …

Visualizing Ancient Empire In Tudor England: Imperial Monarchy, Reformation, And The Antique Soldier In The Title Page To Richard Grafton’S Large Chronicle (1569), Peter Nicholas Otis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes the iconography and visual sources of the title page to the first volume of A chronicle at large and meere history of the affayres of Englande (1569) by the Tudor author Richard Grafton. Representing the visual synthesis of several distinct but interrelated currents that developed in the preceding century, the title page to the Large Chronicle offers a rare glimpse into a transitional moment in the middle Tudor perception and visual representation of the British past. These currents include imperializing royal iconography, with origins in antecedent representations in the late fifteenth century; the entry of the ‘classicizing’ …

Hagia Sophia: Politics Of Space And Hauntology, Hazal Demir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hagia Sophia is one of the most celebrated cultural heritages, considered sacred for thousands of years. However, Hagia Sophia’s political dimension is often overshadowed by its religious-sacred meanings. This thesis aims to analyze Hagia Sophia’s political character through four pivotal historical events: its foundation by Justinian the Great, its conversion into the imperial mosque of the Ottoman Empire, its secularization under the Turkish Republic, and its subsequent reconsecration into a mosque in 2020. Focusing on these four historical milestones, this thesis illuminates a political pattern embedded in Hagia Sophia, emphasizing its role as a space of political legitimacy and ideological …

"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American society encouraged strong bonds between women. As separate sphere ideology took hold, highly-structured female relationships were created and maintained through shared rituals, language, and expectations. The resulting friendships enabled women to build a range of emotional ties with one another. At the same time, an expanding array of gender segregated educational institutions further promoted homosocial networks. Women’s college students built community through their shared experience inhabiting a collective space, forging social circles as well as one-on-one intimate relationships. This thesis examines women’s experiences of friendship within the college setting between 1880 …

Interviews And Perspectives Among Community Members Working With Undocumented Female Border Crossers In The States Along The United States-Mexico Border, Melissa M. Frasco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order to discuss immigration in the context of the United States, we must dispel the myth that immigration is monolithic. Therefore, when we discuss national identity, gender equality, policy, employment rates, and countless other ordinary topics, we are discussing immigration, as it is embedded in our history and our future. The goal of my research is to delineate the experiences of violence that female border crossers undergo in the process of crossing into the United States via the southernmost border. The data collection process involved four semi-structured interviews to collect oral histories from workers at community-based organizations. These organizations …