Digital Commons Network^™

Object (Im)Permanence: Toward A Hauntology Of The Violin, Pala Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Object (Im)permanence goes looking for the violin’s ontological uncertainties, its persistent historical specters, and its relation to things not fully present, no longer, or yet to come. Drawing on the history of the author’s own instrument as an inherited object, this study explores the violin’s strangest affordances: its capacity to hold a psychic charge, sustain absent presence, remotely activate somatic memory, and invite reciprocal relationality. Adapting the Derridean concept of “hauntology” as a framing for the violin’s spectral vitality, Object (Im)permanence imagines how a hauntology of the violin can account for its ontological uncertainties, logic of absent presence, and persistent …

Reimagining Folk Songs: A Bridge Between Tradition And Innovation In Georgy Sviridov’S Music, Polina Nazaykinskaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Georgy Sviridov (1915–1998), one of the most prominent Soviet composers of his generation, remains largely underrepresented in Western performance and scholarship. This dissertation examines the compositional language of Sviridov’s Kursk Songs (1964) through direct comparison with the seven folk songs published in Anna Rudneva’s 1957 collection Kurskie pesni that served as the work’s source material. The study addresses a central paradox of Sviridov’s musical language: how remarkably economical, predominantly diatonic materials can produce powerful and highly individual expressive results.

The analysis considers how Sviridov preserves essential characteristics of the folk sources while transforming their harmony, rhythm, form, texture, orchestration, and …

Dancing In Circles: Bon Dance As Performance Of The Past, Travis Robb Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project traces the contours of the Japanese folk dance tradition of Bon Dance in Hawaiʻi through the nuances of public scholarship, diaspora, and racial capitalism by producing an original play which aims to perform the knowledge and praxis which the performance ritual puts forward. Treating Bon Dance as muse, the original play examines the necessity of turning to the past in order to disrupt a future made inevitable by oppressive systems; a fiction that comments on and critiques the predictive and generative technologies that have embedded themselves into society at large. Through intertwining conversations that explore prophecy and …

Investigating The Role Of Striatal Cholinergic Interneuron D2 Receptors In Behavioral Flexibility, Janyn J. Alfred

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine (ACh) interact within the striatum to shape reward-based learning and choice behavior. DA D2 receptors on cholinergic interneurons (CIN D2Rs) were genetically knocked out to investigate their role in choice allocation using a two-lever matching paradigm. Behaviorally, both knockout (KO) and wild-type (WT) mice learned the initial task equally well. When shifted to asymmetric matching schedules (VI-90 vs. VI-180), ideal matching predicts that mice should allocate exactly 67% of their total responses to the rich lever. Neither group matched as predicted by the matching law. Instead, the KO mice showed a pattern where the higher rate …

Nāgasvaram Ensemble Music In Contemporary South India: Perspectives Of Revival, Rajeswari Ranganathan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of nāgasvaram ensemble music in South India based on ethnographic research in Tamil Nadu conducted between 2022 and 2026. Drawing from observations of its various performance contexts and extensive interviews with contemporary practitioners, teachers, students, impresarios, and archivists, this study examines how the aesthetics, social contexts, and circulation of nāgasvaram ensemble music have evolved over the last four decades. Countering prevalent narratives of its decline and highlighting its endurance, I argue that this musical practice is undergoing a revival, both shaped by and contributing to ongoing social transformations.

Nāgasvaram ensembles featuring the double-reed woodwind instrument …

Theoretical Analysis And Performance Interpretation In Thomas Adès’S Traced Overhead, Han Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While many post-tonal composers avoid any inkling of tonality by embracing dissonance or breaking tonal resolutions, Thomas Adès does not shy away from the traditional harmonies that strongly relate to tonal music, such as the circle of fifths, major and minor triads, and the horn-call motif, but adopts several intervallic systems that govern all the notes, including aligned cycles, parsimonious voice leading, and the twelve-tone aggregate.

To examine how Adès uses these intervallic systems to repurpose traditional harmonies, this dissertation presents a close tonal analysis of his solo piano work Traced Overhead. Integrating historical, pianistic, and extramusical contexts, this …

Which Factors Are Most Important For Understanding Neighborhood-Scale Electrification Transitions In New York City, And How Do These Factors Interact Within Urban Energy Systems?, Aaryan Nair

Publications and Research

Building electrification has emerged as a central strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from urban areas, yet its implementation remains uneven across cities due to differences in buildings, infrastructure, and local conditions. This literature review examines the factors that influence neighborhood-scale electrification transitions in New York City and explores how these factors interact within urban energy systems. Drawing on research from building science, energy systems, infrastructure planning, and sustainability transitions, the paper identifies five recurring categories of influence: building characteristics, demand characteristics, infrastructure conditions, planning and investment capacity, and socioeconomic conditions. The review finds that building age, typology, density, and …

La Citación En Educación: Funciones Retóricas En Textos Académicos Escritos Por Expertos Y Estudiantes Universitarios, David Sanchez-Jimenez, Juan Antonio Núñez Cortés, Enrique Alonso Sainz

Publications and Research

The present study aims to investigate the differences in citation usage and frequency among university students and expert writers in the field of Education. The analyzed corpus comprises 50 papers written in this discipline and is divided into two sub-corpora: one consisting of 25 TFGs and the other one formed by 25 articles published in specialized journals. To examine this phenomenon, a qualitative and quantitative methodology was employed, performing a textual analysis of the rhetorical functions of citations. This analysis is based in the typology proposed by Petrić in her 2007 article, slightly modified for the purpose of the present …

Comm 11 Fundamentals Of Interpersonal Communication Textbook, Teresa A. Fisher

Open Educational Resources

A survey of interpersonal communication.

Women In The Criminal Justice Pipeline: Perspectives From Policy To Practice, Laila Riaz

Student Theses

The study of the criminal justice system has historically been shaped by a male-centered perspective. Consequently, this has marginalized the unique experiences and challenges faced by women. Women are disproportionately affected by issues such as trauma, caregiving responsibilities, and systemic inequalities, shaping their interactions with the criminal justice system in ways that differ from men. This study examines how women experience the pipeline of the criminal justice system. The “pipeline” refers to the stages of the criminal justice system, ranging from an initial encounter with law enforcement to prosecution, incarceration, and eventual reentry into society. Drawing on interviews with academics …

Artificial Intelligence And Social Equities: Navigating The Intersectionalities In A Digital Age (Editorial), Daisuke Akiba, Julie Albright

Publications and Research

This editorial article introduces and synthesizes the Special Issue, “Artificial intelligence and social equities: navigating the intersectionalities in a digital age,” which examines how AI systems intersect with race, ethnicity, and interconnected identity dimensions across global contexts. The eight contributions span healthcare, digital media, higher education, organizational communication, and speculative futures, addressing anti-racist psychiatric algorithms, AI-generated visual disinformation, epistemic injustice between the Global North and South, algorithmically mediated rural–urban divides, culturally untranslated technology transfer, accessibility auditing across the AI lifecycle, and the tension between mechanical objectivity and empathic understanding. Read together, they show that AI is neither inherently …

‘Passing’ The Baton Of Trauma: Queer Failure Of The Women’S Sport Policy Working Group’S Anti-Trans ‘Position’, Meredith M. Bagley, Mary Anne Taylor, Sarah F. Price

Publications and Research

Engaging in critical rhetorical theory and methodology, we interrogate the contemporary landscape of anti-trans backlash in women’s sport. Specifically, we read the ‘TERF wars’ (Pearce et al.) across critiques of biofeminism (Pape) and whiteness (Fischer) while drawing upon critical social science research into trauma-bonding, bullying, and the structural impacts of gender verification policies. Our analysis focuses on the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (WSPWG), offering a trauma-informed reading of the WSPWG’s ‘Position’ statement to illuminate how lesbian female athletes who were previously slandered for failing to meet femininity norms in sport are unable to overcome that trauma to recognize and …

Investigating The Links Between Iq, Emotion Dysregulation, And Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia In Childhood Antisocial Behavior, Isley Jean-Pierre

Student Theses

This study examined relationships among cognitive ability, emotion dysregulation, physiological regulation, and antisocial behavior. Participants were 340 children ages 7-10. Caregivers reported on emotion regulation, aggression, and delinquency, and children completed cognitive assessments. Intellectual profiles were classified as even or uneven. No significant differences in aggression or delinquency were found between intellectual profiles. Emotion Regulation Checklist scores mediated relationships between VIQ and both aggression and delinquency. Resting RSA mediated the relationship between VIQ and delinquency, although the indirect effect was small, whereas RSA reactivity did not mediate either outcome. Overall, findings suggest that emotion regulation may be a more consistent …

Risk Assessment And Sentencing Bias: The Role Of Socioeconomic Status And Mental Health, Lily A. Walsh

Student Theses

The current research examined the impact of risk assessment information in the sentencing of defendants of varying socioeconomic statuses (SES), and mental health statuses. A US sample of students studying law (N = 137) was assigned to view one of eight vignettes that manipulated the defendants SES (i.e., low or high), mental health status (i.e., schizophrenia diagnosis or no diagnosis), and the availability of risk data (i.e., present or absent). Participants sentenced the defendant to probation, short-term jail, or prison, and indicated the sentence length in years. An Ordinal Logistic Regression and a Three-way Factorial ANOVA indicated neither the availability …

Variability In Eligibility And Outcomes: A Cross-Comparison Of New York City Mental Health Courts, Caitlin Sanders

Student Theses

Mental health courts (MHCs) represent a critical diversion mechanism for justice-involved individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), yet substantial variability in eligibility criteria, assessment practices, and program structure limits our understanding of how court-level policies shape participant access and outcomes. This exploratory study provides the first systematic cross-borough comparison of all five New York City MHCs, achieving a 100% response rate across courts. Using an adapted version of a statewide MHC survey instrument, data were collected from court representatives via structured survey administration and supplemental interviews. Findings indicate significant variation across courts in legal and clinical eligibility criteria, assessment personnel …

Pol/His 3005: Social Welfare Policy In The United States, Oswaldo A. Mena Aguilar

Open Educational Resources

The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, yet poverty, hardship, and inequality remain central features of American life. This course begins with that paradox. Why does a country with so much economic capacity tolerate so much poverty? Why does its welfare state protect some risks generously while treating other forms of need as individual failure? Why are benefits for the poor so visible, stigmatized, and administratively demanding, while benefits for the affluent are often hidden in the tax code, treated as private achievement, and politically protected? The course is organized around a sequence of questions. …

Ruslan-M: Longitudinal Multimedia Corpus Of Early Child Speech In Russian, Mariia Diachkova, Valeriya Lelik, Svetlana V. Dorofeeva, Anastasiya Lopukhina, Olga Dragoy, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

This article presents the Russian Language-Monolingual corpus (RusLan-M, v.1.0), a longitudinal multimedia collection of early child speech from two Russian-speaking monolingual children: Tosya (ages 0;10–3;10, 246 recordings) and Yasha (ages 1;04–3;00, 42 recordings). The corpus consists of approximately 41 h (2,454 min.) of video recordings and 35,386 child utterances, available with transcriptions in the CHAT format on TalkBank. The corpus adheres to strict ethics requirements for data sharing with anonymization. We also conducted two exploratory investigations of the acquisition of Russian morphology using the mean length of utterance (MLU) and the newly developed Index of Productive Syntax for evaluating grammatical …

Info 7001: Technology Of Information, S E. Hackney

Open Educational Resources

BULLETIN DESCRIPTION INFO 7001. The Technology of Information. 3 hr.; 3cr. The course will introduce the conceptual and practical elements of visual and computer literacy for the library and information science profession. Particular attention will be paid to libraries and information centers.

EXPANDED COURSE DESCRIPTION The evolution into the age of information has created a requirement that professional librarians establish and steadily increase their understanding of four areas of literacy: oral, print, visual, and technology. Professional training has long been concentrated on the oral and printed aspects of information with some minor attention to the visual and technological. Library and …

Measuring The Tokenization Premium: A Cost Audit For Underserved Language Communities, Avijit Roy, Proma Roy, Hrishitva Patel

Publications and Research

Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their basic infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalent content can require substantially different token counts across languages, affecting API cost, latency, and usable context length before a model is even invoked. We introduce the Tokenization Equity Audit (TEA), a reproducible benchmark for measuring tokenization premiums in technical tutoring content. TEA evaluates three widely used tokenizers, GPT-4o’s o200k base, Qwen2.5-7B, and Mistral-7B, on a 120-item Python debugging corpus translated from English into Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Tamil, and Yoruba. …

Assessing The Impact Dynamics Of Less Lethal Ammunition, Steven Bermejo

Student Theses

Less-lethal ammunition is widely used by law enforcement as an alternative to lethal force during crowd control, on-street confrontations, and other situations requiring force. Although these projectiles are intended to reduce risk of fatal injury, serious injuries and fatalities have been reported, highlighting the need to better understand the factors that influence their impact behavior. This study evaluated the impact dynamics of four types of 12-gauge less-lethal ammunition, including rubber buckshot, single rubber ball, double rubber ball, and Byrna kinetic projectile, using kinetic energy calculations derived from projectile mass and velocity measurements. In addition, Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared …

Ssw 701.50: Social Welfare Policy, Ian G. Williams

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is an Open Educational Resources (OER) remixed version of SSW 701.50: Social Welfare Policy, which is taught at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. This version updated the content and integrated additional OER materials, as part of the Summer 2026 cohort of The Open Knowledge Fellowship at the Mina Rees Library. It is a Zero-Textbook (ZTC) cost course and integrates materials from a range of academic disciplines. Official course description is as follows:

"This foundation course furnishes you with the orienting knowledge and skills needed to examine social welfare policies and to understand their relevance …

Ai-Powered Knowledge Engines As Research Infrastructure For Systematic Knowledge Discovery, Gary Welz

Publications and Research

This paper proposes knowledge engines as a framework for understanding how intelligent systems — both human and artificial — systematically discover, integrate, and generate knowledge. We argue that history’s greatest scientific minds functioned as knowledge engines, processing information through iterative cycles of ingestion, analysis, synthesis, and communication, guided by curiosity and willingness to challenge established beliefs.

We propose a taxonomy of nine integrated capabilities — ingestion, digestion, analysis, calculation, comparison, connection, association, analogy, and multimodal communication — that any serious knowledge engine must combine systematically. The argument is deliberately integrative: achieving ambitious research goals requires orchestrating all nine capabilities within …

Climate Anxiety And Nurses’ Awareness, Motivation, And Behaviors In Addressing Climate-Related Health Risks, Sarah Kaplan

Theses and Dissertations

Background: Climate anxiety, the emotional distress associated with awareness of climate change and its consequences, is an emerging mental health concern that may influence how nurses perceive and respond to climate-related health risks. Climate change is largely driven by emissions of greenhouse gases which radiate and absorb heat. Human-caused climate change is leading to higher average global temperatures and increasing risk to health through poor air quality, changes in vector borne diseases, extreme weather events, and exacerbation and development of physical and mental illnesses. This study contributes to nursing science by examining climate anxiety and climate related health practices among …

Trustworthiness As Inferential Accountability In Qualitative Research, Aamir Rashid, Rizwana Rasheed

Publications and Research

Trustworthiness is a cornerstone of qualitative research rigor, yet it is frequently operationalized as a procedural checklist rather than as a coherent logic for justifying qualitative knowledge claims. As a result, qualitative studies often demonstrate methodological diligence without fully explicating how empirical materials warrant the interpretations advanced or how the scope of those interpretations should be bounded. The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize trustworthiness as inferential accountability, understood as a governing evaluative principle for qualitative inquiry that provides a coherent and contemporary framework for the justification, evaluation, and delimitation of qualitative claims. The paper adopts a conceptual and …

Vestirse Con Un Cuadro”: El Mantón De Manila En La Encrucijada Entre Tradición Y Modernidad En Fortunata Y Jacinta De Benito Pérez Galdós, Ines Corujo Martin

Publications and Research

Este artículo analiza la relevancia sociocultural que adquirió el mantón de Manila en la España de finales del siglo XIX, tomandocomo punto de partida las diversas representaciones de esta prenda en la novela Fortunata y Jacinta(1887) de Benito Pérez Galdós. Como se propone, el mantón, prenda de origen asiático cuyo surgimiento está ligado a la ruta comercial colonial de los Galeones de Manila, constituye en el texto galdosiano un objeto clave para explorar algunos de los debates centrales del imaginario cultural finisecular en torno a la identidad nacional, forjada entre el tradicionalismo y la modernidad. El llamativo accesorio, ligado a …

Transforming Advising And Improving Outcomes: Assessing Impacts Of Advising Changes, Amy S. White, Tailisha Gonzalez, Elgloria Harrison

Publications and Research

Abstract

Background: Earning full-time credit loads and persisting are how college students successfully graduate.

Objective: We measured whether credits and persistence at an urban, commuter Hispanic/Minority-Sserving Iinstitution improved after implementing a social work-based advisement strategy.

Methods: Using a quasi-experimental methodology on a college’s enrollment database, we measured the impact of a new advisement model on earned and attempted credit loads to compare traditional student advisement within control groups (n = 171 and n = 899) relative to intervention (n = 130).

Findings: In 2024, the intervention group attempted an average of 14.7 credits and earned an average of 14.3 credits, …

Notes From The Field - Conference Proceedings, Summer Fellows 2025, Center For Latin American, Caribbean, And Latino Studies (Clacls)

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

CLACLS presents proceedings papers from the third CLACLS Summer Fellows Showcase Conference, held on November 12, 2025.

The daylong event showcased the research endeavors of fourteen Summer Fellows, who offered succinct presentations on their projects funded by the CLACLS Summer fellowship. The included three panels: “Feminist and Queer Critical Perspectives”, “Language, Archive and Power”, “Social Movements and Political Imaginations.”

Signal And Substance: Why Methodological Sophistication Fails To Guarantee Inference, Aamir Rashid, Rizwana Rasheed

Publications and Research

Despite increasing analytical sophistication, empirical research in organization studies continues to suffer from fragile inference, uneven theoretical accumulation, and contested credibility. This paper seeks to explain why these problems persist by shifting attention from authors’ methodological choices to the evaluative dynamics of peer review. Adopting a conceptual and theory-analytic approach, the paper theorizes peer review as an inferential gatekeeping system. Drawing on research design, theory evaluation, and philosophy-of-science literatures, this study develops an analytical framework to examine how evaluative routines shape what constitutes empirical rigor during the review process. The analysis identifies five recurring reviewer blind spots: inferential scope inflation, …

Older Adults' Caregiving Expectations For The Future, Smita Ekka Dewan, Derek Tice-Brown, Janna C. Heyman, Henry J. Davis, Colette Phipps, Joanne Mcmahon, Laura Sutter, Ye Feng, Jacqueline Heyde

Publications and Research

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to explore older adults' perception of caregiver stress and their anticipation of becoming a caregiver (N = 723). Bivariate analyses revealed that perceived caregiving stress was higher among older adults who were females, White/Non-Hispanics, with chronic health conditions, who had experienced prior physical and financial caregiving burdens and was lower among those with just a high school degree. Multivariate analyses revealed that perceived caregiving stress levels remained higher only for those with past experience with physical caregiving, those with chronic health conditions, older females and White/Non-Hispanic older adults. The overall model was …

The Double Attraction Paradox, Rem Jaen D. Krafft

Publications and Research

The Double Attraction Paradox is a podcast series that teaches adolescents how to navigate attraction through body language, limerence, and mirroring while understanding the psychology behind emotional connection. It is a manuscript that combines personal experience, observations, and research, inspired by Rem Jaen D. Krafft's high school crush. Not only does it provide a guide for teenagers and young adults, but it also encourages readers to better understand attraction, communication, and emotional development. The final chapter examines how peer pressure, traditional high school cliques, fear of rejection, and fear of intimacy may influence societal norms, emotional contagion, and relationship formation …