Digital Commons Network^™

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Relationship Between Subject Pronoun And Verb Finite Marking In Aae-Speaking Children, Emily C. Sossaman

LSU Master's Theses

Children learning General American English (GAE) show a relationship between their case marking of subject pronouns and their marking of finite verbs, and this relationship has been found for children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls (TD). The relationship between children’s case marking of subject pronouns and finite verb marking has not been examined in children who speak dialects of English that differ from GAE. The purpose of the current study was to examine this relationship in children learning African American English (AAE) as this dialect differs from GAE. The data came from an archival dataset of …

Factors Related To Parental Stress At Early Diagnostic Assessments For Autism Spectrum Disorder, Abigail Issarraras

LSU Master's Theses

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is marked by pervasive impairments in social communication and restricted, repetitive interests, behaviors, and activities. Parents raising a child with ASD have consistently reported higher levels of parenting stress compared to parents of typically developing children and children with other disabilities. Several different factors influence parental stress levels at different stages of their child’s life, and so an understanding of the most predictive factors of parental stress at initial ASD assessments is critical to best serving the needs of families with a new diagnosis. The current study investigated several factors that may impact parenting stress at …

Source Effects Of Health Information And Digital Health Literacy Among College Students: An Elaboration Likelihood Model Perspective, Julia Morton

LSU Master's Theses

While advertising and persuasion is a widely researched area in mass communication, the impact of health marketing on consumer behavior remains a relatively new arena. The complex health information landscape online is comprised of both public health organizations seeking to improve health behaviors as well as businesses seeking to sell their products or services. It is well documented in the communication literature that the source of information can impact the recipient in a multitude of ways. Digital health literacy is undoubtedly an essential skill for anyone interacting with health information online, spurring the question, do individuals with low and high …

Pragmatics And Pedagogy In University Level Spanish Second Language Textbooks, Vanessa M. Cardenas

LSU Master's Theses

This pragmatic and pedagogical investigation analyzes six university level Spanish second language textbooks (L2Ts) used in the classroom setting. The materials used in this investigation include three beginning level textbooks Dicho y Hecho (2012), Experience Spanish (2012), and Puntos de Partida (2012), and three intermediate level textbooks ¡Avance! (2008), Conexiones (2010), and Interacciones (2013). The purpose of this investigation is to closely examine if the L2Ts communicatively present the speech acts of requesting, refusing, and apologizing, and address forms, with sufficient pragmatic context for the L2 learner to acquire native-like production. The results have shown that the speech acts under …

Sowing The Wild Oats: Scandal And Crisis In The Louisiana Grain Industry, Chandler Taylor

LSU Master's Theses

In 1972, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Earl L. Butz commented, "The grain trade is one of the most fiercely competitive industries in this country;" yet to the general public, the grain trade is a largely unknown entity.[1]Sowing the Wild Oatsseeks to address some of the gaps in our knowledge of the grain industry created by the industry’s general invisibility and a lack of writing on the topic, particularly in reference to the latter half of the twentieth century. In the mid-twentieth century, a major investigation of the New Orleans grain trade sparked national changes affecting the entire United …

American Waste, Jason Allen Christian

LSU Master's Theses

American Waste is an interlinking story cycle told in the first person by a character called Rice. The stories follow Rice from his childhood (in rural Oklahoma) into adulthood, first when lives in a “punk house” with other young punk rockers in Oklahoma City, and later as he travels by freight train around the country. While he travels he reports on what he sees and experiences in the subculture that he is part of, whose members are called gutter punks and crusties. Theirs is a lifestyle bent on risk and adventure and also often plagued with drug and alcohol addiction. …

Investigating The Effects Of Cognitive Diversity On The Small Gasoline Engines Problem Solving Ability Of Undergraduate Students Enrolled In A Team-Based Learning Formatted Agricultural Mechanics Course, Whitney L. Figland

LSU Master's Theses

Perhaps the most challenging factor in teaching is being able to foster a learning environment that meets the needs of all learners, which is often achieved by utilizing a plethora of instructional methods that develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. These 21st century skills have been recurrently identified as a critical component of today’s workplace and employers are hiring individuals who can solve complex problems, especially within agriculture. However, students in todays educational classrooms are often not receiving the hands-on instruction that is needed in order to foster the development of critical thinking and problem solving skills. Further, problem …

Parents’ Perspectives Of Cultural Competence In Schools: The Initial Development Of The Culturally Competent School Community Scale, Aijah Kai Baruti Goodwin

LSU Master's Theses

Diversity in school settings is continuously changing with an increase of minority students in the United States school systems. The present study uses a phenomenological approach to gain parents’ experiences related to culturally responsive and competent practices in their child(ren)’s schools. Interviews were conducted with 10 culturally diverse parents with children in preschool and/or elementary school. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, coded for common themes and analyzed for the frequency and prevalence of the themes in preschool vs. elementary school settings. An analysis of the interviews revealed 6 themes related to culturally competent and responsive practices in school settings. The …

The New British Christianity Of C.S. Lewis, Thomas Kemp

LSU Master's Theses

The emergence of C.S. Lewis as a popular author known for Christian content during the second half of the twentieth century provides an ideal case study for the transformation of religiosity within Britain. As religious behavior shifted from institutional adherence to private experience, Lewis became a ‘popular theologian’ who represented Christianity both for Christians – who looked to him for spiritual inspiration– and for non-Christians – who treated his views as representative of contemporary Christianity. By analyzing the reception, representation, and use of Lewis (his figure and his work) throughout the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first, it becomes clear that …

Naus, Justin Greene

LSU Master's Theses

A collection of poems and nonfiction vignettes, naus entails a navigation of my experience with Tourette Syndrome and, consequently, what it can mean to have a noisy body. Rather than situate noise as a negatively construed iteration of sound, I contend that, following the work of Michel Serres, it is instead a disruption within a system, a parasitical interception, an affective force that has the potential to alter the positions and orientations of a given constellation of bodies, human or otherwise. Similar to how sound, as a verb, can be understood as “to fathom” or “to make sense of,” naus …

The Lowly Ones, Cassie Meredith Benson Grillon

LSU Master's Theses

The Lowly Ones is a collection of short stories that interrogates the meaning of beatitudes written about in Luke 6:20–23 in the Bible. The characters in these stories navigate complex moral situations that examine the meaning behind the values presented in the beatitudes: mercy, sorrow, persecution, etc. These women face the challenges of faith in surprising ways, through the notoriety of a dead sister, the fascination with a lower-class neighbor, and the mysterious purchase of an exotic bird. This collection thoroughly erases the fictitious line religion and society draw between saints and sinners.

Modeling Crowd Feedback In The Mobile App Market, Grant S. Williams

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile application (app) stores, such as Google Play and the Apple App Store, have recently emerged as a new model of online distribution platform. These stores have expanded in size in the past five years to host millions of apps, offering end-users of mobile software virtually unlimited options to choose from. In such a competitive market, no app is too big to fail. In fact, recent evidence has shown that most apps lose their users within the first 90 days after initial release. Therefore, app developers have to remain up-to-date with their end-users’ needs in order to survive. Staying close …

Flood Resilience Assessment Of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina Based On Thermal And Vegetation Index Image Time Series, Yirui Deng

LSU Master's Theses

Resilience is a concept with increasing importance in modern risk management because of its role in reducing risks of unpreventable disasters. Previous resilience assessment studies often require extensive surveys of various social, economic, and psychological data or incorporate remote sensing data as one of the complicated physical and social parameters for assessment models. Limited data accessibility to such data due to funding, time, and labor intensity is a major challenge for their wider applications. Therefore, this study proposes the hypothesis that the overall resilience of an urban area to disturbances of natural disasters can be reflected through the time series …

Disentangling The Role Of Future Orientation And Callous-Unemotional Traits In The Prediction Of Offending In Justice-Involved Youth, Toni Walker

LSU Master's Theses

Future Orientation and callous-unemotional (CU) traits are well established predictors of future offending. A more positive outlook on one’s future goals seems to protect youth from engaging in antisocial behavior, whereas elevated CU traits predict more severe and persistent forms of delinquency. The relationship between CU traits and other aspects of psychopathy, such as grandiose self-worth, is not consistent with a pessimistic outlook towards the future. This study explored the associations among these variables in a sample of male first-time juvenile offenders (N = 1,216). Results indicated that future orientation predicted delinquency over a 5-year follow-up period, and this …

Between Regulation And Repression, Tradition And Innovation: How The Royal College Of Physicians Of London Negotiated Its Place In The Early Modern Medical Field, Erin Michelle Halloran

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project seeks to understand the methods employed by the College of Physicians to maintain its authority and privileges in the English medical marketplace in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The College of Physicians was founded in 1518 by Dr. Thomas Linacre, whose medical humanist ideals became the framework for the College’s organization and statutes. The College was tasked with regulating the medical practice of practitioners in London. Physicians licensed by the College were, by law the only physicians allowed to practice internal medicine in London and the surrounding seven miles. It examined and licensed physicians and scrutinized and …

Blueberry Pectin-Anthocyanin Binding Kinetics And Stability Under In Vitro Digestion, Jee Won Koh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Blueberry pectins were sequentially extracted from highbush blueberry powder and precipitated in alcohol to obtain water soluble fraction (WSF) and chelator soluble fraction (CSF). WSF was high methoxyl pectin (degree of esterification: 53), rich in in neutral sugars (40 mol%), and had less negative charge (-21 mV) whereas CSF was low methoxyl pectin (degree of esterification: 21), rich in uronic acids (92 mol%), and had lower negative charge ( -26 mV).

The stability of blueberry pectin-anthocyanin complex was investigated under simulated in vitro digestion. Binding of blueberry pectins with three anthocyanin standards (malvidin-3-glucoside; M3G, cyanidin-3-glucoside; C3G, and delphinidin-3-glucoside; D3G) and …

Fragments And Flânerie: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, And The Art Of Wandering, Charla Allyn Hughes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that wandering, whether across cities (flânerie) or across geographic regions and countries (travel), is a process of not only finding meaning but also one of confronting alienation and dislocation, conditions of the fragmentariness of modern life, which is signified by transnationalism, media, technology, and consumerism. This examination of flânerie, travel, and cosmopolitanism investigates three women writers’ representations of navigating an alienating, fragmented world—or, more simply, of the search for a sense of home and/or belonging. Transatlantic writers Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Zadie Smith not only consider specific places and suspended in-betweens but also …

Novel Media: Global Contemporary Fiction In The Digital Age, Mary Catherine Pappalardo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Novel Media argues that contemporary literature—particularly the novel form—is best decoded in terms of the new media forms that have proliferated since the dawn of the internet. Perhaps no other development has so dramatically shaped contemporary life than the ubiquity of the internet, internet-capable devices, and the myriad social networks that have blossomed within. Fiction is no different; the social media forms that dominate our lives online have also, I argue, rewired the way novels work in the twenty-first century. As such, a new reading practice is required that attends to these seismic changes to the novelistic terrain. The project …

The Sons Of Emmett Till: Addressing Black Male Masculinity In Urban High Schools In New Orleans, Michael J. Seaberry

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores how Black boys in New Orleans’ urban high schools develop, define, and do masculinity. Beginning with a narrative literature review, this study provides themes common among the six peer-reviewed articles that are specifically written on the subject of Black boys’ masculinity in urban high schools in the United States. Analyzed using Critical Race Theory, the themes discussed in these six articles were used to formulate interview questions for 10 Black male students in New Orleans high schools. The empirical portion of this study found that Black boys in New Orleans urban high schools develop masculinity at birth, …

Foucauldian Dynamics In The Formation Of A Fifth Grade Writing Culture, Ashley Renee Watson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study looks at a student writing culture in a fifth grade English language arts classroom through the lens of Foucauldian power dynamics to examine the power relationships in the classroom and curriculum. The research questions were: 1) What is the nature of a writing culture in a fifth-grade writing classroom? 2) What are students’ perceptions of writing in a fifth grade ELA classroom? The methodology for the study was case study research.

The research took place during the 2017-2018 school year at Southeast Elementary School in Lancaster County in the southeastern part of the United States. Data was collected …

Old School For The New School: Discussing The Importance Of Motown Records In American Music History, Crystal Darcell Birdsong

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to look at the contribution of Motown Records within music history and American history, as well as why it should be of great importance to those who study 20^th century music. It tends to be overlooked in the world of academia, despite efforts to bring the subject to the forefront of today’s classwork and courses at the collegiate level. It is not so much that it does not exist, but it is not nearly as prevalent as it should be, seeing as its contribution to music history and history in general is so …

Finding Rough America, Eric Kennedy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Finding Rough America seeks to establish and examine the components of a body of texts, both in prose and film, that I call Rough America. I argue that this corpus works to broaden the cultural understanding of literature and film about the lives of American lower classes. To do so, I adopt and adapt Guy Standing’s conception of the “precariat class,” an economic classification used to identify the widespread precariousness among what was once the middle- and working-classes. After establishing Rough America as following in the tradition of American literary naturalism, I ground the study of the corpus’s primary thematic …

The Child Ethnographer In The Field: Examples From English, Spanish, And French Caribbean Literature, Emily Ann O'Dell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I consider the child to be an ethnographer in works of fiction and autofiction from the Caribbean islands. Through their liminality as culturally and developmentally betwixt or between, their cultural malleability, their linguistic fluidity, and their curiosity, the child becomes a "native" ethnographer who is capable of translating the culture (both linguistically and culturally) for the reader in order to establish understandings of Caribbean cultures. This is accomplished through the creation of hybridized or creolized texts that have many of the same characteristics as postmodern ethnographies.

In the English Caribbean Xuela provides an ethnographic perspective of Dominican …

Use Of A Behavioral Health Framework To Assess Perceptions Of Hurricane Evacuation Support Services In New Orleans, Louisiana, Aubry Kyle

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents research conducted during the hurricane seasons of 2017 and 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The research’s purpose was to assess citizen perceptions of evacuation support services offered during mandatory evacuation events. A prospective quantitative survey and qualitative, open-ended, semi-structured interview assessed perceptions. Both research methods were designed and assessed using the constructs of the Health Belief Model, a public health model created to assess perceived barriers, benefits, risks, severity, self-efficacy, and cues to action regarding health programming. Quantitative research yielded 211 surveys, representing opinions of New Orleans residents within 1-km Euclidian distance of an evacuation pick-up marker. …

Multiple Voices In The Poetry Of Transculturation: Reading Contemporary Ex-Phonic Poetry Through Muwaššah: Ryoko Sekiguchi, Etel Adnan, And Suheir Hammad, Thana Al-Shakhs

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research is a comparative study that compares two types of multicultural poetry: contemporary poetry written by non-native speakers and the Andalusian medieval genre of muwaššah. In spite of the cultural and temporal gap between the two periods, the poets apply similar strategies to represent multicultural voices, for example integrating foreign expressions. I argue that multicultural poetics break the rules of classical writing and use oral expressions that are more flexible to include different languages and cultural references. This study focuses on oral techniques that offer an appropriate style to express multiplicity.

This thesis is divided into four chapters. …

From Rationality To Relationality: Teacher-Student Relationship As Unknowing, Shaofei Han

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation reimagines the teacher-student relationship through a philosophical approach that draws on Laozi, Karen Barad, Deleuze & Guattari, and Emmanuel Levinas. The teacher-student relationship is normally considered a relationship of the knower (teacher) and the unknower (student) based on the modern western tradition of episteme. This dissertation interrogates the modern binary of the teacher/student, subject/object relationship by bringing ontology and ethics into educational discourse. The problematic practices of modern schooling include the reduction of teaching to knowledge transmission, and the rigid dichotomy of a subject/object relation between teacher and student. Following a Taoist Way of philosophical thinking, this work …

Epic Beginnings: A Symphonic Work And Aaron Copland (The American Stravinsky) Versus Igor Stravinsky, Terrell O. Jones

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The first part of my dissertation is the original music written for this dissertation, which consists of tonal music that describes my life’s journey. I wanted to write something dark, melodic, and very energetic that described my struggles and shows the road I have taken. It exhibits everything that I have learned from my time here at the university. One of the many things that makes my passion so strong is the desire to express myself through music written for ensembles and used in films. The piece is entitled “Epic Beginnings.” Originally, it was named “The Last Dance,” a …

Investigating Cationic Metal Centers For Hydroformylation, Ryan Alexander Johnson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Bimetallic cooperativity can potentially increase activity of reactions. This concept is another way to increase reactivity besides simply focusing on the steric and electronic effects of a ligand. A binucleating tetrasphosphine ligand has been developed to showcase bimetallic cooperativity between two rhodium metal centers. Hydroformylation is a widely used industrial process to produce aldehydes from alkenes, H₂, and CO. The dirhodium catalyst, [Rh₂(μ-CO)(CO)₃(rac-et,ph-P4-Ph)](BF₄)₂,is highly active leading to favorable results when using a DMF/water solvent system, 1-hexene, 90 psi 1:1 H₂/CO, and 90° C: initial turnover frequency …

A Conductor's Guide To Alec Roth's "A Time To Dance", Eric Z. Rubinstein

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this monograph is to provide a comprehensive analysis and conductor’s guide for Alec Roth’s masterwork, A Time to Dance. This study will explore the origins of this work, provide rehearsal and performance considerations, and bring greater attention to its composer, Alec Roth. Compared to his English contemporaries, Alec Roth’s (b.1948) music is lesser-known within the British tradition. Roth composes for choir, orchestra, and musical theatre and is also well-known for his contributions to both the guitar and gamelan repertory. His music spans a variety of languages, voicings, orchestrations, and levels of difficulty, as he is also …