Over The Hills And Through The Hollers: How One Program Is Assisting Residents Of Appalachia With Opioid Use Recovery, Aubrey E. Jones, Jayme E. Walters, Aaron R. Brown

Journal of Appalachian Health

Introduction: The consequences of increasing opioid misuse in the U.S. over the last two decades have been severe, contributing to hundreds of thousands of lives lost and heavy tolls on individuals, families, and society. The Appalachian Region has been hit particularly hard, with its predominantly rural landscape seeing disproportionate increases in opioid misuse and overdoses. These cases have been difficult to address due to poor treatment access and capacity constraints in many areas of Appalachia.

Purpose: The current study focuses on evaluating The Kentucky Access to Recovery Program (KATR), which provides services to individuals recovering from opioid addiction residing in …

Social Ecological Factors And Medication Treatment For Opioid Use Disorder Among Justice-Involved Rural And Urban Persons: The Geographic Variation In Addiction Treatment Experiences (Gate) Longitudinal Cohort Study Protocol, Carrie B. Oser, Evan Batty, Marisa Booty, Kate Eddens, Hannah K. Knudsen, Brea Perry, Maria Rockett, Michele Staton

Sociology Faculty Publications

Introduction Three medications are Food and Drug Administration approved for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD); however, these medications are underused within prisons, which elevates the risk of relapse and overdose when persons with opioid use disorder (POUD) are released. Research is scant regarding the multilevel factors associated with POUDs’ willingness to initiate medication treatment for opioid use disorder (MOUD) while in prison and their continued engagement in treatment after release. Furthermore, rural and urban populations have not been compared. The Geographic variation in Addiction Treatment Experiences (GATE) study seeks to identify multilevel factors (ie, individual, personal network, and …

The Primacy Of Openness In Ecological Complexity Theory, Colby Clark

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Five principles are at the foundation of complex systems theory: emergence, openness, contingency, historicity, and indeterminacy. Of those five, the principle of emergence is easily the most prevalent. Simply put, emergence refers to the idea that some wholes cannot be properly accounted for by appealing to individual explanations of the parts that compose it. In ecological complexity theory, the principle of emergence is strongly associated with the self-organizing feedbacks that often identify the structural framework of ecosystems.

Within the last half century, the intense focus on the principle of emergence has engendered the development of many conceptual distinctions that have …

"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Love, broadly defined, needs space to grow. For love to materialize and sustain itself (in both literature and society), it must find hospitable geosocial, institutional, and psychic terrain. This is especially true for queer intimacies beyond heteronormative relationality, for the prospect of love’s radical––or reactionary––possibilities is contingent upon the more general sociality in which it develops. Yet love is often a worldmaking and, sometimes, historic mechanism unto itself. Love and its concomitant sexualities must therefore be understood within and without normative structures of hegemony; the workings of (neo)colonialism and capitalism––as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism––dictate to love, and …

The Effect Of Exceptionality Label On School Psychologists During The Evaluation Process, Rachel Jacob

Theses and Dissertations--Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

School psychologists often lead the evaluation process that is responsible for identifying students with an education-based disability. They are also responsible for providing recommendations for the student following the evaluation. The current study is focusing on the variable of exceptionality label as it is a universally present variable that has the potential to affect all evaluations. Two recent studies have examined and found labeling bias on preservice educators (Allday et al., 2011; Fisher et al., 2022). This study sought to expand this research by looking at labeling bias in school psychologists. The study measured the effect of exceptionality label on …

An Examination Of Factors Impacting Home-School Collaboration In Head Start Populations, Madison Mei-Mei Yee

Theses and Dissertations--Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

Two essential pillars in a preschool-age student’s life include their caregiver and their teacher. In turn, it is unsurprising that a more cohesive relationship between these two figures can promote better wellbeing, academic skills, and overall developmental growth in young children. Unfortunately, a multitude of barriers impede home-school collaboration, such as socioeconomic status, non-English speaking households, and caregiver mental health, just to name a few. Head Start, a federally funded preschool program, targets underserved populations who often relate to these named barriers. Head Start works out of the Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (PFCE) Framework, a framework specifically geared toward …

Revitalization Through Reuse: A Proposed Repositioning Of A 1960s Shopping Mall In Balcones Heights, Texas - Site History And Literature Review, Sophie Gershtenson

Gaines Fellow Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

A Comparative Analysis Of Applied Behavior Analysis And The Montessori Method, Emily Webb

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

The Montessori method is a multi-sensory curriculum design based on Dr. Maria Montessori’s observations of the positive outcomes a multi-sensory educational approach had when working with children with disabilities; however, there is little empirical data to support the outcomes of using the Montessori method to teach children with disabilities. Despite the limited amount of quantitative research on the Montessori method and early childhood special education, studies suggest Montessori educators are open to professional development on working with children with disabilities and are willing to implement other methods to provide support for those children while still maintaining the integrity of the …

Clustering States To Improve The Strategic Highway Safety Plan, Victoria Cambron

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Each update to a Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) can require a large amount of time, resources, and funding. From the requirements in U.S.C.148(a)(13)(E-F), in the SHSP update process states must consider the results of other transportation planning processes and develop a list of strategies to reduce or eliminate fatal and serious injury crashes (United States, 2023). To fulfill these requirements more efficiently and to gain the largest amount of benefit from said research, this thesis asks the question: how do we select other state transportation plans to study for ideas on improving our own SHSP? In this thesis, a …

"Does This Make Sense?": The Effect Of Congruent Guise In Regional Accent On Grammatical Acceptability Judgments, Nour Kayali

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with congruent or incongruent social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgement task. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a congruent place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

So You Want To Be A Leader? Examining Pathways To Special Collections Administration, Sarah Horowitz, Colleen W. Barrett

Library Faculty and Staff Publications

This article seeks to understand the current state of the field of special collections library administration in the United States. Using a dataset gathered through publicly available information about special collections directors from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Independent Research Libraries Association (IRLA), and the Oberlin Group institutional members, the authors explore the educational backgrounds of directors, the types of positions they held prior to taking on their current roles, and the effect of gender on leadership advancement. This article also discusses the similarities and differences between institution types as well as promotions within institutions and across types of …

Three Essays On Rural Education: Descriptive Studies Focused On Federal Rural Definitions And Policy Changes, Kyung Ha Oh

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

Rural education issues in K-12 public schools are understudied despite a large rural student population in the U.S. This dissertation studies how different federal definitions of rural change how rural school districts and their diverse communities are portrayed, in comparison to their non-rural counterparts. This study also explores the recent federal rural policy changes on rural district revenue and student academic outcomes.

This dissertation consists of three descriptive essays. The first chapter shows how we choose to define ‘rural’ changes what differences are accentuated between rural and non-rural districts. Definitions of ‘rural’ is closely related to who gains access to …

Understanding And Targeting The Tph1-Serotonin-Htr3a Axis In Small Cell Lung Cancer, Yanning Hao

Theses and Dissertations--Toxicology and Cancer Biology

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC), which accounts for 10-15% of all lung cancer, is the most malignant type that tends to grow fast and spread in its early stages. The 5-year survival rate remains low at 6% overall. Thus, new therapeutic methods and pharmacological targets for SCLC patients are urgently needed. We present novel data indicating that the synthesis of serotonin is upregulated in SCLC compared to normal bronchial epithelial cells and non-small cell lung cancer. Serotonin signaling plays a critical role in various physiological and pathological processes. However, its contribution to SCLC development has not been well understood. The …

Migrant-Activist Evidentiary Practices In The Aegean Sea, Beatrice A. Abbott

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This project examines digital maps and images made by migrants and activists traversing or helping others to traverse the Greek-Turkish maritime border in 2015 and early 2016, when over a million people arrived to European shores, mostly by way of the Aegean Sea. These maps were made using applications such as Google Maps, Bing Maps, Maps.me, and WhatsApp and circulated on public Facebook groups and pages. Through a visual analysis of these digital artifacts, I look at how they can be read to witness and contest deadly border geographies produced through migratory policies and practices of deterrence. Further, I argue …

Hoarding Lifesaving Knowledge While Millions Die: The Political Economy Of Global Covid-19 Vaccine Apartheid, Kenneth Stancil

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Coronavirus vaccines saved millions of lives, but experts estimate that the suboptimal production and inequitable distribution of shots resulted in nearly 3 million preventable Covid-19 deaths in 2021 and 2022 as well as millions of indirect deaths during the pandemic. These avoidable fatalities are inseparable from the grotesquely unequal vaccination rates between rich and poor nations. Dose hoarding by high-income countries contributed to vaccine inequality, but the “vaccine apartheid” inflicted on low-income countries reflects an even more fundamental injustice: knowledge hoarding by profit-maximizing pharmaceutical corporations—aided and abetted by wealthy governments—which deprived generic manufacturers of the right to produce additional lifesaving …

A Peculiar Institution: White Supremacy And The Black Guides Of Mammoth Cave, Seth Garcia

Libraries Award for Undergraduate Scholarship

Intensive tourist operations at Mammoth Cave began in 1838 when Frank Gorin purchased the cave property. He brought with him Stephen Bishop, an enslaved person who would become famous across the Western world for his explorations of the cave and his knowledge of its geology. Gorin would also lease Nicholas and Matterson Bransford, and these three men would begin a 100-year history of black guides at Mammoth Cave. This essay utilizes source material written by white visitors in diaries, guidebooks, and travelers’ accounts to better understand white supremacy during the mid to late 19th century. The guides were in a …

Changes In Severity Of Diabetes At Diagnosis Following The Onset Of The Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic, Annelise King

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic it was seen that diabetes was a risk factor for severe COVID-19. The objective of this study is to assess the severity of diabetes at diagnosis during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to pre-pandemic to see how the pandemic and SARS-CoV-2 infection impacted the severity of diabetes. This study used University of Kentucky electronic health records of 13,794 patients who developed diabetes. The majority of patients were female, white non-Hispanic, 65+, and living in an urban area. There were differences seen between the COVID-19 positive and negative cohorts in the DKA and HbA₁c variables, with …

Introduction: There Must Be Something In The Water - Or The Bourbon - In Kentucky: Voting Rights In The Bluegrass State, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Kentucky is best known for three things: horses, bourbon, and basketball. Add positive improvements for the right to vote to the list.

The Bluegrass state has made national news in recent years for its election rules. In 2020, many people in the media and advocacy world pointed to Kentucky as a model for administering an election during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under a bipartisan agreement between the Democratic Governor and Republican Secretary of State, Kentucky initially postponed the 2020 primary to provide for additional planning time. Then it implemented smart rules to ease access to vote-by-mail and made in-person voting safer …

Reading Legal Ethnographies To Re-Map Legal Pluralism: A Pospisilian Corrective To The Prevailing Dichotomous Description Of Afghanistan’S Legal Order, Tomas Ledvinka, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article explores several ethnographies (both academic and para-academic) of Afghanistan’s traditional justice (jirgas and shuras) in order to illuminate contrasts of their conceptual approaches at different periods of the country’s history. In this genealogy we identify ethnographic observations of the levels at which various sociolegal authorities operate and which often elude standard international ontology. The article takes the legal ethnographies as signposts for a conceptual reframing of the legal situation in the country by drawing upon Pospisil’s legal-anthropological conceptual approach which offers an alternative to generic global legal models based on binary oppositions such as formal–informal, state–non-state or official–traditional. …

Rebranding The Battle Against Clinician Burnout, Taylor Albitar

DSW Capstone Projects

The purpose of this capstone project is to take a deep dive into the issue of burnout among marginalized healthcare providers. This paper will dissect key points in history that target wellness and define terms that are relevant to understanding the effects of burnout on a person’s work-life balance. It will be divided into several sections, including an overview of the problem and contributing factors, a thorough review of relevant literature, a conceptual idea that will explore both the problem at hand and theories that can help with its effects, and finally a practice application that will serve as the …

Epidemiology Of Sars-Cov-2 Breakthrough Infections In Kentucky March 1st 2021 - December 31st, 2022, Harrison Hynes

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

Objective: Provide epidemiologic overview of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections in Kentucky considering both demographic and geographic variables.

Background: We believe descriptive information of breakthrough cases for a defined population will provide public health practitioners with useful information relating to SARS-CoV-2 infection control and vaccination efforts.

Methods: We obtained SARS-CoV-2 case data from the Kentucky Department for Public Health COVID-19 case repository, which mirrors National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) data. The study sample used for analysis comprised 147,000 individuals who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Kentucky between the dates of March 1^st, 2021 and December 31^st, 2022. …

From Jane Austen To Meghan Markle: The Persistence Of British Imperialism In White Popular Feminism, Kathryn M. Kohls

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation traces the persistent threads and values of white womanhood from the nineteenth-century British Empire to modern American popular culture. The figure of the white woman was significant to upholding colonialism and empire in the literary mass media and culture of the nineteenth century, and I argue that this figure continues to be used in popular media and online content today to surreptitiously uphold white supremacy and obscure race and gender inequalities. This dissertation will explore the overlaps between nostalgia, historical revisionism, white womanhood, white supremacy, and white feminism in modern American popular culture. The connections between, and the …

Myth, Mockery, & Misery: An Evolution Of Disillusion In Modern-War Expression, Richard W. Halkyard

Theses and Dissertations--English

Industrialization in 19th-Century America yielded a regrettable by-product: the modernization of warfare. Mass armies, technological innovation, and unprecedented rates of industrial productivity prompted the creation of machines designed to inspire fear, increase destructive capability, and inflict mass-death. The modernization of warfare altered forever the way war was experienced and represented literarily. Authors who attempted to represent the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, as well as World War I, articulated modernized warfare with a disillusionment which stems from the tragically dehumanizing effects of mechanical violence on an industrial scale. Myth, Mockery, & Misery argues that as far back as 1862, romantic idealization …

Representations Of Military Women In Contemporary War Stories, Deborah Daley

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of Military Women in Contemporary War Stories seeks to understand how war stories influence our perception of who belongs in military service. With the canon of western war writing dominated by the memoirs and stories of white men, what happens when service women enter into and author war stories, and how does their appearance destabilize questions of who is fit for military service? War literature provides an important lens through which to observe how military service is scripted by culturally and socially constructed expectations of one’s gender, race, and occupation. In male-dominated workplaces, women must not only perform in …

Picturing The Future City: Digital Mediation And Creative Placemaking, Jessica Mccallum Breen

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Creative placemaking is an arts-oriented community development policy that focuses on the potential for art, artists, and cultural organizations to generate social, economic, and cultural vibrancy in their communities and is a primary tool of culture-led (re)development practices (Markusen & Gwada, 2010). Despite the focus of creative placemakers on the local impacts of their work, creative placemaking is more than local, it is both translocal and transcalar. In this dissertation, I examine the role that digital mediation plays in creative placemaking and how it makes visible these translocal and transcalar connections. I begin by outlining a methodology for tracing replicated …

The Psycho-(Geo)Political Driving Forces Of Comfort Women Social Movements In South Korea, Jaeyeon Lee

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

"Comfort women" refers to the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forced to serve the Japanese imperial army sexually, physically, and mentally during WWII in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Since 1992, Korean activists have held the Wednesday Demonstration, which is the weekly protest in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, to call for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government. Since 2011, Korean activists have also installed comfort woman statues in and outside of South Korea.

This dissertation examines the psycho-political driving force behind the Wednesday Demonstration and comfort woman statue movements in South …

Property Protocols And The Spatial Relations Of Real Estate Technologies, Ian Spangler

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

The dissertation contributes to our understanding of the technologically mediated, professionally managed social relations of private property, and specifically, their consequences for housing and home. I analyze standards and protocols for real estate data transfer, such as the multiple listing service, arguing that these standards play an increasingly important role in how real estate capital authenticates property relations. Focusing on technologies that leverage these standards in order to manage, exchange, and marketize housing, I show how standards often derive from moral values grounded in rubrics of white upper-class masculinity and national border-making. In making this argument, I draw on interviews, …

‘A Category Of Their Own’: Quantitative Methods In The Use Of Pile-Sort Data In Perceptual Dialectology, Zachary Ty Gill

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Mississippi Gulf Coast Creoles perceive language differences in their home area. A pile-sort task was carried out in which respondents were given stacks of cards with local communities written on them and instructed to stack together the regions where people “talk the same.” Once the piles were made, the fieldworker discussed their sortings with the respondents. The stacks were analyzed by means of a hierarchal agglomerative cluster analysis and non-parametric multidimensional scaling with k-means cluster analysis overlays to extract the perceived dialect areas. The groupings reveal that respondent strategies are based …

Perceptual Dialectology Of Tulsan Speakers Of English, Andrew Carter

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The present study analyzes new interviews from fifteen Tulsan speakers of English and maps produced by draw-a-map tasks. The interviews and subsequent map tasks were conducted over the course of the winter of 2021 for the purpose of this thesis and have been analyzed for folk linguistic information about the perceptions of Tulsa and the rest of the state. The study finds that Tulsan speakers hold similar dialectal perceptions about both their own city and other locations as their fellow Oklahomans, and also provides evidence of a deteriorating faith among Tulsans in the existence of the northern-southern dialectal divide compared …

“Local, But Intelligent”: Language Ideologies In The Informant Biographies Of The Linguistic Atlas Project, Nicholas A. Passarelli

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis argues for the relevance of the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) for studies of language ideologies, indexicality, and enregisterment. The LAP represents the largest dialect survey of North American English to date, offering an abundance of historical linguistic data for research in dialectology, linguistic geography, and variation over space and time. Additionally, the LAP also contains additional sources of sociolinguistic data, including informant biographies — documents written by fieldworkers at the conclusion of the LAP interview that summarize an informant’s demographic profile, as well as their personality, speech, and caliber as an interviewee. Rife with subjective judgments from the …