Digital Commons Network^™

"Theology" In The Public University, Sarah T. White

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent studies have suggested the transformative potential of “theological” inquiry anddiscourse in religious studies, particularly, in furthering religious literacy and peace building initiatives through greater understanding of “other”. Yet, “theology” is a relatively new academic approach to peace building and conflict studies and is still marginalized to a large degree in secular universities. Vigorous inquiry into the intrinsic value and potential role of “theological” inquiry and discourse in secular academics, as well as possible pedagogical strategies, are worthwhile and necessary towards achieving the wider aims of the secular university. To those ends, this paper presents a broad survey of the …

Narratives Of Success: How Honors College Newcomers Frame The Entrance To College, Cayla Lanier

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Starting college marks an important period of transition for young people, as they manage multiple changes at once and begin to establish identities independent from their parents. The first year college student experience has been the focus of a great deal of academic research, as scholars and practitioners seek to discover the best way to support students and ensure they remain successfully enrolled at the university. However, very little of this research attends to the specific experiences of Honors College students. Further, a focus on the communicative process of transitioning, or organizational socialization, may add to what is currently known. …

Quercetin Loaded Nanoparticles For The Treatment Of Dry Eye Disease, Bassma Sami Nashaat Hamed Eltanameli

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dry eye disease (DED) is a common condition that affects the eye's anterior surface due to tear deficiency or excessive evaporation. The lack of tears leads to dryness and initiation of an inflammatory response which can irritate the eye and interfere with daily activities. Current treatment depends mainly on artificial tears eye drops which offer temporary relief and require repetitive administration due to frequent blinking. Prescription medications are also available but need around three months to relieve dry eye symptoms. Quercetin is a flavonoid that has an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effect. However, it suffers from low water solubility and low …

Restarting Plural Modernity: The Lyrical Tradition Of The Hometown In Kaili Blues, Huadong Fan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The dichotomous paradigm constituted by the realist tradition of Chinese cinema has become the epic and inertial discourse for understanding Chinese modernity. However, I argue that some new filmmakers after the sixth generation of directors have used the narrative and aesthetics of the hometown to change this dominant logic of Chinese modernity. The revolutions and wars of the twentieth century transformed the hometown from a relatively stable agrarian civilization to a modern society in violent turmoil. Recent hometown films are no longer satisfied with this realist aesthetic duality and strive for a pluralistic discourse of Chinese modernity, releasing it from …

Cultural Values As A Moderator Of The Emotion Suppression To Strain Relationship: A Comparison Of Two Dominant Theoretical Mechanisms, Roxanne C. Lawrence

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although the relationship between emotion regulation and deleterious health outcomes is a robust finding in Western cultures, studies show that this effect is attenuated in non-Western cultures. The present study employed an experience sampling method to examine the mitigating effect of cultural values (i.e., individual-level collectivism) on the relationship between emotion regulation and employee strain (i.e., job satisfaction and anxiety) through the theoretical models of emotional dissonance and resource loss (operationalized as inauthenticity and emotional exhaustion). Using data collected from 182 adults working in the service industry, I ran a multilevel path analysis to test the study’s hypotheses. Results indicated …

Crow's Nest, October 11, 2021, Crow's Nest Staff

Crow's Nest

The October 11, 2021, issue of the Crow's Nest.

Usft Digital Scholarship Services Annual Report: Fy 2020-2021, Digital Scholarship Services

Digital Commons @ USF Publications

This is the annual report for FY 2020-2021, the fifth full year of Digital Scholarship Services (DSS).

Mordor En El Caribe: Releyendo The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007) Desde El Afrofuturismo, Juan A. Suárez Ontaneda

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Abstract: Oscar, el personaje principal de la novela The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) de Junot Díaz, nunca se identifica como un hombre negro, pero sí como un morlock, o como un orco. Sus comentarios raciales vienen de la ciencia ficción, como cuando se compara con los morlocks de H. G. Wells, o de la fantasía, como cuando se compara con los orcos de Tolkien. Este artículo propone una relectura de la novela de Junot Díaz desde el afrofuturismo. El afrofuturismo es una corriente literaria y artística que postula imaginar el futuro y reescribir el pasado de las …

National Culture Dimensions As Predictors Of Innovation, Creativity, And Entrepreneurship, Louis F. Jourdan Jr., Michael Smith

Journal of Global Business Insights

The purposes of this study were twofold. The first was to encourage other investigators to examine more closely three indices related to economic growth, specifically innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity. The second was to encourage further investigation of Hofstede’s national culture as explanatory variables. This investigation addressed this research gap by examining the relationships among indices of nations’ creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation, and their relationships with Hofstede’s (2015) national culture dimensions. No previous research was identified which examined countries’ creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation in the same study. The relationships among four measures associated with economic development—the Global Innovation Index (GII), the …

Crow's Nest, August 23, 2021, Crow's Nest Staff

Crow's Nest

The August 23, 2021, issue of the Crow's Nest.

Syrian Children’S Perceived Integration Into Turkish National Education System, Nurgul Bekdemir, Gulce Kalayci, Nuray Alagozlu

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

This study is conducted to analyze Syrian children’s educational life from the perspective of the teachers and explore their acculturation process, and adaptation into the Turkish culture with reference to the difficulties. Moreover, the study will take into account their academic attainment as well as the implemented bilingual education model. Grounded theory was utilized to analyze the data as it enables a scrupulous analysis when there is not much detailed information on the topic. Thematic analysis was conducted as the qualitative research design is required to explore and identify the academic achievement and social adaptation process of Syrian students in …

The Impact Of Tiktok’S Plastic Surgery Content On Adolescents’ Self-Perception And Purchase Intention, Markus Rach

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

This paper analyzed the impact of plastic surgery related content generated by patients and by medical professionals on the self-perception and purchase intent of TikTok users. Doing so, this research project focused primarily on the short video platform TikTok, which displayed over 6 billion relevant content views, as well as a high demographic user-relevance to the main recipient of plastic surgery, females. Building upon an extensive literature review, insights and concepts from beauty, self-perception and influencer marketing research were conceptually related to frame the conceptual model for this project. Relevant user data was gathered by means of an online survey …

Analyzing The Students' Intention To Use Online Learning System In The Context Of Covid-19 Pandemic: A Theory Of Planned Behavior Approach, Kamel Mouloudj, Ahmed C. Bouarar, Karolina Stojczew

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

COVID-19 caused universities to close their doors and compelled the switch toward online education system, Although this option was the best and the only way that guarantees the continuity of studies, yet students were not satisfied, in front of this situation exploring the key factors that affect students' intention to accept online education is of vital importance, and that is what the study seeks to pursuit. To empirically test the intentions to use online learning, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) was applied to Algerian university students. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire from 213 college students of six …

Teamwork, Satisfaction And Mediating Effect Of Affective, Continuance And Normative Commitments On Employee’S Loyalty, Thalita A. C. Nicolleti, Eduardo R. Mangini, Leonardo Aureliano-Silva, Cristiane S. Pires, Carolina A. De Freitas Dias

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Teamwork, staff satisfaction, and organizational commitment on employee loyalty have been investigated by previous literature. However, the mediating effects of affective (AC), continuance (CC) and normative (NC) commitments are still a big gap present in theory. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to explore the mediate role of AC, CC, and NC on employee loyalty. In total, 123 individuals participated in this research. The SEM technique approach was used throughout Smart PLS software version 3.0. The results supported nine hypotheses and rejected one. The theoretical and managerial implications are presented as well as research limitations and avenues for …

“Practice Basic Hygiene, And You’Ll Stay Healthy”: How Primary School Reading Textbooks Transmitted Cultural Education In The Soviet Union, Victoria Storozenko

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Russia’s Cultural Revolution, beginning after the October Revolution in 1917, produced a broadly defined understanding of culture and cultural education at Russian schools that encompassed even basic hygiene and health. Drawing from postdoctoral research, this paper discusses the Cultural Revolution’s impact and its ideas on cultural education as presented in textbooks for 10-year general education schools in the Soviet Union. Discourse analysis revealed that the schoolbooks acted as an interface between a functional education system and changes in its surrounding environment, especially changes due to the Cultural Revolution. Amid today’s COVID-19 pandemic, the study’s findings raise several questions about what …

Bad Bunny’S Purplewashing As Gender Violence In Reggaeton: A Feminist Analysis Of Solo De Mi And Yo Perreo Sola, Dairíne Hoban

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bad Bunny has skyrocketed to fame in the past few years, gaining worldwide recognition as one of the best reggaetoneros of his time. His self-promoted image as an ally to women’s movements and the Queer community has garnered him the recognition of being a role model for youth and as an anomaly in the misogynistic genre of reggaeton. However, few have looked beyond the assertion of allyship to see if his work truly does support women and anti-gender violence ideology. While scholarship on reggaeton has well documented the prevalence of gender violence in the lyrics, videos and overall culture of …

A Comparative Thematic Analysis Of Newspaper Articles In France After The Bataclan And In The United States Of America After Pulse, Simon Rousset

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project interrogates unequal power relations that underlie newspaper representation of terrorism and reinforced Orientalism discourse following the 13 November 2015 mass murders in Saint-Denis and Paris, France, and following the 12 June 2016 mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, United States of America (U.S.A.). It was not surprising to bear witness to the ways national media took hold of these major socio-political events. These events, and the stories that have been published about them, are interpreted through the prism of terrorism, moral panic, and Orientalism, in the sense that the media tend to transcribe the shock of the attacks as …

Alternative Approaches To Protect Sensory Inner Ear Tissue Against Cisplatin-Induced Ototoxicity, Nicole K. Febles

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder often involving permanent damage and loss to the inner ear’s mechano-sensory hair cells and spiral ganglion neuron fibers. Significant causes of SNHL are ototoxic drugs, environmental factors, loud noises, and continuous wear with age. A successful but ototoxic chemotherapeutic known as Cisplatin often damages auditory hair cells via mitochondria dysfunction, DNA fragmentation, and cellular death through apoptosis. Despite the high prevalence of SNHL, there currently is no FDA-approved prevention or cure. Thus, auditory and cancer researchers have investigated various individual otoprotective agent preventions with limited success. This dissertation used a novel …

Montage Music Videos: Racial Utopianism Vs. Abstract Cowboys And The Question Of Cultural Montage, Alan E. Blanchard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Along with the explosion of consumer goods in America over the past century came the human impulse to alter these objects to produce new meanings the manufacturers never intended: commercial products become amateur artists’ raw material. We see this with custom cars and the curious blending of clothes. Inevitably, digital commercial products, like music videos, would undergo a similar treatment as seen in DJ Cummerbund’s “mashup” videos “Old Staind Road” and “Blurry in the USA” where he is painting with audio tracks and sculpting with video clips to create new digital art with new meanings uncoupled from industry’s original intent …

No Spanish In Cinderella’S Kingdom: A Situated Ethnography Of Disney World’S Engagement With Elena Of Avalor, Diana Leon-Boys

Communication Faculty Publications

Research indicates that Disney theme parks function as sites of ideological negotiation. This study builds on the research by examining Disney World’s incorporation of its first avowed Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Bringing together discourses of Latinidad, theme parks, and media, this essay focuses on how the park incorporates Elena into its landscape at the level of production, representation, and audiences. I argue that Disney’s inclusion of Elena, and by extension Latinidad, is malleable, situated within the geographic setting, and dependent on various factors seldom disclosed by the conglomerate. Ultimately, Elena exists as an outsider within the Disney park …

Review Of Writing And Constructing The Self In Great Britain In The Long Eighteenth Century, Edited By John Baker, Marion Leclair, And Allan Ingram, Kelly J. Plante

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. John Baker, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram. Written by Kelly Plante.

Arts & Literature: Feeding Her Child A Green Slipper Instead Of A Cucumber, Kaziwa Salih

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

I first observed the confident, sad, yet hopeful face of Nabat Fayiaq Rahman through the black screen of the TV. She was wearing a traditional, completely black Kurdish outfit that matched the stage curtains designed for the anniversary of the Anfal genocide, marked on April 14th of each year. The Kurdish Anfal genocide in Iraq was perpetrated by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s. Human Rights Watch (1994) estimates that as many as 182,000 Kurds were buried alive in mass graves; many of these mass graves were found after Hussein was overthrown. More than 2.5 million people were displaced, 4500 …

Full Issue 15.1

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Preliminary Study Of Cave Sample Storage Conditions On Fungal Community Diversity, Daniel B. Raudabaugh, Nelda A. Rivera, Gretchen C. Anchor, Elizabeth Bach, Andrew N. Miller, Nohra E. Mateus-Pinilla

KIP Articles

We investigated the effect of varying storage time and storage temperature on fungal species’ isolation as part of a case study of Illinois cave sediment samples. A deeper understanding of cave fungal communities may influence eco-epidemiology studies of emerging or re-emerging cave fungal pathogens. Using culture-dependent techniques, we isolated geophilic fungi from homogeneous cave sediment samples from three Illinois caves. Each sample was stored under five different temperatures ranging from −80 °C to 22 °C. Cave sediment was periodically removed at five different time periods from 48 h to 1 year, serially diluted with distilled water, lawn plated onto two …

From Mythology To Pop Culture: Myth, Representation, And The Historiography Of The Amazon Warrior Woman In Ancient Art And Modern Media, James William Poorman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s global society, the mediums in which cultural iconography are portrayed are mostly film, photography, and other mass media. 2500 years ago, in classical Athens, pottery and sculpture dominated the social scene. . Regardless of societies, religions, cultures, etc., certain human traits seem to follow us through time. On the other hand, some things do change, i.e.: the way civilizations view other groups through cultural lenses, view their own culture through perceived gender norms, and how civilizations and cultures try to correlate taboos into the exotic or barbaric. Wonder Woman is a recreation, or reinvention, of an ancient Athenian …

School Music Administration During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Trauma, Loss, Meaning, Change, And Innovation, Christopher Burns

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On Friday, March 13, 2020, the School District of Osceola closed its doors for Spring Break and did not open again until 3 weeks later in a digital capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way teachers and students learned. The band, chorus, and orchestra classrooms were empty, and replaced with digital meetings with the need to unmute and turn cameras on. This study is an autoethnographic narrative of my life during the COVID-19 pandemic as a district resource for the teachers that I serve. While music administration has existed in many forms over the past 100 years, there are no …

Aspiring To “Make It Work”: Defining Resilience And Agency Amongst Hispanic Youth Living In Low-Income Neighborhoods, Sara Arias-Steele

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explored how Hispanic youth (ages 13-21 years) living in low-income neighborhoods of Florida defined resiliency and expressed agency navigating personal challenges and neighborhood adversity in pursuit of success. From the standpoint of the participants, this study focused on how youths: 1) judge the quality of life in their neighborhoods and the opportunities available for them, 2) identify personal aspirations for themselves and 3) identify what resilient factors allowed them to face the challenges and barriers of their daily lives to pursue this aspiration. This study takes into account the structural barriers that create inequities to examine how personal …

Peminist Performance In/As Filipina Feminist Praxis: Collaging Stand-Up Comedy And The Narrative Points In Between, Christina-Marie A. Magalona

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project documents the interdependent effort between performers, authors, and texts, through re/theorizing the role of the personal narrator in autoperformance as both an individual, and a part of a political collective. Through a scripted and staged performance, studied as the data, I critically engage with representations of first-generation women of color via comediennes (Ali Wong and Cristela Alonzo) and their personal narratives, and dialogically consider moments of dis/identification as a Filipina American.

Rooted in performance in/and communication studies, the overarching method employed is conspicuous aesthetic performance, via a scripted and staged narrative performance. I join performance and other methods …

Reframing The Gothic: Race, Gender, & Disability In Multiethnic Literature, Ashely B. Tisdale

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is about the exploitation and disposability of disabled bodies. I am interested in understanding how some bodies are vulnerable to systems of exploitation by virtue of their race, gender, and disabilities. Chapter one interrogates Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, where ill and disabled female characters are disposed of during the protagonists’ journey toward national progress. Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in The Trees is the subject of chapter two. In this novel, ill, elderly characters of color are experimented on as their sovereign island is mined by pharmaceutical corporations. Chapter three discusses how James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods portrays …

Stop-Motion As Theory, Method, And Praxis: Arresting Moments Of Racialized Gender In The Academy, Sasha J. Sanders

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this autoethnographic qualitative study, I introduce “STOP-motion” as a Black feminist organizing concept, methodological approach, and praxis to examine the twinness of arresting moments when disruption, displacement, disorientation, or disembodiment prompts critical reflection and transforms outsider-within moments into movements of resistance and collective empowerment. I recount three ARRESTING moments of racialized gender I have endured in white-dominated academic spaces: being STOPPED in a breakfast line at a conference, STOPPED in a department bathroom, and STOPPED by a large promotional department banner that exhibited myself and two Black colleagues. Relying on Black feminist aesthetics, I experiment …