Digital Commons Network^™

Social Identity, Scientific Practice, And The Production Of Social Knowledge: An Ethnographic Investigation Of American Social Psychology Laboratories, Donald V. Brown Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social identity has the ability to permeate a multitude of domains in everyday life. Therefore, the science of social psychology—influential due to its impact in education, social and public policy, and the law—rightfully foregrounds the presence of social identity categories in the theorizing and empirical work of the discipline. Many researchers consider social identities such as race and gender to be socially constructed categories. This allows researchers to understand these identities in light of their history, complexity, and relationships to each other. However, the practical application and use of social identities as socially constructed “objects of study” is uncommon in …

Resource Management In Mobile Edge Computing For Compute-Intensive Application, Xiaojie Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With current and future mobile applications (e.g., healthcare, connected vehicles, and smart grids) becoming increasingly compute-intensive for many mission-critical use cases, the energy and computing capacities of embedded mobile devices are proving to be insufficient to handle all in-device computation. To address the energy and computing shortages of mobile devices, mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a major distributed computing paradigm. Compared to traditional cloud-based computing, MEC integrates network control, distributed computing, and storage to customizable, fast, reliable, and secure edge services that are closer to the user and data sites. However, the diversity of applications and a variety …

Kingdoms Becoming: Dialectic Of Black Romanticism, Rasheed M. Hinds

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Kingdoms Becoming emphasizes the profound impact that biblical prophecy, the slave trade, and the American Revolution had on Romanticism, Black nationalism, and horizontal transnationalism. Whereas current scholarship identifies the French Revolution as the seismic shift that inspired British Romanticism and caused a resurgence in prophetic enthusiasm, the American Revolution represents the advent of Black Romanticism and inchoate Black nationalism; this cataclysmic event introduced Afro-British identity, Black Romantic prophecy, and Black nationalist sentiment to the English nation. While many scholars have underscored the ways in which the abolitionist movement informed both British and Black Romanticism and sparked a transnational human-rights movement, …

Nutrient Dynamics And Ecosystem Development Of Urban Forests, Gisselle A. Mejía

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Urban growth and expansion are a major component of global environmental change, with impacts on climate, air and water quality, biodiversity, and human well-being. Forests embedded in urban landscapes are critical in mitigating these impacts at local, regional, and continental scales. However, assessing urban forests is difficult because cities are heterogenous in physical, chemical, biological, and social dimensions. This heterogeneity has constrained how urban forests are defined, and therefore, how they are studied. The objective of this dissertation is to determine how these biophysical and social factors drive ecological processes in urban forests and will address three outstanding challenges in …

The Impact Of Cannabis Use On Neuropsychological And Neural Biomarkers Of Treatment Response In Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders, Melanie B. Thies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cannabis use among patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) is at significantly greater levels than in healthy populations but the impact of cannabis on neural mechanisms of clinical improvement is poorly understood. Cognitive functioning and neural connectivity are disrupted as a result of both SSD and cannabis use, and research indicates that neuropsychological capacity and connectivity of the striatum, a region involved in salience and reward processing, may be integral to effective antipsychotic drug (AP) treatment response. Despite this overlap, no previous research has investigated the effect of cannabis on the brain functions implicated in AP treatment response. The present study …

Countertransference And The Patient's Experience: Exploring How Engagement With Affect Is Related To Short-Term Psychotherapy Outcomes, Ariel R. Westerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Therapist focus on affect in the here-and-now can facilitate a patient’s emotional experience as well as expression of affect, both of which are associated with better outcome over the course of treatment (Diener et al., 2007). A therapist’s use of her own experience of the patient can serve as a signal to intervene in the here-and-now. While “countertransference” was historically seen as an obstacle to a therapist’s neutrality and therefore efficacy (Freud, 1910), shifts in the field toward a two-person psychology model led some to reconsider it as a potential source of clinical data (Winnicott, 1947; Heimann, 1950; Racker, …

“The People Are Tired, And Just Want To Have Fun”: Mahraganat Music And The Struggle For Sonic Presence In Post-2013 Egypt, Mohammed Elfeky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon Asef Bayat’s notion of the “unintelligibility” of Egypt’s subaltern politics, this thesis investigates how mahraganat music is rendered “unintelligible/nonsense” by influential Egyptian cultural figures and is targeted for censorship. Mahraganat is a musical artform that arose from the lower-working classes neighborhoods in Egypt to become a dominant genre in the country. In 2020, the Egyptian Musicians Syndicate, headed by Hany Shakir, banned mahraganat artists from performing officially in Egypt. Before and after the ban, state media debated the genre's status; its detractors framed the music as nonsensical, “absurd”, “meaningless”, “vulgar”, and a “low-brow” dilution of Egyptian cultural production …

Banarasipan As Revelation: Immanent Utopias In The Performance Of Everyday Life, Bhargav Rani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation locates itself at the intersection of performance theory, South Asian studies and philosophy of history to examine the history of an urban consciousness known as banarasipan (literally, "Banarasi-ness") as performed by the people of Banaras in northern India. Over the course of the twentieth century, banarasipan, as a distinct way of being in everyday life, has been characterized by its valorization of heroic laziness, seditious laughter, subversive obscenities, and by its egalitarian subjectivity that overrides sectarian and class differences. In the context of South Asian history, this dissertation interrogates the theoretical premises of both Marxist and postcolonial modes …

Consciousness, Culture, And Comradeship: Narratives Of South African Exile And Anti-Apartheid Activism In West Berlin, Claudia R. Crowie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exile is still an emotionally and politically charged topic and experience in South African history. It evokes emotional and contrasting responses in relation to its role in the struggle for liberation of the Black majority, and reveals tensions along organizational lines in relation to the contributions, influences, and outcomes of the ANC, PAC and the BCM. In this dissertation, I focus on a small group of exiles of various political persuasions in the 1980s, who arrived in West Berlin as exiles in the late 1970s and 1980s, most remaining until the ANC came to power in the first democratic election …

The Campaign To End U.S. War-Making In Yemen: Strategies Of Congressional Advocacy, 2015–2020, Zachary Laub

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Civil society groups and a handful of lawmakers have pursued a robust campaign to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen in Congress. By framing the conflict as a war of Saudi aggression and pulling legislative levers that enabled them to force floor votes, advocates turned a niche issue into one that galvanized majorities in Congress and generated significant media coverage. Even when vetoes blocked their ability to enact binding war powers and arms transfer legislation, advocates nevertheless exerted political pressure that gave the president and the Saudi-led coalition alike impetus to moderate the war effort. This case …

Globalism And Identity In Taiwanese Contemporary Art, 1978–2009, Chu-Chiun Wei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Taiwanese contemporary art emerged in the 1980s and rapidly flourished in the 1990s, nourished by the process of democratization and the construction of Taiwanese consciousness prompted by the lifting of martial law in 1987. This dissertation makes two claims. Firstly, that Taiwanese contemporary art after 2000 can be understood as “post-national,” due to the country’s marginal position in the world and contentious status as a nation-state. Secondly, that Taiwanese post-national art differentiates itself from postcolonial/post-martial law art of the late 1980s and 1990s on the basis of its globalism. The three artists surveyed by the dissertation each exemplify different …

Examining The Linguistic Ideology "Throaty Sounds Are Bad For Performers": The History Of Negative Attitudes Towards Glottal Stops And Laryngealization In English, Dayle M. Towarnicky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes explicit metadiscourse (Johnstone et al 2006) on throaty sounds, primarily focused on glottal segments and non-modal constricted voice quality in English. Authors contributing to this metadiscourse are argued to be an offshoot of the speech chain network which valorized and circulated the English accent known as RP or Received Pronunciation, studied by Agha (2003). The evaluated texts center on English-speaking elocution, singing training, voice, speech, and voice care. The analysis shows glottal and guttural articulations are framed negatively and often discouraged by appeals to both health and aesthetics. Many authors in this performance speech chain network …

The Local Lifting Problem For Curves With Quaternion Actions, George Mitchell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The lifting problem asks whether one can lift Galois covers of curves defined over positive characteristic to Galois covers of curves over characteristic zero. The lifting problem has an equivalent local variant, which asks if a Galois extension of complete discrete valuation rings over positive characteristic, with algebraically closed residue field, can be lifted to characteristic zero. In this dissertation, we content ourselves with the study of the local lifting problem when the prime is 2, and the Galois group of the extension is the group of quaternions. In this case, it is known that certain quaternion extensions cannot be …

Gamma Protocadherin Synaptic Localization And Intracellular Trafficking Is Consistent With Distinct Adhesive And Anti-Adhesive Roles In Development, Nicole Lamassa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Clustered protocadherins (Pcdhs) constitute a family of cell adhesion molecules with approximately 60 Pcdh genes clustered in a 1 MB locus on chromosome 5q31 in humans. The Pcdh gene cluster is subdivided into α, β, and γ subclusters which encode related proteins. Individual neurons activate different subsets of Pcdh-α, Pcdh-β and Pcdh-γ genes by epigenetic mechanisms to generate distinct Pcdh adhesive units expressed by each neuron. This is thought to serve as a “surface barcode” for single-cell identity and synaptic recognition in the nervous system. The actual role for Pcdhs in neural development is still relatively unknown and different roles …

Mechanism Of Activation And Regulation Of By-Kinases, A Unique Family Of P-Loop Enzymes, Fatlum Hajredini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The bacterial tyrosine kinases (BY-kinase) represent a class of membrane-bound enzymes that utilize a cycle of auto-phosphorylation and de-phosphorylation to drive the synthesis and export of exopolysaccharides in both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. The catalytic domain of BY-kinases utilizes a P-loop nucleoside triphosphatase (NTPase) fold that is commonly used by NTPases and small molecule kinases, being the only protein kinase to do so. In the work presented in this thesis, we aimed to obtain an understanding of the mechanisms of the BY-kinases’ unconventional deployment of P-loop scaffold to phosphorylate on tyrosine. We used the BY-kinase of Escherichia coli (K12) as …

Application Of Peo-Ppo-Peo Triblock Copolymers In Synthesis Of Silica And Organosilica Nanomaterials, Shu Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, the research work focused on the application of Pluronic triblock copolymers, poly(ethylene oxide)-poly(propylene oxide)-poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO-PPO-PEO), in the synthesis of mesoporous material, such as double-helical silica nanotube structures as well as bridged organosilica nanotubes by using swollen micelles of Pluronic surfactants and their mixtures. Chapter 1 introduced the background and several important mesoporous structures, and the relevant topics in this dissertation, such as, silica nanotubes, helical silica nanotubes, silica vesicles and organosilica nanotubes. Chapter 2, continued research works from earlier published paper (ACS Nano 2021, 15, 1016-1029), discussed static treatment and stirring effect on the formation of …

Interpreting Jean Coulthard's Concerto For Piano And Orchestra (1963): A Pianist's Perspective, Jocelyn Lai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Jean Coulthard (1908-2000) is recognized as one of Canada’s most prolific and important female classical composers in the twentieth century. She remained creatively active from her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, for eight decades, resulting in a catalog of over 350 works representing most classical music genres. Her music continues to be performed and recorded by renowned ensembles and soloists such as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, CBC Vancouver Orchestra, Calgary Philharmonic, Purcell String Quartet, pianists John Ogdon and Jane Coop, and contralto Maureen Forrester. Coulthard is known for her distinctive coloristic sonorities reminiscent of those in works by European composers …

The Persistence Of Exclusion In Developmental Math Courses In Community Colleges: The Search For Equity And Justice In Math Education, Dora P. Trujillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines how minoritized community college students taking developmental mathematics courses construct their math identities and how structures within academia affect this construction. It uses interviews and a focus group with open-ended questions to look beyond the quantitative studies examining the effectiveness of math developmental courses by exploring student narratives rather than statistical data. Both curricula and pedagogies need to be de-constructed so we may bring social change through diversity to the teaching and learning of mathematics at this level, as developmental math courses have become a systematized form of marginalization. In the process of de-constructing, we also need …

Play: A Normative Theory Of Agency And Culture, Maxaie Belmont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the beginning, people are introduced to many different attempts at engaging with various “cultures”, and of course, are born into their own. The extant literature of various fields in the social sciences have afforded us the realization that no one culture holds neither moral ground nor blueprint for how to be a culture, as our own culture is one of many, all a part of the world. Yet, because of the way our culture specifies how we are to engage and live, we tend towards the assumption that our culture has monopoly on the definition of culture. The following …

Three Lenses Of Contrapower Sexual Harassment, Michael L. Ekema

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contrapower sexual harassment refers to sexual harassment incidents where the perpetrator has less formal power within the organization than the person being victimized. Although the potential for inverse power dynamics were already identified in the early stages of sexual harassment research, the prevalence and antecedents of contrapower sexual harassment have rarely been examined. In addition, prior sexual harassment research has overwhelmingly prioritized gender as the focal variable of interest. This dissertation seeks to contribute to the literature on workplace incivility, organizational deviance, and counterproductive work behaviors by looking at contrapower harassment through three different lenses: The perspective of harassment targets, …

Bondholders’ Influence On Corporate Disclosure: Evidence From Capital Expenditure Forecasts As A Firm’S Commitment, Sae Young Yoon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper addresses how firms cater to bondholders’ demand for additional information by examining capital expenditure (capex) forecasts prior to bond issuance. While bondholders’ demand for additional information incentivizes firms to be more transparent, the importance of macroeconomic factors and comparable bonds outstanding in bond pricing might, however, decrease the benefit of additional disclosure. Using the difference-in-differences approach, I document that firms provide more capex forecasts prior to bond issuance. This increase in capex forecasts is detected when bonds are issued for capital expenditure purposes or when investment-restricting covenants protect bondholders. Next, I find that firms provide more conservative capex …

An Analysis Of The Friendship Paradox And Derived Sampling Methods, Yitzchak Novick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The friendship paradox (FP) is the famous sampling-bias phenomenon that leads to the seemingly paradoxical truth that, on average, people’s friends have more friends than they do. Among the many far-reaching research findings the FP inspired is a sampling method that samples neighbors of vertices in a graph in order to acquire random vertices that are of higher expected degree than average.

Our research examines the friendship paradox on a local level. We seek to quantify the impact of the FP on an individual vertex by defining the vertex’s “friendship index”, a measure of the extent to which the phenomenon …

Coercive Control And Trauma-Coerced Attachment In Commercial Sexual Exploitation: A Mixed-Method Examination, Kendra Doychak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Commercial sexual exploitation (i.e., sex trafficking) can lead to myriad negative consequences for its victims, including exposure to coercive control and the development of trauma-coerced attachments. Scholars have offered theoretical conceptualizations of the relation between coercive environments and traumatic attachments, but this relationship is rarely empirically examined. The current study used data from 68 semi-structured interviews with former victims of sex trafficking to first, formally identify coercive control and second, empirically classify trauma-coerced attachment in this population. Mixed-method analysis were used to identify associations between coercive control and TCA in order to better explain how this abuse dynamic leads to …

Past Actions And Expertise: How States Infer Enemy Intentions, Yu Aoki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Whether and how a state’s past military (in)actions affect perceptions of its resolve and intentions has been disputed. This dissertation argues that non-experts and experts in governments use enemy past actions differently to infer enemy resolve and intentions. Experts are those who have rich knowledge about enemies (e.g., country specialists and intelligence analysts), whereas non-experts are those who do not (e.g., top policymakers). The theory argues that non-experts are influenced by what psychologists call the “negativity bias,” which compels them to pay more attention to negative information than positive information concerning enemies. On the other hand, building on experimental findings …

Function Of Atm And Msh2 During Dna Repair And Recombination, Emily Sible

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Class switch recombination (CSR) produces secondary immunoglobulin isotypes and requires AID-dependent DNA deamination of intronic switch (S) regions within the immunoglobulin heavy chain (Igh) gene locus. Non-canonical repair of deaminated DNA by mismatch repair (MMR) or base excision repair (BER) creates DNA breaks that permit recombination between distal S regions. ATM-dependent phosphorylation of AID at serine-38 (pS38-AID) promotes its interaction with APE1, a BER protein, suggesting that ATM regulates CSR through BER. However, pS38-AID may also function in MMR during CSR, although the mechanism remains unknown. To examine whether ATM modulates BER- and/or MMR-dependent CSR, Atm^-/- mice …

Drag, Drugs, And Demonstrations: Cultural Subversion Under Capitalism, Nicholas Kade Edwards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this essay, I will define cultural institutionalization and articulate the ways in which the phenomenon modulates subversive countercultural movements and integrates them into Western, capitalist cultural structures. I will then illustrate my theory of cultural institutionalization by analyzing three historical case studies of subversive countercultural movements in the United States. The first of which will be the drag queen phenomenon, which provides the most convincing case for the theory in the artistic sphere. Secondly, I will address a more explicitly political movement, the black liberation movement and its various permutations: the civil rights movement, the black power movement and …

Elucidation Of Gene Essentiality And Genetic Determinants Of Intrinsic P-Aminosalicylic Acid Resistance In Mycobacterium Kansasii, Keith J. Levendosky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mycobacterium kansasii (Mk) is an opportunistic pathogen capable of causing tuberculosis-like pulmonary disease in immunocompromised individuals and those with other risk factors including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or malignancy. Mk is frequently isolated from man-made water sources where it forms resilient biofilms, posing a health risk to these susceptible individuals. Despite its medical relevance as an environmental pathogen, and a close phylogenetic relationship with the obligate pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), few studies to date have probed the molecular biology and genetics of Mk. Here, we sought to apply a transposon (Tn) mutagenesis tool to dissect …

A Repository Of Books By Women From The Arab World Translated To English, Nadia El Mouldi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The translation of women writers from the Arab world in the West contributes to the harmful and inaccurate stereotyping of women from the region in the Global North as oppressed and silenced. In this paper, I describe the rationale and building process for “The repository of books by women from the Arab world translated to English”, a digital project built to counter this flattened image of women from the Arab world by shedding light on the books translated so far and exposing the patterns in the choice and translation of books from Arabic to English. I start by discussing the …

The Making Of A Bilingual University In The 21st Century, Michael Mena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the southernmost tip of Texas, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) opened its doors on August 31, 2015 as a ‘bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate’ campus—the only one of its kind and at a scale never before attempted in the United States. This is a categorical achievement in the near 200 year-long quest for the educational advancement of Latinxs in Texas—a state historically structured by white supremacist ideologies, violent economic and political disenfranchisement, as well as a racially segregated education system designed to maintain exploitative labor practices (Montejano 1987; González 1990, 2013, 1999; Blanton 2004). This constitutes the …

The Behavioral And Gene Expression Effects Of Loss Or Exhaustion Of Sonic Hedgehog From Dopamine Neurons, Dustin R. Zuelke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mesencephalic dopamine neurons (DAN) signal motivation and reward prediction errors. Their collective functions are considered critical for the translation of thought into context appropriate actions. Dopaminergic dysfunction has severe consequences: (1) DAN degeneration is a major determinate of Parkinson’s Disease (PD), (2) disturbed dopaminergic signaling in schizophrenia leads to unorganized learning, and (3) chemically induced dopaminergic signaling results in impulse control disorders (ICDs) and life-threatening addictions. The use of the dopamine (DA) precursor L-Dopa for DA replacement therapy in PD patients produces motor and behavioral side-effects such as L-Dopa induced dyskinesias (LID), ICDs, and a propensity for opioid addiction. Despite …