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The Singing Self: An Exploration Of Vocality And Selfhood In Contemporary Vocal Practice, Emily C. Eagen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every vocal training technique relies on understandings of how a singer’s “voice,” both literal and metaphorical, participates in the act of interpreting the works of composers. Western classical singing, as codified by the early twentieth century, typically puts the singer in the role of the “medium” or “channel” for the composer. Later twentieth-century reactions promised liberation from the composer’s “voice” with a validation of the singer’s “authentic” or “natural” voice. This dissertation questions both sides of this binary and asks: what alternative models are possible? This work is in three parts. The first section provides an overview of pedagogical constructions …

A Reflection On The Dialectical Relationship Of Librarian | Teacher: The Need For Pedagogical Training In Core Mlis Curriculum, Melanie C. Locay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis maps a shift in my understanding of knowledge production and teaching and learning. Teaching has a critical role in Librarianship, yet there is a glaring absence of teacher training across MLIS programs. Drawing from established literature on Critical Pedagogical theory, multiple logics of inquiry, and Critical Librarianship we can adopt practices of teaching and learning that elevate marginalized voices and center reflexive theory. This thesis includes a scope of applications of pedagogical theory to LIS practice and identifies an immediate need for an overhaul of the Master’s in Library and Information Sciences core curricula.

Microstructural Characteristics Of Deformed Quartz Under Non-Steady-State Conditions, Hamidreza Soleymani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Because of the long timescale of many geological processes (millions of years), it has been traditionally assumed that the existing forces acting on the rocks at deep crustal levels are in equilibrium (i.e., steady-state). An alternative assumption, however, suggests that rocks in the lower crust and upper mantle are continuously evolving and exchanging energy at various time scales. Under the latter assumption (i.e., non-steady-state), certain geologic systems may never attain equilibrium regardless of the length and the time scale of operating geologic events. These two “endpoint” assumptions suggest there is a wide range of geologically reasonable conditions under which rocks …

Extracting Theory From Practice: A Computational Analysis Of The Persian Radif, Sepideh Shafiei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies radif, the repertoire/system of Persian classical music, by developing a framework for computational research on vocal music performance. The radif consists of seven dastgāhs and five āvāzes (secondary dastgāhs). Each dastgāh consists of several pieces (gushes). Throughout this research, I draw on three areas of knowledge to study each subject: the historical aspects, the current theories, and the practice. When possible, I attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice by extracting the relevant information from practice. To this end, I use and modify existing computational methods for analyzing audio and symbolic data. The main subjects …

Progress Narratives In Trans Internationalism: Surveying A Collected Archive Of The Global Trans Movement, 2008–2018, Flora P. Wolpert Checknoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trans liberation as a global movement began to be documented in public reports in the mid-2000s. Gathered together from their first decade (2008-2018), publications produced by three trans INGOs—Transgender Europe (TGEU), the Asia Pacific Trans Network (APTN), and Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE)—demonstrate the cultivation of a global trans imaginary and materialize records of a coalescing struggle. The publications depict tensions between an evolving global trans imaginary and the construction of a rights deserving trans population in the development sector. The seeking of international action and resources has compelled the unification of messaging through rhetoric and data aggregation across …

Framing The Border: Liminality In The Network Narratives Of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Muhammad Muzammal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores liminality conveyed as displacement before death in the network narrative films of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Due to their depiction of existential crises and possibly fatal scenarios of several characters in different countries and regions, these network narrative films are colloquially referred to as the “Death Trilogy.” Therefore, rearranging the many strands of death-related abstractions and notions in these films around liminality becomes a jumping-off point to explore deeper layers of these works. Through interdisciplinary yet markedly film studies excavations, this thesis projects the liminal spaces of Iñárritu’s films onto border spaces. With borders considered as sites of …

Development And Maintenance Of The Thymic Epithelial Microenvironment, Shami Chakrabarti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The thymus plays a critical role in adaptive immunity by providing a suitable microenvironment for developing and selecting the functional self-tolerant T-cell population. Thymic epithelial cells play an essential role in the development of a naïve, self-tolerant T-cell population. Paradoxically thymus undergoes acute age-related involution, which in turn causes loss of functional T-cell populations. Involution reduces the functionality of the thymus markedly, but the thymus can still develop self-tolerant naïve T-cells. It is crucial to understand how the thymic microenvironment is maintained to provide a suitable T-cell population for life. It has been previously demonstrated that the thymic epithelial homeostasis …

Prevention In Context: An Examination Of Factors Associated With Recent Hiv Testing Among Men In New York City, Anthony Freeman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using intersectionality, Critical Race Theory and Quare theory as theoretical frameworks, this dissertation employs hierarchical logistic regression and data from New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) Community Health Survey (CHS) to examine the relative association of key variables and domains -- demographics, sexual characteristics, risk factors and engagement in medical care variables -- on recent HIV testing for a sample of 3997 men. Further, this study explores these effects separately for White, Black, Latino and Asian men.

Findings shows that respondents who were 18-24 years old, 45-64 years old, residing in Queens or Staten Island, employed, …

Teaching Choral Music Of The African Diaspora In The United States: Toward A “Living Black History”, H. Roz Woll

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In higher education choral curricula, the opportunity to study the breathtakingly rich scope of music rooted in Africa and the African diaspora with rigor and depth is often marginalized, neglected, or missing. If studied, it may be framed in the context of “other music” in contrast to music of the Western European canon, creating an oppositional framework rather than an interdependent one. Moreover, opportunities to study the political economy of this music in relationship to race, class, gender, and religion are lacking. This has multiple ramifications for music students’ preparedness to engage in global habits of citizenship in support of …

Frozen In Time: A Numerical Modeling Approach To The Study Of Ice Bearing Planetesimals Through Carbonaceous Chondrites, Jasmine M. Bayron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Icy planetesimals are significant objects of study for meteoritics, planetary science, and astrobiology due to their connections to the origins of life and liquid water on Earth. An existing closed system aqueous alteration model was adapted to simulate several scenarios involving early Solar System geologic processes occurring in an icy planetesimal interior. The model described in this work has been developed not only to test the validity of constraints currently thought to apply to CM1 parent bodies, but to directly compare the implications of these constraints for the isotopic composition and the modal mineralogy of carbonaceous chondrites. Isotopic ratios of …

Hybrid Ethnobotanical Practices: Afro And Indigenous Place-Making In The Contemporary Colombia Andean Pacific, Rafael A. Mutis Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnography of Indigenous and AfroIndigenous ethnobotanical practices in four communities in Cauca, in the Andean Pacific region in the Western Amazon of Colombia. Through collaborative field work, including interviews and active participant observation, I document the use of herbs and food as medicine, and agricultural and land tenure practices that depart significantly from those of racial-capitalist agribusiness. These ethnobotanical practices recuperate precolonial and ancestral knowledge as one of many efforts to build community autonomy and self-determination in Colombia as it fitfully enters the post conflict period.

Through an intersectional and topographic analysis, I show both the …

Educational Investments In Low-Income Households: The Role Of Parental Occupational Identity And Substitutability, Aparna Anand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Poor parents face difficult trade-offs when investing in their children's education. This dissertation studies how low-income urban households in Southern India, where child labor is a concern, make educational investments for their children. First, I build a model that shows how educational investments are shaped by the possibility of children substituting labor for their parents. Second, I collect parent surveys, child surveys, and student-level administrative data from schools and construct a linked dataset. Third, I examine the relationship between educational investments and several pertinent factors, with an emphasis on child labor substitution and the strength of occupational identity. I find …

Child-Ish Books: Presenting Zines And Artist Books For Kids, Hannah Coleman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This Capstone seeks: to provide a review of the field of children’s literature, with a specific focus on the ways that the mainstream publishing industries are driven by market forces, embed messages of Aetonormativity, Maria Nikolajeva’s (2009) term to describe the belief that adult experiences are normative and superior to the inferior and deviant experiences of children, and participate in the hegemonic control of children through socialization; to share my personal journey away from mass marketed picture books and towards independent publishing entities and New York City’s zine community; to provide a history of indie publishing and zine counterculture, including …

Incentivizing Injustice: Why No High-Level Executive Prosecutions From The Financial Crisis?, Sari Krieger Rivera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

More than ten years after the financial crisis of 2008, which sparked America’s Great Recession, many citizens are still asking why no high-level bank executives were prosecuted for criminal fraud. This question becomes even more perplexing when they remember that many powerful executives did face jail time during the Enron-era accounting scandals of the early 2000s and the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s. This sense of injustice Americans felt in the wake of the biggest economic disaster of their lifetimes has had reverberating political consequences, such as populist movements like Occupy Wall Street and populist political campaigns …

Smartphones And Somatizing, Jonathan Berkowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project explores the relationship between smartphone use, somatizing, and mentalized affectivity. The sample consisted of 511 iPhone users who completed an online survey that included scales measuring somatizing, mentalized affectivity, and general symptoms, as well as measures of smartphone engagement and addiction. Participants also provided data from their screentime application, and information about game-playing tendencies. A series of regression models were used to analyze data.

Results showed that smartphone addiction and game playing predicted somatizing, and did not interact with mentalized affectivity. Game-players somatized more than non-game players, and within the game-playing subgroup, those who reported spending more time …

Cell Cycle Progression Effects Of Albumin, Sharmeen Uddin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Progression through G₁ phase of the cell cycle is controlled largely by growth factors in early G₁ and by nutrients in late G₁ indicating sufficient raw material for cell division. We previously mapped a late G₁ cell cycle checkpoint for lipids upstream from a mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1)-mediated checkpoint and downstream from a mid-G₁ checkpoint known as the Restriction point. We therefore investigated a role for lipids in progression through late G₁ into S-phase. Quiescent BJ-hTERT human fibroblasts primed back into G1 with FBS treatment, were treated with a mixture of …

Mitigating Resurgence In Functional Communication Training: Teaching Varied And Complex Responses, Charlene N. Agnew

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Functional communication training (FCT) is a commonly used intervention for treating problem behavior wherein the reinforcers contributing to problem behavior are (a) identified through functional analysis and (b) then provided contingent on an alternative communication response. However, following successful teaching of an FCR, resurgence of problem behavior may occur in natural settings when the FCR is exposed to intentional or unintentional extinction conditions. We investigated teaching a second FCR following initial FCT, in one of two forms (varied topography or increased complexity) as a method for reducing resurgence of problem behavior. In order to account for history of reinforcement, we …

Legal Purgatory: Why Some Animals Are Neither Persons Nor Property, Sharisse Kanet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All animals with non-borderline sentience are deserving of certain legal considerations independent of their use and relationship to human beings. That is, all sentient beings should have some rights. Given the current organization of the U.S. legal system, which divides all entities into property or persons, it is not surprising that animals are relegated to property status. I put forth a proposal to fix this whose central suggestion is that we create a third legal designation, legal patient, into which all non-person sentient animals (those which do not properly belong on either current category) would fit. These animals would receive …

Class Act: Symbolic Revolution And The Meaning Of College In Prison, Ruth E. Delaney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The United States has gone through two transformations in the meaning of higher education in prison and the value of access for people in prison in the last 50 years and is now moving towards a third. The establishment of Pell grants in 1972 allowed for widespread access to higher education in prison, while the removal of those grants in 1994 effectively ended access. Federal policy makers are now poised to restore access to Pell grants to a broad swath of people in prison (Green, 2019; Krieghbaum, April 22, 2019; Krieghbaum, October 11, 2019). In this paper, I interpret the …

Mechanism Of Action Of Dihydropteridine Reductase, Gabriela Arias De La Rosa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Human dihydropteridine reductase is an enzyme that transfers a hydride from NADH to reduce quinonoid 7,8-dihydropterin (qBH₂) to 5,6,7,8-tetrahydropterin (BH₄), which is a cofactor important in the production of neurotransmitters.DHPR deficiency causes a drastic form of the neurological genetic disease phenylketonuria (PKU) that does not benefit from a phenylalanine-free diet.From site-directed mutagenesis studies, mostly on Rat DHPR, we know that certain residues are important for cofactor binding, substrate binding, and hydride transfer; however, there are still some questions about how DHPR works, particularly, because there is not a crystal structure of the tertiary complex: What is …

Interactions Of Organic Fluorophores With Plasmonic Surface Lattice Resonances, Robert J. Collison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is common knowledge that metals, alloys and pure elements alike, are lustrous and reflective, the more so when a metal surface is flat, polished, and free from oxidation and surface fouling. However, some metals reflect visible light, in the 380 nm to 740 nm range of wavelengths, much more strongly than others. In particular, some metals reflect wavelengths in certain portions of the ultraviolet (UV), visible, and near-infrared (NIR) regime, let us say 200 nm to 2000 nm, while absorbing light strongly in other segments of this range. There are several factors that account for this difference between various …

Lobster Palaces In Times Square: The Public Stage Where America Discovered Itself Through Play And Leisure, Lydia E. Ravnikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1870 and 1920, the period known as the Gilded Age, New York City became the acknowledged national leader in finance, manufacturing, technology, and entertainment. As the country’s leader, it attracted both new millionaires who wanted to validate their social importance in an attempt to rid themselves of a small-town past and immigrants, who were searching for better opportunities. However, to New York’s elite society, the Four Hundred, led by Mrs. Astor, both groups were not welcomed. While the immigrants proved easier to control physically, the new millionaires, however, were indeed a legitimate threat. With this real threat including pressure …

Some Model Theory Of Free Groups, Christopher James Natoli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There are two main sets of results, both pertaining to the model theory of free groups. In the first set of results, we prove that non-abelian free groups of finite rank at least 3 or of countable rank are not A-homogeneous. We then build on the proof of this result to show that two classes of groups, namely finitely generated free groups and finitely generated elementary free groups, fail to form A-Fraisse classes and that the class of non-abelian limit groups fails to form a strong A-Fraisse class.

The second main result is that if a countable group is elementarily …

Spaces Of Statecraft: How The Bureaucratic State Was Built On Manhattan’S Sidewalk, Brian J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through an exploration of the rise in regulation of Manhattan’s largest public space, the sidewalk, Spaces of Statecraft explores the history and socio-spatial implications of the rise of bureaucratic states at a hyper local level. The thesis investigates a period of more than just an expansion of rules; it provides insight into an era of rapid change in perceptions and practices of statecraft in New York City. Uncovering and analyzing how battles over public space unfolded in Manhattan helps to explain the formation of the local state at the turn of the twentieth century.

The local state gave mobility priority …

The Surreal Voice In Milan's Itinerant Poetics: Delio Tessa To Franco Loi, Jason Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of Italy’s linguistic history, dialect literature has evolved a s a genre unto itself. The scope of research presented in this study examines the question of dialect literature as a valid genre which bears lines of demarcation that would assign it the distinction of genre. Research reveals that in fact the simple election of a language, or dialect, does not itself constitute a genre; moreover, most dialect literature bears characteristics that would neatly place it in another genre.

To examine this verity, this research compares two dialect poets who employ Milanese as a means of transmission …

Embracing Conflict And Contradiction As A Path To Awareness, Joann Rintel Abreu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The focus of this autoethnographic dissertation is the exploration of habitus and how it consciously and unconsciously influences our perceptions, emotions, values, and actions. I describe this dissertation as an autoethnography to highlight my subjective approach to research and to dispel any claims of objectivity. Through my experiences as a daughter, mother, administrator, and teacher-educator, I explore three internal conflicts, highlighted by intense emotional reactions, and deconstruct how my past and present contexts inform my values, beliefs, and actions. In each chapter, I describe several events that led to a greater understanding of my emotional responses and how I adapted …

Smashing Solidarity: Two New York Strikes At The Start Of The Postwar Wave, Joseph D. Parziale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two strikes in New York at the beginning of the massive 1945-46 strike wave—one by elevator operators in commercial buildings and another by dock workers throughout the Port of New York—can help us better understand a moment when workers exhibited a profound sense of themselves as a class, while their rivals in the shop, the corporate boardroom, and the halls of power fought vigorously to dispel the notion that workers divided by geography, industry, race, nationality, and gender were right to see their fates as intertwined. Historians’ focus on the economic issues at stake in the major strikes of the …

Burden-Sharing, Security, And The International Protection Of Displaced Persons: The United States And Italy As Case Studies, Paul Celentano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Less than 5 percent of those displaced by war and persecution receive permanent sanctuary. This is because the states tasked with protecting them are wary of the “burdens” that they pose, framing them as threats to national economies, budgets, and public safety. Consequently, states seek to share these burdens with other states in order to minimize their own international protection obligations. While the modern norm of “burden-sharing” has existed since at least the mid-twentieth century, it is vague and, therefore, permissive of a wide range of state behavior. When viewed through the lens of “securitization,” states utilize alarmist rhetoric and …

Cognitive Changes Caused By Lps-Induced Neuroinflammation, Nancy De La Torre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The brain performs cognitive processes finely orchestrated by timely precise action of neurons. Neurons functioning at their highest standard communicate with each other through perfectly functioning synapses. Microglia, as part of the immune system assist synaptic processing and have the ability to affect cognition. Indeed, microglia play a role in cognition. To investigate the link between microglia and cognition we utilized lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to pharmacologically activate microglia. LPS, normally present in the environment on the wall of Gram-negative bacteria is a pharmacological agent used to cause microglia activation in mice. LPS is a typical model to study changes induced by …

A New Feature Selection Method Based On Class Association Rule, Sami A. Al-Dhaheri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feature selection is a key process for supervised learning algorithms. It involves discarding irrelevant attributes from the training dataset from which the models are derived. One of the vital feature selection approaches is Filtering, which often uses mathematical models to compute the relevance for each feature in the training dataset and then sorts the features into descending order based on their computed scores. However, most Filtering methods face several challenges including, but not limited to, merely considering feature-class correlation when defining a feature’s relevance; additionally, not recommending which subset of features to retain. Leaving this decision to the end-user may …