Digital Commons Network^™

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Truth: How Client Assertion, Perception Of Guilt, And Predictive Inaccuracy Influence Plea Recommendations, Anna D. Vaynman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past few decades, the largely hidden, secretive, and widely used system of plea bargaining has caught the fervent attention of scholars. The Shadow of the Trial model has been central to much of the plea-bargaining literature, despite significant critiques about its oversimplification. The model posits that defendants and their attorneys make plea decisions based largely on the estimated probability of conviction and the severity of the sentence to which the defendant could be exposed at trial.

The model, however, assumes that all actors are rational, equally risk averse, have no competing interests, and possess high predictive accuracy. It …

Politics Of Refusal: Justice And Liberation For Black Trans Lives, Quincy Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the challenges faced by Black trans people. In this thesis, I will explore how protest is used to highlight and confront the obstacles faced by the Black trans community. I will also examine the cultural work of Black trans people and what they teach us. The Brooklyn Liberation march and the TV show Pose is an important part of Black trans legacy. They both look at the complications surrounding Black trans lives and contributes to Black trans representation in protesting and fighting marginalization. This thesis will argue the importance of allyship to create safe space for Black …

Electrochemical Resistive-Pulse Sensing In Biological Systems, Rui Jia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Electrochemical resistive-pulse (ERP) sensing with conductive carbon nanopipettes (CNPs) is a powerful technique for detecting single nanoscopic entities, such as single liposomes and biological vesicles, enabling qualitative and quantitative analysis of the redox molecules contained in such entities. ERP experiments were first carried out in biological system by inserting a conductive carbon nanopipette into a macrophage cell to sample single vesicles and measuring reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS/RNS) contained inside them.

Besides sensing intracellular vesicles in macrophage cells, we applied this technique to direct detect single extracellular vesicles (EVs) released from a specific cell, and analysis of reactive oxygen …

Examining Metacognitive Access To Low-Level Ensemble Representations, Vladimir Mudragel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ensemble perception is a process that allows our sensory systems to rapidly extract summary information about the stimuli in the environment. For example, we are able to get a sense of the average number of items in a group of similar items (Burr & Ross, 2008; Halberda, Sires, & Feigenson, 2006) or the average size of a group of similar shapes of different sizes (Ariely, 2001). It is theorized that the qualitative result of ensemble perception is that it provides a gist impression of the current environment, which then enables attentional processes in the brain to determine which parts of …

An Affective Technology Of Heimat: Whiteness, Nation Building And Social Media In Germany, Friederike Windel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examined the patterns of attachments and affective investments in Whiteness, objectifications, and exclusions entrenched in the construct of Heimat, which is broadly defined as “homeland” in German-speaking contexts. It used computational social science and discourse analytical methods to analyze how Heimat was discussed, embodied, and made sense of in affective ways. Sitting at the intersections of critical psychology, critical race and feminist theory, and Heimat scholarship, this research asked how Heimat functions affectively to (re)produce and maintain ideologies like white supremacy and nationalism.

Using Structural Topic Modeling on a big Twitter dataset (611,609), I estimated a model …

Effects Of Genes And Gene-Environment Interactions On Work-Family Conflict And Enrichment, Peter Yu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how macro-level issues can influence how we manage work and family responsibilities. Yet, work-family (WF) research at different levels of analysis is relatively scarce. To address this, I take a multilevel lens to study WF conflict and enrichment in the context of micro-level factors (in the form of genes), macro-level factors (in the form of family and community-level demands), and their cross-level interactions (i.e., gene–environment interactions). To study genetic main effects, I drew from the work-home resources model to identify four candidate genes associated with conditions that could impact the ability to accrue WF resources …

Colonial Geographies Of Gendered Violence And Mental Health In The United States And Puerto Rico, Lorraine Lizbeth L. Torres Colon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As of January 2021, after years of community organizing and protests, the Puerto Rican island government announced a state of emergency due to the high rates of gendered violence on the island. At the same time, within the field of psychiatric epidemiology, consistent findings have indicated higher frequencies of mood disorders and substance abuse disorders among Puerto Ricans both on and off the island, relative to all other US Latinx ethnic groups. This dissertation frames Puerto Ricans experiences with psychological distress and gendered violence as public health issues nested within differing geographies of colonial divestment. I explore the relationships between …

Understanding Victim-Offender Overlap Among Youth In Custody In The United States And Taiwan, Tzu-Ying Lo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The issue of the victim-offender overlap was identified more than 60 years ago (Wolfgang, 1958), but it was not until the last decade that research interest in the victim-offender overlap began to flourish. Although the victim-offender overlap is arguably established by a substantial body of research, a closer look at the existing literature will find scant attention paid to the incarcerated population. Recent studies (Daquin & Daigle, 2020; Kuo et al., 2021; Toman, 2017) have begun to discover the victim-offender overlap in adult prisons, but the victim-offender overlap in juvenile facilities remains underexplored. To fill the research gap, this dissertation …

Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores three Archeology Museums (Historic St. Mary’s City, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the American Museum of Natural History), their attempts at addressing the colonial narratives that museums are built on, and how the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over George Floyd’s death affected these projects. I place a special effort on the online presence of these museums, as this is the main way visitors interacted with the museums during the pandemic. After discussing the origins of museum’s decolonization efforts and their efforts to make an online presence, I talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the events around George Floyd’s …

Out-Of-Distribution Generalization Of Deep Learning To Illuminate Dark Protein Functional Space, Tian Cai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark protein illumination is a fundamental challenge in drug discovery where majority human proteins are understudied, i.e. with only known protein sequence but no known small molecule binder. It's a major road block to enable drug discovery paradigm shift from single-targeted which looks to identify a single target and design drug to regulate the single target to multi-targeted in a Systems Pharmacology perspective. Diseases such as Alzheimer's and Opioid-Use-Disorder plaguing millions of patients call for effective multi-targeted approach involving dark proteins. Using limited protein data to predict dark protein property requires deep learning systems with OOD generalization capacity. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) …

Avoiding Success: How Does Fear Of Success Impact Today's Workforce?, Bradley E. Gray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fear of success refers to the anxiety experienced by individuals as they come close to accomplishing a goal, ambivalent and even paralyzed over choosing to accept or avoid success. Success fearers are more likely to avoid success, choosing to forego their goal to avoid the assumed negative repercussions that will accompany the success (Canavan, 1989). Though interest in fear of success has waned since its introduction in the 1970’s, evidence of fear of success still exists today. However, original theories of fear of success cannot explain its impact on both men and women, and little is known about how it …

Untenable Spaces And Inconceivable Futures In The 21st Century Anglophone Indian Novel, Shoumik Bhattacharya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As the world sours on the history-ending narratives of forever “growth” and unending “development” and recognizes the climate catastrophe, what stories of the future are left? The question of postcolonial space and its representation is a central concern of this dissertation. Thinking beyond the reasons for, and the histories of, the trashing of postcolonial space, examined by thinkers such as Rob Nixon and Jennifer Wenzel, allows for a consideration of the possibilities of life and thriving in unexpected and supposedly untenable contexts. I will therefore focus on what might be considered deterritorialised spaces: that is, spaces outside the structural ambits …

Beyond Punishment: A Critical And Interpretive Phenomenology Of Accountability, Cameron Rasmussen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State responses to interpersonal violence in the US have long been focused on punishment and prison. While opposition to punitive responses to interpersonal violence has been marginal, there are small but growing efforts to challenge the primacy of punishment and incarceration. In its place, different non-punitive approaches to justice have been practiced and promoted including restorative justice and transformative justice, which see accountability, not punishment, as a primary goal. Accountability has been theorized and researched largely from the perspective of survivors of harm, and there is limited research on the experiences of people who have caused harm and engaged in …

Confronting The Doppelganger: Mapping The Ontological Terrain Of An Afro-Caribbean Woman As She Rebrands Diasporic, Feminine Identity Politics: An Autoethnography, Aysha E. Todd-Stone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to interrogate the intricacies governing the intra-racial\ intra-gendered relationship of an Afro-Trinidadian woman as she commandeers professional spaces in North America. The intent is to challenge the instrument of Black sisterhood deeming it as an incomplete, social instrument, and to prove using an auto-ethnographic approach how Diasporic, feminine trauma leads to psychically induced, episodic violence that is highly suggestive but subtle to the naked eye which in turn irretrievably damages intra-interpersonal relations. Quantitative studies have produced a composite from the white\black perspective (Goosby et al., 2015, Sims et al., 2012) and others dealing with gender (Braithwaite., 1981, …

The Archival Impulse: English Family Record Keeping And Archives, Ca. 1450–1700, Maura Kenny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

England in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of documents arising from a growth in literacy and an expansion of state administrative offices. Scholarship on the archival history of this period has grown recently but it has focused mainly on institutional and state archives. Very little has been written about family or personal archives and the uses made of them. Based on modern archival theory and extensive archival research, this dissertation seeks to fill this gap by addressing the creation of family records and archives as a whole, exploring early modern English families as a “community of records.” …

Sex In The Noisy City: Changes In Vocal Behavior Patterns And Dopamine Neurochemistry In The Auditory System Of Oyster Toadfish (Opsanus Tau), Kelsey N. Hom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intense anthropogenic noise can induce stress, behavioral changes, and even hearing loss in aquatic animals. However, there are few studies that have demonstrated how ecologically relevant noise affects aquatic life, and even fewer studies on the effect of noise on animals that require sound for reproduction. The oyster toadfish (Opsanus tau) is an excellent animal model to examine the effects of anthropogenic noise on behavior and neurochemistry since they use a reproductive call to find mates and live near urban areas like New York City. Despite living alongside the most populous city in the United States, these vocal …

Cartographic Subjectivity In Fernand Deligny’S Lignes D’Erre, Anya Komar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) was a French thinker, writer, and social worker who dedicated his entire life to an abolitionist project of protecting “severely autistic” children from internment in mental asylums by allowing them to move freely through the mountains of Cévennes where he established a support network for neurodiverse children. He privileged children’s nonverbal state and let them “direct” the community.

This thesis aims to historicize the drawings made under the guidance of Fernand Deligny between the 1960s and 1980s. His drawing method of tracing children’s movement offered an unprecedented way of providing visibility to children with nonverbal autism, outside …

The Role Of Nuclear Quantum Effects In Supercooled Water And Amorphous Ice, Ali H. Eltareb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Water is one of the most important substances on Earth and plays a fundamental role in numerous scientific and engineering applications. Interestingly, water behaves much differently than other liquids. For example, water shows an anomalous density maximum at 277 K, the solid phase (ice) is less denser than the liquid, and its thermodynamic response functions, such as the specific heat C_P and isothermal compressibility κ_T, also increase anomalously upon cooling. In the glassy state, water can exist in two different forms, low-density and high-density amorphous ice (LDA and HDA). While water has been scrutinized for many centuries, …

Staging Nature: Performing Environmental Crises In War, Housing, And Labor, 1935–1990, Erik Barrett Wallenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Staging Nature” examines how theater was used as a means for expressing environmental concerns in moments of environmental crisis in the United States. I begin with The Federal Theatre Project’s national tour of a performance addressing the metabolic rift in the divide between the city and country with a focus on the devastation of farmland in the Dust Bowl in the late 1930s. At the heart of the dissertation are three theater groups that start in the 1960s during the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapters on Bread and Puppet Theater show that they make a name for themselves …

Stock Stories Versus Counterstories: A Contemporary Retelling And Centering Of Disenfranchised Narratives, Karen C. Pitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the literacy narratives of disfranchised educators. It unveils the toll the “literacy myth” has taken on their educational pursuits in American institutions. Through these published narratives, the study explores the ways in which the Eurocentric ideology dominates academic institutions, noting the marginalizing effects this dominant ideology has had on minoritized students, teachers, and administrators. Understanding that the narrators have remained at the margins in their own stories, this study seeks to address this shortfall by exploring the author’s own literacy teaching narrative. It uses critical race theory (CRT) and CRT counterstory as an innovative methodology to retell …

Typologies Of Battering: Uncovering Patterns Of Coercive Tactics Used By Abusive Men In A Mixed Methods Study, Abbie L. Tuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coercive control provides a current day feminist understanding of intimate partner violence (IPV). Recent research has demonstrated the significance of coercive control and suggests it provides a more accurate understanding of IPV than using physical violence alone. Utilizing a feminist lens, this study’s first aim was to explore if typologies based on coercive control could be developed. The second and third aims were to explore if demographic differences and differences in masculinity exist across typologies. The final aim of this study was to continue the feminist understanding of IPV using the moral emotions of shame and guilt as an extension …

Bow Articulations In The Late Galant (1775–1812): An Analysis Of Bow Strokes In Selected Violin Sonatas Of Mozart And Beethoven, Julia E. Danitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the evolving use of the violin bow during the late galant and Classical era (1776-1812) by means of several violin sonatas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (K. 305, K. 454. Op. 12, No. 1, Op. 96). An analysis of bow articulations supplemented with annotated music examples is provided for these works, as well as information on the bow innovations and French violin school pedagogy at the turn of the 19th century. Understanding the style of bowing during the late 18th century and turn of the 19th century can help inform a modern performer of …

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …

Electrophysiological Signatures Of Stress Adaptability In The Bnst-Vta Pathway, Yuka Miura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chronic stress has detrimental effects on psychological and physiological health. Incapability to adapt to chronic stress can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction. The brain regions critical for reward processing share diverse physiological and molecular changes linked to depressive-like behaviors as a result of chronic stress. Cumulative evidence shows that counteraction or prevention of these alterations in neurons, occasionally in a projection-specific manner, can enhance stress adaptation or resilience.

Chronic stress induces various changes in the brain, including in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The neural projections from the BNST …

Extraction, Property, And Rights In Southeastern Arabian Seascapes C.1820–Present, Scott Erich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic examination of fish, pearl, sponge, and oil extraction in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. These waters, which were fished and labored upon in much of the same way for millennia, have, in the last two centuries, undergone a sea change. Regimes of property and rights have transformed the ocean from a wild and undifferentiated space into a place which is enclosed, privatized, industrially fished, drilled, and otherwise despoiled. This dissertation, building on recent works in environmental history, Indian Ocean studies, and legal and economic anthropology, probes the many cultural, religious, social, …

“Bending The Law” – Weimar Judiciary And The Political Bias Paradox Of The Legal System, Irit Bloch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This interdisciplinary, microhistory project which draws on historical, legal and sociological methodologies, examines the relationship between a new and unstable democracy and a hostile judicial system in the Weimar Republic (Germany, 1919-1933). In particular, it asks how Weimar judges who were bound to codes of law and adhered to the rule of law were able to manipulate laws and to produce judgments along ideological lines while keeping a semblance of legality. By analyzing judicial decisions in three non-political, criminal cases, this research explains the mechanism of subversion and offers a nuanced explanation for the judiciary's motivations to abuse the law. …

Visualizing Dopamine Activity In Deletion Of D2 Receptors In Medium Spiny Neurons, Kunhee Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dopamine has been implicated in motivated behaviors and reinforcement learning. In this study, we are looking at the role of dopamine in allocating efforts when obtaining reward. Using Cre recombinase genetic tool, D2 receptors in striatal indirect pathway neurons were selectively deleted, and dopamine signal was recorded in ventral striatum using fiber photometry. Behaviorally, D2 receptor deletion resulted in less effort in a Progressive Ratio (PR) paradigm shown by decreased breakpoint, number of presses, and reward pellets earned. Due to the previous evidence that dopamine positively modulates effort, we hypothesized that there would be less dopamine release in D2 deleted …

Quantifying Temperature-, Pressure-, And Nuclear Quantum Effects On Hydrophobic And Hydrophilic Water-Mediated Interactions, Justin T. Engstler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Water-mediated interactions (WMIs) are responsible for diverse processes in aqueous solutions, including protein folding and nanoparticle aggregation. WMI may be affected by changes in temperature and pressure, and hence, they can alter chemical/physical processes that occur in aqueous environments. Traditionally, attention has been focused on hydrophobic interactions while, in comparison, the role of hydrophilic and hybrid (hydrophobic–hydrophilic) interactions have been mostly overlooked. Here, we study the role of T and P on the WMI between nanoscale (i) hydrophobic–hydrophobic, (ii) hydrophilic–hydrophilic, and (iii) hydrophilic–hydrophobic pairs of (hydroxylated/non-hydroxylated) graphene-based surfaces. We find that hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and hybrid interactions are all sensitive to …

Construction And Performance Optimization Of Bioconjugated Nanosensors For Early Detection Of Breast Cancer And Pro-Inflammatory Diseases, Pooja Gaikwad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, nanosensors have emerged as a tool with strong potential in medical diagnostics. Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) based optical nanosensors have notably garnered interest due to the unique characteristics of their near-infrared fluorescence emission, including tissue transparency, photostability, and various chiralities with discrete absorption and fluorescence emission bands. Additionally, the optoelectronic properties of SWCNT are sensitive to the surrounding environment, which makes them suitable for in vitro and in vivo biosensing. Single-stranded (ss) DNA-wrapped SWCNTs have been reported as optical nanosensors for cancers and metabolic diseases. Breast cancer and cardiovascular diseases are the most common causes of death …

Diagnosis And Management Of Adults With Hidden Hearing Loss: A Scoping Review, Chana Flohr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Adults reporting speech in noise difficulties yet have audiometrically normal hearing is a common finding in the audiology clinic and are a subject of a recently popular and expanding area of research. Yet, there is still no clear and decisive test battery to diagnose, validate, and manage this disorder in the adult population. The lack of a clear protocol can cause dissatisfaction for both the patient and the clinician.

Objective: The objective of this study is to comprehensively review the existing literature on Hidden Hearing Loss (HHL) in audiology. The study aims to address the lack of consensus and …