Digital Commons Network^™

Dangerous Memories: Lynching And The U.S. Literary Imagination, Anne P. Rice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The terrorization of African Americans through lynching was a national cultural trauma producing a struggle over the meaning of suffering, victimization and moral responsibility. The lesson you were meant to learn from white supremacy and terror powerfully affected how you remembered lynching. My dissertation asks who remembered (and did not remember) what about lynching and how these habits of memory influenced literary and visual representations. I consider the impact of race, gender, class, and sexuality on how lynching was textualized and performed, avoided and blocked. While much recent scholarship has concentrated on the visual technologies of lynching, lynching was also …

Represent: The New York City Public Housing Resident Alliance And Its Struggle Against The Imposition Of The Neoliberal Agenda, Gretchen Susi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research has focused on four interconnected topics: the formation of a citywide group of public housing residents and advocates (The New York City Public Housing Resident Alliance); a collaboration between the Resident Alliance and building trade unions in New York City to gain jobs for public housing residents—The TRADES Coalition (Trade Unions and Residents for Apprenticeship Development and Economic Success); public housing activism in an era of neoliberal reform; and efforts on the part of the Resident Alliance to engage in what Henri Lefebvre refers to as the production of space. It has examined how The New York City …

"I Harbor No Hate": A Study Of Political Tolerance And Intolerance In Holocaust Survivors, Nancy Isserman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The political attitudes of tolerance or intolerance of victims towards their former perpetrators have not been thoroughly researched prior to this study. Through the data collected by the Transcending Trauma Project, a study looking at three generations of Holocaust survivor families, " I Harbor No Hate: A Study of Tolerance and Intolerance in Holocaust Survivors " examined this question. One expects that survivors will until their dying days hate the Germans and the Poles who destroyed their families, their livelihoods, their homes, and their communities. Yet, to a significant group of survivors interviewed for the Transcending Trauma project, this response …

Collaborating In Care: Developing A Model Of Dialogic Empathy In Nursing Education, Kimberlee Jean Trudeau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this exploratory study was to teach nursing students to perceive empathy as a dialogic process versus as a personal characteristic through narrative reflection. This required the development of a dialogic empathy model for nursing education; that is, a model that presents empathy as a reciprocal process shared by the nurse and client within their interactions. Given the increasing cultural diversity between providers and clients in stressful medical situations, awareness of the interaction of the characteristics of oneself and another (i.e., dialogism) could potentially enhance both the efficacy and experience of care.

This study included (a) narrative reflection …

To Stand On Their Own: Women’S Higher Education In Contemporary Kerala, India, Alcira Forero-Pena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a study of the significance for women of college education as it occurs in colleges administered by Christian nuns in Kerala, India. Particularly, it looks at the paradoxical effects of the dramatic social changes Kerala underwent during the twentieth century that guaranteed, among other things, formal education, including post-secondary, to a large proportion of women. On the other hand, it shows not only the persistence of blatant social inequalities fed by class, caste, and gender distinctions but also the increase in inequality due to the forces of globalization. On close examination, there is little correlation between the vast …

Anarchism And The Politics Of Homosexuality, Terence S. Kissack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the mid-1890s through the 1920s activists in the American, English-language anarchist movement carried on a spirited debate on the ethical, social, and cultural status of same-sex desire. Among Americans they were alone in doing so; no other political movement or notable public figure of the period dealt with this issue. By making same-sex desire a topic of political discourse the anarchist sex radicals helped shift the sexual, cultural, and political landscape within which all Americans operated. While the contemporary homosexual rights movement is not the lineal descendant of the turn-of-the-century anarchist movement, the activists examined in this dissertation addressed …

Bartolomeo Di Tommaso Da Foligno, Michael Patrick Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Once famous and influential, the fifteenth century Umbrian painter, Bartolomeo di Tommaso (1408/11–1454) has only begun to receive serious scholarly attention within the past few decades. His long obscurity was in part attributable to the fact that he was not born in Tuscany, and did not work in the great art centers of Florence and Siena, facts that by themselves would relegate him to the status of a lesser artist. Further, his paintings have never been easily reconciled with those that art history has classified as Early Renaissance in style and, indeed even when Bartolomeo was influenced by Tuscan painters, …

The Role Of Dopamine In Motivational And Receptive Aspects Of Female Mouse Sexual Behavior, Amber Bradshaw Hodges

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A pacing paradigm investigated the modulatory role of monoamines in the mesolimbic dopamine system on copulatory behavior in female mice. Specifically whether there is a distinction between the neural regulatory mechanisms of pacing behavior and receptive behavior was determined. Pacing measures motivational and rewarding components of copulation by the female's contacts and withdrawals from the male, while receptivity is the willingness to engage in copulations and is measured by the number of sexual stimulations received. A pacing paradigm was established and female mice were observed to pace in a similar manner, but at a lesser rate, than female rats.

Dopamine …

Identifying The First Person, Roblin Roy Meeks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Wide agreement exists that self-ascriptions that one would express with the first-person pronoun differ in kind from those one would express with other self-designating expressions such as proper names and definite descriptions. At least some first-person self-ascriptions, many argue, are nonaccidental—that is, they involve no self-identification, and hence in making them one cannot accidentally misidentify the subject of the ascription. I examine the support for this claim throughout the literature, paying particular attention to Sydney Shoemaker's proposal that self-ascriptions are nonaccidental in virtue of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. According to Shoemaker, such immunity …

Art Or Propaganda: A Historical And Critical Analysis Of African-American Approaches To Dramatic Theory, 1900–1965, Henry D. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation surveys African American approaches to dramatic theory from 1900 to 1965, demonstrating that in the period the issue dominating the field was a great debate that defined black drama as art on the one hand and as propaganda on the other. In an African American cultural history replete with covert and overt struggles for social and political equality, the art or propaganda question necessarily reached a magnitude and importance found in no other area of twentieth-century dramatic theory. The comprehensiveness of the debate that interrogated this question and its historical and cultural depth has largely gone untreated. Moreover, …

Women's Envy In The Workplace: Contexts And Consequences, Para Ambardar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a paucity of literature on women's subjective experience of being envious or being envied in the contemporary workplace. Yet envy, wanting what another possesses, is believed to thrive in a competitive interpersonal milieu, much like the modern workplace, where employees vie for limited organizational resources and rewards. Accordingly, there is a need to better understand envy's role in the workplace and move from an abstract, context-free conceptualization of workplace envy to one that is more differentiated and context-bound. Eighteen women were interviewed for this qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews. Results were analyzed using both psychoanalytic and social psychological …

Urban Youth Reimagine Trauma: Making Meaning Of Experiences With Chronic Community Violence Through The Arts, Stephanie Urso Spina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of participation in the "Creating Original Opera" (COO) program was investigated among two consecutive (1999 and 2000) cohorts of eighth grade inner-city students living in a context of chronic community violence. Four research questions were posed: (1) What are these students' experiences of violence? (2) What strategies, if any, do they employ to cope with violent events? (3) What, if any, of the above change over the duration of the project? (4) How might those changes relate (or not) to participation in the opera program?

Data collection included a series of three semi-structured interviews with randomly chosen students …

Vigilance Or Tolerance?: Ambivalence And Attitude Accessibility In Response To Terrorist Threats, Julie Tison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research explored the cognitive processes underlying the Response Amplification Effect (RAE), which is ambivalent people's tendency to judge the object of their ambivalence (typically, a stigmatized other) more extremely than a comparable control target. Being in a state of ambivalence is known to be uncomfortable. This discomfort may be dealt with by implementing changes in the accessibility level of attitudinal elements. It is suggested that cognitions compatible with the side of the ambivalence made salient by the current situation will be super-activated and that incompatible elements will be sub-activated, thus leading to amplified reactions congruent with the current context. …

Speech Perception And Lexical Effects In Specific Language Impairment: The Effects Of Vowel Duration And Word Knowledge On Perception Of Final Alveolar Stop Voicing, Frances L.V. Scheffler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The perception of temporal speech cues, lexical knowledge, and their interactions were examined in children (6;0-9;6) with specific language impairment (SLI). An identification task was used to test four 12-step speech continua: word-word (FEET—FEED), nonword-nonword (ZEST—ZEED), word-nonword (CHEAT—CHEED) and nonword-word (REAT—READ). The stimuli were naturally recorded and digitally edited. The vowel steady state, which varied in duration from 110 to 350 milliseconds in 20-millisecond steps, was the acoustic cue to the voicing characteristic of the final consonant in each stimulus. The analyses revealed that both the TLD and SLI groups used vowel duration as a perceptual cue. For the word-word …

Crime Legends In Old And New Media, Pamela Donovan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project explores the contemporary meanings and persistence of the "crime legend." A case study approach was used: three crime legends with a considerable history of public debunking were chosen. These cases were: the market in snuff films, the theft of vital organs for black-market transplant, and the abduction of children from theme park restrooms. Current versions circulating in Internet newsgroups and via electronic mail lists were collected. Discussions in Internet newsgroups were examined and twenty regular newsgroup participants were interviewed. The public newsgroup communication environment is such that salience is established by the interlocutors themselves, rather than by the …

The Police Officer As Survivor: The Psychological Impact Of Exposure To Death In Contemporary Urban Policing, Vincent E. Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All human encounters with death, whether they involve a casual contact with the death of another person or the realistic threat of one's own demise, have important psychological consequences that result in new modes of adaptation, thought and feeling. In the course of their duties, contemporary urban police officers frequently encounter the deaths of others and some participate in mortal combat situations that credibly threaten their own lives. The psychological dimensions of police officers' professional exposures to the deaths of others are to a large extent shaped by the specific duties and responsibilities prescribed by their formal task environment, while …

Mothers Of Sexually Abused Children And The Concept Of Collusion, Patricia A. Joyce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study reports the perspectives of clinical social workers on the mothers of sexually abused children whom they saw for treatment. The subjects were 15 masters-level social workers in an urban child treatment program. The study used qualitative methods based on grounded theory to examine professionals' social constructions of mothers of sexually abused children. The child's disclosure of incest provided the study's conceptual focus, since historically professionals constructed the "collusive mother," even though prior empirical research never supported maternal collusion or culpability for incest.

Respondents were interviewed for approximately one hour using a semi-structured interview guide; nearly one hundred hours …

The Emergence Of Dialogic Identities: Transforming Heteroglossia In The Marquesas, F.P., Kathleen C. Riley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Te 'Enana 'the people' of the Marquesas, French Polynesia, have been engaged for some time in the dialogic negotiation of their heteroglossic identity. Based on an ethnographic study of language socialization in the Marquesas, this dissertation examines how communicative forms are acquired within a changing socio-cultural matrix, as well as on how cultural habits and beliefs are produced and reproduced via verbal interaction.

My first two months of fieldwork were spent in Tahiti (the capital of French Polynesia), living and studying the language use and cultural patterns of an 'enana family. Subsequently, I spent ten months in a village in …

Clinical Process Related To Outcome In Psychodynamic Psychotherapy For Panic Disorder, Cara F. Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study identified psychotherapeutic processes that relate meaningfully to psychotherapeutic outcome for patients with panic disorder undergoing Panic-Focused Psychodynamic Psychotherapy ([PFPP]; Milrod, Busch, Cooper, & Shapiro, 1997). Subjects were 21 patients who participated in an open clinical trial of PFPP (Milrod et al., in press; Milrod et al., 2000). Patients received 24 sessions over approximately 12 weeks. Each patient was diagnostically screened by an independent evaluator and completed a battery of outcome assessments at baseline, termination and 6-month follow up.

The present study utilized two process measures: the Interactive Process Assessment ([IPA]; Klein, Milrod, Busch, 1999), developed specifically to identify …

Painted Slang: The Caricatural Aspects Of French Painting, 1850–1880, Melina V. Kervandjian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A complicated relationship between painting and caricature emerged in France in the 1850s and 1860s when writers like Baudelaire and Champfleury, who were known for their work on painting and painters, produced a number of texts focusing on caricature and caricaturists. Such writings legitimized imagery previously relegated to the realm of "low art" by declaring caricature integral to the aesthetic discourses of the nineteenth century.

The legitimization of caricature also involved a concurrent effort by artists like Honore Daumier, Gustave Courbet, and Paul Cezanne, who incorporated caricatural elements within their painted works. Rather than adopting the traditional strategy of marginalizing …

Chaucer's Troilus And Criseyde In Male Homosocial Contexts: The Politicization Of Same-Sex Desire, Richard E. Zeikowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explore the dynamics of homosociality in late medieval culture, investigating both Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and its cultural and political environments. I articulate two conflicting attitudes toward male same-sex relations: one affirming and celebratory, the other homophobic. I conclude that Chaucer's poem both replicates and generates a late medieval sociocultural discourse characterized by tension between normative male same-sex behavior and the potential politicization of such behavior.

In the introductory chapter, I survey important recent historical and feminist criticism of Troilus and Criseyde and situate my project within the current debate regarding definitions of premodern sexuality. In chapter 2, part …

Redemption And Recovery: An Ethnographic Comparison Of Two Drug Rehabilitation Programs, A Faith Community And A Therapeutic Community, Daniel E. Hood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnography of long-term residential programs for drug users compares a therapeutic community (TC) with an evangelical Christian "training program." Using participant observation and life history interviews, it pursues three themes. The first is comparative and descriptive. It poses a basic similarity between the ideologically disparate programs. Parallels in program process and personal experience of "identity transformation" (conversion) are described. Despite the religious/secular divide, important similarities in anthropological assumptions are also identified. Contrary to earlier research, the singularity of the clientele is demonstrated. Other parallels include the ritual function of prayer and encounter, the centrality of selective biographical reconstruction, and …

The Structure And Procedures Of Hostage/Crisis Negotiation Units In United States Police Organizations, Robert Joseph Louden

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hostage/Crisis negotiation was formally developed as a police function in the United States by the New York City Police Department in 1972–1973. The procedure has saved countless fives. There have also been many hostage/barricade situations which ended in disaster.

This study is an analysis of the hostage/crisis negotiation practices of 276 local, county and state police agencies in the U.S. which employ at least 100 sworn officers and utilize some standard system of negotiation for response to hostage and barricade situations. A four-page questionnaire developed specifically for the project provided data about policy matters, organizational configurations, and about the selection …

Creating Art And Artists: Late Nineteenth-Century American Artists' Studios, Karen A. Zukowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the studios of American painters and sculptors working in the cosmopolitan era of the late nineteenth century. Between the Philadelphia Centennial and World War I, most makers of fine art worked in studios furnished with old furniture, personal mementos, historic relics and superbly-crafted objets d'art, all rich in evocative associations. In these spaces artists made art, taught art, sold art, entertained friends and patrons, and kept house. These studios were often opened to the public, they were featured in newspaper and journal articles, and they appeared in paintings and novels, making them quasi-public places. Born out …

The Development Of The Meanings Of Think And Know Through Conversation, Lea Kessler Shaw

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An apparent discrepancy in the literature on mental verbs between findings of experimental studies (young children fail to contrast terms) and observational studies (children use terms correctly in conversation) can be reconciled using Nelson and Lucariello's (1985) theory of word meaning development. According to their analysis, three aspects of word meaning develop in order: reference, denotation, and sense. For success at experimental tasks, children must have attained a system of interrelated word meanings (sense). However, children's initial uses of think and know take their meanings from the roles in the language games in which they occur (Wittgenstein, 1953).

In this …

The Women Of The Ten, Twent', Thirt': Popular Melodrama Theatre In Turn-Of-The-Century New York, Barbara Meredith Waldinger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the first decade of the twentieth century, when the population of New York City was growing by leaps and bounds because of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, a short-lived theatre movement known as the "ten-twenty-thirty," or, more familiarly, the "ten, twent', thirt," was born. Originally named for the low prices of the tickets, the term came to encompass various types of touring companies that travelled throughout the country, resident stock companies, and hundreds of plays, mostly melodramas, written expressly for this movement. Created by enterprising producers, managers, and playwrights, the ten, twent', thirt' catered to the needs of the working-class …

Parental Stress, Personal Authority, And Family Environment Of Puerto Rican Women, Eduvigis Cruz-Arrieta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The experience of parental stress (stress related to maternal characteristics such as sense of competence, isolation, and perceived restrictions imposed by the role of mother,its relation to the degree of personal authority within the families of origin —being connected and a part of the family of origin while acting from a differentiated position within it and the discrepancies in perception of the families of procreation vs. the families of origin of 126 Mainland and Island-born Puerto Rican women was examined. The participants' perceptions of three specific family characteristics: cohesion (the degree of commitment, help, and support family members provide for …

Adult Attachment And Maternal Representations Of Gender During Pregnancy: Their Impact On The Child's Subsequent Gender Role Development, Leslie A. Gibson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated the relationship between attachment, maternal gender representations of the child formed during pregnancy, and the development of sex-typed play at 28 months in 34 mother-infant pairs. Mothers were interviewed during their third trimester using the Pregnancy Interview (PI), a semi-structured interview that assesses women's representations of their babies and their overall experience of pregnancy, and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which assesses adults' working models of attachment. Maternal gender representations were scored using the Maternal Gender Representation Codes which assess subjects' overall narratives regarding the issue of gender with respect to their children during the Pregnancy Interview. …

The Relationship Between Internal Object Representations And Affective Style: A Tat Study, Robin B. Kerner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explored the relationship between internalized object representations and interpersonal affective style (AS). Subjects were drawn from a sample of families participating in the Yale Psychiatric Institute Family Study (Diamond & Doane, 1994). The present study examined only the parents in these families (N = 70). At the time of their child's psychiatric admission, these subjects were administered the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and participated in a family interaction task in order to assess their affective style (AS; Doane et al., 1981). TATs were scored utilizing Westen's (1985, revised 1989) Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (SCORS). It was …

The Calamus Root: American Gay Poetry Since World War Ii, Walter Ralph Holland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that there is a clear gay poetic tradition dating back to nineteenth century Europe, and it describes an historical taxonomy for gay poetry in America since 1945 by reference to its characteristic themes, influences and leading figures. After a brief discussion of early precursors such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, C. P. Cavafy, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden, the dissertation traces, through close explication of texts, the works of Harold Norse, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Frank O'Hara, Adrian Stanford, Richard Howard, Alfred Corn and Essex Hemphill. The influences on such poets of …