Digital Commons Network^™

Remaking Cinema: Black Hollywood Films, Filmmakers, And Finances, Kiana A. Carrington

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of my project was to create a dataset of black film that can be used for analysis of fiscal trends in black film. It includes the estimated budget, domestic and worldwide box office numbers for over 700 American black films. I defined black films as those that centered on African American stories and African American characters, or were made by Black filmmakers. I also included movies embraced by African American audiences that were made by non-Black filmmakers like Bad Boys, Django Unchained, and The Color Purple. I used a combination of Box Office Mojo, The Black Cinema Database, …

Points Of Reference: Humanities Content For Media Studies, Carolyn A. Mcdonough

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Points of Reference: Humanities Content for Media Studies is a proposed research method designed for students to help them analyze humanities content encountered in undergraduate media studies courses, specifically within commercial advertising. The project is informed by Critical Theory developed by The Frankfurt School as well as by contemporary digital humanities scholars. Points of Reference theorizes a digital pedagogical training tool as a browsing gallery that helps student separate humanities references embedded into media, and to contravene the dominance of Google Search.

Essays On Investor Sentiment, Media, And Trading, Changyun Zhou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that span investor sentiment, media and trading.

Chapter 1: I introduce a direct cross-border sentiment measure of foreign investors and find such foreign sentiment generates significant economic effects on market-level prices. It predicts significant return reversals in the destination markets both in-sample and out-of-sample. This foreign sentiment is unique and distinct from local sentiments in either origin or destination markets. Instrumental-variable and event-based analyses support a large causal effect of cross-border sentiment with, e.g., a multiplier of 4-5. Capital flows contain an important foreign sentiment component, and a residual component positively predicting returns. …

The Power Of A Sound Mind: Exploring Meditation And Sound Therapies For Treating The Emotional Impact Of Tinnitus, Sabeena A. Ramnanan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Tinnitus is described as a sound perceived by an individual that has no external source. Some individuals with tinnitus can habituate to this phantom sound, while others become emotionally disturbed by it. There are several theories which attempt to rationalize the cause of tinnitus, and various treatments which aim to eliminate, mask, or facilitate habituation to one’s tinnitus. Current common treatments include sound therapies and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), either in isolation or in combination with one another. However, not all these treatments aim to address the emotional impact of tinnitus. Novel treatments are emerging, with some attempting to reduce the …

Data Analysis And Visualization To Dismantle Gender Discrimination In The Field Of Technology, Quinn Bolewicki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, a significant population is facing an uphill battle trying to thrive in an industry that has seen exponential growth in recent years. Women, who account for approximately 50.8% of the U.S. population are statistically underpaid and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Despite women-led technology teams establishing a 21% greater return on investment than teams who don’t, and young women largely outperforming men in math according to a 2015 study, there are only three fortune 500 companies led by women, and they comprise only 10% of internet entrepreneurs. Research generates hundreds of articles, infographics, …

Improving The Accuracy Of Juror Self-Reports Of Bias During Rehabilitative Voir Dire, Natalie Gordon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The courts have long acknowledged pretrial publicity (PTP) as a source of juror bias. To safeguard defendants due process rights, jurors who harbor bias are frequently asked during voir dire if they can set aside their bias and be fair and impartial. Yet, jurors’ self-reports of their ability to be fair and impartial are largely inaccurate. For example, regardless of their level of exposure to PTP, jurors typically report an ability to be fair and impartial. Therefore, this method of so-called “juror rehabilitation” is ineffective. This project examines conformity pressures that may be inhibiting accurate self-reporting during juror rehabilitation and …

Mario Levrero: Un Estudio Fenomenológico De Su Obra, Sergio Alves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines three novels of Mario Levrero, which have an unnamed first-person narrator, and his autobiographical-essay-memoir type of works. The novels, known as the “involuntary trilogy”, have been considered by many as a kind that belongs to the subgenre of the fantastic. In both types of literature, we agreed that Husserlian phenomenology was an unavoidable and substantial frame for any discussion. The part of the fictional narrative considered here, by its plots, themes, narrator and characters, vocabulary and concepts, brought us to observe parallelisms with phenomenology as a discipline and body of knowledge, and as a process and attitude. …

Examining The Transient Neural Dynamics Underlying Working Memory Maintenance For Complex Visual Stimuli, Chelsea Reichert Plaska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working memory (WM) is the temporary storage of information to accomplish a future goal. The WM delay period is the time after encoding but before retrieval when information is being maintained, typically in the absence of relevant stimuli. Understanding how the brain supports maintenance during the delay period, and how neural activity and connectivity are related to memory is critical for advancing both basic knowledge as well as informing declines in memory and cognition related to neurodegenerative diseases and healthy aging. An open question in the field of WM research is how information is stored during this delay period. One …

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 …

Influence Of Demographic, Clinical, And Neuroimaging Variables On Neuropsychological Recovery Trajectories After Moderate-To-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury, Elizabeth J. Leif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is prevalent in people of all ages and all walks of life. Cognitive deficits are common after TBI and the recovery patterns are known to be variable across individuals. The current study investigates diffuse axonal injury (DAI), cerebral blood flow (CBF), and focal lesions, in addition to post-traumatic amnesia (PTA), as possible predictors of cognitive trajectory in moderate-to-severe TBI patients. Cognitive trajectory was evaluated with a battery of neuropsychological tests that were combined into three domains: processing speed, verbal learning, and executive function. Patients (N=44) were tested three times at 3, 6, and 12 months post-injury. …

Reimagining Post-Secondary Training, Community College, And Welfare Supports, Aaron Azerad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper seeks to study the income patterns at the sub-bachelorette level through community colleges and workforce training programs. Using 2018 U.S. Census PUMA microdata, this thesis not only explores which fields of study, industries, and occupations have a sufficient number of observations to determine whether they provide incomes which are commensurate with a middle class livelihood but, also whether these jobs are plentiful in number.

The second goal is to evaluate the effects of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (the Clinton era welfare reform) and how it has influenced Giuliani era ‘work requirement’ initiatives tied …

Spilling The Tea In Bilingual Latinx New York City Department Of Education School Social Workers: Towards Entre Nos, Cindy M. Bautista-Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social workers play an important role in schools. There are about one million children enrolled in the New York City Department of Education(NYCDOE) school system, across 1,843 schools (New York City Department of Education, 2020). Of those students, the largest demographic group is the Latinx population, which has been increasing steadily since 2011. Therefore, there is an urgent need not only to increase the numbers of culturally responsive bilingual Latinx social workers, but also to understand their professional experiences. In order to address this gap in knowledge, the roles of bilingual Latinx school social workers as culturally responsive practitioners in …

Bc Bound: A Pathway Designed To Support Non-Traditional Students, Fiona J. Chan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper reviews the creation and practices of the Brooklyn College BC Bound Program, focusing on its mission and structure. The BC Bound Program is a one-semester service at Brooklyn College that admits and supports individuals with their high school equivalency diploma. Through an interview with a coordinator of the program and students who completed the BC Bound Program in their first semester, we can understand its positive impact on college students in their first semester and beyond. Program structure is key in analyzing the process by which the BC Bound program is and can be implemented effectively. Under the …

Migration And Work: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis Of Migrant Groups And Their Labor Experiences, Post Migration, Jill Douek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although there is a large body of literature about migration and employment post migration, much of it is limited to study designs restricting either migrant groups or countries. In other words, current research is limited to focusing either a) only on one migrant group (usually expatriates), thereby failing to compare it to other migrant groups within the same country or cross-nationally or b) on multiple migrant groups in one country, thereby making it difficult to draw comparisons cross-nationally across those migrant groups. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to 1) examine the career-related outcomes, post migration, of three …

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 …

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 …

Constructing Curriculum: Centering Identities In Sex Education, Jozette Belmont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sex education (sex ed) is a state-by-state and school-by-school issue, and there are no federal laws which mandate medically accurate education. In New York, schools only offer one semester of health education which often happens in the last semester of twelfth grade. Further, LGBTQIA+ people’s sexual health and identities are rarely mentioned. Therefore, this project asks: What are the ways sex ed curricula and policies in New York address the needs of LGBTQIA+ youth? To answer this question, I use a critical policy analysis to compare curriculum from the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and Peer Health Exchange …

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 …

The Impact Of State Violence On Women During The 22 Years Of Dictatorship In The Gambia, Isatou Bittaye-Jobe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the gendered dynamics of dictatorship in The Gambia by exploring the impact of state sanctioned violence on women during former President Yahya Jammeh’s twenty-two years of tyranny in the country. During the two-decade long brutal reign under Jammeh, Gambians from all walks of lives faced gross human rights violations and abuses that inflicted collective national trauma on the population. Therefore, this project examines how Jammeh’s tyrannical rule affected women’s rights, health, and wellbeing. Using a content analysis approach coupled with semi-structured interviews with victims and survivors, I argue that although the dictatorship affected all sectors of the …

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 …

Serial Killer: Gustave Flaubert's Pro-Woman, Woman-Killing Madame Bovary, Francesca Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will argue that Gustave Flaubert kills the women in Madame Bovary, all of whom are married and/ or mothers in the novel, in order to overtly represent the impossible conditions of womanhood and domestic life in nineteenth century France. Further, I will expose the ways in which Flaubert, through these killings, aims to release his woman characters from their lives of oppression and imprisonment, detailing their increasingly limited options in life and their lack of agency. Although Flaubert does attempt to give his women, in particular Emma Bovary, limited agency in the work, this agency is always …

The Different Components Of Active Shooter Incidents: Examining The Co-Occurrence Of Offender And Incident Characteristics, Jeffery R. Osborne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present dissertation examined 198 United States single-offender active shooter incidents and thematically differentiated cases based on 1) offender backgrounds, 2) precipitating stressors, 3) offender routine activity, 4) crime scene location, and 5) incident characteristics. Doing so contributed to the increasing number of studies that have stressed the importance of creating empirically-based models to better understand active shooter incidents and the offenders who are responsible. To structure this investigation into active shooter incidents, concepts within Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis were paired with analytical methodologies seen in Offender Profiling and Investigative Psychology research.

The findings illustrated that offenders could be …

School Recess And Changes To Children's Play Opportunities In New York City, Keyonna Hayes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The policy, No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 in US public schools was designed to improve how children learn and test in schools, but it has resulted in the decline or removal of recess from most schools. This thesis examines two important issues. The first issue is to assess the play opportunities that public elementary schools offer to children, in terms of both the time available for recess and the quality of the spaces and resources for play during recess. The second issue is to learn, alongside the question of the quality of school recess, how parents’ work …

Transcending Absence, Transforming Presence: Undocumented Migrants And The Navigation Of Forced And Chosen Space, Daniel Bloch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

By its very nature, undocumented migration challenges the notion of set, static borders, at once rendering them transcend-able while also throwing into stark relief the power and control exercised by the state over undocumented migrants along the arc of their journeys. Two main questions guide my analysis: 1) How are migrants forced to enter and navigate geographic space and zones of exclusion? and 2) How do migrants subvert enforced spaces – often categorized by limbo and uncertainty – both by marking them with their presence and by creating alternative spaces? I consider two compelling examples: In Chapter One, using the …

Is This My Body? A Manual On Navigating Child Masturbation Without Shame, Stephanie M. Amis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children’s natural exploration of their bodies and sexual expression through masturbation is often considered to be taboo by many adults and caregivers. It is important that children are taught that they have the right to explore their own bodies, to express and experience any sexual developments that may be happening. A child can be innocent and still have the freedom to explore the biological processes of their sexuality. In early Christianity, 19th century physicians and some 20th century psychologists greatly influenced the negative attitudes around aspects of child sexuality such as masturbation that still thrive today. As far as child …

When Is A Sandwich Too Much? A Critical Look At Teenage Parenthood And Its Impact On The Lives Of Their Parents, Shirley P. Grant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The transition into early parenthood also implies a shift to early grandparenthood for the parents of teenage parents. The stigmas and stereotypes associated with teenage pregnancy and parenthood are also experienced by their parents for the decisions their children have made. Furthermore, some of these grandparents are caregivers to aging parents while also parenting their younger children. These people, recently called, “the club sandwiched” generation, appear to be experiencing physical, social, economic, and psychological impacts because of their responsibilities of caring for three generations but have not yet received much attention in academic literature. Teenage pregnancy can affect any family. …

Non Ego Laudari Curo: Honor, Shame, And Aristocratic Competition In Tibullus’ Elegy, Federico Di Pasqua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation explores the ethics of shame and honor at the end of the Republic to offer new perspectives on Tibullus’ work and Roman elegy. By situating Tibullus’ corpus within his contemporaries’ aristocratic discourse on honor, my research argues that the elegiac narrator is not alien from the heroic self-assertion and pursuit of vengeance, typical of the honor-seeking elites of Roman antiquity. In my reading, Tibullus, while clad in elegiac non-conformity, is deeply committed to his contemporaries’ honor-driven ethos and, therefore, wary of the policing gaze of his fellow Romans. Albius Tibullus was an elegist and a citizen of equestrian …

The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies …

How Psychotherapists Practice In The Digital Era, Josh Weinstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The digital era, marked by digital devices connected via high speed data networks, has altered human experience in profound ways over the past 40 years. The potential for novel forms of human relating and fulfillment of desire has led to myriad changes in behavior, thought and unconscious activity. While many adapt or thrive in expanded reality, for some, the digital can be context, source and/or location for psychological affliction. When those who suffer seek psychological relief, how psychotherapists listen for, conceptualize and work with the effects of the digital matter a great deal. While theoretical and quantitative research literature exists …

Exploring The Effects Of Coworker Ostracism On Feedback Inquiry And Voice: The Mediating Role Of Proactive Motivation, Ethan G. Rothstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coworker ostracism occurs when employees perceive that their coworkers are ignoring or excluding them. The current work examines how coworker ostracism predicts feedback inquiry and voice, two proactive behaviors important for individual and organizational success. Specifically, I explored whether these relationships are mediated by three proactive motivation states: organizational identification, control appraisal, and positive affect. I also examined whether political skill and perceived organizational support (POS) moderated the relationships between coworker ostracism and proactive motivation states, as well as the proposed indirect effects. I collected data from 309 participants via TurkPrime, using a two-wave lagged design with measurements separated by …