Digital Commons Network^™

Historical Relationships Between Land Elevation And Socioeconomic Status In New York City: A Mixed Methods Gis Approach, Jennifer Brisbane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The role that topography has played in the development of New York City is essential to understanding its present urban form and foreseeing its changes. Geographers and economists have generally agreed that for cities in the United States, socioeconomic status increases with land elevation. This seemingly simple relationship between elevation and class, however, is complicated by factors such as technological innovations, economic shifts, politics, cultural perceptions, and the idiosyncrasies of cities and the neighborhoods within them. The lack of comprehensive research in this area coupled with conflicting findings warranted further exploration into the complex and changing relationships between elevation and …

Suburban Heat Islands: The Influence Of Residential Minimum Lot Size Zoning On Surface Heat Islands In Somerset County, New Jersey, Jennifer Renee Cox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The process of suburbanization blurs regional bounds, forms mega-regions and fosters the expansion of multifaceted environmental problems, such as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Defined by differences in air- and surface- temperature between rural and urban areas, UHI is the result of the characteristics of urbanization which modify the land surface condition, urban geometry, thermal properties of construction materials, anthropogenic heat and air pollution, which increase storage and re-radiation of heat to the atmosphere. Climate change is predicted to worsen the UHI effect. Hence, the objective of this research to characterize the UHI effect as it pertains to suburban …

Psychological Contracts In Information Exchanges, Stanislav Mamonov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Information assets continue to grow in importance of contribution to economic activity. Many emergent businesses, including Google, Amazon and Facebook, leverage crowd-sourced information assets as essential pillars supporting their business models. The appropriation of rights to information assets is commonly done through legal contracts. In practice this approach often fails to prevent conflicts between the information contributors and the companies claiming information rights. In research presented here I attempt to understand when and why the conflicts arise. I draw on psychological contract theory and I develop the framework of psychological contracts in information exchanges. I propose that intellectual property and …

"When I Heard About The March": Testimonies And Participatory Archiving In Peacebuilding, Carolina Muñoz Proto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the Memoscopio archive and its collection of testimonies about the 2009 World March for Peace and Nonviolence (the March). This collection came into existence during 2009 and 2010 through a participatory archiving project carried out by a team of peace advocates and researchers in collaboration with March participants. The March was a transnational and decentralized campaign that promoted peace, nonviolence, and justice through activities in 600 cities, social media, and a three-month march around the world. Through the case of Memoscopio and the March, this dissertation explores the personal and cultural meanings of transnational peace marchers in …

A Structural Approach To The Analysis Of Rock Music, Drew F. Nobile

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation situates itself in the middle of an ongoing debate about the applicability of Schenkerian analytical techniques to the analysis of pop and rock music. In particular, it investigates ways in which the standard conceptions of voice leading, harmonic function, and counterpoint may be updated to better apply to this new repertoire. A central claim is that voice-leading structure is intimately related to formal structure such that the two domains are mutually informing.

Part I of the dissertation focuses on harmonic and melodic theory. Chapter 2, "Harmonic Syntax," advocates for a conception of harmonic function based on syntax and …

From Backlash To Mobilization: Muslim American Prayer Spaces In Post-9/11 New York, George E. Melissinos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper argues that Muslim Americans mobilized against the threat of backlash post-9/11 through the creation of new prayer spaces and maintenance of prayer spaces already in existence before the terrorist attacks. I suggest that the successful mobilization of prayer spaces continues to provide a mechanism of support and unity against backlash for Muslim Americans in New York City since the events of September 11, 2001. I also explore how ineffective mobilization efforts, such as demonstrated by the Park51 project, fail to protect the Muslim American community against backlash.

Diaspora As Development Actors: A Source Of Human And Social Capital For Local Development In Turkey, Meryem Senay Ataselim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides an analysis of Turkish-American diaspora philanthropy - done through social and human capital transfers - and its role in impacting local development in Turkey. The study offers the consideration of a new kind of diaspora philanthropy, namely innovative philanthropy, which channels ideas, skills and experiences that have the potential to impact social change in local communities through social and human capital transfers.

The dissertation presents and analyzes two cases that have been supported by the Turkish-American diaspora. Case studies show that even though diaspora philanthropy towards Turkey is still relatively new and small in financial terms, there …

Collective Memory, Women's Identity And The Church, Jo Ana Elise Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Christianity, Judaism and Islam share a deliberative subjugation of women through ideologies, hierarchical structures and performative practices that effectively relegate women to an inferior position. The Christian tradition has one of the longest-standing and most consistent iconographies with regard to the characterization and status of women in society. The Christian church is prototypical of a religious institution iterating an ideology of women's inferiority through various mechanisms that lodge and preserve it in societal collective memory. This study examines three mechanisms used by the Church to preserve collective memory about women's inferior status in society: doctrine, liturgical practices and visual images …

Understanding Workplace Reciprocity Of Emergency Nurses: A Qualitative Study, Christine M. Corcoran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emergency nurses work with other health care providers under uncertain conditions to provide care to patients with all kinds of illnesses and afflictions from all walks of life. Despite implications that they must work together to accomplish their tasks, there are few studies that explore the relationships among emergency department personnel. Furthermore, there are even fewer that focus on the way emergency nurses work together to provide care to their patients. The purpose of the study was to understand the lived experience of workplace reciprocity of emergency nurses through the use of a qualitative phenomenological method. Nurses with three or …

The Intern Economy: Laboring To Learn In The Music Industry, Alexandre Frenette

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As internships become an increasingly normal part of early careers, there is a need to examine how internships really function, if--and how--they benefit interns and companies. Through participant observation at two firms and semi-structured interviews, I focus on one of the major users of unpaid intern labor--the music industry--to analyze the meanings of intern work, both for the interns themselves and their supervisors. Consequently, this research provides an account of how aspiring and current workers in a competitive industry make sense of and reproduce precarious work conditions. By focusing on how interns and employees construct the importance of the music …

I Hope I Don't See You Tomorrow: A Phenomenological Ethnography Of The Passages Academy School Program, Lee Adam Gabay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines Passages Academy, a school program that offers educational services for court-involved youth in New York City. Looking specifically at the Department of Education teachers who work in facilities run by the Department of Juvenile Justice, this research focuses on the beliefs and behaviors that inform the teaching experience within these facilities. The critical question of how these educators negotiate the learning spaces within this school community is also examined.

The question that informs much of this study is: how are the philosophies of the various stake-holding agencies enacted daily in real classroom settings? This leads to a …

The Process Of Separation For Victims Of Intimate Partner Violence: Evaluating Risk Of Indirect And Physical Abuse Relating To Interpersonal Events, Brittany E. Hayes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research has found that risk of physical abuse increases during the process of separation (Brownridge, 2006). Given the opportunity structure changes once the separation process begins, abusers may be more likely to engage in indirect abuse when their partner begins the process. Indirect abuse is the use of third parties, such as children or family/friends, to manipulate the abused woman. In the current study, opportunity is measured with both events abused women report and relationship characteristics that increase or decrease the likelihood the victim and offender converge in time and space.

The study relies on data from the Chicago …

Roundup Ready Nation: The Political Ecology Of Genetically Modified Soy In Argentina, Amalia Leguizamon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a case study of agrarian transformation in an agro-export society, Argentina. I study the process of adoption of the technological package of genetically modified (GM) soy in the Argentine countryside, its socio-ecological consequences, and Argentines' responses to it. In particular, this research addresses Argentina's unique situation of being a developing country that has positively embraced the biotechnology of GM seeds as a key accumulation strategy without the emergence of major contestation against GM soy monocropping. In order to answer the puzzle of quiescence, I look at how power relations structure access to social and environmental goods and …

Occupy Mall Street? How The Court Conditioned Public Space Where People Go, Anthony Maniscalco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the tension between practicable space and property rights. That tension has frequently animated legal contests over political expression in privately owned, publicly accessible marketplaces in the United States. Do American marketplaces function as marketplaces of ideas? Should they? In order to examine those questions, I survey the Supreme Court's considerations of expressive activity on public and commercial property, in particular, shopping centers. I begin by developing indications of public space, as well as noting the challenges for civic inclusion within the modern political sphere. Next, I survey historical practices of public space within (Western) marketplaces. Those practices …

Teachers At Work: Factors Influencing Satisfaction, Retention And The Professional Well-Being Of Elementary And Secondary Educators, Patrick Edward O'Reilly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study has been to explore the question of how factors in the work lives of teachers influence their experience of workplace satisfaction, and how satisfaction influences retention in the teaching profession. This study had three specific goals: (1) to examine whether five specified factors that teachers' encounter as workers influence their professional satisfaction, (2) to explore whether teacher satisfaction influences retention in the profession and (3) to determine whether school level taught plays a role in degrees of satisfaction a teacher experiences.

Data was collected over a period of five months, using a survey administered to …

Engaging Bad Governments: Resource Groups And Patterns Of Engagement In Bangladesh, Nayma Qayum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bangladesh's governments have pursued an aid-based neoliberal development agenda since the 1980s, which has allowed new resources and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to permeate rural society. These NGOs operate programs through resource groups, small groups of impoverished women who gather at the village or ward levels. This dissertation argues that resource groups have built new citizen-state relationships and enabled new forms of engagement between citizens and their governments. These new transactional relationships are governed simultaneously by informal institutions of accountability and informal institutions of exchange; the former allow actors to reinforce formal rules when badly-performing institutions deviate from them, and the …

Becoming Transnational Citizens: The Liberian Diaspora's Civic Engagement In The United States And In Homeland Peacebuilding, Janet Elizabeth Reilly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the relationship between civic participation in homeland peacebuilding and immigrants' political incorporation and integration in their local communities in the United States. It explores the impact of state (U.S. and Liberia) policies and local context on individuals' civic participation locally and in transnational activities. The study demonstrates the mechanisms through which state policies and local context influence Liberians' political participation in the United States and their transnational citizenship, defined as full legal membership and civic participation. The relationship between civic engagement in the United States and in transnational activities is not an adversarial one. Engagement with the …

Common Knowledge: The Epistemology Of American Realism, Mark Sussman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Common Knowledge: The Epistemology of American Realism, focuses on realist fiction (primarily the novel) at the end of the nineteenth century. Its motivating claim is that the central descriptive and thematic imperative of realism--to depict life "as it is" rather than in some idealized form--emerged in response to crises in the status of knowledge that resulted from an attempt by writers and readers to come to a common understanding of the relationship between private experience and an increasingly fragmented social world. While William Dean Howells's definition of realism as a form of writing that displays "fidelity to experience …

Xenakis In America, Charles Wolcott Turner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Iannis Xenakis had a long-standing interest in the U.S., but given the five years he spent here, little has been written about his experiences. This study attempts, through archival research and interviews, to document Xenakis’ time in the United States. Its subject is his relationship to American cultural institutions, and in what lured Xenakis here for musical composition and research.

The narrative treats the period from Copland’s invitation to Tanglewood in 1963, through Xenakis’ 1972 investment by France as a state-supported artist. While he visited the U.S. many times thereafter, he no longer sought long-term engagement with U.S. institutions, but …

On Becoming A Teacher (Or Not): Students Of Color's Perceptions Of Teachers' Work, Consideration Of Teaching As A Career, And Implications For Diversifying The Teaching Force, Amanda Lee Winkelsas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The racial/ethnic demographics of the American public school teaching force stand in contrast to the racial/ethnic demographics of the students and families who are served by our public school system. In an effort to understand the racial/ethnic demographic disparities between the teaching force and the public school student population, this study explores the perceptions of students of color as they relate to teachers' work, authority, and power. Utilizing a participatory, mixed methods approach in one public, urban, college preparatory school, I analyze the experiences, cultural models, and knowledges that shape students' perceptions of teachers' work and their own consideration of …

Acts Of Belonging: Perceptions Of Citizenship Among Queer Turkish Women In Germany, Ilgin Yorukoglu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how people who have multiple identifications develop a sense of belonging. It focuses on those with politicized, romanticized, and stigmatized identifications which are assumed to be in conflict with one another. My particular case is that of "queer" women of Turkish descent in Germany with Berlin as my main study site.

These people embody what is considered to be an oxymoron: being queer yet also Turkish, being a lesbian yet having a Muslim background, being of immigrant origin yet also German. In short, they are between all worlds and thus, seemingly, do not belong anywhere. Their ambiguous …

The Privileged "In-Between" Status Of Latino Jews In The Northeastern United States, Laura Limonic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is an in-depth look at how religion, class, and ethno-racial status interact and intersect to affect assimilation and integration prospects for new immigrants. The research focuses on Latin American Jewish immigrants in the Northeastern United States, a particularly interesting group to study because they are not easily classified within the American racial and ethnic system and existing ethno-racial categories. As a result, they are presented with a number of ethnic options that they can call upon. The choices they make as well as the constraints they face in making these choices, can broaden our understanding of contemporary immigrant …

The Other Tribeca: Immigrant Work And Incorporation Amid Affluence, Elizabeth A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Tribeca, a small, affluent neighborhood in the lower west side of Manhattan, is a microcosm of the service-and-information-based economic structure that characterizes many communities in other American cities today, and thus provides an opportunity to study the effects of this system. Tribeca residents are predominantly wealthy and work in high-end service-oriented professions, so they consume low-end personal services produced locally. Many of the people who provide these personal services in the neighborhood are foreign born. Although they share space and have regular interactions, conventional assumptions might suggest that Tribeca residents and immigrant service workers lack much in common, and have …

Cadê O Mico? Where Is The Tamarin?: Locating Monkeys In The Politics Of Land And Conservation In Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, Analía Villagra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The golden lion tamarin is a small, endangered monkey found in only a few municipalities in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This dissertation explores the project to conserve this rare primate, a project that links together agrarian reform, forest restoration, agroforestry, and conservation biology. Informed by Brazil's social and political history, and drawing from 12 months of fieldwork conducted in 2008 and 2010, this dissertation argues that by looking carefully at and for the tamarin, we discover the interrelated political, social, and animal relationships that weave together to produce conservation in southeastern Brazil.

Cafeteria, Commissary And Cooking: Foodways And Negotiations Of Power And Identity In A Women’S Prison, Amy Brooks Smoyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study uses foodways theory to build knowledge about the lived experience of incarceration by analyzing women’s narratives about prison food and eating. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 formerly incarcerated women in New Haven, CT. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. Findings explain the different ways that inmates collect, prepare, distribute and consume food, and the centrality of these activities to incarcerated life. By shedding light on these daily routines, the world of prison life comes into greater focus.

Thematic analysis of the data further illuminates the prison experience by suggesting the positive and negative ways that food …

Teachers Working With Families: Natural Enemies Or Necessary Allies?, Kirsten Cole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The complex and crucial connection between families and schools is embodied in relationship between individual teachers and their students' families. Research findings demonstrate that high levels of family engagement lead to greater success for students. Such findings drive policy mandates that hold individual teachers accountable for cultivating this relationship. However, not enough is known about how such mandates are enacted on the ground. In an era when teachers are required to adhere to the standardization of curriculum and the uniform recommendations of "best practice" pedagogic models, teachers must still draw on their whole, complex, human selves when seeking to foster …

The Digital Diaspora In Sunset Park: Information And Communication Technologies In Brooklyn’S Chinatown, Sarah Wendolyn Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis is that, contrary to expectations that working-class Chinese immigrants would have less access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and fewer skills in using them, struggling immigrants to Brooklyn's Chinatown are skilled at using ICTs and do so on a daily basis, in ways that enrich their relationships and transnational participation. They are able to do this despite the severe limitations that ethnic enclave employment places on their time and opportunities, in part because of heavy use of affordable internet cafes in the neighborhood. Building on a growing body of literature on new media and diaspora, this thesis …

Contact-Induced Changes In Word Order And Intonation In The Spanish Of New York City Bilinguals, Carolina Barrera-Tobón

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions (Nicolás es feliz versus Feliz es Nicolás, Es Nicolás feliz, Es feliz Nicolás, ‘Nicolas is happy’) in the Spanish of first- and second-generation Spanish-English bilinguals in New York City (henceforth NYC). The data used for the study come from a spoken corpus of Spanish in NYC based on 140 sociolinguistic interviews (details of the corpus will be presented in Chapter Three). This dissertation addresses the question of whether secondgeneration bilinguals have a less flexible word order in Spanish …

Blogging Chronic Illness And Negotiating Patient-Hood: Online Narratives Of Women With Ms, Collette Sosnowy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personal narratives about women's everyday lives with chronic illness are mapped onto the landscape of social media through blogging. Social media is facilitating an already-existing shift in patients' roles as they are increasingly enabled and expected to self-educate themselves about their illness, collaborate with providers, self-manage their care, and engage in health activism. The health care industry has seized on the widespread use of social media to bolster rhetoric that the accelerated knowledge development made possible through social media has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine. Critics, however, argue that responsibility and activism via digital technologies has become …

The Graying Of People With Intellectual And Developmental Disabilities: Organizational Efforts Of Community Service Providers In Adapting Facilities And Programming To Meet The Needs Of Older Adults, Donna M. Corrado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities are living longer, thereby creating unique challenges for the aging and disabilities networks. This qualitative multicase study explored the ways in which six community service organizations serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have adapted their facilities and programming in response to the growing cohort of older persons in their care. The study focused on the following adaptations: physical plant, financial models, workforce, medical care and programming. Twenty-two in-depth interviews were conducted with executive-level staff of the six participating organizations. Data was triangulated through examination of archival data, organizational documents, agency web sites, and …