Digital Commons Network^™

The Effects Of Social Power Bases Within Varying Organizational Cultures, Ayanna Cummings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on social power in the context of organizational culture and how this relationship impacts outcomes of follower compliance and trust. Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or a course of events (Handgraaf, et al., 2008). There are six different types of social power, including informational, referent, legitimate, coercive, rewarding, and expert (Fontaine & Beerman, 1977). Each type of social power may lead to varying psychological outcomes, such as compliance, satisfaction, and agreement. To date, the empirical literature has not fully addressed the issue of whether one type of power is more …

The Contributions Of Child And Romantic Attachment To Sleep Quality, Karen Estefane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Little is known about the relation between attachment and sleep, although both develop around the first year of life and mutually influence each other. Furthermore, attachment styles and dimensions have been associated with sleep difficulties in both childhood and adulthood. However, these findings have not been consistent, especially among dismissing individuals. In addition, the specific contributions of both child and romantic attachment to sleep quality have not been investigated thus far. This cross-sectional study aims to examine the ways child and romantic attachment are associated with sleep quality. A sample of 671 heterosexual residents of the United States, aged 18 …

Trump’S “America First” Trade Policy And The Politics Of U.S. International Investment Agreements, Jesse Liss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous sociological studies on U.S. trade policy institutions concluded that “free trade” political actors had durable power to determine U.S. trade policy. This conclusion was proven wrong when the Trump administration promised “a new direction” and to implement an “America First” trade policy. My dissertation serves to explain the U.S.’ political transition away from “free trade” and towards “nationalist” trade policy. I do this by examining the politics of U.S. international investment agreements, which are central to U.S. trade policy. As case studies, I use the investment agreements from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership …

Culture And Mental Health: Considering The Role Of The Complex Cultural-History In Irish-American Population, Tiffinie Patricia Sesko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the mental health of Irish immigrants and first generation Irish Americans. As the Irish-American population makes up such a large portion of the entire population of the United States, it is important we acknowledge its origin and take that into account where mental illness and treatment are concerned as the Irish culture has a pronounced effect on mental health. The intended audience of this review are expert and non-expert members of the clinical setting and community who may gain insight on helping a client or family member find a way to understand and express repressed feelings affectively. …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

Genealogy Of The Concept Of "Hate Crime": The Cultural Implications Of Legal Innovation And Social Change, Roslyn Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The term "hate crime" is new to legislative and public discourse, as well as legal and social science scholarship. A decade after the concept of a "hate crime" was introduced in Congress, the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), to punish criminal actors who target victims because of their characteristics (race, color ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, gender, gender identity, or disability). Using relevant archival sources, this project uses genealogical qualitative methods to examine the interplay of cultural elements manifested in this provocative term, which reflect dominance and subjugation among social groups (In- and Out-Groups) …

An Experimental Investigation Of Emotional Labor Display Rules And Performance In A Human Resources Sexual Harassment Interview Simulation, Jolie M.B. Terrazas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Human Resource (HR) professionals are expected to engage in emotional labor (EL), or, management and control of their own emotions and emotional expression, during sexual harassment (SH) investigations. This EL expectation, or display rule (DR), is dynamic and complex requiring suppression of emotions and expressions of neutral empathy and is thus termed a dynamic neutral-empathic DR. Prior research shows that DRs in other occupations function as job demands that can deplete employees’ personal resources and negatively affect performance. The current study investigates the impact of the dynamic neutral-empathic DR by testing a process model that was developed via an …

Mapping How Culture In New York City And London Influences Respectively The Iconic Fashion Brands Of Kors And Mcqueen: A Case Study, Carol Brathwaite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an explanatory case study that applies geographic information systems (GIS) data, biographical data, and other secondary data. It includes mainly qualitative data collection and analysis; furthermore, the study examines quantitative data on the cultural events offered within each city. Overall, this case study adopts a theoretical perspective. The two individual cases (based on a multiple, holistic case-study design framework) of fashion culture in New York City and London, as per Michael Kors and Alexander McQueen respectively, represent ‘confirmatory cases or presumed replications of the same phenomenon’ (Yin 2014:59). Each describes the house’s fashion aesthetics as well as …

Individual Levels Of Bias And Immigration Policies In The United States: A Test And Extension Of The Dual Processing Model Of Bias, Lorraine Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study was a test and extension of the Dual Process Model of bias on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the United States. The Dual Process Model predicts that people who score higher on either the Social Dominance Orientation scale or the Right Wing Authoritarian scale will hold more negative attitudes toward immigrants, particularly if immigrants are viewed as a threat. A sample of 315 participants from across the United States was recruited using Amazon’s M Turk site. This study used a combination of attitudinal measures, policy scales, and experimental vignettes. The study found that the Dual …

Underrepresentation Of Women In Politics: Focus On New York City, Yuliya Szczepanski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the factors that account for underrepresentation of women in American politics play out in New York City. Although women comprise more than a half of the country’s population, and more women than men are registered and turn out to vote, the United States is below average in terms of percentage of women politicians as compared to other countries, and keeps dropping in those ratings. Further, New York City, arguably one of the most diverse and liberal cities in the U.S., has never elected a female mayor, and, in 2017, only about a quarter of the city …

From Design To Completion: The Transformation Of U.S. War Memorials On The National Mall, Sara Jane Weintraub

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at U.S. war memorials on the National Mall built between 1983 – present. Each memorial designer was selected through an open design competition process and was subject to the same government approval processes. The Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), the National Capitol Monuments Commission (NCMC), and the National Park Service (NPS) all must approve memorials built on the National Mall. In some cases, the memorials shared project architects and sponsoring agencies. The case studies show that the design competition process ultimately shapes the meaning and appearance of the built memorials.

I argue that the guidelines, winning design, …

From Targets To Agents: Women's Perceptions Of Their Vulnerability And The Strategies They Use To Resist, Alexis Halkovic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Women in the U.S. are sexually victimized at high rates and are socialized to believe they are unable to defend themselves. While there is ample evidence that women can successfully fight off assailants using physical force (Clay-Warner, 2002; Ullman, 2007), women’s self-defense training initiatives are not funded by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) or any national anti-violence organizations (Carlson, 2014). The NRA, on the other hand, tailors programs to instruct women to use guns for self-defense leaving them as the only national organization promoting women’s right to defend themselves (Carlson, 2014). This project interrogates how women think about their …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

Writing For Strangers: Structural Transformations Of The Public Letter, 1640-1790, Shang-Yu Sheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines public letters in England during the period spanning the English Civil War to the French Revolution, showing how authors employed the printed epistolary form to imagine different relations with the “stranger readers” who constituted the nascent reading public. I employ a formalist approach to analyze the various rhetorics made possible through the public letter’s framed structure, focusing on the assemblages of the narrative positions of letter writer, addressee, and reader. Each chapter describes a mode of the public letter in socio-spatial terms: spectacle, network, community, and public. Building on studies in book history and print culture, this …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

Past Peer Victimization Experiences And Current Psychological Well-Being And Ethnic Identity Among South Asian College Students, Rejitha Nair

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Very little is known about the peer victimization experiences of South Asian immigrant students and the factors involved in these experiences. The present study retrospectively investigated the peer victimization experiences of South Asian immigrant students in high school, the perceived reasons for victimization, and how these experiences relate to their psychological well-being and ethnic identity as college students. Two hundred and twenty college students, who were first or second generation immigrants from South Asia (e.g., India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) and attended high school in the United States, participated in the study.

Overall, the results revealed that …

Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Performance art, with its origins in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, has long been a political, politicized, and transgressive form of art, posing challenges to art world institutions, political and social norms, and the nature of art itself through practitioners’ unconventional uses of the body, space, and audience/viewer participation. Much of the power of performed art comes from its performative and transitory nature: it does not simply express, represent, or communicate information. Rather, performative art forms such as installation or performance are productive of political aesthetics. Art may not necessarily intervene directly with political, legal, and legislative decisions or acts, but …

The Lived Experience Of Feeling Disrespected, Nadine Donahue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study is to explore the lived experience of feeling disrespected. The participants were registered professional nurses, with at least two years of clinical experience. A phenomenological approach utilizing Giorgi’s method was used to analyze the data and interpret the findings for this study. New knowledge about feeling disrespected contributes to nursing science and may help nurses and organizations that employ them, provide a healthy work environment that supports and retain them. The experience of feeling disrespected was illuminated by the following themes; “Powerless, feeling like a “nobody,” treated like you are “stupid,” utter discouragement and broken …

No More False Heavens: In The Wake Of Campus Sexual Violence, Destry Sibley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project [https://arcg.is/0zy0eb] explores the crisis of sexual assault on college campuses. The project draws on a collective "biography" of women students and their experiences, as well as creative writing and data visualization. It exists on the web and uses a mix of media -- data interactives, photographs, writing, audio, video, and annotated text are all possible mediums. (Only audio is collected from interviewees.)

Through this project I seek to consider issues of gender and inclusion within a college institution, with a particular focus on the built environment of the campus as metaphor. How does the architecture of …

Féminisme Oblige: Katharine Susan Anthony And The Birth Of Modern Feminist Biography, 1877-1929, Anna C. Simonson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Féminisme Oblige examines the life and work of Katharine Susan Anthony (1877-1965), a feminist, socialist, and pacifist whose early publications on working mothers (Mothers Who Must Earn [1914]) and women’s movements in Europe (Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia [1915]) presaged her final chosen vocation as a feminist biographer. Between 1920 and 1958, Anthony published nine biographies of women, all of which in some way challenged the assumptions behind established gender norms and the status quo. Perhaps most importantly, Anthony’s biographies, grounded in the exciting new theories of Sigmund Freud, challenged women themselves to think differently about their prescribed …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Conceptualizing The Emergence Of Social Capital In Young Children, Courtney Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores the concept of social capital as it relates to children. Three major theorists, Coleman (1988), Putnam (1995), and Bourdieu (1986), offer different conceptualizations of social capital, but all agree that social capital exists within relationships amongst people and allows them to facilitate an action or receive some sort of benefit. Within much of social capital literature, children are mostly viewed as passive recipients of social capital from their parents and teachers, as opposed to being acknowledged as creators of their own social capital. More recent research is starting to recognize the latter and to conceptualize how children, …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Cruising Borders, Unsettling Identities: Toward A Queer Diasporic Asian America, Wen Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I challenge the dominant conceptualization of Asian Americanness as a biological and cultural population and a cohesive racial category. Instead, I consider it as a form of flexible subjectivity and an affective emergence that occurs and materializes due to the multiple sites of convergence in the neoliberal assemblage of model minority ideology, imperialist geopolitical history, racialized queer politics, and criminal (in)justices. I examine the spatial and temporal configurations of Asian American subjectivity through a queer and postcolonial lens, first by conducting a critical historical review of the category of Asian American in the geopolitical history of psychological …

Seeing And Being Seen: A Multimodal Inquiry Of Multilingual High School Newcomers And Their Contributions To Educational Communities, Ivana Espinet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation research followed the experiences of seven high school newcomers who chose to participate in an internship program, assisting elementary school students, some of whom were also emergent bilinguals. This study used ethnographic and visual methodologies to explore young people’s evolving understanding of teaching, learning, and languaging as members of a community of practice within the internship.

The internship provided a space for the young people to make sense of schooling in their new country. The narratives that the interns shared highlight how the set of linguistic and cultural-historical repertoires of practice that they entered with shaped how they …

Patterns Of Injury In Homicide Relationships: Clinical, Psychological, And Investigative Implications, Shea L. Alvarez Cussen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite accounting for only 1.3% of all violent crime, homicide still, perhaps more than ever, garners widespread fascination. It has long been recognized as a complex event characterized by variations in behavioral style, level of violence, motivation, and personal interaction. Mixed findings and methodological variation (i.e., lack of standardized method of measuring injury severity, sampling bias, varying definitions of victim-offender relationships) regarding severity of wounding and victim-offender relationship highlight the need for more empirical research. The importance of considering multiple elements of a crime when attempting to obtain a psychological understanding of victim-offender dynamics has been neglected. In an effort …

An Evaluation Of The Effects Of The Search For Education, Elevation, And Knowledge (Seek) Program On Short- And Intermediate-Term Outcomes, Raymond Galinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) program is an educational opportunity program within the City University of New York designed to provide economically and academically disadvantaged students, who otherwise would not have such access, the opportunity to attend college and to succeed once enrolled. However, despite being in existence for a half-century, surprisingly little is known about how the SEEK program contributes to student achievement and success. This study was the first to empirically measure the short- and intermediate-term impacts of this program on student outcomes.

Using propensity scores to match SEEK students to similar non-SEEK students to …

Procedural Justice For Youth: Discrepancies In The Provision Of Defense Counsel For Youth In The Juvenile Justice System, Emily K. Pelletier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Youth in the juvenile justice system experience racially disparate outcomes at all contact points throughout the system process, despite race-neutral state policies governing the juvenile justice system. States provide defense counsel for indigent youth in the juvenile justice system through policies containing race-neutral language; however, each state maintains different policies protecting youth rights to defense counsel. This study questions the relationships among state policies protecting youth rights to defense counsel, racially disparate outcomes for youth in the juvenile justice system, and state socioeconomic and racial composition. The study relies on content analysis to transform qualitative state policies into quantitative data …