Digital Commons Network^™

Play In The Undercommons: The Transformative Power Of Fugitive Practice In A Multiracial, International Teacher Inquiry Collective, Kushya Sugarman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Though scholars have begun to position youth’s fugitivity, refusal, and disengagement as logical responses to hostile environments, and as part of a larger legacy of Black speculative planning and action, most teachers do not. Elementary teachers, especially in urban contexts, notoriously struggle with “classroom management” and teachers across contexts cite behavior challenges, such as “disruptive” behavior, as the number one challenge facing our schools. In fact, up to 50% of novice teachers leave the profession in the first five years due to students’ behaviors. This dissertation interrogates the common trope of the wayward student who must be controlled. I consider …

The Beautiful And The Bullshit: Speaker And Listener Mental Representations Influence Bullshit Receptivity, Ryan Tracy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bullshit is a topic that has enjoyed an explosion of attention in both cognitive and social psychological research domains. While the picture painted thus far suggests that receptivity to such statements (i.e., perceiving meaning where none exists) hinges upon an individual’s ability to engage in reflective (vs. reflexive) cognitive processing, little attention has been paid to how purveyors of bullshit influence one’s willingness to engage with the message. This is critical to explore, given the status of misinformation in today’s media climate. A critical step involved in determining characteristics of speakers that predict bullshit receptivity is to understand how people …

Just Transitions: Critical Exploration Of Environmental Policy And Decision-Making Through The Lens Of Lived Stories, Mariya Marinova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research explores perspectives on just transition, what transitional policies and practices are already set in motion, the conditions necessary to achieve it, and how this knowledge can inform environmental policy. Focusing on West Virginia, it employs qualitative methodology with open-ended interviews and develops life sketches of transitions to demonstrate how deeply intertwined just transition is with the lives of the people in places marked by extractive industries. Combining guiding principles from environmental and landscape justice, energy justice, feminist energy systems framework, and place attachment theory, the findings reveal that just transitions need to be transformative, focusing on understanding how …

Competitive And Noncompetitive Credit Assignment To Reward Cues In The Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex, Mihwa Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the mechanisms underlying variations in credit assignment to reward cues, with a focus on the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC). The lOFC has long been implicated in signaling reward expectancies, with controversy as to whether it signals the economic value of future outcomes, their sensory features to guide behavior or both. However, whether the lOFC signals the relative (competition-dependent) or absolute (contiguity-dependent) credit of cues is unknown. To address this, I employed a combination of novel behavioral assays, in-vivo electrophysiological recordings and optogenetic stimulation in rats. In Chapter 2, I tested the suitability of a self-initiating variant of …

Radical Co-Teaching: How Building Relationships Creates Radical Co-Teaching Partnerships, Meagan L. Serrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the development of co-teaching relationships in K-12 classrooms in New York City. More than half of all teachers in New York City will be placed in co-taught classrooms, but they are not directly instructed on how to co-teach–and the relational aspects of co-teaching are largely ignored. This study uses New York public school teacher insights and experiences to understand what really goes into building strong co-teaching partnerships. Using a grounded theory framework for analysis, the research project examines the aspects of successful co-teacher relationships from the co-teacher perspective. The goal of this project is to understand how …

Reviving Hysteria: The Nineteenth Century At The End Of The Twentieth, Christina Quintana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores popular and medical representations of female madness in two time periods: the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. I argue that 1990s American culture produced an abundance of texts, images, and narratives that revitalized the iconography and medical discourses of late nineteenth-century hysteria. Analyzing popular texts, films, and cultural touchstones of the 1990s, I explore how Victorian ideas about women’s minds—such as the inherent feebleness of the female brain and nervous system; the fatalistic, life-altering effects of female puberty; the association between hysteria and deviant female sexuality; and the implicit racialization of hysteria and female madness more …

Health Behaviors And Physical Health Among Young Adults With Varying Psychometric Schizotypy, Christopher Liong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Schizophrenia has consistently been associated with increased rates of physical illness and early mortality. One explanation for this association might be poor health behaviors, as people with schizophrenia are more sedentary, less physically active, and more likely to engage in substance use compared to the general population. Schizotypy may be conceptualized as the phenotypic expression of increased risk for schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and dimensional models of schizotypy suggest that it varies on a continuum ranging from non-clinical (i.e. low schizotypy) to clinical (i.e. high schizotypy and dysfunction, as in schizophrenia). Though schizotypy and schizophrenia appear to share similar deficits and …

Brain Injury And Psychosocial Trauma: Outcomes Among Justice-Involved Individuals, Mahathi D. Kosuri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Justice-involved individuals experience disproportionately high rates of both traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and psychosocial traumas. However, these traumas have yet to be conceptualized together, leaving a chasm of research on how they interact and influence this population. The current study was the first to measure the effects of TBIs as well as psychosocial trauma among justice-involved men, within the context of executive functioning, history of justice involvement, and recidivism. A sample of men (N=95) from a private correctional facility were given the Ohio State University Traumatic Brain Injury Questionnaire (OSU-TBI-ID), the Lifetime Stressor Checklist- Revised (LSC-R), along with …

Black Horror Film And The Role Of Mood In Race Perception, Nicholas P. Whittaker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary discussions of black or antiracist art are often haunted by an air of pessimism. This pessimism rests on the intuition that art cannot change the political realities of antiblackness and/or our relationships with blackness. In this dissertation, I resist this hegemonic view by arguing that black horror films generate a particular, politically-valuable aesthetic experience. Specifically, they allow us to experience blackness and black people as unintelligible. This, I argue, runs counter to everyday experience of blackness; when blackness appears unintelligible, we lose the sense of satisfied comprehension that characterizes our everyday experiences of it. I argue that these films …

Race, Rebellion, And Counterinsurgency: California's Supermax Prisons, Stephen Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation project concerns the geographies of counterinsurgency in California’s super-maximum-security prisons. I argue that these facilities – the first of which opened in the mid-1980s, and which were more repressive and isolating than any of California’s existing prisons – were explicitly developed in response to powerful organizing by people in prison. As early as 1973, corrections administrators and prison officers argued that dangerous prison gangs, organized along racial and geographical lines, were behind prisoner militancy, and advocated for expansive security measures including indefinite confinement in supermax prisons. I demonstrate, however, that officers and administrators deliberately promoted conflict, attempting to …

Advancing Affective Computing: Emotion Recognition And Tracking Across Diverse Contexts (Varied Environments), Shao Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Affective Computing (AC) is an interdisciplinary field that recognizes, interprets, and processes human emotions. Emotions are complex, involving consciousness, physical sensations, and behavioral expressions, and are significant in various domains like mental health, human-computer interaction, and social security. Real-world applications of AC include monitoring drivers’ emotional states to improve road safety and understanding the emotions expressed by artists in visual arts. Traditional methods relying on facial expressions often fall short due to the nuanced nature of emotions, which vary across individuals, cultures, and contexts. Accurate AC systems require sophisticated, multimodal models to handle these variations and external factors like noise …

Resting-State Eeg Microstate Features For Major Depressive Disorder Classification, George M. V. Quinn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neuroimaging studies have revealed consistent abnormalities in functional connectivity within specific neural networks that may serve as biomarkers for major depressive disorder (MDD). It is important to find inexpensive, non-invasive techniques that target these biomarkers to make diagnosis easier and more objective. EEG microstates are quasi-stable potential topographies that are thought to reflect the quasi-stable network activity of the underlying neural generators. MDD has been shown to alter features of the four canonical EEG microstates (A, B, C, D) with some conflicting results. The most consistent network abnormalities in MDD are found in the anterior default mode network, and this …

"White Slaves Of California": Race, Religion, And The Railroad In Maria Amparo Ruiz De Burton's The Squatter And The Don, Katie Buonanno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In The Squatter and the Don (1885), Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton depicts the decline of the Alamars, a patrician Californio family, in the years after California was annexed by the United States. This thesis explores the different rhetorical maneuvers Ruiz de Burton makes to place the Californios in a broad, enfranchising Anglo-American national paradigm. The novel negotiates the messy, competing histories of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonialism, ultimately making the case for the enduring presence of Spanish missionization in the region, as well as the cultural assimilability of the Californio population. While the novel has frequently been read as …

Supporting Social Equity Through Informal Spaces On An Urban Campus, Eve B. Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on applying research to design in the setting of higher education. Specifically, it explores the informal spaces outside the classroom at a predominantly Black college in an urban setting. The existing structural challenges facing college students are many, including issues related to financial resources, mental health/wellness, family responsibilities, psychosocial identity formation, and structural racism. These challenges were compounded by the events of the spring of 2020, when a heightened awareness of anti-Black racism, combined with the hardships of COVID-19, brought college campuses to a close and masses of people to the streets to protest the unjust killings …

Original Vs. Simplified Miranda Rights: The Impact On Miranda Rights Comprehension And Subsequent Waiver Decisions, Sydney Baker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Youths’ developmental immaturity negatively impacts their ability to meaningfully understand and appreciate their Miranda rights, raising questions about the validity of their waiver decisions. Moreover, most Miranda warnings are long, written at advanced reading levels, and contain complex sentence structure and vocabulary, which further hinders comprehension. In response, several jurisdictions have begun to use developmentally informed Miranda warnings for youth. However, research has yet to determine whether this improves youths’ ability to make informed Miranda waiver decisions. As such, the current research study explored whether simplified Miranda warnings increased youths’ comprehension of their rights, whether Miranda comprehension was related to …

Individual Differences In Wild Asian Elephant Behavior: Links Between Innovation And Responses To Novelty Across A Mosaic Landscape, Sarah L. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An animal’s responses to a novel or changing environment are influenced by a number of behavioral traits and cognitive abilities associated with flexible decision making. Animals also exhibit strong consistency in some behavioral responses, described as personality traits, which may influence their ability to adjust to environmental changes. It is important to investigate both flexibility and consistency in behavior, as well as how these two characteristics interact with each other, to understand the range of individual variation in behavior and decision making within a species. This knowledge can also help us understand how some species and individuals within a species …

The Crisis Of Market Society And The Fascist Solution In The Work Of Karl Polanyi, Nicholas E. Reynolds

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The revival of interest in the work of Karl Polanyi, which has generated valuable lines of inquiry across disciplines, has largely neglected Polanyi’s extensive writings on fascism. This dissertation argues that Karl Polanyi should be considered a theorist of fascism, one whose thinking revolves around the concept of a “fascist solution” arising as a consequence of a terminal deadlock of market society. This dissertation surveys two decades of Polanyi’s work to construct a full picture of his theory of fascism and its importance for his broader theorizing about the dynamics of capitalist societies. Polanyi makes at least three specific contributions …

Maternal Subjectivities In The 18th And 19th Century British Novel, Anastasia Vahaviolos Valassis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How is the maternal subjectivity narrated in the pages of the 18th and 19th century British novel? This dissertation examines this question. The novel’s close connection to the child’s subjectivity and perspective is something woven into its very fabric, and so the mother is often a side character, an object in the story. She is an obstacle to be overcome, a distant idea, an absent figure, or even someone too perfect to be represented on the page. The novel often reflects or mirrors this culturally and psychologically accepted way of viewing the mother. The tracing of the narratives in which …

Self-Perceived Cognitive Functioning In Motoric Cognitive Risk Syndrome: Enhancing Risk Detection In Health Disparity Older Adults, Caroline O. Nester

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Motoric Cognitive Risk Syndrome (MCR) is a predementia condition that combines two clinical presentations associated with dementia: slow gait speed and subjective cognitive concerns (SCC). MCR diagnosis is associated with increased risk for dementia over its individual components of SCC or slow gait alone, making it a valuable marker of early neurodegenerative changes. MCR does not require expensive, time-consuming assessments to be diagnosed, broadening accessibility in remote or under-resourced settings. At present, there is no consistent method to assess SCC in MCR – a key diagnostic feature of the syndrome. The lack of understanding about SCC in MCR may limit …

Timbres Oubliés: The Forgotten Sounds Of Loeffler's Octet, Graeme Steele Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Modern musicians play a lot of old music and a lot of new music, but not so much “new old music.” This study—with its accompanying critical edition score, world-premiere recording and first present-day performances—represents, at long last, the deliverance of one such work from the ashes of history to the ears of the present: Charles Martin Loeffler’s forgotten Octet for Two Clarinets, Harp, Two Violins, Viola, Cello and Double Bass, a piece that was left unpublished, unrecorded and unheard since 1897.

This paper documents my efforts to finally reintroduce the Octet to the repertoire. By cross-referencing the autograph manuscript score …

A Praxis Of Radical Collectivity: Centering Justice And The Poetics Of Racialized Progressive Leadership, Alisa Algava

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Educational research that effectively addresses larger sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts must interrogate macro-level decision-making and policies and prioritize the lived experiences of those who directly affect and are affected by social structures. This project explores racial and economic justice work in schools by centering the perspectives of those progressive educational leaders who strive, work and grapple to center all adults and children within our larger unjust education systems. As individual leaders share their stories through one-on-one recollections and in critical collaborative inquiry groups, they illuminate spaces of contestation, continuity and liberation. The context of both continuous and unfolding pandemics along …

Enhancing The Accuracy Of The Mild Cognitive Impairment Diagnosis In Community-Based, Racially/Ethnically Diverse Older Adults, Katherine H. Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is thought to represent an intermediate stage of cognitive impairment that is often, but not always, a transitional phase between normal aging and dementia. Diagnostic criteria for “MCI” and international consensus criteria have been developed and refined over decades beginning in the 1990s, but the definition is still debated. Moreover, the operationalization and measurement of one of the criteria for MCI (i.e., subjective cognitive concerns, SCC), which is included in most classification approaches, is highly variable and there is great inconsistency across the literature. Some research efforts even support the removal of this criterion on the …

The Blackgirl Project: Examining The Impact And Manifestation Of Colorism Among Black Adolescent Girls In The United States: A Critical Participatory Action Research Approach, Gina (Diagou) R. Sissoko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Colorism is a skin tone stratification system that privileges lighter-skinned people over their darker-skinned counterparts. Although colorism remains surprisingly understudied, it has been linked to a variety of negative mental health and social outcomes. Colorism particularly impacts Black girls—particularly in adolescence. This dissertation utilized microaggressions theory and a critical participatory action research framework to describe (1) the manifestation of colorism in the lives of darker-skinned Black girls, (2) the impact of colorism on Black girls’ mental health, (3) the ways in which Black girls cope with and resist colorist experiences, and (4) create a taxonomy of colorist microaggressions. Ten Black …

Helpful Intentions? Impact Of Intentionality On Children's Memory For Forensically-Relevant Information, Ella P. Merriwether

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rationale: When a child is a witness or victim of a crime, they are often asked a barrage of questions regarding when the crime took place, how many times it occurred, and how the abuse unfolded (Cross & Whitcomb, 2017; Sullivan et al., 2022). These questions can be problematic because they rely on concepts for which children may lack memory or linguistic ability to answer (Fenson et al., 2000; Friedman, 1993). One fundamental element missing from the copious research (e.g., Brubacher et al., 2012; Stolzenberg et al., 2017a; Wylie et al., 2021) on children’s ability to recount forensically-relevant information is …

Moving Pictures Of The Past: Nostalgia For Classical Hollywood In The Broadway Musical, 1960–1990, Curtis Russell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I examine how Broadway staged classical Hollywood between 1960 and 1990 amid social, artistic, and industrial upheaval. While upheaval and experimentation are constants even during epochs of apparent stability, the story my dissertation tells is of an industry facing the perils of obsolescence by looking backward and westward to understand how its larger and more powerful culture industry sibling navigated similar moments of disruption. Building on Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “nostalgia film,” I contend that between 1960 and 1990 the nine “nostalgia musicals” under consideration served the same function for the Broadway musical that the nostalgia …

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment For Combat Systems In Role-Playing Genre Video Games, Cheuk Man Chan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Static difficulty adjustment has been applied to video games since their inception. However, dynamic difficulty adjustment did not become a topic of interest in either the academic fields or the industry until the turn of the century with sufficient advancement in processing power of computers and console systems. Amongst the work done in this area, most of the focus has either been placed on the action/adventure or the strategy game genre. However, there are only a limited number of studies regarding the role playing game genre which, by the nature of such games, generates a massive amount of data regarding …

Challenging Beliefs: Examining The Efficacy Of Corrections For Conspiratorial And Partisan Misinformation, Ava Zwolinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The threat of misinformation is widely acknowledged among researchers and laypeople (NORC, 2021). When misinformation coalesces with conspiracy theories, the repercussions can be especially dangerous, sometimes even fatal. Events such as the January 6th insurrection and the Buffalo Tops Supermarket shooting were both, in part, inspired by misleading information and conspiracy theories (Burke, 2022; Dawsey, 2023). While misinformation involving conspiracy theories is recognized as possibly posing a greater threat to correction efforts (Lewandowsky, 2021a), no study has yet experimentally manipulated the presence or absence of conspiratorial elements within misinformation. This dissertation explores whether conspiratorial misinformation is more difficult to correct …

Meconium: A Potential Means To Predicting Later-Life Cognition, Leah Duran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maternal perinatal stress is a commonly experienced, yet chronically undiagnosed condition (CDC, 2010). Literature has suggested that perinatal stress exposure has long lasting implications of the developing child both physically and mentally (Behrman et al., 2007; Hobel et al., 2008; Bowman et al., 2004; Polanska et al., 2017; Van de Bergh et. al, 2020). The use of meconium in the clinical setting has become one that serves a purpose of detection in medical conditions like in utero drug exposure. Using meconium as a predictor for brain behavior, however, is still an emerging concept in the literature. It is quickly gaining …

“Community Thinking Spaces”: Exploring The Openings And Possibilities Of A School-Based Intergenerational Community Of Practice, Lucy A. Robins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory case study examines the possibilities of creating generative, collaborative, intergenerational learning communities within a traditional public 6-12 school in the United States, as an antidote to the ideologies of adultism, systems of whiteness, and settler colonial logics. The study is situated within a single public school site, where I have been a science teacher and teacher leader for the past eight years. The school, which self-identifies as a “progressive” public school, serves to reify the history of schools as sites for control through what I term a “we know best” ideology. This ideology serves to dismiss and devalue …

Ethnoracial Inequality In Egalitarian Sweden: Swedish Exceptionalism And Racial Legacies, Beiyi Hu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ethnoracial Inequality in Egalitarian Sweden: Swedish Exceptionalism and Racial Legacies investigates the persistence of ethno-racial disparities in Sweden, a country often celebrated for its humanitarianism, egalitarianism, and tolerance. I explore several key questions: How do ethnic and racial minorities, as well as majority Swedes, perceive and understand race and ethno-racial inequalities in a country that does not officially recognize race? What sociohistorical legacies and institutionalized practices have contributed to contemporary ethnoracial inequalities in Sweden? And for ethnic and racial minorities, what are their day-to-day experiences of racism? Combining analysis of governmental data and in-depth interviews as well as exploratory spatial …