Digital Commons Network^™

The Mystic Chords Of Memory: The Civil War Musical As Historiography, Christine Snyder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The U.S. American Civil War is arguably the defining event in the nation’s history; it was the bloodiest war in that history, but also the means by which the United States ended slavery within its borders. Musical theatre, the major U.S. American contribution to popular and commercial theater, might seem a natural partner for chronicling these vital and epic events, but unlike the founding of the nation, which spawned two popular musicals, 1776 (1968) and Hamilton (2015), Civil War musicals have struggled to find audiences or become a part of the musical theatre canon. In this dissertation, I examine how …

Online Communities And Offline Criminal Justice: The Digital Fallout Of Major Criminal Incidents, Jacqueline M. Scott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

User-generated online data has, in recent years, become an important basis for sociological research, and the ubiquity of social media presages the importance of an increased understanding of its inner workings in the spheres of criminology and sociology. This dissertation examines the dynamics of user-generated information on social media and social news in the wake of 53 criminal incidents which generated higher-than-average interest online. Using multiple platforms and analytical techniques, I investigate the dynamics of within- and between-platform information uptake, examine potential avenues and drawbacks of the actionable information available online during a crisis, and describe patterns and focal topics …

Worldbuilding: A Theory Of Resilience In Transgender And Gender Expansive Young People, Jennifer Debower

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Transgender and gender expansive (TGE) young people have long histories of surviving, resisting, and even thriving despite hostility. However, dominant narratives rarely explore their stories of agency and resilience. This research aims to address that gap by asking: Where are the stories of TGE youth's strength, creativity, and resistance? What lessons lie within them? Using a critical, constructivist grounded theory approach, this study examines how 16 TGE young people navigate and challenge transphobia’s precarious conditions. Results suggest that because the current realities do not make space for their existence, TGE young people find strength in creative practices (fashion, hair, body …

A Dream No Longer Deferred: The Power And Limits Of Conditional Integration On The Social Mobility Of Undocumented Young Adults, Hyein Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Who are undocumented college graduates and how do they transition into the workforce upon graduation? This dissertation examines the diverse trajectories and social mobility patterns of 1.5 generation, undocumented Latinos, Asians and blacks with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Temporary Protected Status (TPS), or the “truly undocumented” across the country. Although millions of undocumented young adults, closely resembling their 1.5 generation, documented peers are coming of age firmly rooted in American society, little is known about this population due to the lack of credible data. This project employs a mixed methods approach to analyze both qualitative and quantitative data …

The Application Of Bayesian Meta-Analytic Models In Cognitive Research On Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Nic Zapparrata

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Meta-analysis is the systematic review and quantitative synthesis of specific areas in literature and is an important quantitative tool for researchers interested in synthesizing a particular body of research. The current research used meta-analysis to investigate processing speed in two neurodevelopmental disorders. This dissertation consisted of four meta-analytic papers. The first paper was a meta-analysis that synthesized a large body of research on processing speed, measured via reaction time (RT) measures, in groups of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) versus age-matched neurotypical comparison groups. This research was motivated by two previous meta-analyses in the literature on processing speed …

Language, Legitimacy, And The Law: The Social Roots Of Legal Obligation, Joshua Keton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a recent turn, both legal scholarship and judicial practice in the United States have converged on the idea that the content of the law is grounded on moral facts—especially facts about democracy. Leveraging insights from the philosophy of language, especially the underdetermination of meaning by syntax and semantics, I argue that textualism can only be reconstructed as a small part of a complete theory of legal interpretation. I then consider a more serious claim to the necessity of moral facts in metaphysically grounding the content of the law. As Mark Greenberg’s anti-positivist theory would have it, the content of …

Analysis Of Victim/Villain Narratives Presented Under Genocide And Ethnic Cleansing Frameworks: The Kosovo Case, Kristi Allaj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The small country of Kosovo has been a point of contestation in the Western Balkans for decades. In that regard, the country has divided the two main feuding groups into Albanians and Serbians, who contemporarily showcase intense ethnic rivalries. The 1998-1999 conflict impacted the region's demographics, the international community's normative changes, and the contemporary policies of the now-independent country. The Kosovo War is often attributed to ethnic tensions and the rise of nationalism. At the same time, the NATO intervention that created a series of dissenting opinions is pinned on the humanitarian crisis. All notions that stand. This thesis aims …

Toward Otherworlding The Teaching-Learning Of Psychology With Community College Students, Francisco Medina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reimagines a different relationality to teaching-learning psychology in the community college classroom through a series of three separate articles. Each article draws on quasi-ethnographic, autoethnographic, and group discussions elements to wonder about the types of theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical dimensions that might make psychology courses more attuned and accountable to younger generations and the end of the world as we know it. The first article explores the metaphysical inseparability, interdependence, and co-constitution of teaching-learning, theory-making, and collective world-making in the psychology community college classroom as an invitation to the end of psychology as we know it. I argue …

Who Do Civilian Review Boards Serve And Protect? Applying Andre Gorz’S Non-Reformist Reform Theoretical Framework To Empirical Analysis From New York State, Jackson Diamond

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the wake of countless high-profile instances of police violence and repression against civilians in the United States, waves of reformation have washed over American police departments. Some have questioned the efficacy of these reforms, as civilians continue to suffer acts of violence at the hands of the police. One such reform measure, adopted broadly in recent years, is the creation of civilian police review boards. To analyze how this reform has affected citizens’ ability to hold their police departments accountable for their actions, I analyzed a sample of 89 municipal police departments in New York state in the year …

Altruistic Imperialism: The Co-Optation Of Mutual Aid By The Nonprofit Industrial Complex, Kelly T. Waltz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis assesses the role of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) in neoliberalism’s material destruction of global community development and its exploitation of human benevolence. An examination of the institutionalization of high-profile social movements such as BLM and #MeToo demonstrates that the nonprofit industrial complex is built upon a misappropriation of feminist and liberation ideologies and practices, an insidious weaponization of our collectivist tendencies, and the systematic subjugation of mutual aid networks originally created and operated independent of systems of capital. The systemic and conceptual limitations of mainstream methods and the criteria by which nonprofit organizations’ effectiveness is evaluated are …

Legislating The Taboo: Taboo Subcultures, Political Communication, And Public Policy, Rebecca S. Krisel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, titled "Legislating the Taboo: From Subculture to Public Policy," comprises three articles that collectively delve into the intersection of taboo subcultures, political communication, and public policy. While the fields of sociology and anthropology more thoroughly explore the concepts of "taboo" and "subcultures," political science has not given them due attention. This research seeks to bridge this gap by examining how taboo subcultures evolve into political constituencies with policy demands and how these demands are communicated through various mediums, including mainstream and social media.

The first article, "Virtual Dance Communities and The Right to the Internet," investigates how the …

Black Food Geographies And The Politics Of Resistance In The Brick City. An Intersectional Analysis Of Black Food Provisioning Practices, Food Access, And Racial Food Inequities In Newark, New Jersey From 1666 – 2020, Angelika Winner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work studied Black food geographies in Newark, NJ, which represent alternative food provisioning practices and strategies working within but also parallel to traditional food geographies and exist within and despite of foodscapes of domination. Black food geographies not only include the spatial agency of Black residents but also entail the structural intersectionality and organized abandonment that Black residents currently experience as well as their historical production. Thus, food access of Newark’s Black resident was analyzed with a three-pronged mixed methods research design, a supply-centered analysis from a Positivistic perspective, a political economy-centered historical analysis from a Marxist perspective, and …

Social Workers Working With Intimate Partner Violence Survivors: The Influence Of Trauma Work On The Social Worker’S Intimate Relationships, Claire T. Mccue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working therapeutically with trauma survivors, such as survivors of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) carries a risk of vicarious traumatization (VT) for social workers, as well as the potential for vicarious post-traumatic growth (VPTG). This phenomenological study sought to explore and understand how vicarious exposure to trauma affects social workers who treat survivors of IPV and their intimate relationships positively and negatively. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 15 social workers working directly with survivors of IPV in New York while being involved in their intimate relationships.

Utilizing the constructivist self-development perspective, the study found social workers experienced physical, emotional, …

Knowledge And Attitudes Towards Usage Of Hearing Protection In Volunteer Firefighters, Rachel S. Combs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Occupational noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) represents a substantial global public health concern. Regulatory agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health (NIOSH) aim to establish noise exposure limits in occupational settings, yet certain professions, such as firefighting, remain at a heightened risk. Although research has been conducted on noise exposure and hearing protection in career firefighters, a lack of research exists on volunteer firefighters. The purpose of this study was to 1) establish the extent that volunteer firefighters are currently educated on hearing conservation and hearing protection 2) …

Religious Communication In Interfaith Romantic Relationships: Positive Approaches To Improve Relationship Outcomes, Jaclyn K. Doherty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As interfaith romantic relationships become more common, it is important to understand how couples can effectively navigate their religious differences and promote positive relationship outcomes. A critical strategy to this end is communication, yet the existing literature provides limited evidence to understand how the content of religious conversations affects couples’ outcomes. This dissertation explores communication about religion in interfaith relationships and positive relational approaches to religion that may increase relationship quality.

First, I conducted a mixed methods pilot study, finding that interviewees in interfaith couples promoted relationship quality, in part, by addressing their religious differences and recognizing their religious similarities. …

Chipping The Blue Wall: The Effect Of Dogs On Police Officer Receptivity To An Employee Assistance Program, Kenneth M. Quick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is substantial evidence that demonstrates the negative impact of stress on police officer mental health is increasing due in large part to perceived societal shifts in support for the police and trends in criminal justice reform efforts. While employee assistance programs (EAP) are the dominant mechanism for police agencies to address officer mental health, officers are reluctant to use them due to a combination of mental health stigma and organizational distrust. This dissertation studied police officer perceptions of an employee assistance program (EAP) and the effect of exposure to professionally trained dogs during an outreach session on indicators of …

Computational Approaches To Linguistic Challenges In Arabic Speech Recognition, Enas Albasiri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to document the linguistic features of Arabic that pose challenges to speech and language technologies and advance these technologies by developing state-of-the-art computational tools focusing on automatic speech recognition (ASR), text normalization (TN), and corpus development. TN converts expressions such as numbers, dates, and times—named semiotic classes—from their written to their spoken domain, such as converting ‘$84.00’ to ‘eighty-four dollars’, while inverse text normalization (ITN) converts verbalized text to its written form. This conversion is an essential preprocessing step for text-to-speech (TTS), and post-processing step for ASR. Arabic presents a challenge for TN and ITN because one …

Factors That Impact New York City Public High School Graduation: Finding Barriers To Education Through Data Analysis And Visualization, Kyoung Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is to provide visual evidence about the factors related to high school graduation rates of New York City public high school students. By analyzing the NYC public high school data, including graduation rates, school survey results, and school funding allocations, this project explores the graduation gaps among different student bodies, such as ethnic groups and school locations. The graduation disparities across the five boroughs are further examined for students with disabilities, economic difficulties, and language barriers. School-level data is used to visualize the gaps in school performances and funding allocations across the five boroughs. Lastly, the visualization …

Socially Safe On Smartphones: How Smartphone Use Reduces Social Risk Taking, Diogo Koch Alves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Consumers are often faced with decisions that carry a degree of social risk, with uncertain outcomes that could impact their social standing. Examples include choosing the ideal outfit to wear to an upcoming party or selecting a gift to give to a friend. Given the prevalence of smartphones in consumer decision making, I investigate the effect of smartphone use on social risk taking. Across seven studies, I find that smartphone use, relative to the use of other devices, results in a lower propensity to make socially risky decisions. I propose that smartphone use, by increasing the salience of one’s social …

A Municipal Modernity: Women, Architecture, And Public Health In Working-Class New York, 1913–1950, Jessica Fletcher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Municipal Modernity” is the first study to analyze the architectural history of the district health centers in New York City that women reformers and their allies founded to address poor health in working-class communities. It reveals that women’s philanthropic adaptive re-use was foundational to the architecture of the public health care in New York and led to a program of municipal district health centers. Philanthropic reformers adapted buildings in the 1910s and 1920s to provide affordable health care for low-income women and children in European immigrant and Black neighborhoods. During the New Deal, municipal officials followed the example set …

Cinema And Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches To Image-Making In The Americas And The Caribbean, Natalie M. Erazo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project is composed of an open-access syllabus hosted on a CUNY commons site, as well as a paper that examines various films and texts responding to the theme of cinema and ritual. Referenced films will focus on ritual as a decolonial feminist methodological framework, rooted primarily in Afro-descended and Indigenous cosmovisions within Latin America and the Caribbean. From a dance ritual spell warding off U.S. imperialism in present-day Puerto Rico, to a poetic visual eulogy for murdered women in rural Mexico, to a community prayer to Yemaya bringing relief for water scarcity in Cuba to a cautionary tale …

Equality, Solidarity, And Exploitation: An Essay On The Philosophical Foundations Of Socialism, Callum Zavos Macrae

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In popular consciousness and culture, equality is often considered to be the preeminent socialist value. Equality, on this view, sits at the heart of the socialist ideal, and those who ascribe great value to equality will, other things being equal, find themselves more predisposed towards socialism than those who do not. However, in recent years egalitarian accounts of the socialist ideal have increasingly come under criticism from defenders of an alternative, freedom-based approach to understanding the values that underpin socialist commitment. This dissertation proposes to defend the egalitarian account of the socialist ideal. By reconceptualizing equality, we can reconstruct a …

Using Leaf Spectra To Elucidate The Taxonomy And Ecology Of Living And Dried Plants, Natalia L. Quinteros Casaverde

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Identifying plants and understanding of changes in plant communities are crucial to the conservation and management of nature. The shortwave spectral reflectance of leaves is a promising tool for rapidly identifying species at different taxonomic ranks and predicting important plant functional traits. However, the spectral reflectance of leaves changes in response to biotic and abiotic conditions.

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the potential of shortwave spectral reflectance to investigate (Chapter 1) how its variation affects the accuracy of methods used to predict plant taxonomies and what environmental factors most influence biophysically predicted traits, (Chapter 2) what are …

Power And The Press: Reimagining The World By Producing Information Together, Jen Hoyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study of three collectively-organized activist printing projects examines how information production is a strategy for communities to reimagine and reconfigure oppressive power structures. I consider the High School Student Union and their newspaper, the High School Free Press; the women’s collective that took over RAT Subterranean News; and WIMP, a radical printing collective that broke away from the New York City Students for a Democratic Society chapter and supported a variety of progressive movements in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research examines how dissatisfaction with oppressive power structures leads individuals to build collective …

Mechanistic And Engineering Studies Of Lov Photoreceptors In Yeast, Matthew M. Cleere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A variety of cellular biosensors have evolved which can translate electromagnetic radiation from the environment into biological functions. Light-Oxygen-Voltage (LOV) domains in particular, are a group of photoreceptors that respond to blue wavelengths of light and can become a cellular photoswitch by converting this stimulus through their attached effector domains. For instance, the Helix-Turn-Helix (HTH) DNA-binding activity of the bacterial transcription factor EL222 and the Regulator of G-protein Signaling (RGS) in the fungal membrane associating protein BcLOV4 are both induced by blue-light sensing LOV domains. While previous work has provided the field with a structural characterization of LOV proteins in …

The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thematic project examines the notion of self-division, particularly in terms of the conflict between cognition and metacognition, across the fields of philosophy, psychology, and, most recently, the cognitive and neurosciences. The project offers a historic overview of models of self-division, as well as analyses of the various problems presented in theoretical models to date. This work explores how self-division has been depicted in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, Don DeLillo, and Mary Shelley. It examines the ways in which artistic renderings alternately assimilate, resist, and/or critique dominant philosophical, psychological, and scientific discourses about the self and its …

Interracial Instagram: Depictions Of Interracial Couples On Instagram, Christie Sillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines depictions of interracial romantic relationships on Instagram, a popular photo- and video-sharing social networking site. Social networking sites like Instagram, whereby users connect with each other by creating, sharing, and consuming content, are prime sites for sociological study because ideas are constantly being (re)made on them. On Instagram, meaning-making is mainly done through the construction of a profile and the posting of images and/or videos. Using a mixed-methods research design of hashtag analysis, digital ethnography, discourse and image analysis, I critically analyze Instagram profiles that depict interracial romantic relationships. In doing so, I develop a contemporary, social …

From The Outside Looking In: Transmasculine Narrative Identity, Experiences, And Larger Narratives On Social Media, Micah Roldan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Narrative identity development is an essential process in how individuals perceive themselves and the world around them. Often, narrative identity is studied in cisgender heterosexual individuals and applied to others without the acknowledgment of individuals that fall outside of these categories. Drawing upon existing literature and autoethnography, this thesis aims to meaningfully bridge this gap by studying the narrative identity development of transmasculine individuals through the lens of social media. This thesis proposes that the use of social media to share gender transition journeys has created a new digital trans and queer narrative for users and viewers. This narrative is …

The Black Map Project: A Black People’S Epistemology Of Healing, Britton Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work is a love letter to Mary Turner and her descendants, by which I mean all Black people, that lifts recipes and roadmaps of Black creative healing and liberatory praxes. It is a freedom dream (Kelley, 2002) that dares to (re)imagine mental health care by holding Black healing and liberation centrally in mind. I do not seek to prove through this work but rather to provoke [thought|action|repair]. In this work, I unsettle prescribed notions of therapy that have long dismissed/erased/ignored the needs and [therapeutic] practices of Black people. The Black MAP Project resists epistemologies of ignorance (Mills, 2022)—born in …

The Role Of Glutamate In The Medial Prefrontal Cortex In The Acquistion And Expression Of Conditioned Approach, Rudolf Nisanov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A series of experiments were conducted to assess the role of glutamatergic stimulation in the dorsal and ventral regions of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in both the acquisition and expression of reward-related learning using a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm, the conditioned-approach paradigm. Rats with surgically implanted cannulas were exposed to Pavlovian conditioning sessions that occurred on three alternative days (acquisition) or seven consecutive days (expression). These 60-min conditioning sessions consisted of 30 pairings of light (CS) and food pellets (US) presented under a random time schedule. After a two-day break, rats underwent a session with no CS or US and …