Digital Commons Network^™

To Reflect & To Be Reflective: Student Experiences Of Critique In Art & Design Higher Education, Jade Seobin Yun

Masters Theses

This thesis investigated the critique process in art and design higher education, focusing specifically on student experiences at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Through a combination of autoethnographic reflection and a campus-wide student survey, the study explored how critique was perceived, practiced, and internalized by students across disciplines. Central to this inquiry was the emotional and pedagogical complexity of critique, which was often treated as an assumed skill rather than a learned process. Drawing from personal narrative, pedagogical literature, and qualitative data, the research proposed a framework of Trust (Barrett, 2019), Courage (Brown, 2022), and Responsiveness (hooks, 1994) …

Returning Into The Deep Forest--A Methodological Practice Around Memory, Asianness, And Speech, Yu Ye

Masters Theses

">">The title of this thesis is borrowed from the Tang dynasty poem Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei: “Empty mountain, no one in sight—only the echo of voices. Returning sunlight slips into the deep forest, shining once more on moss.” I feel like my essay is responding to this kind of sensation: light does not shine head-on, but folds back, glancing sideways through dense branches, illuminating what is often overlooked. In that gesture of return—quiet, angled, persistent. This thesis unfolds in three chapters, each following a distinct path—image (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes), movement (The Rings of Saturn by …

Out Of Consumption Out Of Context Into Recursion, Xubai Li

Masters Theses

In a world where consumption is inevitable, our choices define us. However, the situation is never so black and white. The boundary between commodification and authentic representations has grown increasingly opaque, layered with irony, sincerity, critique, and tribute.

Within this complexity lies not a clear resistance, but an opportunity: to embrace the oscillation and locate one’s authenticity through metamodernist sensibilities.

My process begins by interrogating the accepted—may it be a product, a technique, or a medium. I deconstruct, fragment, and remove it from its original context—both physically and conceptually.

What emerges is a recursive reconstruction, where origin and iteration intertwine, …

Notes On Revivalism, Elana R. Kates

Masters Theses

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Afrography: Scripting Futures Anchored In Culture & Community, Osmond Tshuma

Masters Theses

Latin and Arabic are the most used writing systems in Afrika, not only because of their functionality but because of colonial history. Colonialism established Eurocentrism as the standard, while Afrikan creations were marginalized and demonized. This thesis investigates various ways of reclaiming identity through typography using the concept of Sankofa, which emphasizes retrieving and learning from the past to build the future. By integrating cultural objects into designs and everyday visual language, we can challenge and reverse the demonization imposed on Afrikan symbols by colonial narratives.

The belief of Ubuntu, the philosophy that an individual’s well-being is intrinsically tied to …

Patchworks - A Design Framework For Repairing Systems, One Patch At A Time., Jack A. Martinez

Masters Theses

Design interventions for social good often fall short—ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Even successful projects tend to have fleeting impacts. Despite prototyping, innovation, and scaling expertise, designers struggle to create lasting community change. Skills that drive capitalist markets remain underutilized in the social sector. Reducing barriers to entry in the design for social good field might foster a more equitable, service-oriented design practice.

This thesis examines how designers can collaborate ethically and effectively with community organizations to support their missions. It examines the challenges and benefits of applying a ‘patchwork design approach’ to social good through real-world partnerships. …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …

Designing Between Worlds, Levon Kostandyan

Masters Theses

This thesis reimagines design as a means of cultural continuity—an act of memory, resistance, and transformation. Rooted in the diasporic Armenian experience, it explores how identity is carried not only through storytelling, but through materials, rituals, and objects that evolve across time and place. Through the transformation of pomegranate skin from waste into a meaningful design material, the project navigates the space between symbolism and substance, honoring both the fruit’s ancestral weight and its potential as a living material language.


The work moves between personal narrative, historical research, and material experimentation, engaging with themes of displacement, hybridity, and embedded knowledge. …

I Don't Want To Talk About It, Margaryta Winkler

Masters Theses

This thesis is a contradiction. It is an attempt to verbalize what words can’t capture. It asks what is lost, what is gained and what can only be said when nothing is said at all. It is a love letter to wordless visual narratives. Drawing on the work of animators and illustrators like Gints Zilbalodis, Don Herzfeldt, Shaun Tan and Sophie Burrows, as well as the author’s own explorations, it looks at the risks and rewards of wordless storytelling. It is about silence, but not absence. It is about images that refuse to be reduced to captions and stories that …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

Where The Ocean Ends, The Mountains Becoming, Yuchen Wang

Masters Theses

The father figure casts a long shadow—both a scaffold and a snare. Inherited silence, latent anger, and the fear of being seen are unspoken legacies that bind me. I move within a structure he built that promised protection yet enforced obedience. There, love was often inseparable from control.

This work emerges from the fracture between resistance and inheritance, between the instinct to escape and the compulsion to remain tethered. The paternal presence is no longer a person, but rather a system—an architecture of power and repression—that continues to influence my gestures, choices, and silences. Even distance fails to sever the …

Smora: Breath As Memory, Pratikesh Pundkar

Masters Theses

Smora: Breath as Memory explores smell as a medium for memory, presence, and emotional communication in a world dominated by visual and audio stimuli. The project investigates olfactory interaction through multisensory design, proposing a tangible product system called Smora Cassette that captures, stores, and shares scent memories. Grounded in user research, expert interviews, and material prototyping, Smora speculates a future where smell reconnects us to the truth of lived experience, offering a poetic yet grounded alternative to AI-generated realities.

Textus Complexus, Vishakha Ruhela

Masters Theses

textus complexus investigates how language shapes thought by merging scientific rigour and poetic action to challenge reductive narratives. My inquiry stems from a fascination with complexity as an existential condition—one that resists homogenisation, preserves collective memory, and demands inclusive, multidimensional engagement. Hybridity, as a spectrum from complicated to complex, becomes a methodological tool to uncover latent connections that lead to cross-communication, and articulate transitional spaces through recursive processes. By systematising multiplicity via layering, modularisation, and indexing, my work foregrounds expression through form, where structural clarity emerges from cumulative gestures rather than simplification.

The projects in this thesis trace the roots …

Creativity As A Universal Calling: Exploring The “God As Creator” Motif And Imago Dei As Foundations For Christian Practice And Ministry, Catherine Delanee Belcher

Masters Theses

“I’m just not a creative person.” This phrase is frequently expressed in various contexts, from elementary school art classes to collaborative projects in academic and church settings. It often functions as a convenient explanation for a perceived lack of enthusiasm or participation. Why is this statement so readily accepted as an unchangeable reality rather than challenged as a misconception? There appears to be a widespread belief that creativity is an exclusive attribute, reserved for artists, musicians, or visionaries. This assumption invites a critical theological inquiry: Is creativity an innate ability bestowed upon a select few, or is it a divine …

The Evolution Of The Drum Set In American Musical Theater, Andrew M. Wert

Masters Theses

For several decades, American musical theater has been an essential part of the entertainment industry and has provided large-scale employment for musicians. Over the past several decades, composers have produced new works incorporating contemporary music styles and ensembles. This project will explore the changes in music styles in the music of musical theater from vaudeville to the present, analyze the effect that popular music in America has had on the techniques used by composers and orchestrators who write for drum set in musical theater, and examine changes in the function of the drum set player in pit orchestras. Ultimately, this …

The Prophet Jeremiah As A Type Of Messiah, Jc Cross

Masters Theses

How did Jesus interpret the prophet Jeremiah? Did Jeremiah function as a typological precursor to the Messiah? These questions warrant a renewed scholarly examination. While the book of Jeremiah has been the subject of extensive academic inquiry, particularly its first chapter, little research has focused on the prophet’s personal experiences as a foreshadowing of the Messiah or the textual allusions within the book to a messianic figure. Jesus repeatedly asserted that those well-versed in the Hebrew Scriptures should recognize the messianic foreshadowing present in the prophetic texts. Jesus’ disciples reinforce this interpretive framework. While a comprehensive analysis of how all …

Africanism In America: Exploring Hybrid Identities Of African Students In The Us, Ruth A. Yeboah

Masters Theses

This study interrogates the intercultural experiences of African international students (AIS) in a US Midwestern University. With a focus on West African students, the project explores how students confront and overcome linguistic, cultural, and systemic barriers as they create new dynamic spaces which are neither American nor African, but a mixture of both in a predominantly White institution. Drawing on the theoretical constructs of hybridity and language ideology, the findings reveal how AIS actively negotiate identity by using traditional African cultural traits, rooted in Africanism—with new cultural influences, generating unique, fluid and constantly-evolving hybrid identities. I utilized ethnographic observations …

Critical Editing Studies: A Textual-Intertextual Approach To Editing, Rhetoric, And Cultures Of Sensitivity, Amanda Keren-Happuch Yaa Emefa Anka

Masters Theses

This study explores how editing influences public discourse and perception by analyzing two major editing controversies, one involving the written word and the other, image. The method of analysis I employ is close textual-intertextual analysis in which I rely on the original source, that is, the written word and image in question, and supplement the analysis with secondary sources, such as media articles, scholarly works, and public reactions. The first case study focuses on the issue of bowdlerization as regards Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl and the second artifact focuses on digital editing as it relates to …

Nudging Creativity In Typography With Font Pairing Prompts, Thomas Jockin

Masters Theses

Graphic designers face an overwhelming abundance of font choices in the digital marketplace, leading to difficulties in creating innovative typographic pairings and a tendency to rely on familiar options. Current industry practices and typography education lack effective methodologies to foster creative and diverse font use. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap by introducing Font Flow, a web application designed to enhance typography creativity through randomized font pairing prompts.

The proposed system leverages structured constraints to challenge designers, prompting them to work with unexpected font combinations that may initially appear incompatible. By engaging in this problem-solving process, designers develop a deeper …

Hyphenated Journeys: Identity Negotiations Of Multiethnic Vietnamese Americans Through The Lens Of Hybridity, Rheyna Leilahn Biu

Masters Theses

This study explores how Vietnamese Americans with mixed heritage navigate their identity. Through interviews and autoethnography, it examines how multiracial/multiethnic Vietnamese Americans maintain their Vietnamese identity while constructing their multiracial/multiethnic identity. The findings underscore the importance of several factors of identity maintenance, including seeking cultural security outside the home, language as a key to culture, and the importance of connection through cultural sharing in shaping and expressing multiracial/multiethnic identity. It uses Homi Bhaba's theory of hybridity to understand how these individuals view their hyphenated identities. The research highlights the role of verbal and nonverbal communication in this process. The researcher …

How The Flock Falters: An Analysis Of Apostasy In The Shepherd Of Hermas, Justin R. Bamba

Masters Theses

This study provides a detailed analysis of apostasy as it is expressed in the Shepherd of Hermas. Drawing from the work of B.J. Oropeza, the study offers a threefold analysis that identifies the Christian community in danger, the nature of apostasy as it pertains to this community, and the consequences of such apostasy. Special attention is devoted to Vision 3 and Similitudes 8-9 for their vivid Tower motif, a unique literary device by which the author expresses the hope and limitations of repentance, community identity, and the causes and consequences for separation from this community—all of which contribute to a …

Theological Themes And Musical Influences Of Worship In Indonesian Immigrant Churches In The United States, Agnes Keren Bale

Masters Theses

Beyond evoking emotional experience, theologically sound songs are crucial for evangelizing, edifying the church, and congregational spiritual growth. This study examines worship in Indonesian immigrant churches in the United States, analyzing recurring theological themes in the most regularly featured songs in the worship repertoire. Additionally, it explores the influence of Western worship music which shapes the blended identity of these churches. Via the data gathered through worship service observations from a few churches and a survey for platform ministers, twenty-two congregational songs were coded and analyzed for their theological themes. Findings included the omnipotence and sovereignty of God, victory/battle, faith, …

The Pragmatic Effect Of Φιλέω And Αγαπάω In John 21:15-17, Steven J. P'Pool

Masters Theses

The final chapter of John’s gospel is central to the New Testament in that it depicts the risen Jesus appearing to His disciples and sharing a meal with them, restoring Peter to his place as a leader among his brothers, and records John’s eyewitness testimony to the events reported. It is in verses fifteen through seventeen of chapter twenty-one that attention turns to Peter and John, with the latter eaves dropping on the conversation. John records the conversation in these three verses in which Jesus restores Peter from his trio of denials prior to Jesus’ crucifixion with three opportunities for …

Disease Diagnosis Using Natural Language Processing And Deep Learning, Manas Kumar Sherla

Masters Theses

This research presents an automated disease diagnosis framework that leverages natural language processing and deep learning to predict diagnosis codes from unstructured electronic health record (EHR) clinical notes. Using the MIMIC-III critical care dataset, clinical narratives such as discharge summaries and physician notes are extracted, validated, and preprocessed to construct a labeled corpus aligned with ICD-9 diagnoses. The study implements a pipeline comprising text cleaning, feature extraction, and supervised learning, and compares traditional models such as Logistic Regression and Bi-LSTM with transformer-based architectures built on BERT. Models are trained and evaluated with categorical cross-entropy loss and standard multi-class metrics, including …

Domestic Student Engagement With International Peers: Local Insights, Global Connections, Alissa Sutton

Masters Theses

As competition to recruit international students grows, institutions must prioritize fostering a sense of belonging that supports their retention and success. Central to this is the quality of interactions between international and domestic students, which shape both groups’ social and academic experiences. This study examines the barriers and facilitators influencing domestic students’ engagement with international peers and the role of institutional support in promoting meaningful cross-cultural connections. Findings reveal that domestic students recognize the importance of engaging with international peers but they often encounter challenges such as lack of awareness, uncertainty about how to connect, and limited institutional opportunities. Support …

Women Spinning On The Edge: Finding And Redefining The “Spinster” In The Witches Of Discworld, Kathryn Ann Fitzmaurice

Masters Theses

The word “spinster” has undergone a series of evolutions over the past seven hundred years, first coined to describe the occupation of women engaged in the spinning of plant and animal fibers into thread and yarn in the Middle Ages and later a legal marital status designation used until the 21^st century. The connotation associated in social contexts became pejorative. This project’s tracing of the word spinster is used to set up the broader scope looking at how the spinster can be viewed as an archetype, what we can learn through the lenses of gender and feminist theory, and …

The Influence Of Family-School Communication On Junior High School Students’ Academic Success, Stephen Junior Amoah

Masters Theses

This study examines the influence of family-school communication on students' academic success in the context of Ghana, with a particular focus on Junior High School (JHS) students. While existing research emphasizes the importance of family involvement in educational outcomes, limited studies explore how family-school communication directly affects academic success in Ghana. By using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines quantitative and qualitative data collection. The quantitative component includes an online survey distributed to JHS graduates, assessing the frequency, impact, methods, and barriers of communication between families and schools, as well as their perceived effect on academic performance. The survey includes …

Performance Of Standard Medical Mllms On Ecg Image Data, Prisha Anil

Masters Theses

This work presents a structured benchmarking study of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) applied to electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation tasks. We evaluate three representative architectures: MedGemma, HuatuoGPT-Vision, and LLaVA-Med, across progressive experimental stages involving text-only structured prompt normalization, text–image fusion with ECG plots, and full multimodal fusion incorporating time-series signals. A standardized five-section cardiology prompt was designed to enforce consistent output structure and SCP-code alignment, enabling reproducible metric computation across models. Quantitative evaluation using BERTScore, token-level F1, and diagnostic accuracy demonstrates that HuatuoGPT-Vision achieves the highest semantic and diagnostic alignment, while MedGemma exhibits superior formatting stability and reproducibility. In contrast, LLaVA-Med …

Construct Validity Of The Cognitive Assessment System- 2nd Edition: Rating Scale: Comparisons With The Learning Behaviors Scale, Cameron Graham

Masters Theses

Cognitive assessment instruments, such as the Cognitive Assessment System Second Edition: Rating Scale (CAS2: Rating Scale), are frequently utilized by school psychologists to assess children’s cognitive abilities and psychopathology. However, the CAS2 and the CAS2: Rating Scale have little research regarding their psychometric properties. The present thesis examined the construct validity of the CAS2: Rating Scale in comparison to the Learning Behaviors Scale (LBS). Canivez and Gaboury (2013), while assessing the construct validity of the CAS, found that for the ADHD group, the LBS Attitude Toward Learning, Attention/Persistence, and Strategy/Flexibility scores and the CAS Planning and Attention scores were significantly …

Jesus's Use Of "Woman" In The Fourth Gospel, Cori Mcgrew

Masters Theses

In John's Gospel, Jesus uses the word "woman" in surprising ways: to address his mother at the wedding in Cana and at the Cross, to address a woman in Samaria, in a parable about a woman giving birth in his Final Discourse, and finally, to address Mary Magdalene at the garden tomb. This thesis uses the unusual way Jesus addresses his mother in the Fourth Gospel as a catalyst to find a connection between all five uses of "woman" by Jesus in John's Gospel, concluding that these instances evoke creation imagery, in particular of Genesis 3:15. The allusion to Genesis …