Digital Commons Network^™

An Examination And Demonstration Of Bildungsroman As A Plot Type, Eric Holmes

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on plot types for Bildungsromane, commonly called a coming-of-age novels. This story theme was first described two hundred years ago, and since, the definition has transformed, broadened and segmentized. However, making a specific plot type for a Bildungsroman, is not commonly discussed. This thesis identifies two distinct plot types which have been used multiple times in Bildungsromane. The first plot type is based on a protagonist who has not fully matured and suffers through a lack or flaw in maturity. The second plot type has the protagonist embark in a journey and matures and gains wisdom on …

The Dream Itself Was Home”: Imaginary Homelands As A Model For Analyzing Contemporary African Return Narratives, Renee King

Masters Theses

Although contemporary African return narratives featuring female protagonists explore a wide range of themes, they consistently portray women who struggle to situate themselves within an increasingly globalized world. In these narratives, the homeland initially functions as a stabilizing anchor that emboldens the protagonist to pursue education or employment abroad, yet works such as Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish and Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah reveal that the homeland the protagonists once treated as immutable ultimately exposes itself as a dream. This destabilization unsettles the notion of an unshakeable cultural identity and demonstrates how migration reshapes both the self and the meaning of home. …

Co-Dominion: The Changing Nature Of The Adamic Covenant In An Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Corey Hastings

Masters Theses

Theologians and religious bodies attest to the rising influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in governments, the economy, and the lives of the people of God. Through the covenant with Adam, God gave humans the blessing of dominion and capabilities unique to creation to till the earth. Today, humans retain the image of God but AI increasingly displaces human functions with coordinated agency. Using Hebrew language exegesis of passages from Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, this study compares capabilities gifted to humans with the scope of current and near future AI models. It incorporates direct artifact analysis of a large-language model as …

Desegregation Of The Ranks: How The United States Military Was The First Professional Organization To Integrate All Ethnic Groups, Matthew Lee Spiller

Masters Theses

A nation’s military has often been at the forefront of social progression. The Spartans, a military society, granted women a voice in government and a degree of autonomy over their own lives, while the Athenians—the founders of democracy—considered women second-class citizens with no control over their own affairs. The United States military is no different, striving to ensure fair and equal treatment of all ethnicities within the armed forces. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the United States military—six years before the desegregation of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This …

Murder Of A Creative: Mfa Thesis, Himani Sanjeevkumar Mehta

Masters Theses

In the creative industry, the phrase “fast-paced environment” is often treated as an essential ingredient for productivity and success. The contemporary design landscape operates within an output-driven system that prioritizes speed, visibility, and measurable worth, contributing to the growing commercialization of creativity. Within this framework, the creative process is often diminished or overlooked where it no longer serves efficiency, reducing creativity to a consumable outcome rather than a reflective and sustaining practice. As a result, creative professionals and students increasingly experience creative anxiety, burnout, and paralysis, alongside imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and self-doubt. These conditions are rarely examined as systemic outcomes …

Is Genuine Redemption Possible Through A Counterfeit Christ?, Tams M. Mullins

Masters Theses

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), commonly referred to as Mormons, consider themselves Christians without equivocation. Evangelical Christianity has, however, challenged this claim since the inception of the Latter-day Saints. The Latter-day Saints purport to be Christian in doctrine and practice and claim a Christian identity centered around their acceptance of the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. While the Latter-day Saints ascribe to a high Christology, confess Jesus as Lord, and regard Him as their Redeemer, the Jesus of the Latter-day Saints’ literature bears little resemblance to the Jesus of evangelical Christianity. …

Fight With What You Have: The Influence Of Pre-War Cruiser Doctrine On The Guadalcanal Campaign, Dawson Baber

Masters Theses

The Guadalcanal campaign was one of the most important campaigns of the Second World War. It was the first American offensive action and began the rolling back of Japanese forces. Guadalcanal would also be a watershed moment in American naval doctrine. The experiences suffered during the six-month campaign led to significant changes in how the Navy employed its surface forces. Since the outcome of the campaign leads to significant changes in how the Navy fights, it is important to understand what led to the battles and why they went poorly. To be more specific, how did the Navy prepare itself …

The 1778 Fort Pitt Treaty: U.S. Relations With The Lenni-Lenape Nation And The Unraveling Of Early Promises, Veronica E. Riddle

Masters Theses

This study examines the Treaty of Fort Pitt (1778), signed in present-day Pittsburgh, as the first formal diplomatic agreement between the United States and the Lenape (Delaware) Nation during the American Revolutionary War. Formed amid the military and political instability of the Revolution, the treaty promised mutual military assistance, recognition of Lenape sovereignty west of the Alleghenies, protection from settler encroachment, and the unprecedented possibility of Native representation within the emerging American confederation. However, following the deaths of key Lenape leaders, escalating frontier violence, and the failure of the Continental Congress to ratify or uphold critical provisions, the treaty rapidly …

Just Hillbillies: State Power, Private Militarism, Coal, And Constitutional Crisis In The West Virginia Treason Trials, 1919-1937, Ryan Gregory Fix

Masters Theses

In August 1921, roughly ten thousand armed coal miners marched toward Logan County, West Virginia, in the largest armed labor uprising in American history. When the fighting at Blair Mountain ended, the state prosecuted union leaders for treason against the state of West Virginia. This thesis examines that legal campaign of 1921–1923 and its long aftermath, arguing that the treason trials functioned less as a search for individual guilt than as an instrument for fixing the meaning of Blair Mountain before the miners could define it themselves. Where decades of gubernatorial proclamations and martial law had exposed the limits of …

In Search Of Whitman's "Real War": Soldier Recreations During The American Civil War, Rebecca C. Felton

Masters Theses

When most people think of the American Civil War, they recall the agonies and ecstasies of combat, envisioning the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the glorious folly of Pickett’s Charge, or the ravages of Sherman’s March to the Sea. What gets left out of the history books is what the common soldier experienced more than anything else: camp life. This study sheds renewed light on what the soldiers of the Union and Confederacy did to pass the time between battles. It focuses specifically on what they did for fun, addressing three categories of recreational activities: sports, music, and literature. It finds …

The Relationship Between Musical Aptitude And Multiple Intelligences In High School Music Students, Rachel Connor

Masters Theses

This quantitative correlational study examines the relationship between musical aptitude, measured by Edwin Gordon’s GIA assessments, and students’ predominant multiple intelligences (MIs), as defined by Howard Gardner. Although MI has been widely researched, little is known about how intelligence strengths relate specifically to musically adept students. High school music students at Fayetteville Christian School in Fayetteville, NC, were first assessed using the GIA to identify those demonstrating musical aptitude. Eligible students then completed the AMI R/ARCH Profile to determine their strongest MI. A correlational analysis examined whether specific intelligence strengths are commonly associated with musical aptitude. Grounded in Gardner’s MI …

Post-Machine | You Vs. The Algorithm: A Creative Act Of Rebellion, Matthew Schultz

Masters Theses

Algorithms have become intertwined with everyday life, infiltrating both personal and social environments. They have transformed from influenceable tools useful for customizing information to machines of influence that are now dictating standards. These machines have begun morphing individuals idea of the self. This has become an epidemic of lost identity and fragmented self in order to conform to algorithmic acceptance. Emerging professionals in creative fields in the last decade have become particularly susceptible to this influence. If not addressed, young creatives will soon lose any autonomy of self and have a homogenized identity that matches the demands of the algorithm …

Celtic Catharsis: A Look Into The Emotional Appeal Of Irish Music In The United States, Coralyn M. Kutzner

Masters Theses

This research study investigates the emotional connection and interest in Irish music within the Irish musician community in America. The background for this study includes an in-depth look at the history of Irish and Irish music culture in America, as well as a brief overview of the connection between music and emotions. The study itself was conducted in various locations where there was live Irish music playing. Through the use of personal interviews and an emotional evaluation scale, participants were asked to recount their first encounters with Irish music and the emotional connection they feel because of and while playing …

Geological Carbon Storage In Deep, Low Permeable Shale Reservoirs: Insights From The Haynesville Formation, Louisiana, Himakshi Goswami

Masters Theses

As global initiatives to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions intensify, depleted unconventional shale gas formations have emerged as critical candidates for large-scale geological carbon storage (GCS). This study investigates the feasibility, dynamic trapping mechanisms, and operational optimization of CO₂ sequestration in deep, low-permeability shale reservoirs, using the Upper Jurassic Haynesville Shale in northwest Louisiana as a comprehensive case study. Compositional reservoir simulation (CMG GEM 2021.10) was performed using the SPE Haynesville dataset, with CO₂ injected at a rate of 10,000 ft³/day across single and multiple depth intervals spanning 11,290–11,314 feet. Results demonstrate that multi-depth injection significantly improves residual trapping, reduces buoyancy-driven …

Viral Visions Of Femininity: A Visual Thematic Analysis Of Trending Tradwife Imagery On Instagram, Phoebe L. Lim

Masters Theses

This study uses visual thematic analysis and a semiotics lens to examine how trending tradwife content on Instagram constructs domestic femininity through recurring signifiers of whiteness, homemaking, motherhood, and hyperfeminine aesthetics. Current rhetorical analysis of the tradwife movement argues that the imagery of sweet, nostalgic traditionalism functions to mask visual and semiotic codes associated with patriarchal hierarchies, anti-feminism, pronatalism, and alt-right ideologies (Proctor, 2022). Drawing on the theoretical models of Saussure, Peirce, and Barthes (1972), this research analyzes how strategically curated visuals of domesticity and femininity function as ideological signifiers within digital culture. Analysis of 100 posts under #tradwife found …

Material Costs, Karima Weinman

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how migration fatality and disappearance data can be reinterpreted through material craft to create a more reflective encounter with information. Working with the Missing Migrants Project's dataset, this project asks how design can communicate dimensions of human loss that conventional data visualization cannot reach.

The work situates contemporary border violence within a longer colonial history, arguing that the logics of surveillance and quantification that structured European imperial expansion persist in the databases that govern mobility in the Mediterranean today.

Terrazzo is a 15th-century Venetian flooring technique built from discarded fragments bound together into a unified surface. This …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

I Miss My Computer: Online Artistry, Web Aesthetics, And Coming-Of-Age In A Digital Landscape, Catherine Capeci

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how young artists develop their creative practices in a world informed by digitality. Through survey research of 44 art students between the ages of 14 and 22, as well as a process of autoethnographic inquiry, I examine how artists in high school and college relate to digital imagery, web archives, online gaming, and social media platforms, and how these experiences inform artmaking. I believe that art educators should explore how the internet informs aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities, and how these sensibilities show up in young artists’ work, more so than focus on digital media as its own …

"Hand And Mind Lead To Life": Craft Pedagogy In Art Education For Older Adolescent Learners, Katherine Fu

Masters Theses

Art educator Jo-Anna Moore (1991) asks “What is the purpose of our individual growth through art or craft?” (p. 162). Moore’s question is daunting not least for the seasoned artist, but for the young people in our art classrooms who, to varying degrees, are or are not interested in art. This thesis draws from my personal narrative as an older adolescent whose introduction to craft helped me navigate great questions of identity, belonging, and motivation. It seeks to discover how craft can become a method of teaching art to all students, and in particular, how such a pedagogy addresses the …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Fetishismus:Facism, Sodomy, And The Exhibition, Matthew P. Gershovich

Masters Theses

Fetishismus examines the contemporary dislocation between homosexuality and queerness. Homosexuality is the biological, innate quality of same-sex attraction. Queerness is rooted in deviance, perversion, and sociologically attached to the “other.” Although almost always used in an explicitly homosexual connotation, “queerness” is not entirely contingent on the physical engagement of homosexual acts. In historical usage, queer is used as a pejorative adjective, implying a lack of masculinity with the intent to invoke repulsion. In contemporary parlance the two are treated as synonymous. This intertwined relationship relies on the forced lack of social and spatial belonging that is rooted in a foundational …

Returning To The Hand, Tatum Dodd

Masters Theses

Historical preservation is traditionally understood as the act of protecting objects and buildings from change, reinstating and stabilizing the past so they may endure into the future. When preservation seeks to freeze and resolve the past, it separates it from the reality of our multi-layered histories and the traces of labor, repair, and care unfolding across generations. Through a human-centered lens that allows one to touch, uncover, and redefine, we are able to relate to our built environments through an ethical practice of care, inviting new avenues of dialogue and engagement with our past.

Recording traces of the hand within …

Looking In All Directions, Abby Sunde

Masters Theses

“Looking in All Directions” mobilizes attention towards the concepts of ‘desettling’ through art and ‘desettling’ as a way of being. Desettling constitutes resistance, resilience, survivance, and refusal of current Western modalities within our society. This body of work is a material exploration of these worldviews to find potential ways to embody a practice that aligns ourselves outside of a colonial settler mindset while living within its societal condition. Using glass, sound, and installation work, the artist un-centers expected encounters with an inherited dominant worldview and instead offers an actualized shift in awareness. Concepts of interconnectedness, interwoven time, and embodied memories …

Beyond The Tampon (Menstrual Equity & Justice Certification), Rucha Kale

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that while menstruation is a common life event, experiences related to menstruation are not inherently inequitable for a range of reasons that relate to wider currents that revolve around a narrow idea of the “default” human body. One imagined as non-menstruating, uninterrupted in its activities, or endowed with social, economic, and political agency. This project asks what becomes possible when those usually excluded from this norm are no longer treated as exceptions to accommodate, but as core and central constituencies to design with and for.

Using menstruation as a critical site of inquiry, the thesis first examines …

Dead Reckoning, Jeremy A. Grail

Masters Theses

For over a century, conceptual, social, and legal frameworks have governed human relationships with technology by dematerializing data and personal information. From the early twentieth century, when human speech was converted into electrical pulses through telephone wires, to today’s pressure to integrate sensing, computation, and automation into every facet of contemporary life, electronic communications have become increasingly detached from the body and systematically defined as a weightless, immaterial asset.

This thesis refutes the industry-led myth of the “immaterial cloud” by revealing the presence and transmission of data to be a series of physical, tectonic, and spatial events that are woven …

Where Forms Dream, Siran Liu

Masters Theses

What does it mean to dream?

There is a passages from Daoist classic ‘Zhuangzi’, attributed to the philosopher Zhuang Zhou: The “Butterfly Dream”:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou

In this story, the dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. …

What Teachers See: Collaborative Artmaking In Chinese And U.S. Elementary Schools, Jiayu Shi

Masters Theses

This study explores how elementary art teachers in the United States and China perceive and use collaborative artmaking with their students. Driven by my personal journey as a Chinese student and art educator now studying in the U.S., this research asks: How do teachers in these two countries compare in their views of collaborative artmaking, including its social-emotional outcomes, benefits, and challenges. I conducted semi structured interviews with three elementary art teachers: two from China (one veteran, one early-career) and one from the U.S. with experience in both rural and urban schools. Findings show that teachers in both contexts value …

A Thesis By An Art Student Trying To Find Meaning In Simulation Games, Yichuan Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a strange question: what happens if meaning is no longer written by an author, but emerges from the behavior of a system itself?

Beginning with observations of the Providence River and inspired by Conway’s Game of Life, information theory, and artificial life research, the project investigates simulation as a space where language, memory, and collective meaning can evolve without central control. Rather than treating video games as vehicles for storytelling, this research approaches them as dynamic systems capable of generating unpredictable forms of organization and perception.

The thesis proposes a closed spherical computational world populated by simple …

A Body Stitched In Traces, Youyun Shang

Masters Theses

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Commodity Beyond Price: A Visible Database Of Free Objects, Yifei Cai

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how value is constructed and circulated outside of traditional monetary exchange systems. During two years of living in Providence, I collected hundreds of "free objects." For each item, I wrote a brief description detailing its physical characteristics, provenance, or emotional significance, and measure it according to four parameters: price, cost, weight, and value. Of these, "value" is subjectively defined by memories, emotional attachments, and it presented as relational equivalencies established within the collection itself.

It presented as an open-ended archive, this project functions simultaneously as an installation, an exchange system, and a visual database. The thesis proposes …