Digital Commons Network^™

Brexit And The Devolution Of Uk Settlements: A Qualitative Case Study Of The Socio-Political Factors And Consequences Of Brexit On Scotland, Deborah Erioluwa Adeniji

Masters Theses

This paper takes a real in-depth look at the United Kingdom’s position in the geopolitical landscape before and after one of the most crucial votes in the nation’s history, namely the Brexit vote of 2016. To bring clarity to those who may be new to UK politics, it is important to note that Brexit is an abbreviated term for Britain’s exit, or departure, from the European Union (EU). This paper explores the position of the United Kingdom, or Britain, in the world before and after its departure from the European Union. Throughout the course of this paper, the following questions …

Apologetic Response To The Timing Contradiction In The Synoptic Gospels, Oluwaseun Ebenezer Agboola

Masters Theses

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, commonly known as the Synoptic Gospels, serve as the primary sources for understanding the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For centuries, Christians have treated these accounts as sacred and authoritative texts that shaped doctrine and devotion. However, despite their theological significance, the Synoptic Gospels present challenges when examined from a historical and literary perspective. One of the most debated issues is the apparent discrepancies in the timing of the crucifixion of Jesus. While the Gospel of Mark states that the crucifixion was at the third hour (9 a.m.), Luke emphasizes …

In A Flash: A Study Of Flash Fiction’S Ability To Create Complete And Meaningful Stories, Morgan A. Lomax

Masters Theses

In In a Flash: A Study of Flash Fiction’s Ability to Create Complete and Meaningful Stories, I seek to prove that despite flash fiction’s extreme brevity, this relatively new sub-genre of fiction is capable of producing fully delineated stories with powerful messages, especially messages that align with a Christian worldview. To do this, I first examine the various definitions and complex history of flash fiction. Then, through the critical literary lenses of formalism, structuralism, and reader response theory, I analyze the different ways flash fiction uses the following eight narrative elements to create stories within specific examples of flash fiction: …

I Came To Fulfill The Law: ΠληρόΩ As Used In The Discourses Of Jesus, Ethan Lunik

Masters Theses

One of the central questions of the church with respect to Christian orthopraxy, or right living, concerns the relationship between the Christian and the Old Testament (OT) Law. Historically, the church has not obeyed many commands clearly laid out in the OT, such as observing a seventh-day Sabbath, the dietary laws, and other laws that perhaps are viewed as cultural more than didactic. Christians understand the OT to be inspired Scripture, and these commands to be genuine orders of God, so the question of why the church has historically ignored these commands is easily raised. While answers to this question …

The Discipling Worship Leader: How Perceptions Impact The Role Of The Worship Leader, Justin Smith

Masters Theses

Although worship and discipleship are often envisioned as two distinct practices, they share fundamental aspects of spiritual formation. Worship is often restricted to music, emotional expression, and outward performance, while discipleship tends to be associated with intellectual study, biblical knowledge, and structured learning. However, both disciplines encompass holistic contributions to a believer’s spiritual growth. Discipleship extends beyond epistemology; it involves personal transformation. Worship is not merely an experience or the expression of emotions but rather transformative in nature. Both worship and discipleship, however, encompass more than the contemporary church culture often acknowledges. The two-fold research plan combined findings from a …

Recess: Utilizing Gamification To Encourage Lifelong Creativity In Emerging Adults, Julia Schneider

Masters Theses

While creative outlets are prioritized in childhood, adults in the United States are increasingly less likely to engage their creativity during leisure time, which ultimately impacts overall well-being. This project aims to explore: (1) What is creativity, and why is it beneficial? (2) What factors contribute to the decline of creative engagement? (3) How does engaging with creative outlets impact overall well-being? (4) How can play be used as a catalyst to foster creativity? Through a literature review, case studies, and visual analyses, this thesis examined and integrated existing research on creativity and play in order to effectively create a …

Poland: A Forgotten Ally, Juliana Rose Pettis

Masters Theses

World War II created a significant change in Polish History. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact rendered Poland torn into two sections. Hitler occupied the western side, while Stalin overran the eastern side. The two dictators split Poland in September 1939. It was the only country singled out for such a destiny. In response, the Poles created the Polish Underground. This government utilized asymmetrical warfare to fight against the Nazi occupation and assist the West. The Poles assisted continuously throughout 1939 to 1945, but their fight for independence resulted in the partitioning of Poland and the beginning of Joseph Stalin’s communization of Europe. …

Women And Puritanism: Establishing A Theological And Philosophical Framework For Women's Legal Rights In Seventeenth-Century New England, Karen A. Jones

Masters Theses

Using the framework of the modified germ theory, this thesis seeks to discover how the intersection of theology, philosophy, and law reveal the rationale behind the state of women’s legal rights in seventeenth century Puritan New England. The study mostly focuses on 1630-1690, since these sixty years represent the limit of Puritan hegemony in New England. During the 1690s, the Crown forced the northeastern colonies to conform to common law and subsequently expunge their laws of any hints of Puritan biblicism. The conclusion will address the ramifications of this change. The main body of this work, however, takes up Marylynn …

Using Computerized Instruction To Increase Professional Competence With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Cbt) Modifications, Paige Lee Sherlund-Pelfrey

Masters Theses

One in thirty-six children receive an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis, and an estimated 5.4 million adults in the United States have previously received an ASD diagnosis (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2022). At least seventy percent of individuals with ASD have one comorbid disorder (Valderas et al., 2009). Some common comorbid disorders for individuals with ASD include depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an evidence-based therapy that can support depressive, anxiety and OCD symptoms, and has empirically supported modifications that can be used with the ASD population. However, research reports that clinicians are not …

Ni-Mn-In Heusler Alloy Ribbon For Magnetocaloric Application, Bao Nguyen

Masters Theses

A traditional cooling system, which applies compression technology within the working fluid, has had a lot of negative impacts on the environment and has low efficiency. They have almost reached the thermodynamic efficiency; there is little room for further improvement. Therefore, solid-state cooling systems, especially those that use the magnetocaloric effect (MCE), have drawnmuch interest as an alternative solution for the vapor-compression system. The Heusler alloy, especially Ni-Mn-In in this research, can be an excellent candidate for this application due to its unique properties, such as the shape memory effect and giant MCE. Their giant MCE results from a first-order …

Resonance, Jess D. Skyleson

Masters Theses

Resonance is a digital media installation intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of inter-connection within and between ourselves and others, and to depict how our voices live both within and beyond us. The exhibit is divided into two intertwining halves:

Externally, the piece involves creative communication between people, art mediums, and life experiences. This aspect includes the contributions of thirty patients, doctors, and caregivers who responded to one another’s artwork in a series of workshops led by the artist. Starting with the creative writing of patients, this was provided to a group of unrelated medical providers, who responded with visual …

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) …

Hunting, Feiyang Zhuang

Masters Theses

This writing is about fragility and revelation of technological systems. It considers how brokenness, delay, and opacity are not flaws but openings—opportunities to reimagine our relationship to technology as something grounded, sensory, and continuous with the natural and material world.

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 …

Swing Landscape, Yingwen Lin

Masters Theses

The text will consist of my self-introduction and short articles. Roughly speaking, the narrative is built upon my background and personal transformation. Geographically, I was born in Shenzhen (largest migrant city in China), lived in Shanghai (China’s largest economic center and a major international financial hub), and now reside on the East Coast of the United States, as a particle moving between different cultures, global commodities, and online media. I engage subjectively in these objective changes, with objects and events shaping who I am. I consider myself an outsider, an observer, an economic enthusiast, and a newspaper reader, participating in …

The Stream Of Life, Yitao Yuan

Masters Theses

The repetitive engagement with technological objects erases the depth of emotion by creating habits that bypass embodied and erotic pleasures and lead to a de-sexualized form of technology fetishism. The stimuli produced by machines that humans engage with are not able to convey the strength of intimacy between humans. Such virtual stimuli as the words and images produced and mediated through modern machines continuously shape conscious perception. This thesis book is split into two sections: a theoretical text and a series of images and explanations about my installation practice and process. They both seek to investigate the intersection of human …

Body Choice Of Women-507, Yilin Sun

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the struggle for bodily autonomy through the lens of contemporary art, focusing on 507, a kinetic installation by Yilin (Rebecca) Sun. At the heart of this work lies a powerful meditation on the emotional and political dimensions of reproductive responsibility. In a world where women’s rights over their own bodies are frequently contested, 507 becomes both a vessel of remembrance and a visual act of resistance. It channels the often-silenced experiences of women into a shared space of reflection, mourning, and confrontation.

Rather than offering straightforward answers, 507 presents an enigmatic title and a symbolic language …

Tierras Celosas, Gery Vargas

Masters Theses

Tierras Celosas is a field study, a symposium presentation at Brown University, a belief system. It is a machine-object, a cosmotechnic tension, an ontological contradiction. It embodies resistance and release, failure, and reclamation.

'Manch' Beyond - Museum, Dhwani Bapna

Masters Theses

In contemporary India, the museum remains a symbol of cultural prestige, yet according to national cultural surveys, fewer than 1% of Indians visit museums annually, a statistic that reflects not only structural and spatial exclusions, but also psychological barriers shaped by class, language, and institutional codes of conduct. These institutions are far from neutral: they embed expectations about how to see, move, and behave, privileging a didactic framework. In the absence of intimacy, dialogue, and belonging, the museum becomes a space visited, not inhabited.

Rather than viewing space as a container for artifacts, this thesis reimagines space itself as an …

Bodies Collapsing Together... Together As Dust., Catherine J. Wang

Masters Theses

I welcome you to a pedagogy of collapsing bodies: the teaching and learning practice between surviving occupants of Institutions.

From the villainizing of trans- bodies in K-14 public schools to the bodily removal of Palestinian discourse from universities, the 2025 presidential takeover of the Department of Education unearths systemic urgencies over the fragility, complicity, and agency of academic institutions—survivors of wars, recessions, shootings, climate disasters—that have always been collapsing. As long as educational campuses stage political and industrial performances, Institutional marriage to capitalism collapses the future of the university. Our architectural pedagogy shoulders this weight of confrontation: design education as …

Objects Into Things: The Ordinary Into Extraordinary, Michael K. Yirenkyi

Masters Theses

The most intimate experience of architecture starts at the scale of the object, from the slight grazing past the sofa to the painful bump of the toe against the legs of the sharply angled table. These objects have become a huge part of our everyday life and how we navigate the world around us, especially in the home where we spend the most time with them. Yet how many of us are truly aware when we engage with these objects. In a methodology deeply rooted in the design of objects into things, ideas investigated through this process are situated in …

Soft Stickers, Alexandra L. Croft

Masters Theses

The United States has long maintained an extractive relationship with national forest land, leaving a dwindling number of old-growth forests and an overabundance of young, small trees. Waste byproducts of the industry, such as sawmill offcuts, are typically burned or chipped for groundcover; but what if they were reconsidered as viable building materials in their own right? Opting for stuffed and strapped connections over conventional notches and nails, Soft Stickers proposes a building ethos that accepts and accounts for material variation and dimensional change over time through supple materials and a long-term maintenance commitment. Green wood offcuts dry and shrink …

Wooorrmmhooolleess, Kimberly Duck

Masters Theses

By now we all know that the internet is an integral part of our existence. One could argue that this online existence holds equal importance to our physical one. While the lines blur even further and Mark Zuckerberg can’t wait to cosplay the rich computer guy from Ready Player One, I choose to refrain from the existential dread that seems to be inescapable when thinking of the future nowadays. While we often associate the internet with portals (after all, we once called websites “Internet Portals”—in German at least), Wormholes more accurately capture the experience. Portals promise instant connection. But what …

Fervor, Tam C. Stockton

Masters Theses

As with the light that spills from the excitement of a flame, the ideas explored within the writings of Fervor emerged as the luminous flickering of those energies which arise in spaces of worship and belief, and their image. These writings shift and contort, suggesting the necessity for a constant renegotiation of sight, casting shadows of uncertainty that seem to move of their own volition. Rather than attempt to suggest a definitive understanding of the image and its relations, this work has embraced the fragmentary nature of the photographs from which it emerges. Taking the form of an artist's dictionary, …

The Navel Of The Dream, Ella C. Baum

Masters Theses

The images in The Navel of the Dream evoke a state of groundlessness. In this body of work, photographs act as thresholds between what is seen and what is felt, between daydreams and nightmares, and memories and myths. The camera is used as a means to engage with feelings of loss, and reenact the mythos of childhood, as well as the deep waters of the subconscious.

Created in Southern Sweden between 2022 and 2025, these photographs investigate the fallow winter landscape, the liminal space of deep, dark Scandinavian nights and the transformative qualities of ice, snow and …

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 …

Notes On Revivalism, Elana R. Kates

Masters Theses

.

Ontology Of The Discarded, Hae Young Kwon

Masters Theses

'Ontology of the Discarded' proposes a methodology for conferring existential legitimacy on everyday objects that are easily cast aside by turning them into jewelry. By projecting my own experience of once having been abandoned onto these trivial, voiceless things, the work offers consolation and a path to overcoming neglect. The thesis philosophically analyzes the human〝object relationship and the value judgments humans impose on objects, and, through research on related artworks, demonstrates how jewelry-fying quotidian items transforms both their value and their relationship with viewers. Each piece examines the object's inherent properties and, through strategic jewelryification, elevates it with a distinct …

Re-Imagining As Re-Empowering, Zheyun Chen

Masters Theses

While landscapes designed have been shown to effectively promote healing, foster community, and facilitate social empowerment, the landscapes of domestic violence shelters are woefully understudied.

This thesis explores the potential of integrating and combining existing design elements into the landscape to create a system that fosters a “safe place” within an urban context.

In this thesis, I developed a series of typologies based on existing landscape elements that are not necessarily connected with trauma-informed care or a healing landscape. I examined these in an urban context, specifically at Casa Myrna, a domestic violence shelter in Roxbury, Boston, MA.

Through the …

Site-Specific Nurseries: Reconnecting Nurseries To Time And Place Through Ecotypic Bare-Root Production, Tryn Collins

Masters Theses

We surround ourselves with empty landscapes, landscapes that are stagnant and decorative. Lawns edged with cultivated non-native species are inert spaces, devoid of complexity and serve little function beyond their appearances. These spaces that symbolize wealth through controlling nature are in fact the end of nature. Most of us are completely unaware of the intricate webs of life, the ecologies, that are our real habitat, hidden under the concrete and turf, pushed to the edges of our developments. They are relationships established over thousands of years between plants, insects, animals, weather and soil. This kind of complexity scares us, it …