Digital Commons Network^™

Crumbs On The Counter: A Study Of The Ability Of The Food Memoir To Reveal A Writer's Identity Through Culinary Experience, Danielle Courtney Ledoux

Masters Theses

Despite various backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, the table offers a place for people to meet on common ground. With my chosen creative work, the food memoir, I invite the reader to the common ground of food so that I can share my journey of self-discovery through specific memories with my mother. This process demonstrates how the food memoir effectively reaches a modern audience by incorporating key components of the cookbook, the memoir, and narrative writing. This analysis of the academic fields and writing techniques incorporated in the food memoir reveals a key literary tradition of the subgenre—the discovery of identity …

Enhancing Teacher Delivery Of Behavior Specific Praise With Performance Feedback And Self-Monitoring, Ky’Aria Moses

Masters Theses

Teachers receive a number of professional development trainings and consultations to develop or enhance their repertoire in various evidenced based practices (EBP) and classroom management strategies. Nevertheless, teachers’ adherence to strategies learned during trainings often decline when external supports are removed (Codding et al., 2015; Oliver et al., 2015) which may lead to challenges in the consistent and accurate implementation of EBP in classroom settings (Shernoff et al., 2020). Performance feedback and self-monitoring have been used to address these challenges and promote teachers’ use and fidelity of EBP in the classroom (Scheeler et al., 2004; Oliver et al., 2015). The …

A Preliminary Evaluation Of The Behavioral Gerontology Staff Training Protocols, Minyoung Kim

Masters Theses

Staff training in aging settings is integral to ensuring quality services, and such training has traditionally been conducted in person. With the COVID-19 outbreak, there is a need for innovative approaches to training that reduce exposure for trainers and staff. However, the efficacy of such an approach has not yet been demonstrated. To prevent the waste of staff resources at long-term care facilities, this study evaluates the efficacy of behavioral gerontology staff training protocols as a form of telehealth by utilizing graduate and undergraduate students as pilot participants. We use an additive concurrent multiple-probe design across participants to evaluate the …

The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave, Hannah Suzanna

Masters Theses

Using tarot and machine learning, I actively de-compose the narrative of four disintegrating sites — a conservation cemetery in North-Central Florida, my Dad’s house in California, an abandoned parking lot near my apartment in Providence, RI, and myself as an inherently mortal human.

Rather than a tool for prediction, I see tarot as a system of decay — breaking down human experiences into archetypes to allow presence with our existence.

What happens when we look at other predictive technologies, such as machine learning, as means of breaking apart our reality too? When talking about science fiction or speculative fiction, a …

Objects And Images, Jack Lovell

Masters Theses

My work often involves photographic source material as well as surrealistic forms. Two primary influences, René Magritte and Gerhard Richter, can be seen as at odds with each other in many respects. Drawing parallels and distinctions, I explore relationships in the work of Magritte, Richter and myself.

House Of Reincarnation, Xinyu Li

Masters Theses

In this book, I will introduce my practice as an artist interested in nightmares, monsters, and abandoned places. My works are personal, so I have designed a character as a guide for the book; the creature is another version of me. This book will describe the adventures of the creature as the main storyline; the stories run through Hakka cultures and my personal experience, and gradually explain the source of my inspirations and design process. With the creature as company, readers won't feel lonely while reading the book.

Tracking Traces, Songan Kyung

Masters Theses

My art practice in RISD is to reveal violent narratives embedded beneath the surface of digital traces. By taking the role of investigator — crime 71 scene investigator, conspiracy theorist —, I experiment in ways to dismantle and reconstruct the ongoing social phenomena caused by the circulation of harmful digital traces. My practice comprises careful choices of protecting the ones harmed by the malignant digital traces and disclosing the toxicity.

The Reenactment : "Object" As Performance, Yue Jiang

Masters Theses

Throughout history, women have endured many obstacles placed upon them in both the private and public spheres. Women are pressured to achieve an ideal beauty standard and the expectation to fulfill the obligation of traditional domestic roles. As a 23-year old Chinese woman who daily faces these pressures, I intentionally critique them using my body as the site and the pressure as subject. Through acts of performance, using handmade and mass-produced objects consumed daily by women, I highlight the insidious pressures and expectations placed upon women’s bodies. By utilizing the format of photography to document the discomfort of “wearing” or …

Prepositions, Alexis Hill

Masters Theses

My work is a conscious engagement with traditions of process art that emphasize making over outcome and the desire to create art that cannot be predetermined. The art objects are primarily a by-product of engagement with my material reality. This is hard to pin down and harder to talk about. Historian Kim Grant’s introduction to the circular and sometimes impenetrable creative process is a good summation of one of the essential problems of my art [school] experience: “The artist’s hard work often takes place without a clearly denied goal, thereby rendering the artist’s labors endless, and any results resistant to …

Balancing The Tangible And Intangible, Shiqi Wu

Masters Theses

I love reading stories, but until now, I had never written my own. Balancing the Tangible & Intangible is organized around my experiences and stories, which are inseparable from my work. Together they constellate a narrative of remembrance. Memories surface, and so do connections, allowing for assurance and conviction during a time of personal flux and global unsettledness. As a choreographer and composer of relationships between the tangible and intangible, I rebuild networks of connections linking memories of my relationship to China, my home country, to my experience of living in the West.

In today's global society, population migration is …

Hybrid Garment, Diya Wang

Masters Theses

What is in the overlap between jewelry and clothing? Does the combination of jewelry and apparel create a new, significant,way of seeing art?

Hybrid Garment is a series of work that explores the overlap between fashion and Jewelry. As an artist and designer, my background and training prepared me to dissect and rebuild the relationship between and potential of jewelry and garments. The potential of hybridity serves as a methodology to combine and conflate the two disciplines.The essence of this work carries the idea of inclusivity, it encourages people at all levels to wear them. In addition, anyone wearing it …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Art Can Empower Children And Lead Them To Think Seriously About Significant Critical Issues, Jialu Gao

Masters Theses

This thesis is an investigation of how students can benefit through art and how visual arts educators can engage students in thinking about critical issues that are happening within contemporary society. Raising people’s awareness of the value of art, and especially urging to practice art better in schools’ curriculums are the starting point. This thesis includes looking at selective literature from Elliot Eisner, Charles Fowler, Mika Munakata and other educators and authors. The author also examines select contemporary practices in art education that occur in different settings, for example, in school, in gallery, in museum, and in community. The author …

Beauty Still Lives Here: Narratives Of Radical Self-Love, Deshun Peoples

Masters Theses

This exhibition is primarily concerned with the act of taking up physical and socio-political space. Through the use of form, design, color, and installation this work places various histories and traditions of both ceramics and resistance in communication with one another. The red, black, and green of Marcus Garvey’s 1920 Pan-African/Black American flag are proudly displayed against a warm, calm, pale green backdrop to highlight the importance of mental health in all endeavors, especially in the emotionally taxing labor of social, political, and economic protest in the battle for humanity, life, civil rights, equity, access, and decision-making power.

Cognitive Development & Art Education: Relationship, Suitability, And Future Implications, Zheng Yao

Masters Theses

In this thesis the author sought to discover linkages between Art, Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Cognitive Science through a review of scholarship surrounding the integration of cognitive theories, art, and education. There have been numerous studies that claim that art education in elementary and secondary schools improves students' academic performance, interpersonal skills and improves attitudes to life. Nations meanwhile constantly modify standards and frameworks for teaching and learning in the visual arts. However, despite these changes, the author wondered to what extent, if at all, new standards-based visual arts curriculum frameworks were responsive to concepts within cognitive theory. This qualitative study …

Building Empathy At The Intersection Of Art, Nature, & Culture: A Field Guide For Art Educators, Jasmine Gutbrod

Masters Theses

This thesis is an offering for those compelled to use art and design learning as a way to strengthen the resiliency of our collective cultures. By integrating intersectional place-based pedagogy into art and design learning, art educators can resist the idea that humans exist on a hierarchy with each other and other species. A deeper understanding of place can build empathy for both nature and culture, and can help educators imagine alternative classroom models that focus on building empathy within a learning environment. The importance of place is examined through a literature review, contemporary artist analysis, case studies, and interviews …

Sensory Refreshment: Tcm Reconsidered, Ni Tang

Masters Theses

With the rapid development and expansion of our cities and the economic demand placed on residents, city dwellers are under more personal stress than ever. Long commutes, overtime work, irregular rest, unhealthy diets, urban pollution and noise all adversely impact wellbeing. These unhealthy conditions overwhelm the mind and make residents mentally and physically sub-healthy. Sub-health is a state between complete health and sickness, which is especially common in large cities. The sub-health rate in Shanghai and Beijing has reached more than 70%.

Chinese medicine can regulate the human body from a holistic perspective and help solve sub-health problems. Chinese medicine …

A Study Of Pedagogical Approaches To Inform Instructors On How To Help Ease The Transition Of A Flute Student Switching To Oboe, Mai'ya Jackson

Masters Theses

Young band students are seldom allowed to begin on the oboe, due to the specialized difficulties of the instrument. It is more prevalent for a student to begin on another instrument, such as the flute, and transition to the oboe after some initial experience. Many students switch to oboe from flute, since both instruments have similarities in fingering and wind technique. However, there are significant differences between the two instruments. These differences include embouchure formation, articulation, octave keys and alternate fingerings, intonation adjustment, and double reed care. If a student is not able to receive individualized instruction during this transitional …

Incorporating Video Game Music Into Music Education: Potential Benefits And Challenges, Zechariah D. Emery

Masters Theses

This study examines the potential benefits of incorporating video game music into various forms of music education. Since no previous scholarly work could be found on this specific subject, this study relies on examining various aspects of video game music and adjacent studies on student motivation and achievement. The study is broken up into several sections. An analytical study determines that video game music has developed to the point where it is just as complex as other forms of music and has unique aspects that could make it a valuable tool in education. The study also examines the uses of …

Loose Threads / Hilos Sueltos, Estefanía De Ros

Masters Theses

In this body of work, I’ve collaborated with four artisans from my home country, Guatemala: Apolonio Vicente, Vinicio Vicente, Mario Poz and Manuel Otsojay. They all use traditional craft methods with natural materials: wicker, wool, and cotton. I interweave, overlap, and knot mementos from my childhood with current ideas and dialogues that contain loose threads to the work. All of the layers merge in fluid forms with texture and movement. The curtains let light in, the rug sets warmth, and the “cayuco” invites you to slow down.

I aim to push back against the devaluing of craft traditions, especially in …

I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head : Frenetic Vortex, Animal As Image - Field Notes (1989-2021), Steffanie A. Padilla

Masters Theses

This essay is an attempt to describe a hypnosis induced by media through the accumulation of images in everyday life starting the day I was born. Raised by television and the internet, I go through a chronological timeline of my life selecting banal memories to showcase how violence to animals became neutralized/rendered invisible. The work is primarily concerned with mental health while focused on the youth, ecological destruction, and how sensory overload keeps us from knowing ourselves. The motivation of this paper is to better understand how our environment shapes our reality by using a psychological, media theory, and cognitive …

Remember Me: How We Can Modify The Home For People With Dementia, Wenjin Wang

Masters Theses

More than 50 million people live with dementia worldwide. For reasons of familiarity, affordability, and psychological comfort, the home is uniquely preferred by people with dementia (PwD) and their caregivers for aging in place. Ample studies show that built environmental features (e.g., furnishing, lighting, layout) influence the daily lives of PwD. These features can be modified easily and with fewer disruptions to daily life at home. However, most PwD and their caregivers usually have little knowledge of what can be achieved through simple interventions to environmental features.

There is a great need for an exhibition to explain the dementia-friendly home …

Dead Space: The Changing Discourse Of Death: How To Design A Contemporary And Enduring Funeral Practice, Xin Wang

Masters Theses

My thesis seeks to design my grandfather’s cemetery to regain a piece of my personal memory. It also seeks to situate this issue in the contemporary context of the pandemic, which helped inspire my topic. I started my thesis in a very turbulent year. I found myself missing family members far away on the other side of the earth.

How are they doing now?

I suddenly missed my Grandfather’s village, which I had only visited once a year prior to the great pandemic. My Grandfather passed away when I was very young. I get along well with my Grandmother, but …

Becoming A Precipice: The Liminality Of Queer Cruising, Chance Deville

Masters Theses

In “Becoming a Precipice,” I am analyzing queer cruising areas as psychological landscapes from a queer, non-binary perspective, counter to heteronormative conventions. These landscapes are important to me, as being a full participant in this culture is my main form of sexual interaction. My inquiry is prompted by the need to interpret how this specific form of desire molds itself into visceral responses and manifestations of performative masculinity. Entering the cruising landscape itself increases awareness and intensifies the senses, in a space where signals become critical in determining transactions with other individuals beyond spoken language. These somatic reactions are uniquely …

Wounds Need Air, Camilla Jerome

Masters Theses

A personal essay in the first-person voice describes the artist’s lived experience navigating the American medical industrial complex with multiple misdiagnosed chronic pain disorders. The artist’s personal story spans thirty years and is contextualized by illness, gender, race, age, ability, class, and is grounded in the artistic expression of self. Descriptions of mental illness, physical disability, and access to proper healthcare are weaved into an examination of embodied knowledge.

Making Meaning, Eric Loucks

Masters Theses

Making Meaning explores mental health through the lens of a contemporary craft-based design practice. Themes of identity, catharsis, connection, flow, teaching, and community create a framework for understanding the role craft plays in developing and maintaining a healthy mindset. The physical pieces that result from this approach are meticulously made, highly considered, and given the quality of contemporary heirloom: a piece that promotes a kind of emotional connection and wellness in their owner.

Imaging "Interracial": Performing Racialized Desire In "Interracial" Heterosexual Hardcore Pornography, Megan Christiansen

Masters Theses

“Interracial” is a term that implicitly categorizes sex between Black cis men and white cis women within contemporary hardcore pornographic video. The artistic and research practice described in this paper is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire.

Looking with care and criticality at the pornographic representation of sex between Black men and white women can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key in constructing notions of desire and taboo in America. Through this work I begin to consider how racism and misogyny …

Loneliness / Togetherness : Interiority And Connection Under Isolation, Huaqin Chen

Masters Theses

Inhabitants’ perceptions can be greatly impacted when they are in an enforced space, a state of incarceration. That sense of confinement can cause mental or physical health issues on account of the loneliness, lack of interaction or confusion of time and space. Living through enforcement and isolation deeply affect human cognition and behavior. We can also easily find precedents of living through enforcement in the plots of films. By studying narrative, this thesis reconstructs domestic space by investigating the changes in our daily life after our current pandemic. A spatial sequence is created according to the relationwship among time, space …

Woven Healing: Reimagining The Rural Health Center, Mahasweta Jayachandran

Masters Theses

Seventy-five percent of India’s population is rural. Of those rural citizens, almost nine out of ten lack access to adequate health facilities. While the existing composition of any village in India is housing, temple, and agriculture, the physical well-being of residents has no home. When the local government builds a new isolated healthcare center, these disconnected centers become deserted and a place of unhealthy activity.

How do you effectively embed a new spatial intervention within an existing system of the village that supports health, rather than extending the boundaries of the village into sprawl? Historical study of medical practice in …

Migrating Architecture: Vernacular Futurism, Yichu Jiang

Masters Theses

The history of mankind is migration: while large migrations describe groups and communities, each individual has a unique life history of migration. When moving to a new place, singly or in groups, migrants need self-identification support to adapt to a new environment. As the built environment continuously interacts with human’s everyday life, architecture provides a stable environment, which helps to build individual perceptions in space and social relations. Therefore, architecture migrates with its population and evolves according to context.

Tulou, as a result of historical turbulence and massive migration in China, exemplifies such a phenomenon of migrating architecture. The prototypical …