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The Speculative Mode Of The Image: Destabilizing Reality In Crash, Invisible Man, And Beloved, Steven Connors

Open Access Dissertations

In an exploration of the dimensions of speculative fiction, which is a prominent cultural and academic apparatus wanting definition in the twenty-first century, this dissertation examines the speculative mode of the image in various transatlantic novels, ranging from J. G. Ballard’s Crash to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The image in itself is a multivalent term that warrants analysis. As a concept, the abstract nature of the image serves to destabilize reality. It is always in conversation with the notions of reality. Indeed, images inform our senses of reality. In part, they constitute our social forms. …

The Pursuit Of Sustainability In Solar Power Generation, Leni John

Open Access Dissertations

Solar energy has become an important source of power generation. Like all technologies, photovoltaic (PV) components have limitations in their usefulness and operational effectiveness. The rapid development of solar power technology, along with the costs and requirements for long-term maintenance, complicate the serviceability of these technologies when they become obsolete. As critical component spare parts are depleted, warranties expire, or original equipment manufacturers cease support for their legacy technology, it poses a significant risk to maintaining PV power plant operations. As a result, owners lack a comprehensive Decision Support System (DSS) to address failures in obsolete technology.

This dissertation aims …

Textual Sediments: Genre And The Planetary Novel, William Bowden

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how twenty-first-century prose fiction navigates the ecological and temporal dimensions of planetary crisis. In response to accelerating pressures - climate change, ecological collapse, and the intensification of capitalist modernity - literary studies has turned increasingly to the planetary as a conceptual frame. Yet this shift has often outpaced the development of adequate critical vocabularies and narrative methodologies. By drawing on ecocriticism, narrative theory, phenomenology, and related fields, Textual Sediments proposes a new framework for reading what it terms the planetary novel: a sedimentary genre characterized by temporal layering, formal hybridity, and a recursive engagement with scale. Through …

"Understanding Obesity Experiences And Treatment Decision-Making In Hispanic-Latino Communities”, Viviane Fornasaro-Donahue

Open Access Dissertations

Obesity disproportionately affects Hispanic-Latino adults in the United States, yet rates of metabolic and bariatric surgery (MBS) remain lower in this population compared with non-Hispanic White adults. This dissertation comprises three interconnected phases aimed to (I) explore perceptions of obesity, obesity treatment, and patient-provider communication, (II) inform the development of a culturally responsive bilingual educational material about obesity and MBS, and (III) evaluate its acceptability among Hispanic-Latinos adults with obesity.

Phase I involved a qualitative exploration using semi-structured interviews with Hispanic-Latino adults (n=26) recruited from a community and a clinical MBS setting. These interviews explored participants’ perceptions of …

Translanguaging Through Experiencing: The Lived Experiences Of Multilingual Learners Studying Chinese, Jiangping Cai

Open Access Dissertations

Although the United States has a population with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, multilingual education has been greatly influenced by monolingual and raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2019; García, 2014; Ruiz, 1984). With world language enrollment continuing to decline (Lusin et al., 2023), investigation of the lived experiences of diverse groups of multilingual learners (MLLs) would help to understand language learning from a sociocultural perspective, and better support multilingual education and planning. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the Chinese learning experiences of native English multilingual students studying Chinese at a U.S. public university language program. The …

From Page To Stage: Enlightenment Common Sense & The Semiotics Of The Body, 1660–1820, Nilton X. Gomes

Open Access Dissertations

How did eighteenth-century audience members or novel readers come to see beyond the facades of literary characters and narrators? By looking into moments of bodily concealment in the eighteenth-century novel and theater, this dissertation examines how authors and playwrights in this period wrote with subtly and force to make the body as and in many instances more legible to their readers as the words on the page or the dialogues on the stage in attempts to suture the gap that lies between what a writer intends and what a reader grasps in a literary work. It also stresses the body’s …

Advancing Clinical-Community Partnerships To Address Pediatric Food Insecurity, Nader Hamdi

Open Access Dissertations

Background: Children and families experiencing low income in the United States are at a greater risk of food insecurity (FI) and suboptimal diet quality than the general population. Childhood FI, which is associated with numerous poor health and developmental outcomes, has become so pervasive that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends universal FI screenings. Routine FI screening in clinical settings presents opportunities for clinic-community partnerships to connect families experiencing FI with food access and nutrition education (FANE) programs. A variety of FANE programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - Education (SNAP-Ed), are administered at the federal level to …

The Immigrant Experience Of Latina Mothers From A Strengths Perspective: A Focused Ethnography, Esperanza Gutierrez

Open Access Dissertations

Latina mothers are part of a rapidly growing ethnic minority group in the United States (U.S.). Researchers have largely illuminated their challenges and problems in their immigration process. A problem-oriented approach leads to labeling of the individual based on vulnerabilities, pathologies, and deficits. Nursing needs a greater emphasis on the strengths perspective, empirical studies, and a broader culturally based conception of strengths, including Latina mothers who immigrate to the U.S. A strengths perspective would be beneficial in encompassing Latina mothers’ capabilities and potentialities.

Focused ethnography was used to identify and describe the strengths of Latina mothers who immigrated to the …

Culturally Sustaining Disciplinary History Instruction: Teachers Exploring A Possibility Through Practice, Brenda Santos

Open Access Dissertations

Since Wineburg (1999) suggested that history is an act of reasoning rather than remembering, historical thinking (or disciplinary history) has become a widely accepted and practiced vision for history instruction in the United States. Yet evidence suggests that this has not contributed to greater student learning or investment. Some scholars have pointed to a need for culturally sustaining pedagogy in history classrooms, but a vision for such a pedagogy remains unarticulated. This study involves a group of high school teachers in practitioner inquiry aimed at developing both their own learning and knowledge for the field about the practices of culturally …

Study Of The Factor Structure Of Commonly Used Measures Of Adhd, Anxiety, And Depression Among College Students, Emily Shepard

Open Access Dissertations

The present study aimed to examine the factor structure of three commonly used assessment methods, the ADHD Rating Scale (ADHD-RS), Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), among a sample of college students with and without ADHD with the goal of identifying a potential common inattention factor among the three measures. Additionally, the influences of race and sex on the factor structure was assessed. Participants were recruited from nine different universities in the eastern United States study (N = 456, n_ADHD =228). Each measure was analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis with comparison across ADHD …

Queer And Trans Inclusion In Finnish Teacher Education And Educational Research, Megan C. Jones

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation presents findings from a case study on queer and trans inclusion in a Finnish graduate program in educational research. The study was also able to expand to include experiences and perspectives from teacher education programs at the same university. This research serves an incredibly timely purpose of bringing issues of queer and trans inclusion to light in a context that is marketed as having idealistic educational practices and programs. Overall findings indicate that even in Finland, a country often looked at as an exemplary model of educational reform, there is a lack of queer and trans inclusion in …

Computational Close Reading: A Critique Of Digital Literary Methodology, Damiano Consilvio

Open Access Dissertations

Computational Close Reading intervenes in digital humanities and American literary scholarship to negotiate a significant institutional and disciplinary problem: the devaluation of close reading and interpretation in digital humanities applications to literary studies in favor of more distant modes of reading. To remedy this issue, I pursue a core question meant to bring the literary and the digital into a more perfect confluence, as a demonstration of possibilities meant to run counter to these preconceptions about computational reading: how “close,” if close at all, can digital technologies bring us to the interpretive elements of literary texts? I argue that they …

Blockchain Technology In Supply Chain Management: Performance And Risk Management Perspective, Leo Hong

Open Access Dissertations

Study 1

Blockchain technology (BT) in the supply chain/logistics has drawn much attention. Several benefits associated with the technology include cost-saving, sustainability enhancement, and economic viability. However, there are limited BT performance measurement models. The topic of the BT performance in supply chain management (SCM) is scattered across multiple disciplines. This study identifies different dimensions of BT performance and supports SCM managers to understand the systematic and holistic assessment of BT performance.

Study 2

The specific features of blockchain provide promise in managing supply chain risks. Given the growing research scrutiny in blockchain-based supply risk management, the development of a …

Incorporating Hemodynamic Cognitive Neuromarkers For Personalized Assistive Communication Technology, Seyyed Bahram Borgheai

Open Access Dissertations

A Brain computer interface (BCI) for communication bypasses standard efferent neural pathways towards peripheral nerves and muscles and directly translates brain activity into symbolic commands to facilitate communication in people with motor impairments. Although a range of access options have been developed, there are still many challenges, particularly for those with severe motor-control limitations. Limitations in availability of access options and the accuracy they provide may lead to patient frustration. Hence, many conventional non-invasive BCIs that rely on eye-gaze control and alternative communicative solutions, such as eye-tracking systems, fail to provide successful and efficient communication in people with severe motor …

The Text(Tiles) Of Adinkra Symbols: West African Art, Gender, & Poetic Translations, Rachel A. Ansong

Open Access Dissertations

The Text(tiles) of Adinkra Symbols: West African Art, Gender, & Poetic Translations is a critical and creative dissertation that interrogates Adinkra symbols from West Africa. These symbols, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, serve as codes, communicating warnings and meanings of proverbs to recipients. Many individual Adinkra symbols are abstract ideographs of the philosophical ideas they represent. My work expands on existing scholarship and further elaborates how Adinkra symbols moved from Ghana to the United States (U.S). Specifically, I trace how these creative-pictorial-philosophical symbols evolved in use as artistic mediums of expression of African/Black tradition and identity for the migrant African/Black …

Learning To Visualize: Middle-Level Learners Analyzing And Designing Science Infographics, Mark Davis

Open Access Dissertations

Infographics are part of daily life because of the rise of digital media and technology, as learners now encounter a barrage of images carefully designed to convey data and information through social media. But what happens in the classroom when young learners first encounter this expressive genre? This case study examined a unit of instruction on analyzing and creating infographics in a content-area middle school classroom. Data included classroom observations through video and audio recording, examination of a student graphic organizer and student-designed infographics, and semi-structured interviews with students and the facilitating teacher. Results show that students learned how to …

Broken Dozer, Haunted Vale: The Ecopoetics Of Ambient Language, Andrew Merecicky

Open Access Dissertations

Broken Dozer, Haunted Vale is a collection of poetry that explores the principles of ambient language poetics as articulated in its critical introduction. Rather than a poetic focused on a set of thematic concerns, ambient language poetics is an ecopoetic that addresses the writing process itself and proposes an alternative to the internal/external spatial metaphor that inspires creative writing pedagogy premised on the urgency of self-expression. The poems within the collection are an experimental inquiry into what might be possible in making poems if the activity of reading/writing is not motivated primarily by representational and mimetic aims that are described …

Black Feminist Autoethnography: How Identity Can Affect Peer Review Practices In The College Writing Classroom, Eileen M. James

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the importance of embodied teaching pedagogy as it relates to peer review practices in the college writing classroom. This work uses autoethnography as a research method, exploring issues of (dis)embodiment and experiences with collaborative learning in classrooms. In addition to a review of applicable literature focused on peer review practices, writing pedagogy, and Black Feminist Autoethnography, this dissertation contains narrative sections from the viewpoint of the subject--a Black woman--as a student, an instructor, and a researcher working to examine her experiences and how they demonstrate the need for embodied approaches in the classroom. The purpose of this …

Training And Professional Practices Of School Psychologists Serving U.S. Indigenous Communities: A Qualitative Descriptive Study, Erin D. Churchill

Open Access Dissertations

The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) is committed to supporting the academic, behavioral, social, and emotional needs of students from historically underserved and/or marginalized backgrounds. However, there continues to be a lack of attention given to U.S. Indigenous populations in the school psychology literature. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the training and professional practices of school psychologists serving U.S. Indigenous communities. Fifteen certified and/or licensed school psychologists practicing in a school setting with three or more years of experience serving high-density Indigenous school populations participated in the study. Qualitative methods were employed, and data were …

Counter-Narratives Matter: A Critical Race Analysis Of Black Servicemen’S School-To-Military Trajectory, Derece Vanterpool

Open Access Dissertations

For more than a decade the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and more recently the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) have mandated that schools allow military recruiters access to student information with the objective of recruitment for military service. Thus, national education reform has become the conduit through which schools are legally obligated to support the military agenda to recruit children. Enabled by ESSA, the military launched campaigns predominantly in large urban schools attended by poor and working-class Black students (Furumoto, 2005), which often offer a narrow and disempowering curriculum and are under-resourced (Anyon, 2014). The practice of military …

Working Towards Proficiency: Investigation Of Reclassification And Growth Rates For High School English Learners In An Asset And Research-Based English Learner Development Course, Amy Correia

Open Access Dissertations

This study evaluated the impact of a newly-developed asset and research-based English Learner Development (ELD) course on high school English Learners’ (ELs) likelihood of reaching reclassification or showing growth on an annually-administered state assessment of English language proficiency (ELP). Logistic regression was used to calculate the probability that an EL would reach reclassification while controlling for the student-level variables of gender, lunch status, and time in country. Linear regression was used to calculate growth rates in literacy. The findings of this study revealed that ELs who participated in the ELD course were 1.6 times more likely to reach reclassification status …

Turning Points: A Case Study Of Motivation In Foreign Language, Shawna C. Iula

Open Access Dissertations

Enrollment in foreign language courses has been declining. Fewer students are studying foreign languages and those that do often discontinue after the introductory levels. This single-embedded case study looks into why students who initially wanted to continue on to more intermediate levels did not, and also why students who initially only wanted to complete introductory levels changed their plans and continued on to more intermediate levels. Participants included two groups with nine participants total. The first group consists of five students who initially planned on discontinuing after introductory levels and changed their minds and decided to continue. The second group …

South Asian American College Students’ Mental Health Help-Seeking Attitudes And Preferences, Mehwish Shahid

Open Access Dissertations

Previous research has established that Asian Americans are less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to utilize mental health services. This has given rise to a multitude of studies examining Asian Americans’ attitudes towards seeking professional psychological help. However, given the immense diversity of the Asian American population, there exists a need for additional studies exploring the needs of specific subsets of the Asian American population. The present study explored the mental health help-seeking preferences and attitudes of South Asian Americans in particular. Participants were 131 South Asian American undergraduate and graduate students from universities across the United States. …

Gatekeepers And Access Agents: How Admissions Officers Understand Their Roles In Shaping College Access In The 21st Century Market For Higher Education, Brian Stevens

Open Access Dissertations

Many scholars (Cox, 2016; Harklau & McClanahan, 2012; Niemann & Maruyama, 2005; Solórzano, 2005) have explored the causes of opportunity gaps in higher education. Those studies have looked at the various impediments to accessing higher education that have led to the persistence of gaps in college attendance rates, but few have specifically explored the complex relationship between college admissions officers and institutional admissions policies. This study will contribute to literature related to higher education access by examining the roles of admissions officers and adding their perspectives to a body of work where their voices have been largely absent. Grounded in …

The Mark Of The Vanishing Reader: Intradiegetic Interaction In Multimodal Narrative, Catherine Ann Winters

Open Access Dissertations

What is a book? What do we expect to find in books? Who is the twenty-first-century reader? Such questions have proliferated over the last thirty years as the anxiety of the death of the book and the vanishing reader has loomed over literature. In this dissertation, I explore how twenty-first-century American multimodal narrative books featuring intradiegetic readers (a character who reads a story within the storyworld) represent the possibilities and limits of the print book to engage the informed reader in a changing media ecology. The books in this study are not merely testing the limits of how stories can …

Understanding Principals’ Perceptions Of Effective Communication In Suburban And Urban Schools: A Cross-Case Study, Abdelnasser Hussein

Open Access Dissertations

The research explored the perceptions of effective communication with parents in suburban and urban school districts from the perspective of the school principals. To achieve this purpose, the study was guided by five research questions: 1) What are the principals’ perceptions of effective communication with parents?; What are principals’ perceptions of effective strategies of school-home communication?; How does a principal’s perception of effective communication influence the strategies implemented to communicate with parents?; How does the cultural context of a school setting affect principals’ perceptions of school-home communication?; and What are the barriers that may obstruct effective communication between principals and …

Confirmatory Factor Analysis Of The Wisc-Iv With A Trinidad Referred Sample, Cherisse Rambarose

Open Access Dissertations

There has been an extensive amount of research in the intelligence-assessment literature on the structure of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, fourth edition (WISC-IV; 2003a). Numerous studies show that the test’s general factor structure replicates across normative and referred groups, in the U.S. and globally. Thus far, few studies have been done examining the factor structure of this, and other intelligence tests with Caribbean samples. The current study adds to this body of literature by examining the factor structure of the WISC-IV with a referred sample from Trinidad. This study utilized archival data from a sample accessed through private …

Opening Ceremony: A Writing Practice Towards Queer Futurity, Laura Marie Marciano

Open Access Dissertations

Opening Ceremony is a collection of poems in completion of a creative dissertation in poetry at the University of Rhode Island. The book is a five-year writing practice towards queer futurity and considers, both in form and content, how poems can transgress hierarchal binaries and create exit discourse. The poems use lyric imagery, reference to color and material, space on the page, and colloquial language, to write the bodies, aesthetics, and experiences of contemporary queer life. It is a practice of not rallying against hetero-patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy, which may restabalize binaries, but rather, giving homage to that which …

Ecologies Of Materiality And Aesthetics In British Modernist War-Time Literature, 1890-1939, Molly Volanth Hall

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines landscape representation in English novels, memoirs, manifestos, and poetry between 1890 and 1939 responding to World War I and the larger dynamics of imperialism of which it is a part. Analyzing how such works reflect and reshape dominant environmental perception during the early twentieth century’s marked acceleration of mass warfare and ecological change, it reads for the way images of mud, stone, land, and soil—collected under the term base matters—express the entanglement of environmental and national structures of feeling ranging from fear to dissociation. These base matters dominate characters’ and authors’ changing perception of the material world …

The Role Of Kindergarten Vocabulary Knowledge And Language Status On Early Reading Comprehension, Jennifer Cruz

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of receptive vocabulary knowledge on first and second grade reading comprehension for 340 Kindergarten Dual Language Learners (DLLs) and monolingual students. An additional purpose of the study was to examine the effect of a Tier 2 vocabulary intervention on students’ reading comprehension abilities. Linear regression analyses found statistically significant interactions between initial vocabulary knowledge and DLL status, as well as initial vocabulary knowledge and intervention treatment condition on first grade reading comprehension. Vocabulary at the end of Kindergarten and the change in vocabulary scores also significantly predicted first grade comprehension. …