Digital Commons Network^™

She Absorbs, Jamie Westermeyer

Theses

Drawing from lived experience, this thesis investigates the ways sensitivity, attentiveness, and emotional labor are cultivated over time, specifically within gendered environments that reward endurance and self-containment. The figures in this work exist within moments of tension—straining, compressing, and distorting under pressures that are often invisible yet deeply felt. This work focuses on endurance—how individuals adapt, absorb, and negotiate expectations placed upon them. My figures operate as both personal and collective bodies, embodying experiences that extend beyond being autobiographical. Moments of physical distortion and emotional discomfort coexist within the sculptures, allowing vulnerability and critique to appear simultaneously. Ultimately, the sculptures …

Neuroarchitecture: Color Psychology And Its Impact On The Built Environment, Jean Morgan

Theses

Neuroarchitecture merges neuroscience and architecture, examining how built environments affect our emotions, behaviors, and overall well-being. One of the principles of this interdisciplinary topic focuses on Color psychology, which explores the profound influence of colors on human emotions, behaviors, and cognitive responses. In the built environment, the strategic use of color extends beyond aesthetics, shaping user experiences, functionality, and psychological well-being. This thesis explores the interplay between color psychology and architectural design, highlighting how color choices influence mood, productivity, and social interactions within spaces. The main focus will examine the relationship between colors and equal causation in psychological effects. The …

Gender Symbolism, Emmanuel Joseph Okechukwu

Theses

This thesis, Gender Symbolism, explores how contemporary ceramic practice can be used to challenge colonial ideas of gender and reclaim African perspectives on identity. Drawing from personal experience growing up in Nigeria as someone who did not conform to rigid expectations of masculinity, this work examines how gender has been historically constructed, policed, and misunderstood within both African and Western contexts. Through research into pre-colonial Nigerian societies, this thesis argues that gender was once understood as fluid, situational, and socially defined, rather than fixed within binary categories. The imposition of colonial rule, Christianity, and Western legal systems introduced rigid gender …

Designing The Spaces In Between: How Transitional Spaces In Elementary Schools Shape Clarity, Well-Being, And Belonging, Cristin Witcher Siegel

Theses

This thesis investigates the role of transitional spaces in elementary schools and their impact on students’ experiences of clarity, well-being, and belonging. While educational design often prioritizes classrooms as primary sites of learning, this study argues that the spaces between them, including corridors, stairwells, and entry zones, play a critical role in shaping daily experience and supporting student development. Using a comparative case study methodology, three elementary schools in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago were analyzed, each representing a distinct architectural era and educational philosophy: Crow Island School (1939), Wilmette Junior High School (1958), and Sunset Ridge School (2018). …

What’S In It For Us?, Hannah Giancola

Theses

What’s in it for us? examines how value can be created, abstracted, and redefined through material practice, participation, and shared experience. Situated in the space between maker and mender, the artist works in the symbiotic relationship between creation and repair. Wood is the primary material of creation, often in its imperfect form. It becomes both medium and metaphor representing intrinsic value while helping to challenge the systems that’s equate value with market and currency. From a multidisciplinary approach and adaptive nature, the work pulls from personal history, interfaith upbringing, and influences from conceptual art to traditional craft. This thesis transitions …

Complexity And Usability Of Digital Healthcare, Theresa Haas

Theses

Digital services, ranging from online shopping and banking to government services and healthcare, are rapidly taking over human-provided services. The accessibility and usability of such digital services may not allow older adults to make use of them, making automation a barrier to access societal services. This is especially critical with many healthcare-related services and apps. This research is framed around two interrelated constructs, task complexity and individual complexity, the latter influenced by cognitive decline in older users. The experiment has three representative tasks of different task complexity and the measure of individual complexity which is understood through previous knowledge of …

Support Systems, Capability Configurations, And Enabling Conditions For Circular Entrepreneurship, Israa Thiab

Theses

The transition to a circular economy requires entrepreneurs who can create value from waste, design regenerative business models, and navigate resource-constrained environments. Yet understanding what enables circular entrepreneurial success remains fragmented across the sustainability and entrepreneurship literatures. This dissertation examines how entrepreneurial support systems, capability configuration, and external enabling conditions shape circular venture development and performance through three complementary studies that together advance a unified framework of circular entrepreneurial effectiveness. Study 1 employs participatory action research with a donor-funded incubation program in Jordan, examining how stakeholder priorities reconfigure support systems for circular entrepreneurs. Analysis of two cohorts reveals that stakeholder-driven …

Behaviour-Based Gender Prediction Using Mobile App Usage Patterns, Saleha Alblooshi

Theses

Widespread usage of mobile applications has generated massive behavioural information, which reflects routines, preferences, and lifestyles of users. Gender, demographic details are typically gathered in telecommunications settings in the registration of the SIM, but this data is often based on administrative ownership, and not the user of the device. This inconsistency can break the customer profiling, accuracy of segmentation and effectiveness of targeted marketing. The study is exploring the hypothesis through the examination of the data obtained based on an undertaking to check the validity of the registered gender data in telecommunication customer relationship management systems by using the behavioural …

They’Ve Been Waiting For Me A Long Time, Anna Minzer

Theses

They’ve Been Waiting for Me a Long Time is a photo-based project saturated in process, layers, and iterations. Using collage as a connective approach, They’ve Been Waiting for Me a Long Time interrogates the boundaries of the domestic and wild, the aestheticized and the abject and the trappings of gender in tension with queer values.      As my visual art encapsulates a variety of approaches, my sources and inspirations manifest from a variety of media—installation, literature, philosophy, photography, and wallpaper. With an assortment of influences, I demonstrate a proclivity towards the liminal. A prime purpose of They’ve Been Waiting for Me …

Abigail Sarai: A Neuroaesthetic Approach To Fashion Brand Development, Abby Martos

Theses

This thesis project presents a comprehensive direct-to-consumer business plan for an independent women’s fashion brand, Abigail Sarai, strategically positioned around the commercial value of aesthetic design. The project is grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework integrating neuroaesthetics and consumer behavior research. Existing literature demonstrates that visual principles such as symmetry, harmony, and proportion activate neural reward systems associated with pleasure, while consumer research identifies happiness and emotional well-being as central drivers of purchasing behavior. Building upon these findings, this project proposes that aesthetic beauty can function as a deliberate and measurable value proposition within fashion entrepreneurship. By aligning brand design …

From There To There, Daniil Kolchanov

Theses

From There to There is a semi-fictional journey, an attempt to figure out what home is, that uses photography as the main medium. It started with the physical act of leaving my country, but quickly turned into an internal journey. In this project, I am interested in themes of displacement, lack of belonging, and home as a utopian idea. Combining different ideas of home, metaphors, symbols and everyday moments, I talk about an idealized home, ideas of stability, connection, and a sense of belonging in an ever-changing environment. From There to There questions the internal relationship between identity, memory, community, …

Yes, I Think So?, Madeeha Ahmad

Theses

Yes, I Think So? is a body of work that explores memory as something unstable and alterable by emotion, time, and lived experience. Influenced by my experience with epilepsy, the show meditates on how dreams, seizures, and waking life can blur together, fracturing a sense of consistency and continuity. Rather than thinking of memory as a definitive record of the past, I encounter it as a process of reconstruction. Wood serves as both a material and a metaphor. It records time visibly with its growth yet remains unpredictable in its resistance to complete control. Indigo dye moves the work farther …

3d Deep Learning For Pulmonary Nodule Malignancy Classification In Ct Imaging, Nart Madi

Theses

Early detection of lung cancer significantly improves patient survival, with pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) imaging serving as key indicators of early-stage disease. However, manual classification of nodules is time-consuming and subject to interobserver variability. This thesis proposes a reproducible deep learning framework for pulmonary nodule malignancy classification using volumetric CT data. Using the LIDC-IDRI dataset, a standardized preprocessing pipeline is developed, including isotropic resampling, intensity normalization, and 3D patch extraction. A baseline 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) is implemented and compared against a proposed SE-ResNet3D architecture that incorporates residual connections and squeeze-and-excitation mechanisms. Both models are trained and …

Predicting Customer Churn In Telecommunication Companies: A Predictive Analytics Case Study Inspired By E&, Nadia Almheiri

Theses

Customer churn is a significant challenge in the telecommunications industry, particularly in competitive markets such as the United Arab Emirates, where customers can easily switch between providers such as e& and du. Telecommunications companies must move beyond reactive approaches and adopt data-driven strategies that enable early identification of churn risk and support proactive retention. This study develops an interpretable churn prediction framework using logistic regression and decision tree models within IBM SPSS. Following the CRISP-DM methodology, the research identifies key demographic, behavioural, and service-related factors that influence churn, and evaluates model performance using accuracy, precision, recall, and ROC-AUC. The findings …

Subject. Object. Thing., Cristin Hand

Theses

Subject. Object. Thing. is part of an accumulating record of self-construction and self-reflection. The work considers the complications of visibility through self-portraiture, how the desire to be seen exists alongside the impulse to withhold, obscure, and substitute. Working across photography, performance, collage, and sculptural constructions made for the camera, I fragment, disassemble, and reconfigure my body as photographic subject and material. This exploration is structured around a series of oppositions; concealment/exposure, anonymity/specificity, subject/object, naked/nude, and destruction/reconstruction. I do not attempt to resolve these oppositions. Instead, I consider where these categories blur, contradict themselves, and become unstable. Central to this inquiry …

A Reconfigurable Architecture For Dense And Sparse Matrix Multiplication In Processing-In-Memory, Timothy Avila

Theses

Traditional Von-Neumann computing architectures suffer from a fundamental limitation known as the memory wall, where performance is constrained by the cost of data movement between memory and processing units rather than by computational capability. This limitation is particularly pronounced in data-intensive workloads such as machine learning (ML) and hyperdimensional computing (HDC), where matrix-vector operations dominate execution and are often memory-bound. Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architectures have emerged as a promising approach to mitigate this bottleneck by enabling computation to occur within or near memory, thereby reducing data movement overhead. However, due to these processors' specialized nature and the limited integration of general-purpose …

The Houston Eclipse, Korey Hans

Theses

The Houston Eclipse is a sports branding project for a fictional WNBA team, built on the idea that design can shape the fan experience. In a market where consumer attention is constantly being fought over, the brands that stand out are the ones that make people feel something. Sports already carries that emotional weight, but most fan-facing products don't take full advantage of it, often reducing team identity to a logo placed on top of a product without regard for the form it's applied to. This project approaches branding as a full system rather than a single mark. Drawing on …

Antidistillation Sampling For Classification Models, Khawaja Abaid Ullah

Theses

Knowledge distillation enables adversaries to replicate the functionality of proprietary machine learning models by querying their APIs and training surrogate student models on the returned soft-label distributions. Antidistillation Sampling (ADS), recently proposed for large language models, perturbs the output distribution of a teacher model at inference time to degrade the quality of the resulting distilled model while preserving utility for legitimate users. We adapt ADS to the supervised classification setting and identify a structural obstacle to its direct transfer: the high-confidence, near-one-hot output distributions characteristic of well-trained classifiers leave insufficient probability mass on non-target classes for the additive penalty to …

"We Pledge Ourselves To Use Our United Strength": Education, Women's Clubs, And The Woman Suffrage Movement In Tennessee, Michelle P. Harris

Theses

The state of Tennessee played a central part in the battle for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which would secure women’s right to vote. While the showdown in Nashville in August 1920 when suffragists and anti-suffragists descended upon the city to lobby for their respective sides gained a lot of attention for the state’s role in woman suffrage, the increasing opportunities of women outside the domestic sphere helped launch the suffrage movement. Educational opportunities, work outside the home, and voluntary societies were just a few of the ways that women stepped out into the public sphere. These endeavors outside the …

I Wrote Myself Awake: A Personal Encounter With A/R/Tography, Michelle Geipel

Theses

This project and its accompanying short story function as visual and narrative representations of a/r/tography, demonstrating how creative practice can be used to explore and construct personal meaning through writing and art-making. The co-written story exists alongside the altered book as evidence of how the creative process not only engages the brain through neuroplasticity, but also supports meaning-making and the formation or discovery of identity. Through the integration of life writing, visual art, and reflective inquiry, this work illustrates how understanding can emerge from within the act of creation itself.

The Investigation Of The Digital Divide: Government Literacy With African American Seniors, Jenettie Pirtle

Theses

My thesis, The Great Divide: An Investigation of Digital Literacy with African American Seniors, explores how race, age, and income shape access to technology and digital learning. Many African American seniors continue to face barriers to digital literacy due to limited resources, lack of exposure, and social inequalities. Using a qualitative approach, I conducted a focus group to hear directly from seniors about their experiences with technology, what challenges they face, how they feel about using it, and what support they need. Guided by Critical Race Theory and the concept of digital inequality, my analysis highlights the gap between access …

Reclaiming Suppressed Symbols: Yoruba Iconography And Nuyorican Identity In The Art Of Nitza Tufiño, Ariana Williams

Theses

This thesis examines the work of Afro-Puerto Rican artist Nitza Tufiño through Yoruba iconography, diasporic memory, and gendered Nuyorican identity. Grounded within the cultural and political context of the Nuyorican Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and, this study argues that Tufiño’s visual practice reframes suppressed African spiritual symbols through a woman-centered perspective, positioning Black femininity and spiritual labor as sites of resistance to colonial erasure and racial marginalization. Drawing upon Yoruba-derived cosmologies, Santería, and processes of visual syncretism, Tufiño integrates African, Indigenous Taíno, and Caribbean traditions to articulate a gendered visual language rooted in care, ritual, and collective memory. …

User-Centered Design For Public Financial Services: A Federal Student Loan Management App Case Study, Carmen River Christopher

Theses

Researchers have studied several facets of federal student loans, such as the impacts it has on borrowers’ finances, mentality, and life goals, plus the history of the federal student system and potential changes. There has been little research conducted on how borrowers make decisions regarding repayment, including choosing plans, navigating the repayment system, and understanding the long term implications of their choices. Since this research largely does not exist, there are few tools and resources to help guide borrowers as they manage the large, complex, and dynamic landscape that is navigating the federal loan system and repaying their debt. I …

Anastasis: Slow Fashion, Barbara Bultman

Theses

This thesis explores how slow fashion principles contribute to the longevity and cultural significance of iconic garments. Using qualitative research methods, including historical analysis, literature review, and practice-based design research, this project analyzes and recreates six iconic garments: the little black dress, trench coat, wrap dress, shift dress, wide-leg trouser, and women’s suit. The research investigates couture-level construction techniques, sustainable materials, and timeless silhouettes, demonstrating how these strategies can extend garment lifespan and foster emotional attachment between consumers and clothing. Ultimately, the research concludes that slow fashion provides a practical framework for creating durable, meaningful garments that support both environmental …

The Judicial Subjectivity In The Fair Use Analysis Of Andy Warhol Foundation For The Visual Arts, Inc. V. Goldsmith And Its Implications, Donna Khademi

Theses

The case of Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith demonstrates the subjective nature of the fair use doctrine. Scholars suggest that judges are often forced to interpret expressive works without specialized training in art, leading to inconsistent rulings. These discrepancies can lead to legal ambiguity and potentially weaken First Amendment protections. A deeper understanding of authorship, appropriation, and contemporary art highlights their crucial role in evaluating expressive works. By examining current legislation and judicial precedents, this paper shows the subjective and inconsistent nature of the present legal framework and offers a set of related proposals. It …

Staging Collapse: Anita Berber’S Cocaine And Morphium As Disability Aesthetic Performance, Blair Summers

Theses

This thesis examines Anita Berber’s performances Cocaine and Morphium within the cultural climate of Weimar Germany, where the body became closely tied to ideals of health, productivity, and national renewal. Through the framework of disability aesthetics as defined by Tobin Siebers, this study argues that Berber transforms addiction, collapse, and bodily decay into a visual and affective language of artistic and political critique. Rather than present the body as disciplined or morally ideal, Berber stages instability, excess, and death through gesture, costume, set design, and music. In doing so, she reimagines the stigmatized female body as a site of agency …

Analyzing Comparisons Of Seascapes By Caspar David Friedrich And Fitz Henry Lane Through A Digital Gallery Show, Adrianna Murphy

Theses

This project focuses on a comparative digital exhibition and analysis between Caspar David Friedrich and Fitz Henry Lane’s seascape artwork. Both artists have not been shown together in a gallery; thus this research into common themes in their works reveals a new perspective on early- to mid-19th-century seascape art. This perspective shows how their different geographies and historical contexts converge through the shared visual language of contemplation, morality, and reflecting in the mystery of life through nature. The project aims to create a digital gallery that showcases an ideal layout and a comparison of the artists, with curated works that …

Historic Churches Of Sheboygan, Erin Brehmer

Theses

This project focuses on the histories and architecture of six nineteenth- and early twentieth-century churches in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and developing a museum program about them. The aim of the project is to add to the art historical knowledge of Midwest architecture by researching the Greek Revival architecture used by First Baptist Church of Sheboygan; the Gothic Revival styles used by Grace Episcopal Church, St. Luke United Methodist Church, Hope Reformed Church, and St. Clement Catholic Church; and the Byzantine ornamentation used by St. Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church. Furthermore, this project uses the historical findings to create a museum public program …

An Introduction To World Art History: Course Curriculum, Skyler M. Bancroft

Theses

Art history as a field has inherent biases that are primarily rooted in Western traditions. A majority of the content which students are exposed to focuses on regions such as Europe and the Americas, with less focus on Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The purpose of this thesis project is to develop a secondary school curriculum that approaches art history from a world perspective to foster students’ sense of cultural awareness and empathy, as well as the development of skills such as critical thinking and visual literacy. Students will leave this course with a greater understanding of art from various …

Unveiled Voices: An Ode To Black Brides A Digital Resource Guide For Black Brides And Inclusive Bridal Design, Jaslyn A. Banks

Theses

This project examines the lack of inclusivity within the bridal industry, with a specific focus on the absence of skin-tone appropriate illusion mesh and diverse representation for Black brides. Through a combination of scholarly research and visual analysis, this study identifies how Eurocentric design standards continue to influence fabric development, marketing practices, and overall bridal aesthetics.

In response to these findings, this project introduces a digital lookbook titled Unveiled Voices: An Ode to Black Brides A Digital Resource Guide for Black Brides and Inclusive Bridal Design, which serves as a curated resource highlighting Black bridal designers who prioritize inclusivity, cultural …