Digital Commons Network^™

The Farthest I Can Sense Time, Danielle Alhassid

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the experiences of immigration, identity, and language through the lens of diasporic memory and intergenerational storytelling. At its core lies Communion of Empty Mouths (2024), a multi-channel video installation exploring the physical, communal, and ephemeral dimensions of language development and loss. The work juxtaposes live animation, tactile materials like ceramics, and experimental soundscapes to delve into the ancestral and embodied nature of linguistic expression.

Anchored in Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin’s text My Hands and inspired by familial narratives, the thesis critiques hierarchical and gendered dimensions of language, focusing on Yiddish as a diasporic medium of resistance and …

Xxx, Samuel Tucker Claxton

Theses and Dissertations

In XXX Tucker correlates the rise in online hookup apps and the fall of queer nightlife spaces to show how the internet has affected gay cruising spaces. They relate their installation-based work to the ideas of liminal spaces and Jean Baudrillard's

hyperreal. Further, they contextualize their practice within the scope of Robert Grober's work.

“Watch Me!” The Impact Of Training Experience On Dogs Social Referencing Human Emotional Cues, Madison Murray

Theses and Dissertations

Dogs utilized human facial expression and vocal tone to drive decision making during a novel object choice task, displaying a preference for negatively valenced objects. Training experience was not correlated to dog likelihood to social reference.

Examining Risk Factors For Comorbidity Between Posttraumatic Stress Disorder And Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder In A Sample Of Trauma-Exposed Transgender Adults, Dylan Seeley

Theses and Dissertations

Comorbid PTSD-OCD post trauma exposure is understudied. Little research examines specific risk factors and marginalized populations. This study examined gender-based victimization, emotional avoidance, and executive functioning as risk factors. Findings suggest gender-based victimization is a unique gender minority stressor that may pose significant risk for transgender populations.

Factors Associated With Intimate Partner Violence Among Non-Binary Individuals Assigned Male At Birth (Nbamab), Ahmad Z. Mouazzen

Theses and Dissertations

One hundred-fifty partnered Nonbinary assigned male at birth (NBAMAB) people completed an online survey assessing experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV), and associated factors, including mental health, internalized and anticipated stigma, and relationship power and functioning. The results contribute to understanding of IPV among NBAMAB people, with further research suggested.

Afro-Caribbean/Afro-Caribbean Descendant Students' Attitudes Towards Mental Healthcare, Imani Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

The low mental healthcare utilization rates for Afro-Caribbean College students living in the USA has been seldom studied. This study sought to add to the literature by measuring if Afro-Caribbean cultural affiliation, an Afrocentric worldview, and/or student generation influences mental health seeking actions and mental illness stigma in this group.

Serious Music With Bea Witkin: An Upper West Side Audio Walk, Megan Hattie Stahl

Theses and Dissertations

Serious Music with Bea Witkin is a site-specific audio walk on New York City’s Upper West Side produced by Megan Hattie Stahl. This immersive, musical documentary explores and extends the life and work of composer Beatrice Witkin (1916-1990). Across four stationary chapters and three walking interludes, participants follow a one-mile route from Riverside Park to Straus Park by way of Witkin’s longtime residence on West End Avenue. Through guided narration, archival music, interviews and recordings of contemporary musicians sight-reading a 1985 string quartet piece by Witkin, Serious Music invites listeners to consider where music begins and ends.

Witkin, who graduated …

Activism Within The Music And Recorded Sound Archive, Julius Tanner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the integration of applied ethnomusicology within the recorded sound archive of the New York Public Library. The process of repatriating recorded sound through community engagement lead to the development and eventual reparative work of outdated subject headings and other descriptive language within the archive. This thesis also explores how cultural preservation of similar non-physical fields such as naming conventions within linguistics and the development of gastronationalism combats globalization and ultimately colonization.

Structures Of Feeling: Zoe Leonard And The Photographic Archive, Anika Zempleni

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Zoe Leonard’s work with photographic archives. Focusing on three of Leonard’s archive-based projects—The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-96), You see I am here after all (2008), and In the Wake (2015-16)—this thesis argues that these works are connected through frameworks of feeling and subjectivity.

Aesthetics And Hidden Orientalism In Chicago's Nickerson Mansion, Julie Treumann

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis offers new research on the Sitting Room at the Nickerson Mansion, an 1883 Gilded Age-era house in Chicago, IL. As a rare extant example of neo-Islamic interior design, it provides a new lens on Orientalism in American domestic architecture and a new perspective on Mrs. Nickerson, a little-known female tastemaker of her time.

Equity's Garden, Nicole A. Barreras

Theses and Dissertations

Equity’s Garden is a narrative-driven video game that explores fairness and communication through the framework of a community garden. Players take on the role of the director of a garden's allocation committee, responsible for distributing planting spaces among neighborhood residents. Through branching storylines, players navigate the consequences of their decisions.

Art As Resistance: Challenging Colonial Legacies Through The Eyes Of South Asian Diasporic Women, Sofina Tanni

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how South Asian diasporic women artists in New York utilize art to resist colonial legacies and express their multifaceted identities. Through ethnographic research, it highlights how themes of nostalgia, preservation, community, and activism shape their work, fostering collective resistance and transformative decolonial pathways.

You Get That From Me, Robyn Duncan

Theses and Dissertations

You Get That From Me is a mixed-media, collage-based film that integrates personal portraits, allegorical maps, and digital collages with spoken narration to craft a stylistic memoir of a pivotal period in my life: the transition from childhood to motherhood.

Free Fall, Mariam Bolkvadze

Theses and Dissertations

Free Fall, a mixed media project, addresses the horrifying cases of infant abduction experienced in the country of Georgia over the last 40-50 years, and how the nation's systemic issue became one of the causes of illegal child trafficking in the country. The project features an infant room setting with video projections, TV screens with interviews, and custom sound effects. The setting of Free Fall is a visual metaphor of the experiences of those affected by the abductions and illegal child trafficking drawing from the iconography of early childhood. Ultimately, my installation seeks to advocate for justice and support …

Burn, Deborah Rolf

Theses and Dissertations

Burn is a hybrid documentary that explores the collective experience of being “burned out” through interviews and lumen photography. Burnout is a syndrome associated with improperly managed workplace stress. Lumen printing is an alternative photographic process where photographic paper is exposed to daylight.

‘Keeping It Real’ Goes Wrong: Deconstruction Of Masculinity In The Work Of Jay-Z And Kendrick Lamar, Leo Mcmahon

Theses and Dissertations

Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar use their latest albums, 4:44 and Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, to address the wake of damage their behaviors have caused. On a personal level each artist apologizes to their wife for infidelities, but along the way they deconstruct performances of masculinity that have dominated popular hip-hop music since the late 1980's. Highlighting the pressure the music industry puts on hip-hop artists to perform a hyper-sexual, hyper-violent masculinity, I argue that the artists join the genre of African-American autobiography to reveal the inauthentic performances of 'realness' in hip-hop. Posturing as representatives of African-American men, …

Self-Awareness And Identity Transformation In The Latinx Experience: A Comparative Analysis Of Gloria Anzaldúa’S Borderlands/La Frontera, Yuri Herrera’S Signs Preceding The End Of The World, And Corrido Music By Los Tigres Del Norte, Kimberly Cruz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how literature and music, including titles by Yuri Herrera, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Los Tigres del Norte, reflect evolving Latinx identities amidst socio-political pressures. It emphasizes self-awareness as a tool for change, portraying Latinx identity as dynamic, shaped by history, and continuously negotiated in resistance to marginalization.

Dear Cheri, Chenhao Chang

Theses and Dissertations

Dear Cheri is a 43-minute essay diary film that follows my journey toward reconciliation and reconnection after a period of self-imposed isolation from loved ones. The story unfolds as I search for people named Cheri—the same name as the writer of three valentines I stumbled upon in a thrift store. These valentines, written by Cheri in the 1970s and addressed to her parents, hold a deep resonance for me, mirroring my own feelings of isolation as a foreigner in a foreign land and evoking themes of separation and loss. In an attempt to confront these haunting emotions, I embark on …

Body Of Work: Wax As Medium In Art And Science In Enlightenment Bologna, Kristen Pou

Theses and Dissertations

Eighteenth-century Bologna is well known for its body of accurate and precise wax anatomical models. However, wax was also used for non-scientific purposes: for portraiture and religious artworks. This paper sets forth an argument to explain the scholarly neglect of enlightenment Bolognese waxworks that did not depict anatomized human bodies.

Optimizing Biofilm Assay Reproducibility And Characterizing The 12-Hydroxystearic Acid On Escherichia Coli, Khilola Khusanova

Theses and Dissertations

Biofilm formation in Escherichia coli plays a critical role in microbial chemical communication and surface-associated persistence. This study investigates the antibiofilm activity of 12-hydroxystearic acid (12-HSA), evaluating its R and S enantiomers as well as a racemic mixture. E. coli BL21, biofilms were grown under standardized laboratory conditions and quantified using the Crystal Violet staining assay. Treatment with 12-HSA resulted in a measurable reduction in biofilm biomass, with differences observed between the individual enantiomers and the mixture. These findings suggest that 12-HSA influences early adhesion and biofilm development, supporting its potential as a small-molecule modulator of bacterial surface behavior. This …

The Existence Of Critical Thinking Skills In Higher Education: Evolving Or Vanishing, Michele Monroe

Theses and Dissertations

This study will encompass research on how and why a void has evolved in students' critical thinking skills between the secondary and higher education realms. The research questions that will be addressed are whether instructional methods, tools, and strategies meet the demands of our 21st-century students and how assessments facilitate students' analytical and critical thinking beyond content. The participants for this study will be four English professors from a suburban area private university. The design for this research will be a qualitative methods approach using an interpretative phenomenological design. Qualitative data will be collected through the use of interviews asking …

My Writing Makes It So Others Can Feel Seen: A Queer Phenomenological Study Of Lgbtq+ College Students Affective Experiences In An Out-Of-School Poetry Workshop, Jenna L. Lynch

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the affective experiences of LGBTQ+ undergraduates in an out-of-school poetry workshop. Through the lens of queer and affect theories, the study asks the following research questions: 1) How does reading and writing poetry foster community in an LGBTQ+ out-of-school poetry workshop? (2) How can participation in an out-of-school poetry workshop with members who identify as LGBTQ+ engender a love of writing in queer students? (3) How do LGBTQ+ college students’ affective experiences manifest in a queer out-of-school poetry workshop? Using queer phenomenological methods (Ahmed, 2006) to engage with such data sources as audio and video class recordings, …

The Role Of Colleges Of Pharmacy In Student Mental Health Support, Diana J. Patino

Theses and Dissertations

The college journey is not easy, particularly within the pharmacy program— students undergo significant transitions that include meeting new rigor levels and pace in professional coursework, establishing new peers and faculty relationships, and coping with high stress levels (Choi et al., 2019). This qualitative case study will investigate how a pharmacy program and its associated resources relate to student mental health support and how pharmacy students perceive the importance of mental health initiatives in their academic program experience.

Teachers Perception Of Student Engagement Using Face-To-Face And Remote Instructional Methods, Anika Mcintosh

Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenology examines the instructional practices of high school teachers and the changes the challenges of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic have wrought, with a focus on strategies to promote student engagement. The more students are engaged, the more they may see the relevance of their experiences, feel connected to their school experiences, and develop more positive attitudes and attributes, both inside and outside of the school walls (Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Morison, 2006). Six big themes emerged through qualitative analysis were instructional strategies, adaptation to online learning, teaching practices post 2020, perceptions of the teachers, teacher-student relationships, and barriers …

How Technology Overuse Is Affecting Youth’S Physical Activity Time, Amiya Prema Sikidar

Theses and Dissertations

Prior research demonstrates how time and energy dedicated to screens is negatively correlated with physical activity time (Alotaibi et al., 2020; Scaranni et al., 2023; Barot et al., 2023; Parasuraman et al., 2017). Therefore, in this research study, we aimed to investigate if time dedicated to screens is still replacing participation in physical activities or if technology has become so integrated in our lives over time that it no longer affects our physical activity time. We tested this via an online survey of 62 students (38 females, 24 males) at St. John’s University. Participants completed an internet addiction questionnaire (M=46.66, …

The Perceived Knowledge Of Effects Of Radiological Effects Amongst Radiologic Professionals, Kenneth Martinucci

Theses and Dissertations

X-ray, an accidental discovery in 1895, has been used to diagnose and treat various ailments. Despite the benefits of X-rays, it has been established that the radiation has the potential to cause harm to individuals and even death following its use. The harm associated with radiation has been evidenced in various historical tragedies globally, including the Chernobyl accidents, the Goiania accidents, and even the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These incidents highlight the potential hazards associated with radiation use. Individuals exposed to the radiation from the incidents had higher risks of cancer, neurological dysfunctions, congenital disabilities, predispositions to cardiovascular …

From The Words Of Our Fathers: Black Paternal Perspectives On Literacy And Recommendations For Literacy Instruction For Black Males, Imani A. Irving

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the literacy experiences of Black fathers and their recommendations for enhancing literacy instruction for Black male children from birth through Grade 12. Grounded in African American Male Theory, the research aimed to address knowledge gaps in understanding Black male literacy experiences and provide insights for improving Black male literacy education. Using participatory action research with an initial modified Delphi approach, the study gathered potential areas of consensus among Black fathers on essential curricular revisions to promote positive Black male literacies. Participants included a purposive sample of 10 Black fathers with Black sons from birth to adulthood. Through …

Critical Literacy Engagement Of Elementary Multilingual Learners: A Mixed Methods Study, Abigail Wilson Luger

Theses and Dissertations

As the number of students identified as multilingual learners (ML) continues to increase in schools across the United States and the accountability for states to provide rigorous and meaningful instruction rises, the daily instructional experiences of students identified as ML need more focused research. Existing research on students identified as ML often focuses on their acquisition of English. Students identified as ML often experience rote instruction and do not have access to critical literacy practices, especially in the elementary school grades. Critical literacy practices are cognitively rigorous and can include analyzing current structures of power, equity, and facilitating student talk. …

The Implementation Of Social-Emotional Learning: The Role Of Leadership And Administrative Support In Producing Change, Joann M. Luisa

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative dissertation explores the administrative implementation and organizational change required for effective social-emotional learning (SEL) programs in K-12 schools. Through interviews with school educators, psychologists, social worker, deans, administrators and assistant superintendents along with analysis of implementation documents from multiple district buildings, this research examines the key factors, challenges, and best practices in implementing comprehensive SEL practices. The findings of this study imply that successful SEL implementation requires several collaborative alignments to be successful. District-wide commitment, planning for individual schools, and ongoing support and professional development for staff are vital to the success of this implementation. Strong leadership from …

Looking Back And Looking Ahead: Veteran Teachers Reflect On The Impact Of The Online Educational Marketplace On Professional Identity, Natalie N. Malone

Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly complex, diverse, and inclusive classrooms require the direction of a highly skilled teacher who is committed to continual professional growth. Although many research studies have addressed professional growth and identity development among pre-service and early career teachers, few have investigated the long-term evolution of professional identity. Understanding the influences and characteristics that shape professional identity throughout the career can yield important insight into why some teachers continue to thrive and grow while others stagnate. The purpose of this multiple case study is to explore the evolution of the professional identity of elementary school teachers (K-5) in the northeastern United …