Digital Commons Network^™

Elucidating The Role Of The Tumor Suppressor Gene Rna-Binding Motif 5 (Rbm5) In Models Of Traumatic Brain Injury, Kara L. Snyder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a worldwide health burden that causes death and disability. Clinical management of TBI involves guideline-based protocols to limit secondary brain injury but there remains an unmet need for therapeutics to target neuroprotection and to improve cognitive outcomes in patients. This dissertation concerns the examination of RNA binding motif 5 (RBM5) as a potential therapeutic gene target to promote neuroprotection in models of TBI. RBM5 is a potent pro-death tumor suppressor gene in cancer. We hypothesized that it also promotes cell death in neurons in the brain and therefore its inhibition would decrease neuropathology following CNS …

Trace Metal Cycling During Phytoplankton Growth In The Southern Ocean, North Pacific, And Tampa Bay, Shannon Michelle Burns

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The trace metals iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), cobalt (Co), nickel (Ni), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), and cadmium (Cd) are essential to primary production in the oceans. They act as micronutrients, used in intracellular enzymes for macronutrient acquisition, light harvesting, and mediation of reactive oxygen species. In some cases, they can also substitute for each other when a primary trace metal micronutrient is depleted. Characterizing the interplay amongst trace metals, macronutrients, and phytoplankton growth is vital for understanding the biogeochemical underpinnings of primary production, and for modelers who develop biological pump frameworks for global carbon cycling.

In Chapter two, I investigated …

Reading Rent: Interracial Relationships And Racial Hierarchies, Susanna A. Perez-Field

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In examining the musical Rent by Jonathan Larson (1995) and its film adaptation by Chris Columbus (2005), most scholarly work and analyses have focused on the work’s identity as a queer text. I assert that elements of this musical have been overlooked for its depth of racial and class hierarchies. Utilizing sociological theory and interracial relationships, I will examine characters and musical numbers to explore diversity and class positioning.

I will explore Rent for themes of racial, gender, and sexual identities and how they are presented through the friendships and romantic relationships of the eight principal characters (alphabetically): Angel, Benny, …

Labile Dissolved Nickel (Ni) Concentrations In The North Pacific, Calyn M. Crawford

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nickel (Ni) is an important micronutrient for phytoplankton and bacteria that serves as a required co-factor in several metalloenzymes. Despite these known biological uses, total dissolved Ni concentrations remain elevated in global surface waters, in contrast to the surface depletion commonly observed for macronutrients and other nutrient-type trace elements. A prevailing hypothesis for the muted depletion of dissolved Ni concentrations in surface waters is that dissolved Ni in seawater is not in a bioavailable form. The chemical lability of Ni in seawater provides insight into Ni speciation and bioavailability, but few measurements have been made in the open ocean to …

Selective Framing And Narrative As Anthropocentric Agents In Yellowstone: America’S Eden, Breanna Lee Hansen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Yellowstone: America’s Eden is but one example of nature documentaries tackling the complexities of nature-culture relationships during the age of the Anthropocene. Yellowstone National Park, the first to be named, is a primary example of how our relationship to the natural world developed through conservation and commodification. Yellowstone: America’s Eden demonstrates how film techniques conceal nature as a human construct through selective framing and narrative. By analyzing editing techniques made in the representation of Yellowstone National Park, this thesis bridges anthropocentrism to nature documentaries. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from media studies, environmental humanities, and anthropology, this thesis analyzes the ways …

From Counter-Strike To Counterterrorism: How The Cheater Reconfigures Our Understanding Of Asymmetric Warfare, Enya C. Silva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Around the turn of the century, as the United States increased its military presence in the Middle East in what was widely known as the War on Terror, computer games were also rising in popularity. Military inspired narratives and settings are very common in video games, especially in the genre known as the first person shooter – characterized by a single player, first person point of view. Alexander Galloway provides a vocabulary for understanding the video game, and the first person shooter in particular, derived from the framework of game studies. Scholarship around video games usually either seeks to affirm …

Organizing And Communicating Health: A Culture-Centered And Necrocapitalist Inquiry Of Groundwater Contamination In Rural West Bengal, Parameswari Mukherjee

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a discursive point of praxis, this dissertation project seeks to record knowledge from below around the overlaps between health, water and health interventions emerging from rural communities located in North 24 Parganas and Purulia in West Bengal that are disproportionately impacted by water-insecurity. My dissertation also documents how multiple-stakeholders such as local NGOs, international NGOs, non-profits, and donor agencies organize access to safe water and health interventions for the water-insecure communities located in North 24 Parganas and Purulia. The integration of the CCA and necrocapitalism afford theoretical and methodological guidance in this dissertation to help document the localocentric stories …

Academic Procrastination Among Chinese International Undergraduate Students In The United States, Yunlu Xiang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research aimed to explore academic procrastination among Chinese internationalstudents, using NVivo 12 to analyze data gathered through interviews with six participants. The study identified both internal and external factors contributing to academic procrastination, with social networking and software being the most significant external factors and disinterest and avoidance being the most significant internal factors. The participants did not identify the COVID-19 pandemic as a significant factor in academic procrastination. The study analyzed gender differences in academic procrastination among Chinese students. The pandemic had different effects on men and women, with men downplaying the concept of time and women experiencing …

Transformative Psychedelic Experiences At Music Events: Using Subjective Experience To Explore Chemosocial Assemblages Of Culture, Gabrielle R. Lehigh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clinical interest in psychedelic treatments in the United States started in the 1950s, but anti-drug policy and anti-social sentiments quickly thwarted future research. The last decade has renewed clinical interest in using psychedelics to treat a diversity of mental health ailments. While these studies provide essential protocols, treatments, and therapy models for patients, they are limited in understanding the role of the contextual elements that influence psychedelic experiences and outcomes. This project examines how people use psychedelic substances outside medical settings by studying transformative psychedelic experiences at music events. This inquiry into psychedelic use utilizes an integrated framework of chemoethnography …

Motherhood In The Multiverse: Melodrama And Asian American Identity In Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, Aditya Sudhakaran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In what follows, I look to the visual and narrative composition of the multiverse between Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (The Daniels, 2022) and Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022) to develop a more precise understanding of the superhero blockbuster as a contemporary expression of sensation melodrama. To do so, I use two depictions of maternity to excavate two very different approaches to the multiverse: one that externalizes social conflict, which it answers with individuated and exculpatory violence, and another that internalizes social conflict, which it answers through collective care. I introduce the blockbuster’s mobilization of the multiverse …

Early Agricultural Lives: Bioarchaeological Inferences From Neolithic And Early Copper Age Tombs In The Central Po Valley, Italy, Christopher J. Eck Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current project seeks to illuminate the diets of the earliest farming societies in central Northern Italy. Neolithic peoples who first began settling in the Central Po Valley sometime at the end of the seventh and beginning of the sixth millennium BCE forever changed the landscape from one of expanding sub-continental forests to one of intensive agricultural production and anthropogenic influence. A total of 109 individual burials from 24 separate infrastructure project excavations of 17 sites surrounding the modern city of Mantua, Italy were analyzed utilizing a biochemical approach and a bioarchaeological explanatory theoretical framework based within embodiment and life …

Dreaming To Get Out The “Sunken Place”: Fantasy, Film, And The Inner-White- I(Eye), Jordan Battle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since its inception during the transatlantic slave trade, blackness within the collective unconscious of Western society has been sutured to negative stereotypes, images, and feelings. In modern discourse on race and racism, the unconscious manifestations of anti-black racism adopted from cultural impositions, the impact of enslavement and colonization on the psyche of the subjugated, and the importance of the mind in revolutionary efforts are all too often undertheorized. Through an Afropessimist framework, this thesis uncovers the origination of the black imago in Western society, how and why it is habitually recreated, and how black theorists, artists, political activists, and others …

Losing The Streaming Wars: What Netflix Loses In Television Narrative And Participatory Fan Cultures, Annabelle G. Naudin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the rise of streaming television and subsequent “binge-watching” and its impact on the narrative structure of a series. By looking at shows such as Stranger Things, which pioneered the rise in this new form of television, one can see the shift in narrative structure in comparison to previous long- form television such as LOST. This shift can be seen in the slow disappearance of “game-changer” cliffhangers within episodes that build to a larger implication in a season arc in favor of one longer mystery that stretches throughout the season. In this thesis, I argue that this …

"Queen Of The Mother-Tucking (Western) World": Authenticity And Nationality On Drag Race, Zane A. Willard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Against the backdrop of legislation across the United States regulating drag performances, I turn to the reality television (RTV) franchise Drag Race as a popular media site where queer identities are represented. More specifically, I analyze the series RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs The World (UKVTW) which is the first series in the franchise to feature participants from different countries competing for the title “Queen of the Mother-Tucking World.” Furthermore, the series suggests it represents “global” drag. Understanding that no singular RTV series can represent a singular global drag identity, I ask: how does the series represent global drag? Turning …

The 'Charm And Distinction' Of Proverbs: The Duality Of The Gem Analogy In Erasmus's Adagia, Blythe Broecker Creelan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the Adagia, Erasmus of Rotterdam frequently compares proverbs to precious gems and gemstone jewelry. My interdisciplinary study contributes to the broader discussion of Erasmus’s use of imagery by evaluating the specific qualities Erasmus associates with gemstones as analogous to the qualities he argues synonymously describe proverbs, specifically how both possess and imbue “charm and distinction.” The historical use of gemstones as essential for the display of social status and political power coupled with the contemporaneous belief in amuletic and astral magical properties of gemstones reveals the complex connections Erasmus forges between the qualities of gemstones and proverbs. Erasmus’s marked …

Surviving A Broken System: Synergies Between Solidarity Economies And Sustainable Development Goals, Julie Beach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Capitalism has created problems including wealth polarization, rapid depletion of natural resources, and pervasive systemic societal issues. Hard work is not enough to solve the unequal distribution and barriers preventing access to necessities. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were created to remedy the harsh reality of global inequities and negative environmental impacts by working towards a more just and equitable future for all. Solidarity Economies (SE) offer an alternative framework to achieve these goals.

This research used multiple qualitative methods to investigate the synergies between SE and SDGs in a growing urban environment. St. Petersburg, FL struggles with affordable housing, food …

American Horse Power During The Great War, Hanna K. Lipsey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation charts the significant, if understudied, history of American horses during the era of World War I, from roughly 1914 to 1919. Its chapters trace how the US Army acquired, used, cared for, and ultimately demobilized horses over the course of that conflict. Beginning with their acquisition, via either an Army Horse Breeding Program or a complicated buying process, horses faced a complex introduction into military service. Life for these animals did not get any easier once they reached the European front. Although the US military was beginning to replace horses with motor trucks and tractors, horses remained central …

Ambient Athleticism: Politicizing Akira’S Accelerationist Olympiad, Thomas G. Chaplin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis politicizes Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated cyberpunk film, Akira, specifically through how it stages its myriad neoliberal crises as opportunities for accelerationist solutions mediated by the Tokyo Olympics. Akira’s display of fully animated and intense action physics produces an aesthetic relation to its own athletes that contracts around their bodies in an attempt to transgress classical and oppressive compositions. Akira’s vague utopic promise receives broad acceptance and affirmation by extant scholarship, often relying on the accelerative impulses found in the works of Gilles Deleuze to substantiate Akira’s hopeful ending. Invoking Gilles Deleuze’s notion of athleticism, this thesis critically rereads …

Queering The Weeki Wachee Mermaid And Its Renewed Aesthetic Value, Jacqueline D. Merveille

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have asserted that the visual representation of womanhood responds to a cultural context, which often adheres to patriarchy and the satisfaction of the male gaze. The mediated depiction of the mermaid through time is polysemous and therefore deserves a thorough examination substantiated by robust theories. As a gendered feminine figure that complies with the patriarchal pressure of subjugation to gratify male desire, the mermaid can, however, elude the socially constructed dichotomy of genders, contributing to her agency and queerness. By investigating the Florida roadside attraction of Weeki Wachee Springs’ mermaid shows and other mediated visual depictions of the sea …

Harmony Of Difference: Theorizing Rashid Johnson's New Universalism In The Grids Of Antoine's Organ, Mark Fredricks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My reading of Antoine’s Organ, a sculptural installation created by the artist Rashid Johnson in 2016, explores the artwork as a richly textured response to the limited universalism of modernism. I argue that Antoine’s Organ is a multimodal expression which crafts a harmony of difference using the aesthetic language and forms of both visual art and music. The term “harmony of difference” is taken from and inspired by a composition of the same name by jazz musician Kamasi Washington, and is used within to describe Rashid Johnson’s counterpoint strategy to work differences with and against each other, mobilizing the grid’s …

Digital Realness: Queer Intimacy In Contrapoints, William S. Beaman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Digital media comprises a diverse ecology of creative genres, institutions, communities,platforms, and entrepreneurial businesses. Yet despite its practical association with variegated social forms, digital mediation as such is often theorized as a logic of homogenization, problematically obscuring its heterogeneously contested character. This article reconceives mediation as an irreducibly multi-scalar and heterogeneous infrastructure, recasting online activity as contested participation in wider social contexts. I am contributing to a counter tendency in media studies that methodologically treats digital forms as polysemic, ambiguous and contested, rather than necessarily homogenizing, in the context of specific cases. Drawing out the theoretical implications of this methodology …

Florida Punks: Punk, Performance, And Community At Gainesville’S Fest, Michael Anthony Mcdowell Ii

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fest is an annual punk rock music festival held in Gainesville, Florida. At Fest, participants engage in aesthetic creation and participation, negotiate identities, participate in political discourse, and forge communities. In this dissertation, I use theories of performance, framing, and culture to understand Fest. To do so, I theorize Fest using three approaches to performance: performance as an object of study, performance as a metaphor for everyday life and identity, and performance as a method of inquiry. Using these three approaches to performance, I understand Fest as performance, as a site that permits and constrains performances of self, identity, and …

Conquistas And Chronicles: A Social History Of The Fernando De Soto Expedition Of Conquest, 1538-1543, Morgan Norman Greig

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of the last century, Fernando de Soto’s conquest of Florida has been a central topic of debate among scholars of the United States. In particular, the written sources generated by expedition members during and after their time in Florida have been used primarily by archaeologists and anthropologists for ethnohistoric data on Native American societies in the early-sixteenth century southeast. However, there are two central problems in the historiography that have plagued the field of Soto studies, both of which are the central focuses of this study. First, there has never been a full-length historical study conducted on …

Using An Appreciative Inquiry Summit To Improve Support For First Year Experience Community College Instructors, Elise G. Zornow

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This evaluation study had three main aims: 1) to examine how an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Summit can be used to promote First Year Experience (FYE) instructors’ sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness within the context of the FYE program at a community college; 2) to examine how an AI Summit might guide FYE program development; and 3) to examine how and in what ways an AI Summit might influence FYE instructors’ intent to act on the recommendations that result from this approach to program development. Instructors teaching the FYE course at a community college in the Southeastern United States were …

Phenotypic Variability In Ipsc-Induced Cardiomyocytes And Cardiac Fibroblasts Carrying Diverse Lmna Mutations, Jiajia Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mutations in the LMNA gene (encoding lamin A/C) are the second most common cause of familial arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. Diverse LMNA variants in cardiomyocytes have been associated with cardiac phenotypes. Moreover, cardiac fibroblasts make up a large fraction of the myocardium's non-myocyte component, intrinsically linked to extracellular matrix synthesis and turnover as well as secreting large amounts of bioactive metabolites. However, our understanding of how different mutation sites and the non-myocyte niche mediate cardiomyocyte function is limited. To fill this gap, in this thesis I investigated the hypothesis that variable LMNA mutations have significant effects on the genetic, structure and electrophysiological …

The Labors Of Professional Wrestling: The Dream, The Drive, And Debility, Brooks Oglesby

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study centers and examines the laboring body of the professional wrestler as it moves and works through professional wrestling training. I put forth debility as a theoretical framework to naming and understanding the ways that long-term bodily wear and early death becomes an acceptable cost of doing business for the wrestling industry. Dreams of achieving wealth, fame, and stability while escaping precarity and obscurity draw fans toward joining the industry, and these dreams work to maintain a working culture that takes for granted the ways that the wrestler’s body is marked for disposability, wearing down, and early death. I …

_Las Vidas Negras_: Examining Identity Among Afro-Latinos In The Us In The Twilight Of Black Lives Matter, Victor Garcia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work seeks to name how the Black Lives Matter movement, and related movements for Black liberation and justice, has had an effect on the self-perception and identities of US-based Afrolatinos. Using survey and interview data, I tease out issues of ethnoracial dissonance, social identity, and the ways that Afrolatinos have used the context of Black Lives Matter to make sense of the antiblackness they have faced. This is a significant investigation because it speaks to the potential for a richer tradition of pan-Africanism taking root in Latin America and among Latin Americans of African descent.

Visions Of Entanglement And Escape: In-Visible Voice In The Films Of Terrence Malick And George Lucas, Michael Lee Taber

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis juxtaposes the unexpectedly parallel careers of the filmmakers George Lucas and Terrence Malick. Both popularly and academically, Lucas and Malick are typically conceived as divergent practitioners and are framed in oppositional terms. The goal of this thesis is – in part – to break down this oppositional understanding of Lucas and Malick as filmmakers. This traditional understanding of Malick and Lucas collapses when we consider their respective relationships to sensation and abstraction. Affirmations of sensation and Malick abound, as do critiques of abstraction and Lucas – all the while it is Malick who is aligned with abstraction and …

Pronk Poppenhuis: Establishing And Destabilizing Agency Among Seventeenth-Century Burgher Wives In The Dutch Republic, Emily M. Gregoire

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis shines novel light on the Dutch pronk poppenhuis, as a microcosm which models the simultaneously destabilization and establishment of agency among the Baroque burgher wives who commissioned them. Closely discussing seventeenth-century Dutch female ambitions, this article will explore the ways in which these housewives were both taught to behave appropriately in Dutch society and how they then displayed obedience to those values. I concurrently argue that the commissioning of and interaction with the pronk poppenhuis, particularly Pronk Poppenhuis De Patronella Dunois, simultaneously represents and perpetuates the growth of agency within the commissioner. This will be done through close …

The Hybridization Of Home: Establishing Place Between The Garrison And The Wilderness In Mary Rowlandson's (1682) Captivity Narrative, Brooke M. Weltch

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholarship surrounding captivity narratives long agrees that the psychological and philosophical beliefs of their authors lend insight into the contemporaneous hegemonic power structures through literary forms. Looking beyond these forms to the places they describe, however, illustrates the extent to which cultural perceptions infiltrate even the mere relationships that individuals have with their environment as well as the material structures surrounding them. I focus the role of place in Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682). I argue that Rowlandson forms an attachment with the wigwam on account of her traumatic experiences while in captivity. Her displacement …