Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Self-Determination And The Lived Experience Of Employed Adults With Intellectual Disabilities: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Abdelrahman Mohammad Alzarie

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Literature reveals that self-determination is a critical predictor of employment at the post-secondary level for individuals with Intellectual Disabilities (ID). However, current research concerning self-determination in the post-secondary work of individuals with ID is scarce and primarily focused on the perspectives of parents or educators or has been driven by evaluating learning models of self-determination. Furthermore, individuals with ID were not adequately represented as participants in the current research, and their voices were not given the opportunity to be heard. Therefore, this qualitative phenomenological study aimed to explore the lived experience of six Saudi employed adults with mild ID who …

English Use In Italian Contexts: A Digital Ethnographic Study Of Language Ideological Discourses, Antonella Gazzardi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Language ideologies are systems of beliefs about languages. Naturalized as “common sense,” they are widespread and significantly influence social, discursive, and linguistic practices. Language ideologies are expressed and circulated in a wide range of media formats, including social media, where lay people and experts alike share their opinions and beliefs. One “language problem” they debate about is the use of English in otherwise Italian contexts that is (mostly) deemed unnecessary (referred to as Italenglish). By applying a citizen sociolinguistic lens (Rymes & Leone, 2014), and by adding an ethnographic component to the critical discourse analysis of digital data (Fairclough, 2013), …

Music As An Instructional Modality To Increase Attending Behavior Of Elementary Students, Zachary Grossman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Audio and audiovisual cues, when used as teaching tools, result in desirable learning outcomes for young learners when compared to visual cues alone (Havy et al., 2017; Kirkham et al., 2019; Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003). Previous research has demonstrated that music can be an effective delivery method for teaching math in the elementary classrooms (An & Tillman, 2015; An et al., 2014; Azaryahu et al., 2020). However, the effectiveness of music at increasing attending behavior specifically has not been assessed in these studies. This study evaluated the effectiveness of music based instruction on students’ attending behaviors compared to non-music based …

Environmental Justice From The Ground(Water) Up: Coping With Contamination In Tallevast, Florida, Grey W. Caballero

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How do communities living with chronic environmental contamination cope with the social, political, and economic impacts of the contamination? This research employs a community-engaged oral history approach with participant observation and archival research to address this question. We focus on the case of Tallevast, Florida, where the local groundwater has been contaminated with chlorinated solvents for over 60 years and where cleanup is estimated to take another 100 years. In addition to concerns about health and wellness, we find that residents are also concerned about household displacement and the disruption of social networks, failed governance at the local and state …

L2 Writer Identity Construction In Academic Written Discourse: A Multi-Case Study, Beibei Ren

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Writer identity has gradually become a focus in writing scholarship in recent years. From a social constructivist lens, writer identity is not optional; it resides in all texts. And it is a construct that does not exist in a vacuum, but is shaped by the sociocultural and academic context, and simultaneously individual writers agentively selected from the socially available repertoire to construct their identities in text. Departing from social constructivism, this study adopted Ivanic’s (1998) conceptualization of writer identity, which consists of autobiographical self, discoursal self, self as author and possibilities for selfhood, and highlighted the role of agency in …

Head Movement Behaviors In Various Communication Environments, Angkana Lertpoompunya

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In a complex environment with only a single-source speech target, modern hearing aids can improve signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) by using directional microphones, and consequently, improve speech intelligibility. However, in many realistic listening situations where there are multiple sound sources, especially in a turn-taking conversation, improving the SNRs in one location may come at a cost of another equally important location. Critically, the hearing aid user is also unlikely to retain a static head orientation to which the hearing aids reference in these complex environments. For this reason, modern premium hearing aids are now equipped with motion sensors (e.g., accelerometers) to …

A Critical Analysis Of The Graduate Socialization Of Racially Minoritized School Psychology Students, Tatiana J. Broughton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

By centering the voices of racially/ethnically minoritized school psychology graduate students I sought to understand how racially minoritized individuals experience their socialization process into the field, to critique and expose oppressive structures in place in their graduate programs, and to utilize garnered information to provide implications to address and dismantle oppressive structure within school psychology programs. Additionally, I sought to provide insight for school psychology training programs by identifying antiracist practices that minoritized graduate students view as supports in their training programs. Participants were eight racial/ethnic minoritized graduate students who participated in one to two virtual interviews discussing their experiences …

How The Taiwanese Podcast Bailingguo News Framed The 2019 Hong Kong Movement: A Framing Analysis Of The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill, Yu-Fei Chiu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, people can access different types of media to get information. Podcast is one of them and became more popular in recent years. In Hong Kong, the anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement took place in 2019. In this research, we are looking for the frames that Kylie and Ken as the hosts of the Taiwanese podcast - Bailingguo News used when they talked about the movement. The researcher applied framing theory to conduct this study, using textual analysis to analyze five episodes that mentioned the movement on Hong Kong from Bailingguo News. The researcher extracts the themes in the podcasters' …

The Effects Of An Interactive E-Book On Promoting Idiomatic Competence And Motivation Among L2 Learners Of Arabic Language In Saudi Arabia, Alfaifi Adel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Native Arabic speakers used idiomatic expressions such as idioms, formulas, and collocations, in their daily communications. In learning Arabic as a second language (L2), effective communication requires “the ability to understand and use idioms appropriately and accurately in a variety of sociocultural contexts, in a manner like that of native speakers, and with the least amount of mental effort” (Liontas, 2015, p. 441). Yet, promoting L2 idiomatic competence in the classroom and beyond remains a difficult task (Liontas, 2006; Tabatabaei, 2012). The utilization of e-books in the learning environment in L2 teaching in the English language has received much research …

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 …

Do Industries' Political Profiles Affect Their Portfolio Return Performance?, Shaddy S. Douidar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The political profiles of an industry influence its performance due to its impact on industry-level investor sentiment and idiosyncratic risk. I form eight comprehensive political profile portfolios after double sorting on industry-level: (1) political geography proxied by political alignment, (2) corporate political strategies (CPS), proxied by donations to political action committees & lobbying expenditures, (3) and government interference, proxied by dependence on procurement contracts & federal regulations, and exhibit that an industries’ political profiles impact its returns. Industries with high political alignment, concentrated corporate political strategies, and low government interference, deemed the high-performance portfolio, earn an annualized alpha of 10.3428%, …

Evaluating The Effect Of Public Health Governance Structure And Public Opinion On Covid-19 Disease Control Interventions, Daniel Chacreton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Background

Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the responses to the pandemic varied greatly from nation to nation. In the US, state-level variance in responses has likely contributed to the disparate COVID-19 infection-related state-level outcomes such as incidence and case fatality rates. The large variances in national and sub-national responses to COVID-19 when combined with the abundance of factors that influence disease transmission rates has created a number of important research opportunities.

Methods

In this vain, this research study aims to describe the relationship that exists between public health governance structure and public sentiment and COVID-19 control measure effectiveness …

Community Heritage: A Source Of Health/Medical Aspirational Capital For Black Males, Lafrance Clarke Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a recognized need for more Black male healers who pursue careers in medical fields.Thus, the purpose of this study was twofold: to explore historical documents to tell the histories of men of African descent who practiced healing in Florida and, from those histories, create a virtual heritage tour to support teaching about leadership through African American history and narratives of healing. The research questions were: How does the heritage curriculum history about Black men healers of FL provide a historical counter-narrative about Black men and their leadership in connection to health/medicine?How do historical counter-narratives about Black men support …

Saudi Pre-Service Teachers’ Beliefs And Practices Regarding Digital Technology In Early Years Education: A Qualitative Case Study, May Mohammed Alyaeesh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated Saudi pre-service teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding digital technology in early years classrooms. It sought to determine whether participants were prepared to employ such technology to meet the objectives of the Saudi Vision 2030 national development program. This topic was viewed through the lens of the TPACK framework. The study found that the student teachers were not sufficiently prepared to infuse digital technology. They held positive beliefs about digital technology infusion but were concerned about young children’s use of this technology. There was an absence of effective practices, participants’ technical competence was very basic, and their recognition …

Minecraft In Language Teacher Education: Acceptance And Integration In Practice, Kristen E. Fung

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s technological era, understanding if and how teachers’ acceptance and integration of technology evolves is critical to understanding their needs. Technology creates complicated demands on educators and research shows various factors may contribute to their limited success at integrating it (Bustos & Nussbaum, 2009). Research also shows that teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards pedagogical innovations and information and communication technologies are prominent factors that impact adoption and integration (Tejedor & Muñoz-Repiso, 2006), and the perceptions teachers develop as pre-service teachers influence their classroom performance as in-service teachers (Moon et al., 2016). While research shows plentiful evidence of the educational …

Towards More Task-Generalized And Explainable Ai Through Psychometrics, Alec Braynen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this work, we propose that adopting the methods, principles, and guidelines of the field of psychometrics can help the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community to build more task-generalizable and explainable AI. Three arguments are presented and explored. These arguments are that psychometrics can help by providing 1) a framework for formulating better datasets, 2) psychometric AI data that can lead to models of generalization in AI, and 3) explainable AI through more informative evaluations.

A review of psychometrics and psychological generalization is performed, along with an overview of evaluation, generalization, and explainability in AI. Various ideas are presented throughout for …

Comparison Study Of Consumer’S Perception Toward Urban Air Mobility In The United States And Rest Of The World Using Social Media Information, S M Toki Tahmid

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a wide concept that will enable access to on-demand air mobility, cargo delivery, medical applications, and emergency services that is run through a connected and integrated transportation system. This study aims to investigate social media data to compare the major topics discussed in the United States and rest of the world and perform a sentiment analysis to see if the comments are positive, negative, or neutral. Twitter was the primary source of information that was used in this thesis, as it is a place where people interact, create, and share information and ideas online. In …

Heidegger And The Origin Of Authenticity, John J. Preston

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927, scholars have coupled Martin Heidegger’s reflections on authenticity with a rich tradition of thought which reminds us that philosophy can, from time to time, function as a catalyst for self-discovery. While this function is an undeniable feature of Heideggerian authenticity, I would like to suggest that it is secondary to the role that authenticity plays in Heidegger’s philosophical investigations. By analyzing the full phenomena of authenticity and tracing its first technical uses back to Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle, I show that Heidegger’s methodological breakthrough in the early 1920s, the development …

Community Scholars: A Diversity Pipeline Program To Promote Equity, Diversity, And Inclusion For People With Disabilities, Laura M. Rodríguez López

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation in practice documents the program evaluation of the Community Scholars (CS) program at the Florida Center for Inclusive Communities (FCIC), a University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD) at the University of South Florida (USF). CS is part of a diversity pipeline program that recruits youth with disabilities to engage in paid on-the-job training (OJT) with FCIC. Scholars are community members (youth with disabilities) that are enrolled as FCIC trainees and receive mentoring, development of basic administrative competencies, individualized career coaching, college counseling, and disability policy and self-advocacy training. Through the OJT experience, scholars gain skills that …

From Practitioner To Scholarly Practitioner: Exploring The Perceptions Of Edd Students "Becoming", Caridad M. Gibson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Doctoral students who engage in a Professional Doctorate of Education degree program (EdD) are expected to experience a transformative shift from practitioner to scholarly practitioner. Through their engagement in the EdD program, they enter as practitioners, who become equipped to transfer and reintegrate their knowledge within their practice and field, and through this transformative process, they become scholarly practitioners. The EdD becoming represents the critical learning events, dialogues, and reflections experienced by doctoral students. Researchers have conducted studies to examine various aspects of the EdD degree including the credibility of the degree, the effectiveness of programmatic elements, rigor within programs, …

Impact Of Language Sampling Context On Language Productivity And Complexity, Trina J. Tolentino

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Language sampling is a familiar tool in the speech-language pathologist’s (SLP’s) repertoire, used to assess a student’s language ability and inform treatment targets. The current literature has several studies comparing various dimensions of language sampling context, but with relatively small samples. The goal of this study was to identify what sampling contexts elicit the most productive and complex language, thereby contributing insight into what conditions may yield the most accurate representation of a child’s language skill, as well as the resulting intervention focus.

One-thousand thirty-seven kindergarten, first-, second-, and third-grade students (mean age [years; months] ≈ 7;5; range = 5;0-10;9), …

Organizing For Here And There: Exploring The Grassroots Organizing Of The Puerto Rican Diaspora In The Tampa Bay Area, Dominique Rivera

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Drawing upon participant observations and semi-structure interviews with 10 Puerto Rican grassroots organizers from the Tampa Bay area of Florida, this project examines the processes by which Puerto Rican diaspora members build, maintain, and utilize social and symbolic ties as resources for organizing and executing grassroot projects and campaigns with a dual focus on the Puerto Rican community in the Tampa Bay area and in Puerto Rico. Complex webs of interlocking social and symbolic ties that transcend region of origin and regions of destination constitute a transnational social field, within which exchanges of ideas, practices, and resources are organized among …

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 …

Development And Evaluation Of The Values-Centered Assessment Tool (Vcat) To Inform Culturally Responsive Behavioral Parent Training Intervention, Daniel Kwak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, we aimed to develop and evaluate the use of the Values-Centered Assessment Tool (VCAT) intended for use by behavior analysts to design and provide culturally responsive behavioral parent training intervention for children with behavioral difficulties who are from diverse cultural backgrounds. The study was completed in two phases using a mixed methods research approach. In Phase 1, the VCAT was developed through review of literature and interviews with behavior analysts and was validated through an expert panel review. Major revisions made from the initially developed VCAT included the addition of (a) a questionnaire for parents, (b) information …

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 …

Educational Language Policy: An Examination Of Race And Language In Policy Discourse, Dionne L. Davis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Linguistic diversity is an integral thread in the tapestry of America. As such researchers how linguistic differences across ethnoracial groups can be understood as resources rather than problems. The aim of this study was to examine ideologies concerning race/ethnicity and language in the discourse of educational language policies that guide multilingual approaches to education. The design of this study was critical discourse policy analysis, and the framework was a combination of Critical Language and Race Theory, also known as LangCrit (Crump, 2014), and Raciolinguistics (Alim, 2016; Flores and Rosa, 2015). The research questions were: (1) How are ideologies about the …

Saudi Efl Learners’ Detection And Comprehension Of English Vivid Phrasal Idioms: A Conceptual Replication Study, Basma A. Moreb

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was a mixed method research. The quantitative part investigated Saudi English learners’ English vivid phrasal (VP) idiom detection differences by lexical level, semi- lexical level, and post-lexical level, as well as comprehension and interpretation by zero-context and full-context conditions. It also researched the extent to which Saudi English learners differed in their scores on the measure of participants’ perceptions on the need for including VP idioms in classrooms. The qualitative part of this study investigated the challenges Saudi English learners faced while completing the detection and comprehension tasks and the strategies they used to detect and comprehend the …

Ethnographic Insight On The Construct Of Blackness: Heritage, ‘Home,’ Community, And Reality In Carver City-Lincoln Gardens, Tampa, Florida, 1928-2021, Lisa Katina Armstrong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study is a community-engaged investigation of the experiences and impacts of Black people living in the segregated space called “Carver City-Lincoln Gardens.” This study aims to advance scholarly and mainstream conversations about one racialized community; it is a significant space because the Lincoln Gardens Area was explicitly designated by the Department of Defense as a residential space for Black veterans after World War II to purchase homes. By exploring this housing arrangement through an anthropological lens, the findings indicate that a mixed-method, collaborative ethnography reveals nuances that might be glossed over when communities are racialized. This study also seeks …

The Making Of Microcelebrities On Douyin: Multimodal Design And Online Identities In Informal English Instruction Videos, Yaqian Jiang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the online education market continues to expand globally, teaching and advertising have converged in digital spaces in unprecedented ways. Driven by the attention economy, independent online educators must compete to cultivate a consumer base. To attract followers, they must engage not only in online teaching activities but also in self-branding practices. This dissertation explores how microcelebrities who teach English on Douyin utilize linguistic and other semiotic resources for both instructional and self-branding purposes.

To address this topic, I collected 84 informal English language instruction videos created by 14 different Douyin microcelebrities. Taking a social semiotic approach to multimodal discourse …