Digital Commons Network^™

Stress, Anxiety Symptomology, And The Need For Student Support Services For University Freshmen Of First-Generation Status, Low-Ses Backgrounds, And Those Registered With Disabilities, Kelly Dale Allison

LSU Master's Theses

Three populations of concern for professional social workers in higher educational settings include first-generation college students (FGCSs), students from low socio-economic (low-SES) backgrounds, and students with disabilities. As the national demand for degrees in higher education rises both socially and economically, the push for young adults’ postsecondary success becomes increasingly crucial. In college and university settings, a significant portion of students may be classified as FGCSs, low-SES, or may be registered with a disability. Examining these vulnerable populations within higher education settings, particularly regarding stress and anxiety symptomology, can help social workers recognize the social, developmental, and academic inhibitions that …

Prison Privatization And Inmate Labor In The Global Economy: Reframing The Debate Over Private Prisons, Alfred C. Aman, Carol J. Greenhouse

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The pragmatics of privatization offer terrain for a critical understanding of the relationship between government and business under the conditions associated with the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. Prison privatization is especially significant in this context, given the fact that—for privatization advocates and critics alike, in the United States and elsewhere—prisons represent a bellwether for broader questions about the scope of government. We review the recent history of prison privatization in the United States from the vantage point of the policy responses to the privatization movement more generally, to highlight the various factors that, over time, made private prisons iconic of …

A Study Of The Effectiveness Of A Common Household Chemical For Maceration, Sara O'Neil Wyatt

LSU Master's Theses

Maceration is often a necessary component when working on a forensic case. Since it is not very common to get a case with fully skeletonized remains, the soft tissue must be removed for the forensic anthropologist to start their assessment. There are varying maceration techniques, but the goal is the same: to remove the soft tissue without damaging the bone The main purpose of my research is to examine a common household chemical, Drano® Max Gel, to determine its effectiveness for maceration. I tested two diluted solutions of Drano® Max Gel, 25% and 12.5%, both heated and unheated, to determine …

Dwelling Poetically, Proceeding Orphically: The Platonic Tradition And The Heideggerian Humanism Of Ernesto Grassi, Geoffrey Alexander Leeves Bain

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Martin Heidegger exerted an immense influence over twentieth century thought by providing profound insights into the nature of Being as well as scathing social critiques, focused on the destructive force of late modern technological reductionism. As part of Heidegger’s project, he elaborated upon a sophisticated history of Being in which two great monsters of Platonism and Humanism are cast as Antichrist and False Prophet. Subsequently, however, his own student Ernesto Grassi argued that Renaissance Humanism was not a stepping stone towards subjectivism and technological thinking, but rather stood in conformity with the fundamental essence of Heidegger’s own project. This study …

Curated Landscapes: The Evolution Of The Postcard Shot, Louise Cheetham

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research examines traveling landscape-objects in tourist environments and their impact on cultural identity in America. Traveling landscape-objects include any form of tourist paraphernalia or representation of cultural landscapes. For these purposes, I studied different forms of tourist representation of the Natchez Trace Parkway, an entity of the National Park Service. Research areas include the content, location, and changing medium of traveling landscape-objects, while also addressing their meaning, frequency, quality, role in non-representational arenas, and the future of tourist representations. Methods include detailed cataloguing and analysis of over one thousand images of various shapes and forms ⎯ ranging from early …

"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Examining a broad range of texts,“‘Superbly Sterile:’ Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture,” argues that Thomas Hardy’s final naturalist novels, popular nineteenth-century vampire narratives, and the fiction of Oscar Wilde queered the bildungsroman (or novel of development) through characters who failed or refused to progress along sexual and maturational timelines. Where these texts’ critics have tended to read them as cautionary tales about homosexuality or predatory female sexuality, this dissertation contends that they also presented alternate forms of kinship and reproduction. They do so through the use of recursive, inverted, or otherwise backward relationships to time. Where Victorian sexology …

The Edible Landscape: Plant Breeding, Farming, And Sustainbility In Northwest Portugal, Joseph Blanchard Powell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of a participatory plant breeding project in northwest Portugal. Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is a crop enhancement strategy that brings farmers and plant breeders together in the effort to conserve crop genetic resources in-situ, improve yield, and increase the overall agricultural sustainability in agriculture. One strategy in PPB calls for plant breeders to spend considerable time on working farms to understand better farmers’ knowledge and skill, and to survey the existing crop genetic diversity within the existing resource limitations on farms. Although there are clear social implications for PPB, the bulk of PPB evaluative …

Musicking New Orleans Street Musicians: A Methodology For Writing About Music, Savannah Cadi Rose Ganster

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project argues for the use of performative writing as a methodology for writing about musical performances. An analysis of recent scholarship on music and musical performances written by performance studies scholars supports the use of performative writing in texts that address musical performances. In order to further this methodological claim, this study uses performative writing to document both historical and present day accounts of musical performances of street musicians in New Orleans. Utilizing Foucault’s theories on and Roach’s model of genealogy, Bruner’s notion of reflexive ethnography, and Small’s concept of musicking, I theorize, on a meta-methodological level, that performative …

Going Off To The War In Hungary: French Nobles And Crusading Culture In The Sixteenth Century, Brian Sandberg

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

Crusading culture played a significant role in the conceptions and practices of religious warfare in the Early Modern Period, as French authors and militant nobles redeployed Hungary as a crucial theater of crusading war. Examining crusading warfare in Hungary reveals new facets of warrior nobles’ military activities in early modern France and abroad, building on recent studies of French noble culture. The article concludes that French readers developed notions of crusading warfare in part through reports of the war in Hungary, contributing to a burgeoning literature on the production, diffusion, and reception of early modern news and information across Europe.

Booker T. Washington And The Historians: How Changing Views On Race Relations, Economics, And Education Shaped Washington Historiography, 1915-2010, Joshua Thomas Zeringue

LSU Master's Theses

“Booker T. Washington and the Historians” analyzes the past century of scholarly writings on Booker T. Washington and seeks to describe the major paradigms used to explain his life and work. Between 1915 and 2010 four major paradigms emerged. The hagiographic paradigm, which offered an uncritical and triumphal account, dominated Washington scholarship from 1915 to 1950. In the 1950s the critical paradigm became widely accepted among historians; Washington was viewed as a compromiser with white supremacists and Northern industrialists. In the 1990s and 2000s the educational paradigm, which focused on Washington’s pedagogy and educational achievements, developed as an alternative to …

An Afro-Brazilian Landscape: African Oil Palms And Socioecological Change In Bahia, Brazil, Case Watkins

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Palm oil extracted from the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) is the world’s most produced vegetable oil, commanding a roughly 50 billion dollar global industry. In contrast to the agroindustrial firms and monocultures that dominate global production, a biodiverse cultural landscape of African oil palms in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia has for centuries supplied local alimentary and spiritual demands for palm oil—an essential resource in Afro-Brazilian cultures. Drawing on fieldwork, ethnography, archives, GIScience, quantitative analysis, and travelers’, rare, and secondary accounts, this dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of Bahia’s palm oil landscapes, cultures, and economies. Analyzing …

Dendrotempestology: Identifying The Statistical Relationship Between Hurricanes And Tree Growth In The Pine Savannas Of Coastal Mississippi, Clay Stephens Tucker

LSU Master's Theses

Hurricanes cause massive destruction of property and land through high wind speeds, high precipitation, and flooding from storm surge inundation. Hurricane Katrina produced nearly an 8.5 meter-high storm surge at Pass Christian, Mississippi. The envelope of high water from Hurricane Katrina covered a large area of the Gulf Coast including, but not limited to, the area from the Atchafalaya Bay in Louisiana to Mobile Bay in Alabama. This study assesses the relationship between hurricane characteristics (i.e., storm surge and maximum wind) and tree growth using coastal pine tree cores taken in Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (GBNERR). GBNERR, an …

Impact Of Reduced Rates Of Hormonal Herbicides Aon Sweetpotato (Ipomoea Batatas Lam.) Growth And Development, Thomas Michael Batts

LSU Master's Theses

Studies evaluated impact of dicamba, 2,4-D, and glyphosate at reduced rates to sweetpotato at root formation (RF) and development (RD) growth stages. For DGA salt of dicamba at RF, glyphosate plus dicamba at 1/10x reduced storage root number 42%, canner grade yield 33%, and total yield 36%. With choline salt of 2,4-D at RF, storage root number compared to the non-treated (6.5) was reduced with glyphosate alone at 1/100x (5.1), 2,4-D alone at 1/250x (5.1), and glyphosate plus 2,4-D applied at 1/10 (4.2) and 1/1000x (5). Canner yield was reduced 32% with glyphosate alone 1/10x, 26 and 27% with 2,4-D …

Impacts Of The Three-Dimensional Oceanic Thermal Structure And Translation Speed On Tropical Cyclogenesis And Intensity Fluctuations During The 2005 North Atlantic Hurricane Season, Jordan Vick Pino

LSU Master's Theses

Tropical cyclones are some of the most devastating natural phenomena on the planet. While it has long been recognized that sea surface temperature is an important factor in the evolution of tropical cyclones, it is limited due to its two-dimensional nature. This research seeks to investigate the role of the three-dimensional oceanic thermal structure and translation speed (U_h) on the cyclogenesis and intensity fluctuations of these powerful storm systems. This investigation utilized two main data sets: (1) depth of the 26°C isotherm (D26) which indicates the depth (or volume) of the warm water layer, and (2) hourly-interpolated wind …

Essays In Labor Economics, Sukriye Elif Filiz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present three distinct topics on labor economics that can be read independently from one another. In the first chapter, using matched mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I investigate the impact of mothers’ involuntary job loss on children’s academic achievement. In the next chapter, I examine the impact of eye and hair color on wages-at-first-job after schooling. In addition, I investigate whether hair color has an impact on the wage-at-the-first-job if the individual resides among people who have similar features. In the last chapter, I examine the impact of unemployment insurance benefit generosity …

Investigations Into Ecogeomorphodynamics Of Coastal Embryo Dunes At Padre Island National Seashore, Texas, Katherine Anne Renken

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an investigation into the interplay between vegetation and aeolian processes in the coastal embryo dune environment at Padre Island National Seashore, Texas. Vegetation is a geomorphic agent, altering aeolian process dynamics. This research adopted a three-pronged approach to improving our understanding of ecogeomorphodynamics in the coastal environment. The first study analyzed large-scale spatiotemporal trends in the vegetation community of the embryo dune environment in order to contextualize smaller scale aeolian processes. Results of this study demonstrated that there was a clear transition in community assemblage from the seaward edge of the embryo dune zone, where species functioned …

Sexual Dimorphism In The Crania In A Norwegian Sample, Tonje Bakke Noack

LSU Master's Theses

Physical anthropologists strive to improve the accuracy of sex identification and to establish criteria of measurements within various populations. Different groups of native inhabitants show dissimilar results within cranial measurements and inaccuracies have been confirmed when comparing all populations to the common standard lineal measurements. This research examined 24 measurements on 120 crania from Norway and used statistical analyses to determine the sexual dimorphism between male and female crania. The study established the measurements with the most sexual dimorphism. These are the measurements of bizygomatic breadth, basion-bregma, biauricular breadth, glabella-opisthocranion, and upper facial breadth. The similarity of the values of …

Investigating Prehistoric Exchange In New Zealand: Portable Xrf And Spatial Analysis Of South Island Obsidian, Herman Nick Robles

LSU Master's Theses

The Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand currently houses a collection of obsidian artifacts that were once in the possession of ancestral South Island Maori. Although the stone artifacts that reside in the Otago Museum are known to have been collected mostly in the South Island of the New Zealand archipelago, there is not much information as to where the ancestors of South Island Maori originally obtained the raw material to create the stone artifacts. Using portable x-ray florescence (XRF) analysis to non-destructively geochemically characterize the obsidian, a study was performed on the collection of stone artifacts to provide a …

A Spatial Analysis Of Obesity And Its Associations With The Built And Natural Environment, Physical Inactivity, And Socioeconomic And Demographic Conditions In The United States Of America, Mustafa Erdem

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Obesity has strong genetic determinants but the genetic composition of the population does not change rapidly. Thus in this study, the major changes in non-genetic factors such as the development of obesogenic environments and shifting socioeconomic status and lifestyle of individuals are hypothesized to increase the risk of obesity. As the prevalence of obesity continue to increase worldwide with substantial attention in the US, a clearer understanding of how spatial associations between obesity and confounding factors are interrelated is crucial to better tackle the issue of obesity. This study employs the ‘global’ and ‘local’ Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) methods …

Mishpacha In The American Diaspora: An Exploratory Study Of Highly-Involved Jewish Families, Trevan Glen Hatch

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Both family and religion are important to a large majority of the population in the United States. In the last few decades, research on religious families has significantly increased. Empirical research on Jewish families, however, is scant. The purpose of this study is to explore contemporary American Jewish family life in relation to Judaism, both cultural and religious. Specifically, the two primary objectives of this study are 1) to examine how Jewish culture and religion may influence and shape Jewish family life; and 2) to examine how family relationships may influence observance of Jewish cultural or religious traditions. This reciprocal …

Collections Created During Conflict: Preserving The Memory Of The First World War, Rachel Gifford

LSU Master's Theses

The Great War (1914-1919) forced society to decide whether cultural heritage institutions, as a whole, had value. An examination of the types of materials gathered during the Great War, the identity of the collectors, and the intended purpose the repositories highlights the shift in the methodological practices of libraries, archives, and museums during this period. This study focuses primarily on three Allied museums created during the conflict: The Imperial War Museum in England, the Bibliothèque-Musée de La Guerre in France, and the Liberty Memorial in the United States. These institutions emphasize how types of repositories were used as they instituted …

Fish Remains From The Beatty Curve Site (35kl95), Virginia L. Butler, J. Tait Elder, Daniel Mcgowan Gilmour, Alexander E. Stevenson, Camilla F. Speller

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The archaeological record of fish in the Upper Klamath Basin is important for several reasons. First it is important to descendant indigenous people in the region. Nineteenth century explorer accounts and ethnographic records highlight the importance of fish to subsistence and overall lifeways of Klamath basin people in the 19th and 20th centuries before major habitat destruction (Gatschet 1890; Spier 1930; Lane and Lane Associates 1981; Deur 2003b). Ancient fish bone records emphasize the long-term relationships between fish and Native Americans and the range and diversity of fish species used, which have been in great decline over the past several …

Attending To Reality: Iris Murdoch On The Moral Good, Ante Jeroncic

Faculty Publications

Even a scant acquaintance with current cultural and philosophical trends will readily point to a widespread predilection for subjectivist forms of moral reasoning. By “subjectivist” I refer to various non-cognitivist and constructionist paradigms in moral philosophy and popular parlance that reduce ethical statements to expressions of individual or collective preferences, feelings, or prejudices stripped of any object-given normativity. Th e following are but some of the factors that fuel such perspectives: the proverbial fact/value dichotomy and anti-realist sentiments pervading large swaths of analytic philosophy; poststructuralist and postcolonial “genealogies” that tie the language of universal morality to discourses of power, patriarchy, …

The Equity Baseline Report: A Framework For Regional Equity, Jared Franz, Cat Goughnour, Duncan Hwang, Kayse Jama, Meg Merrick, Andre Riley, Gerardo Vergara-Monroy

Institute of Metropolitan Studies Publications

The Equity Baseline Report: A Framework for Regional Equity is an authentic community-led report resulting from a yearlong collaborative effort conducted by six local community based organizations (CBOs). The organizations were selected competitively to work under contract with Metro staff to identify, inventory, classify and recommend quantitative and qualitative evidence-based indicators and corresponding data sets that measure the varying degrees by which people experience equity in our region.

An Assessment Of Retractions As A Measure Of Scientific Misconduct And Impact On Public Health Risks, Alison J. Abritis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research misconduct has been generally considered a limited issue, occurring in a small percentage of research studies. Studies of the number of article retractions use retraction percentages to perpetuate the idea that research misconduct is not a common event, and use information in the retraction notice to quantify types of research misconduct and types or research error. However, retractions appear to be the wrong variable with which to assess misconduct rates and characteristics. Using final misconduct findings in hard science research from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) for investigations closed from 1993 through 2013, the number of publications and …

Latino Immigrant Workers’ Search For Justice After Occupational Injury, Carla Gabriela Castillo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Latino immigrants encounter an entanglement of rights and policies after occupational injury or illness. In collaboration with an immigrant worker center, ethnographic research and a survey are used to analyze injured workers’ experiences. The center uses survey results to identify common threads and systematic problems, and to explore potential direct action. Through interviews with workers and medical and legal professionals, I investigate the barriers Latino immigrants face following occupational injury or illness, how their lived experiences relate to the greater medicolegal frameworks that demarcate most formal processes of compensation and treatment, and the experiences of professionals who mediate these structures. …

The “Other” Side Of Wall Street: Banking, Policies, And Adaptive Methods Of U.S. Migrant Workers, Cassandra Rae Decker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Migrant farmworkers' social and economic mobility is frequently constrained through the denial of basic resources, such as access to the formal financial sector. This thesis ethnographically examines banking policies as they apply to low-income, mobile, populations that temporarily reside in Florida. It utilizes participant observation, interviews, and participatory mapping with migrant farmworkers. It also considers how policymakers and service providers in the formal and informal financial sectors rationalize control of resources and the effects on mobile populations. Particular attention is paid to adaptive practices in the alternative financial sector – cash checking services, carrying cash, and remittances. By utilizing the …

The Continuum Of Ethno-Racial Socialization: Learning About Culture And Race In Middle-Class Latina/O Families, Maria D. Duenas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the discursive messages and specific practices that Latino families use to transmit messages about culture, race, and racism. Scholars have not fully explored the complexity and range of practices and discourses that are involved in Latinos’ ethno-racial socialization. The use of the phrase “ethno-racial socialization” is important because it combines the concepts of racial socialization and ethnic socialization in an effort to account for how the lived experiences of Latinos who mostly think of themselves as a racial group, are treated as one race, and thus, discuss race with family members. This research explores this process using …

Two Essays Examining Organizational Performance, Stacey Alexis Gelsheimer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In highly competitive industries where firms aren’t protected by barriers to entry and consumers’ preferences are constantly changing, the willingness and ability to adapt and continually improve operations may be critical for continued success. However, the internal exchanges between employees and managers that may be an integral part of the development and implementation of new ideas are often not modeled or included in our standard economic theories. In this research I investigate whether a higher level of employee voice (or employee input) predicts higher levels of continual improvement, and whether this continual improvement predicts higher levels of firm performance. Additionally, …

Community Identity And Social Practice During The Terminal Classic Period At Actuncan, Belize, Kara Ann Fulton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the relationship between the ways in which urban families engaged local landscapes and the development of shared identities at the prehispanic Maya city of Actuncan, Belize. Such shared identities would have created deep historical ties to specific urbanized spaces, which enabled and constrained political expansion during the Terminal Classic period (ca. A.D. 800–900), a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers declined. This research contributes to the understanding of urban processes of growth and decay in this region, and how they are linked to the behaviors of social factions in settlements.

For communities, …