Digital Commons Network^™

Was It Something They Said? Stand-Up Comedy And Progressive Social Change, David M. Jenkins

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From our earliest origins in every civilization across the globe, comic performances have fulfilled an important social function. Yet stand-up comedy has not attracted the serious academic inquiry one might expect. This dissertation argues that in the absence of public intellectuals stand-up comics are important to how we talk about and negotiate complicated issues like gender and race. These comic texts are sites of cultural critique, public discourse, tools for articulation, a means of persuasion, and serve to galvanize communities.

This dissertation argues that stand-up comedy performances are a vital part of modern American intellectual and social life and are …

Half Empty/Half Full: Absence, Ethnicity, And The Question Of Identity In The United States, Ashley Josephine Martinez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study helps us understand the complexities of transnational abandonment, and transnational abandonment in the context of Saudi heritage in particular. Based on a textual analysis of narratives on a blog by individuals abandoned by their Saudi fathers, my findings suggest that they discursively construct their identity in three ways: a) by negotiating their illegitimate status as perceived by many Saudis, and the validity of their search; b) by making sense of the absence of father and the cultural knowledge of the paternal side, while negotiating the inevitable presence of the father in many other ways and their ethnic difference; …

Department Of English Newsletter, Winter 2014-2015, Illinois State University, Department Of English

Department of English Newsletter

Newsletter of the Illinois State University Department of English

Haitian Children's House-Tree-Person Drawings: Global Similarities And Cultural Differences, Abimbola Afolayan

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The issues of rising terrorism, violence, and scarcity of basic needs will increase in the coming decades, and children that need psychological services in disaster areas around the world will also increase (Alim, 2008). The study utilized the House-Tree-Person (HTP) projective test to examine the adaptation and maladaptation of Haitian children who lived in extreme urban poverty, broken infrastructure, and relocation camps in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. The 43 participants of the original archived data set provided 129 protocols of house, tree, and person drawings (Roysircar & Colvin, 2015). Out of that dataset, the present study used 39 …

Toward Transforming Health Systems: A Practice Study Of Organizing And Practical Inquiry In Academic Medicine, Thomas A. Ellison

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Transformation of health care systems will be grounded in new professional relations and collective, cross-disciplinary actions to impact care delivery. Organizing such relations and actions involves practical inquiry rather than applying professional knowledge. This dissertation presents an exploratory, performative study of the initial organizing of the Health Systems Innovation and Research (HSIR) Program in Health Sciences at the University of Utah. The HSIR program was conceived principally to catalyze cross-disciplinary innovation and health services research and enhance care delivery changes by documenting care improvements and publishing research. This study includes a composite narrative of the organizing and practical inquiry work …

The Inner Witch: Channeling And Containing Femininity, Marta Kondratyuk

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This dissertation addresses the literary witches in American and Russian twentieth century literatures. It investigates why and to what effect images of witches and witchcraft are appropriated by individual authors in different historical situations. My study focuses on literary witches as personification of conspiratorial female power. Witches come in different forms, shapes, ages and colors. They possess contradictory powers. They can be evil or benevolent, old or young, mythological or historical, powerful or vulnerable, repellent or attractive but one constant remains: they are feared. I closely read the authors’ selected texts to argue that literary witches are representations of a …

Barr And Citlau's "Compassion Without Compromise: How The Gospel Frees Us To Love Our Gay Friends Without Losing The Truth" (Book Review), Carol Reid

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

A Person's A Person No Matter How Small - Understanding The Role Of Temperament In Working With Toddlers And Young Children, Robinson B. Kimberly, Ann Vanbuskirk Dr.

Georgia Association for Positive Behavior Support Conference

Abstract Early childhood and educational research have indicated that a young child’s temperament is predictive of success in school and adulthood. A child’s temperament has the potential to impact not only their interpretation of life events, but can also influence the activities that they choose and how adults respond to and interact with them. Child temperament research has identified three widely known profiles based on nine dimensions of behavior: “difficult”, “easy”, and “slow to warm up”. The purpose of this presentation is to provide information about child temperament and the ways in which adults can use positive relational interventions to …

Battling With Monsters : Integrated Gamification In The First-Year Composition Classroom, Lee Hibbard

Theses

The study of games features in digital media and game design classrooms, but no research exists on a combination of gamification and bringing games as texts into the first-year composition classroom. Using the method of `integrated gamification', I created an innovative multimodal classroom that includes the study of videogame texts alongside literature, film, and television texts, and uses the mechanics of those videogame texts to create a deeper immersion in the course content. In my thesis research, I will demonstrate the impact integrated gamification has on students in the first year composition classroom as recorded from a semester-long case study …

Imaging The Early Cold War: Photographs In Life Magazine, 1945-1954, Kathryn L. Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes Life’s early coverage of the Cold War (1945-1954) in order to explicate this publication’s creation and reinforcement of prescriptive attitudes about this ideological engagement through photographically illustrated news. By uncovering Life’s editorial approach this project proposes a new diagnostic for evaluating documentary images by re-configuring Hayden White’s incisive theory of emplotment—the process of engendering historical narratives with meaning— through semiotic models proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Roland Barthes, thereby offering a useful tool for future scholars to re-examine modern media’s transition towards prizing visual immediacy over critical engagement.

Life’s editors’ link narrative devices …

Genetic Integrity Assessment Of Cryopreserved Tomato (Lycopersicon Esculentum Mill.) Genotypes, Ana Coste, Dana Suteu, Ioan Bacila, Constantin Deliu, Sergiu Valimareanu, Adela Halmagyi

Turkish Journal of Biology

Shoot tips of five tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) genotypes were successfully cryopreserved by droplet vitrification. Recovered plants were studied for genetic stability by two different assays: amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) using 4 primer combinations and sequencing of lycopene $\beta$-cyclase gene (LCY-B) from leaves. The highest shoot regeneration after cryopreservation was 70% (Pontica) following 24 h osmoprotection in 0.5 M sucrose and 30 min dehydration in plant vitrification solution 2 (PVS2). The data inferred from AFLP showed no genetic dissimilarities between in vitro regenerants derived from cryopreserved tissues compared with the noncryopreserved controls. Although a single nucleotide polymorphism, a G→T …

Tokens In A Man’S World: Women In Creative Advertising Departments, Jean M. Grow, Tao Deng

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Mncs And Csr Engagement In Asia: A Dialectical Model, Angela Ka Ying Mak, Suwichit Chaidaroon, Augustine Pang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using the Circuit of Culture as a guiding framework, this study highlighted how MNCs in Asian developing countries engage and negotiate with local stakeholders as they implement their CSR initiatives. Twenty-one qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with PR practitioners responsible for CSR projects in Asia. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes related to the framework elements. Results demonstrated how MNCs practice CSR in Asia through the five moments (identity, regulations, production, representations, and consumption). MNCs faced a number of dialectical tensions (e.g. following the country's laws, lack of CSR comprehension among employees, and resistance from the stakeholders). Effective strategies …

Name-Giving Variations In Kurdistan Province Of Iran: An Ethnic Identity Marker Categorized, Abbas Eslami-Rasekh, Mohammad Ahmadvand

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Name-giving, in addition to being an act of designation or official registration, implies the cultural identity of name-givers. One obvious aspect is showing the social values and practices in an area. This study aims to explore the social factors which motivate name- giving among Kurdish ethnicity of Iran. The corpus of data for the analysis included the National Organization for Civil Registration of Iran, Kurdish websites, interviews, and questionnaires given to Kurdish citizens of Kurdistan. The important classifying variable is the socio-cultural preferences which were compared through using the frequency of different categories of names. The results of the study …

Reconsidering The Influence Of Islam On Yoruba Cultural Heritage, 1930-1987, Akeem Abiodun Oladiti

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Previous studies on the activities of Islam have focused on the contribution of the religion to state building (Last, 1967, p. 4 ), the nineteenth century jihad (Smith, 1961, p. 45) and the phenomenal growth of Islam during the colonial period (Gbadamosi, 1978, p. 77). However, no specific attention has been paid to how Islam affected Yoruba culture negatively with specific focus on the area of religion education and language. This study intends to fill this obvious gap in the historiography of influential cultural invasion of Islam from 1930, when colonial political structures allowed the Muslims to maintain a physical …

Sexuality, Desire And The Ageing Female Body: An Essay, Lauren Marsh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis consists of a novella, ‘One Night in Hong Kong’, and an essay, ‘Sexuality, Desire and the Ageing Female Body.’ The novella tells the story of an erotic affair between the female narrator and a man in a hotel room in the neon city of Hong Kong. Told in four parts, the story shifts in time, reflecting on earlier events in the narrator’s life and a trip she made to the Sicilian city of Catania in 1954.

Older female protagonists and their sexuality are rarely depicted in contemporary Australian fiction. Where representations do exist, they act as ‘interventionist’ texts, …

A Postcolonial Critique Of Industrial Design: A Critical Evaluation Of The Relationship Of Culture And Hegemony To Design Practice And Education Since The Late 20th Century., Taslima Begum

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

A Postcolonial Critique of Industrial Design: A critical evaluation of the relationship of culture and hegemony to design practice and education since the late 20th century. This thesis specifically focuses on the professional practices and training of Western industrial designers using postcolonial theory to inform working practices in a complex global ecology. It investigates the culturally hegemonic construction of design solutions in man-made products. By adopting key ideas from postcolonial and cultural studies as a lens to evaluate fields of industrial design discourse, practice and pedagogy, the work proceeds from the premise that design is not intrinsic to a product …

Capturing The City: Part Of The Portfolio Memory City, B Momchedjikova, I Rae, T Milbrandt

School of Art, Design and Architecture

Introduction to the book Capturing the City translated by Jorge De La Barre, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio, Brazil Antropolítica: Revista Contemporânea de Antropologia, n. 38 (2015) http://www.revistas.uff.br/index.php/antropolitica/article/view/333/pdf

Body + Power + Justice: Movement-Based Workshops For Critical Tutor Education, Beth Godbee, Moira Ozias, Jasmine Kar Tang

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Rhetoric Of Young Non-Regular Workers In Post-Bubble Japan: A Genealogical Analysis, Noriaki Tajima

Wayne State University Dissertations

This work explores the development and struggle of a rhetorical subject of Japanese young non-regular workers against the recent slow economic trend. In Japan, the bubble-burst in 1991 invited a long economic recession, and companies started to adopt non-regular—low-wage, short-term and insecure—contracts from quintessential Fordist full-time seishain regular contract; yet, a large body of older seishain workers has retained this stable and affordable status. As a result, the vast majority of working forces enrolled in the job market since then has suffered from a low living standard, many on the verge of survival, while domestic mass media discourses have legitimated …

Linking Trajectories: On-Line Learning And Intercultural Exchanges, Nanette Levinson, Kaitlin E. Davidson

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

There has been tremendous growth both in study abroad and intercultural exchange options in the United States and also in on-line learning options in higher education. Reviewing 91 cross-cultural experiences with at least one type of formal on-line component, this paper provides an overview and categorization of these offerings as well as a discussion of trends. It also offers recommendations to help strengthen and shape further offerings and related research.

My Choice, My Fraternity, And My Engagement: Experiences Of White Men In Black Greek Letter Organizations (Bglo), Kourtney Prentice Gray

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative study grounded in the theoretical framework and research of Alexander Astin’s Student Engagement Theory, with support from Critical Race Theory and Terrell Strayhorn’s work on Sense of Student Belonging, utilizes a methodological case-study approach with multiple units of analysis. In an effort to understand the choice, ownership, and engagement of White men who hold membership in Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLO), this study utilized the counter-narrative tenant presented and supported by Critical Race Theory to examine the racial identity and engagement of fraternity men from a pluralistic experience. Additionally, the researcher hypothesized that there is a special experience …

Imaging, Spectroscopy, Mechanical, Alignment And Biocompatibility Studies Of Electrospun Medical Grade Polyurethane (Carbothane™ 3575a) Nanofibers And Composite Nanofibers Containing Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes, Faheem A. Sheikh, Javier Macossay-Torres, Travis Cantu, Xujun Zhang, M. Shamshi Hassan, M. Esther Salinas, Chakavak S. Farhangi, Hassan Ahmad, Hern Kim, Gary L. Bowlin

School of Integrative Biological & Chemical Sciences (Formerly Dept. of Chemistry)

In the present study, we discuss the electrospinning of medical grade polyurethane (Carbothane™ 3575A) nanofibers containing multi-walled-carbon-nanotubes (MWCNTs). A simple method that does not depend on additional foreign chemicals has been employed to disperse MWCNTs through high intensity sonication. Typically, a polymer solution consisting of polymer/MWCNTs has been electrospun to form nanofibers. Physiochemical aspects of prepared nanofibers were evaluated by SEM, TEM, FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy, confirming nanofibers containing MWCNTs. The biocompatibility and cell attachment of the produced nanofiber mats were investigated while culturing them in the presence of NIH 3T3 fibroblasts. The results from these tests indicated non-toxic behavior …

Understanding Tony Scott: Authorship And Post-Classical Hollywood, Robert Arnett

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

The article offers criticism to several films directed by the British motion picture director Tony Scott, including the films "Man on Fire," starring Dakota Fanning, Denzel Washington and Christopher Walken, "Domino," starring Mo’Nique and "Déjà vu," starring Jim Caviezel and Denzel Washington. Particular focus is given to his authorship and film production as a post-classical director in Hollywood, California.

Red Dirt Writing: Journalism, Foucault And The Transformation Of Onslow, Karma Louise Barndon

Theses : Honours

The remote town of Onslow in the Pilbara region of WA plays host to two massive liquefied natural gas plants that will contribute billions to the state and national economy over the next 50 years. Recognising the importance of creating a first draft of history, the Tracking Onslow project was launched in 2012 by ECU and the Shire of Ashburton, to use journalism as a research methodology to document physical changes in the town and changing community perceptions about the gas plants and the companies that run them. The project produced six magazines over a three-year period. This practice-led thesis …

Mobile Production: Spatialized Labor, Location Professionals, And The Expanding Geography Of Television Production, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This article addresses the spatial challenges facing television laborers amid an increasingly expansive and contingent environment of local production incentives. Pushing away from the term runaway production and its limited engagement with local, spatialized dynamics of labor, I argue for a consideration of “mobile production,” wherein television series are capable of being executed in an increasingly wide range of locations—not necessarily Los Angeles—and capable of being moved should changes in an incentive system create the need to do so. Through personal interviews and analysis of industry discourse, this case study of location professionals considers how the mobility of production affects …

Always Already Suspect: Revising Vulnerability Theory, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

Martha Fineman proposes a post-identity "vulnerability" approach that focuses on burdens we all share; this article argues that theory needs to incorporate recognition of how invisible privileges exacerbate some people's burdens. Vulnerability theory is based on a recognition that we are all born defenseless, become feeble, must fear natural disasters, and might be failed by social institutions. It thus argues for a strong state that takes affirmative steps to insure substantive equality of opportunity. While vulnerability theory might help explain and remedy situations like Hurricane Katrina, it also might be susceptible to an argument that racial profiling is a necessary …

Late Emergence Of The First Possession Heuristic: Evidence From A Small-Scale Culture, Patricia Kanngiesser, Federico Rossano, Michael Tomasello

School of Psychology

Western preschool children often assign ownership based on first possession and some theorists have proposed that this judgment might be an early emerging, innate bias. Five- to 9-year-olds (n = 112) from a small-scale group in Kenya (Kikuyu) watched videotaped interactions of two women passing an object. The object’s starting position and the women’s gestures were varied. Use of the first possession heuristic increased with age, and 8- to 9-year-olds performed similarly to German 5-year-olds (n = 24). Starting position and gestures had no effect. A control study confirmed that 5-year-old Kikuyus (n = 20) understood the video material. The …

Digitods: Toddlers, Touch Screens And Australian Family Life, Donell J. Holloway, Lelia Green, Kylie J. Stevenson

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Children are beginning to use digital technologies at younger and younger ages. The emerging trend of very young children (babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers) using Internet connected devices, especially touch screen tablets and smartphones, has elicited polarising opinions from early childhood experts.At present there is little actual research about the risks or benefits of tablet and smartphone use by very young children. Current usage recommendations, based on research into passive television watching which claims that screen time is detrimental, is in conflict with advice from education experts and app developers who commend interactive screen time as engaging and educational.

The Use Of Cultural Memory In Reinforcing Contemporary Russian Patriotism: A Case Study Of The Film "Stalingrad" (2013), Laura Roop

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

According to cultural memory theory, cultural tools such as texts and symbols transmit the knowledge of meaningful historical events to groups. These cultural tools reproduce history by cultivating narratives that are relevant in a given time, and thus reflect the ongoing concerns over memory. The purpose of communicating significant turning points in a nation's history is to create a system of values, a self-image and the continuity of a nation. Films are considered to be both textual and visual representations of cultural memory. Since memory and commemoration of the Second World War have gone through many changes, one has to …