Digital Commons Network^™

Eating The Heart Of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries In The Stories Of Louise Erdrich And Tomson Highway, Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway's work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. …

Beast-Gods, Bandits, And Beggar-Kings: The Traveler In Political Thought, Nader Sadre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I use texts by Plato, Locke, Homer, and Gandhi to explore the political dimension of travel. I argue that travel is a proxy for practices and conditions that exceed “normal” politics. In this capacity, travel reveals what normal politics is, or is assumed to be. Travel marks a boundary of the political realm in a double sense: it may conceal or point to a pre-political source of authority; and it may provide an intimation of new political modes and orders. My analyses suggest that there is no single or consistent relationship between travel and politics. Rather, the …

False Cures Of U.S. Nationalism: The Border Wall – A Raucous Call From The Silent Center, Tatiana N. Browne-Kai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In trying to grasp the authoritarian surge in the U.S. since 2016, political theorists have increasingly turned their focus back to the Studies of the Authoritarian Personality. In response to the risk of these contemporary studies’ use of psychoanalysis in a de-historicized and individualized way, this paper opts for a double historicization of modern mass-formations. In analyzing the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the Minuteman Border Fence and We Build the Wall, civil initiatives that aim at fortifying the U.S.-Mexican border wall (D. Trumps central campaign theme), the current surge to the right is shown to be based on and made …

Role Of Influence In Complex Networks, Nur Dean

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Game theory is a wide ranging research area; that has attracted researchers from various fields. Scientists have been using game theory to understand the evolution of cooperation in complex networks. However, there is limited research that considers the structure and connectivity patterns in networks, which create heterogeneity among nodes. For example, due to the complex ways most networks are formed, it is common to have some highly “social” nodes, while others are highly isolated. This heterogeneity is measured through metrics referred to as “centrality” of nodes. Thus, the more “social” nodes tend to also have higher centrality.

In this thesis, …

The Cognitive Thalamus: Source Analysis Of Scene Working Memory Delay Activity, Bernard A. Gomes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working Memory represents a limited-capacity store for maintaining information and manipulating the store's contents over a short period for the guidance of goal-directed behavior. Working Memory is an essential component of executive functions that are intricately associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC has been implicated in maintaining task-related information online for brief periods in the absence of relevant information. This active maintenance phase is called the delay period that occurs between encoding and retrieval of the stimulus. Previous studies have attempted to understand the relationship between working memory and the PFC, especially during the delay or maintenance phase …

“An Instrument In The Shape / Of A Woman”: Reading As Re-Vision In Adrienne Rich, William J. Camponovo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This single-author-oriented dissertation on the work of Adrienne Rich looks at her extensive body of work both in poetry, and in prose. This project considers how Rich re-visited and re-read her work over the course of her career, often making new discoveries and observations in quasi-autobiographical prose. This dissertation interrogates the ways in which these framing efforts may be in tension with both academic and journalistic narratives of her career arc. In looking at Rich’s own writing that, at times, attempts to re-contextualizes her work, even for herself, this project aims to chart out an oeuvre that functions as a …

Rehabilitative Movement Approaches And Dance Interventions In Parkinson’S Disease, Cecilia Fontanesi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The scope of this work is to address the functional deficits and symptoms experienced by those living with Parkinson’s Disease through movement interventions.

Chapter 1 offers a brief overview of current pharmacotherapy and rehabilitation approaches in Parkinson’s, focusing on dance in particular as a movement intervention that may be particularly suited to this population.

Chapter 2 focuses on brain plasticity and motor learning in PD, reporting the effects of rTMS applied after the acquisition of a motor skill. In this study, adaptation tested in patients with PD was comparable in the sham and TMS sessions, while retention indices tested on …

Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival, 1962–1992, Christopher T. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Histories of “primitivism” in the avant-garde show that Euro-American modernism was always engaged in the appropriation of nonwestern and Indigenous art, with particular interest in Northwest Coast Native art forms by the Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Indian Space Painters. However, there has been little consideration for how Northwest Coast Native artists chose to engage with the styles and tenets of Western modern art. To date, the history of post-war Northwest Coast Native art has been dominated by what is known as the Renaissance, a narrative in which artists pursued a neo-traditional style in modern times through the recovered and revival …

Investigating The Neural Mechanisms Of Unconscious And Illusory Touch Perception, Lua Koenig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite our everyday reliance on touch, from manipulating tools to dressing ourselves, relatively little is known about the neural correlates of tactile perception. As with other modalities, our conscious, reportable experiences of touch can dissociate from the physical tactile stimulation processed by the skin. In unconscious touch perception, tactile stimuli can be processed and guide our behavior without an accompanying conscious percept. For example, we may swat away a mosquito without having consciously registered its presence on our skin. In tactile illusions, conscious tactile experiences occur without a corresponding tactile stimulus. Multisensory tactile illusions arise when stimulation of a different …

Visualizing Tedx Events: Ten Years Of “Ideas Worth Spreading”, Antonios Liamis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I have always been fascinated by how ideas are spread. Often, ideas are chosen to serve an immediate purpose, and there is an expectation that the choice will matter only insofar as it serves to achieve the desired goal. However, once an idea takes off, it becomes sufficient in itself to disseminate its message. When I first heard about the rubric “Ideas Worth Spreading” in connection with Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conferences, I had an emotional response because I was always trying to get involved in those three categories. My fascination with the question of what makes some ideas …

Dietary Development And Nutritional Ontogeny In Gorilla Beringei : A Multi-Layered, -Omics Approach, Emma C. Cancelliere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In species who consume folivorous diets, immature individuals must contend with the challenges of extracting nutrients from fibrous foods before dietary adaptations and strategies are fully developed. Additionally, immatures have distinct nutritional needs to support their stage-specific metabolic and biophysiological requirements. To meet these stage-specific needs, while constrained by underdeveloped feeding strategies and digestive capacities, immatures may adopt distinct diets better suited to their specific developmental context. However, where dietary modification is constrained by low dietary diversity or landscape homogeneity, it is unclear how immature individuals compensate through alternative strategies. In turn, little is known about the nutritional and life …

A Family Guide To Distance Learning, Center For Public Research And Leadership

Center for Public Research and Leadership

Your partnership with your school is critical during distance learning. When your child experiences most schooling at home rather than in a classroom, your family's relationship with the school changes. You may have a greater window into what and how your child is learning, and you are likely to take a role that you rarely or never play during in-person schooling. And, you're likely to perform your usual roles in new ways.

Your family is up to the task. This new school year provides an opportunity for you to forge a stronger partnership with your school – the kind that …

Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms Of Adverse Trauma Outcomes In Emerging Adulthood, Olena Kleshchova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Exposure to traumatic stress and adversity during the formative years of development can have adverse effects on mental health, neuroendocrine stress system function, and the brain, that persist into adulthood. One candidate mechanism that might confer vulnerability to enduring adverse outcomes of early life trauma is disruption of normal brain maturation. As the brain matures, functional interactions among brain regions change until the functional brain architecture (i.e., the functional connectome) reaches a mature state in adulthood. Given that different neural circuits have distinct developmental trajectories and sensitive periods, traumatic stress at a given point in development might have …

Affect, Behavior And (Dys)Regulation: Integrating Youth's Projective Tests And Self-Reports, Laurel Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Past and current research indicates that unconscious processes (e.g., outside the realm of conscious awareness) contribute to aspects of adaptation and development, such as emotion regulation, adaptability, interpersonal flexibility and overall identity formation. Further, unconscious processes including: Defense Mechanisms (DMs), Affect Maturity (AM) and Object Relations (OR), can be operationalized and scored using valid and reliable psychodynamic instruments (e.g., Rorschach Inkblot Method), with theoretical and empirical links to underlying emotion regulation processes. Currently however, emotional dysregulation and its sequelae (e.g.,depression and ADHD symptoms) are most often assessed based on one’s conscious awareness, using standardized self-report measures or structured clinical interviews. …

Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …

The Political Aesthetic Of Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Judgment, And Culture, Quixote R. Vassilakis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt’s critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt’s reconceptualization of Kant’s theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt’s poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a …

Tones In Shupamem Reduplication, Magdalena Markowska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents an analysis of reduplication in Shupamem, an Eastern Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. In this language nouns, verbs, and adjectives undergo full segmental reduplication. At the suprasegmental level, on the other hand, tones of the reduplicants are not entirely faithful to their bases. The tonal asymmetry of the reduplicted phrase also relies on the grammatical function of that phrase within a clause, as well as on the neighboring grammatical words, such as tense particles. This morphological process gives also an insight to an underlying tonal representations in Shupamem. Nominal reduplication, in particular, provides a proof of the …

Occitan Musicians, Immigration, And Postcolonial Regionalism In Southern France, Sarah E. Trouslard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in southern France, this dissertation analyzes contemporary Occitan musical expression in relation to postcolonial immigration. “Occitan” refers to a group of linguistic practices found in the south of France, including Provençal and Languedocien. Throughout this study, I discuss commonalities between postcolonial and regionalist history and theory, shedding light on notions of cultural citizenship that have defined French sociopolitics in recent decades. The historian Herman Lebovics (2004) coined the term “postcolonial regionalism” in reference to the impact of decolonization on regional protest movements in France during the 1970s. During that time, singer/songwriters of the nòva cançon …

Inspirations For Awake: Expressions Of Trauma Through Fiction And Autoethnographic Literature, Sophia Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Awake is a novella based on true events in my own life. This capstone project addresses my own experiences with intimate partner violence. While it is inspired by my life, I chose to write a fictional narrative rather than a strictly biographical piece of nonfiction. Instead, this novella illustrates a few of the traumas that I went through from within the lens of a fictional narrative. This enabled me to tell about my experiences by crafting my memories into a story, without the pressure of submitting an accounting of them. Writing Awake has been helpful to me in that it …

Misuse Of Social Behavior In Down Syndrome: Caregiver Conducted Functional Analysis, Sally M. Izquierdo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Young children with Down syndrome often engage in charming non-contextual social behaviors. The developmental literature suggests that non-contextual social behaviors may function to escape from difficult activities to preferred social interactions. Caregivers may reinforce the behavior, perceiving it as evidence of the child’s social strength, when in fact, the pattern of behavior may also contribute to missed learning opportunities and a developmental gap between children with Down syndrome and their typically developing peers. We investigated the pattern by subjecting it for the first time to functional analyses. We identified non-contextual social behavior, confirmed function(s) of escape to attention, and compared …

Ujamaa Policies And Women Gender Issues Of Land Tenure In Tanzania, Nasa S. Edgar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

History has shown us that women always have a part to play in society and that they have fought to receive equal opportunity with their male counterparts. In the United States in the late 1800s and early twentieth century, this movement by women became known as the women’s suffrage movement. It paved the way to women fighting for equal opportunity including for the right to vote and equal pay. In Tanzania, women fought and continue to fight against customary practices that are discriminatory against them. In this thesis I make three arguments: 1. I argue that the history of the …

Memory For Episodic Details Of Naturalistic Events Remains Stable Over The Course Of One Week, Kennedy E. Stomberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We have many experiences every day, and we tend to parse them into individual events. While many studies have been conducted to understand the nature of event segmentation, less is known how event memories change over time. In the present study, participants watched a movie clip, and then were asked to immediately retell what they had seen. They performed the same free recall task a week later. We found that the passage of time did not significantly affect the number of recalled events or the detailedness of event memories. We discuss potential explanations for our findings, including our small sample …

Searching For Pōhakuloa: A Citizen Scientist’S Journey In Aloha ‘Āina, Drake Logan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tells a story about the United States (US) military’s land occupation of two Indigenous Hawaiian wahi pana (sacred places), on O’ahu and Hawai’i Island, which have produced widespread health concerns regarding exposure to military toxins. I conducted six months of fieldwork in Hawai’i, in which I partnered with local communities in a Critical Participatory Action research process. Together, we formed and co-led a community-based science pilot study of contamination from Pōhakuloa Training Area, generating new citizen science methods capable of uncovering evidence on confirmed military toxics uses. These methods were developed in critical solidarity with international communities who …

The Characterization Of Hematopoiesis In Murine Fetal Bone Marrow, Trent Daniel Hall

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and their downstream progenitors are a heterogeneous population of cells that are indispensable for lifelong hematopoiesis and are often utilized in the clinic for the treatment of hematologic maladies via hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). Over several decades, it has been discovered that HSCs arise in the dorsal aorta of the developing embryo, migrate to the fetal liver (FL), and undergo a large expansion before reaching their final resting place in the bone marrow (BM). Many resources have been invested in understanding the roles of the different niches HSCs encounter along their journey. A greater understanding …

India’S Research Contribution In Physical Sciences During 2000-2019: A Bibliometric Study, Miteshkumar Pandya, J P Singh Joorel

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study provides an overview of the research productivity of scientists/researchers/faculty from across India, in terms of the number of research publications contributed in the Physical Science discipline. The study attempted to analyze bibliometric indicators of published research that have been indexed in Scopus database. There are 1116847 documents published during the period of twenty years i.e. 2000-2019. The study revealed that there is a consistent growth in number of documents published. It has been observed that there are 543728 documents published during 2015-2019 which is higher than the total publication during 2000-2014. The subject discipline, ‘Engineering’ has been emerged …

Effects Of Using Hemp Hearts As A Feed Additive In Broiler Chicks, Brian Parr, Cheyenne Hooks, Mallorie Snider, Huichang Chae, Tony Brannon

Journal of Agricultural Hemp Research

In this experiment, hemp hearts of differing percentages were fed to broiler chicks for 49 days. The experiment, which was initiated to identify the potential of hemp hearts as a feed source, consisted of four experimental groups and one control group. Each experimental group received a diet containing: 10%, 20%, 30% and 40% hemp hearts; the control group did not contain hemp hearts, but contained soybean meal. As a result, broilers fed a diet containing 20% hemp hearts gained the most weight, t(16) = 2.12, p < 0.05 and feed conversion was also the lowest t(18) = 2.10, p < 0.01. These results indicate the feed efficiency of broilers using 20% hemp hearts was the lowest numerically, but the most efficient qualitatively. The diets consisting of higher percentages of hemp hearts demonstrate a need for additional supplementation.

Oxygen Targets In The Intensive Care Unit During Mechanical Ventilation For Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome: A Rapid Review, Andrew F. Cumpstey, Alex H. Oldman, Andrew F. Smith, Daniel Martin, Michael P.W. Grocott

Peninsula Medical School

No abstract provided.

Tennessee Farm Bureau News - September 2020, Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation

Tennessee Farm Bureau News

No abstract provided.

Why Denominations Can Climb Hills: Rlds Conversions In Highland Tribal India And Midwestern America, 1964–2000, David Howlett

Religion: Faculty Publications

Based on oral history interviews and archival sources, this essay analyzes the religious affiliation between Sora villagers in the highlands of eastern India with Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) members in the American Midwest. The relationship between these distinct groups transposed a pattern of interactions between highlands and lowlands in upland Asia to a new globalized space in the late twentieth century. Conceiving of “conversion” as a broad analytic trope to discuss various individual, group, and organizational transformations, this essay argues that “converts” in the Sora highlands and American plains instrumentalized their relationships with the …

Structural Investigation Of Bacilliredoxins: Enzymes Involved In Bacillithiol Redox Metabolism, Colin Mchugh, Paul Cook

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

Bacillithiol is an important compound involved in intracellular redox homeostasis and fosfomycin resistance mechanisms of some Gram-positive bacterial pathogens. Cellular regeneration of active bacillithiol (BSH) from a disulfide (BSSB) or mixed disulfide state (BSS-Protein) involves the bacilliredoxin enzymes BrxA/B. An X-ray crystallographic structure of apo BrxA from Bacillus subtilis has been previously characterized, but no BrxB or BSSB-bound Brx structure currently exists. Here we present an X-ray crystallographic structure of BrxA from the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus with a bacillithiol disulfide (BSSB) bound in the active site. Elucidation of this structure will help researchers to understand how BSSB binds in bacilliredoxins, …