Digital Commons Network^™

Storefront: Local Businesses Acting Locally In Two Chicago Neighborhoods, Steven Tuttle

Dissertations

Local businesses occupy an important role in society and the American imagination. Entrepreneurialism is valorized and €œmain street€ is often used as a populist shorthand in discussions of €œregular Americans.€ While sociologists and the lay public often identify the opening of new, higher-end businesses as an indication of impending gentrification, few sociological studies examine commercial gentrification or call into question relationships between local businesses and urban communities. This is a study of the roles and experiences of local businesses in two gentrifying neighborhoods in Chicago. Drawing upon ethnographic observation and qualitative interviews, I examine the role of local businesses in …

Movement On The Margins: Exploring The Leadership And Agency Of Women Of Color Student Activists In Predominantly White Higher Education Institutions, Cobretti Williams

Dissertations

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to learn more about the experience of student activism through the eyes, ears, and narratives of women of color in predominantly White higher education institutions. Using an adapted theoretical framework of critical feminist agency, I conducted interviews and focus groups with women of color whom represent the past, present, and future of student activist experiences on campus. Their stories and knowledge affirmed the historical significance of student activism in higher education, and more notably, provided additional critical perspectives towards the development and re-imagination of leadership, agency, and institutional structures in colleges and universities. …

Shaping Beauty, Claiming Authenticity: Gender, Work, And Immigration Experiences Of Low-Wage South Asian Immigrant Women Workers, Soulit Chacko

Dissertations

Based on in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews and participant observations in immigrant women run beauty salon, this dissertation illuminates the lived experiences of low-wage, majority Muslim, immigrant women from Pakistan and India. The study brings attention to the experiences of low-wage work and answers three central questions: (a) How is race, class, and gender reproduced within the ethnic beauty salon?; (b) How do immigrant women working in the ethnic beauty salon self-identify themselves through the work they do?; and finally (c) How does the beliefs, ideas, and practices within the beauty salon space shape how women present themselves as immigrants and …

Changing Concepts Of Merit In China's Education System: An Oral Historical Research Of Teachers In Key Schools, Yao Chen

Dissertations

This study examines teachers' views of meritocracy and how their conceptions and views influence their everyday practices in schools with regard to producing, recognizing, and awarding individual merit in China's key schools. This study uses a qualitative methodology, especially oral history interviews. It shows that the meaning of merit has changed over time, depending on cultural and institutional contexts during China's transition from Mao's age to the present. Thirteen teachers, who have been working in the education system of China since the early 1980s, and who have worked as teachers in China's key (magnet/elite) schools (including higher education institutions), were …

Factors Associated With Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy And Quality Of Life Among Type 2 Diabetes Patients In Saudi Arabia, Awatef Ibraheem

Dissertations

Evidence has suggested that diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) is associated with decreased quality of life (QoL) and impaired physical and emotional health. About 82% of the diabetic population in Saudi Arabia show signs of DPN. However, it is under-recognized and undertreated. Further, DPN is linked to several clinical and metabolic risk factors. However, there is minimal evidence from Saudi Arabia on the impact of DPN on the individual's QoL. The aims of this current study were to (1) examine the impact of DPN symptoms on functioning, health perception, and QoL and (2) explore the biologic and individual factors associated with …

Climate Change And Global Security, Nathan Jones, John P. Sullivan

Journal of Strategic Security

No abstract provided.

Your Goals And You - Don’T Let Your Goals Get (To) You …. Before You Can Get To Them!, Shweta Singh

Social Work: School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Other Works

What is the one thing you can count on as far as goals are concerned? Not one thing but many things and secondly- your goals are similar to goals of many people around the world, who (interestingly enough) have really nothing in common with you. And finally- that is because how we decide our goals, has very little to do with what is inside us and more about the surrounding influences.

Just lean back and think about how much you are taught and selectively exposed to - by way of opinions, ideas, thoughts about what an ideal life is? Who …

The Struggles And Triumphs Of The Invisible Subject: The Experiences Of Mature Women Students Caring For Those With Learning Disabilities Whilst Studying In Higher Education, Kitty King

Plymouth Institute of Education Theses

The caring role entails substantial social, physical, emotional and financial costs, especially for women with caring responsibilities, which presents challenges and restrictions for them when participating in activities outside the care-giving domain, such as engagement in education. Against these odds and despite the considerable demand caring places upon carers, a limited number of mature women caring for those with learning disabilities are navigating access to and participation in Higher Education. Considering the effort that this group of women expend attempting to combine multiple identities, and compared to the considerable research in Higher Education about the experiences of other groups of …

Understanding The Fate Of Active Pharmaceutical Compounds In Waters Receiving Poorly Or Untreated Wastewater For The Development Of A Dedicated Environmental Risk Assessment Approach, Simone Bagnis

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Theses

The global increasing consumption and production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) is of a growing environmental concern. The inherently biological activity of APIs creates a concern of potential ecotoxicological effects even at very low concentrations. Such risk is particularly exacerbated in low and low-middle income countries (LLMICs) where it is common the practice of direct discharge of untreated wastewater (DDUW) into surface waters, which creates a heavily polluted area downstream, described as the “impact zone”. Little is known about the environmental fate of APIs in this area. Nevertheless, measured environmental concentrations (MECs) of LLMICs show higher concentrations than for high-income …

Do Not Adopt A Double Negative: An International Comparison Of The Corporate Opportunities Doctrine, Patrick Prestidge

Plymouth Law Review

No abstract provided.

South Asian Americans’ Identity Journeys To Becoming Critically Conscious Educators, Radhika Khandelwal

LMU Theses and Dissertations

Typical identity stereotypes for South Asian Americans, such as the model minority myth, do not convincingly support a trajectory into K–12 education, as South Asian Americans are not readily seen as agents for social change. This qualitative study explored how South Asian American educators’ understanding of their ethnic and racial identity interplayed with their practice as critically conscious educators for social justice. Eleven participants who self-identified as social-justice-oriented were interviewed to share their experiences as South Asian American educators. Their responses revealed South Asian American educators develop their ethnic identity consciousness in complex ways, demonstrating self-awareness and subsequently draw upon …

Straight From The Source: Black College Presidents Tell Their Stories, Steven Purcell

LMU Theses and Dissertations

Students on college and university campuses across the United States are becoming more racially diverse. However, leadership on college campuses is not trending toward more diversity, particularly in higher administrative posts such as the presidency. To better understand this stagnate trend of college president diversity, this critical narrative study examined the lived experiences and insights of six current or former college presidents who identify as Black. The participants in this study are a unique cohort of individuals who have served as presidents/chancellors at institutions where Black students are not the majority ethnic/racial group on campus.

More specifically, this study sought …

A Case Study Of Equity And Student Experience In A California Community College, Agyeman Siriboe Boateng

LMU Theses and Dissertations

In California community colleges, students of color reach educational milestones and culminating outcomes disproportionately less often than their peers. In the past decade, the state has committed renewed energy to refining student equity plan regulations requiring individual colleges to identify and develop strategies to close such gaps. This dissertation sought to focus on the intended beneficiaries of these efforts, asking how students themselves define and experience equity. Using semistructured, narrative interviews to explore the experiences of nine students of color at a California community college, this qualitative case was supported by institutional documents, participant observation, and interviews with college personnel. …

Improving Governance Of Maritime Higher Education Institutions To Ensure Success Of Filipino Cadets, Cleto Del Rosario,, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Momoko Kitada, Johan Bolmsten

Articles

No abstract provided.

Hot Food Takeaways Around Schools: Can Fast Food Be Healthier?, Claire Louise Turbutt

Other Faculty of Health Theses

Obesity is the greatest global health challenge facing this generation; over half of the adult population are overweight or obese. Calls for food environment interventions include recommendations for restriction or banning of new fast food retailers (FFRs). The Takeaway Toolkit was published by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and aimed to alter consumption of unhealthy takeaway food through reformulation and behavioural insights. A systematic review assessing evidence on FFRs in the environment around schools in the United Kingdom (UK) was completed and published. This revealed a research gap around food environment interventions. A study was designed to investigate “the …

Prison Space, Social Control And Relationships In A Post-Soviet Women’S Prison, Arta Jalili Idrissi

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

This thesis attempts to capture, at the macro, meso and micro levels, the ideological rupture, which has emerged after the breakdown of the Soviet project in Latvia, and in particular its effect on penality and women’s imprisonment. This rupture has been conceptualized as a ‘clash of the titans’, which is the ongoing struggle between a Soviet legacy that refuses to die and an increasingly dominant neoliberal regime. While the breakdown of Soviet hegemonic power signaled a victory for democracy and market economics, the spread of western liberal democracies has been a challenge for post-Soviet societies. While democratic traditions took centuries …

Poor Copy: Fan Practices And Producerly Art Making, Beth Emily Richards

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

This thesis includes a body of artworks including performance, video, photography and audio installation, a zine, and textile artwork, documentation of which is presented via a YouTube channel, also titled Poor Copy. This research explores methodological similarities between fan and art practices, and analyses how fans, artists, and their methods of making engage with extant narratives. Two histories act as a narrative throughline for this investigation: a 1999 Michael Jackson concert in Barnstaple, North Devon, where the performer may or may not have been a tribute artist; and a day in 2002 when Michael Jackson visited Exeter City Football Club, …

Trace And History: An Investigation Of Kurdish Banner-Making Through Contemporary Art Practice., Rostam Hakeem

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

Abstract Author: Rostam Abdulazeez Hakeem Title: Trace and history: an investigation of Kurdish banner-making through contemporary art practice. This practice-led research project considers the culture of banner-making in Iraqi Kurdistan. The research is trans-disciplinary in character, combining artistic, historical, and sociological research. The calligraphers’ workshops of the city of Sulaymaniyah in Kurdish Iraq are a focal point. Here the backing-boards to banner-making have absorbed traces of slogans written on banners for many different purposes over extended periods of time. The permitted appropriation of these backing-board palimpsests provides material for the development of an innovative genre of abstract painting, deploying calligraphy …

Digital Porosity And Its Impact On The Mediation Of Networked Images, Claudia Pilsl

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

This doctoral research examines digital porosity and how this effect of the Internet influences the mediation of networked images. This practice research is informed by the hypothesis that digital porosity affects the communication of data with it the perception of context and chronological order of events. Digital porosity, intended as a loose analogy to the kind of porosity depicted by Benjamin and Lacis (1925) in their description of everyday life in ‘Naples’, is a neologism that I devised to describe one of the consequences of the Internet since web 2.0. As the area afflicted by digital porosity is potentially large, …

An Exploration Of Religious Practice As A Valued Occupation, Patricia Eyres

Other Faculty of Health Theses

Background: Religion touches our everyday lives. Some have a deeply held faith while others engage infrequently in rites of passage such as marriage or funerals, but religion is a common worldwide phenomenon. Globally, millions of people engage in religious practice or religious ‘doing’ daily, but occupational science has not explored this common occupation widely, and occupational therapists continue to struggle to consider religious practice within the occupational needs of their clients. Within increasingly multi-cultural and multi-faith communities, it is imperative that the occupation of religious practice is better understood and considered within practice. Method: An auto/biographical overarching research orientation is …

The Festival In The Meta-System Of Culture, Nadezhda Krasteva

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

Crossing the borders of various disciplines – anthropology, cultural studies, cultural theory, sociology of culture, sociology of art, art history, art criticism, events management and tourism – festival studies are slowly attracting academic attention in their search for independent status among the social sciences. Culture, defined by Juri Lotman as a self-descriptive mechanism, is the structure from which perspective I approach the contemporary artistic festival in an attempt to determine its position as an element in the meta-system of culture. The semantic notion of culture proposed by the scholar refers to a dynamic system of signs organising and preserving information …

Social Work Students Managing Emotions: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Utilising Poetry And Prose As An Autoethnographic Turn, Beth Moran

Plymouth Institute of Education Theses

This thesis reports on research exploring how student social workers experience, express and manage the emotional content of practice learning in a relational context. It considers how social/supervisory support promotes emotional management for student social workers. Student respondents reflect on a variety of placement experiences ranging from a third-sector advice centre; a service supporting people who are homeless; local authority child protection services; a hospital discharge team and statutory adult mental health teams. Their responses reveal organisational interventions with a wide range of people from children and families to adults engaging with health and social care services. New knowledge is …

The Effect Of Imagined Intergroup Contact On Heterosexism, Laurel Mertz

Master's Theses

Heterosexism and other forms of prejudice against the LGBTQ community remain prevalent across the world. Thus, the study of how to reduce heterosexism has become a much more common and necessary domain of research in recent years. Previous research has demonstrated mixed results of the effect of imagined intergroup contact on heterosexism. the current study sought to evaluate various contexts in which imagined intergroup contact would decrease or increase levels of both implicit and explicit heterosexist attitudes. I predicted that individuals who imagined winning a basketball game with a gay teammate would display more positive attitudes toward gay men whereas …

The Creation And Evolution Of Introductory Courses In Women's Studies Programs, Tori Kay Olson

Master's Theses

This study seeks to understand what affects knowledge production in introductory women's studies courses. Using critical discourse analysis, the study looks at the archives of two very different programs within the Chicago area. the two programs studied, Loyola University Chicago and University of Illinois€”Chicago, offer two different examples of how women's studies programs were created and evolved, and how this influenced the knowledge production in their introductory courses. in addition to the archival materials of these two universities, this study relies on various reports and accounts written by women's studies scholars during the same timeframe as the documented archival material …

Educational Debt: Educational Loans And The Family, Keyla Navarrete

Master's Theses

Student debt is a well-documented topic in sociological literature. It is well known that there is a student loan crisis in the United States. However, kinship or familial ties in educational debt is not as studied as individual student loans. The student debt crisis seems to reach a new catastrophic level as years pass. Yet, not much research exists that looks at external sources of financing for students such as parents, grandparents, or other familial ties. This study contributes to the literature of student debt by analyzing debt patterns across those that take out loans for themselves, their spouse, or …

When “Best I Can” Is Not Enough: Welfare Managers’ Appraisal Of Clients’ Mothering Practices, Brianna Turgeon

Research, Publications & Creative Work

The “mommy wars” are a cultural narrative of conflict between mothers that amplifies the scrutiny placed on mothering practices. While mothers at all social locations face criticisms for their choices surrounding parenting, mothers in poverty lack the resources to enact many socially mandated parenting practices and contend with additional scrutiny through participation in programs like welfare-to-work. In this project, I examine the parenting expectations mothers on welfare must navigate. I use 69 semi-structured interviews with welfare-to-work program managers in Ohio from 2010-2011 to examine which mothering ideologies they encourage and discourage clients to adopt. I find that managers are highly …

Semi-Structured Interviews: A Team-Based Approach To Design, Implementation, And Analysis, Rachel Wishkoski

Library Faculty & Staff Publications

This chapter explores semi-structured interviewing as a research method in the context of a study investigating the impact of a library workshop on faculty teaching practices. In addition to covering interview guide design, strategies for conducting interviews, and qualitative coding, the chapter shares lessons learned by a novice practitioner-researcher and suggestions for team-based qualitative research.

The Continuation Of Violence: Analyzing The Retraumatization Of Incarcerated Survivors Of Domestic Violence And Evaluating The Potential Of A “Trauma-Informed” Prison Model, Eliana Kahn

Senior Independent Study Theses

The United States criminal justice system emphasizes punishment, in the form of incarceration, over the rehabilitation of individuals convicted of criminal activity. While confinement is harmful to many inmates, incarcerated women are even more vulnerable to the extent that they are disproportionately survivors of domestic violence and abuse. Given this vulnerability, the primary purpose of this study is to explore the impact of incarceration on survivors of domestic violence and abuse. I aim first to analyze the ways in which punitive institutions replicate dynamics of abuse, often retraumatizing female survivors of domestic violence. I then evaluate the policies and procedures …

Contested Commemoration: The Relationship Between Politics And The Memorialization Of The Second World War In Polish Literature, Cinema, And Museums (1945-Present), Alexandria Joyner

Senior Independent Study Theses

This study examines the relationship between politics and the memory of the Second World War in Polish literature, cinema, and museums from 1945-Present. I argue that the memory of the Second World War has changed radically over the last seventy- five years as the Polish government, in both the communist and post-communist periods, pursued a politics of memory. I build this argument first by identifying three political turning points that caused the communist government to confront and reevaluate the narrative they promoted about the war: 1945, 1956, and 1967. I include a fourth turning point, 1989, to show how post-communist …

Pedagogía Política: Un Análisis De La Enseñanza De La Dictadura De Pinochet Y Los Derechos Humanos En Chile, Emily Elizabeth Xiubei Beuter

Senior Independent Study Theses

As Chileans continue to struggle with reconciling with their past in post-dictatorial Chile, this same struggle plays out in the classroom with the teaching of the dictatorship and human rights. While there is a vast corpus on memory historiography and pedagogy literature, researchers have overlooked the role of teaching in memory formation and the perspectives of those actively forming student memory. This study analyzes how various spheres of education on the dictatorship and human rights reflect larger societal tensions and are themselves spheres of contested memory. Further, I argue for complexity as there are numerous educational spheres who are in …