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Faculty Retirement Recognition Dinner 2021, Western Michigan University

Faculty Recognition

Faculty Retirement Recognition Dinner

May, 2021

Honored Guests:

• Haluk Aktan
• Donald Alexander
• Betsy M. Aller
• Mary L. Anderson
• Paula Andrasi
• Kailash M. Bafna
• Ila M. Baker
• Blair Balden
• Kent Baldner
• Jan Bedrosian
• Sharon Carlson
• Eva Copija
• David Curwen
• Mervyn Elliot
• P. Dan Fleming
• Yvonne Ford
• Sharon Garber
• Richard A. Gershon
• Susan Hoffmann
• Bradley Huitema
• Yvette D. Hyter
• Bharti Katbamna
• Alan E. Kehew
• William S. Kern
• Andrew Kline
• Mary D. Lagerwey
• Robert Landeros
• David S. Lemberg
• Daniel M. Litynski
• Mushtaq Luqmani
• D. Steven Mackey
• Niloufer Mackey
• Thomas C. Marks
• Joseph W. McKean
• Terrance Michmerhuizen
• Judy Moonert
• Michael S. Nassaney
• Susan Nelson …

Delphine Diallo: Artist Analysis Archive, Sophia Pallwein-Prettner

Global Contemporary Artist Analysis Archive

No abstract provided.

Different Indicators Of Adiposity And Fat Distribution And Cardiometabolic Risk Factors In Patients With Type 2 Diabetes, Li Ding, Yuxin Fan, Jing He, Ruodan Wang, Qing He, Jingqiu Cui, Zhongshu Ma, Fangqiu Zheng, Hua Gao, Chenlin Dai, Hongyan Wei, Jun Li, Yuming Cao, Gang Hu, Ming Liu

Population and Public Health Science Faculty Publications

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of adiposity and fat distribution on the odds of elevated cardiovascular risk factors among adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Methods: The present cross-sectional study included 2,427 adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Body fat was assessed by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry. Multivariate-adjusted logistic regression was used to estimate effects of adiposity parameters on elevated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c, ≥7.0%), hypertension (blood pressure ≥140/90 mmHg), and elevated low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (≥2.6 mmol/L). Results: The multivariable-adjusted odds ratio (OR) for elevated HbA1c was 0.82 (95% CI: 0.70-0.96) for each SD increase in leg fat …

The Student Experience In A Covid-19 World: An Ethnographic Inquiry Into The Experience Of Butler University Students During A Pandemic, Ben Christopher Martella

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

With the abrupt closing of colleges across the United States in the spring of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent reopening in the fall of 2020, students in higher education were among some of the most affected group of individuals. In this ethnographic study, data was collected and analyzed based on student experience with COVID-19 at Butler University. The study aims to answer the research questions: How are students at a small midwestern university experiencing COVID-19? What impact are the university’s mitigation efforts having on students? How do students understand and describe University public health measures? Participant observation, …

Ministry In Medicine: Patient Perceptions Of Healthcare Professionals Praying In The Workplace, Allison Carole Kinsinger

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In the United States healthcare system, many patients practice prayer which causes healthcare providers to navigate the boundaries of patient-practitioner relationship when considering offering to pray with their patients. Practitioners should have the freedom to offer prayer to their patients because of the healing and calming properties of prayer. This study examines how patients respond when practitioners offer to pray with them, whether patients consider religion when selecting a healthcare provider, and if prayer from a provider with a religious affiliation different from their own impacts the desire for patients to accept prayer.

“Idol”: Examining The Intersection Of Race, Gender, And Sexuality In Boybands, Grace Maynard

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In response to the socio-political climate of recent years, there has been a growing category of socially-engaged pop music. These works can be explicitly connected to their ideas about gender, race, and age. While boybands may not be perceived to create activist works of art, they do often have large public platforms with potential to reach out to a mass population of dedicated fans. They are given the power and privilege of a life in the limelight. As such, their messages may carry deeper meanings than at first glance. This thesis explores the impact of successful boybands by examining The …

Beyond Representation: Disney/Marvel's "Black Panther" As A Womanist Text, Daphne M. Watson

University Honors Program Senior Projects

Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther (Coogler, 2018) is touted as a cultural phenomenon for its predominately Black cast and crew and its portrayal of Blackness and Africa in progressive and noble ways. However, Black Panther’s demonstration of the tenets of Alice Walker’s Womanism bears deeper examination. The superhero movie Black Panther is relevant culturally and scholarly, not only because it broke domestic and international box office records, nor because a predominately Black cast and crew led these achievements, but because these firsts are achieved through a film driven by strong themes of Womanism.

Flexible Lives On Engineering's 'Bleeding Edge' : Gender, Migration And Belonging In The Semiconductor Industry, Sarah E. Appelhans

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation explores gender, flexibilization, and belonging within professional high tech employment, particularly amongst women and migrant engineers. Prior studies of women in the “integrated circuit” focused on low-skilled factory labor (Nakamura 2014, Grossman 1980); however, women are increasingly choosing careers in the male-dominated engineering workforce, which designs and manufactures semiconductor technology. Fieldwork for this dissertation took place between May 2018 – Aug 2019 in the Northeastern US, a regional hub for semiconductor manufacturing companies. Thirty-eight life history interviews were conducted with participants from several companies in the area, along with frequent follow ups and participant observation with seventeen engineering …

Against Empathy Bias : The Moral Value Of Equitable Empathy, Zoe Fowler

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Empathy has long been considered central in living a moral life. However, mounting evidence has shown that empathy is often biased towards (i.e., felt more strongly for) close and similar others, igniting a debate over whether empathy is inherently morally flawed and should be abandoned in efforts to strive towards greater equity. This debate has focused on whether empathy limits the scope of our morality, with little consideration of whether it may be our moral beliefs limiting our empathy. Across two studies conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N= 604), we investigate moral judgments of biased and equitable feelings of empathy. …

The Materiality Of Metaphor In Mayan Hieroglyphic Texts : Metaphor In Changing Political Climates, Rebecca Ann Dinkel

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Recent research on the discursive and rhetorical forms of Mayan hieroglyphic texts has demonstrated how language and writing were used to frame, not just represent, Pre-Columbian Mayan history. Research on the role of metaphor in this framing has only just begun, and despite the well-known multimodal character of Mayan hieroglyphic texts, research on the role of metaphors in pictorial images has been even more limited. Previous research has not fully documented metaphor variation, particularly as it materializes across different modalities, media, places, and times. Doing so will allow for more subtle and elaborate interpretations of metaphor use and meaning in …

Intergenerational Embodiment Of Stress : How The Broader Sociocultural Environment Can Shape Child Growth And Development, Elizabeth A. Holdsworth

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Childhood growth has been a means of identifying systemic, material inequalities within populations. The plasticity of growth is responsive to multiple environmental factors, most notably adequate nutrition, but also psychosocial stress. Psychosocial stress can be a function of the social and political economic ecology, reinforcing power hierarchies within societies. This dissertation proposes that childhood growth can also reflect inequality in the distribution of psychosocial stress exposure through mothers’ feelings of a chronically stressful environment conveyed through maternal-infant interactions.

Journeying To A Third Space Of Sovereignty: Explorations Of Land, Cultural Hybridity, And Sovereignty In Ceremony And There There, Jillian Eve Sanchez

English (MA) Theses

In Native American literature, there is a discourse that solely focuses on the relationship between Indigenous people and the land. This relationship is vital to understanding the traditions, rituals, storytelling, and practices of Native Americans. The presence of settler colonialism changes the relationship, effectively changing the nature of cultural and spiritual relationships as well. Indigenous literature provides examples of the modern relationship Native people have with their land; an example of this is Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Tommy Orange’s There There Despite modernity, assimilation, and ways of life introduced by settler colonialism, Native people maintain a relationship to the …

Christ Ke Ha’I Mo’Olelo: Race, Christology And Pacific Islander Storytelling, Lauren (Kalani) Padilla

Theology Projects & Theses

Christianity’s unique contribution to racial justice discourse is its Christocentric interpretation of what it means to be human. And yet, one impulse of contemporary, justice-oriented Christian scholarship is to mimic secular critical race theory — lapsing into racial taxonomy and binary even to describe Christian ethnicity. This thesis takes J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account and Brian Bantum’s Redeeming Mulatto as contemporary examples of how this method plays out in Christological claims. In addition, critical race theology tends to focalize the transatlantic narrative of racialization that surfaces in the legal, sociopolitical sphere. The limits of this discourse are made …

The Reagan Administration And The Aids Epidemic: The Relationship Between Rhetoric And Marginalization, Leah Pimm

Honors Theses

The use of rhetoric can be a powerful tool to persuade individuals. Politicians are no stranger to using this tool and often employ it when speaking to their constituents. One politician who utilized his own forms of rhetoric is former President Ronald Reagan. Reagan used rhetoric to discuss major issues with the American public, including the AIDS epidemic. This thesis analyzes Reagan and his administration’s use of rhetoric regarding the AIDS epidemic in order to answer the research question: How did the Reagan administration’s use of rhetoric further marginalize the risk groups associated with the AIDS epidemic? Although previous literature …

Unraveling The Mummy: The Effects Of Natural Mummification On The Recovery And Degradation Of Dna, Marissa Gandolfo-Muller

Honors Theses

As demonstrated through casework and research studies (Hawass et al., 2010; Gielda & Rigg, 2017), anthropogenic mummification and modern-day embalming can expedite degradation of DNA. Current research in the field of forensic mummification is sparse and little research has been done on quantifying naturally mummified DNA (Leccia et al., 2018; Shved et al., 2014). This research focuses on observing and quantifying the differences in the recovery and degradation of DNA from specimens that have been naturally mummified. This research on natural, forensic mummies is a blend of experimental archeology and postmortem DNA analysis.

In this study, two control specimens and …

Bears Ears National Monument: An Integration Of Social And Environmental Justice, Helen Greene

Honors Theses

In 2015, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition of the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni Tribes submitted a proposal to President Barack Obama for the creation of Bears Ears National Monument. In 2016, using the power given to the president in the Antiquities Act, President Obama issued a presidential proclamation establishing the monument. But in 2017, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation that significantly reduced the acreage of the monument. Bears Ears is located in the southeast corner of Utah, and is a remote and geographically unique area of land that holds historical, cultural, and …

Engaged Pedagogy And Teacher Discourse: A Critical Examination Of Public Education In Mississippi, Kelsi Ford

Honors Theses

This thesis explores Mississippi K-12 public education in terms of inequality and critical pedagogy with a focus on historical factors, state testing, and personal accounts of current teachers. The research is based on ten in-depth interviews with current schoolteachers regarding their perspectives on education and personal experiences and draws from previous scholarship, notably bell hook’s concept of engaged pedagogy. Critical pedagogy offers a model for transformative education for resisting social inequity and promoting democracy and citizenship, but teacher interviews suggest that the structure and culture of classrooms are contradictory to adopting critical pedagogy. Specifically, the research finds that both standardized …

Emotional Intelligence As A Moderator Of The Relationship Between Psychopathic Personality Traits And Relational Aggression, Aria T. Smith

Honors Theses

Psychopathy is a robust predictor of aggressive behavior and psychopathic personality traits have been shown to predict relational aggression in non-clinical samples of college students. Given the manner in which emotional intelligence appears to be useful in navigating complex social interactions, some have suggested that it may be involved in certain forms of deceitful or manipulative behavior, including those that may be part of relational aggression. The current project evaluated the role of psychopathic personality traits and emotional intelligence in the prediction of relational aggression among college students. In addition to examining the direct relationship of these variables to relational …

The Tangled Roots Of The Holocaust: An Analysis Of The Evolution Of Colonial Discourse Through The Prohibition Of Sexual Relations And Marriages Between Races, Bianka Adamatti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Nazi violence did not have its origins only in the brutality of the First World War or radical nationalist ideologies, but also in European colonialism. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that colonial processes were fundamental to the origins of the Holocaust. To prove this, I applied the content analysis to detect colonial discourse (stereotype, ambivalence, and mimicry) in three legislations from different contexts, which prohibited sexual relations and marriages between races. The documents analyzed exemplified the segregationist thinking of each period of colonization. Portuguese laws from the beginning of modernity demonstrate the transition from religious …

Teacher Perception Concerning The Role Of Elementary Principals In School Culture And Climate, Robyn Murray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A phenomenological research study was conducted to examine teacher perceptions of elementary principals’ behaviors affecting school culture and climate. The researcher gathered data from participant interviews. Participants were selected using purposeful sampling of teachers identified by their principals as meeting study criteria. The schools in which teachers were selected were also chosen using purposeful sampling based on superintendents’ perceptions of positive principal influence on school culture and climate.

Data analysis provided insight to the researcher into the phenomenon being explored in this study. Teachers were asked to participate in an individual interview with the researcher and provide answers to open …

A Scapegoat Theory Of Bivens, Katherine M. Crocker

Notre Dame Law Review

Some scapegoats are innocent. Some warrant blame, but not the amount they are made to bear. Either way, scapegoating can allow in-groups to sidestep social problems by casting blame onto out-groups instead of confronting such problems—and the in-groups’ complicity in perpetuating them—directly.

This Essay suggests that it may be productive to view the Bivens regime’s rise as countering various exercises in scapegoating and its retrenchment as constituting an exercise in scapegoating. The earlier cases can be seen as responding to social structures that have scapegoated racial, economic, and other groups through overaggressive policing, mass incarceration, and inequitable government conduct more …

Understanding First-Generation Latinx Students' Experiences In A Predominantly White Private Institution: A Grounded Theory Study, Jacqueline Aparicio

Education (PhD) Dissertations

Latinx student enrollment in higher education institutions has increased over the years. Despite their increased number of enrollments, there is also an increase of Latinx first-generation students dropping out of higher education. Not only are they not earning a degree, but they are leaving these institutions with debt. This is a concern because students dropping out affects the institution's overall graduation rates. This qualitative study examined factors that contributed to ten first-generation Latinx students’ persistence and success at a predominantly White, private institution. The study used grounded theory methodology and methods to develop an initial exploratory theory. The dissertation study …

Exploring Downstream Effects Of Racial Trauma Leading To Ptsd: A Review Of Systemic Physiological And Neurobehavioral Alterations, Alexis Verwoert

PCOM Capstone Projects

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating psychiatric disease that often follows acute or chronic exposure to extreme stress. Hallmarks of this disorder include stressors, intrusion symptoms, avoidance, negative alterations in cognition and mood, and alterations in arousal and reactivity (Bovin, 2015). Since it was first defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III (DSM-III), the diagnostic criteria for PTSD have evolved to encompass stressors as they may occur repeatedly across the lifespan (Bovin, 2015). Physiological and behavioral consequences of this extreme stress manifest themselves as systemic alterations in form and function. As is true of many diagnosable …

Intimate Distortions, Katherine Van Drie

All Theses

Intimate Distortions look beyond the stereotypes of nature and conditioned social prescription to reflect upon the complexities and nuances of our contemporary society. As we endeavor to overcome trauma and the negative influences that knock us off balance, Intimate Distortions exist in a complex place between nature and culture – a place of hybridity that indicates something evolved and ‘natural’, but also to the historical, social and cultural constructs that humans continue to exist within. This work explores how we, who are part of the natural world, contrive to mold our identities and present ourselves to others in superficial and …

Colonial South Carolina Cowpens And Savannas: Analyzing The Distribution Of Colonial Cattle Grazing Sites Using Gis And Predictive Modeling, John Benjamen Thomas

All Theses

Some of colonial Charleston’s most significant landscapes are rural savannas. While it is often overlooked, the colonial cattle industry centered in South Carolina’s Lowcountry savannas played a large role in the early economy. Ultimately, the cattle trade provided many of the resources that made Charleston one of the wealthiest cities in colonial America. Today, the preservation of the physical landscapes associated with the cattle industry is more important than ever as issues like climate change and urban growth and development threaten to destroy these historic landscapes.

The purpose of this thesis is to test the applicability of modeling techniques as …

Crossroads Of Development: Considering Gullah Geechee Communities As Traditional Cultural Properties, Darcy Elizabeth Neufeld

All Theses

Though Gullah Geechee heritage has been recognized by the National Park Service as traditional cultural property (TCP), no known Gullah Geechee property on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is listed as a TCP. TCPs are properties eligible for NRHP inclusion that are associated with the history and continuation of a traditional culture. This thesis aims to bridge that disconnect by exploring how Gullah Geechee communities could be considered as TCPs through the context of two case studies. The Gullah Geechee culture may be briefly defined as a distinct African American culture descended from Africans enslaved on plantations along …

University Of Minnesota, Morris 2021 Commencement, Communications And Marketing

UMM Commencement

The University of Minnesota, Morris's Fifty-Eighth Commencement Saturday, May 15, 2021.

Examining High Status Via Resource Control Strategies, Emotional Intelligence, And Empathy, Rebekkah Ann Wall

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The innate drive for human belongingness in cooperative societies is coupled with strategies they use to gain resources. Individuals in high social status use specific strategies to gain their status. Emotional intelligence and empathy are also factors that enable status acquisition as they facilitate connectedness and the ability to relate to others, which can be important for the development of humans as social beings. High status, or popularity among peers, is usually examined via peer-reports of sociometric and perceived popularity, however, they may be evaluated via likability or social dominance respectively due to shared characteristics. This study examined self-reported social …

Geospatial Analysis Of Registered Sex Offenders: A Case Study From Pulaski County, Arkansas, Maggie Rose Bridges

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this case study was to analyze the spatial distribution patterns of the residences of registered sex offenders in Pulaski County, Arkansas to determine the impact of state enforced residence restrictions. Density and clustering factors were used to identify census tracts of the study area with high and low concentrations of offenders. These zones were then compared to identify which characteristics were similar and dissimilar between high and low concentration zones. The results indicate that there is a non-random distribution of registered sex offenders in the study area. The findings also indicate that the residence restrictions placed on …

Ephemeral Existence: Tracing Early Twentieth Century Tattoos And Perceptions Of Identity Within The New Orleans Police Department Mugshot Collection, Kaylie M. Mccarthy

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

People have long used tattoos as markers of identification. However, there remain limited scholarly studies on the history of tattoos within the city of New Orleans. This thesis argues that through analysis of the tattoos recorded in the New Orleans Police Department Mugshot Collection, it is possible to situate the early twentieth century arrested population within a greater societal context, allowing for the intimate details of individual lives and personal stories to come to the forefront. Through the synthesis of demographic data from the 152 mugshots that pertain to tattooed arrestees, and three case studies on arrestees with patriotic, nautical, …