Digital Commons Network^™

"I Just Had To Do Most Everything": Gender, Settlement And American Empire In The Far West, Hannah Alexandra Reynolds

Dissertations and Theses

The field of settler colonial studies has made huge strides in recent years toward problematizing the establishment of the United States on stolen land and the nation's steady, violent expansion across the continent. Settler colonial framework provides a rich opportunity for historians of the American West to reframe white settlement on the frontier, especially that which was made possible through land grant legislation such as the Homestead Act of 1862. As the families who took up land grant property sought new opportunities for themselves, they also acted as drivers of U.S. territorial acquisition. This process was inherently gendered, in terms …

Political Partisanship And Sincere Religious Conviction, Mark Satta

BYU Law Review

In order for a religious conviction to receive protection under the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it must be a sincere religious conviction. Some critics of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby have suggested that the plaintiffs in that case and in related cases were motivated more by political ideology than by sincere religious conviction. The remedy, they argue, is for courts to be quicker to scrutinize claims of religious sincerity. In this Article, I consider another possibility—namely, that current sociopolitical partisanship in the United States has eroded a clear distinction between political …

Covid-19 And Transition To Distance Learning: Perspectives Of Postsecondary Teachers In Kenya, James Ogechi Kereri, Grace Moraa Kennedy, Dovison Kereri

Faculty Publications

Several countries have transitioned to online and/or virtual learning to minimize the impact of Covid-19 on education. In Kenya, schools were closed for the better part of 2020 and reopened back on relying on an online mode and/or virtual learning. However, very little is known about the impact of such transition on postsecondary educators. Therefore, this research aims to bridge this gap by investigating the impact of online and/or virtual learning transition on postsecondary educators based on age, gender, location, and academic rank. Using a nationally distributed web-based survey, the study utilized data from 117 educators across Kenya who participated …

Everything To Lose: Extraction, Racism, And Survival On Wet'suwet'en Land, Anne Spice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work critically analyzes the role of extractive industry in the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and occupation of Indigenous lands, and examines how Indigenous resistance to oil and gas projects augments the damaging effects of fossil fuel extraction and create alternative possibilities for life in the face of catastrophic environmental crises. In Wet’suwet’en territory, in Northern British Columbia, Canada, construction has begun on the fracked gas Coastal GasLink pipeline, despite the opposition of local Indigenous leaders and chiefs. Several Indigenous land reoccupation camps have been set up by Wet’suwet’en people to resist the pipeline’s construction, and the resulting conflict …

Sunbelt Schooling: Publics And Politics Of Education Advocacy In Phoenix, Arizona, Matthew Chrisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past forty years, public education in the United States has been the target of both neoliberal and conservative education reforms that have imposed austerity and privatization, set limits on racial, gendered, and sexual citizenship, increased school responsibility for social reproduction, and winnowed visions of public education as both a universal social entitlement and site of participatory democracy. These reforms emerged from, and remain powerfully anchored in, the United States Sunbelt, a crescent of metropolitan suburbs spanning southern California to Florida. This region propelled the conservative revolution in American politics but is also the site of progressive organizing that, …

Falling Forward: The Governance Of School Reform, Race, And The Contest For A Dignified Future In Newark, N.J., Claire Cahen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the Great Recession, a two-pronged policy agenda of charter school creation and public school austerity was implemented in many impoverished, multiracial urban school districts in the U.S. The reforms have yet to meet durably effective resistance. The three articles that comprise this dissertation address questions about how school reforms, austerity, and privatization have been made governable, specifically in relation to the: preservation of local Black political machine power, creation of a labor market for charter school teachers, ongoing contestation attempts by public educators in inert unions. These questions correspond to theoretical debates about contemporary forms of racism and the …

The Beehive, The Favela, The Castle, And The Ministry: Race And Modern Architecture In Rio De Janeiro, 1811–1945, Luisa Valle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deploys a multidisciplinary and decolonial framework to investigate the architecture of cortiços, the Favela Hill, the Castelo Hill, and the Ministry of Education and Public Health (MES) building as constitutive of the history of modernization and modernity in the Centro (city center) of Rio de Janeiro, 1811-1945. The first three chapters investigate the distinct geographies, formal and material qualities, and populations of cortiços, the Favela Hill, and the Castelo Hill, as well as their racialization and essentialization by the “unsanitary” and “degenerate” labels bestowed upon these landscapes by the state. Traditional narratives and practices of modern architecture and …

Nunc Pauperis Agri: Rural Fantasy And Economic Reality In The Elegies Of Tibullus, Victoria Elizabeth Jansson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that attention to economic anxieties in Tibullus’ elegies is crucial to understanding his corpus. Concerns about agricultural production, globalized trade, and institutional power recur throughout the elegies. An appreciation of economic desire may not only produce a fruitful reading of Tibullus’ poetry, but also help to answer some of the questions suggested by elegy’s socio-historical framework. This project relies methodologically on both economic analysis and a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework. Additionally, each chapter explores a different facet of religious experience in the elegies: the myth of the Golden Age, prayers to the goddess Ceres, and references to the …

Practicing Abolition: A Digital Roundtable On Abolitionist Pedagogy, Samantha Lilienfeld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project explores education and pedagogy as sites for abolitionist practice, and approaches abolitionism as a method by building on the idea of abolition democracy. Using the framework of abolition as a pedagogical practice, I see teaching and learning as urgent tasks of contemporary abolitionism. My project integrates research and scholarship on the abolition of prisons and policing with practices of pedagogy, in part by thinking interdisciplinarily with students and scholars working within CUNY. Practicing Abolition: A Digital Roundtable on Abolitionist Pedagogy incorporates voices from students and scholars about how they practice abolitionist pedagogy in higher education by presenting …

Cultivation, Conflict, And Consumption: Food Systems In Syria, 1920–1946, Sara Pekow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Syria during the French Mandate using food as a primary unit of analysis. The exploration of food pushes this project beyond the boundaries of political and diplomatic histories of Syria during the French Mandate, bringing forward the hidden voices of the nonelite. Nonelites are often not visible in archives, but their absence in most written sources permits us to ascertain their experiences in studying the materials that comprised their everyday lives. The sources consulted for this work include memoirs, print media, and state archives, to name a few.

Each chapter of this dissertation follows a different link …

Anticipating Revolution: The Lebanese Left And The Civil War, Jeremy N. Randall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at interweaving forms of intellectual, political, and cultural productions to interrogate the understandings of Lebanon as a polity within interlocking matrixes of capitalism, sectarianism, and nationalism. Weaving together hegemonic discourses represented by the speeches from political elites alongside leftist intellectual and productions, this project seeks to challenge the narratives of Lebanon as a sectarian state. Rather, I seek to shift attention to other potential readings of the nation-state, its peoples, and histories that were not and are not foreclosed by the dominant framings of the country more recently. By focusing on the rich discursive space of the …

Medicinal Plant Use For Type-2 Diabetes Treatment In The Traditional Vietnamese Medicine System Of Southern Vietnam, Lan Truong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnobotanical study examines the traditional health care system of the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam. The basic inquiry focuses on how the healers in the traditional Vietnamese medicine (TVM) system are treating a disease relatively new in Vietnam, type-2 diabetes (T2D). The study includes a description of the system in which the healers work. The research design compares two locations, one on the mainland (Rạch Giá City) and the other on a nearby island (Phú Quốc Island).

There are six chapters. The first chapter establishes foundational information about the region, population, and the traditional medical system. The results of …

Landscape, Settlement, And Community: The Natural, Human, And Sacred Geography Of Classic Maya Civilization In West-Central Guatemala, Marc A. Wolf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the fluid and commonly multi-compositional aspects of Maya settlement patterns, which reflect concepts of space within Maya worldviews. Research will be focused on the predominantly Classic (ca. AD 650-810) era archaeological site of Cancuen and its neighbors in the Verapaz department of Guatemala. These settlements provide a complex arena where questions of identity, spirituality, and ethnic affiliations can be addressed within a spatial context. The continuing detailed settlement and environmental survey mapping within the Cancuen region is the primary source of evidence from which a more thorough appreciation of emic Maya spatial considerations will be investigated.

The …

"Queering" Age-Friendly New York City, Austin G. Oswald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background and aims: The global population is aging and becoming more culturally diverse. As such, scholars, practitioners, and policymakers are expected to think critically about strategies to improve the quality of life of people as they age. In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Age-Friendly Cities movement to improve the well-being and meaningful engagement of older adults living in the community. New York City (NYC) was the first city in the world to be designated “age-friendly” by the WHO, and is possibly viewed as a model for other cities to emulate. Few empirical studies have examined the age-friendly …

Promoting Play-Based Learning Strategies In The Upper Elementary And Lower Middle School Classroom, Michelle L. Randall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This white paper is framed by an understanding of the proposed influence play has on the process of supporting children’s developmental needs while simultaneously strengthening their ability to receive and recall academic content. The white paper is driven by a self-motivated desire to reimagine the ways in which teachers deliver and review content at the upper elementary and lower middle school level. By upper elementary, I am referring to the 4^th and 5^th grade classroom. By lower middle school, I am referring to the 6^th grade classroom.

The past decade of research regarding play-based pedagogy and play-based …

Building The Revolution: Ideology, Affect And Gender In Bolivarian Caracas, Andreina I. Torres A.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Building the Revolution: Ideology, Affect and Gender in Bolivarian Caracas,” examines the Bolivarian Revolution (1998-present) as a heterogenous shifting political process, and terrain of struggle in which a multiplicity of actors disputed the meanings and direction of socialism in Venezuela. During three years of ethnographic and archival research in Caracas (between 2014 and 2017) I researched one of the many Campamentos de Pioneros (Pioneer Camps) that was part of the Movimiento de Pobladores y Pobladoras de Venezuela (Venezuela’s Settlers’ Movement). The pioneers sought to “rescue” and occupy centrally located land in the national capital in order to build housing for …

Colonial Education: Puerto Ricans And The Carlisle Indian School, Progenitors Of The Mythic Identity, Melissa Swinea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

‘GOD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES’ reads a subheading of The Red Man –a historic periodical memorializing the tune of 19th century Americana with references to Godliness and its connection to Indianness and ostentatious capitalism in a canon of school newspapers. The Red Man was the staple periodical of the Carlisle Indian Industrial Institute published monthly and declared “in the interest of Indian education and civilization” for the annual price of 50 cents[1] The subject and recipients of The Red Man would also include 193 Puerto Rican students sent to Carlisle through the U.S.’s campaign to Americanize the Caribbean …

A Solitary Solidarity: Conditions For Attunement In The "Migration Crisis" In Greece, Katherine Sheese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I draw on ethnographic field work and qualitative interviews with activist volunteers in Greece in 2016 to explore the conditions for ethical and affective attunement in the face of crisis and complicity. I offer a thick description of the multiple injuries to one’s senses and sensemaking capacities and the contradictions, tensions, dilemmas that undermine the capacity for attunement, a term I use to refer to the overlapping abilities to feel, to be moved, and to locate oneself and to connect to others. I begin by developing a contextual analysis of the complex and contradictory machinery of …

El Ritmo Del Westside: Exploring The Musical Landscape Of San Antonio’S Historic Westside, Valeria Alderete

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The westside of San Antonio, Texas fostered a uniquely diverse musical landscape throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, demonstrating the results of cross-cultural exchanges reflected in music. From Conjunto and Ranchera music, to R&B and Jazz, a wide range of music genres was celebrated in the historic westside, eventually shaping the birth of the area’s own Westside Sound, which remains a staple in many Chicano communities to date. Despite the cultural significance and rich history, the historic westside’s musical past remains widely unknown, often overshadowed by research and documentation surrounding the area’s violent history with gang networks and crime.

Committed to …

Democratic Processing Of Waste: European Federalism And Decentralized Waste Management In Navarra And Basque Country, Michael Stinavage

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every country, regardless of regime-type, produces garbage. Waste is a significant contributor to the climate crisis, and its management requires the participation of society at large. The competency for waste management falls on the most decentralized forms of governance. The local government, however, faces a tremendous difficulty in that it may not be able to realign economic and political incentives to make the sustainable management of post-consumer material a viable option. Using waste policy as a lens to assess climate crisis readiness and federal governance, this study considers Navarra and Basque Country, two of Spain’s most decentralized regions, and creates …

“The Act Of The Paper”: Literacy, Racial Capitalism, And Student Protest In The 1990s, Anna Zeemont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A transdisciplinary archival project, this dissertation uses counter-institutional student literacies emanating out of the City University of New York (CUNY) in the 1990s—placing them within much bigger political, educational, and geographic contexts—to think through the dynamics of ground-up resistance in the face of profound, institutionally sanctioned raced-classed dispossession. In this decade, New York and the US were marked by increased racial-economic inequality, notably via intensified policing and incarceration in Black/brown neighborhoods alongside cuts to public resources like schooling. As the city’s only public college option, serving mostly multilingual, low-income students of color, CUNY was especially targeted by such budget cuts. …

Elements Of Social Disorganization And Environmental Criminology: A Spatial Analysis Of Homicides In Villa Nueva, Guatemala, David J. Topel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study seeks to integrate the main spatial theories of crime, social disorganization, and routine activities theories while investigating the spatial dimension of homicides in Villa Nueva, Guatemala. Empirical relationships at a small unit of analysis, the natural cadaster blocks as defined by the municipality offer a more appropriate unit of analysis for the context of the city. While there is a robust body of work in developed nations synthetizing social disorganization and routine activities theories, the exploration of criminological theory integration and the use of the smallest unit of analysis still needs the addition of empirical research in Latin …

Strategies Anti-Racist Supervisors Use To Disrupt Racism In Social Work Practice, Sarah Ross Bussey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Addressing racism and bias within social work practice is crucial, given the social justice mandate of the profession and the profession’s history of complicity in oppressive policies. In a time of increased social division, overt bigotry, and pervasive structural violence, social workers have an opportunity to lead the helping professions in meaningful social transformation. Social work supervisors play a central role in developing and guiding ethical social work practice. Yet, little empirically driven scholarship exists providing supervisors with strategies for disrupting racism and bias in the practice of their supervisees. This exploratory qualitative study employs a grounded theory approach to …

Where Gunshots Turn Fatal: A Geographic Examination Of The Spatial Patterning Of Gun Violence, David Hatten

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation contributes fundamental work to the examination of gun violence through an investigation of prevalence, trends, and likely place-based dynamics that explain the spatial patterning of gun violence in Kansas City, MO over a 5-year period (2015-2019). Specifically, this dissertation assesses 1) the degree to which separate shooting typologies (fatal and non-fatal) concentrate in micro-places, 2) whether they co-locate at micro-places, and 3) the likely community characteristics and place-based dynamics that explain these observed patterns. Importantly, the role of place-based dynamics related to the post-incident operational response to gun violence is tested (e.g., a street segment’s proximity to trauma …

Making The Rural Urban: Inter-Class Dynamics To Protect The Environment In The Colombian Countryside, Sebastián F. Villamizar Santamaría

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past thirty years, the small rural town of La Calera in the outskirts of the Colombian capital of Bogotá has received an influx of upper-middle class residents that want to live “in nature.” These ex-urban newcomers arrived in the Andean highlands to live next to the long-time residents, who are descendants of peasants and mining workers that live “off nature.” The different visions of what nature or its uses should create a series of interactions among residents that will decide how will this area’s ecological resources be used in the face of further urban expansion.

Yet, contrary to …

Genomic Insights Into Mechanisms Of Microbial Evolution And Evolution-Inspired Strategies To Combat Pathogen Diversity, Saymon Akther

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We live in an era of emerging infectious diseases that are increasingly common, rapidly spreading, and gravely devastating. Lyme disease, caused by bacteria belonging to the genus Borreliella, is rapidly rising in the Northern Hemisphere because of geographic range expansion of both the tick vectors and the pathogens. Evolutionary comparative analysis of Borreliella genomes is a key to understanding the phylogeographic history and mechanisms of their global diversification. Moreover, genomic variations in Borreliella associated with human pathogenicity, e.g., at loci encoding cell-surface antigens interacting with the vertebrate hosts, have not been fully identified. Similarly, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, caused …

Modelmatcher: A Scientist-Centric Online Platform To Facilitate Collaborations Between Stakeholders Of Rare And Undiagnosed Disease Research, J Michael Harnish, Lucian Li, Sanja Rogic, Guillaume Poirier-Morency, Seon-Young Kim, Kym M Boycott, Michael F Wangler, Hugo J Bellen, Philip Hieter, Paul Pavlidis, Zhandong Liu, Shinya Yamamoto

Duncan NRI Faculty and Staff Publications

Next-generation sequencing is a prevalent diagnostic tool for undiagnosed diseases and has played a significant role in rare disease gene discovery. While this technology resolves some cases, others are given a list of possibly damaging genetic variants necessitating functional studies. Productive collaborations between scientists, clinicians, and patients (affected individuals) can help resolve such medical mysteries, and provide insights into in vivo function of human genes. Furthermore, facilitating interactions between scientists and research funders, including non-profit organizations or commercial entities, can dramatically reduce the time to translate discoveries from bench to bedside. Several systems designed to connect clinicians and researchers with …

Drift Net: The Social And Political Agency Of The Migratory Text, Chris Campanioni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a discursive model I call a “migratory text”—migrant-produced media that includes notebooks, correspondences, self-portraiture, diaristic video, auto-archival installation, and immersive performance—Drift Net gleans connections between world literature, literary translation, academic scholarship, and public policy. Alongside close readings of texts from the interwar period through today and intimate archival fieldwork with refugees and shelter staff across Europe, this study mobilizes queer theory and gender and sexuality studies as well as performance studies and media theory to critique migrant-assimilation techniques by state actors and NGOs. In centering the Cold War throughout its five chapters, Drift Net broaches the different political …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

Colonial Hotspots: Reflecting On My Conditional Citizenship As A ‘Coloured’ [Woman] In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Danille Arendse

Journal of International Women's Studies

The prevailing geopolitical situation has perpetuated epistemic and ontological violence against the citizens of Africa. This indicates that geopolitics have an impact on socio-spatial relations and human interactions that may affect the citizenship of oppressed persons. This paper contains reflections on the conditional citizenship of the author, who is legally identified as a Coloured [woman] in post-Apartheid South Africa. The racial classification Coloured [women], which was created during Apartheid, remains a divisive racial category in post-Apartheid South Africa, one that preserves stereotypes and negative connotations. The author draws the reader’s attention to her geographical location as a specific site of …