Digital Commons Network^™

The #Metoo Movement: The Interaction Of Disclosing Online And Receiving Support, Elizabeth Brooke Wilson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Research shows the prevalent psychological consequences that follow experiencing sexual trauma, so it is important to seek interventions that decrease those psychological consequences. The current study assessed change in levels of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after disclosing online and reading #MeToo tweets. Participants consisted of 121 college students who were grouped by history or no history of sexual assault. Initial levels of depression, anxiety, and PTSD were assessed. Then, participants were asked to either disclose their sexual assault or trivial characteristics of their shoes. Afterwards, participants read tweets from the #MeToo movement or neutral tweets. Three days …

Classrooms And Minefields, Jonathan Simmons, Sandra Silva-Enos, Shannon Kelley

Exploring How We Teach

• Graduate school is a time of personal and professional challenges and changes. Engaging in personal reflection about your identity and your goals can help you make sense of these changes.
• Set and enforce your own personal and professional boundaries to protect all the parts of your identity; learn to recognize your own triggers and prioritize your own self-care.
• Create a set of lifelines—people and resources you can be vulnerable with and can turn to for both personal and professional challenges. You will need different lifelines to help with different problems such as identity whiplash or the many landmines you may …

Transferring Knowledge And Opening Pathways: The Unconventional Doctoral Student-Adjunct Instructor, Samantha Prado

Exploring How We Teach

• Doctoral student/adjunct instructor is a unique and important positionality that can provide perspective on the range of graduate student instructor experiences that exist.
• Positionality can be used to break down educational barriers and increase equity in the classroom.
• Transferring knowledge between contexts can be a form of advocating for social justice.
• There are both advantages and challenges to being a doctoral student/adjunct instructor.

Using A Minoritized Graduate Instructor Identity To Cultivate An Inclusive And Diverse Learning Space, Faqryza Ab Latif

Exploring How We Teach

• How to humanize the classroom climate and establish an authentic presence that can challenge the conventional Westernized classroom structure.
• How graduate instructors can use their malleable identity to their advantage in cultivating an inclusive community of diverse learners. There are experiences that are unique to graduate instructors, especially for those of us who come from underrepresented cultural backgrounds. These experiences can be utilized to construct a more inclusive and diverse learning environment, which could then encourage students to do the same.

Validating Students' Diverse Identities, Erin Hughes

Exploring How We Teach

• Recognizing and appreciating students’ identities is important for learning and feelings of academic empowerment.
• The ways in which we can amplify students feeling validated is by being responsive to their needs and respecting who they are both inside and outside the classroom.
• The ways students may feel invalidated are by perpetuating the power dynamics between student and teacher, disregarding students’ mental health, and engaging in inflexible standards.
• Students may feel more able to take on the difficulties of academia when we help them take a strengths-based approach to who they are.

How Can Graduate Instructors Promote Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In Their Courses?, Taneisha Vilma, Natalie Low

Exploring How We Teach

In this chapter, readers will find

• Strategies to include Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices when designing the course syllabus.
• Considerations for fostering equity among students through the format and scoring of course assessments.
• Methods to include diverse cultures and contexts in course materials to increase representation.
• Strategies for promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in various components of a course by graduate instructors who have different levels of course autonomy.

Teaching For Black Girls: What Every Graduate Student Instructor Can Learn From Balck Girlhood Studies, Theresa Hice-Fromille

Exploring How We Teach

• The neoliberal university undervalues teaching and upholds standardization practices that reproduce harm towards marginalized students. Black Studies approaches to education challenge these education standards.
• Teaching for Black girls is a pedagogical approach derived from Black Girlhood Studies in which the instructor commits to engage students as their co-creator, co-witness, and co-conspirator.
• All graduate student instructors can implement curricular tools and instill pedagogical values, such as instructor responsibility, student agency, collaboration, and reflexivity, to engage a practice of teaching for Black girls. In so doing, instructors model behaviors that promote Black girl thriving within and beyond the classroom.
• Instructors in STEM …

Teaching To Fail: Creating Vulnerable Learning Communities To Facilitate Students' Growth, Avaneesh Narla

Exploring How We Teach

• In today’s academic environment, students perceive no room for failure. Thus, they do not explore or take risks, and this limits their growth. As a result, the instructor must create opportunities for failure while mitigating the stress associated with failure.
• Opportunities for failure can be created in the curriculum and course structure through scaffolding, formative assessments, and extensive feedback. The instructor must also adopt a growth mindset when it comes to the students’ abilities.
• Instructors can create an environment where failure is expected by being vulnerable in the classroom themselves and highlighting their failures and subsequent growth. Graduate students are …

The Impact Of Appearance On Transgender Victimization, Tabrina M. Bratton

Theses and Dissertations

Trans people experience disproportionate rates of victimization compared to cisgender people. This disparity persists despite the finding that many of the same predictors of cisgender victimization have been identified for transgender victimization (e.g., age, race, income, employment, sex work participation, homelessness), which suggest transgender-specific factors may be at play. Some scholars have proposed that transgender victimization is due to their non-conforming appearance. The purpose of this dissertation was to expand our understanding of anti-trans violence by concentrating on the relationship between appearance and sexual and recent physical victimization. This dissertation builds upon the existing transgender victimization literature by focusing on …

Supporting Transgender And Nonbinary Middle School Students Through Inclusive Policies And Practices, Victoria Velding

Masters Projects

The United States is experiencing a youth mental health crisis. Research suggests rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation have reached concerning levels in transgender and nonbinary youth. School can be a hostile place for marginalized youth. Transgender and nonbinary youth are especially susceptible to harassment and victimization, making school a particularly hostile place. When schools offer support and LGBTQ resources, school experiences can be improved for transgender and nonbinary youth. Unfortunately, school-wide supports and resources for LGBTQ students are less common in middle schools than high schools, leaving many students struggling at a critical developmental stage in their lives. …

Everyday Consumption In Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction, Lígia Bezerra

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian …

Foul Play: How Racism In The Ncaa Contributes To The Mental Health And Academic Performance Of College Athletes Of Color, Kellie Courtney

Student Theses

While past research indicates that student-athletes of color are vulnerable to experiencing racial discrimination, it is unclear how these experiences of discrimination affect their mental health and academic performance. The purpose of this study was to understand how racial discrimination (in both academic and athletic settings) is associated with the mental health and academic performances of student-athletes of color. To recruit participants, the survey link was posted on social media platforms and was also emailed to student-athletes attending City Universities of New York (CUNYs). Consistent with previous research, the current study found that racism in both academic and athletic settings …

Words From Elsewhere: The Rhetoric Of Nineteenth Century African American Prophetic Call Narratives, Thomas M. Fuerst

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation examines the various rhetorical tactics of the African American Prophetic Tradition of the nineteenth century, specifically those utilized in the prophetic call narratives of Maria Stewart, Nat Turner, Julia Foote, and Richard Allen. These figures anchor their larger prophetic messages in the claim that God has called them to the prophetic task. This rhetoric of calling assumes that God still speaks, and that God’s speaking matters to local communities under the thumb of racial and gendered oppression. Moreover, the rhetoric of calling assumes that God’s speaking has material (not just spiritual) effect in the world, and that God …

Design And Analysis Of Strategic Behavior In Networks, Sixie Yu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Networks permeate every aspect of our social and professional life.A networked system with strategic individuals can represent a variety of real-world scenarios with socioeconomic origins. In such a system, the individuals' utilities are interdependent---one individual's decision influences the decisions of others and vice versa. In order to gain insights into the system, the highly complicated interactions necessitate some level of abstraction. To capture the otherwise complex interactions, I use a game theoretic model called Networked Public Goods (NPG) game. I develop a computational framework based on NPGs to understand strategic individuals' behavior in networked systems. The framework consists of three …

Trauma Exposures Across The Life Course For Individuals Who Experience Incarceration, Maria Morrison

Brown School Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, with 2.2 million people currently behind bars, 60% of whom are people of color. At the same time, there is an unprecedented political consensus to develop strategies for reducing the incarcerated population and safely returning the majority of incarcerated individuals to society. While there has been a substantial research focus on the potential of this population to commit acts of violence post-release, this tells only half the story. This dissertation hopes to provide a more complete picture of the role of violence in the lives of individuals released …

Exploring The Meaningful Qualities Of Transactions In Virtual Environments For Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Gamers, Karen Mccarthy, Shasta Rice, Amanda Flores, John Miklos, Alex Nold

Occupational Therapy | Faculty Scholarship

To date, most research on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) has focused on the effects playing MMORPGs have on players’ health and wellness. The virtual environment of MMORPGs has yet to be explored as a space where meaningful occupations occur. This qualitative descriptive study examined the virtual environment using a transactional perspective to describe the qualities of gaming to which MMORPG players ascribe meaning. Participants included six MMORPG players with experience playing World of Warcraft, Runescape, or Guild Wars 2. Data were gathered using interviews, participant observation, and a focus group, and analyzed using thematic analysis. Three themes were …

The Colbert-Walker Site (22le1048): History And Archaeology Of A Chickasaw Home, Council House, And Travelers’ Stand, Raymond Taylor Doherty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In late 1813, at a time of increasing violence on the Southern frontier, Chickasaw leader George Colbert (Tootemastubee) left his home and ferry on the Natchez Trace to move back to relative safety in the heart of the Chickasaw Nation. He returned to the place that had once been his father’s plantation and made what he described as a “shelter from the weather.” He later hired skilled craftsmen to build a large and finely carpentered new home on the site. The Colbert-Walker site (22Le1048), near present-day Tupelo, Mississippi, has long been said to be the location of this structure, which …

Rendering Documentary Portraiture: An Interrogation Of Archival Discourse Through A Critical Exploration Of Nineteenth Century Stage Actress Charlotte Cushman’S Material Memory, Skyler Sunday

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Visual depictions of nineteenth century stage actress Charlotte Cushman, such as photographs, engravings, and painted portraits assist researchers in re-envisioning her both as an actress and as a person, but what do her remaining archival possessions further reveal to researchers about her memory? How do different objects operate as portraits that allow the researcher to tap into and remember specific moments and memory? How does the effort to preserve memory take different forms? This project argues that, when viewing the archive through its stored objects, our collective notion of portraiture can be expanded and used to interrogate existing methods of …

The Purple Heart And Suicidal Behaviors In Post-9/11 U.S. Army Combat Veterans With A Traumatic Brain Injury: A Mixed Methods Study, Jayna Moceri-Brooks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Military suicide rates remain high, despite years of targeted efforts to prevent suicide. Specifically, Army Combat Veterans who sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) while deployed in support of the Global War on Terrorism are at the highest risk for suicide. This dissertation highlights possible causes for suicidal behaviors within this unique group and provides specific military suicide prevention recommendations. The dissertation is organized into three publishable manuscripts: The first manuscript (Chapter 1) is a mixed-methods dissertation research proposal written according to the National Institute of Health proposal guidelines. The second manuscript (Chapter 2) is an integrative review of the …

Determinants Of Reproductive Freedom Among Israeli Women Ages 18-50: A Mixed Methods Study, Abby Kra-Friedman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Reproductive freedom is a social determinant of health (SDOH) that reduces health disparities and increases health equity. Through the National Health Insurance Plan, Israeli women can access a range of contraceptive methods. Scant data on Israeli women limits development of policies and interventions to meet international benchmarks for reproductive freedom. The purpose of this dissertation study is to synthesize current international multidisciplinary literature using the capability approach for reproductive freedom, explore determinants of reproductive freedom among Israeli women ages 18-50 using Nussbaum's capability approach, and make recommendations for nursing research, practice, and theory.

Methodology: Using Whittemore and …

“I Hear You”: Exploring The Lived Experience Of Counselors’ Empathic Response To Clients When Conducting Telephonic Counseling During Covid-19, Michael Sickels

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dissertation supervised by Dr. Debra Hyatt-Burkhart

This study sought to unearth the lived experience of counselors empathically responding to clients via telephonic counseling during COVID-19. The term empathic response refers to as attending to the emotional and mental state of another person in a way that is attuned with the feelings and meanings of the individual’s experience. There are few studies that have assessed the merits of telephonic counseling, and even fewer that have examined counselors’ empathic response to clients through this medium.

To uncover the lived experience of the target population, the participants of the study were purposefully selected …

Weathering The Storm: Navigating Urban Ecologies Of Communication In Times Of Crisis, Austin Hestdalen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores cities as urban ecologies of communication in which crises emerge and are given significance within the dialogic relations cultivated among public actors attempting to make a living, together, within the shared historical-cultural contexts of everyday life. To describe cities as urban ecologies of communication is to describe them in terms of urban communication and its interdisciplinary foundations in the study of rhetoric, philosophy, planning, policy, architecture, sociology, geography, and media. The first chapter introduces the challenges of urban risk and crisis management within the complex ecologies of communication constituted by cities and reviews how ‘risk’ and ‘crisis’ …

"I'M Not Your Ride Or Die": A Qualitative Study Of Black Women's Experiences In Intimate Marketplaces, Alana Jamelle Peck

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Black women’s marriage rates have consistently been on the decline since the 1960’s and currently, Black women are the least likely to get married across all races and genders (Bureau 2020). Scholars have been using these statistics to tell monolithic narratives of Black womanhood, and even blame Black women for larger issues within the Black community (Collins 2000, Johnson and Loscocco 2015; Moynihan 1965). Prior scholars have also attempted to provide solutions to this problem, while never even approaching Black women, to suggest ways that they can increase their marriage rates and consequently uplift Black families and the Black community …

Review Of: Vignettes 2020: Anabaptist Women Writers—Sheila Petre And Gabriella Showalter, J.P. Miller

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Vignettes, compiled and edited by Sheila Petre and Gabriella Showalter, is a fascinating text. It is a book that was written by, and is intended for, Anabaptist women writers. The book is a collection of articles that profile around 400 Anabaptist women writers from more than 15 countries. The book provides many resources for aspiring writers; it recommends books on writing, such as The Elements of Style, and contains a directory of all the women profiled in this book. [First paragraph.]

The Ramifications Of Wisconsin V. Yoder: Six Foundational Problems With A 50-Year Old Landmark Case, Torah Bontrager

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

My essay introduces the 1972 United States Supreme Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder to readers who don’t come from a legal background who want to understand the negative ramifications of the case and how it affects their individual rights. Yoder says that children of practicing Amish don’t have a right to any education and future other than one inside the Amish Church. My essay deconstructs the case from the perspective of an Amish American woman— yours truly — who escaped in the middle of the night at age 15 because of how this ruling has shaped the Amish people. I …

Ethnography And Plain Anabaptist Women: Some Considerations On Positionality, Power, And Pandemic, Beth Graybill

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This article discusses ethnography as a discipline and the role of my qualitative fieldwork with Conservative and Old Order Mennonite and Amish women in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania over the past 20 years. It includes extended quotes with interview subjects based on my fieldwork with Plain Women in the ethnographic, female-centered tradition. In it, I discuss the importance of feedback and reflexivity with my interview subjects, and strategies for overcoming their natural humility. More importantly, this article discusses underpinnings related to gender and patriarchy as I examine power dynamics at home and in broader Amish society related to abuse and violence, …

Sexual Abuse Among Conservative Anabaptists: Culture-Specific Dynamics That Increase Risk Of Victimization And Silencing Of Victims, Trudy Metzger

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

How do biblical beliefs and religious-cultural teachings influence a theology of silence among conservative Anabaptists? This research explores this opening question through qualitative research, by examining the impact of theology on expectations of silence among victims of sexual abuse. Conservative Anabaptists are comprised of a range of Mennonite and Amish groups who adhere to deeply fundamental religious beliefs, various forms of separated attire including some type of head covering for women, as well as social isolation and separation from mainstream society to varying degrees. Some even restrict interactions with other conservative Anabaptists whose beliefs differ from their own. Private messages …

Attitudes Toward Transgenic Corn Usage Among Amish & Conservative Mennonite Farmers In Ohio, Scot Long

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Mass adoption and planting of genetically modified corn are part of the larger industrialized agricultural production system in the United States. Amish and conservative Mennonite farmers in the Holmes County settlement region offer an alternative production system often characterized by lower usage of chemical inputs, greater implementation of crop rotation, and significantly higher usage of hybrid versus GMO field corn. Moreover, the rationale among Amish/Mennonite farmers toward adoption of GMO (based on “convenience”) or rejection of GMO (based on “too many unknowns”) stems both from cultural diffusion of neighboring farms as well as variable need for nonfarm income. This article …

Ten Years Of The Journal Of Amish And Plain Anabaptist Studies: An Editor’S Reflections On A Social Movement In Academia, Cory Anderson

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This Issue of JAPAS: Ground-Breaking Research, Wisconsin v. Yoder’s 50th, and the New Plain People Book Review Panel: With this issue, JAPAS is now 10 years old, a full decade of providing quality scholarship and opportunities to publish Amish and plain Anabaptist studies-focused research. Fittingly, this JAPAS is—by word count—the largest issue yet. Given this 10-year milestone, I want to use this editorial space to recall some of JAPAS’s development, in essay style, sharing some of my outlooks, opinions, and personal experiences. But first: an introduction to this issue’s extremely varied contents. [First paragraph.]

Social-Religious Change In The Church Of God In Christ, Mennonite: An Analysis Of Shifting Emphases In The 'Holdeman Church' Based On The Periodical Messenger Of Truth, Ronald Jantz

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This study examines cultural change within the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite (“Holdemans”). In this analysis, I contrast the religious culture of the Holdeman people with that of rural, middle America in order to understand the changes and the degree to which the Holdeman people have been assimilated into the prevailing rural culture. The Holdeman people live a form of Biblical Christianity in which decisions about both practical and spiritual matters are made by consulting the Scriptures. Yet, higher levels of income, more education, advanced technologies, and the transition from farming occupations to small businesses are all affecting both …