Digital Commons Network^™

The [Object, Me, Symbiote, Other] In The Machine: Insights From Video Game Psychology For Teleporter-Robot Relations, Nicholas David Bowman, Jaime Banks

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

Avatars serve as embodied representations of user agency in physical, digital, and mixed realities, extending our physical, cognitive, and perceptual abilities into those spaces. From this perspective, there is a tendency to presume that as users assume control of an avatar, they necessarily psychologically merge with and identify as that entity. Borrowing from video game psychology research into player-avatar relations (PAR) and player-avatar interactions (PAX), we present an argument for considering a broader range of sociality regarding user relations with avatar robots: Seeing avatar robots as Object, Me, Symbiote, and authentically social Others. We extrapolate from PAX measurements to tentatively …

“Continuity Without Cultivation”?: The Student Figure, Legal Education, And Writing Pedagogy In India, Diya Deviah, Ammel Sharon

Socio-Legal Review

This paper reconstructs the historical figure of the student in India through the intertwined trajectories of writing pedagogy and legal education. Moving beyond the socio-political portrayal of students as agents of resistance or nation-building, it examines how the classroom can function as a dynamic site for meaning-making. Drawing on archival materials, including syllabi, composition manuals, and legal reform reports, the paper traces the role of English language education in shaping legal pedagogy from the colonial period to the establishment of contemporary National Law Universities. Situating these developments within broader debates in writing and composition studies, the paper proposes alternative pedagogical …

The Violence Of Numbers: A Critical Appraisal Of The Justice Capabilities Framework, Abhineet Maurya

Socio-Legal Review

Systems of indicators and international rankings have today become a new mode of evaluating social, political, and economic life. In the context of measuring the rule of law and justice delivery systems at a local as well as a global level, such indicators enable empirically grounded solutions to justice reform issues. However, scholars like Siddharth Peter de Souza argue that the existing discourse concerning the rule of law and access to justice indicators promote a specific vision of a well functioning justice system grounded in western normative considerations. de Souza, in his book Designing Indicators for a Plural Legal World …

Cultivating Legalism From Paper Proofs: Analysing Everyday Forms Of Claim Making By Van Gujjar Pastoralists In Uttarakhand, Mohammad Meer Hamja, Pranav Menon

Socio-Legal Review

Scholarship from South Asia has often highlighted how subaltern peoples partake in social movements as figures of resistance but rarely analyse their techniques of working the law in their favour to negotiate citizenship with the state. Such modes of articulating claims through affective gestures and vernacular legalese foster plural meanings to otherwise rigid legal categories and dogmatic bureaucratic interpretation. This paper draws upon socio-historical and ethnographic accounts of Van Gujjars to highlight how these pastoralists utilise myriad forms of paper proofs and documentary evidence to engage in claim making across the forests of Uttarakhand. Through an articulation of everyday tactics …

Increasing Reading Fluency In Ell Learners, Jennifer N. Patton

Graduate Research Papers

I am creating a project on how to effectively teach fluency to ELL students. To do so, I had to first research. Recent researches have revealed that English Language Learners (ELLs) face certain challenges that threaten their academic success, especially their reading fluency, and as a result, make learning difficult. To achieve the purpose of this research, this chapter is focused on providing a deeper analysis into the problem of fluency and how it affects ELLs. The target with this is to review shared knowledge around reading fluency development in ELLs. This chapter, therefore, entails reviews of the literature on …

Sequencing Conversational Turns In Peer Interactions: An Integrated Approach For Evidence-Based Conversational Agent For Just-In-Time Nicotine Cravings Intervention, Tavleen Singh, Michael Truong, Kirk Roberts, Sahiti Myneni

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Risky health behaviors place an enormous toll on public health systems. While relapse prevention support is integrated with most behavior modification programs, the results are suboptimal. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) applications provide us with unique opportunities to develop just-in-time adaptive behavior change solutions.

METHODS: In this study, we present an innovative framework, grounded in behavioral theory, and enhanced with social media sequencing and communications scenario builder to architect a conversational agent (CA) specialized in the prevention of relapses in the context of tobacco cessation. We modeled peer interaction data (n = 1000) using the taxonomy of behavior …

Community Scientist Program Provides Bi-Directional Communication And Co-Learning Between Researchers And Community Members, Jessica Alvarado, Larkin L Strong, Birnur Buzcu-Guven, Leonetta B Thompson, Erica Cantu, Chelsea C Carrier, Chiamaka D Chukwu, Cassandra L Harris, Luz K Melendez, Crystal L Roberson, Angela M Ross, Sophia C Russell, Pablo Sanchez, Amirali Tahanan, Blair C Zdenek, Belinda M Reininger, Lorna H Mcneill

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Community involvement in research is key to translating science into practice, and new approaches to engaging community members in research design and implementation are needed. The Community Scientist Program, established at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2018 and expanded to two other Texas institutions in 2021, provides researchers with rapid feedback from community members on study feasibility and design, cultural appropriateness, participant recruitment, and research implementation. This paper aims to describe the Community Scientist Program and assess Community Scientists' and researchers' satisfaction with the program. We present the analysis of the data collected from 116 Community Scientists …

Initial Exploration Of Zero-Shot Privacy Utility Tradeoffs In Tabular Data Using Gpt-4, Bishwas Mandal, George Amariucai, Shuangqing Wei

Faculty Publications

We investigate the application of large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, to scenarios involving the tradeoff between privacy and utility in tabular data. Our approach entails prompting GPT-4 by transforming tabular data points into textual format, followed by the inclusion of precise sanitization instructions in a zero-shot manner. The primary objective is to sanitize the tabular data in such a way that it hinders existing machine learning models from accurately inferring private features while allowing models to accurately infer utility-related attributes. We explore various sanitization instructions. Notably, we discover that this relatively simple approach yields performance comparable to more complex …

Transnationalizing Feminist Translation Studies? Insights From The Warwick School Of Feminist Translation: A Roundtable, Olga Castro, Emek Ergun, Maud Anne Bracke, William J. Spurlin, Luciana Carvalho Fonseca

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This roundtable article features a conversation among the five scholars who delivered keynotes at the Warwick School of Feminist Translation, held at the University of Warwick, UK, in May 2023: Olga Castro, Emek Ergun, Maud Anne Bracke, William J. Spurlin, and Luciana Carvalho Fonseca. Drawing on their uniquely interdisciplinary expertise on the politics of translation and interpreting, the authors explore the urgent role that translation and translators, as well as the fields and scholars of feminist and queer translation and interpretation studies, play in distrupting and dismantling heteropatriarchal, racist, homonationalist, and colonial regimes of power. Their conversations reveal the urgent …

Rivers Of Language Across Oceans: Review Essay Of River In An Ocean: Essays On Translation, Edited By Nuzhat Abbas, Luise Von Flotow

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article presents an academic review of the collection of articles “on translation” and entitled river in an ocean. It engages with the foreword by Françoise Vergès and the introduction by editor Nuzhat Abbas, which set the tone of ‘decolonial feminism’ that permeates the essays. The reviews of the eleven essays—by women from southeast Asia, Africa, Palestine and Saudi Arabia—come from the perspective of feminist translation studies but pay careful attention to their very specific concerns around exile and life in diaspora.

Beauvoir, “French” Feminisms, And “Translation Work:” A Roundtable Conversation, Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This conversation featuring four scholars—Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin, Lorraine Delavaud, Marine Vaslin—took place on zoom on December 1, 2023. It was organized, transcribed, and edited by Sandrine Sanos who also wrote the introduction to contextualize the conversation. The roundtable reflects on the making of the translation of Judith Coffin’s book on Beauvoir; and how it became a collective object, and the challenges and productive limitations that it involved, showing how such a project helped forge and relied upon transnational, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational feminist solidarities. The ways Beauvoir became a transatlantic object sheds light on the ways that the book …

Musical Reward In Young Children, Haley E. Kragness, Kendra Mehl, Amy M. Belfi

Psychological Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Musical pleasure stems from an interplay of social, emotional, and cognitive factors. In adults, there are large individual differences in musical reward, with some individuals (deemed "hyperhedonic" to music) reporting very high reward and others (deemed "anhedonic" to music) reporting very low reward. Musical anhedonia is, therefore, a selective lack of pleasure in response to music, defined by self-reported low musical reward in the absence of generalized anhedonia. While this phenomenon has been investigated in adults in recent years, little is known about musical anhedonia or musical reward more generally in children. To address this, we investigated parents' perceptions of …

(Another) Introduction: Translating Transnational Feminisms, Erin Katherine Krafft, Caroline De Souza

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In this introduction to part two of the special issue “Translating Transnational Feminisms,” we examine the position of feminist translation practices and the theories of Feminist Translation Studies within transnational cultural and geopolitical contexts. We again explore translation as a core component of transnational feminist solidarities, focusing particularly on Feminist Translation Studies (FTS) as containing frameworks that allow for forms of and approaches to analysis that, due to the multidisciplinarity of the field, offer sight and insights that are unique in their depth and breadth.

Two Decades Of Gender Troubles In Iceland: The Translation Of Gender, Differences, And The Uncertainty Of Meaning, Katrín Harðardóttir

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

When “gender” was translated to Icelandic in 1998 as kyngervi, the notion of performative gender had been circulating in Icelandic academia for a little over a year. The introduction and dissemination of the term inside academia then became quite rapid, with the help of diverse professional fields such as art, literary, history and gender studies, but criticism on the translation did not appear until well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, when it was pointed out that the translated term conveys a difference between “sex” and “gender,” with the possible consequence of perpetuating this dichotomy although it …

Shifting Shapes: Transnational Tactics Of The Authoritarian Right In Brazil And Russia, Erin Katherine Krafft, Caroline De Souza

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Global right-wing anti-gender movements have developed a transnational pattern in their uses of language as a means of subjugation and of control, and this article examines manifestations of this pattern in two specific states: Brazil and Russia. By exploring the anti-gender languaging, rhetoric, and legislation advanced by Jair Bolsonaro (President of Brazil 2019–2022) and Vladimir Putin (President of Russia 2000–2008 and 2012 to the present) and their supporters, we find that, in both contexts, anti-gender campaigns are reactions to and also drivers for increasingly dramatic political and social conflicts, and in each case, anti-gender ideologies are embedded in larger right-wing …

Community Organizing For Democratic Renewal: The Significance Of Jacques Maritain’S Support For Saul Alinsky And His Methods, Brian Stiltner

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Jacques Maritain’s ideas about democratic renewal remain as important and inspirational as ever. A less well-known element of Maritain’s political thinking is his support for grassroots community organizing. This support, peppered throughout his writings, comes into stark relief when examining his longtime friendship and correspondence with Saul Alinsky, the dean of community organizing in the US. This article argues, first, that we must understand Maritain and Alinsky’s friendship to properly appreciate the legacy of Maritain’s political thought and, second, that understanding the complementarity of their approaches allows us to see that together these two friends present a powerful strategy for …

Two Decades Of Supporting Excellence In Stem Through Programs That Work: A History Of High-Quality Stem Programming In The Commonwealth Of Virginia, Bill Haver, Deborah Neely-Fisher

Journal of Mathematics and Science: Collaborative Explorations

The Virginia Mathematics and Science Coalition annually recognizes effective science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. The leaders of these Programs That Work receive recognition and others gain ideas to incorporate into their STEM programs. Programs That Work was initiated in March 2000 as a part of a statewide conference designed to better understand effective strategies to increase the success of women, minorities and members of other groups who had been underrepresented in STEM. Programs That Work has since expanded to include effective STEM programming for all students and teachers at all levels by recognizing school systems, colleges and universities …

Neurodiversity In Workplace, Jacqueline L. Zindell

M.S. in Leadership

This research paper explores the intricate relationships between neurodiverse and neurotypical individuals within the workplace. Through an exploration of the literature, the research focuses on the specific challenges faced by neurodiverse individuals, including those with conditions such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyslexia. The topic of neurodiversity will provide support to leaders in navigating interactions with neurodiverse individuals and fostering inclusivity in the workplace. This research serves as a foundational step towards creating a toolbox for the workplace. A survey was conducted using Survey Monkey to gauge respondents' familiarity with the concept of Neurodiversity and to identify effective strategies …

Artificial Intelligence Is Like A Perpetual Stew, Nathan Reitinger

American University Law Review

Artificial intelligence is inescapable. It is in our phones, fridges, and most of the businesses we engage with use it to “improve” their services. From deciding on what YouTube video to watch next to driving vehicles or firing weapons, artificial intelligence is a linchpin in our society. But what is artificial intelligence? And, more importantly, why does that matter? It matters because we are currently unprepared to deal with the paradigm-shifting legal issues brought about by artificial intelligence. And without this understanding, we are nearly certainly going to make mistakes. The bright side is that artificial intelligence is not complicated. …

Centering Community Voice And Knowledge Through Participatory Action Research, Jennifer Lucko

Education | Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes a Participatory Action Research (PAR) Project focused on improving public safety and community lighting in one Latinx immigrant community in California as a case example to better understand the possibilities for university-community-government partnerships. The paper explores residents' motivations for their sustained participation in the project, the relationships and power dynamics that led to a $100,000 commitment from the city government to fund the recommendations of the PAR collective, and the social contexts that allowed community residents to position themselves as political actors as the PAR project progressed over the 2021-2022 academic year. This case example illustrates how …

A Collective Responsibility And Inquiry Approach To Teaching Media Literacy, Timothy N. Constant

The Great Lakes Social Studies Journal

None

Rockin’ The Regime: Mormon Missionaries, American Popular Music, And The Fading Of Spanish Fascism, Ryan A. Davis

Faculty Publications – Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

In 1972 a group of Mormon missionaries in Spain formed a band known as Los Salt Lake City. Playing primarily folk and rock music, they toured the country, gave radio and press interviews, and released two albums and an EP. Their experience is recounted and assessed in relation to the musical context of Spain at the time, including the social, religious, and political implications of the musical context.

The Great Lakes Social Studies Journal Volume 4, Issue 2 Full Issue, Michele Phillips, Linda Doornbos, Tammy Zillox, David Zwart, Gina Smith, George Dalbo, Talene Kelegian, Armen Hadjinian, John C. Savagian, Gabriel Doss, Ronald V. Morris, Denise Shockley, Aaliyah Lannon

The Great Lakes Social Studies Journal

None

Revolutionary Comics: Samandal’S Feminist Topography Of Resistance, Alexandra Gueydan-Turek

French & Francophone Studies Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Applications And Analysis Of Nlp Deep Learning Models For Antibiotic's Side Effects Classifications, An Ly

CGU Theses & Dissertations

I introduce a novel recursive modification to the classical Goemans-Williamson MaxCut algorithm, offering improved performance in vectorized data clustering tasks. Focusing on the clustering of medical publications, I suggest to employ recursive iterations in conjunction with a dimension relaxation method to enhance density of clustering results. Furthermore, I propose a new vectorization technique for articles, leveraging conditional probabilities for more effective clustering. I believe that these methods will provide advantages in both computational efficiency and clustering accuracy. I will analyze the effectiveness of recursive iterations and higher-dimensional generalizations of the GWA in the hopes of achieving more accurate dissimilarity-based clustering. …

How We Make It: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community, A Multimedia Project, Alexandra Juhasz, How We Make It Collective

Publications and Research

How We Make It: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community is a born-digital multimedia piece that lives on the Scalar platform and that was submitted and eventually accepted into the Special Section on Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19. The text below is a close reproduction of the Navigation page within the Scalar piece. While reading this text, one cracks open the door to glimpse the ten-person collective behind this project.

Thai Efl Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Perspectives On Academic Writing: Challenges And Strategies, Chariya Prapobratanakul

PASAA

This study investigated the perceived English-language academic writing challenges encountered by Thai EFL undergraduate engineering students and the strategies they employed to overcome these challenges. The data were collected from third-year Thai EFL undergraduate engineering students through a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview adapted from Hyland (2016) and Lin and Morrison (2021). The results revealed that vocabulary, grammar, and structure were the most challenging aspects at the sentence level for students. At the paragraph level, they considered summarizing and paraphrasing academic sources and producing a coherent argument the most challenging aspects when writing academic texts in English. Feedback from instructors …

Lexical Level In English Major Efl Students’ Writing: A Learner Corpus Study, Pong-Ampai Kongcharoen, Jiraporn Dhanarattigann, Tirote Thongnuan

PASAA

This study aimed to investigate the lexical competence of English-major EFL students. The learner corpus comprised 552 pieces of writing by sophomore English majors during five academic years between 2017 and 2021, containing 190,506 words in total. The results from VocabProfile program showed that these students used words contained in the academic word list (AWL) at lower rates than what has been suggested by experts. This is probably because they were in their second year studying their first writing course. With less exposure to higherlevel English, they might not have developed an advanced vocabulary repertoire. However, when considering the AWL …

Effects Of Data-Driven Learning On Writing Complexity, Accuracy, And Fluency (Caf) Of Thai Efl Learners, Punyapa Boontam, Supakorn Phoocharoensil

PASAA

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of data-driven learning (DDL) in L2 writing instruction. This paper examined whether and to what extent DDL activities could enhance the writing complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of 30 Thai EFL learners. The presentation of DDL in this study was hands-on concordancing with the assistance of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The study was held in the context of an English writing workshop focusing on opinion paragraphs, divided into two phases: four weeks for the patternhunting activities and two weeks for the pattern-refining activities. Applying the CAF …

The Development Of A Full Online Flipped Classroom Instructional Model For Enhancement Of Engineering Students’ English Meeting Skills And Learning Engagement, Piyatida Changpueng, Fasawang Pattanapichet

PASAA

The flipped classroom instructional approach gained popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly disrupted language instruction. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a full online flipped classroom instructional model to enhance students’ meeting skills and their engagement. The model consisted of two lessons: group meeting skills and writing the minutes of meetings. The participants comprised 48 third-year undergraduate engineering students from a public university in Thailand. The study utilized the KW#4 principle to compare average scores of passing students in formative and summative assessments, and to analyze pre-test and post-test scores, aiming to evaluate the model's impact on …