Digital Commons Network^™

Building On Rented Land: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis Of Black Women’S Digital Homeplace-Building On Tiktok, Monica Thompson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) examined the lived experiences of seven Black women TikTok users, exploring how they describe and make meaning of TikTok as a space of digital expression amid algorithmic constraint and platform precarity. Grounded in Black Cyberfeminism, Critical Race Theory, and hooks’ (1990) homeplace theory, the study asked three questions: how Black women describe their use of TikTok; how they make meaning of the platform as a space of expression; and how they navigate platform instability, political threats, and content restrictions while maintaining authentic expression. Drawing on semi-structured Zoom interviews and analyzed using Smith et al.’s (2009) …

Identifying Textual Predictors Of Early Termination In Clinical Trials In Medicine: An Explainable Machine-Learning Study, Rohan Ramnarain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

About one in five clinical trials in medicine ends early, wasting valuable resources and reducing the evidence available for developing life-saving medical treatments. This project uses a method called Trial2Vec, which is a self-supervised machine-learning method that converts clinical trial documents into dense numerical representations that capture their key design and clinical characteristics, to turn each proposed clinical trial’s written protocol into a compact numerical profile (a process referred to as embedding). These profiles are then paired with a predictive machine learning models to identify the words and phrases in the trial documents that can signal a higher risk of …

Visible Lives, Invisible Strands: Critical Consciousness And Civic Engagement Among Muslim Sa/Swana College Students, Firdevs Yigiter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, young people have navigated an increasingly polarized sociopolitical climate marked by racism, Islamophobia, and heightened racial violence (Cureton, 2023; Wegemer et al., 2025). These tensions have intensified in the current moment, shaped by the aftermath of October 7, activism for Palestinian rights, and the political climate of the Trump Administration. College campuses, which historically are sites of political activism and social transformation, are not neutral spaces. For SA/SWANA Muslim college students, these dynamics are intensified by systematic marginalization and a polarized political climate (Khamis, 2023).  In this dissertation, I examine how SA/SWANA Muslim students experience ethnic-racial discrimination, …

Managing Migration And Political Change: Lessons From Sweden’S 2015 Asylum Crisis For South Korea’S Emerging Immigration Era, Sean Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this capstone project is to analyze how two nations that have little in common in terms of geography or politics have been required to deal with immigration issues in ways that their institutions did not anticipate. One nation has been dealing with immigration-related issues for some time now, while the other nation has yet to do so. In 2015, when Sweden received approximately 162,000 asylum applications in one year alone, Sweden’s housing systems were strained, many of the municipalities were unable to keep up with the demand, and the political climate began to shift in ways that …

Goddess In A Trash Can: Religious Ritual Disposal In New York City Public Parks, Zoe Oro-Hahn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Practitioners of Afro-Caribbean religions, including Santería, Vodou, Espiritismo, and Las 21 Divisiones, utilize the New York City Public Parks system to hold rituals, connect with spirits and ancestors, and dispose of religious remains leftover from trabajos (workings) and brujería (witchcraft). Utilizing photos from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, my thesis considers the religious, political, social, and practical rationale behind this phenomenon, explores the rituals occurring, and provides policy suggestions that balance religious needs of practitioners with the safety and wellbeing of New York City’s parks.

Revolutionary Petunias In The Hallways: Adultification, Identity, And Black Girls’ High School Experiences, Renee Niles

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how adultification, the racialized misperception of Black girls as more mature, responsible, and self-sufficient, shapes high school experiences and identity development. Using Constructivist Grounded Theory and Black feminist epistemology, the study draws on interviews with eight Black women to explore how these experiences are interpreted over time. The study conceptualizes adultification as a form of developmental governance, an ongoing structural process that regulates perception, behavior, and identity from adolescence into adulthood.

Towards Auto-Evaluation For Large Language Models, Jiahao Ying

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for evaluation methodologies that are timely, scalable, reliable, and informative. Conventional evaluation benchmarks, although essential for measuring model capabilities and guiding model development, are often constructed and maintained through labor-intensive human annotation. As LLMs continue to improve through increases in model scale, training data, and computational resources, static benchmarks may quickly lose discriminative power. Moreover, the growing use of large and diverse training corpora increases the risk of benchmark leakage, which can inflate evaluation results and obscure the true capabilities of models. These challenges call for a …

The Colonial Borders Within: Racial Profiling, Language, And Civil Juries, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

This Article builds on the scholarship of Kevin R. Johnson, whose work has long illuminated how immigration law and constitutional doctrine have enabled the subordination of Latines through racial profiling,2 language discrimination,3 and exclusion from civic institutions, like juries.4 His analyses of juror exclusion and the importance of a diverse judiciary underscore how the composition of civil and criminal factfinders shapes both recognition of harm and the remedies afforded.5 Long before the current period of intensified, abusive immigration enforcement, his scholarship traced the historical roots of these practices, examined their contemporary manifestations, and revealed the ways in which the law …

Teaching Telemachus: Learning To Live And Lead In A Flawed World, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Odyssey By Homer. Translated by Emily Wilson.

La Espiritualidad: Transmitting Peruvian Culturo-Spiritual Elements Into Occidental Systemic Spaces, Deisy Amorin-Woods

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This paper is a decolonising, Indigenous qualitative inquiry that integrates elements of critical autoethnography, narrative methods and conceptual analysis to explore how Peruvian Andean cosmology can inform contemporary systems thinking and family therapy practice. Writing as a mestiza, a Peruvian migrant in Australia, the author traces the lived experience of cultural erosion within Western, individualistic contexts and her reconnection with ancestral Andean teachings. These teachings—rooted in reciprocity, ecological attachment, collective responsibility and relational balance—are presented as living epistemologies that offer timely contributions to working therapeutically. The author examines core Andean concepts including ayll (kinship-based community), ayni (sacred reciprocity), Yachay (aprenderes …

A Hybrid Approach To Phishing Email Detection: Leveraging Machine Learning And Large Language Models, Hessa Shamal Biri

Theses

Phishing attacks have reached a new level of sophistication through the deployment of large language models by attackers. The current AI-generated threats defeat existing detection systems which base their operation on past data. The thesis presents a hybrid system for phishing email detection which combines real email data with synthetic LLM-created samples to enhance traditional machine learning classifiers performance. The study created a hybrid dataset of 20,627 emails by combining 18,631 real messages from the Kaggle Email Classification Dataset with 1,996 synthetic emails. The synthetic emails were generated using four large language models LLaMA-3, Falcon, LLaVA, and Mistral to capture …

Task Complexity Matters: An Empirical Study Of Reasoning In Llms For Sentiment Analysis, Donghao Huang, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities have fueled a compelling narrative that reasoning universally improves performance across language tasks. We test this claim through a comprehensive evaluation of 504 configurations across seven model families—including adaptive, conditional, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning architectures—on sentiment analysis datasets of varying granularity (binary, five-class, and 27-class emotion). Our findings reveal that reasoning effectiveness is strongly task-dependent, challenging prevailing assumptions: (1) Reasoning shows task-complexity dependence—binary classification degrades up to -19.9 F1% points (pp), while 27-class emotion recognition gains up to  +16.0 pp; (2) Distilled reasoning variants underperform base models by 3–18 pp on simpler tasks, …

Ai-Powered Student Support And Development Platform, Wadha Rashed Alyammahi

Theses

Over the past few years, academic stress and student mental well-being have become critical concerns in educational settings, significantly affecting academic performance and overall quality of life. Students increasingly rely on digital platforms for academic support; however, many existing solutions lack the ability to adapt to users’ emotional states or provide personalized, context-aware assistance. In response to this challenge, this study presents the design and development of an intelligent, stress-aware conversational support system for students based on advanced natural language processing techniques and large language models.

The main goal of this study is to explore the effectiveness of an LLM-based …

Parenting Styles And Experiences Of Parents Of Children With Down Syndrome Displaying Aggressive Behaviors, Melanie Ray

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Religious Behaviors, Islamophobia, Gender Roles, Language Proficiency, And Education Levels On Mental Illness Stigma And Help-Seeking Behaviors Among Arab Women In The U.S., Rima Muhsen

Dissertations

The official U.S. census does not provide data on the number of Arab Americans in the United States, which hinders studies that focus on this population group to explore their needs and improve access to mental health services. Arab women in America represent a subgroup that has received insufficient attention from researchers, particularly regarding culturally sensitive topics such as mental health problems and their associated stigma. The influence of cultural, social, and religious factors on self-stigma associated with mental illness has not been adequately studied among this marginalized group. While previous research has suggested a relationship between self-stigma, social stigma …

Diverse Families Navigating Mental Health At The Pediatrician’S Office: A Mixed Methods Exploration Of The Interplay Of Stress, Culture, And Child Mental Health In The Primary Care Setting, Sara B. Budowsky

Dissertations

Low-income and ethnic minority youth experience high psychiatric need but persistently low participation in traditional mental health care. General pediatricians are often the first and only healthcare providers with whom many families engage around their child’s emotional and behavioral development. Using both quantitative analysis of retrospective secondary data and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of in-depth interviews with diverse caregivers, this project explored influencers of child mental health and family utilization of pediatric primary-care-based mental health services in the context of a uniquely multicultural clinic serving a predominantly Medicaid population. Three key findings include: 1) Caregiver Stress was a highly significant, …

The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence And Neuro-Linguistic Programming On Candidate Assessment In Talent Acquisition, Amna Fahim

Dissertations

Digitalization in human resource management led to the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) in recruitment practices. However, although AI and NLP were adopted globally, the empirical evidence in emerging countries, especially Pakistan, was scanty. Hence, this study investigated the impacts of individually and jointly implementing AI and NLP on candidate assessment outcomes in the telecommunications industry in Pakistan. According to the literature, this study is grounded in Technological Determinism, Machine Learning Theory, Psycholinguistic Theory, and Cognitive Behaviorism. A quantitative correlational approach was used in this study. To investigate the proposed research questions, descriptive statistics, Pearson …

Disability Employment In Côte D’Ivoire: Human Resources Managers’ Experiences And Challenges, Kinanpy Vanessa Toure

Dissertations

This study examined the critical role of human resource (HR) managers in promoting workforce integration and addressing the persistent barriers faced by people with disabilities (PWDs) in Côte d'Ivoire. Focusing on the perspectives, challenges, and lived experiences of HR managers, the research explored how inclusive workplace practices were developed and implemented within the Ivorian context. Employing a qualitative case study design, the study utilized semi-structured, scenario-based interviews and analyzed allowable public documents, specifically the Ivorian Labor Code, a relevant NGO publication addressing disability inclusion in Côte d’Ivoire, and the publicly available websites of participating organizations. This approach was intended to …

Leadership Without Assimilation: Reimagining Executive Leadership Development To Affirm Black Identity And Leadership Persistence, Nicole Monroe

Dissertations

Executive leadership development programs are often treated as race-neutral pathways to advancement, yet they frequently reflect dominant cultural norms that require leaders from marginalized communities to assimilate in order to succeed. This study examined the question: How can executive leadership development be restructured to affirm Black identity, cultural intelligence, and leadership persistence rather than require assimilation into exclusionary models? This study employs a convergent mixed-methods design, including interviews with 9 Black executive leaders and a document analysis of leadership development programs using the Assimilation Pressure Index. Findings reveal persistent assimilation pressures and identity negotiation within leadership development experiences, and document …

Technology Disruptions In Platform Ecosystems: Ai, Market Adaptation, And Digital Resignation, Eunah Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how technological disruptions reshape behavior, competition, and user response in platform ecosystems. Bringing together two studies of generative AI in digital labor market and one study of mandatory privacy disclosure in mobile app ecosystems, it argues that platform technologies do not affect participants uniformly. Instead, their effects are mediated by market structures, competitive dynamics, and platform dependence.

The first study shows that ChatGPT shifts workers’ human capital strategies by reducing investment in specialized depth while increasing skill diversity, revealing a move from exploitation toward exploration. Yet market rewards remain uneven, as workers who integrate AI with deep …

Beyond The Margins: The Praxis Of Black Joy As Resistance And The Transformation Of Black Male Identity In Community-Based Educational Counterspaces, Shaylona Sharri Wheeler

Social Justice in Educational Leadership EdD Dissertations

This study explored the self-perceptions of Black male students in secondary education in Oakland, California, with particular attention to racial and ethnic identity development. Through a qualitative research study, five Black male participants including educators, student participants, and alumni of Kingmakers of Oakland (KOO) engaged with identity collages and in-depth semi-structured interviews. Kingmakers of Oakland, a community-based organization dedicated to uplifting Black boys and men who’s culturally affirming practices shaped participants’ understanding of self, community, and their roles as emerging leaders within and beyond Oakland. This study was guided by two central research questions: (1) How does a community-based organization …

Grammar Expert: A University-Based Grammar Application To Support Grammar Learning And Writing Instruction, Ivy Chan, Yin Teng Chong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Technologies like web-based grammar applications have been integrated into classroom writing pedagogy to enhance students’ learning experiences. Drawing from qualitative findings from students’ interviews and reflection journals over one semester, this technology review focuses predominantly on university students’ perceptions towards an internally developed grammar application, Grammar Expert. Adopting the Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory (TACT) framework, the review identifies that GE’s affordances include promoting engagement in grammar learning, offering a flexible and encouraging environment, and ensuring real-world applicability, while its constraints involve aspects related to a limited user interface. Subsequently, the authors will present their pedagogical narrative on integrating this …

Screening Tools For Maternal Mental Health In Africa: A Systematic Review, Joyce Jebet, Irene Mageto, Benard Mutwiri, Abednego Ongeso, Ruth Wagathu, Rose Maina, Denis Munene, Kawira Kithuci, Peter Gatiti

School of Nursing & Midwifery, East Africa

Background:

Maternal health during pregnancy and the postnatal period encompasses mental health, which is a key aspect in enhancing a positive outcome. Despite screening for other possible complications during pregnancy and the postnatal period, very little attention has been paid to screening for mental health. Screening is a key tool in early diagnosis and, eventually, timely diagnosis and management in cases where complications arise.

Aim:

This study aimed to assess the available maternal mental health screening tools and compare the outcome on their utilization during pregnancy and postnatal periods in the African continent.

Methodology:

This was a …

The Spiritual Communities Of Bronies, Amie Sexton

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Bronies, adult, typically male, fans of the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, have long been regarded for seemingly breaking expectations around gender norms. This study finds that Bronies break expectations around what is expected of spiritualism. Through interviews and ethnographic observation of social media spaces Bronies frequent, it is found that spirituality based on the cartoon within the fandom is broad, diverse, and at times, normative. A proportionally-small group of fully sincere spiritualists with plural experiences and strong convictions inspire a much larger community of post-ironic aspirants. Aspirations towards spiritual experiences and the development of profound terminologies create …

An Inferential Analysis Of Lexical Networks, Christopher D. Gravelle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lexical networks are graphs where words are treated as nodes, and relations between words are treated as edges. The adoption of lexical networks in psycholinguistics is impeded by a lack of readily available inferential methods, which limits work to purely descriptive analyses with little ability to make inferences about what variables account for lexical network structure. The current research explores the use of latent space network models as a method for analyzing lexical networks. Latent space network models are latent variable regression models, which model the presence or strength of edges by estimating pairwise distances between nodes in a latent …

Twitteratura: Digital Social Reading And Active Reception Of Literary Texts In The Context Of Italian Contemporary Literature, Iuri Moscardi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Digital Social Reading (DSR) as a novel mode of literary engagement, focusing on the Italian project Twitteratura, a series of social reading experiments conducted on Twitter (2012–2016) and later on the Betwyll app. The research situates Twitteratura within the intersection of Reader-Response Theory, Digital Humanities, Reception Studies, and Sociology of Literature, demonstrating how digital environments reshape the act of reading and interpretation. Through detailed analyses of four DSR projects centered on major twentieth-century Italian authors—Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Natalia Ginzburg—this dissertation argues that Twitteratura provides a concrete, data-rich demonstration of Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response …

Covert Scrambling To The Edge In Tshangla: An Analysis Of Wh- In-Situ, Tshering Y. Dorji

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the syntactic derivation of wh- in-situ constructions in Tshangla, an understudied Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan. Argument wh-items can remain in-situ in islands—including sentential subjects, adjunct clauses, relative clauses, and coordinate structures—while projecting their scope to the matrix level. This island-insensitivity for certain wh-items suggests a lack of movement in the narrow syntax, yet diagnostic tests, including crossover effects, reconstruction effects, and parasitic gap licensing, provide compelling evidence for a movement-based account. I propose an analysis involving covert LF scrambling to the left edge of an island clause. This movement is driven by semantic requirements …

Gramsci’S ‘Democratic Philosopher’ And The Concept’S Foundations In Marxian Social Ontology, Eli Recht-Appel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis deals with the term ‘democratic philosopher’ from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In order to lay the groundwork for my distinct interpretation of the ‘democratic philosopher,’ I begin by providing an overview of Gramsci’s theory of the role of intellectuals in civil and political society. I then argue that the ‘democratic philosopher’ emerges from Gramsci’s typology of intellectuals but is a category which is both temporally and ontologically distinct from his more well-known concept of ‘organic intellectuals.’ ‘Organic intellectuals,’ intellectuals who co-develop alongside their fundamental social group or class, occupy a variety of cultural and political roles in …

The New Middle Cinema: Aesthetic Restraint, The Urban Middle Class, And The Reconfiguration Of Mainstream Bollywood (2007–2017), Hasnatun Nabi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 2007 and 2017, a distinctive wave of mainstream Hindi films, termed here as the “New Middle Cinema”, employed aesthetic restraint to reconfigure Bollywood’s identity in response to a rapidly changing India. Rejecting the industry’s traditional spectacle, melodrama, and visual opulence, these films embraced naturalistic visuals, grounded performances, character‑driven narratives, and a muted color palette. Drawing on industrial analysis, close textual reading, and audience reception data, this thesis examines seven representative films (Chak De India, Wake Up Sid, My Name is Khan, The Lunchbox, Piku, Kapoor & Sons, and Lipstick Under My Burkha …

Exploring Minor Feelings: Asian And Asian American’S Racialized Emotions, Identity, And Mental Health Amidst Covid-19, Kristina Mirasol Arevalo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the central role of racialized emotions in shaping how Asians/Asian Americans (A/AA) experience, interpret, and respond to racism, yet these emotional processes remain underexamined in psychological research. Rather than treating emotions as outcomes of discrimination, this dissertation conceptualizes racialized emotions as dynamic processes through which structural racism is experienced, interpreted, and embodied in everyday life. This framework positions racialized emotions as a key mechanism linking racialized social contexts to identity development and mental health. Across three studies using qualitative and quantitative methods, I examine how racialized emotions shape racial meaning-making, ethnic-racial identity, and psychological well-being among …