Digital Commons Network^™

Cruel Deference: State Narratives, Credibility, And Power In Convention Against Torture Adjudications, Amelia S. Mcgowan

Saint Louis University Law Journal

U.S. courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) have long treated the U.S. Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices as uniquely authoritative sources for determining country conditions in claims for immigration protection. In its 2025 precedential opinion Matter of A-A-R-, the BIA extended this deference to claims for protection under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). This decision and others like it raise the question: whose voice matters most when evaluating the likelihood that an applicant faces torture, and why?

This Article critically examines the evolution of the Country Reports’ authoritative role in U.S. protection …

The Odyssey Of Third Country Removal, Matthew Boaz

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In February 2025, a hotel in Panama became a focal point for international media when a group of several hundred asylum seekers from countries such as Iran, Turkey, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka were suddenly sent there from the U.S. without legal recourse or notice of their destination. The majority of the migrants agreed to repatriation to their home countries, but a significant number remain, seeking to navigate an asylum system that seems intent on denying relief, with few other options available. A short time later, a similar cohort arrived in Costa Rica with an eerily familiar tale to tell. …

Filling The Network Gap In Research Ethics: Analyzing Ethical Issues At Scale In Big Team Science, Susan Wolf, Gillian H. Roehrig, Timothy L. Pruett, Korkut Uygun, Claire Colby Mcvan, Evelyn Brister, Shawneequa L. Callier, Alexander M. Capron, James F. Childress, Rosario Isasi, Andrew D. Maynard, Kenneth A. Oye, Paul B. Thompson, Terrance R. Tiersch

Articles

Scientific research increasingly involves large, multidisciplinary teams networked across multiple institutions to develop new technologies. Despite the rise of complex research networks and big team science, there has been too little analysis to date of the ethical challenges facing these networks. The extensive literature on the ethical issues confronting individual researchers and small teams (the microlevel) and on the larger societal challenges flowing from research and new technology (the macrolevel) leaves a troubling gap in between, at the mesolevel of the research network involved in big team science. Yet the ability of complex networks to conduct research ethically—which is essential …

Advancing Neurotech Justice In Youth Digital Mental Health: Insights From An Interdisciplinary And Cross-Generational Workshop, Francis X. Shen, Craig W. Mcfarland, Donnella S. Comeau, Leo Anthony Celi, Benjamin C. Silverman, Sepideh Abdi, Mahsa Alborzi Avanaki

Articles

Researchers and clinicians are increasingly looking to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools to improve psychiatric care. Of particular promise is addressing the youth mental health crisis. Yet, the introduction of AI-enabled digital technologies for psychiatric treatment of young adults raises a host of ethical, legal, and societal issues (ELSI). To provide guidance in addressing these issues, we convened a two-day meeting at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University: Advancing Neurotech Justice in Mental Health: Insights from an Interdisciplinary and Cross-Generational Workshop. The meeting brought together a diverse cohort of 17 experts and 5 students …

Ttt Sahur- Team Traveling Therapist Supporting Allies In Health Urban Residents, Victoria Chan, Allison Gonzalez, Neri Nchami, Addisen Suber, Jerry Wang, Christopher Celarie

DC Health and Academic Prep Program (DC HAPP)

High levels of employee burnout and turnover are prevalent within mental health clinics across DC 1. High employee burnout and turnover affect both employees and patients. It delays care for patients because of the smaller number of employees and impedes the quality of care patients receive. It also adds to the stress that the employees are experiencing with the new workload, causing more burnout and continuing the cycle of high employee turnover 2 . This project is aims to address the employee burnout and turnover of mental health clinics by bolstering the current workforce. In this project, second year master …

Town Of Gilmanton Annual Reports Of The Officers, Trustees, Agents, Committees, And Organizations Of The Town Of Gilmanton, New Hampshire For The Year 2025, Gilmanton Town Representatives

Gilmanton, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

Lawn And Order: Government Information On Gardening, Arizona State University, Fletcher Library

Agriculture/Horticulture

Photographs, Bibliography, and Collection Description for a display of government documents from Fletcher Library at Arizona State University.

Testing Spatial Memory And Associative Learning In Planaria With Chronic Nicotine Usage, Gregory Smith, Jessica Toledo-Franco

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Nicotine is a psychoactive substance, commonly delivered through e-cigarettes. In the short-term, nicotine can cause an individual to feel enhancements in attentiveness, while also reducing stress or withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal generally refers to the phase after quitting or reducing the use of a substance; however, in nicotine, these symptoms can be seen as early as the first usage. Unlike most studies that have focused on mammals as the subject, the goal of this study is to investigate how nicotine addiction and withdrawal influences learning and memory through Dugesia dortocephala in T and Y mazes. As the concentration of nicotine increases, …

The Ai Advocate: Tracking The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Trial Advocacy, John G. Browning

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

In his annual State of the Judiciary address on December 31, 2023, Chief Justice John G. Roberts chose to focus on the use of generative AI. He cautioned that while AI "has great potential to dramatically increase access to key information for lawyers," its use "requires caution and humility" because of the risk of "dehumanizing the law." Chief Justice Roberts' timely warning, made at the height of concerns nationally about lawyers relying on fabricated case citations caused by the "hallucinations" of generative AI, could have just as easily been targeted not only to the legal profession generally, but to trial …

Ai Deference, Kevin Frazier

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Existing AI tools allow administrative agencies to chart a more aggressive regulatory path. AI can identify which statutes and regulations, if reinterpreted, would further the agency's agenda. AI can also draft new regulations and forecast their likely effects.

No laws explicitly ban agencies from using AI. In fact, successive presidential administrations have encouraged agencies to increase their use of AI. Cities and states have already been integrating AI into ever more substantive governance tasks. Governments around the world are likewise finding novel ways to incorporate AI into drafting, enforcing, and adjudicating laws. In short, it is a matter of when, …

Razorback Gymnastics Record Book, 2026, University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Athletics Media Relations

Arkansas Gymnastics

No abstract provided.

A Qualitative Study Of Spanish Speaking Latino/A Teachers And Their Impact On Spanish Speaking Latino/A Students, Catherine Bennett Nwosu

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Despite the rapid growth of Spanish speaking students in U.S. schools, Spanish speaking educators remain underrepresented in the teaching workforce. This qualitative study examines the perceived impact of Spanish speaking educators on Spanish speaking students and families. Guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latino/a Critical Theory (LatCrit), this study explores how language, identity, and lived experience shape educators’ practices within school communities. Data was collected through focus group interviews with four Spanish speaking educators working in public schools in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States serving Spanish speaking students. Thematic analysis revealed that Spanish speaking educators serve as …

Backward, Benjamin W. Abbott

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

Backward is a solo show about a man who, when he turns forty-five, starts living backward in time. Every day he wakes up, he has traveled back to the day before the one he just lived and there's nothing he can do to stop it. As he relives his life in reverse, he must confront his failures as a husband and father. Even as he learns the lessons necessary to repair them, those relationships get left behind in the future. He continues moving backward and eventually must confront the most difficult relationship of them all: his relationship with his own …

Rainbows And Shades Of Gray, Lillian I. Savage

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

Rainbows and Shades of Gray is an original musical that explores the complexities of addiction, memory, and grief through a nonlinear, liminal narrative structure. The story follows Aaron, a deceased veteran, father, and musician forced to confront moments from his life as he grapples with the impact of his addiction on his relationships with his wife, Danielle, and daughter, Natalia. Through a series of fragmented scenes spanning past and present, the musical examines the emotional aftermath of trauma and the ways in which love persists despite harm.

Blending dialogue and original music, the piece uses song as a narrative device …

Leveraging Research-Based Knowledge Translation Via Rural Libraries To Improve Maize Postharvest Practices In Uganda, Jackline Estomihi Kiwelu, Patrick Ngulube

Libraries

Background: Rural community libraries are increasingly recognised for providing localised knowledge, yet their potential to support agricultural extension services and improve access to postharvest knowledge in Uganda remains underexplored.
Objectives: This study examined the postharvest information needs of smallholder maize farmers and explored how community libraries can be leveraged to translate and repackage research-based knowledge to meet these needs.
Method: A mixed-methods parallel design was employed. Data were collected from a survey of 312 maize farmers, personal interviews and two focus group discussions (FGDs) with 22 extension workers and four librarians. Desk research was conducted to analyse relevant documents. Quantitative …

Ashley Hanson '82-Bruce Morbit '76 And Joe Mastrangelo '76, Ashley Hanson, Bruce Morbit, Joseph Mastrangelo

Alumni Oral History Project

No abstract provided.

Balancing Face-To-Face And Digital Communication: The Role Of Relationship Maintenance In Dual-Earning Families, Tamara D. Afifi, America L. Edwards

Information Science Faculty Publications

This study examines how face-to-face (FtF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC) contribute to relationship maintenance and resilience in dual-earning families, a largely overlooked area in family communication research. Guided by the theory of resilience and relational load (TRRL), we test how ongoing FtF and CMC maintenance behaviors predicted well-being across a week among 62 families (i.e., two parents and one adolescent). Using a week-long daily diary and physiological measures (cortisol and IL-6 assays), we assess perceived stress, mental health, and loneliness. Findings suggest that both FtF and CMC maintenance are associated with lower stress and better well-being, with FtF showing somewhat …

Play Without Pain: A Comprehensive Overview About Playing Injuries In Instrumentalists, Emily Hofer

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

Clara Schumann, renowned composer and pianist, writes to Johannes Brahms while on her annual English tour: “I have good news for you in that I am being afforded an enthusiastic reception, people say I have never played so well, etc.; but I am suffering terribly with rheumatism in my arm and finger muscles…I am absolutely exhausted” (Altenmüller & Kopiez 110). Clara had been enduring concert after concert to financially support her family, and though she received high praise for performances, her health was deteriorating because of it. Many musicians like Clara train rigorously, dedicating thousands of hours to master their …

Muted Trumpets As A Sonic Representation Of Isolation Or Solitude, Caroline Reyner

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

The sound of a trumpet can be used in a variety of applications. This is due to its ability to adjust its timbre to fit different situations. Among the most common adjectives applied to brass instruments, especially trumpets, are terms associated with bright, metallic, or brassy qualities (Wallmark 587-588). While these are timbral qualities of the trumpet, they are not the only ones of which the trumpet is capable. According to ACTOR Research, the following timbres of the trumpet have been extracted from various orchestration treatises – agile, blaring, brassy, bright, brilliant, crisp, flexible, piercing, powerful, responsive, sharp, smooth, and …

A Societal Critique: Reading Lady Audley’S Secret Through Its Periodical Context, Alison Marshall

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

Lady Audley’s Secret has been defined as a sensation novel, a melodramatic genre from the 1860s. It depicts the life and many personas of Helen Talboys. Helen lived a poor life with her father until she married her husband, George Talboys, a man with access to his father’s fortune. Upon hearing of this union, George’s father revokes access to those funds, leaving them with very little money. After George leaves with a promise to make his own fortune in the gold mines, Helen fakes her death and becomes Lucy Graham. While working as a governess, Lucy marries above her class, …

Evaluating The Effects Of Biochar-Based Slow-Release Nitrogen Fertilizers On Camelina Growth And Development In Greenhouse, Lily Geffre

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

The world’s dependence on conventional fertilizers such as urea allows for significantly increased crop yields but has also greatly contributed to the environmental degradation of agricultural lands and surrounding areas. Biochar-based slow-release fertilizers (SRFs) are an ideal alternative to conventional fertilizers, as they enhance nutrient uptake and retention, improve soil properties, and reduce nutrient leaching and volatilization. This study evaluated the effects of biochar-based SRFs, in comparison with traditional non-SRF fertilizers, on the vegetative growth, physiological growth, and yield of Camelina sativa under greenhouse conditions. Conventional urea yielded the best overall crop results, but a coated biochar-based urea SRF achieved …

Homemaking In Hashtags: A Rhetorical Study Of Hannah Neeleman’S #Tradwife Narrative Across Social Media, Emma Areson

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

In a media landscape saturated with curated images of domesticity, the emergence of the “tradwife” aesthetic demands critical scrutiny as a site where gender, consumption, and ideology converge. Hannah Neeleman, better known to her followers as Ballerina Farm, has become a central figure in this phenomenon, leveraging Instagram and TikTok to craft an idealized vision of rural homemaking, motherhood, and faith. A former Juilliard-trained ballerina and beauty pageant winner, Neeleman now manages a multimillion-dollar farm brand that combines self-reliance with aspirational aesthetics. Her image gained even wider visibility and scrutiny after The Times published an in-depth profile that sparked debate …

Chronic Alcohol Consumption Disrupts The Gut Microbial And Metabolic Landscapes, Madison B. Blanton, Ethan G. Napier, Katelyn E. Keen, Ethan V. Stuart, Isaac R. Cinco, Hami Hemati, Ronald C. Bruntz, Landon Wilson, Stephen Barnes, Rupak Khadka, Kathleen A. Grant, Ilhem Messaoudi

Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty Publications

Introduction: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) increases incidence of infections, organ damage, and cancers. Aberrant inflammation is likely a driver of these adverse outcomes. Indeed, chronic alcohol consumption (CAC) rewires macrophages/monocytes toward a hyper-inflammatory phenotype. Prior studies showed increased gut permeability and dysbiosis. Translocation of host- and microbial-derived metabolites could trigger the hyper-inflammatory responses generated by macrophages/monocytes. However, the exact changes in these metabolites remain poorly defined due to confounders that complicate clinical studies and the differences between human and rodent gut microbiomes.

Methods: Here, we utilized a non-human primate model of ethanol self-administration to characterize alcohol-induced alterations in gut microbes …

Beyond Fixed Thresholds: Per-Label Calibration For Fine-Grained Emotion Detection On The Goemotions Dataset, Sai Puneet Naga Venkata Subramanyam Patchipulusu

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

This study investigates the effectiveness of five community fine-tuned transformer models for fine-grained emotion detection on the GoEmotions dataset: SamLowe/roberta- base-go_emotions (RoBERTa-base), cirimus/modernbert-base-go-emotions (ModernBERT), mrm8488/deberta-v3-base-goemotions (DeBERTa-v3-base), bhadresh-savani/bert-base-go- emotion (BERT-base-cased),and tasinhoque/distilbert-go-emotions (DistilBERT) . While the original GoEmotions research by Demszky et al. (2020) established a BERT-base baseline with a macro-F1 of 0.46, this thesis extends that work through independent empirical evaluation of five derivative models, systematic per-label threshold optimization, and comparative analysis of architectural trade-offs across the full transformer model family. Using the GoEmotions simplified test split (5,427 examples across 28 categories), all five models were evaluated at a fixed 0.5 …

Family Functioning And Stress In Arab American Young Adults, Sahar Kaouk

Selected Full-Text Dissertations 2020-

Family functioning plays a central role in the lives of Arab American young adults, yet little research has examined how family dynamics relate to stress in this population. Guided by Bowen’s (1978) Family Systems Theory, this study investigated the relationship between family functioning and perceived stress, as well as the roles of Differentiation of Self (DoS), Reflective Coping, and collectivistic orientation. Participants included 225 young adults ages 18 to 25 who self-identified as Arab American. Data were collected using self-report measures, and structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model. Results indicated that family functioning was indirectly related …

Terrorism Research: Where Are We Going?, Clark Mccauley, Sophia Moskalenko

Psychology Faculty Research and Scholarship

This chapter brings together some of the research directions suggested in earlier pages of the  Handbook. Attention is drawn to P/CVE issues, the uncertain relation of radicalized ideas and terrorist violence, the potential of polling and survey research, the importance of moral judgment in radicalization to political violence, and the value of comparing terrorists with different streams of activists working for the same cause.

An Intersectional Investigation Of Gendered Racial Microaggressions And Asian American Women’S Body Appreciation, Liujun Chen, Xiaoyin Liu, Thomas P. Le, Lydia H.R. Ahn

Psychology Faculty Research and Scholarship

While some research has explored the cultural correlates of negative body image among Asian American women, fewer studies have addressed what may contribute to body appreciation among Asian American women. We recruited a sample of 234 Asian American women via Prolific, who completed an online survey. Specifically, the present study examined (1) whether gendered racial microaggressions were associated with body appreciation among Asian American women, (2) whether resistance and empowerment against racism moderated this association, and (3) whether three subscales of internalized racism—self-negativity, weakness stereotypes, and appearance bias—mediated this association. A regression analysis showed a negative association between gendered racial …

The Impact Of Intimate Partner Violence On Victims’ Mental, Physical, And Economic Well-Being: A Comprehensive Literature Review (2012–2022), Kerry Lee, Jennifer L. Mezzapelle, Lyric N. Russo, Emily M. Douglas, Denise A. Hines

Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research Faculty Research and Scholarship

Intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a significant global public health concern, drawing increasing attention due to its profound impact on victims. A systematic review by Lawrence et al. (2012) demonstrated that IPV victims of physical and psychological abuse experience higher rates of physical injuries, poorer health outcomes, poorer physical functioning, and increased psychological symptoms compared to non-victimized individuals. Building on this work, we conducted a systematic review of 159 quantitative studies published between 2012 and 2022.

Across the included studies, more than half had samples ranging between 100-500 (52.8%, n=84) in size, were cross-sectional (84.9%; n=135), and utilized …