Digital Commons Network^™

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

Countersense, Avrie Allen

Masters Theses

countersense is an engagement with embodied experience, the conditions that shape it, and the sense we make of it. countersense is a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making in graphic design, performed between perception and meaning-making, self and material conditions, and always foregrounding what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.

Re-Assembly, Tonia Zhang

Masters Theses

Graphic design is bound by invisible defaults — software suites, standardized formats, and interfaces optimized for speed, profit, and frictionless output. Re-Assembly treats these standardized technologies not as neutral scaffolding, but as the primary material for critical inquiry. By dissecting this “default” infrastructure, the work exposes the logic of extraction and control baked into our templates and grids. Through a practice of subverting and rebuilding these everyday systems, design is pushed to operate under decentralized and open terms. This repositioning rejects the role of the designer as a surface technician, instead defining them as an active agent and an architect …

Productive Armature, Gabriel Ofem Peter

Masters Theses

What if water was all you had, what if your only source of survival was a body of water? I shudder to think that some people get to be put in this situation in the world we live in. As I understand the importance of water to survival, it is obvious that water can be the only lifeline of survival for a community. This is the experience for residents of Makoko, Lagos. Their survival depends on the Lagos Lagoon, a large body of water flowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. This research looks beyond the surface of what this community …

Watershed Amendments: Assembling New Pervious Ground From Landscape Waste, Sophie Kaplan-Bucciarelli

Masters Theses

In Providence, Rhode Island, much of the downtown area is built over a vast historic tidal estuary. Though we no longer see the salt marshes, wooded bluffs, or meadows that once characterized this landscape, we recognize their absence in contemporary crises of urban heat, flooding, polluted soils and stormwater runoff, and habitat loss. These conditions are particularly acute along the city’s industrialized river corridors, where vacant lots and parking areas sit idle, their history paved over and potential constrained by limited imagination and resources.

These lots - already experiments in fill and land building after centuries of disturbance - can …

Touching Ground: Embodied Methods Of Design, Mary A. Ritchie

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that landscape architecture must more intentionally integrate embodied, outdoor practices into the design process in order to foster a deeper understanding of and engagement with the primary medium of the field: the land itself. When we study a site through digital means, we detach our bodies and minds from the physical material we are working with. Embodied practices encourage a slower, more attentive mode of observation that engages both mind and body through tangible actions and sensory experiences. Through physical touch and sensory engagement, we gain insight into a place across many scales, from the granular texture …

Human After All, Ritu Mantri

Masters Theses

human

0. a being, relating to, or belonging to a person or to people.

1. an organism whose behaviour is structured by survival, instinct, and the immediate conditions of its environment.

2. a primate capable of thinking in abstractions. It makes marks, builds tools, and uses language to reflect on itself and the world around it.

3. a maker that increasingly constructs systems as a mirror of itself to store memory, meaning, and perception beyond the limits of its body.

4. an entity whose intelligence is increasingly indistinguishable from the tools and technological infrastructures it has built.

5. a superhuman …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Beyond The Tampon (Menstrual Equity & Justice Certification), Rucha Kale

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that while menstruation is a common life event, experiences related to menstruation are not inherently inequitable for a range of reasons that relate to wider currents that revolve around a narrow idea of the “default” human body. One imagined as non-menstruating, uninterrupted in its activities, or endowed with social, economic, and political agency. This project asks what becomes possible when those usually excluded from this norm are no longer treated as exceptions to accommodate, but as core and central constituencies to design with and for.

Using menstruation as a critical site of inquiry, the thesis first examines …

Frictional Intelligence, Posheng Cheng

Masters Theses

This is an experimental interaction design project that challenges anthropomorphism in human-computer interaction. In particular, the recent advancement of artificial intelligence technologies like Large Language Models has taken anthropomorphism to new heights. The conversational chatbot interface of AI prioritizes mimicking an inherently human communication medium to maximize human-likeness. However, anthropomorphism has several downsides. Conversational interfaces obscure the limitations and the tangible cost of the technology. They also imply fictional moral status and human-level cognitive capabilities, which means general public sentiment focuses on the ``overhyped'' excitement and fear rather than on other socio-ethical and capacity questions that are far more urgent …

Waterway: A Steam-Based Therapeutic Device System, Mingyuan Dong

Masters Theses

Across history and global cultures, water has played a central and often spiritual role in practices of care, from cleansing rituals to saunas and steam therapies. Yet, within contemporary product design, water is typically treated as a utility rather than as an experiential material capable of shaping perception, attention, and well-being. This thesis, Waterway, investigates how water, specifically in its steam state, can be designed as both a therapeutic medium and a ritualized experience that engages the body and mind.

Waterway proposes a steam-based wellness system that addresses physical pain and somatic discomfort while cultivating slower, more attentive interaction. Rather …

My Utopian Dream, Pingfan Que

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the author’s feelings of exclusion and marginality through a critique of mainstream social narratives, consumerism, and capitalism. Written in an autobiographical and essayistic mode, it combines personal

reflection with an exploration of the motivations behind an art practice shaped by the desire for equality, belonging and co-existence. Because the author’s artistic practice revolves strongly around personal narrative, the thesis uses subjective experience and metaphor to affect as both material and method. Through the allegorical figures of the Bluebird, the cat, and “blankness,” it explores the difficulty of social belonging, the pressure of adaptation, and the emotional struggle …

Sentience, Sheetal Agrawal

Masters Theses

The increasing urgency for sustainable and adaptive systems has driven research toward embedding intelligence directly into materials rather than relying solely on external sensing and control systems. This thesis explores how smart material1 embedded systems can be designed to recognize and respond to environmental signatures, defined as measurable patterns such as temperature fluctuations and mechanical forces. Central to this investigation is the integration of shape memory alloys, particularly Nitinol, with geometry-based actuation mechanisms that amplify material behavior into functional system responses.

The central argument is that designing with smart materials is a design problem, not primarily a materials science problem …

Love Letters To Insects: Affect-Based Science Communication, Manuela Guzmán

Masters Theses

Love Letters to Insects is a series of artists’ books that, mimicking a scientific insect collection, asks how visual narrative can shape and reframe our relationship to our environment.

Delving into the historical construction of the nature-culture divide, my thesis considers how colonial history has shaped modes of representation in Latin America that distance, objectify, and “other” living beings. Engaging with science, history, philosophy, and decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, as well as the work of comic artists and theorists, I think about the way I learned to interact with my environment and find in visual storytelling a place to challenge …

Gray Sheep, Jennifer Richie

Masters Theses

When material comforts are not available or accessible, how can we care for one another with what is available? Can these methods be scaled up? How can we emulate the tight cultural bonds of people who relied on each other due to their isolation from cultural centers (like towns and cities)? Is it possible to be self-sufficient and not wealthy in the 21st century or has this ability died with past generations?

Using only scraps, found and discarded materials, and items from RISD’s Loop Lab and Second Life, I explore the skills and engineering that would have been a necessary …

Somatic Prosthetics For Planetary Resonance, Disha Dharesh Kumar R

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a 'crisis of imagination', the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as conscious at different levels and participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Information Pansycishm, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. …

Social Soils: Reclaiming The Urban Pedosphere, Manal Dar

Masters Theses

Soil is in crisis. A third of the world’s soils are already degraded, and by 2050 that number may reach 90%, threatening biodiversity, climate stability, and food security. Urban soils, in particular, carry the layered records of industrial residue and environmental mistakes, disproportionately impacting immigrant and racialized communities.

The thesis asks what happens when landscape architecture begins from the root up, taking soil as both problem and possibility. Social Soils takes on the case study of Greenpoint, where both organic and inorganic contaminants in the soil such as lead, arsenic, PAHs and VOCs pose serious health risks to the inhabitants. …

Billiards Cosmographies, Camilla Radoyce, Camilla Radoyce

Masters Theses

The world is full of systems too large to change. Climate catastrophe, extraction, infrastructure, and property organize everyday life while remaining largely invisible in their totality. We possess the tools to alter these conditions, yet the same arrangements continue to return. The same worlds are built again and again.

Billiards Cosmographies treats billiards as a way of thinking about how humans organize around inherited systems and enduring forms. This thesis proposes the billiards table not as a fixed object, but as a gizmo: a device for imagining how new social worlds might be assembled from a constellation of what already …

Unleashing Material Agencies, Yahui Chen

Masters Theses

Contemporary architectural practice has come to rely on a narrow repertoire of high-energy industrial materials, giving rise to what might be called a material "hegemonic structure" in which certain substances and construction logics dominate at the expense of others. This dominance suppresses material diversity and limits architecture's capacity to align with ecological processes, producing a systemic metabolic imbalance within the built environment. At its root, this imbalance reflects a structural absence: the persistent treatment of architecture as a closed, controllable system that imposes human will upon matter while suppressing its inherent agency.

Engaging with what Jane Bennett terms "vital materialism," …

Embodied River: Deliberate Unbuilding In Post-Dam Landscapes, Travis Kelley

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the possibilities and challenges that legacy hydro-powered dams and mill complexes offer. Through historical and contemporary analysis of New England’s 14,000 dams and of a particular site in Maynard, Massachusetts, the research delves into the factors that make these interventions so challenging. It begins from an assumption rooted in the ethical and environmental imperative to remove or modify legacy dams, which are those built for a purpose that is no longer being utilized, and rejects the existing binary of “remove” vs “preserve,” which is the dominant narrative in the dam removal conversation as it exists in 2026. …

Embodied Leadership And Conditional Legitimacy: Critically Conscious Male Leaders Navigating Systems Of Power, Luis A. Legaspi

Dissertations

Leadership is not a neutral concept; it is shaped by overlapping systems of power, including empire, whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. These interlocking systems influence how leadership is defined, recognized, and legitimized, often privileging particular identities and forms of authority. The persistent underrepresentation of people of color, women, and queer individuals in positions of leadership reflects how dominant conceptions of leadership remain closely aligned with historically entrenched structures of power.

This critical narrative inquiry study examines how men, who disproportionately occupy positions of social and institutional authority, make meaning of masculinity, power, and leadership within these systems. Drawing on relational …

Compassion At The Core: Reimagining Schools As Centers Of Human Flourishing Through Youth-Led Action Research, Tara S. Waudby

Dissertations

In an increasingly competitive and standardized world, student wellbeing is a growing priority in K-12 education, alongside an emerging focus on human flourishing. While not commonly paired with wellbeing science, compassion is gaining prominence as an important systemic mindset. Focusing on compassion in schools cultivates attitudes of caring, openness, generosity, concern for others, and concern for the environment, leading to positive impacts on organizational culture and learning. This points to a broader question about what it means for students and communities to flourish. However, it is unclear how compassion is experienced in the lives of students. A common solution has …

Coenzyme Q10 Improves Functional And Structural Parameters Of Dairy Goat Sperm During Cooling And Cryopreservation, Ranadheer Narlagiri, Abdallah M. Shahat, Courtney Henry, Ashvini Pawar, Niki C. Whitley, Iman B. Shaheed, Mahipal Singh, Brou Kouakou, Irina A. Polejaeva, Adel R. Moawad

Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Science Faculty Publications

Cryopreservation of gametes is crucial for conserving genetic diversity in livestock and endangered species, but the process can significantly impair sperm quality due to oxidative stress. Our aim was to evaluate the impacts of coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) supplementation on the in vitro quality of cooled and cryopreserved goat semen. Semen samples collected from six mature Saanen bucks were pooled then diluted with AndroMed^® semen extender to a final concentration of 800 × 10⁶ sperm/mL. Diluted semen was supplemented with 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, and 20 µM CoQ10. Extended semen was either cooled at 4 °C for 72 …

Precision And Targeted Therapies In Curative And Metastatic Colorectal Cancer: Current Guidelines And Emerging Therapies, Yunus Emre Demirhan, Arshdeep Gill, Marcus Yoakam, Samir Dalia

Student Publications

As the global incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) continues to rise, particularly among young adults, the integration of precision medicine into clinical management represents an evolving priority. However, the clinical maturity and evidence base of precision oncology differ substantially between metastatic and curative-intent settings. In metastatic CRC, actionable biomarkers frequently direct therapy selection and sequencing, with several matched regimens now incorporated into routine practice. In contrast, curative-intent precision strategies must meet a higher evidentiary bar because many patients are cured by surgery and conventional adjuvant therapy alone. Consequently, any therapeutic escalation requires a clear survival benefit without imposing unnecessary toxicity. …

Secondary Teachers' Perspectives About The Difficulties Of Transitioning From Traditional To Student-Centered Teaching Approaches, Jo Ann Delgado-Garcia

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Generalizability Of An Ai-Based Mammogram Risk Score (Mrs) For Breast Cancer Among Diverse Populations Of Women, Shu Jiang, Debbie L Bennett, Peter Kraft, Graham A Colditz

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Conventional prediction models incorporating genetic and clinical factors including breast density underperform in non-European populations. We investigated an artificial intelligence-derived mammogram risk score (MRS), a summary of texture features that captures intrinsic breast-tissue characteristics-the substrate for cancer development. This study leveraged data from two North American screening cohorts totaling >226,000 women, including non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, East Asian, South Asian, and Indigenous women. MRS distributions showed nonsignificant shifts (and similar SDs) between cohorts and across race and ethnic subgroups. MRS increased with age and was significantly associated with breast cancer risk, with hazard ratios per SD ranging from 2.24 [95% …

O-Glcnacylation As A Metabolic Integrator In Cardiovascular Physiology And Disease, Saima Shakil Malik, Xinchun Pi, Liang Xie

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

No abstract provided.

Holistic Management Of Epilepsy In Adults With Intellectual Development Disorders, Elena Fonseca, Antonella Riva, Samuel López‐Maza, Malin Zaddach, Marie‐Claire Porter, Ingo Borggraefe, Lance Watkins, Andreas Schulze‐Bonhage, Rohit Shankar, Pasquale Striano, Lina Nashef

Peninsula Medical School

This seminar addresses the complexity of the management of epilepsy in adults with intellectual development disorders (IDD), advocating holistic and multidisciplinary care aligned with the learning objectives of the International League Against Epilepsy. Epilepsy is significantly more prevalent in people with IDD, presenting unique diagnostic, therapeutic, and psychosocial challenges. Accurate diagnosis is hampered by limitations in communication, necessitating reliance on caregivers' observations. In adults with IDD and epilepsy, utilization of diagnostic tools, e.g., video electroencephalograph (EEG) monitoring, is helpful but can be challenging. Management requires careful consideration of cognitive and behavioral comorbidities and the effects of antiseizure medications (ASMs) on …

Tuning The Neighborhood: Purifying People, Places, And Environments In Suburban Kolkata, Sourav Saha

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In modern science, disciplines such as physics, mechanical and civil engineering, seismology, and acoustics have conceptualized vibration as a quantifiable mechanical phenomenon, measured through the metrics of frequency, amplitude, and resonance. In contrast, scholarship in anthropology, musicology, and sound studies has approached vibration as a socio-historical, cultural, and political phenomenon. This article examines how vibration (spandan) operates as a metaphysical, sensory, and ethico-affective force that mediates relations among people, places, and environments. Focusing on the practice of satsang adhibesan (devotional congregation), the article demonstrates how members of the Deoghar-Satsang community participate in sonic rituals of prayer, silent chanting, meditation, sacred …

A Comprehensive Treatment Evaluation Protocol Utilizing A Customized Powerpoint Template For Esthetic Planning, James B. Wooddell Dds, Joseph Passaro Dds

Virginia Dental Journal

No abstract provided.