Digital Commons Network^™

The Schools, Saint Mary's College Of California

Undergraduate Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Core-Designated Courses, Saint Mary's College Of California

Undergraduate Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Undergraduate Academic Regulations, Saint Mary's College Of California

Undergraduate Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Majors, Minors, And Certificates, Saint Mary's College Of California

Undergraduate Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

2025-2026 Academic Catalog, Saint Mary's College Of California

Undergraduate Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Review Of Viri Dignitatem: Personhood, Masculinity, And Fatherhood In The Thought Of John Paul Ii, Christine Falk Dalessio

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Ghannouchi Test: The Compatibility Of Religious Ideas And Secular Democracy, Andrew P. Sheppe

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Secular, democratic societies and governments evolved out of religious societies and defined themselves partially in opposition to religious authority. This historical relationship has led to a debate about the compatibility between religious ideas and modern, secular society. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde posited that secular, democratic societies still depend on religious foundations. Jürgen Habermas disagrees, claiming that processes of rational dialogue can provide sufficient support.

Two prominent twentieth century theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr and Abraham Joshua Heschel demonstrate that democratic systems are enriched and protected by theistic ideas, thus supporting Böckenförde’s dictum. However, they both recognize the importance of epistemic humility and a …

Course Descriptions, Saint Mary's College Of California

Undergraduate Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Realism, Instrumentalism, And The Language Of Science Teaching: A Quantitative Study, James M. Almand

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, correlational study was to investigate how science educators' epistemological orientations, specifically, their leanings toward realism or instrumentalism, influence the degree of certainty in their instructional language. The study addressed a significant gap in science education literature by empirically analyzing whether educators' philosophical beliefs about the nature of scientific knowledge predict the language they use when teaching science. Data were collected through a researcher-developed survey, the Science Educators' Epistemological Beliefs and Classroom Language Practices Survey, which measured participants' epistemological positions and linguistic tendencies across a sample of current and former science educators in the United …

Hearing All The Colors: Stories Of Engagement From Teachers' Perspectives, Carolyn Allison

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study documented four high school English II End of Course teachers' stories about student engagement in the classroom. Students of color, in particular, have been maligned for underperformance on state-mandated tests. Instead of focusing on the despairing headlines and data, this study focused on how teachers follow the state standards and district curriculum guides to increase success. The teachers' authentic voices on student engagement shine through their stories. Student engagement is not a one-size-fits-all scenario which these teachers prove.

The teachers' stories served as the data for this study. The data was viewed through the lens of …

Apathy Or Agency: Exploring Civic Engagement With Ap Psychology Students, Regina Dilley

Theses and Dissertations

Sensing my high school students’ apathy toward civic engagement, I used a community of inquiry framework to address this problem of practice. Through mixed-methods action research, I explored participants’ perspectives on community, civic engagement, and their involvement in both spheres. A community of inquiry framework was the foundation for my research questions, and as I collected data, I launched an intervention based upon my findings. Although the results of this study were not statistically significant and are not generalizable, I collected a wealth of survey, interview, and reflection data from 48 students across two classes. Analysis grounded in my observations …

A Spatial Examination Of Colonial Anglican Landscapes In The South Carolina Lowcountry, Madeleine Paige Blaze

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project will focus on the early colonial landscape of the South Carolina Lowcountry to analyze the placement of Anglican churches that were built between 1700 and 1730. My research will expand on previous analysis of the Anglican landscape to incorporate additional components that will aid in a better understanding of regional organization. To do so, I will incorporate a landscape archaeology theoretical frame that will allow my research questions to be explored. This project will also include GIS analysis to examine spatial visualizations, navigation paths, and colonial relationships to understand the Church’s early interactions with and on the …

Service Encounter Behavior (Seb) In Higher Education: The ‘Moment Of Truth’ From A Dyadic Perspective In Programme Administration, Lai Hong Ng, Lai Ling Ng

Journal of Global Education and Research

The global increase in demand for higher education has intensified competition and led to the marketisation of higher education. It is pertinent to manage service quality because students rely on the service encounter behavior (SEB) of employees when judging service encounters. This research gains insights into the SEB of student-employee in programme administration, which are influenced by situational definitions and situational roles (role expectations and role response), from a dyadic perspective. The critical incident technique is employed to elicit employees’ experiences in service encounters. The outcome of this research offers an SEB guide, identifying situational roles in a range of …

Conjuring Realities: Southern Supernaturalism And Race From The Antebellum Era To The Early Twentieth Century, Dylan T. Kobus

Theses and Dissertations

Conjure practices in the nineteenth-century American South, such as “Hoodoo” or “Voodoo,” are commonly portrayed as primarily “black” beliefs or entrenched in “Africanistic” cultures. For the enslaved, their black spiritual systems, including conjure, were a powerful tool of resistance against the white enslaver. Black conjure practitioners established themselves as an affordable and pervasive medical alternative to often ineffective or harmful professional medicines for black and white Southerners, regardless of class. In this way, conjure challenged the authority of racial capitalism and destabilized the perceived moral and intellectual superiority of whiteness. Moreover, by examining legal documents, newspapers, fictional literature, and oral …

Struggling Access To Justice Through Mediation In Bangladesh: Headway Lessons From Australia, Jamila A. Chowdhury, Mehnaz Siddiqui

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

Enormous case backlog and protracted delays in courts are hindering access to justice in Bangladesh. Consequently, an initiative to provide quick and low-cost consensual justice through mediation was first initiated in the family courts of Bangladesh in the year 2000. However, although after an initial success, the system has been struggling over the decades. While contemporary research has identified various constraints causing such meager disposal of cases in family courts, using expert interviews of family court judges and relevant literature review on Australian family courts, this Chapter reiterates such constraints to generate relevant headway lessons from Australia that has excelled …

Editing Japan: Pornography Commentary As Postcolonial Revenge In China's Digital Sphere, Yichi Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines how Chinese male audiences reconstruct postcolonial masculinity through the consumption and reinterpretation of Japanese pornography. By analyzing commentary videos produced by "Team Strawberry," I argue that this phenomenon constitutes a symbolic revenge against Japan's historical dominance. Through degrading Japanese female performers and mocking Japanese culture and male actors, Chinese viewers invert colonial hierarchies, transforming sexual consumption into a nationalist project. However, this mimicry of colonial violence ultimately reinforces patriarchal structures rather than subverting them, while also framing nationalism through sexual conquest that mimics collective historical trauma. The re-editing and mocking of Japanese pornography by Chinese content creators …

Birth Of Inspiration: York County, South Carolina, The Setting That Inspired The Clansman, Zachary Alan Lemhouse

Theses and Dissertations

In 1905, Thomas Dixon, Jr., published his controversial novel The Clansman. Monopolizing on racist sentiments held by white southerners, Dixon’s narrative contributed significantly to the perception of the Lost Cause myth and defense of white supremacy in America. The novel, and its subsequent adaptations as a play and the film Birth of a Nation, was inspired by actual events that occurred in Dixon’s ancestral home of York County, South Carolina. Located in the northernmost region of South Carolina’s Piedmont, York County played host to a struggle for civil rights during the Reconstruction Era that garnered national and international …

Ideologies Of Language, Race, And Time In U.S. Political Discourses, Paige Pinkston

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation follows how public discourses that emerged during the 2020- 2022 “Critical Race Theory Panic” played out in different contexts and at different scales in the United States, from conservative national media to South Carolina legislative action. While political discourse has become increasingly nationalized (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014), new legislation has largely taken place at the state level (Johnson, 2022). Drawing on over two years of fieldwork and methods of discourse analysis, I thus examine how nationally circulating discourses about race and racism were taken up by South Carolinians to create partisan alignments and distinctions as well as to …

“Cruelty, Bloodshed, And Degradation From The Inauspicious Conjunction Of Stars”: “Magic” In The 1857-58 Rebellion In India, Summer Bordon

Theses and Dissertations

During the 1857-58 rebellion in India, British soldiers and civilians saw ample evidence of Indian belief in “magic”. Prophecies about the end of British rule were implicated in inciting rebellion. When a solar eclipse occurred during the British army’s campaign to regain control of Delhi, victory was attributed partially to Indian superstition. Much of the historiography of the 1857-58 rebellion has uncritically accepted British sources’ conceptions of Indian “magic”, dismissing it as superstitious, politically hindering, and divorced from material reality. Yet, British understandings of magic cannot be taken at face value. Instead, they must be located within broader colonial narratives …

Exploring The Holistic Wellness Of Black Women Counselors, Shanta A. Jerideau

Theses and Dissertations

Counselor wellness is crucial for clinician longevity and ethical practice. However, there is limited literature on the holistic wellness of Black women counselors. This manuscript probes into the lived experiences of Black women counselors, particularly in relation to the sociopolitical climate and racial injustices in the United States. Utilizing Consensual Qualitative Research, we examine the experiences of 15 Black women counselors working in counselor education, private practice, and community agencies within the Southeast Region of the United States. We anticipate this approach will enhance counselor education literature and foster increased peer support.

Climate Fiction Of The Anthropocene, Joseph Paul Ferguson, Cassandra Tytler, Peta J. White, Susan Oliver

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

No abstract provided.

Post-Anthropocene Provocations: Human-Sized Scholars’ Rocks, Cronenbergian Flesh Caves And Zen Garden Design Cues For A Future Proof Re(Image)Ining, Brenton Rossow, Darren Tynan

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This research explores concertinaing past, present and future interventional creative and pedagogical practices to address the challenges of the Post-Anthropocene era. We argue that the Post-Anthropocene is marked by biotechnological entanglements, environmental violence and digital overstimulation. The discussions herein critique a hyperattentive achievement society characterised by a scattering of attention, a near-constant screen-mediated stream of digital material and tasks and the commodification of leisure time. Enlisting Byung-Chul Han’s concept of hyperattention and themes and motifs from David Cronenberg’s films, the authors propose “FUTURE PROOF re(image)ining” as a collaborative Cli-Fi narrative concept. The project reimagines objects from an initial art installation …

Justice Making, Justice Spaces And Justice Users, Dean D' Cruz, Reboni Saha, Siddhrath Peter De Souza, Varsha Aithala, Naomi Jose, Sharada Kerkar

Books

This insightful book reimagines how justice systems can be reshaped to better serve the needs of people—especially those who are disadvantaged. Focusing on public spaces in Goa—courtrooms, police stations, protest sites, and classrooms—it asks how these spaces are structured, and what must change for them to truly support those seeking justice.

Drawing on insights from practitioners, activists, and researchers, the authors explore how ordinary people relate to these spaces and the barriers they face. Through grounded case studies and theoretical reflections, the chapters of this work offer a wider commentary on how we might design justice systems that are more …

Wild Hogs In The Water: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies Of Reservoir Storage In Texas, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Reservoirs are developed to store water in reserve for future use. But once built, reservoir sites inevitably hold more than just water, often serving as a key habitat for a range of species. This paper examines how one such animal has transformed water storage facilities and nearby landscapes into contested ground in urbanising areas of Texas, USA. Living around the reservoirs, feral hogs complicate the process of urbanisation by degrading the stockpiled water and infrastructure at the storage sites themselves and by damaging private property throughout the surrounding landscape. Tracking local efforts to manage the hogs, the case study illustrates …

Political Ecologies Of Storage For The 21st Century, Sayd Randle, Matthew Archer

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

New resource storage arrangements are proliferating rapidly both in terms of physical infrastructures-for the storage of things like "clean" energy, nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, fresh water, and data-and as part of a set of discursive moves that reinforce a vision of a near future world in which problems of climate change mitigation and adaptation in particular (but also issues like energy security, water security, industry growth, etc.) are solved through eco-modernist techno-fixes. This Symposium sketches the contours of a framework we term political ecologies of storage. In doing so, we treat storage as both a potent imaginary and a concrete …

Calibrated Structures Of Feeling: Cultural Citizenship And The Reproduction Of The Military In Singapore, John Lowe, George Wong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article discusses the nexus between Raymond Williams’ structure of feelings and the reproduction of military masculinity as cultural citizenship. By placing the gaze upon National Service in the Singapore Armed Forces as a rite of passage into manhood, this work uses representations of the military in popular culture and souvenirs/ephemera to elucidate how structures of feeling are calibrated as masculinity the state wants its citizenry to internalize. These render military masculinity emergent for Singaporean male bodies. With the male body functioning as an important edifice of the military, emotions toward military service are the connective tissue between enactments of …

Religious Beliefs, Cooperation, And Evolutionary Mechanisms, Nicole Fellice Ko, Norman P. Li

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Religion is an organized system of spiritual beliefs, practices, and rituals that often involve a sense of the divine (Schilbrack, 2022). An evolutionary mechanism is an evolved set of traits that interpret environmental inputs and generate behavioral responses that enhance survival or reproductive success (Li et al., 2018). Cooperation refers to the act of individuals or groups working together to achieve a shared goal or mutual benefit (Alós-Ferrer & Garagnani, 2020).

The Miseducation Of Model Minorities: The Gospel Of ‘Schoolvation’ And The Myth Of The Schooled Society, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The ‘model minority’, the phenomenon of some ‘minority’ communities (or some members within them) achieving social and economic advancement despite encountering the difficulties of assimilating into a mainstream society, is often described as a myth, especially as one of the central problematics in Asian American studies. Usually, the modern use of the word myth is pejorative: the model minority in this sense refers to a false empirical description of some minorities and should be quantitatively disaggregated and qualitatively debunked. In this article, I want to explore the model minority as another kind of myth, in the classical sense of mythos, …

Manufactured Superiority: The War On Terror, United States Dominated Media, And The Global Implications Of American Exceptionalism, Ayan Mohamed

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

This research examines American exceptionalism and its effects on the global perception of the United States, specifically how it shapes international narratives, marginalizes alternative perspectives, and reinforces a ruling American worldview that inhibits effective engagement and cross-cultural dialogue. The study will focus on two key areas: U.S. military interventions and media representation. First, it will analyze the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq (2001–2021), assessing how U.S.-enforced destabilization in the region perpetuates hegemonic control. Second, it will investigate U.S.-backed, Israel-led Palestinian erasure as a case study of interventionism that positions the U.S. as the self-designated enforcer of global order. …

The State Of The Science Of Natural Family Planning: A Report From Nfp Scientists’ Meeting Held In Orlando, Fl, September 4, 2024, Michael D. Manhart, Richard J. Fehring

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

A one-day meeting was held as a pre-conference to the Catholic Medical Association Annual Educational event in 2024. A panel of eighteen physicians, scientists, and researchers involved in NFP work was convened to review the available evidence in four topical areas: (i) evidence for effectiveness of NFP methods to postpone and achieve pregnancy, (ii) evidence for effectiveness in the postpartum and perimenopause transition periods, (iii) evaluate the current state of technology in NFP (specifically app and quantitative hormone monitoring), and (iv) evidence examining the impact of NFP on marital relations. In each topical area, the panel worked to reach a …