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Advancing Maternal Health Equity In Nebraska: Examining Prenatal Care Access Disparities, Policy Context, And Doula Integration As A Complementary Solution, Marlette Grace Dulcinee Mabiala-Maye

Theses & Dissertations

Maternal health inequities persist across the United States, with Black, Native American, and immigrant-origin women facing disproportionate barriers to timely prenatal care. This dissertation examined access to prenatal care in Nebraska, a mixed rural and urban state with extensive maternity care deserts, through three interrelated aims. Aim 1 analyzed PRAMS data using survey-weighted regression with race-by-socioeconomic-status interactions to characterize disparities in the timing and barriers to care. Aim 2 evaluated the state’s October 2020 Medicaid expansion across pre-pandemic, acute pandemic, and post-expansion periods. Aim 3 applied qualitative description and the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research to interviews withtwenty-three maternity care …

Land-Use Transitions And Carbon Emissions Of Aquaculture Expansion In The Brazilian Amazon, Felipe S. Pacheco, Sebastian A. Heilpern, Rafael M. Almeida, Suresh A. Sethi, Marcela Miranda, Nicholas Ray, Laura Greenstreet, Joshua Fan, Brendan H. Rappazzo, Marcelo Gomes Da Silva

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Accounting for land-use change underlying food sector expansion is critical for conserving ecosystem integrity. This challenge is particularly acute in the Amazon, where the conversion of forests for food production is pronounced and has broad implications for global biodiversity and the cycling of water and carbon. Here, we analyze land-use transitions associated with aquaculture development in the Brazilian Amazon. We found that a 450-fold increase in aquaculture pond area from 1985 to 2022 occurred primarily on pasturelands (87%) but also included wetland conversion (4%) and deforestation (5%). Notably, continued growth can be sustained within already altered landscapes: In Rondônia, the …

Pushed To The Edges? Electivity Patterns Of Urban Stream Homeless Encampments In Environmentally Burdened Areas, Serena Alexander, Bennett Williamson, Jeff Wootton, Costanza Rampini, Gregory Brian Pasternack, Yufang Jin, Rune Storesund, Igor Lacan

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Urban stream corridors in the San Francisco Bay Area have increasingly become locations for homeless encampments, yet little is known about the environmental conditions of these spaces. This study uses a geospatial electivity index to examine whether urban stream encampments in Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties are disproportionately located in census tracts with high pollution burdens, as measured by CalEnviroScreen 4.0. Findings show a statistically significant overrepresentation of encampments in census tracts in the top 25% of pollution and vulnerability scores, and a significant underrepresentation in lower-pollution areas. These results suggest that homeless individuals are being pushed toward environmentally …

Beyond The Deficit Lens: Black Family Literacy As Social, Cultural, And Historical Practice: Implications For Literacy Teacher Education, Tasean D. Baldwin

The Reading Professor

Literacy education in the United States has long centered on standardized English and formal classroom instruction. While intended as a universal benchmark, this approach systematically overlooks and delegitimizes the rich literacy history and traditions rooted in Black families and communities. Through the application of frameworks such as New Literacy Studies, Gee's Theory of Discourse Communities, Yosso's Community  Cultural Wealth model, and Critical Race Theory, this article reframes Black family literacy through a social, cultural, and historical lens. It is forged and perpetuated by resistance to racial oppression, through the intergenerational exchange of knowledge, and oral traditions within the community. This …

Solar Cell Innovations For Renewable Research Frontiers, Ayad Abbood Abdulhasan, A. M. Mustafa, Mohanad Muzahem Khalaf, Hussain Zuhailawati

AUIQ Conference Proceedings

Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology stands at the forefront of the global renewable energy transition, offering a scalable, clean, and increasingly cost-competitive pathway to electricity generation. This article presents a comprehensive review of solar cell innovations within the framework of the science-energy (sci-energy) nexus, encompassing the full spectrum of photovoltaic material platforms from mature crystalline silicon to emerging perovskite, organic, and multi-junction architectures. Advanced device engineering strategies including tandem cells, heterojunction designs, light management techniques, and charge transport optimization are critically assessed. System-level considerations spanning grid-connected photovoltaics, building-integrated PV (BIPV), off-grid deployment, and hybrid renewable integration are examined alongside technical challenges …

Landscape Character Analysis And Assesment At Local Scale, Eli̇f Önal, Serkan Özer

Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry

​Landscape areas are one of the most important elements of human life all over the world. Varied landscape areas are a valuable natural resource and have high cultural value. The first step to ensure the effective landscape use is to identify these areas, analyze them in detail, and determine their characteristics. The northeastern Anatolia region in Türkiye has a rich diversity of landscapes because of varied geographic, climatic, and topographic features. The aim of this study was to identify the landscape character types in the Tortum district, located in the Tortum River basin in northeastern Türkiye, and to assess the …

Nationwide Characteristics Of Infectious Disease Patients Transported By Helicopter In Türkiye, Ayşe Gülden Bekgöz, Kerem Dost Bi̇lmez, Muhammed Saltuk Deni̇z

Turkish Journal of Medical Sciences

Background/aim: To evaluate the clinical, demographic, and operational characteristics of patients with infectious diseases transported by helicopter ambulance and to examine differences in the transfer patterns, flight durations, and diagnostic categories.

Materials and methods: Registry data of patients with infectious diseases transported by helicopter ambulance were analyzed. Demographic characteristics, diagnoses, referring and receiving hospital types, intraprovincial and interprovincial transfer status, flight durations, and temporal distribution of transfers (hours, days, and months) were evaluated. Flight duration was calculated in minutes and compared between intraprovincial and interprovincial transfers.

Results: A total of 543 patients with infectious diseases were transported by helicopter ambulance. …

A Large-Scale Annotated Flight Time-Series Dataset And Geospatial Post-Flight Analysis Tools For Ngafid, Roman Kozulia

Theses

This work presents three contributions to the National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID): a maintenance-linked flight dataset forpredictivemaintenanceresearch, anaviationchartprocessingservice, and an interactive geospatial heat map for post-flight event analysis. The first contribution is a maintenance-linked flight dataset for predic- tive maintenance and prognostics research in general aviation. The dataset contains approximately 100,000 non-simulated maintenance work orders and more than a million multivariate flight recordings extracted from NGAFID. Eachflightisassociatedwithmaintenancerecordsandlabeledaspre-maintenance, day-of-maintenance, or post-maintenance. Flights are exported as one-hertz sensor time series with flight-phase annotations, while a clustering pipeline groups technician-written maintenance records into event categories. To our knowledge, thisisthelargestpubliclyavailablegeneralaviationflightdataset linked to …

Building Ties, Connecting Islands: Api Kartini's Longing For An Affective Community During The Cold War, Asri Saraswati

Kritika Kultura

This article discusses the inter-class and cross-oceanic ties envisioned by socialist women’s organization Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women Movement or Gerwani) through an analysis of their magazine, Api Kartini (AK). The magazine published fiction and non-fiction writings that reveal their affective impulse to build connection as they shared their observations of the women’s movement and labor in Indonesia and abroad. The magazine addressed middle-class women and wives, connecting them emotionally with women of the working class and women organizations across the oceans in their rejection to colonialism and feudalism and their fight for equal rights. This article aims to understand …

Island As Mechanism: Island Narrative And Affective Landscapes In Ng Kim Chew’S “Fish Bones” And “Allah’S Will”, Chi Miao, Shu Li

Kritika Kultura

This article reframes Sinophone Malaysian (Mahua) literature through the perspective of island studies, foregrounding Malaysia’s cross-island configuration. We propose negative islandness as an operational category: a structurally produced negative affect of suspension, deferral, and dread generated by the island–sea regime’s simultaneous openness and boundedness. We argue that, in Ng Kim Chew’s “Fish Bones” and “Allah’s Will,” the island operates as a mechanism that interstitializes perspectives and tidalizes narrative time, thereby converting arrival into an unfinished passage and relocating trauma into embodied, material rhythms. Through close readings, we develop two interrelated strands: First, an interstitial perspective with the temporality of tides …

Tally’S Spatial Criticism: Following Jameson And Going Beyond, Ying Fang

Kritika Kultura

As a celebrated Marxist literary theorist and cultural critic, Fredric Jameson has been very influential and highly acclaimed in China’s academia for about forty years. One of his former undergraduate students, Robert T. Tally Jr., is now widely regarded as an inheritor of Jameson’s thoughts as well as his impact on China’s literary studies. Tally is especially valued for his spatial criticism, which, characterized by its distinct terminology and methodologies, builds upon Jameson’s intellectual legacy while also significantly moving beyond it. In the first place, Tally’s notion of space inherits Jameson’s view of history and space while also drawing on …

Reconfiguring "National Allegory" In A Critique Of The Philippine Neocolonial Experience, Epifanio San Juan Jr.

Kritika Kultura

With appropriate adjustments, Jameson’s theory of national allegory can serve as a serviceable frame to interpret Filipino texts. Allegory as figuration or image-thinking aims to resolve conceptual blockage or theoretical dead-ends. Analyzing an exemplary story by Lualhati Bautista, this essay seeks to demonstrate how the author’s mode of representation captures the effect of combining feudal-archaic and capitalist modes of production in the lives of typical characters. Private thoughts and feelings conflict with public norms in the predicament of two uprooted protagonists caught in the crisis of a disaggregated polity. The Philippine social formation as a dependent entity exemplifies the mix …

The Reception Of Jameson’S Works In China, South Korea, And Japan, Mingming Li

Kritika Kultura

An examination of data from the academic databases CNKI, DBpia, and CiNii indicates that the reception of Fredric Jameson’s works in China, South Korea, and Japan can be traced back to the early 1980s. Shaped by their distinct historical and political contexts, each country has developed its own academic discourse surrounding Jameson’s theories. In China, Jameson’s intellectual presence began in 1986, marked by Tang Xiaobing’s article “Postmodernism: Commodification and Cultural Expansion—An Interview with Fredric Jameson.” Since then, over 1,100 research documents on Jameson have been published in China, covering a wide array of topics such as Marxism, postmodernism, globalization, and …

The Violence Of Abstraction: Fredric Jameson, The “Asiatic Mode,” And The Problem Of Asia, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Kritika Kultura

This forum introduction revisits Fredric Jameson’s engagement with Asia by focusing on a central tension in his work: the productive power of his world-historical method and the limitations of its reliance on the typological figure of the “Asiatic mode of production.” Rather than treating this tension as grounds for either dismissal or recuperation, the essay argues that Jameson’s categories become most useful precisely at the point where they encounter their limits, opening the possibility for alternative modes of theoretical practice. It proposes refunctioning and provincializing as complementary methodologies through which inherited concepts are displaced, reworked, and renewed in relation to …

Spatial Dynamics Of Lead Waste: An Esda Approach To U.S. Interstate Transfers, Santiago Acuna Gonzalez

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Spatial Dynamics of Lead Waste: An ESDA Approach to U.S. Interstate Transfers   This research applied a novel Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) methodology to analyze interstate movements (n= 446) of lead (Pb; CAS 7339-92-1) among facilities that transported more than 1,000 lbs offsite across the United States, using the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2024 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Using QGIS, the analysis produced three geospatial products by integrating TRI Form R Schedule 3A with coordinates from the EPA Facility Registry Service (FRS) to populate offsite locations. First, a state-level net-flow choropleth distinguished exporting from importing states. Second, an export-focused map …

Ctamj Forum On Mshsl Activities: Speech, Kathleen Walker, Scott Voss, Tanner Sunderman, Rebecca Meyer-Larson

Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal

The CTAM Journal seeks to raise up voices from notable interest groups. Occasionally, individuals are asked to share their thoughts on issues that pertain to the target readership of CTAMJ.

For this special forum, four coaches share their voices on Minnesota State High School Speech: Kathleen Walker (Fairmont), Scott Voss (Apple Valley), Tanner Sunderman (Mounds Park), and Rebecca Meyer-Larson (Moorhead).

Sac Newsletter 2026, South Asia Center

Newsletters from the South Asia Center

No abstract provided.

Actionable Hydrologic Data To Information With National Water Model-Based Derived Dataset, Cutting-Edge Data Services, And Agentic Ai System, Sujan Chandra Mondol

Theses and Dissertations

Hydrologic data are the cornerstone of many complex hydrologic research and operational workflows that produce useful hydrologic information for water resources decision-making, flood risk communication, and water availability implications. The National Water Model (NWM) is a valuable source of hydrologic data, particularly for its extended coverage of unmonitored streams and the large-scale continuity of hydrologic processes. Precomputed secondary datasets derived from this simulated data, such as streamflow indices, can improve operational efficiency through thresholding. Disseminating the data through modern technologies, such as application programming interfaces, is required for ready integration into applications. However, if extraction requires an intermediate service, there …

Addressing Haitian High School Students’ Educational Challenges Through Their Self-Cultural Awareness, Gregory Louis

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

The study is grounded in the understanding that culturally responsive education practices can promote academic success and empower students to navigate multiple cultural contexts. A review of literature highlighted the complexities of Haitian students' educational experiences, the impact of cultural identity on academic achievement, and the need for further research on this topic.

The research employed in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Haitian high school students and their parents to gather data on their experiences, perceptions, and attitudes towards education and cultural identity. The study aimed to contribute to a deeper understanding of the educational experiences of Haitian students and inform strategies …

Psychotropic Medication Prescribing To Children And Young People Mental Health Inpatient Services: An English National Study, David Branford, Anne Webster, Marinos Kyriakopoulos, Shermin Imran, Prathiba Chitsabesan, Tina Irani, Teresa Randon, Kirsten Peebles, Rohit Shankar

Peninsula Medical School

Background:Mental disorders frequently begin in childhood or adolescence. Worldwide, psychotropics are commonly prescribed for under-18s to stabilise behaviour, mood or thoughts. Psychotropics could cause long-term effects on children and young people (CYP) health, growth and development. There is a knowledge gap about psychotropic prescribing in CYP mental health inpatient units.Aims:To understand and compare psychotropic prescribing patterns in England mental health inpatient units for CYPs and to solicit CYP and their parents’ and carers’ views of it.Method:A national Quality Improvement programme authorised by National Health Service (NHS) England invited all English CYP mental health inpatient units to participate. The programme included …

Contradiction And Critical Consciousness: Engaging Canadian University Students In Racial Dialogue On Anti-Chinese Racism, Dan Cui

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This study examines how Canadian university students perceived and engaged with anti-Chinese racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on grounded theory and interviews and written reflections from 28 undergraduates at a predominantly White university, the study analyzes students’ contradictory understandings of racism shaped by media, national narratives, and prior educational experiences. Informed by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, it conceptualizes these tensions as a contradictory racialized habitus, in which awareness and denial, empathy and distancing, coexist. Three themes emerged: contradictory orientations toward anti-Chinese racism, the transnational influence of U.S. political discourse, and the limited transformative impact of a social justice course. …

The Prevalence And Landscape Of Accent Reduction Programs At Us Institutions Of Higher Education, Sandra Greene, Katie Hopkins, Melissa Whatley, Christina W Yao

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

Many institutions offering accent reduction programs claim they help international staff and students modify their accent, thereby helping them be more successful within the context of higher education. Despite accent reduction programs being labeled as predatorial, deficit-laden, and pathologizing of accents, programs continue to proliferate on college campuses while perpetuating English language dominance, linguistic racism, and the hierarchization of Englishes. Yet, there is limited research on the scope of these programs within higher education. This descriptive study, informed by QuantCrit, adds to the existing literature by highlighting the landscape and characteristics of the approximately 9% of institutions of higher education …

Not Quite Foreign, Never Fully Belonging: Racialization Of Southbound Policy Students In Taiwan, Garima Jha

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This paper critically examines how race and racialization shape the socio-cultural adjustment experiences of international students from New Southbound policy (NSP) countries in Taiwan. Drawing from a qualitative part conducted for my master’s thesis, which explored the coping strategies and adjustment processes of seven students from Southeast and South Asia through semi-structured interview, I reframe the data to center race as an analytical lens using the conceptual framework proposed by Glasgow (2009) which explains that racialization as the process through which social meanings are attached to perceived cultural or bodily differences, creating and maintaining hierarchies among groups. and Brondolo et …

Inclusions And Illusions: Transnational Matrix Of Subordination & The (In)Visible Hierarchies Among Racialized International Students In Ontario Universities, Shamiga S. Arumuhathas

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This study critically examines the (in)visible racial hierarchies experienced by racialized international students (IS) within Ontario’s (HE) education landscape amid populist, anti-immigration backlash and expanding internationalization. Guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectionality, this research employed narrative inquiry with 14 self-identified racialized IS at 2 public universities. Core research questions include: How do racialized IS experience belonging, racism, and institutional EDID (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Decolonization) in present-day Ontario? How do EDID and internationalization policies obscure or reinforce racial hierarchies? Findings reveal a transnational matrix of subordination: White IS remain proxies for institutional belonging, while racialized and domestic students act …

Race, Racism, And Racialization In International Higher Education: A Transnational And Mobility-Aware Approach, Benjamin Denga, Louise Michelle Vital

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

Race, racism, and racialization are increasingly recognized as central to understanding inequality in global higher education. Yet dominant frameworks in comparative and international higher education remain nationally bounded and citizenship-centered, offering limited insight into how race operates under conditions of mobility, legal temporariness, and transnational governance. As internationalization intensifies through student mobility, cross-border partnerships, and global knowledge circulation, racialized experiences are shaped by visa-dependent status, differential protection, global racial imaginaries and discourses, uneven or unequal geopolitical relations and institutional logics of internationalization (including marketization, risk management and revenue extraction). In this conceptual article we argue that race and racialization in …

Contrasting Coastal Dune Environments In Chile, Aurora Christianson

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Emerging coastalization and urbanization threats to the prehistoric Concón Dunes and Humedal de Mantagua coastal area of Chile is being investigated by researchers via uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) in "Contrasting Coastal Dune Environments in Chile." Four UAS were utilized: Anzu Raptor T, DJI Mavic 3E, DJI Mavic 3M, and DJI Air 3 to collect various images of the coastal dunes. Multispectral and RGB cameras gather images by photogrammetry to create orthomosaics and monitor vegetation indexes in Pix4Dmapper. Thermal cameras provided images in rainbow, white hot infrared, and black hot infrared schemes to monitor wildlife and vegetation. The normalized difference vegetation …

Evaluating The Impact Of Ai-Assisted Tools On Novice Interface Design For Combat Search And Rescue Operations, Louis Pandolfo, Kaylee H. Akerlund, Cassidi Ellison, Sierra Martinez

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) operations are specialized military missions with the goal of rescuing personnel from hostile territory, often involving helicopters and elite teams tasked with locating and stabilizing survivors. It is imperative to a mission's success that any interface used by rescuers is efficient and usable, as they work under high risk, high stress, and time limited conditions. This study examined how access to artificial intelligence (AI) design tools influence novice interface design under a time constraint. Participants completed an interface design exercise based on a simulated U.S. Navy maritime disaster and CSAR mission. The overall aim of …

Drug Seizures, Entry Points, And Social Vulnerability In The Us, Taryn Eddy

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Drug trafficking into the United States remains a significant homeland security challenge, shaped by transportation infrastructure, border dynamics, and community vulnerability. This study conducts a spatial analysis of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) drug seizure activity in relation to major transportation entry points and county-level social vulnerability. Using ArcGIS Pro, drug seizure data are mapped by CBP Field Office and overlaid with key infrastructure layers, including land ports of entry, international airports, seaports, and interstate highway corridors. County-level Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) data from the CDC/ATSDR are incorporated to assess whether areas experiencing high seizure activity are also characterized …

Speculative Urbanism Versus Paddy Land Conservation: The Land Paradox In Policy Making, Neethu Das

Journal of Law and Public Policy

This paper argues that paddy land has become a contested space for competing policy objectives in Kerala, one of the southernmost Indian states. It critically examines two competing policy approaches in the state: one focused on fostering economic growth through investment-friendly policies and the other prioritising the preservation of ecological resources for long-term sustainability. It analyses how conservation laws are gradually weakened to foster an investment-friendly environment. In addition, it examines the shift from viewing land primarily as leverage, which has undermined efforts towards long-term sustainability. The insights informing this analysis were drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Thrikkakara, a …

Comparison Of Training Background And Characteristics Between Osteopathic And Allopathic Team Physicians In Professional Sports Leagues., Brandon D Rust, Ambika Singh, Matthew T Mckinley, Joseph Imler, Mackenzie Elting, Ryan Callahan, Christopher L Rennie, Leighann C Krasney

Orthopedic Surgery Resident Research

CONTEXT: Team physicians (TPs) play a critical role in professional sports, providing medical care for athletes under high-pressure conditions. These positions are highly competitive, influenced by previous affiliations, training pedigree, and institutional connections, with fellowship training increasingly essential. Although the number of osteopathic (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine [DO]) physicians in the United States has grown substantially, TPs in professional sports remain predominantly filled by allopathic (Doctor of Medicine [MD]) physicians, and the training pathways of DO TPs are not well characterized.

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study is to compare the training and demographic characteristics of DO and MD TPs …