Digital Commons Network^™

Echoes Of A Country In Question: Visualizing And Constructing Lebanese Identity Through Contemporary Artistic Practice At The Venice Biennale, Anoush Manoukian

MA Theses

Historically (and presently) riven by sectarianism, struggling with massively degraded infrastructure, and seething with starkly apparent class divisions, Lebanon has long been tied up with bloody postwar politics, paralyzed by innumerable crippling setbacks on its path to recovery. During war, images of conflict have been plastered across media stations, firming the country’s place in the global conversation and imagination; everyone had heard about Lebanon, and people from the art world were attracted to the work being produced in Beirut: a localized body of work that was thematically interesting, formally unique, aesthetically neoconceptual and allegorical in approach. Unresolved conflicts have long …

Complete Issue, Christopher Tremblay, Patrick J. O'Connor Phd, Laura Owen, Diana Camilo, Moya Malcolm

Journal of College Access

No abstract provided.

Ai In Pk-12 Education: Implications For Teaching And Learning, David Naff, Meleah Ellison, Casey Bailey, Tzu-Wei Wang, Kiana Bradford

MERC Publications

This research and policy review from the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC) explores the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for teaching and learning in public PK-12 education. It is part of a two part series with a companion report focused on AI implications for PK-12 policy. The report explores two questions:

1. How is AI shaping teaching and instructional practice?
2. How is AI shaping student learning and development?

It concludes with a series of key takeaways and recommendations for PK-12 policy and practice.

Establishment Of An In Vitro Dss-Induced Epithelial Injury Model To Investigate Il-6 Signaling And Microbial Metabolite Mediated Barrier Recovery, Srijal Kunwar

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Dextran sodium sulphate (DSS) is widely used in vivo to induce epithelial injury; however, the molecular effects of DSS on intestinal epithelial cells, that investigate inflammatory and metabolic repair mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we establish an in vitro DSS-induced epithelial damage model using differentiated Caco-2 cell monolayer. Exposure to 2.5%(w/v) DSS for 24 hours resulted in significant upregulation of pore forming protein Claudin-2(2.677-fold) and oxidative marker, NOX-1(1.866-fold), accompanied by increased ROS production confirmed via DHE staining. Increased epithelial permeability was observed by TEER analysis, without significant cytotoxicity. Surprisingly, ELISA analysis revealed significant downregulation of IL-6 (p-value …

Modelling Novel Planar Nozzle Geometries For A Z-Pinch Fusion Propulsion System, Stephanie Manasterski

Theses

Interplanetary travel using chemical or electrical propulsion faces two major obstacles: the long mission timelines and the health risks to human crews from prolonged radiation exposure. Fusion propulsion offers a potential solution through high specific impulse and moderate thrust values. Z-pinch fusion, a pulsed magneto-inertial fusion approach, is promising for propulsion as the plasma is confined through current-driven compression, eliminating the need for external confinement coils to achieve ignition conditions, and the confinement configuration is simple. A 3-dimensional model of a novel linear magnetic nozzle geometry was developed with the propellant, dissociated ammonia, oriented sideways in the nozzle, assuming prior …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

The State Of The State: Teacher Edition, Rena Lesué

The Utah English Journal

Mr. Cox clears his throat.

Do we have someone who can take the minutes?

Mrs. Weber? Please?

She tap-taps some papers into order

and pauses to peer down at

a dirty sketch on the surface

of the student desk she occupies.

One hand snakes into her canvas tote

and retrieves a hanky.

She spits into it and smudges

the drawing

into a grotesque

fingerprint.

The Future Of The English Class Essay: Reimagining Multimodal Composition In The Chatgpt Era, Taylor Rose-Dougherty, Christy Goldsmith

The Utah English Journal

As English teacher educators, we are on the frontlines of navigating the technological elephant in the 2025 writing classroom: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that can produce pages of text in mere seconds. English teachers’ philosophies on GenAI are as diverse as their preferred novels or their favorite poets. But, as the two dozen publications in major English education journals1 in the past two years suggest, what is at stake is not the end of high school English (Herman, 2022), but the opportunity to give it a makeover (Herman, 2023) by reimagining what writing experiences …

Teaching Students To Write For The Future By Writing For The Present, Amber Jensen, Meridith Reed

The Utah English Journal

“When you get to eighth grade, you’ll need to know how to write a topic sentence.”

“The five-paragraph essay will prepare you to write in high school.”

“College professors expect you to accurately cite your sources in MLA format.”

“When you graduate from college, you need to be able to write a professional email.”

Perhaps you heard messages like these from your writing teachers as you moved through middle school, high school, college, and into your careers. We certainly did. And perhaps, like we have, you have been a writing teacher in a middle school, high school, or college classroom …

Challenging The Stereotypical Latina In Elizabeth Acevedo's Clap When You Land And The Poet X, Victoria Olsen Yates

The Utah English Journal

Book banning has become a trigger phrase in the United States, and schools have become book-banning hubs. In the 2023–2024 school year, PEN America recorded 10,046 book bans. Among the most commonly banned books, 44% included people of color (BIPOC) and 39% included LGBTQ+ individuals (Meehan, Baêta, Markham, & Magnusson, 2024). Banning books harms marginalized youth because they will not see themselves in literature, causing them to have a distorted view of the world. Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) explains this further in her idea that books can serve as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Bishop illustrates how books can …

After All, Megan Russell

The Utah English Journal

After all the voices of the day have quieted down,

I think.

After all the pencils have been lost, some sharpened

to nubs, others scattered through the hall,

I wonder.

After all the paper has been crumpled and used up,

I ponder.

Dimension Reduction Involving Exogenous Variables With Applications In Manufacturing And Healthcare, Linxi Li

Theses and Dissertations

High-dimensional data analysis presents diverse challenges, including the curse of dimensionality, the complexities of working with datasets that combine large feature spaces with limited sample sizes, and difficulties in identifying meaningful relationships among variables. As datasets grow in size and complexity across different fields, it is increasingly important to develop practical approaches for extracting essential information from such data. Dimension reduction methods address these challenges by alleviating the effects of high dimensionality, enhancing the ability to reveal hidden patterns, and uncovering latent structures within the data to support further analysis. Some methods reduce dimensionality while preserving all relevant information, offering …

Staging Violence With Intentionality, Toby O'Brien

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the role of the fight choreographer in the theatre while addressing the potential issues staged violence has in distracting an audience from the intended narrative of the play. Avoiding the instruction manual approach of stage combat in favor of expounding on the theory of violent entertainment, I have constructed a thesis that informs the reader of certain types of violence found in both classical and modern productions and have researched the psychological ramifications of violent spectatorship and the necessity for content acknowledgements as well as consideration for the performer’s well-being. By exploring the history of violent entertainment …

Gz17.602, A Combination Of Three Nutraceuticals, Interacts With Carboplatin And Etoposide To Kill Neuroblastoma, Michael R. Booth

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the efficacy of GZ17.602, a combination of Harmine, Isovanillin, and Curcumin as a therapeutic for MYCN-amplified Neuroblastoma, both alone and in combination with standard of care chemotherapeutics. This was done due to the low survival rate associated with these neuroblastomas, the large degree of morbidity associated with current treatments, previous experiments in the Dent lab having shown 602 as effective for killing cancers of other types, and the current lack of understanding of the biology of GZ17.602 in solid pediatric cancers. Due to the GZ17.602 components being present at different concentrations in tumors than those administered, the …

Daisyworld, Eva Foldy

Theses and Dissertations

Daisyworld explores how painting can represent ecological and sociopolitical crisis without relying on narratives of total collapse as a catastrophic end, instead framing the present as a condition of ongoing, uneven transformation. Drawing on ecological models of adaptation, interdependence, and planetary self-regulation, it uses plant fasciation as both a biological reference and speculative metaphor for distorted yet generative forms of survival. Situating painting within a broader history of visual culture, it examines how images function as accessible systems of knowledge while challenging colonial and human-centered modes of representation. In dialogue with contemporary, systems-based artistic practices, the project repositions painting as …

Tangled Up In Blues, Clara B. Deweese

Theses and Dissertations

Martin Buber’s philosophy teaches us that when our masks fall and our armor’s unveiled, we discover humanity shared. Tangled Up in Blues unpacks the snapshot photographic practice I’ve had for years, which documents my mutually uplifting relationships, and is presented for my thesis exhibit through a painterly technique that deconstructs and reconstructs  the images onto wood panels using laser transfer. As we navigate a distracted and fragmented society made of greed and bigotry, cherishing the deep connections and shared memories brings us optimism.

Spilt Milk, Fatima Kaleem

Theses and Dissertations

Spilt Milk explores how institutional discipline is rehearsed across the Pakistani home, school, and television soap opera. These seemingly domestic spaces converge at the military-industrial complex, where media propaganda (ISPR) and consumer commodities collaborate to manufacture a unified national identity.

Through an installation of school desks and re-fabricated cereal boxes, this project examines the ‘cereal/serial’ as a site of ideological consumption. By refabricating these boxes with embroidery, drawing, lace, and synthetic hair, the work subverts state-mandated narratives. These material interventions replace assembly lines with spills of hair and sweat to highlight the vulnerability of the body under surveillance. This project …

Sensory Constellations, Madaline K. Gardner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates neurodiversity within the field of fine arts by integrating disability studies, institutional critique, and material practices in painting and printmaking. Through visual analysis and studio-based research, the project examines how tactile engagement, color relationships, and repetitive mark-making can articulate embodied experiences of neurodivergence. It challenges dominant institutional frameworks that pathologize neurodivergent behaviors by reframing stimming as a generative and communicative practice. The resulting body of work includes both image-making and the creation of tactile objects designed to facilitate sensory interaction. The thesis proposes alternative ways of understanding artistic practice and accessibility within art institutions.

All Other Ground Is Sinking Sand, Kevin Hopkins

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis project, All Other Ground Is Sinking Sand, is a body of work that frames soft sculpture as "prophetic charm" and collaborative performance as the ceremony that charges them. In this essay, I will explore the conceptual chronology of the charms, their connection to the notion of décalage, and their potential to compel witnesses toward the immediate liberation of queer, Black individuals.

With my research centered on the necessity of shifting cultural responses to enduring racial trauma, I focus my work on deconstructing Black hypermasculine archetypes shaped by white supremacy and unpacking the tension between individual autonomy and social …

Between The Veins: Materializing Memory In The Age Of Digital Storage, Alice Mohammed Aslem

Theses and Dissertations

What happens to a childhood stored behind a password? This thesis began with a simple moment of scrolling through my son’s photographs on my phone. As the images multiplied, they began to lose clarity, turning into an overwhelming digital archive. This made me ask: What kind of memories am I preserving for him?

Having grown up between analog and digital worlds, Between the Veins explores how I navigate memory through material objects and digital archives. Using weaving, images are transferred onto screw pine and palm leaves. In this process, digital files of his childhood are translated into organic fibers of …

Awareness, Empathy, Action: How American Students’ Study Abroad Experiences In The Middle East And North Africa (Mena) Influence Self-Perceptions Of Global Citizenship, Renee Lamb

Theses and Dissertations

Internationally minded practitioners and academics have posited for decades that global citizenship could be a tool the world can use to build a stronger and more sustainably minded global culture. Through global citizenship’s inclusion in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Target 4: Quality Education, educators from pre-primary to university have been put at the forefront of this movement. At the higher education level, study abroad is arguably the most important global learning tool used by American institutions today for building global citizenship. However, the vast majority of American students study abroad in Western Europe, leaving a glaring gap in …

Munajat: Design As A Dialogue With The Divine, Shawky Abdalla

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary design discourse remains grounded in functional, seemingly user-centered paradigms, often neglecting what lies beyond the tangible within a human experience. This research challenges such frameworks by positioning design as a dialogue with what exceeds the physical, moving toward the experiential, where meaning precedes and informs form. Drawing on Islamic philosophy, particularly the relationship between zahir and batin (outward form and inward meaning), the study repositions design as a medium for remembrance (dhikr) rather than mere utility.

Through a critique of modernist and postmodernist principles, the research proposes a series of objects that engage with memory, introspection, and transcendence in …

Algorhythm: Commodification Of Hobbies On Social Media Platforms, Fariha Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Forcing the world online, the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to turn social-media-based hobbies into income-generating cash cows. Digital creative spaces became sites of capitalist logic where hobbyists came to operate as both laborers and commodities. Profit-focused algorithms operate imperceptibly, shaping creative behavior and decision-making in ways that are difficult to recognize, and even harder to resist. This thesis asks how algorithmic participation on platforms such as Instagram conditions a hobbyist, and how that conditioning can be made legible to audiences who inhabit such platforms without always seeing them. Using autoethnography, I position myself as both researcher and subject to document the …

The Weight, Hammet Reavis

Theses and Dissertations

What follows drifts between out to under, argument to object, learned to unlearned, and then back again, for now. What remains is not erased, but held in tension - pressed forward by an unspoken weight. However, let's go on record and retrace this gesture, not by means of crossthru, but as underline.

Will You Let Me In?, Irene Piazza

Theses and Dissertations

Imposed borders are everywhere: The borders created by stanchions during bureaucratic lines, the borders of a country, the borders of a page. Humans are forced to follow them. Borders are imposed structures that dictate a way to move, a way to write, a way to be confined. But what happens when those borders aren’t followed? What happens when someone decides to walk through the stanchion belt by crouching under it or sliding its buckle open? What happens if a person decides to walk outside of the paved pathway? What happens if someone crosses a border or writes beyond the page …

Contours Of Duration: Movement Authored Through Form—A Behavior Archive, Jood Senussi Elbeshti

Theses and Dissertations

Insect anatomy offers an elegant example of motion derived from structure. Inspired by insect movement, Contours of Duration employs a cam-and-follower system consisting of moving, leg-like parts, designed to engage a series of rotating cams, such that the shape of each cam’s surface activates the legs in unique ways, generating repetitive movement, and demonstrating how geometry produces distinct motion behaviors over time. Through iterative experimentation and controlled variation, trace emerges as a central methodology, whereby movement, over time, creates a distinct pattern of marks, making motion legible and reflecting how subtle changes to surface and form generate different behavioral outcomes. …

Spell Of Forty Small Failings, Erin B. Ehren

Theses and Dissertations

Spell of Forty Small Failings is a collection of images and writings that draws from an unruly range of literary forms, academic disciplines, and religious cannons in order to address the Divine—all that which exists on account of the phenomena of what it is to see and be seen: to hear and be heard: to touch and be touched: to know and be known, and through that knowing proceed beyond mediation. I wrote this thesis for me in the hopes that all along I was writing for you.

Mediator: Ornament As A Visual Language Of The Transcendent, Selma Fejzullaj

Theses and Dissertations

Adolf Loos’s declaration that “ornament is a crime” defined modernist design, establishing a legacy that dismisses ornamentation as wasteful and regressive. This research questions that legacy by repositioning aesthetics as a divinely grounded value, inspired by the Qur’anic vision of Paradise. In this celestial realm, beauty is not wasteful but a manifestation of divine perfection. Conceptually, the project reclaims ornament as a vital tool for contemplating metaphysical themes. Materially, it reimagines glass, shifting it from modernist "radical honesty" to a medium of layered depth. Recombining traditional Islamic ornamentation practices such as Girih and Chaharbagh, the project evokes the Qur’anic vision …

Centering Individual Well-Being In Learning Environments: Academic Stress, Psychological Safety, And Digital Discourse, Rachel Niemira Namboodri

Theses and Dissertations

Statement of Problem

How do we guide students through school while supporting their emotional and psychological health? This question lies at the heart of contemporary educational psychology research, as growing evidence demonstrates that students’ academic achievement and psychological well-being are deeply intertwined with their experiences in learning environments (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Edmondson & Lei, 2014; Gopalan & Brady, 2020; Song et al., 2024; Spencer, 1995; Walton & Cohen, 2011). Decades of scholarship affirm that students’ academic achievement and psychological well-being are deeply intertwined with how they experience schools, classrooms, peers, teachers, and institutional structures (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Edmondson …

To Put It Simply, Men Are Like Kites., Yangyang Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the performative professionalization of So-called “emotional mentors” on mainstream Chinese social media platforms, specifically Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok). and its impact on the contemporary Chinese emotional landscape. Through a series of undercover investigations in livestreams, I analyze the rhetorical tactics and professional jargon used by these “Gurus” to attract and monetize vulnerable audiences.

The research highlights a critical paradox: while promising emotional clarity, these methods from “Love Gurus” often corrupt the sincerity of intimate bonds, resulting in significant emotional labor and self-doubt for Female. The project aims to demystify this predatory industry and its role …