Digital Commons Network^™

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

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.

Sites Of Departure, Kevin Tomas

Masters Theses

At all scales of human history, there exists a record: The story of how things came to be. An infinity of interconnected traces that thread the intimate and the immense into a single fabric.

Beginning from distinct points of entry, Sites of Departure explores the axes of resolution and scale in documentation, asking what becomes visible when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside. Moving between recovery and confrontation, the work questions the structures that produce our understanding, while creating new documents for future interpretation—all against the reality that to make a claim, is to claim some truth. …

Frameworks, Hailey Lee

Masters Theses

Put on a pair of glasses. What do you see? People? Trees? Cars? Buildings? Now focus on the glasses themselves. Can you see the frame? Why is it that you donʼt notice it until now?

Glasses make the world feel clearer, sharper, more accurate. But what youʼre seeing is always a view inside a frame. The glasses give you a frame, and show you the world through it. Once you get used to that frame, you forget that everything you see is already inside one. Most of us forget that the frame of our glasses is always there—at the edge …

Optimalism, Clara F. Cayosa

Masters Theses

Optima. Optimal. Optimism. Optimalism.

Optima is a humanist typeface created by designer Hermann Zapf (German, male)

Optimal is what design—and life—in 2026 wants to be: maximum productivity, maximum output. But optimal for whom, and by whose measure?

Optimism is what you find in jeepney decalomania, or sari-sari store signage in the Philippines. It is the joy of everyday making, an assemblage of color and humble material. In Clara Balaguer’s words: of turning shit into gold.

Optimalism is my (Filipino, female) thesis; an accumulation of what I've learned trying to persist in graphic design. This is …

\N: Playground Of Digital Interventions, Thea Kim

Masters Theses

How do we live within the digital world? Is the space a tool, a refuge, a playground, or something so deeply embedded that we no longer notice it at all? The digital strives to disappear. In becoming invisible, it becomes harder to question, quietly reorganizing how we perceive, act, and relate.

Yet, the digital was not always encountered this way. There were moments when we explored the web, hacked it, and played within it — out of our own curiosity, mischief, or simple pleasure. These practices, often informal and unintentional, expanded the medium from within, stretching what it could hold …

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 …

Meadowkeepers, Molly Lefanowicz

Masters Theses

New England’s cities cover the lowlands where meadows once dotted the landscape. These meadows were among the first spaces lost to development— hidden today beneath layers of concrete foundations, asphalt roads, and diligently mowed turfgrass lawns. Meadows are critical ecosystems: they support pollinators, act as seed banks for local plants, filter rainwater, sequester carbon, and build soil. But their steady disappearance is more than an ecological loss. As stewards and inhabitants of meadows, people hold a longtime cultural connection to their presence. Meadowkeepers is an effort to renew that connection.

Meadowkeepers introduces a community-scale model for meadow reestablishment in urban …

Margin:Finding Coexistence Within The Marginalized Habitats Of Cities, Zihan Sun

Masters Theses

Marginal spaces can be found throughout cities, yet they are often ignored and overlooked. Despite this, these areas play a crucial role in urban environments due to their unexpected vitality. The overlapping uses of dominant and marginal actors, including humans and non-human species such as pedestrians, pigeons, and plants, create spatial conflicts within these spaces. How can the existing conditions of marginal spaces be subtly reworked to mediate these tensions without erasing marginality?

This thesis investigates three sites in Providence across different scales, using consistent observation and documentation to understand their marginality. Different actors serve as lenses for analyzing and …

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Weaving Grounds: Connecting Canyons And Empowering Borderland Communities, Maria D. Lopez Vazquez

Masters Theses

National policies materialize in the United States-Mexico political divide, also known as the borderlands. Willow Canyon is a dissected land form inextricably linked to the Tijuana River watershed, forming with the adjacent landforms on both sides of the border one landscape. The Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty¹, signed in 1848 by the US and Mexican governments, traced an arbitrary line across these landscapes, disregarding their relationship. The consequences of these actions are visible in the physical deterioration of the landscape and ecology, as the hydrological cycle has been modified. In the 1940’s, the picturesque flow of Willow Canyon was dissected by urbanization, …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Chronos | Kairos: Exploring Time Through Experimental Comics And Artist’S Books, Rhea Pradeep

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how the reading experience of comics changes when they are presented in various artist’s book formats, particularly through the lens of time and space. This project encourages the practice of close reading, arguing that the physical form of a book is not only a container for the content, but also plays a part in its meaning-making. It shifts the narrative pace, perception of time and reader engagement. Research in this paper is heavily influenced by scholars like Johanna Drucker, Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. This interdisciplinary, practice-led research combines narrative analysis of experimental comics, close reading of …

Resistant Silence Engraved Trauma, Silence In Domestic Spaces, & Acts Of Resistance, Priyanka Kumar

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that silence surrounding trauma within domestic spaces is not merely an absence of speech or a condition of voicelessness, but it functions as an act of resistance. Focusing on domestic abuse within patriarchal structures, this research examines the ways trauma is embodied, negotiated, and concealed in everyday life. Central in this inquiry is the figure of the “sole witness” to abuse, those who live in close proximity to violence, endure its aftermath and negotiate survival through subtle and often unseen acts of resistance.

I am not attempting to define trauma, but the thesis explores the traces trauma …

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 …

Through You I Will Feel, Mitchell L. Poon

Masters Theses

Through You I Will Feel is an installation exploring my family’s archive and my relationship with my ancestral heritage. An abstracted simulation of my childhood home’s dining room, it examines how revisiting the family archive can reveal new information not only about the past, but also about the present and the future. The installation consists of five works which integrate printmaking and print-adjacent processes: a set of four lithographic prints, cyanotype and natural toning on fabric, inkjet-printing on shrink plastic, UV dye-printing on polymer clay tiles, and digitally printed wallpaper.

The written thesis is a culmination of my time at …

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 …

Latinx Immigrant Parents’ Adjustment To Their Children’S Health And Educational Services For Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Eliana Cristina Gassette

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

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.

A Psycho-Spiritual Transformation In Covid-19 Crisis Narratives: A Comparative Study In Indonesia And Pakistan, Heru Prakosa, Nurlaela Widyarini, Johanes Seno Aditya Utama, Juan Carlos

Makara Human Behavior Studies in Asia

Although the COVID-19 pandemic ended as a global health emergency, its psychosocial legacy persists in many communities. This study examines how religion and spirituality support recovery in Indonesia and Pakistan by shaping crisis narratives. Faith-based language is treated as psychosocial data and interpreted through its functions in meaning-making, emotion regulation, social connection, value anchoring, and action commitment using Psycho-Spiritual Transformation (PST) as a guiding framework. Open-ended responses were collected from 274 participants via an online survey in July 2021 (Indonesia n = 236; Pakistan n = 38). Across both contexts, narratives typically moved from pressure and inner conflict toward spiritual …

Specific Randomness, Xinyi Li

Masters Theses

Stability is not a default. It must be actively produced.

My work grows out of precarity. Everything around me is a running process, but nothing is guaranteed. This thesis is about how to keep form going under that condition. My argument is that pattern is the key: not as decoration, but as an information system that lets the effort of sustained construction be seen, while keeping its logic from being fully read.

I use computational tools to apply rules to source images. The condition of these source images is that multiple constrained processes are running at once, each following its …

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 …

Where Each Step Lands: Reconnecting And Reparenting Through Visual Narrative, Skye Wang

Masters Theses

This research begins with lived experiences of dissociation and a persistent sense of disconnection between body and consciousness. It explores the potential of visual narrative as an embodied practice. Through daily walking and sketching, bodily sensations are translated into visual language through a synesthetic process, forming the foundation for a picture book as the central outcome of this project.

The picture book adopts the perspective of a jumping spider positioned beneath a five-year-old girl’s shoe, creating a shifting, downward-facing viewpoint. The spider functions as a viewing position, while the girl represents the inner child. The narrative is constructed around the …

American Paradise, Virginia Hanusik

Masters Theses

The following is a collection of stories and ideas about the making of our physical and emotional worlds, along with their fracturing, deconstruction, and degradation within the American industrial landscape.  It suggests the value of the unknown and the grace of mistakes, emotional and material friction, and the hiccups that come with learning.

For American Paradise, I’m bringing my interest in landscape extraction, and the people and families within them, to my own autobiography. In this work I turn to where I grew up, the people that brought me there, my connection to manual labor, and the use of specific …

破酆都 Calling Her Through The Gates, Yuqi Liu

Masters Theses

My practice centers on papermaking, printmaking, and artist books to explore fiber as both image and language. I treat paper not simply as a surface, but as a living material through which memory, labor, and history can be held. By making my own sheets from plant fibers, fungi, and other organic matter, I create works in which material and meaning are inseparable. Shaped by my engagement with the natural world, women’s history, and overlooked vernacular forms of knowledge, my work moves through cycles of life and death, presence and disappearance, fragility and resilience. My projects with mushrooms and mycelium led …

An Anxious Artist's Guide To Magic, Mot Tuman

Masters Theses

Illustration’s essence is using some type of media to tell a story. This could be anything from sculpture, watercolor, even just text alone. Beyond its medium, I have been thinking for a while of illustration and storytelling as a type of illusory magic. Magic, according to the Oxford language dictionary as being "The power of using supernatural or other unseen forces to apparently influence events or human behaviour." It gives us the power to reach inside the mind and heart of a person and change their emotional and mental state. It's the ability to create a world and have others …

Love In Passing Time, Elysa T. Adams

Masters Theses

Elysa Adams, 2026

Love in Passing Time reflects on how the Black church has molded my understanding of faith, family, and community. Working across relief, screenprint, sculpture, and sound, my practice explores how knowledge is shared across generations through music, tradition, and adornment.

The exhibition draws on my upbringing as a pastor’s child, in which the church serves as both a spiritual and communal home. These experiences appear through sculptural paper garments based on childhood memories, tambourines featuring the faces of people who have impacted my life, carved portraits of my grandparents, and sculptural pews that reference the architecture of …

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 …