Digital Commons Network^™

Part-Time Faculty In Art And Design Higher Education: Support & Challenges, Katherine Ye Jin Lee

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the challenge part-time faculty in art and design higher education face and the institutional support they receive through a case study conducted at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Through an extensive, anonymous and voluntary part-time faculty survey across different departments at RISD, it examines: 1) current perceptions of available institutional & departmental teaching support, 2) teaching approach & practice, and 3) student-faculty engagement. The research aimed to gather data on challenges that are unique to part-time faculty in art and design fields, especially in relation to faculty-student engagement to understand areas where they can be better …

Always More To Explore: Play And Resilience In Community-Based Artmaking, Charlotte T. Faubert

Masters Theses

The following research investigates the ways in which material exploration in community-based artmaking spaces fosters learning through play and creative resilience. Using teacher-based action research, three visual arts workshops were designed, conducted, and reviewed in order to understand how community-based teaching strategies that center material exploration impact these two components of social emotional growth in elementary-aged art students. The conclusions drawn from this research indicate that material exploration, learning through play, and creative resilience are elements within community-based artmaking that form an ecosystem of learning, with all three phenomena feeding off of one another in a non-linear capacity. Additionally, it …

Echándole Ganas: Pláticas Of Belonging + Resistance In Art + Design, Itzanya Bravo

Masters Theses

This thesis centers the experiences of Mexican American students, alumni, faculty, and community-based artists navigating art and design higher education in the United States. Grounded in the question ¿Dónde está la gente latina?—where are the Latino people?—this research examines how representation and culturally sustaining practices shape Mexican American students' sense of belonging and creative agency in a country with systems built on white supremacy

Using pláticas as the primary methodology—a relational, conversational approach rooted in community and storytelling traditions—alongside autohistoria-teoría and Chicana Feminist Epistemology, this study draws on eight in-depth pláticas with Mexican American creatives across art + design higher …

What Teachers See: Collaborative Artmaking In Chinese And U.S. Elementary Schools, Jiayu Shi

Masters Theses

This study explores how elementary art teachers in the United States and China perceive and use collaborative artmaking with their students. Driven by my personal journey as a Chinese student and art educator now studying in the U.S., this research asks: How do teachers in these two countries compare in their views of collaborative artmaking, including its social-emotional outcomes, benefits, and challenges. I conducted semi structured interviews with three elementary art teachers: two from China (one veteran, one early-career) and one from the U.S. with experience in both rural and urban schools. Findings show that teachers in both contexts value …

Studio Archeology: Uncovering Pedagogical Potential In Artist Spaces, Julia I. Ambros

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates artist studios and their potential for pedagogical application, focusing specifically on grounding the abstract act of making an inspiring studio in the identification and analysis of tangible creative methods used by artists in their studios. This project combines the thinking of four authors–Eisner (1979); Sullivan (2005); Sjöholm (2014); and Bennett (2010)–into a theoretical framework that characterizes the studio space as an art practice research site that reflects the artist’s values, provides readable evidence of thinking and making processes, and influences the future trajectory of one’s art-making. Treating the studio space like an archaeological dig, this project conducted …

Improving Competency Of Care At End Of Life, Linda J. Perez

Group: Northern Arizona University School of Nursing, DNP Doctoral Papers

Providing competent care at the end of life (EOL) has been recognized as an essential skill for nursing students transitioning to practice (NSTP). EOL has been defined as the phase in which patients enter the terminal stage of a chronic illness or experience an unexpected health decline that ultimately results in death (Hughes et al., 2024). Due to limited EOL education provided in nursing schools, many NSTP have experienced significant anxiety, which has contributed to decreased self-efficacy and reduced competency when caring for patients at EOL (Jablonski et al., 2020). EOL discussions are often not had or minimally discussed due …

Confidence And Self-Efficacy Improvement In Medication Administration Using Simulation-Based Strategies With Nursing Students, Nilda Lopez

Group: Samford University Moffett & Sanders School of Nursing

This project evaluated the effectiveness of simulation-based learning in improving nursing students’ confidence and self-efficacy in medication administration.

Bandura’s self-efficacy theory guided the design, emphasizing mastery experiences, feedback, and emotional regulation (Bandura, 1977). Lewin’s change theory provided a structured framework for implementation and sustainability through unfreezing, change, and refreezing processes, supporting both student learning and faculty adoption.

This quality improvement project was conducted over one semester with practical nursing students. Structured simulations included standardized prebriefing, guided scenarios, and debriefing. Faculty observations and student reflections were used to assess changes in confidence, self-efficacy, and clinical judgment.

An Ice-Sheet Modelling Framework To Determine Vulnerable Regions Of The Greenland Ice Sheet In The Past, Benjamin A. Keisling, Joerg M. Schaefer, Robert M. Deconto, Jason P. Briner, Nicolás E. Young, Caleb K. Walcott-George, Gisela Winckler, Allie Balter-Kennedy, Sridhar Anandakrishnan

Earth and Environmental Sciences Faculty Publications

The contribution of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) to sea-level rise is accelerating and there is an urgent need to characterize which sectors of the ice sheet are the most vulnerable. Estimating the volume of Greenland ice that was lost during past warm periods can support efforts to constrain the ice sheet's response to future warming. Sub-ice sediment and bedrock, retrieved from deep ice core campaigns or targeted drilling efforts, yield critical and direct information about past ice-free conditions. However, it is challenging to scale the few available sub-ice point measurements to the geometry of the entire ice sheet. Here, …

A Thesis By An Art Student Trying To Find Meaning In Simulation Games, Yichuan Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a strange question: what happens if meaning is no longer written by an author, but emerges from the behavior of a system itself?

Beginning with observations of the Providence River and inspired by Conway’s Game of Life, information theory, and artificial life research, the project investigates simulation as a space where language, memory, and collective meaning can evolve without central control. Rather than treating video games as vehicles for storytelling, this research approaches them as dynamic systems capable of generating unpredictable forms of organization and perception.

The thesis proposes a closed spherical computational world populated by simple …

Waiting For Memory To Expire, Yuanji Liu

Masters Theses

Nostalgia is sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. In Chinese, nostalgia is more like an experience of chóu(惆), it is like a subtle weaving of heart and mind, where an ineffable emotion circles endlessly within. This is a process of repetition, of continuously generating and renewing—a reflection on loss, memory, and the passage of time. Within this affective terrain, images—particularly those expired in digital communication—act as traces of presence and absence, mediating our encounter with the past and our sense of home from a distance. These expired images, though seemingly unreadable …

Finding The Magic: On Kenning And Mediation, Anna L. Rasmussen

Masters Theses

There is a natural inclination towards storytelling for all artists, one way or another, and I am no different, though my method is ceramic sculpture instead of spoken or written word. Here I am doubling down on that instinct and placing myself in the role of the medial woman. In doing so I am further exploring the methods of how society is shaped through storytelling, where to place oneself in that dichotomy, making and using art for preceptive purposes, and becoming a new sort of cunning folk in the process. In these essays and stories, you will read feminist and …

A Body Stitched In Traces, Youyun Shang

Masters Theses

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Body In Process: Assembly, Control And The Medical Gaze, Fangzhou Lu

Masters Theses

This project begins with the doll as a way to think through assemblage. It has a human form, but it is not born as a whole; it is assembled from parts. Its joints, holes, and modular structure make it more like a puzzle toy. I use it to examine the act of “assembly” itself, and to understand the body as something that can be taken apart, adjusted, and replaced.

This logic of assembly also runs through real-life practices surrounding living bodies. Medical repair and treatment, through suturing, fixation, replacement, and transplantation, maintain and extend the body’s reconfigurability. In the plant …

In Transit, Ziqi Xu

Masters Theses

The train moves continuously, yet it never seems to arrive. Inside, light shifts, sound repeats, and space unfolds from one carriage to the next. There is a persistent sense of forward motion, but no clear destination. The experience is familiar, yet difficult to locate within a fixed point in time. We often understand time as something that flows—a linear progression from past to present to future. However, what we perceive may not be time itself, but changes in our environment. A light turns off. A door opens. A sound fades. These events create the sensation of movement, allowing us to …

There Is No Real : The Burden Makes It Real, Matthew L. Brown

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the concept of burden ship as a framework for understanding human connection and meaning within contemporary life.  Through a series of interconnected essays, this project examines different facets of burden including themes of knowledge, time, identify, responsibility, and choice, and through this exploration, the project investigates how these burdens shape Individual and collective experiences of reality.

These essays are accompanied by artistic projects that use light, digital interaction, weight, constriction, and material tension, as methods of embodying burden in physical form.

At the core of this thesis, is the belief that meaning is not passively discovered; it …

Commodity Beyond Price: A Visible Database Of Free Objects, Yifei Cai

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how value is constructed and circulated outside of traditional monetary exchange systems. During two years of living in Providence, I collected hundreds of "free objects." For each item, I wrote a brief description detailing its physical characteristics, provenance, or emotional significance, and measure it according to four parameters: price, cost, weight, and value. Of these, "value" is subjectively defined by memories, emotional attachments, and it presented as relational equivalencies established within the collection itself.

It presented as an open-ended archive, this project functions simultaneously as an installation, an exchange system, and a visual database. The thesis proposes …

What A Wonderful Dream, Zhaoyue Chen

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between childhood memory, cuteness, fantasy, and psychological tension through ceramic sculpture and installation. Drawing from amusement imagery, toys, consumer objects, animal forms, and decorative environments, my work investigates how cuteness can function as an emotional and visual surface rather than simply representing innocence. While these forms often appear soft, playful, and comforting, they can also evoke feelings of restraint, instability, vulnerability, and discomfort.

The title What a Wonderful Dream was inspired by a visit to a Winnie the Pooh ride at Disneyland with my close friend and her eleven-month-old baby girl. That experience led me …

Music As An Environment, Yuval Gur

Masters Theses

Music.

For me, music has always been a constant. In my happiest moments it lifted my joy into other realms; in my darkest, it consoled me and offered refuge.

Over time, however, this constancy has grown predictable. Recorded music, once capable of transforming a day, has faded into background sound - familiar but dulled. This project begins with my loss of wonder: how might the act of listening regain its power to move me?

I ask: how does the experience of listening transforms when music is encountered as an environment that can be entered and navigated rather than as a …

Domestic Travelers: Transparent Machines, Hollow Bodies, Hanyi Wang

Masters Theses

Digitization is not a modern invention. Derived from the concept of fingers, this mindset of packing information into quantifiable, interchangeable units sounds mechanical, yet eerily physical. Try to imagine: a ghostly hand with millions of fingers with the same length, likeness, and function. Under the worldview of Digital Narrative, we live in a digital simulation: everything is representable with quantifiable units, fluid across media. Yet under this spectacle of convenient abundance, something is missing. The Unknowables are replaced with arbitrary symbols, while the Uncategorizables are omitted. This is a framework that cannot accommodate human subtleties and complexities. One needs to …

Digital As Material, Ruoxi Li

Masters Theses

My project explores the material side of digital objects by breaking and rewriting 3D model files. I draw on media geology and digital materiality theories and use glitch to explore how digital forms are built from layers of code, signals, and physical infrastructures. I work with a discarded hard drive and move between its physical parts, its digital model, and the distorted versions that appear when the code is disrupted.

Through 3D modeling, physical disassembly, magnetic imaging, and animation, the project looks at how glitch can act as a method of excavation. It reveals the hidden structures that support digital …

Until The Ground Breaks, Annie Hu

Masters Theses

Until the Ground Breaks explores the complex relationship between personal memory, embodied experience, and internalized "archival logic." By examining long-term cross-cultural diasporic experiences and the shifting dynamics of family narratives—including the sensory experiences and fading memory of a grandmother, a father's correspondence that acts as a textual record of emotional logic, and the continuous revision of family history—this thesis dissects the psychological tremors that occur when the illusion of a singular, stable memory archive collapses. This research rejects the view of memory as a static container of truth, revealing it instead as a dynamic, unstable, and constantly rewritten living system. …

41.82379°N, 71.38497°W, Xiaotong Cai

Masters Theses

I, Xiaotong Cai, have known an abandoned bridge was lifted and stuck at 64-degree from 1976. I have walked and bent down towards it for over 60 times, each paralleling a journal entry. The visits and 27,351 words (up until May 5th) are the living proof: observation, encounters, correspondence, collectively and personally. It’s been nine months since it emerged in flux. Two flesh. A moving outsider and a still bridge. How can an Unused giant activate a human body? Who is the attractor and intervener?

Here, my solution is to conduct a series of small gestures. I say, interpreting without …

The Evolution Of Economic Rhetoric And Its Correlation With The Marginalization Of Ethics In Economics, Mi Phan, Rhiannon Scharnhorst

Undergraduate Research (Journal)

Economic discourse has undergone a profound transformation from its moral-philosophical origins to contemporary mathematical formalism. This study examines whether the shift toward formalized economic writing resulted in the marginalization of explicit ethical reasoning. Through comparative textual analysis of twelve chapters from six influential works—spanning from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) to Milton Friedman’s methodological essays (1953)— the research identifies a pattern in which ethics is less and less prevalent. Pre-formalist economists like Smith and Marx integrated moral arguments directly into their analytical frameworks, examining questions of exploitation, justice, and social welfare as central to economic inquiry. Post-formalist economists, pursuing …

Slouching Towards Inefficiency? The Cardiometabolic And Cognitive Costs Of Poor Posture, Ava Mae Fitzenrider

Honors Projects

Posture affects all of our lives. It is both static and dynamic, adapting continuously to environmental demands. One postural alteration frequently observed in occupational settings is hyperkyphosis, which can be induced by sitting position. During computer use, individuals commonly adopt a slouched posture, which can exacerbate hyperkyphosis, and contribute to dis-ease within the body. Previous research has demonstrated that such postural deviations can negatively affect pulmonary function, as well as other bodily functions. Despite these findings, the effects of acute hyperkyphosis (“slouching”) on cardiometabolic function and cognition remain largely unexplored. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the …

I Believe, Rusudan Dushuashvili

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how products become believable and desirable through the stories that surround them, and how design enables the continuous cycle of desire that defines consumption. Drawing on  the underlying structures of myth-making, identity, and belonging that allow consumer culture to function, it argues that consumer culture operates through the same instruments older systems of belief have always used — narrative, ritual, sacred objects, and shared language — and that design is what makes the story stick to the object.

“I Believe” is an archive of objects collected from contemporary consumer culture. Half are products found in the marketplace; …

2026 Ursinus College Commencement Progam, Ursinus College

Ursinus College Commencement Programs

This Ursinus College Commencement program from 2026 contains the list of speakers, honors, awards and order of events for the day.

Advancing School-Based Sexual Reproductive Health Education Through A Fifth-Grade Educator Toolkit, Emira Romero

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Projects

Background: Although sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education is a critical component of early health literacy and health promotion, educators remain underprepared to deliver this education. Local Problem: A gap analysis conducted at School A, a public elementary school in the San Francisco Bay Area, revealed the absence of a SRH curriculum for their fifth graders. Methods: A Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) student-led quality improvement project to introduce a SRH educator toolkit to increase educator confidence and self-efficacy was conducted at School A among fifth grade teachers. Pre- and post-intervention data were collected on implementation day to evaluate the …

Standardizing Preoperative Screening: A Color-Coded Triage Tool Quality Improvement Project, Lyn Green

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Projects

Abstract

Background: Ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) require effective preoperative screening to ensure appropriate patient selection and minimize day-of-surgery (DOS) cancellations, which affect patient safety, operational efficiency, and financial performance.

Local Problem: In a Northern California ASC serving a racially diverse, predominantly older-adult population with a high burden of chronic diseases, the DOS cancellation rate was 3.84%, exceeding the 2.3% institutional benchmark. Inconsistent preoperative screening contributed to avoidable cancellations.

Methods: A pre- and post-intervention quality improvement design evaluated the effect of a standardized screening tool and staff education on DOS cancellations.

Interventions: The Preoperative Stoplight Tool, a color-coded triage system classifying …

The Effects Of Asymmetric Cervical Muscle Fatigue On Cervical Proprioception, Stepping, And Standing Postural Sway, Maryam Homafar

LSU Master's Theses

Background: The cervical spine contributes critically to proprioception and postural control through its dense mechanoreceptor population. The acute effects of asymmetrical cervical muscle fatigue on proprioception, gait, and balance remain understudied, especially considering its widespread occurrence in multiple populations.

Objective: To investigate the acute effects of asymmetrical cervical muscle fatigue on cervical proprioception, stepping ability, and standing postural sway in healthy young adults.

Methods: Eighteen of 25 healthy participants, who met the inclusion criterion of baseline cervical joint position error (CJPE) below 4.5° for left and right rotational directions, completed pre-fatigue and post-fatigue assessments with eyes closed, including CJPE test, …

¡Estamos Aqui!: The Underrepresentation Of Latinos In Professional Sports And Sports Media, Antonio Hernandez

University Honors Theses

The Latino population has had a long and complicated history within the United States. Since the turn of the 21st century, Latinos continue to become the largest minority group within the country. As the Latino population continues to rise, other industries have failed to properly represent the community. Within the world of professional sports, Latinos continue to be grossly underrepresented, with professional athletes from Latino backgrounds representing less than 6% of all professional athletes across all disciplines. This number is just under ¼ of the total percentage of Latinos within the United States. With Latino's influence of other cultural phenomena …