Digital Commons Network^™

Not Retirement, But A Rewiring And Fresh Perspectives Post-Dbs, Says Piyush Gupta [Interview With Business Times], Su Shyan Lee, Piyush Gupta

Oral History Collection

In an interview with The Business Times, SMU Chairman Piyush Gupta discussed topics ranging from meditation and conservation to the future of education. On his role at SMU, he emphasised his desire to help shape tertiary education and noted that the rise of AI makes it critical to rethink how we learn. Mr Gupta believes that in an AI-driven world, students must move beyond domain knowledge to focus on interpreting information, "connecting the dots," and engaging others with genuine empathy. He is supportive of a more experiential curriculum at SMU — one that focuses on regional exposure through internships and …

Mismatch Negativity (Mmn) And Neurodevelopmental Outcomes In Children Born Preterm, Aidee León Lúa

Theses - ALL

Premature birth is a leading factor contributing to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and cognitive disabilities. Early detection measures can help children access services earlier, even before behavioral traits manifest. Event-related potentials (ERPs), measured though electroencephalography (EEG), are objective and non-invasive methods to study brain activity in children born preterm. The mismatch negativity (MMN), measured by the difference in neural response to alternating frequent and rare stimuli, has been associated with cognitive abilities in preterm children, but its relation to autistic traits remains underexplored. The present study examined whether speech evoked MMN amplitude and latency in children born preterm between 5 …

Carrying Home Across Oceans: Embodied Adinkra Memory, Decolonial Resistance, And Diasporic Life Of Sankɔfa And Gye Nyame, Anthoniet Essien Christian

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I explore how Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, particularly Sankɔfa and Gye Nyame, function as living expressions of memory, spirituality, and belonging within diasporic life. Drawing on autoethnography, story circles conducted at Pentecost International Worship Centre (PIWC) in Syracuse, New York, and embodied experience, the study examines how these symbols move beyond decoration to become active tools for remembering, resisting, and reconnecting with ancestral knowledge. Through everyday practices such as dress, ritual, worship, and digital expression, Sankɔfa and Gye Nyame carry memory across generations and geographies, shaping how diasporic subjects understand home, identity, and faith. The research shows that …

Community Art Therapy: Opportunities Of Accessibility In Spaces And Materials, M Mahoney

Theses - ALL

Community art therapy offers opportunities to address inequities in access to therapeutic services by locating creative practices within shared, non-clinical spaces, and using nontraditional and everyday materials. This qualitative phenomenological study examined how community-based eco-art therapy, using found, foraged, recycled, and low-cost materials in a community studio, shapes participants’ experiences of accessibility, connection, and creativity. Eight adult participants attended two community-based workshops that included open-ended artmaking, a mindfulness-oriented material walk, and individual semi-structured interviews with response art. Data from interviews, field notes, and artworks were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings indicated that participants conceptualized accessibility as multi-dimensional, encompassing cost, transportation, …

Interdisciplinary Practices In The Band Room: Repertoire As A Tool To Enrich Student Learning, Ainsley L. Brouse

Theses - ALL

Interdisciplinary learning is an educational theory approach that emphasizes the importance of incorporating content from different subject areas into the teaching of one’s own topic of study. Research has presented that the use of interdisciplinary teaching practices can have several benefits on students' learning outcomes and overall academic success. Music has deep and rich historical roots that can provide students a more hands-on experience with the concepts and events they are learning in their history classes. The use of interdisciplinary practices through specific repertoire selections will not only provide students with a deeper, more meaningful experience with the music they …

Brief Candles: Memory, Degradation Of Time, Indices And Activation, Jared A. Dominique

Theses - ALL

This thesis explores the relationship between landscape, memory, and image-making through a multidisciplinary practice spanning photography, painting, and collage. Rooted in early experiences with skateboarding as a framework, the work adopts a subcultural way of seeing that reinterprets urban space as fluid, contingent, and open to reconfiguration. This perspective informs an ongoing investigation of post-industrial and altered environments as sites marked by both physical and historical violence. The project frames these landscapes as “spectral,” holding traces of human activity, memory, and absence. Alongside this external mapping, it examines an internal landscape shaped by visual memory, personal experience, and mediated imagery, …

Feminization, Fetishization, And Gender Hierarchy: How Trans Women Are Represented In Porn For A Cishetero Audience, May Van Linden

Theses - ALL

Trans people, especially trans women, are a highly-targeted minority group and suffer rapidly-increasing discrimination, often predicated on the notion that trans women are dangerous sexual deviants. Further, trans women are often fetishized in their day-to-day lives, regularly manifesting as abuse. At the same time, demand for porn featuring trans women has skyrocketed, but literature about trans women in porn remains extraordinarily lacking in both quantity and quality. My research critically examined how trans women are represented in mainstream internet pornography consumed by a cishetero audience. I performed textual analysis of internet porn featuring trans women through a theoretical lens of …

Silence After Freedom, Md Minhajul Abedin

Theses - ALL

The project examines how the 1947 Partition of Bengal and India and its fraught legacies continue to shape communal identities and lived experience in Noakhali, Bangladesh. I have used photography as a tool to construct historical memory and to examine how memory and violence are inscribed in place, while visual practice can revisit histories and engage with contemporary lived experience, which official narratives have ignored. I chose Noakhali as a site to understand the regional realities of the Indian subcontinent in a post-colonial era. Noakhali is a southern district of Bangladesh, where I was born and raised. This area has …

Cruising The Unseen: Queer Semioerotics And The Aesthetics Of Denial, Carl Voss

Theses - ALL

My art practice is rooted in the body—its pleasures, longings, limits, and shared vulnerabilities. I work across painting, printmaking, and drawing, utilizing a strategy coined Queer Semioerotics. My process starts with lived experience in queer communities, particularly within nightlife, the Pup Play community, and other intimate spaces of connection. My work traces how desire, memory, and care take visual form through documentation, material play, and modes of denial. These works explore how joy and intimacy continue despite anti-Queer sentiment, social isolation, and state violence. Through gestures of withholding, redaction, and illegibility, the works create openings for longing and recognition rather …

Drowned, Pleasured And Veiled, Taylor Simone Gearhart

Theses - ALL

Drowned, Pleasured and Veiled explores how societal ideas around romantic passion can mask manipulative and violent behavior. It examines historical and pop cultural representations of romance that give cover to the everyday violence that patriarchy visits on women within intimate relationships. ​This body of work explores themes of shame, control, desire, and the ways physical and emotional violence can be threaded throughout those experiences. Through photography and performance, the artist visualizes and interrogates the ways power pervades intimate relationships.

Who Gets Better Buses? Studentification, Bus Geographies, And Transit Privilege In Postindustrial Upstate New York, Carlos Jose Gonzalez

Theses - ALL

Decades of deindustrialization have forced several American cities to seek other sources of economic life for their shrinking populations and increasingly impoverished populations. One sector that has shown much potential for revitalization has been the “meds and eds” of hospitals and universities. The growth of higher education is fueled by a rise in enrollment that has transformed the demographic, economic, and social atmospheres of university neighborhoods. Yet an important transformation missed by these “studentification” scholars are the accompanying reconfigurations of public transit. Given that students, and young people generally, are less likely to own their own car, universities have to …

Sexual Identity And Sleep Health In Adolescents: The Role Of Parenting Practices, Alexa Grace Deyo

Theses - ALL

Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened vulnerability to insufficient sleep, which contributes to adverse emotional, cognitive, and physical health outcomes. Evidence indicates that adolescents who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) are at an increased risk for poor sleep relative to their heterosexual peers. However, little is known about which dimensions of sleep health differ by sexual identity or modifiable factors that may underlie these differences. This study examined whether adolescent sleep duration, sleep efficiency, and daytime sleepiness differed by sexual identity, and investigated whether parental acceptance and parental monitoring helped explain these differences. Participants were 5,919 …

Blue-Collar Belonging: How An Analysis Of Identity, Epistemics, And Stance Reveal Fluid Community Membership In Rural Upstate New York, Kennedy Reed Jones

Theses - ALL

This thesis examines how community membership is constructed in everyday conversations amongst rural blue-collar people in Upstate New York. Through a sociolinguistic approach, the data from this project was collected by recording naturally occurring conversations of rural blue-collar community over a year. These conversations were then transcribed and coded, seeking out pockets of blue-collar topics in the conversations. When doing this, blue-collar/blue-collar experiences were understood as manual work, typically not done in an office, and that does not often require a degree. Therefore, by drawing on sociolinguistic scholarship on identity, epistemics, and stance, this project argues that membership in this …

Beyond The Policy - Designing A Healing Campus For Xinhua's Children, Katharine Massey

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

To some people children are seen as a blessing, but for China, they were considered detrimental to the economy status of the country. For 35 years China implemented a policy that limited families to one child so they could curb their rapid population growth and keep their image of being an economic leader of the world. This thesis will look at the lasting impact the one-child policy had on the population of China and the results that have emerged since the law has ended, along with the 2024 stop on foreign adoption programs and who was most impacted by it. …

The Impact Of Stress On Selective Attention Among College Student Athletes, Jayla K. Mcgaffin

Honors Theses

Student athletes face unique stressors from balancing academic and athletic demands (Lopes Dos Santos et al., 2020), which may deplete cognitive resources and impair focus. The present study examined the relationship between perceived stress and selective attention among college student athletes. Stress was conceptualized as the interaction between external pressures and individual coping responses (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Twenty undergraduate student athletes from the University of New Haven completed the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-14) and a computerized Flanker task measuring selective attention, but only eighteen were used in the final correlation analysis. It was hypothesized that higher levels of perceived …

Addressing Childhood Obesity In Low-Income Communities In Massachusetts, Alexa Thomas

Capstones

No abstract provided.

Affective Labor And Deservingness In Global Care Economies: A Comparative Film Analysis In Brazilian And U.S. Cinema, Débora Ferreira Leite

Theses - ALL

This thesis examines how contemporary cinema constructs narratives of migration, care labor, and social mobility through representations of Latina caregivers. Focusing on two films, Knives Out (2019), directed by Rian Johnson, and Diários de Intercâmbio (The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student, 2021), directed by Bruno Garotti, the project explores how cinematic narratives shape cultural understandings of care work, migration, and the American Dream. Although these films emerge from different national industries and genres, both center Latina women navigating transnational labor arrangements and aspirations for social mobility in the United States. Drawing on scholarship on the global care economy, transnational …

Talking To The Eyes: Paradoxes Of Ineffability And Effusivity In Mark-Making, Theodore Xavier Berg

Theses - ALL

Redefining mark-making as an active form of material signification has helped me understand my experience of the paradox of ineffability. This experience is as accurately described by the term effusivity as it is by ineffability, because it is not a matter of what cannot be expressed, but rather of what cannot not be expressed; of the experience that inescapably accompanies expression and signification. As our material means of expression and signification evolve digitally, the consequences of their contradictions become more discernible.

The Trouble With Being Human, Sam Bray

Theses - ALL

Grief, Trauma and the Invisible Spaces We Cannot Leave

Going Live: How Twitch Appearances Shape Voter Perceptions Of Political Candidates, Leah H. Ross

Theses - ALL

This paper examines the persuasive power of political candidates appearing on livestreaming platforms as a campaign strategy for targeting younger, politically disengaged voters. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of platform affordances, parasocial interaction, celebrity endorsement, and source credibility, it argues that the unique digital architecture of livestreaming sites creates media conditions distinct from traditional broadcast media and other social media. These conditions amplify parasocial experiences, telepresence, and flow, making audiences potentially more receptive to political messaging. The paper then situates livestream appearances within the broader tradition of celebrity endorsements and the growing influence of social media in campaign communication. It …

Assessing Knowledge And Decision-Making In Basic Genomics Among Adolescents And Adults, Sidharth Masarur

Honors Scholar Theses

Background

Genetic testing and genomic sequencing are increasingly part of pediatric care, yet many adolescents and parents lack the knowledge needed to make informed decisions. Prior studies show gaps in understanding, even among highly educated families, raising concerns about the adequacy of consent and assent. Little is known about when youth begin to comprehend genomic sequencing and how this impacts their own genetic and genomic decision-making.

Objective

To assess baseline genomic knowledge among adolescents and parents, examine its influence on decisions about genetic testing and sequencing, and identify opinions on appropriate age thresholds for youth participation in testing decisions.

Methods …

Leading A Culture Of Success, Collin T. Ginnaty

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

An in depth look toward leadership in the private and public sectors with emphasis in Law Enforcement Leadership.

A Quality Improvement Project To Increase Identification And Treatment Of Obstructive Sleep Apnea In Patients With Type 2 Diabetes In A Rural Clinic, Paige Spence

Evidence-Based Practice Project Reports

No abstract provided.

Geometric Approaches To Memory Formation In Soft Matter, Gentian Muhaxheri

Dissertations - ALL

The primary focus of this dissertation is the development of a geometric framework for understanding memory formation in systems composed of interacting hysteretic elements, or hysterons. Using tools from bifurcation and catastrophe theory, this work provides a description of how complex memory behaviors emerge from the structure of the system's configuration space and the system bifurcations under external driving. As a concrete model system, we study networks of connected rubber balloons subjected to different inflation protocols. Under pressure control, the system maps naturally onto a Preisach-type system of non-interacting hysterons and exhibits return point memory. In contrast, under volume control, …

Who Really Cares: A Critical Textual Analysis Of Television Portrayals Of The Fictional “Black Lady Therapist” Post-Pandemic, Tiara Johnson

Dissertations - ALL

Given television’s capacity to shape audience perceptions (Bryant & Oliver 2009) and help our cultural understandings of mental health (McMahon-Coleman & Weaver, 2020), both academic and industry research on mental health depictions and stigmas on television have increased. However, with the growing crisis and need for mental healthcare within the Black community over the past 15 years, this research uses a critical qualitative textual analysis to explore television's portrayal of fictional Black Lady Therapist (BLT) as a main character, and how these depictions counter and support stereotypical depictions of the Black woman and how these depictions can be used to …

Scalable Advanced Control Of Building Hvac Systems Using Physics-Informed Machine Learning, Xuezheng Wang

Dissertations - ALL

Buildings account for approximately 40% of total energy consumption in the United States, with HVAC systems representing the single largest energy end-use. Advanced control strategies such as model predictive control (MPC), reinforcement learning (RL), and differentiable predictive control (DPC) have demonstrated significant energy savings in individual studies, yet their widespread adoption remains limited by the lack of scalable, control-oriented dynamic models, the absence of consensus on control strategy selection, and the gap between single-zone research and multi-zone real-building deployment. This dissertation addresses these barriers through an integrated research program spanning physics-informed machine learning (PIML) model development, advanced control evaluation, and …

As Seen On Tv: Growing Influence Of Latinidad In The United States, Alex Vazquez

Dissertations - ALL

“As Seen on TV: Growing Influence of Latinidad in the United States” examines how Latinos increased their political power through television. Examining both English and Spanish language television programming and its business dealings from the 1970s to the 2010s uncovers an unexplored history of Latino activism. Cultural representations of Latinos on television caused Latinos to respond to these depictions through acts of protest, challenging television’s display of Latinidad. In this dissertation, Latinidad serves as a broad term to link Latin Americans living in the United States. It crosses ethnic identities, uniting them through similar elements of culture expression, language, attitudes, …

Global Invertibility Of Sobolev Mappings And Energy Minimizers With Prescribed Jacobian, Sabrina Traver

Dissertations - ALL

We prove two main results at the intersection of Geometric Function Theory and Nonlinear Elasticity. The first is a Sobolev variant of the Inverse Function Theorem, which generalizes a famous result of John Ball. It uses Classical Sobolev Theory as well as the Degree Function, which was initially a topological tool. The second result is the existence and uniqueness (up to rotation) of a radially-symmetric minimizer for Sobolev mappings with prescribed Jacobian. This result generalizes recent work of André Guerra, Lukas Koch, and Sauli Lindberg.

On Compact Quasi-Einstein Metrics Of Constant Scalar Curvature, Eric Morgan Cochran

Dissertations - ALL

This thesis concerns a generalization of Einstein manifolds called quasi-Einstein manifolds. These manifolds are a triple $(M,g,X)$ where $(M,g)$ is a Riemannian manifold, and $X$ is a smooth vector field on $M$. Quasi-Einstein manifolds are of interest in general relativity, where a special class of quasi-Einstein manifolds are known as near horizon geometries. They are also related to Ricci solitons, which are self-similar solutions of the Ricci flow. In the first set of results in this thesis, we study the existence of Killing fields on compact quasi-Einstein manifolds. In particular, we prove an equivalence between compact quasi-Einstein manifolds of constant …

The Impact Of The U.N. Convention On The Rights Of People With Disabilities On Education For Students With Disabilities In China: A Case Of Non-Compliant Effectiveness With International Law, Renci Xie

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation empirically investigates the impact of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in China, with a particular focus on Article 24, the right to education. Using a mixed-methods approach, this dissertation addresses two central questions: whether and how Article 24 has influenced Chinese national policies on inclusive education; and whether and how the Chinese law that promotes inclusive education has impacted the lived experiences of students with disabilities in seeking educational accommodations. To examine changes in Chinese national policy, the study employs Critical Discourse Analysis of disability-related education laws and regulations. This analysis …