Digital Commons Network^™

Public Governance And The Regulation Of Local Spatial Plan Preparation In Poland, Andrzej Nałęcz

Studia i Materiały Wydział Zarządzania Uniwersytet Warszawski

Objective: The aim of the article is to present the results of legal and sociological research on the implementation of the participatory public management paradigm in Polish law through an analysis of the example of stakeholder participation in the process of preparing a local zoning plan based on the Act on Planning and Spatial Development, amended in 2023.

Method: The dogmatic method was used to analyze the current regulations. The sociological method was used to assess the expected effectiveness of the analyzed regulations as instruments for implementing participation in spatial planning.

Results: The regulations in Poland concerning the preparation of …

Living Heritage, Resilience And Ethically Informed Infrastructures In Malawi, Martha B. Lerski, Frank Puluputu Mwale

Publications and Research

Rooted in a rural community’s needs, this paper explores how historically, and ethically informed infrastructures can support community engagement towards identification, documentation, and dissemination of local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge relating to climate change. The paper examines climate adaptation and sustainability issues through the lenses of community organizing and Library & Information Science best practices. It draws on a growing body of literature identifying a role for expanded epistemological and subject discipline perspectives. While the impacts of climate on material culture are increasingly recognized, intangible, and biocultural heritage have not received as much attention. Living heritage traditions and knowledge systems …

Political Agroecology In Syracuse: Local Understandings, Possibilities, And Barriers To Food System Transformation, Cooper Olds

Theses - ALL

In recent years, agroecology has begun to receive increasing attention from international institutions such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO). For some, this is seen as a valuable case of up-scaling agroecology which will lead to greater institutional support for the framework. However, critical agroecologists have raised concerns that such institutional adoption is rather a form of co-optation where the social and political elements of agroecology are omitted to facilitate the integration of the framework into a wider program of food system reform. As a result, there is ongoing contestation over the framework between these co-opted …

The Dead Still Walk: White Masculinity And The World Of The Walking Dead, Connor Knowlan

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I explore how the television program The Walking Dead discusses white masculinity in a variety of contexts. Through a reading of the character of Daryl Dixon and the actor who portrays him, Norman Reedus, the thesis examines how the construction of white masculinity animates both fictional character and star persona. The study reveals that television programs like The Walking Dead can help to discuss larger social issues, such as white masculinity, in a fictional setting to highlight themes such as redemption and the postracial fantasy in a way that challenges traditional social understandings of the world. The …

Investigating The Topic, Impact, And Resource Gap Between Academia And Industry In The Field Of Artificial Intelligence, Lizhen Liang

Dissertations - ALL

Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen fast development in industry and academia. Striking advancements from industry companies have stunned the research field, inviting a fresh perspective on the relationship between industry and academia. Industry research teams have played a critical role by developing large-scale computational infrastructure, curating extensive datasets, and publishing impactful AI research. As a result, industry-led AI research has impacted both fundamental and applied AI, blurring the distinction between academic and industrial research. Concerns have arisen regarding the growing resource gap between industry research teams and academia research teams. While some AI research topics remain accessible, research in areas …

Composing Songs For Dead Sailors, Toby Wren

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

Toby Wren discusses his latest creative work, the Songs for Dead Sailors song cycle, a psychological exploration of love and loss in the time of tall ships. This project was conceived as creative practice scholarship. In this presentation, Toby explains the creative processes and influences behind the work.

Grades Are Bugs, Jordan Freitas

Computer Science Faculty Works

This paper argues that grades are bugs in our educational system, undermining desired behaviors and outcomes. Grades were introduced into higher education for purposes directly at odds with the goals of inclusive pedagogy today, as well as the neuroscience of human motivation and learning. Students enter computer science programs from increasingly varied backgrounds and experiences, and face a rapidly evolving landscape of prospective career paths while higher education costs in the United States are ever increasing. Computer science educators have a responsibility to adapt and carefully re-examine typical approaches to all aspects of the learning environments we build and curricula …

Illustration As Analysis: Discussing Gender Bias And Stereotypes In The Design Of Female Characters In Chinese Video Games, Hanyu Shi

Theses - ALL

This research is dedicated to examining gender bias in the design of female characters in Chinese video games, and exploring how illustration strategies can effectively promote the transformation of female characters from stereotypical and one-dimensional to more diverse and three-dimensional representations.Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, this research synthesizes and applies a multifaceted research approach that includes a literature review, sociological and feminist theoretical frameworks, semi-structured interviews, in-depth case studies, and visual cultural analysis. By combing the existing literature and several computer game cases on the market, this research reveals the profound influence of traditional cultural concepts …

Reparative Justice In Late Twentieth Century Africa: The O.A.U, Durban, And Accra Reparations Conferences, Franklin Donudenu Adorsu

Theses - ALL

This thesis explores the evolution of African-led transnational reparations campaigns from the final decade of the twentieth century through the early decades of the twenty-first. It examines how reparative justice initiatives have emerged in response to the enduring legacies of slavery, colonialism, and systemic racial oppression, and how these campaigns reflect both historical memory and contemporary demands for justice by Africans and people of African descent worldwide. While early reparations discourse often centered on the diaspora, this research argues that recent mobilizations on the African continent in attempts to seek redress for historical injustices, particularly the 1993 Abuja Conference, the …

Lives And Dreams: A Study Of The Entrepreneurial Journeys Of Bosnian Immigrants In The Startup World, Elvis Avdic

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation explores how Islamic faith, moral endurance, and community-based values shape the entrepreneurial practices of Bosnian immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States. Through three interrelated qualitative studies, it challenges dominant models of individualistic, profit-driven entrepreneurship by centering faith-informed ethics, relational motivation, and structural constraint. The first paper draws on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), Islamic ethics, and critical theories of endurance to examine how entrepreneurs navigate their motivations across the business lifecycle. It finds that religious duty, family obligation, and social responsibility often blur the line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, giving rise to a distinct moral logic of endurance grounded …

Academic Summaries (Human Rights Violations Issue), Erica Jensen

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

No abstract provided.

Belonging, Identity, And Reintegration In India: Two Generations Of Us Women Return Migrants, Jenna Sikka

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines how generational differences among Indian returnee women shape their experiences of reintegration into Indian society, highlighting how migration and return are embedded in broader socio-historical, cultural, and gendered contexts. Focusing on two cohorts- women who migrated before India’s 1991 economic liberalization and those who migrated after- the study draws on qualitative interviews to explore how returnees navigate the tensions between values acquired abroad and the social expectations they face upon returning. The older cohort of returnee women, many of which were influenced by Gandhi’s ideals, often view their reintegration as a process of reconnecting with familiar values, …

Leaning In: Diversity, Dialogue, And Whiteness At A Quaker Independent School, Mauricio Thomas Torres

Dissertations - ALL

Diversity has emerged as a hallmark of institutional excellence in several fields. At the same time, it has been vilified and maligned by conservative pundits and politicians as Donald Trump has worked to frame diversity as un-American and unmeritocratic. This tension makes diversity worthy of sociological analysis. Though there is an emerging critical sociology of diversity, much of that work has been primarily concerned with the discursive, ideological, and symbolic dimensions of diversity. In contrast, this dissertation examines how diversity moves through and is contested and supported within the organization and cultural context of Friends Prep (FP), a progressive Quaker …

Curating Climate Change: Information Flows Across And Within Social Media Platforms, Yiran Duan

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation explores how climate change information spreads on X (formerly Twitter) and what content from YouTube travels to X, focusing on climate change related tweets posted during November 2022. Using content analysis, machine learning, and case studies, about 114,000 tweets and their embedded YouTube videos were analyzed. The findings show that not all climate-related content is equally shared, some information is more likely to spread than others. The findings also indicate that users with a moderate number of followers are the ones connecting YouTube and X, rather than those with the highest follower counts on X. The findings are …

Why Deliberate Practice Is Not A Basis For Teacher Expertise, Jim Hordern, Nick Pratt, Peter Kelly, Katherine Evans

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

In this paper we examine the notion of ‘deliberate practice’, which has formed the basis of several teacher education programmes in England and the United States and promises to improve the quality of teaching via highly structured training programmes. We identify early criticisms of deliberate practice and unpack the assumptions embedded in its underpinning thinking. We demonstrate that deliberate practice is insufficient as a basis for teacher expertise as teaching is not a ‘performance profession’, the activities of teachers cannot all be easily or meaningfully decomposed, and the ‘goals’ of teaching are not solely geared towards maximising measurable student attainment. …

Do Minorities Attend Culturally Competent Hospitals? The Case Of Minority-Serving And Safety-Net Hospitals, Rumel Mahmood

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

Minorities disproportionately attend minority-serving hospitals (MSHs) and safety-net hospitals (SNHs). This study examines whether MSHs or SNHs are more culturally competent than their counterparts. No research to date has examined the cultural competency of MSHs and SNHs with hospitals outside of these categories. The literature on the determinants of hospital-level cultural competence is sparse, with limited measures used nationally and a robust measure used in a single U.S. state. I calculated a 100-point score of hospital cultural competence from a nationally representative survey of hospitals (N = 849 respondents). Using multilevel regression models, I found that MSHs are culturally …

The Political Philosophy Of Habitude: Conservatism Analytically Explained, Kyle S. Hodge

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Conservatism is both undertheorized and poorly understood in philosophical political theory; all extant theories have proven deficient. They either conflate what is contingently associated with conservatism with its essence, draw mistaken generalizations from apparently conservative behavior, or else are explanatorily incomplete.

To avoid these deficiencies, I develop a rigorous, theory-neutral groundwork for evaluating theories of conservatism. This groundwork utilizes both traditional methods of analytic philosophy and, for the first time in the field, historiometry. Philosophical analysis determines the formal requirements of a successful explanation while empirical, historiometric data determines the most salient conservative exemplars whom any such theory must explain. …

Keynote 2: The Rebirth Of The Santiago Way As A Model And Parameter For The Creation Of Cultural Itineraries, Paolo Caucci Von Saucken

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

The revival of pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela was driven by a complex set of factors that converged and solidified in the second half of the twentieth century. Chief among them was the role of the Catholic Church and the regular celebration of Holy Years, proclaimed whenever July 25th—the feast of the Apostle James—falls on a Sunday. Each occasion, supported by modern and effective means of communication, has served to rekindle and promote the pilgrimage to Compostela. A pivotal moment in this revival was the declaration of Pope John Paul II during the Holy Year of 1982, in which he …

F2) Seeking Zion: Motivations Behind Latter-Day Saint Pilgrimage-Like Travel To Religious Heritage Sites, Daniel H. Olsen

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

This presentation examines the motivations behind pilgrimage-like travel among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to religious heritage sites such as Palmyra, Nauvoo, and Salt Lake City. Although LDS doctrine does not include a formal theology of pilgrimage, these journeys fulfill spiritual, social, and pedagogical functions that align closely with traditional pilgrimage frameworks. Drawing from the interdisciplinary fields of pilgrimage studies, religious tourism, and Latter-day Saint theology, this research conceptualizes LDS heritage travel as a form of modern, constructed pilgrimage grounded in processes of place-making, memory, identity, and faith reaffirmation.

Through qualitative synthesis of existing …

E3) Developing A Model For Religious Tourism Governance: Comparing The Soumela Monasteries In Turkey And Greece, Dino Bozonelos, Nuray Turker

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

The growth in religious tourism, through people of faith and cultural tourism, is in contradistinction with the global decline in religious attendance. While many increasingly secularized individuals are less involved with organized religion, the desire for spiritual experiences has continued. This leads many to travel to sacred sites, valued for their authenticity. This growth necessitates good governance when it comes to sacred destination sites. But what does good governance actually look like when it comes to religious tourism and pilgrimage? How does this occur when the sacred space serves the needs of multiple visitors, including pilgrims, religious tourists, and cultural …

F1) Hermitage And Digital Storytelling: A Case Study For Sustainable Visitorship, Antonio Lenzo

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

Hermitage and tourism may appear to be potentially unrelated, even antithetical. And yet, hermitage practices, both historical and current, have often elicited a strong attraction for the movement of people towards rural areas especially in the context of pilgrimage and religious tourism. While in some cases this activity has led to overtourism, storytelling related to hermitage practices may also be pivotal in the fostering of sustainable tourism practices.

The UNESCO World Heritage site of Monte San Giorgio, at the border between Italy and Switzerland, presents a long-standing history in which the movement of people has been heavily shaped not only …

E1) Revisiting The Bocaue Pagoda Tragedy In The Philippines: Personal Reflections And Lessons Learned Thirty Years After, Katherine Arceta

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

The Bocaue Pagoda Festival has been celebrated annually in the Philippine province of Bulacan since the 1850s to honor a miraculous event in history, where a local woman was saved from drowning in a river by holding onto a floating cross. Since then, the fluvial parade, which consisted of ceremonial barges held every first Sunday of July, steadily gained popularity and attracted pilgrims from within and outside the locality. On July 2, 1993, however, an unfortunate event struck when a large pagoda carrying hundreds of pilgrims and devotees sank due to overloading that resulted in the deaths of 266 people. …

E2) Killing Bali (Part Ii), Pierre Fournie

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

Tourism is growing and growing fast. Before the pandemic, in 2018, the number of arrivals worldwide reached 1.4 billion arrivals from less than 600 million, twenty years earlier. In Indonesia, after being elected in 2014, former President Joko Widodo emphasized the importance of tourism, considered as a strategic sector. It had to become the largest exchange currency contributor bypassing rubber, coal, oil and gas.

In the collective awareness of tourists, Bali remains the place to go. International visitors praise the beautiful landscapes and paddy fields of Bali, the uniqueness of its Hindu and Buddhist cultures. In 2018, the “island of …

F3) From Religious Sites To Cinematographic Sets. The Symbolism Of Religious Cultural Heritage In The Italian Serie “Lolita Lo Bosco”., Antonietta Ivona, Lucrezia Lopez

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

Religious cultural heritage is a fundamental pillar of territorial identity, especially in regions with a deep historical heritage such as Apulia, in the South of Italy. In addition, it has historically been a key element in the construction of audiovisual narratives, providing symbolic depth to the stories and enriching their aesthetics. The Italian series Lolita Lo Bosco, A Tv series set in Apulia (Italy), takes advantage of these sacred spaces not only as physical scenarios, but also as vehicles of cultural and symbolic significance, historical memory, traditions and tensions between modernity and cultural heritage.

This presentation analyzes the use of …

Vicarious Traumatization – The Potential Achille’S Heel Of Critical Incident Stress Management Responders: The Importance Of Spiritual Well-Being, Resilience, And Basic Psychological Needs, Harvey O. Burnett Jr

Adventist Human-Subject Researchers Association

This study examined the importance of spiritual well-being, hope, Psychological Body Armor TM (PBA), and basic psychological needs in predicting low vicarious traumatization among trained Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) responders. Results showed that spiritual well-being, PBA, and autonomy were significant predictors of lower vicarious trauma.

Accessibility To Communities Of Faith: Overcoming Unequal Access For People With Disabilities, Shannon M. Trecartin, Terrance P. Trecartin, Ernesto Douglas Venn

Adventist Human-Subject Researchers Association

This presentation explores the religious experiences of Adventist members with disabilities worldwide, focusing on their access to SDA education and participation in community practices like small groups, prayer meetings, and evangelism. It concludes with recommendations for congregations and church leaders to enhance inclusion and engagement.

The "N" Framework: A Teacher Knowledge Framework For Numeracy Across The Curriculum, Kathy O'Sullivan, Niamh O'Meara, Merrilyn Goos, Paul Conway

Numeracy

Governments and policymakers around the world are encouraging teachers to teach numeracy across the curriculum. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for the knowledge required to teach numeracy across multiple disciplines. The concept of teacher knowledge is complex and consists of many different facets of knowledge. This paper proposes a framework that integrates theories from existing models of general and subject specific teacher knowledge, along with a model of numeracy. The authors developed the "N" framework, an integrated framework of numeracy knowledge, subject specific knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. Each element is essential for teaching numeracy across the curriculum in …

C1) Critical Reflection On The Specificity And Coherence In Portugal Of Processions And Pilgrimages As Religious Practices, Adalberto Dias De Carvalho

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

In an anthropological and ethical tourist exploration of religious practices, silence due to its symbolic and spiritual value stands out, among others, as an important and profound experience. It is used in different ways, depending on the religious tradition, but it always emerges as being powerful in deepening the connection with the divine and facilitating inner meditation.

In Christianity, silence, by fostering a more direct relationship with the sacred, also promotes listening to the ˜answers of the entity to which that communication is especially directed.

Since the acceptance and practice of silence is inherent and clearly compatible with ritual solemnities, …

D3) Sacred Steps: Walking, Religion, And The Path To Peace, Francesca Benna

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

Walking is one of the simplest and most primordial human acts, yet it carries profound meanings that transcend cultures, religious traditions, and paths of individual and collective transformation. Walking is not merely a means of movement but a practice that fosters reconnection with oneself, the environment, and the community. Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, highlights how nomadism is an inherent human condition, suggesting that movement is essential not only for physical survival but also for mental and spiritual well-being. In an era marked by environmental crises, conflicts, and increasing technological alienation, rediscovering the value of walking responds to a deep …

C2) Generation Z Tour Guiding Performance With Tourists From The Three Abrahamic Religions, Vitor Ambrósio, Carlos Santos

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

Major changes are occurring in tourism and enterprises should try to be proactive. Through higher education, students are exposed to the latest knowledge that should also benefit the entrepreneurs of the tourism sector. Yet the connection between institutions of knowledge and the tourism trade is critically lacking. All parties involved are aware of this, however, there are no clear guidelines on how to build more solid bridges between different actors. Many evidence and studies suggest that Muslim tourists have become an important global market (Oktadiana, 2021), also Jewish tourists are quite important for the tourism industry (Lybra Tech SRL, 2025). …