Digital Commons Network^™

Development And Validation Of A Theoretically Informed Instrument To Measure The Antecedents Of Microbreaking Intentions (I-Mami) Of Procedural Healthcare Workers, Robin Riddle

ETDs from 2020-2029

ABSTRACT Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSD) affect 77% of nurses and 60% of surgeons, exceeding rates in other occupational sectors and threatening healthcare workforce sustainability. Microbreaking is brief, strategic pause of 20 seconds to five minutes performed every 20 to 40 minutes during medical procedures. It has demonstrated effectiveness in reducing fatigue, improving accuracy, and lowering physiological stress markers without extending medical procedure duration. Despite this evidence, adoption remains limited, and no theoretically informed instruments exist to measure the behavioral determinants of microbreaking intentions among procedural healthcare workers. Investigators of this three-manuscript dissertation developed and established content and construct validity as …

Micromobility In Nyc: 2025, Mike Owen Benediktsson Phd, Xuemeng Li Phd

Publications and Research

This report offers a statistical snapshot of micromobility across the city over a three-week period in late 2025. Our team of trained researchers systematically observed over 1,700 micromobility vehicles at 155 separate intersections across the five boroughs of New York City. Our primary findings describe overall patterns in the demographics of micromobility and vehicle behavior at city intersections, and show how this behavior is shaped by variations in infrastructure as well as individual-level attributes.

Liturgies Of The Self: Contemporary American Cult Fiction, Identity, And Narrative Evangelism, Kerry Hillis Goff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

“Liturgies of the Self: Contemporary American Cult Fiction, Identity, and Narrative Evangelism,” examines how American novels from 1980 to the present stage cultic logic as a cultural grammar of belonging. Across two cohorts—1980–2000 and 2001–present—the project demonstrates how narratives of consumerism, violence, embodiment, race, and simulation reveal identity as liturgical performance rather than autonomous selfhood. The first cohort—Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989)—dramatizes cultic rituals through spectacle, grotesque display, and overt performance. DeLillo stages consumer spectacle as collective liturgy; …

Hard Hats And Second Chances: A Phenomenological Study Of Employer Support In Construction-Based Reintegration, Christofer M. Pacheco

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative phenomenological study examines how formerly incarcerated individuals perceive and experience employer support during workplace reintegration in the construction industry. Although employment is widely recognized as a protective factor against recidivism, post-hire experiences from the perspective of justice-involved employees remain underexplored. Grounded in an interpretivist paradigm and informed by Social Support, Social Learning, and Identity perspectives, the study investigated how structure, self, and environment interact to influence retention, growth, and desistance.

Nineteen interviews were completed with six construction workers in New Mexico who had maintained employment for at least one year following incarceration. Through the use of Seidman’s three-interview …

Father Knows Best? Not Here: Metaphors Of Kinship And Kingship In Haudenosaunee, Aristotelian, And Confucian Political Thought, Ian Kalman

Comparative Philosophy

The notion that the organization of large-scale social structures are rooted in domestic ones has a longstanding history in both Chinese and Greek classical political philosophy. Aristotle and Confucius independently reasoned that a good family, one with a strong father, mapped onto a good state, one with a strong king - though they differed on the details. While there is a strong literature juxtaposing these two titans, less attention has been paid to how their ideas compare with other philosophical traditions. This article provides an anthropological intervention to the comparative study of Confucius and Aristotle – while both autonomously argued …

The Coherence Of Navayāna Pragmatism: Ambedkar And The Pragmatist Reconstruction Of Buddhist Philosophy, Danish Hamid

Comparative Philosophy

This paper examines the philosophical coherence of B.R. Ambedkar’s reconstruction of his (Navayāna) Buddhism in relation to John Dewey’s pragmatism. Building on Scott Stroud’s reading of Ambedkar as a Deweyan Pragmatist (2017, 2023), it argues that Dewey’s evolutionary naturalism, his conception of growth, and pragmatic redefinition of concepts provide Ambedkar with the methodological tools for a naturalistic and socially reconstructive reinterpretation of Buddhist doctrines such as anicca (impermanence), dhamma (Buddha’s teaching), nirvāṇa (enlightenment), karuna (compassion), etc. Ambedkar transforms impermanence from a metaphysics of flux into an ethics of progressive growth, and recasts dhamma as a social morality grounded in fraternity …

The Modern-World System: Europe Or Asia? Fernand Braudel & André Gunder Frank, Charles Lemert

Fast Capitalism

Author Biography

Charles Lemert, Wesleyan University

Charles Lemert is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University and will soon publish: Americans Thinking America; The Bottom Turtle: Silence and Society; and. with Immanuel Wallerstein: Living Progressively in a Transitional Time.

Minding Machines: A Note On Alienation, Sascha Engel

Fast Capitalism

This paper discusses an underrepresented dimension of contemporary alienation: that of machines, and particularly of computing machines. The term 'machine' is understood here in the broadest sense, spanning anything from agricultural harvesters to cars and planes. Likewise, 'computing machine' is understood broadly, from homeostatic machines, such as thermostats, to algorithmic universal machines, such as smartphones. I suggest that a form of alienation manifests in the functionalist use and description of machines in general; that is, in descriptions of machines as mere tools or testaments to human ingenuity. Such descriptions ignore the real and often capricious existence of machines as everyday …

The Solace Of The Sojourn: Towards A Praxis-Oriented Phenomenological Methodology And Ethics Of Deep Travel In Martin Heidegger's Sojourns

Fast Capitalism

This article focuses on Martin Heidegger's little read travel journal, Sojourns (1962), and explores how it yields surprisingly fruitful insights into our contemporary era of neoliberal globalization via its implicit exploration of the complex interconnections between travel, phenomenology, and ethics. Specifically, I posit that Sojourns contains an implicit praxis-oriented phenomenological methodology and ethics of global travel that together gesture towards a coherent practice of "deep travel," which American literature scholar Cinzia Schiavini aptly defines as "a vertical movement in a closed space which starts from the surface of the land and goes backward in time, searching for the hidden social …

Bound To Capitalism: The Pursuit Of Profit And Pleasure In Digital Pornography, Jennifer Miller

Fast Capitalism

This paper explores digital pornography dialectically through a case study of Kink.com, an online BDSM subscription service. It considers the tension between discourses of authenticity that seek to obscure profit motive and shifts in content prompted by market considerations.

Author Biography

Jennifer Miller, University of Texas at Arlington

Jennifer Miller is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural theorist who researches children's picture books. She has published in the Journal of Homosexuality, the edited collection Heroes, Heroines, and Everything in Between, and is currently working on a book length project under contract with the University Press of Mississippi.

The Twilight Of Automation, Mario Khreiche

Fast Capitalism

The future of work has come under renewed scrutiny amidst growing concerns about automation threatening widespread joblessness and precarity. While some researchers rush to declare new machine ages and industrial revolutions, others proceed with business as usual, suggesting that specialized job training and prudent reform will sufficiently equip workers for future employment. Among the points of contention are the scope and rate whereby human labor will be replaced by machines. Inflated predictions in this regard not only entice certified technologists and neoclassical economists, but also increasingly sway leftist commentators who echo the experts' cases for ramping up the proliferation of …

Max Weber's Odyssey: The Wild West, The Frontier, And The Capitalist Spirit, David Norman Smith

Fast Capitalism

This article examines one aspect of Weber's thinking with respect to the United States: his view of frontier regions as new horizons for capitalism. This was not an incidental or side issue for Weber, whose famed analysis of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was only half-finished when he traveled through the United States in 1904. Nor is Weber's outlook on this topic immaterial for contemporary historians, many of whom now affirm quasi-Weberian views under such rubrics as "the New Western" history. A full account of Weber's notion of the frontier would exceed the limits of a journal …

Divining Domination: Steve Bannon As A Political Mystagogue, Tony Allen Feldmann

Fast Capitalism

Right-wing commentators (on tv, radio, newspapers, documentaries, or the internet) are often considered a source of misinformation and radicalization in American politics. Understanding the role of such commentators in the political sphere has taken on new significance since the election of Trump, who regularly takes talking points as well as political advice from prominent figures in right-wing media. The purpose of these political "shock jocks" also extends beyond mere political commentary: They offer their audience a framework for understanding the world. This framework contains certain reified perceptions of society and history. Durkheim and those working in his tradition have long …

Hamlet's Father: Hauntology And The Roots Of The Modern Self, Lukas Szrot

Fast Capitalism

In his 1949 work Hamlet's Ghost, Richard Flatter wrote of the ghost of Hamlet's father that the play ultimately belongs to him, to the ghost.   Modernity, like the play, belongs to its ghosts, to its dead fathers haunting their wayward sons, the metaphysical specters it imperfectly endeavors to exorcise. Critical theory has often focused on the possibility, and the contours, of a utopia populated by liberatory spirit and liberated persons. Less well explored, however, are the implications for tradition, religion, and the transmission of culture at a metaphorical echelon—those ostensibly "pre-modern" ideas which the broader project of Enlightenment liberalism never …

Sociopoetics In The Works Of Shakespeare, Thomas Bechtold

Fast Capitalism

This study is meant to develop an immanent critique following the dialogism of socio-poetics in the literary criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin. Socio-poetics in the reception and composition of Shakespeare's works reflect the first intimations of social and political transformation to a modern nationalized society from a premodern feudal society. This study explores Shakespeare's use of metaphor through his dramatizations and characterizations at the dawn of modernity and the decline of feudalism: identifying contradictions and tensions that intimate this transformation in English society and language, and, providing an approach to this globalizing language that partakes in simultaneous modes of confabulation and …

Shakespeare's Plays Of Deranged Authority: The King's Three Bodies, Daniel Krier

Fast Capitalism

Shakespeare's plays are situated upon the threshold of two worlds: a declining traditional order torn apart by political rivalry and ascendant early-modern capitalism. The history plays dramatize infighting among warring factions of privileged aristocrats as well as revolutionary forces propelled by the rising commons and the politics of commodity. Legitimate authority is rarely secure among the kings perched upon Shakespearean thrones. In Shakespeare's Henriad and King John, crowns are contested from the moment they are placed upon royal heads, inspiring Kantorwicz's political theology: the corporeal body of short-lived kings is distinct from the sovereign's sublime body that reigns without cease. …

The Sorrows Of Modern Subjectivity: Capital, Infinity Disease, And Werther's Hysterical Neurois, Christopher Altamura

Fast Capitalism

In this article I analyze Werther, the protagonist of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. I argue that Werther and his sorrows must be understood within the context of the unique configuration of alienation(s) present in modern societies, characterized by the sui generis combination of capital, egoism and anomie, and asceticism. Further, I argue the sociologically alienating conditions of modern societies create neurotic subjects of repression who lack compensatory symbols of moral worth, which drives them to pursue equivalent signification via fantasy. Finally, I argue that Werther represents an extreme case of hysterical neurosis emanating from …

The Master's Race: Phallic Whiteness In "The Young Savages", Graham Cassano

Fast Capitalism

This essay examines two parallel, historically contemporaneous, depictions of the Freudian master-slave dialectic. John Frankenheimer's first film, The Young Savages (1961), reconstructs Hank Bell's (Burt Lancaster) repressed transformation from Italian racial other into a white ethnic. In doing so, the film approaches the possibility that race itself may be a kind of social construction. To get at this notion, the film explores the meaning of race in an overtly psychoanalytic language. In fact, The Young Savages echoes the argument of Jacques Lacan's nearly contemporaneous essay, "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious." Lacan's …

Ignoring Goethe's Faust: A Critical-Theoretical Perspective On American Ideology, Harry F. Dahms

Fast Capitalism

The neglect of Goethe, his work in general, and Faust in particular, in English-speaking countries, is notorious. While Shakespeare's plays have been prominent and widely performed in German-speaking countries, the same is not true for Goethe in the English-speaking world. Focusing non-exclusively on Faust, and cutting a link to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, I will endeavor to delineate problematic aspects of American ideology, and what it would take, within U.S. sociology, to be cognizant of the latter.   Georg Lukacs wrote about Goethe and Faust, and so did Theodor W. Adorno and Leo Loewenthal, highlighting its importance to critical theory. The …

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves, Mark P. Worrell

Fast Capitalism

Introduction to the Symposium: "Cultural Reflections of Capital."

Author Biography

Mark P. Worrell, SUNY Cortland Professor, Retired

About The Authors, Fast Capitalism Editorial Team

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, Fast Capitalism Editorial Team

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

The Biopolitical Conditions Of Sovereign Performativity, Benjamin Taylor

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

The Tragedy Of The Commonplace: Clichés In The Age Of Copyright, Jakob Norberg

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

The East As A Theatre House Of Suffering: ‘Suffering’ Scholarship And The Orientalist Bind, Yasmin Ibrahim

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Social Movement Uses Of Capitalist Infotainment, Jl Johnson

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Writing Circuit Histories, Sascha Engel

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Fast Capitalism 15.1, Timothy W. Luke

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

About The Authors, Fast Capitalism Editorial Team

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Fast Capitalism Editorial Team

Fast Capitalism

No abstract provided.